But the rhetorical play with figurative language is impressive. When Lawrence takes the cliched metaphor and undermines the validity of that metaphor by reducing it to simile ("True, if I cut it will bleed like a can of cherries"), he changes the terms of the trope so that the body is no longer a vessel for the soul but a vessel for the "bleeding" (because the can of cherries literally and figuratively bleeds). When triumphantly he declares that the bones are just as alive as the blood, both of which are part of the body, he has completely lost sight of the original concept and has won his argument only on his own revised metaphorical grounds. What he has also shown, however, is that the whole idea that he is refuting, that the body is merely a vessel for the soul, is specious because it is only an abstraction. All that is concrete in the entire equation is the literal body itself.
Lawrence then elaborates, confounds, and contradicts this point in the ensuing thesis statement: "And that's what you learn if you are a novelist. And that's what you are liable not to know if you're a parson, or a philosopher, or a scientist or a stupid person." The addition of "stupid person" here adds humorous emphasis to his downgrading of the writers in other fields, but it also in some sense contradicts his dismissal of the importance of mind over body. Obviously, the novel no more addresses the literal blood, bones, and skin of a reader than these other forms of writing do. The whole introductory section of the essay, then, functions only abstractly, as an aphorism for his argument. The novel addresses the "whole" man not as literal blood and issue but as a collection of incongruous and contradictory experiences; this "whole" is the one that Lawrence argues other fields of thought and writing do not, and cannot, reach. Since in this essay Lawrence himself is treating the physical body as a vessel, a metaphor for his larger point, he is also contradicting the original premise on which his metaphorical argument rests, that life should not be reduced to aphoristic abstraction.
