The Rainbow

D.H. Lawrence The Rainbow (1915)
In terms of his career path - if we really must call it that - this seems to be the point at which D.H. Loz sprouted wings and took flight, figuratively speaking, which is reflected in The Rainbow having been remembered as either his greatest novel, or one of his greatest, or at very least a classic of English literature. I first read it back in the late nineties, backtracking from The Plumed Serpent in search of more of that good shit. The book seemed thickly impenetrable and daunting when I bought it from some place in Camberwell which is now almost certainly a gaming concern, but I was determined to at least give the thing a try; and much to my astonishment, then as now, I found it both complex and ambitiously unorthodox, even experimental in how it was written, and yet reading never became a chore. I couldn't put it down, as they say in the Daily Mail.

The Rainbow is the story of a young woman coming of age and rejecting the expectations bequeathed by the nineteenth century, with her psychological landscape being very firmly mapped through the dynastic succession of first her grandparents, then her parents, as the family establishes itself in rural Edwardian society. Practically, this means we follow the lives of Tom Brangwen and his Polish wife, Lydia, then her daughter Anna, and then Ursula, growing up, teaching at a local school, rejecting marriage, deciding everything is bullshit, and so on. Even the most dramatic and life-changing of events occur at a seemingly glacial pace, yet retain the startling dynamic of actual experience through Lawrence focusing almost entirely on the psychological currents of the events he describes; so even the quietest moments are subject to the tumult and violence of - for sake of possibly coincidental comparison - expressionist or fauvist paintings, with the core of the story formed from immaterial forces, the drives and emotional pathways of his characters which pull them along, with the physical substance reduced to mere surface detail. London, for example, is described in more or less psychogeographical terms. It's exhausting but nevertheless rewarding.

The point of this seems to be Lawrence's scrabbling towards something which religion once described but which he sees as requiring liberation from from the actual theology - which I suggest partially because this was quite clearly a preoccupation throughout most of his writing. This idea seems to be echoed by Tom Brangwyn taking Lydia from her employment at the vicarage, although there are echoes throughout the narrative; and it's equally significant that the aforementioned Brangwyn fails to truly connect with his new wife, whose distance is emphasised by her Polish heritage. This was another of Lawrence's preoccupations, namely communion or the failure thereof. The means by which The Rainbow is told aspires (and I would say succeeds in this aspiration) to eliminate all sense of separation between reader and narrative by seating us directly within the intuitive meaning and flow of events so that it is difficult to fully understand it as something which unfolds before us like a stage play, rather we are inside the story looking out. This in turn gives contrast to the cognitive gap between men and women, as Lawrence understands it, and as he described in The Plumed Serpent:

Men and women know that they cannot, absolutely, meet on earth. In the closest kiss, the dearest touch, there is the small gulf which is none the less complete because it is so narrow, so nearly non-existent.

The whole novel returns to this contrast over and over, most notably during Anna Victrix, an entire chapter of thrusting and pulsing emotion, sex intertwined with anger, almost a war which then births Anna's children - reiterating Lawrence's distinctly timely fixation with evolutionary cycles, life from death and the related contrast of intertwined forms - Will Brangwen with his churches and cathedrals, constructed expressions of the sacred in unyielding stone, in parallel to Anna's seemingly more direct connection.

In light of the above, and specifically the narrative's tendency to pulse and surge with a positively sexual rhythm, we probably shouldn't be too surprised to notice Biblical parallels as traces of a ruin upon which Lawrence was attempting to build, just as the great flood of chapter nine clears the earth for new ways of being which ultimately lead to a rainbow, the vision which concludes the chaos of the storm. The Rainbow was written as European society was gripped by not only new ideas, but more significantly the realisation that there could be new ideas and a rejection of the established order. Lawrence's critics accordingly reduce The Rainbow to Ursula Brangwen's emancipation where it actually strives for a somewhat broader vision of liberty.

One example of such criticism is to be found in Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, which I haven't read so I'm assuming its quotation in the appendix of this edition preserves at least some of the context of her objections. Millett seemingly reduces The Rainbow to a parable about the women's suffrage movement, then duly lambasts Lawrence for failing to understand women, and for writing Ursula as his idea of a woman, when the driving force of the novel is this very same cognitive gap between what exists and what is believed to exist or what we believe should exist, additionally missing the distinction that the point of Ursula probably isn't Ursula so much as her understanding of her world. The Suffragettes feature on the periphery of this world as part of the landscape, which Millett reads as phallocratic mansplaining or somesuch, rather than simply another structure for Ursula to reject as more persons telling her what she should do, having already decided what's best for her. I identified because it's more or less how I feel about the SWP. Finally, most tellingly, Millett raises an eyebrow at Shame as the title of the chapter in which Ursula has a lesbian affair with another woman, yet without the relationship being formally identified as such. This objection seems particularly wide of the target given that Lawrence's prose is fairly direct when invoking shame, as Ursula experiences in one of the later chapters after physically punishing a child; and that the lesbian episode is described in giddily euphoric terms which cast the chapter title in what I suspect must be an ironic light, not least due to this section almost certainly drawing heavily from Lawrence's own ambiguous sexuality.

Criticism of D.H. Lawrence's work often seems wide of the target, as with the above, usually relying upon an understanding of Lawrence at some remove from anything he was actually trying to do. Historically the main objections have been that The Rainbow and others have constituted pornography, which focuses on the words rather than anything which may be said by them, and remains a stretch given the absence of actual pornographic descriptions. Lawrence implies by accounting for the emotional reactions rather than writing about anything going in and out. I'm told that the abandonment of the moral position in chapter eight is actually Will Brangwen taking Anna up the shitter which, for me at least, is an objection bordering on the sort of mentality which once busied itself with the erotic properties of Victorian furniture.

The hype really is bollocks. Lawrence wrote about sex without the actual sex getting in the way, and communicated some fairly profound and complex ideas about our place in the world and how we, each of us, make our progress from cradle to grave; and he did so without even the language getting in the way, arguably distilling something truly fundamental into a form as direct and instantaneous as any modernist painting.