The Rocking-Horse Winner: Overview
Critic: Simon Baker Source: Reference Guide to Short Fiction, 1st ed., edited by Noelle Watson, St. James Press, 1994
Criticism about: D(avid) H(erbert Richards) Lawrence (1885-1930), also known as: David Herbert Richards Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert Richards) Lawrence, Jessie Chambers, Lawrence H. Davison, David Herbert Lawrence, D(avid) H(erbert) Lawrence
Genre(s): Short stories; Travel literature; Novels; Plays; Poetry; Translations; Psychological novels; Literary criticism; Letters (Correspondence); Essays
The final stories of D.H. Lawrence, written in the middle and late 1920's, represent a period of formal experimentation, in which he moved away from traditional narrative realism and the settings of rural and urban England to the realm of the mythical, supernatural fairy story. As Frank O'Connor said, the withdrawal of the sense of actuality pushes the stories, closer to the tales of Puskin and Poe rather than the studious realism of Chekhov and Maupassant. Yet that sense of the miraculous always present in Lawrence's narrative saves them from becoming mere exercises in the occult and uncanny.
\The Lovely Lady, 1933),
Lawrence's second attempt to write a contribution for a collection of ghost stories compiled by Lady Cynthia Asquith in 1926, is a fusion of various narrative modes. Perhaps closer to the German M?rchen (in its bleakness) than the fairy story, it is a conscious artistic adaptation of the oral storytelling technique. It combines elements of the
supernatural and the fable with a variety of Lawrence's favourite traits, such as the unhappy marital relationship, the capitalist obsession with money and work, and the pervasive sexual and religious symbolism. The characters only live in so far as they progress the narrative, making the story similar to Doyle Springer's definition of an \and stylized parable where the characters are never our prime concern, since some idea shapes the whole. [that is, in such stories, we are more interested in “ideas”—themes rather than characters] The basic plot concerns a middle-class couple who live beyond their means, and the effect this has on their young son. Upset by his mother's
unhappiness, and mindful of her belief that the family are \he
sets out to discover \by riding his rocking-horse to the point of frenzy, and magically coming up with the names of winners in classic races, aided by his uncle and the gardener. However, the fortune he amasses doesn't bring his mother the happiness he had expected, and in an effort to pursue still greater wealth he collapses and dies at the very moment of his greatest victory. The suspension of incredulity required by the reader is barely apparent because of the subtlety with which Lawrence narrates the events: There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them.
The fairy tale simplicity of the opening sentence is echoed in his next story, \sentences, divided into two or three syntactical clauses each time, impart the sense of a fixed, eternal unfolding of events with their nursery rhyme simplicity, especially the repetition of \beginning of each clause. This linguistic repetition is themed throughout the narrative, with the stresses falling on the phrases \more money,\The spectral quality is reinforced by the first of those phrases being given to inanimate objects, the satire on the consumerism and rapacity of polite society emphasized by the house furnishings:
And yet the voices in the house, behind the sprays of mimosa and
almond-blossom, and from under the piles of iridescent cushions, simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: \The avaricious nature of the capitalist ethos is wryly parodied by the number of proverbs and clichés that are either directly stated or
associated with the tale. The phrase \assumes the mantle of a double entendre as the events unfold; \wooden horse that takes its rider nowhere\advancement merely to maintain the status quo.
A tribute to Lawrence's narrative control are the astonishing number of symbolic patterns in the text, which defy any single, coherent reading. The two most obvious are images associated with sex and religion. Paul has an Oedipal urge to replace his failed father in a family where money is taken as the nexus of affection. The symbolism of sexual activity centres on Paul's \which is \onwards in a \ride\towards \
description of Gerald Crich and the stallion in Woman in Love, will need no introduction to Lawrence's suggestiveness in such descriptions. Likewise, it is impossible to ignore the allusions toward masturbation in Paul's \recalls Lawrence's sentiments in his essay \\is the one thoroughly secret act of the human being.... The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse.\The religious symbolism is more apparent but less easy to understand. Bassett perceives Master Paul as a seer, telling Oscar in a \religious voice\considering Paul's claim that \told\him of his luck. Yet the M?rchen framework is that of a hero who bargains with evil powers for forbidden knowledge and wealth, and his mother's fear in the final scene (\in God's name was it?\son collapses and dies during his last vision. The diversity of narrative modes and the complexity of the symbolism make \Rocking-Horse Winner\much more than a neat parable about an acquisitive society's implicit deathwish. As Brian Finney has noted, the reversal of expectation, the breaking of literary conventions, and the movement towards verbal play and self-conscious artifice makes this story a forerunner of Borges and Beckett, and one of the finest achievements of postmodernist prose. Source: Simon Baker, \Rocking-Horse Winner: Overview\in Reference Guide to Short Fiction, 1st ed., edited by Noelle Watson, St. James Press, 1994.