Abstract
This chapter, “‘Between Heaven and Earth’: Space, Music, and Religion in The Rainbow”, examines Lawrence’s turn from the predominantly visual mode of Sons and Lovers to an acoustic model suggested by the analogy of Chladni patterns of sound waves in sand. A structure of widening circles (akin to sound waves) takes an opposite trajectory to Wagner’s retreat from the outside world in Parsifal (1881), while acoustic patterns of repetition and stasis at the level of language parallel contemporary musical innovations. Thomas Hardy, Debussy, and Schoenberg offered various models for negotiating a course between Romanticism and realism, spirituality and materialism, towards a modernism that brings together the putatively sacred and profane, with Schoenberg’s oratorio Die Jakobsleiter offering rich parallels with Lawrence’s idea of religious art.
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Notes
- 1.
The extent to which Sons and Lovers conforms to the realist mode has been a major area of critical concern. For example, Jack Stewart disputes whether “realism” is an “adequate term” to describe the metaphorical patterns in Sons and Lovers (Stewart 1999: 33), although for him the primary parallels remain in the visual arts of impressionism and expressionism. See also my discussion of Lawrence and realism in Reid 2018.
- 2.
- 3.
Lawrence thus invokes the “rhythms of architecture” that Ruskin famously described in “The Nature of Gothic”, but we might also interpret this as a musical rhythm in light of Goethe’s well-known maxim that “architecture is frozen music” (Ripley 1839: 282).
- 4.
This oft-cited phrase has been variously attributed to Debussy, Mozart, and Ben Jonson, but certainly Debussy’s music is noted for its use of silence, for example, see Orledge 1982: 204–205.
- 5.
The cyclical development of The Rainbow is also widely interpreted as a function of Lawrence’s rendering of myth, for example, in Bell 1992: 76–96.
- 6.
Richard Taruskin provides a more technical description of how “different instruments enter in counterpoint with different orderings of the six tones of the hexachord, so calculated that after six such entries all six constituent tones are continuously present in the texture” (Taruskin 2010: 345).
- 7.
As noted in my Introduction, there were three levels of music according to ancient Greek theory and later developed by Boethius. As Mark Evan Bonds explains, a “hierarchical distinction between the mind and the senses reveals itself with special clarity in the threefold classification of music in Boethius’s De institutione musica. Two of the three categories he identifies are inaudible to the human ear: Musica mundana, the harmony of the spheres, imperceptible to humankind; musica humana , the harmony of the human soul, perceptible within the mind of the individual; musica instrumentalis, sounding music, perceptible through the senses” (Bonds 2014: 32). This distinction between mind and body, the heard and the unheard, resonates strongly with the opening pages of The Rainbow and provides a musical supplement to existing readings of the Brangwen women straining towards the social world.
- 8.
See also Howard J. Booth’s discussion of how The Rainbow is inflected by the religious language adapted by radical thinkers like Edward Carpenter. His quotation from Carpenter’s poem “York Minster” resonates directly with my discussion of “The Cathedral” chapter: “The quaint barbaric tentative uncertain-toned Gregoric refrain, soaring, / Soaring, soaring, through the great desolate nave wandering” (qtd. Booth 2015: 26). On the “Song of Songs”, see Baldanza 1961.
- 9.
P.T. Whelan goes much further in arguing that “The Rainbow and Women in Love together form a sequence very similar to that of the four parts of the Ring cycle” (Whelan 1988: 175). E.M. Forster provides literary precedents of Wagnerian rainbows in Chapter 22 of Howards End and in his short story “The Celestial Omnibus” (1911).
- 10.
George Hyde asserts that Chladni patterns also suggest how “a kind of silent ‘Dionysiac’ music … is given a provisional ‘Apollonian’ shape” (Hyde 1990: 58). For a book-length discussion of the influence of Nietzsche on Lawrence, see Milton 1987. Mark Kinkead-Weekes provides a succinct summary of Lawrence’s thinking as he composed The Rainbow: “There is both Nietzsche and anti-Nietzsche in the argument that the individual will-to be-oneself-to-the-maximum, must also be able to put itself aside in order to give the maximum new life, secure in belief that the universe is governed by a great creative power” (Kinkead-Weekes 1996: 218–219).
- 11.
Will Brangwen is based on Alfred Burrows, the father of Louie Burrows, a “church organist and teacher of wood carving” (Pinion 1978: 297). R. William Neville, the brother of Lawrence’s friend George Neville, also became an organist, at Beauvale Methodist Church (Baron 1981: 4). There was also a fine organ at the Congregational Chapel in Eastwood, that Lawrence attended, installed in 1877: see http://www.hebdenbridgehistory.org.uk/charlestown/eastwood/chapel.html
- 12.
Stoddard Martin perceives that Lawrence’s later novels Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent turn to “the Parsifalian [question] of how a man loves another man” and “seek in various forms the ideal brotherhood” (Martin 1982: 177).
- 13.
Until 1914, Wagner’s specially constructed “Festspielhaus” (festival theatre) in Bayreuth, where Parsifal had its world premiere in 1882, staked its claim to be the only space where Wagner’s “Bühnenweihfestspiel” (stage-consecrating festival play) could be performed.
- 14.
Although Schoenberg argued for the limitation of performances outside Bayreuth after the copyright expired, in the interests of Wagner’s heirs, there is no evidence that he ever visited (possibly due to financial constraints).
- 15.
Lawrence’s essay “Christs in the Tyrol” critiques “the monuments to physical pain … found everywhere in the mountain gloom” (TI 44–45).
- 16.
- 17.
My interpretation of “rhythmic form” thus extends to the fundamentals of form in The Rainbow and I therefore disagree with Whelan’s conclusion that “the phrase ‘rhythmic form’ is used not in respect of the structure of The Rainbow, but with reference to its characterisation” (Whelan 1988: 176). In my support, I would also cite Michael Bell’s extended reading of how “Lawrence’s narrative language seeks to render the movements of feeling, rather than ideas about feeling” (Bell 1992: 53).
- 18.
Adorno explains that “Mahlerian suspensions tend to be sedimented as episodes. These are essential to him: roundabout ways that turn out retrospectively to be the direct ones”. His examples are “the ‘Bird of Death’ passage before the entry of the chorus in the Second, the posthorn episode in the Third, the episodes in the development sections of the first movements of the Sixth and Seventh, to the measures evoking spring in ‘Der Trunkene’ in Das Lied von der Erde, and the passage marked Etwas gehalten (somewhat restrained) in the Burlesque of the Ninth” (Adorno 1996: 41).
- 19.
The pulse of a piece of music is sometimes described as its heartbeat; it is the rhythm that makes us tap our feet.
- 20.
For Mahler’s contribution to musical modernism, see Albright 2004. Albright notes, for example, how Mahler’s symphonies “aspire to become vehicles for the transmission of universal vibrations of human perception”, which suggests a shared zeitgeist with Lawrence, including shared Nietzschean influences (Albright 2004: 6–7).
- 21.
Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron provides another important example of the threshold between worlds, which has caused Adorno and others to consider whether it is “an anti-Parsifal or a neo-Parsifal” (see Steinberg 2004: 222).
- 22.
This passage is also influenced by Hardy as noted by Langbaum 1985: 73.
- 23.
For a reading of The Rainbow and the biblical fall, see Burack 2000.
- 24.
In a letter of December 1910, Lawrence referred to the Song of Solomon in a flirtatious way to his fiancée Louie Burrows (1L 219): specifically, he references The Song of Songs. Translated from the Hebrew by Ernest Renan … Done into English by W. R. Thomas (1895). Frank Baldanza recognises the importance of Hebrew texts in his analysis of Lawrence’s use of parallelism in The Rainbow: “Hebrew poetry is, in essence, a series of parallel statements. This is exactly what Lawrence called ‘slightly modified repetition’” (Baldanza 1961: 108). My intention here is to build from the poetic aspects of Lawrence’s use of language towards an understanding of how he also challenged the boundaries of poetry and music.
- 25.
T.R. Wright also discusses the “Song of Songs” in the context of Lawrence’s essay “Love” (Wright 2000: 116).
- 26.
Debussy’s Two Dances were originally composed for harp and strings, but the concert programme indicates that the piano transcription was performed: “‘Two Dances for Piano and Strings’, Claude Debussy, (a) Danse Sacree (b) Danse Profane” (University of Nottingham, Manuscripts and Special Collections, La B 81).
- 27.
Paul Poplawski’s interesting analysis points to Lawrence’s reading of Jane Harrison, to which I would add that Harrison also emphasised the role of music in ritual art. For instance, she writes: “It has often been noted that two, and two only, of our senses are the channels of art and give us artistic material. These two senses are sight and hearing” (Harrison 1948: 121). Her previous book Themis (1912) is more explicit about the interrelationship of dance and song.
- 28.
Kirsty Martin interprets this scene in terms of her overall thesis of “rhythms of sympathy”, in light of which she notes the repetition of “splash” as “a generic marker of the ballad form, a form which has been suggested to invoke ideas of community” (Martin 2013: 154–155). However, as I discuss in Chap. 1, Lawrence’s adaptations of the ballad form also suggest a proximity to song.
- 29.
For example, Kandinsky’s Impression III, The Concert (1911), was a response to hearing Schoenberg’s music. Some of Schoenberg’s letters to Kandinsky are printed in Auner 2003.
- 30.
- 31.
Kandinsky’s “innerer Klang” literally translates as inner sound but is often given as “inner feeling” (Kandinsky 1977: 2), thus as with Lawrence’s “rhythmic form” sound is a metaphor for, and means of revealing, feeling.
- 32.
As Jack Stewart observes, “there is no evidence of [Lawrence’s] conscious use of expressionist techniques” but, in any case, “‘Influence’ is too crude a concept for Lawrence’s response to the zeitgeist” (Stewart 1980: 297). Nietzsche was a formative influence that Lawrence shared with the German Expressionists, for whom The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music was a foundational text (Gray 2005: 39).
- 33.
For the influence of Nietzsche on Schoenberg, see Harrison 1996: 47–48.
- 34.
For a discussion of Lawrence’s Platonic references to angels as two halves of a separated whole, see Reid 2013: 60–63.
- 35.
Kandinsky may have been influenced by theosophist colour theories, for example, in Thought-Forms (1901), by Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbetter: see Enns 2013: 185–186.
- 36.
Camille Paglia has also noted parallels in the attitudes of both writers, when she writes that “Seraphita chills sex and gender on Nordic ice. Body vs. mind, sensuality vs. abstraction: like D.H. Lawrence, Balzac diagrams the European cultural schizophrenia. Nature is in bondage to the seraph. The ice cracks and nature revives only when Seraphita weakens and dies” (Paglia 1990: 405–406). Paglia’s references to ice bring to mind the final scenes of Women in Love, but her use of the term “diagrams” returns us to the Chladni patterns, with which this chapter commenced.
- 37.
Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) was the author of an influential eight-volume, spiritual interpretation of the Bible titled Arcana Celestia (published 1749–1756).
- 38.
The Rainbow was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act, with reference to evidence by hostile critics including James Douglas, who wrote that “A thing like The Rainbow has no right to exist in the wind of war” (qtd. Draper 1986: 94).
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Reid, S. (2019). “Between Heaven and Earth”: Space, Music, and Religion in The Rainbow. In: D.H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04999-7_4
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