Fancy or Imagination? "The Rocking-Horse Winner"
Author(s): W. R. Martin
Source: College English, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Oct., 1962), pp. 64-65
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/373851 .
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64
COLLEGE
case."2 This charge has been repeated recently in a more elaborate form by Marvin
Mudrick (Nineteenth
Century Fiction,
March 1957) who sarcastically refers to
Conrad's exaggerated reputation as a "poet
in fiction," and objects to the "unctuous
thrilling rhetoric," the "colorful irrelevance
of metaphor" in The Nigger of the "Narcissus." Some of the liveliest skirmishes
among recent writers on Conrad have been
fought on the grounds of his grandiloqu2AbingerHarvest (New York, 1936), p. 140.
ENGLISH
ence and symbolism.3 But "Typhoon" rarely figures in this critical quarreling because
its precision makes it one of Conrad's least
problematical works. It remains one of the
few Conrad stories which nearly everyone
likes: which is one way of saying that it is
more artful or unified, but obviously less
ambitious and profound than, say, The
Nigger or Lord Jim.
'See Ian Watt, "Conrad Criticism and The
Nigger of the "Narcissus," NCF, 12 (March
1958), 257-283.
FANCY OR IMAGINATION?
"THE ROCKING-HORSE WINNER"
W. R. MARTIN
D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse
Winner" appears in several anthologies,1
and I think it worth while to defend it
against the strictures of F. R. Leavis (D.
and Graham
H. Lawrence: Novelist)
Hough (The Dark Sun). This can be done
by starting with a close analysis of a paragraph to be found near the end of the
story:
Then suddenly she switched on the light,
and saw her son, in his green pyjamas,
madly surging on the rocking-horse. The
blaze of light suddenly lit him up, as he
urged the wooden horse, and lit her up,
as she stood, blonde, in her dress of pale
green and crystal, in the doorway.
The sudden switching on of the light,
which "lit him up" and "lit her up, as she
stood . . . in the doorway," invites our
attention to a heraldically graphic picture
that contains the central meaning of the
story. That both mother and son are in
green marks the culmination of the movement. This is further dramatised and elu1The Rinehart Book of Short Stories (1952),
D. H. Lawrence: Selected Poetry and Prose
(1957), The Portable D. H. Lawrence (1947).
Professor Martin teaches English at the
University of Waterloo, Ontario, and his special
interest is Jane Austen. A South African who
emigrated with his family to Canadain 1961, he
is the author of several articles published in
English Studies in Africa.
cidated by "madly" (supported by "surging" and even by "blaze"-a word used
several times for the look in the boy's
eyes) which is offered in its loose colloquial
sense as a description of the boy's motion,
but must be taken to refer quite literally
to his condition. His madness is an infection caught from his mother, whose
hysterical whisper, "There must be more
money! There must be more money!"
issues finally in the son's "Did I say Malabar, mother? Did I say Malabar?" and prefigures at the beginning of the story the
frantic iteration in the rocking-horse's
motion. Indeed the whisper is echoed by it:
"It came whispering from the springs of
the still-swaying rocking-horse." To complete the definition of the climax, the
mother's "crystal" dress reflects the hardness "at the centre of her heart," and a
few lines after our paragraph we are told
that the boy's eyes (eyes are an important
index throughout) "were like blue stones"
and that the mother felt her heart had
"turned actually into a stone."
All this is, perhaps, no more than "skilful," which is as far as Hough will go in
praise of the story. But "skilful" does less
than justice to it, as I hope to show.
Our paragraph refers to the toy as a
"rocking-horse"-this is the ninth time it
is so called-and in the next line it is a
"wooden horse." "Wooden" has appeared
twice before, but its definitive connotative
ROUND
force has not been felt because there has
not been this juxtaposition.Now the modulation points with delicately controlled
emphasisto the significance of the rockinghorse in the story.
The simple but decisive effect of
"wooden" is to make clear a distinction
that we now see to have been implicit in
the story from the beginning. The real and
lively race-horses,whose names-Sansovino,
Daffodil, Lancelot, Mirza, Singhalese,Blush
of Dawn, Lively Spark-resound insistently
through the story, represent with almost
crude emblematic clarity the possibilitiesin
a fully lived life and are in ironic contrast
to the wooden horse, which, with its
"springs,""mechanicalgallop"and "arrested
prance"is the symbol of the unlived, merely
mimetic, life of Paul's parents. The toy
horse "doesn't have a name" because it is
a nonentity, a substitute: "Till I can have
a real horse, I like to have some sort of
animal about." The rocking-horse is seven
times referred to simply as the "horse,"and
this unobtrusively establishesan ironic tension between real life and the unliving
imitation.
The tale presents an aspect of the rocking-horse which compels attention. It appears in our paragraphin "madly surging"
and "urges."The mother hears a "soundless
noise," "something huge, in violent hushed
motion"-here again the rocking is linked
with the whispering, which "the children
could hear all the time, though nobody
said it aloud"-and sees him "plunging to
TABLE
65
and fro." For all this frenzied effort the
horse rocks backwards and forwards on
the same spot, "still-swaying." Lawrence
does not have to score this heavily, but
the rocking motion evokes with poetic
economy and precision the futility of the
parents, whose "prospects never materialised."They buy "splendidand expensive
toys" (substitutes, in this story, for real
things) for their children; they spend
lavishly on themselves in a desperatestruggle "to keep up" their social position.
Neither the toys nor the social position
give real satisfaction and the parents are
condemned to ever more frantic and meaningless repetition. This is seen in the
mother: she clamours for money, but as
soon as she gets the ?5,000 she is back
where she was before, wanting more money
more desperately. The parents too are on
a rocking-horse, and they are not individuals-like the wooden horse they have no
names-but representativesof a large section
of bourgeois society.
With so much significant meaning so
successfully conveyed through objective
correlatives, I cannot agree with Hough
that the story is a product of "fancy not
imagination," or share Leavis' exasperation that it is "so widely regarded (especially in America, it would seem)." Both
Hough and Leavis say that the story is
not representativeof Lawrence,but it seems
to me to be about, and to dramatizemost
forcefully, one of his central concerns: the
nature and nemesis of unlived lives.
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