The Rainbow -D.H. Lawrence

I've recently noticed a trend amongst academics: They refer to some work by Lawrence (usually Women in Love) and then follow it up by saying that The Rainbow is actually a better novel. That said, no one ever really talks about the novel itself, and few people make any mention of Lawrence when discussing "serious" modern literature--Joyce, Woolf, et al. He was not mentioned once in any of my undergraduate courses and he rarely shows up on the GRE subject test. But things seem to be changing. The Rainbow surfaces on no less than three syllabi for the Fall 2009 semester at Berkeley. So I decided to dive in myself.

I can't say I'm a big Lawrence fan. The Rainbow has been putting me to sleep for days now. The narrative lacks structure, the dialog is overwrought, and the characters (while pathetic) are just not that interesting. Still, there is something in this novel that I haven't found anywhere else in modern literature: dense, voluptuous metaphors that go down like an old right-bank Bordeaux. And like a good claret, they last for minutes. I've found myself at times enmeshed, almost mired, in a play of contradictions and unlikely combinations that takes minutes to climb out of with any sort of clarity. In the following excerpt, Tom Brangwen, a young-twenties newly-wed by turns melancholy and sanguine, visits a cathedral with his wife:

Then he pushed open the door, and the great, pillared gloom was before him, in which his soul shuddered and rose from her nest. His soul leapt, soared up into the great church. His body stood still, absorbed by the height. His soul leapt up into the gloom, into possession, it reeled, it swooned with a great escape, it quivered in the womb, in the hush and the gloom of fecundity, like seed of procreation in ecstasy.

Here Lawrence makes good on his reputation as an overtly sexualized writer. This paragraph, in fact, is part of a three-page orgy involving Tom and various altars and arches. Forget insinuation and innuendo, Tom is actually having a mystical-orgasmic experience inside of a Gothic cathedral. I had to read the scene twice just to make sure I hadn't been witnessing a steamy love scene between Tom and his wife Anna. One of my favorite passages in "literary theory" addresses this phenomenon--that is, when metaphor overtakes its subject. Listen to Kierkegaard:

But as the metaphor gains more and more ground, accommodates more and more in itself, it invites the onlooker to rest in it, to anticipate a pleasure to which restless reflection perhaps would lead one by a long detour. When the imagistic finally acquires such dimensions that all existence becomes visible in it, this is the retrograde movement toward the mythical. (The Concept of Irony)

To rephrase Søren: when metaphor overtakes its subject to the extent that it becomes the subject, we are witnessing the creation of myth. Mapping this theory of myth onto Lawrence has interesting consequences. "All existence becomes visible in it" becomes "All existence becomes visible in sex." Note also that Lawrence is not sexualizing a pastoral landscape, a raging storm or the act of pollination; he is sexualizing a church. To rephrase again: "All religion becomes visible in sex." I read this as emblematic of Lawrence's larger project, which tries to displace organized religion as a totalizing ordering system (both epistemological and metaphysical) with a more natural and vigorous sexual mythology.

Much could be written on the actual language of the passage: Why is the ecstatic moment "gloomy?" Why is the soul a "she?" What's entailed in the deliberate separation of body and soul? But I just want to briefly rest on the closing words, "like seed of procreation in ecstasy." I love this for two reasons: First, it's not a man or woman in ecstasy, but the seed itself. It 's the seed that is likened to a soul "quivering in the womb." I just love that image. Second, it's the only reversion to simile in the passage (uses "like"). Unlike Kierkegaard's concept of metaphor, which grants metaphor near totalizing power, simile's claim to validity is confined by mere appearance. However, placing this simile at the end of this paragraph firmly establishes the reader in the world of metaphor. Rather than using simile to connect us back into something concrete--such as, "like waves breaking on the shore," or "like a flower sprouting from the earth"--Lawrence circumscribes it within the broad field of the sexual metpahor. The metaphor has grown to the extent that the simile can only have referent within that imagistic system.

There's an interesting philosophical question involved here, too. One could question if metaphor truly has the power that Kierkegaard says it does. Further, suppose it does have myth-making abilitites, what is the place of myth in a world (our world) so bereft of mythology. I like to think, as a future English scholar, that there is some place for the myth of which Søren speaks. Would be interested to know what others think...