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...

The Sheltering Sky -Paul Bowles

I read The Sheltering Sky for the first time about eight months ago. It's an absolutely stunning novel, driven by a bleak philosophy right through to the very end. I think of it as French existentialism without any of the individual freedom that Sartre insists on. Bowles reveals the redemptive quality of that system to be not so much false as it is ludicrous, unsatisfying and virtually impossible. A naturalistic fatalism pervades the landscape, characters, and even the language itself. Last night I finished my latest read (The Ballad of a Sad Café) and needed something to put me to sleep. Why then did I pick up The Sheltering Sky?

Towards the beginning of the novel, Port goes out to explore the Saharan town to which he has practically dragged his wife and friend. He finds himself walking with a local out into the desert to meet a girl. Port realizes that this is a bad idea, yet he keeps walking:

You can still break it up. Stop walking. Now. But the combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones was too powerful.

I like to imagine the two men walking in perfect synchronization, hands in pockets, each looking at each others' feet. Thematically, it's pretty simple to see what Bowles is getting at here: a sort of ambient fatalism is propelling Port to do things he knows he shouldn't do. But the power of the passage derives from its refusal to locate this force outside of the natural elements in the scene--there is only man and the desert. Port is theoretically free to turn around and walk back to the safety of the hotel. "But the combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones was too powerful." What a sentence! What an image! A battle is staged between Port's rational interior monologue and the rhythm produced by his unthinking footsteps.

Formally, the italicized "thoughts" of Port are short and jerky--increasingly so as he nears the decisive moment. The narrative that follows is an elegant, down-beating sentence with consistent hard stresses that overwhelm with sheer metrical force the fragmented interior protests. "Combined even rhythm of their feet on the stones" can almost be scanned as trochaic hexameter--that is, six consecutive stressd-unstressed feet (When's the last time you've seen one of those?). Bowles is describing "even rhythm" with even rhythm. The pathetic "You can still break it up" doesn't stand a chance.

On the imagistic level: this rhythm originates from human movement but is decidedly inhuman, usurping the very bodies which give it life and in turn acting maliciously against them. But it's not just the feet creating the rhythm; it's their resounding percussion on the stones. I should mention that Port is in the desert--these are not cobblestones. The harsh, impassive, cruel landscape has no mercy. There is no room for a false step. Each fall reverberates through the great expanse all the way to the edge of the sheltering sky. We are in Bowles's universe. It's terrifying. Tread lightly...literally.