Undulating Styles: The Rainbow

Abstract

Evidently the wealth of critical writing on Lawrence, and in particular on his mature fiction, means that the main ideas are continually laid down and augmented, and Lawrence’s style almost always, rightly, receives critical attention. That there are right ways and wrong ways of approaching his language is something which is implicitly taken up in this study. Lawrence is, of course, recognizably a highly metaphorical writer and his work has much to communicate about the necessarily metaphorical nature of understanding. If Lawrence can be seen ‘thinking metaphorically’ in his discursive writing, to what extent is the poetic character of his thought available to us in his fiction? While I would be reluctant to say that The Rainbow is ‘about’ language any more than the books on the unconscious, or indeed Women in Love, are ‘about’ language, directly, my intention here is to examine metaphoricity in The Rainbow as the proper vehicle for Lawrence’s thought in the context of a significant work of fiction. This will not prove to be another mode entirely, different utterly from that of the subsequent novel, Women in Love, for instance, but a specific modulation of Lawrence’s ‘metaphysic’, broadly speaking.

There still remains a God, but not a personal God: a vast shimmering impulse which wavers onwards towards some end, I don’t know what — taking no regard of the little individual, but taking regard for humanity. When we die, like rain-drops falling back again into the sea, we fall back into the big, shimmering sea of unorganised life which we call God. We are lost as individuals, yet we count in the whole.

(Letters, I, p. 256)

For we are all waves of the tide. But the tide contains the waves.

(‘The Crown’)