Abstract
Lawrence is here writing to Arthur MacLeod about The Sisters, the novel that ultimately was transformed into The Rainbow and Women in Love. In exploring the difficulty of his writing the novel, the letter reveals what is one of The Rainbow’s most insistent features as a text: its embodiment of the inadequacy and unreliability of language as a means of communication, first between its characters and then in consequence between text and reader. It is this feature which reveals the novel — for all the continuation of the great tradition which it has been claimed to show, for all the stress that has been laid on its value as a social chronicle — as one that rejects as much as continues established forms and conventions. Yet, at the same time, the repeated inadequacy of language in the novel depends on the acceptance of language as a narrative and analytic medium, so that once again the dynamic of continuation and rejection is in operation.
I am doing a novel which I have never grasped. Damn its eyes, here I am at Page 145, and I’ve no notion what it’s about. F. says it is good. But it’s like a novel in a foreign language I don’t know very well — I can only just make out what it is about. (i. 544)1
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Notes
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I. September 1901–May 1903, ed. James T. Boulton. Subsequent references to the letters are given by volume number followed by page number.
The painting is of considerable importance in the symbolic language of the later stages of Women in Love: for a discussion of this, and of the visual in Lawrence’s literary imagination and the structure of The Rainbow, see my ‘“Terrible and Dreadful”: Lawrence, Gertler and the Visual Imagination’, in D. H. Lawrence in Italy and England, ed. George Donaldson and Mara Kalnins. London: Macmillan, 1999.
See Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996, 167–8. This is by far the most lucid discussion of the relationship between the two texts.
Quoted by C. H. Rolph in The Trial of Lady Chatterley: Regina v. Penguin Books Limited. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961, 44.
Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922, 55.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ed. Michael Squires. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993, 604.
Marvin Mudrick, ‘The Originality of The Rainbow’, in Twentieth-Century Interpretations of The Rainbow. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971, 11–32. Quotation taken from 17.
‘The Marriage of Opposites in The Rainbow’, in D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays, ed. Mara Kalnins. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1986, 21–40.
G. Wilson Knight, ‘Lawrence, Joyce and Powys’, Essays in Criticism II (October 1961), 403–17. The question of anal intercourse in The Rainbow occurs in the renewed sensuality between Anna and Tom after the birth of Ursula. For the present purpose, what actually happens is immaterial: it is the sheer imprecision that is important, since it mirrors the trance-like, ineffable quality of the spiritual state of the couple rather than emphasising the anatomical actuality of their embrace.
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© 1999 Stuart Sillars
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Sillars, S. (1999). The Rainbow: Language Against Itself. In: Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910–1920. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27664-6_4
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