Lawrence’s book is fiction, and that, as it happens, makes all the difference. It has nothing to say about political or social forces, or about the actual conditions that bring about social change. As a political thriller, Kangaroo is undeniably a failure. The book is a ‘thought-adventure’;15 ‘a queer show’¹⁶ in which nothing much happens. Instead, with the distinctive specificity that the novel allows, Lawrence investigates the psychology of individuals.¹⁷ Yet this is ultimately its strength, for Lawrence explores here not politics as such but the allure of politics, the dreams which are the undertow of our beliefs. The novel explores the impulse to politics, what motivates our ambitions and draws us to the seductions of particular totalising ideologies, and the origin of these desires in our relations with others both as those relationships draw us towards and drive us away from one another.¹⁸ As Michael Wilding rightly observes, the whole drama of Kangaroo involves the effort of society to recruit the author to a cause – not the other way around.¹⁹ In this sense, the novel is neither political nor apolitical but anti-political. Its ultimate refusal to reduce individuals to statistics or probabilities or to unify their aspirations behind a collective ‘we’ shows a commitment to the singular and irreducible in human relations that stands against the game of politics that both Kangaroo and Struthers play, albeit in different ways. This literary opposition to ideology itself justifies our understanding Kangaroo in terms of a theory of justice, irreducible and opposed to politics.

Lawrence saw in the form and experience of the novel a powerful counterpoise to politics, to ideology, and to their shared tendency to generalise. Over and over again, in the non-fiction essays contemporaneous with Kangaroo, he insisted on the novel as an exploration of human relations and experiences which could not be reduced to principles, rule, or generalisations.

For Lawrence then, the novel attends to the singularity of human relations. ‘The novel is the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness that man has discovered. Everything is true in its own time, place, circumstance, and untrue outside of its own place, time, circumstance’.²¹ Lawrence is not alone in this view: read Sartre²² or Kundera²³ or any of the other twentieth-century writers on literature and you will find the same understanding born of the same aesthetic experience: that the amorality of the novel, its refusal to finally judge but only to understand the uniqueness of human relations, is its morality.

Just when Lawrence was turning his mind to the meaning and nature of the novel, Mikhail Bakhtin was beginning to formulate his own monumental work on the question. Bakhtin’s theory of the novel was written in the 1920s and 1930s under breathtakingly difficult circumstances.²⁴ In 1929, the year his pivotal work on Dostoevsky was published, Bakhtin was arrested in Soviet Russia and sent into internal exile in Kazakhstan. Apart from a tract on communal farming techniques, he published nothing under his own name for the rest of the Stalinist era. The authorship of much of his other work is ambiguous and contested and some texts were lost or destroyed in the hardship of famine and war. Bakhtin’s reputation in the West only began to develop with the second edition of Dostoevsky in 1963, the belated publication of Rabelais in 1965, and the English translation of The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays in 1981.²⁵ Composed under brutal conditions and working in almost complete intellectual isolation, Bakhtin’s work nonetheless confirms and mirrors Lawrence’s pre-occupations. Via a rich theoretical vocabulary, Bakhtin outlines the ways in which the novel structurally privileges multiple layers of meaning and points of view and is inherently committed to a formal and linguistic indeterminacy.

I will return at several points throughout the rest of this book to Bakhtin’s recognition of what is both distinct and distinctly ethical in the novel. Bakhtin sharply distinguished the novel from other literary forms, such as the epic, or indeed, poetry. Although the argument is no doubt overstated and shows in particular a rather limited appreciation of poetry’s potential, it nonetheless clarifies what Bakhtin saw as the unique genius of the novel. In terms of their temporal orientation, the genres are strongly contrasted. The epic is never set in a continuous present, but in a distanced and mythic past in which meaning and event have already and forever been determined. Some of D.H. Lawrence’s early novels, such as The Rainbow, seem to evoke such a world, and it is as well to understand that Bakhtin’s arguments refer to ideal-types and tendencies – elsewhere he refers to the novel’s two differing ‘stylistic lines’ of development – and not to unfailing characteristics.²⁶ But from the classic examples of Rabelais and Cervantes on, the history of the novel engages a real world of uncertainty, becoming and flux. The novel, whether set in the past, present or future of its author or reader, seems still to be unfolding as we read it, in a context in which its significance and evaluation have not yet been settled. The novel appears in a zone ‘of proximity and contact’,27 fragmented and incomplete. Indeed, at the very birth of the novel, Don Quixote depicts precisely the collision between epic forms and social reality and shows with comic force the incurable impoverishment of the former.²⁸ This engagement with the world becomes even more recursively layered in Part II, where the fictional character Don Quixote keeps meeting, for example, other fictional characters who have read about him after the (non-fictional) publication of Part I. The world of the text and the text of the world thus intersect and confront one another. This is what Bakhtin means by emphasising, by way of contrast, the epic’s utter isolation from ‘personal experience, from any new insights, from any personal initiative in understanding and interpreting, from new points of view’.²⁹

The distinction between epic and novel is even more marked in its approach to language. The ideal-type of the epic, and even the ideal-type of the poem, speaks in a coherent and ‘normatively shared’ language, a voice of authority and instruction. The characters within it do not have voices of their own but are mediums through which authority is ventriloquised. On the contrary, the novel gives distinctive voices to each of its participants (including simultaneously its characters, narrator and author) and sets these voices against each other. The novel is inherently fragmentary and double-voiced.³⁰ The most powerfully developed feature which Bakhtin recognises in the novel is its heteroglossia or polyphony, its inherent multiplication of voices and perspectives.

For Bakhtin, the hybridity of utterances and registers is a feature of communication itself. Because what we say is always directed towards another, language always attempts to accommodate, appropriate or transform ‘the alien conceptual system of the understanding receiver’. So in speech – the parallels with Levinas are striking – ‘one always anticipates an answer, one always speaks in another’s language’.³¹ The novel accentuates the layered and multiplied ‘heteroglossia’ of dialogue and turns this hybridity into the grounds of its own style and structure. Irony, metaphor, dialogue, indirect speech, quotation, citation and repetition all position ‘the speaking person and his discourse’ at the very heart of the novel.

As Bakhtin shows, the novel’s capacity for polyglossia is to be found not just because it preserves the distinct voices of different characters, nor even in the dialogue the novel establishes between them. The play of multiple discursive (and social and philosophical) levels is intrinsic to the genre in a unique way. In addition to the unique voice of a character in, say, a novel by Dickens or Dostoevsky, there is the voice of the narrator behind all such voices, and behind the narrator the voice of the author, and innumerable ways of speaking behind and interlaced with each of these: the voices and languages of the society of the time, the discourses of memory, of social context, of conventional wisdom, of proper and improper speech, and even the voice of the literary tradition itself. One might say, in legal terms, that the novel is always hearsay. In each and every sentence of the novel we hear not one but multiple voices already playing off each other, being appropriated, quoted and reflected back by the character, the narrator, the author, and so forth. Thus the novel is always and inevitably ‘double-voiced’: at every single moment different registers within it cite and play and battle one another, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.33 Bakhtin provides many examples, such as this one from Dickens, that bring home the subtlety of this dialogic tension.

As Bakhtin rightly notes, such a characterisation layers a character’s self-image directly atop the narrator’s parodic mixture of the discourse of conventional wisdom with a ‘ceremonial epic tone’ all of which take place ‘in concealed form, that is, without any of the formal markers usually accompanying such speech, whether direct or indirect’.³⁵ Bakhtin draws our attention to a singularly thick form of dialogism. He emphasises not only how the voices of characters or participants in a novel (or a world) differ one from another, but how they evince an internal instability, transformed and acted upon by the contexts in which speech takes place and the audience and perspective to which speech is always already addressed. ‘The dialogic imagination’ presents not just a mosaic of voices, multiple but authentically distinct. Without denying this distinctiveness, Bakhtin insists at the same time upon their transformation under the communicative pressure of their contexts of utterance.

Bakhtin thus emphasises the generic imperatives of the novel. The whole trajectory of its historical development leans towards problematising not only traditional sources of authority – as for example when Bakhtin emphasises the role of the carnivalesque and of the figures of the rogue, the clown and the fool in the novelistic tradition after Rabelais – but the novelist’s own authority and own limits of understanding.³⁶ The novel’s specific gravity comes from its internal dialogism and necessarily double-voiced register, its attention to the limits and effects of language and its orientation towards an external reality which it strives and always fails to capture. One can almost imagine that he has Joyce’s Ulysses in mind,37 although he does not mention it. And Lawrence’s work, as we will see later on, is replete with just such Bakhtinian instability.

Text

In his well-known work around the time of Kangaroo, D.H. Lawrence argues that there is a tension between the morality and the relativity of the novel. Famously, he pits the moral purpose of the artist against the amoral force unleashed by the ‘tale’ itself.³⁸ He might have been thinking of Bakhtin’s focus on temporal reality and heteroglossia, and of the power of style to resist a normative or ideological closure. Certainly, Lawrence no less than Bakhtin takes Anna Karenina as a prime example of a novel in which the tension between the morality and the tale is sharply etched. Tolstoy, the pious old moralist, is no match for the life force and sympathy of his own creation.³⁹ If Tolstoy kills Anna off, Anna ultimately survives him. In reading the novel, we are witnessing the transformation of the author’s own preconceptions under the assault of the experience of writing it.

But perhaps Lawrence had in mind his own transformative experience in writing Kangaroo. The shift away from reactionary modernism in the course of the novel is not just an intellectual or political decision: it is recorded by – constituted by – even caused by – Lawrence’s creative experience itself. The Bakhtinian heteroglossia and anti-authoritarianism, the Lawrentian amorality, the psychological specificity and fragmentary disunity of the novel, are not merely features of the novel as a finished product but forces that create it. Lawrence didn’t rewrite Kangaroo; Kangaroo rewrote Lawrence. He does not master literature but is mastered by it.

We have striking textual evidence for the claim that Lawrence’s creative experience accounts for the intellectual metamorphosis that occurs in the second half of Kangaroo. This change takes place after Chapter X and corresponds to a pause in Lawrence’s writing. In the original manuscript, in the pages leading up to this chapter, Somers is offered the leadership of the Diggers by Jaz, and there follows a further meeting with Cooley. But in the published version, no such offer is made and Somers’ meeting with Kangaroo concludes with the realisation that he is ‘a thing, not a whole man. A great Thing, a horror’.⁴⁰

In the original version as recorded in Lawrence’s notebooks, Somers’ wife, Harriett, expresses her incredulity at Jaz’s suggestion, saying of her husband, ‘him a leader, this pathetic little man?’ So we begin to see how the heteroglossia of the novel, the internal dialogue between views it enacts, was already working not just on the characters in Lawrence’s novel but on Lawrence himself. Bruce Steele’s careful introduction to the Cambridge edition of Kangaroo illustrates the interpellative power of this dialogue. He explains the book’s change of direction with the remark that, in the original version, ‘Harriett scotched the idea … Harriett had already given all this the lie’.⁴² Even such a steely textualist thus appears to conclude that Harriett the character convinces Lawrence the author not only to refuse Jaz’s offer but to prevent it ever being made at all. And so, in the final version, Harriett’s argument with Somers seems embedded in the chapters themselves, not least in the revised Chapter IX, which inserts before the crucial meeting with Kangaroo, now completely re-oriented, an ironic reflection on the parallels between marital and political leadership entitled ‘Harriett and Lovatt at Sea in Marriage’. Lovatt Somer’s projections of absolute unity and absolute mastery are displaced, with equal futility, onto his personal relations. The delusion of power is revealed as a folly which Harriett is quite capable of ‘scotching’ wherever it manifests itself.

The critical moment is Chapter X itself. In the original draft, it was to build on Lawrence’s fantasy of political leadership. Instead, Chapter X begins the whole process of Somers’ renunciation of politics. In the following chapter, he is offered positions of influence by both Struthers’ Socialists and Kangaroo’s Diggers, and rejects both, leading to the cataclysmic break with Kangaroo. That Lawrence had planned for his alter ego to lead the revolution is confirmed not only by the original versions of the previous chapters, so radically changed after Lawrence’s break, but by Frieda, who read the draft every night. But how Chapter X first unfolded cannot now be known. Lawrence not only rewrote it after a break – a crisis perhaps – but tore the original version out of his notebooks and destroyed it.⁴³ A more dramatic statement of Lawrence’s change of heart and the struggle which the novel itself imposed on his vision can scarce be imagined. Lawrence tried to write a novel of transcendental triumph, a novel which would reflect the ideals of the New Romantics and would fully realise his own desire for authoritarian completeness, unity and rebirth. But he couldn’t do it – the tale defeated the moral. The particularity of the novel’s imagination and the diversity of its points of view rebelled against a romantic purity of inclusion as much as a positivist purity of exclusion.