Walt Whitman's Great New Doctrine (Part 2)

In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence offered a hint of what he had in mind when he advocated "a morality which changes the blood":

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel, properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the most secret places of our life: for it is in the passional secret places of life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow, cleansing and freshening. [Modern Library Paperback edition, 2001, p. 107].

Lawrence was not alone in his regard for the novel's role as a moral tutor: "For both Tolstoy and Bakhtin, novels, the most prosaic of forms, occupy a special place in ethical education. For good or ill, they are powerful tools for enriching our moral sense of particular situations. They locate obligation in eventness..." Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, 1990, p. 27).

I do not imagine that what Lawrence was reaching for was quite the same as what Tolstoy or Bakhtin were attempting to articulate. Nevertheless, what Lawrence invoked as "the spirit of place" (Chapter 1 of SCAL) seems to resonate with at least Bakhtin's notion of "eventness."

In any case, "blood" for Lawrence may be a metaphor for Whitmanian "sympathy."And the "flow" of one's sympathy may well be context sensitive--indeed, hyper-sensitive. And it may be in this sense that Whitman's "great new doctrine" is, as Lawrence asserted, "A doctrine of life. A new great morality. A morality of actual living, not of salvation" (SCAL, p. 181).

Which calls to mind a remark of another disciple of Whitman's: Henry Miller. But that will have to wait until the next installment.