Behold, I show you a mystery. Not all shall see the rainbow that I beheld. My reading experience eerily evoked the phantasmagoric mystery of love between a man and a maid. Infatuated, I dissolved into delirium and lingered with my new book in bed-- panting, feverish, lapping the quasi-religious liturgy known to humans since Adam first beheld naked Eve. Despite my being no stranger to carnality, I did not recognize what was happening to my weak flesh as I read. I had surrendered my heart to Lawrence's obscure vision as my eyes chased the winged and dark words across the page and as my heart raced ahead of my brain—my face, mooning over every word and my body, swooning to the firestorm of lyricism. I had bullish stamina and indulged my book-lust with thrust, speed and fury—in morning-tide and glorious night. I was a gnostic initiate who stood at the threshold of the twelfth Lustre of Kabbalistic Love. I did not understand this book. I felt it. I pierced the veil only to discover darkness and confusion. I groped with my hands for the terra firma of intellect only to observe a rich loamy earth trapped beneath my nails and the detritus entrenched in the grooves of my soft palms. Then this magnificent mare of a novel wheeled against me and trampled me with the force of thunder—its hoof-strikes bruising my tender flesh as I contemplated abandoning the book. For Lawrence, sex leads to the direct perception of reality without priestly intermediaries, and he elevates sexual communion to a sacrament. If you have ever felt the rapture of love and believed in a force greater than yourself (that could not be measured or quantified), you may acknowledge the resemblance even if you think it blasphemous. “The Rainbow” is the 20C Book of Genesis, and Lawrence, the lyrical prophet (cooing in the 21C literary wilderness) nearly convinces you of his obscure vision with word-pictures as he unfolds the lives and loves of three generations of the Brangwen family. Patterns emerge in the tempestuous relationships that repeat themselves in cycles of each generation as surely as the seasons turn. Yet, sweet summer fruit becomes wormwood in winter. What starts with the fire of love and communion transfigures itself into the abomination of desolation of black smoke. Some couples, like the Phoenix, fly from the ash; some lie broken-winged and dying. We are born into Eden and then are banished to face the flood. We drown in that flood or we cling to something permanent and thus live to watch the waters recede. Perchance, we witness a rainbow. Aye, there’s the rub! For in that love-- like living death by fire or flood-- what dreams may come when we shuffled off love before its season? Yet, some cannot look up to the sky for the sign of promise. instead they gaze, with downcast heart, eyes transfixed by the muck of the receded flood debris below their feet.As I read, something happened in the green Eden I had first met in the incomparable prologue. Midway through my literary journey, I bogged down in the Marsh Farm. I became disillusioned and frustrated with the inscrutable characters. The plot itself seemed straightforward and accessible, but the motivations and attitudes of the characters puzzled me. I began to suspect Lawrence of willful obscurantism, and I realized that I did not understand and began to question Lawrence’s harsh will. I flirted with other books, my heart turning to other gods, I put aside the novel for three days and nights, not knowing if I would consummate my relationship, let alone draw near in tenderness to its sequel, “Women in Love.” Fierce Lawrence would brook no questions or wavering, and, for my sins of disbelief, Lawrence banished me from his novel. Yet, like Lucifer cast out of paradise, I resolved to claw my way back into Eden. For me, D. H. Lawrence created a reading experience as volatile as fierce love. The epiphany of truth arrived only after I realized that my reading experience mimicked the lives of these characters in the realm of the dark gods. One feels rapture, then Gethsemane, then “the formal feeling comes.” Eventually, blessed equilibrium returns only if we resolve to pay the price. Some do; some do not. The men and women in his book come together for physical love that is described in allegorical imagery of the natural world--a lyricism created with fire and written with angelic fingers of flame. Then comes the battle for their independence and authenticity. Some lovers in this book yield not an inch to their beloved. Some despair when Paradise appears lost; some do not. In Lawrence’s world, there is a battle between the sexes and a lack of understanding of the other until they can again share the communion of the flesh that brought them together in the first place. If this is doctrine, I think it foolish; yet, there is a resonance here that approximates the misunderstandings that arise and proliferate when lovers submit themselves to the torments of love. When those lovers gallantly meet inevitable hurt, the love, sharply pruned, may blossom anew. But when a couple ignores the pain and refuses the pruning, the love becomes tumorous, and rots and returns to the fecund earth from which it sprang. Though I understood them not, I realized that the characters, through their contradictory attitudes and behavior acted consistently against the irrational force of love. For love will not submit to the Aristotelian mean or to Cartesian logic. Love is selfish and unselfish. Love is rapturous and indifferent. Love is freedom and bondage. Love is victory and surrender. Love is joy and anger. Love is hope and despair. Love is identity and obliteration. Love is Eden and Apocalypse. Enter this world at your own risk. Refuse to enter this world at your own risk.In the beginning, Lawrence created a heaven and earth in the Midlands. Darkness moved across the face of the deep until shafts of hard light pierced the wet darkness. First, there was Eden; then came the flood. If we survive its raging torrents, we send out our doves, hoping they will not return void, and we pray that we may endure the catastrophe of love to behold the rainbow of promise. June 24, 2014Here is a link to "Women in Love," the second novel in the series of the Brangwen Family Saga: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
And the rainbow stood on the earth.Once, Lawrence was a king. He was important. Even in the 1970s, he remained a regular on Literature curriculums. Then, gradually, his grip loosened. His fingers tired from hanging on to the ledge, or they were plucked, one by one, by some grinning creature. Apart from the odd film adaption of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he was let go. He fell. And, judging by many of the reviews here, ’twas a good thing to... Maybe now that beards are back, perhaps ... ? Alas, no, the world is not ready for a Lawrence revival. He is an artist, and an artist isn’t always easy. We prefer easier pleasures these days. We’ve been taught to. And we’ve been taught to be suspicious of more difficult ones, and those who champion them.And I champion them.This is only my second Lawrence novel, my first being the aforementioned much smaller, quicker and more breathless Lady Chat’s. But I ended up reading that twice and really wanted to tackle another. So, when I saw second hand copy for 50 cents at an op shop, I took the op. But where was she, that she seemed so absent?People often go missing in this book, chiefly on an internal, psychological level. The difficulty people find in this book, and I still found in it, of course, is how it treats both character and time. Lawrence is a master of both in a strict literary narrative sense, which is one of the reasons he should still be on every solid Literature syllabus. We track three generations of characters, three Brangwens in particular, and Lawrence focuses on many different points of their lives, and skims through others; people meet then part, then other sections of their lives connect later on, that might have even happened before; but the chief issue at large is the idea of the ‘self’, so that even the same character, at different points of time, appears to be a different character, who happens to bear the same name. I’ll focus on Urusla Brangwen, the third of the trio, since she is perhaps the most overt example of Lawrence’s play and examination. Ursula goes through a range of phases in her life, or different versions of Ursula, more accurately, in interaction with those around her, and the world around her, and Lawrence matches his style brilliantly to the various Ursulas he occupies. The aesthetic energy ebbs and flows, but always sustains such a sense of bravado in its suitability to the moment. And sometimes, this kind of dedication to the art of representing not just ideas of people, but people themselves, in words, can grate on the contemporary reader. When Ursula is at her most introspective, we get some very heavy linesHe was a consummation, a being infinite. Self was a oneness with the infinite. To be oneself was a supreme gleaming triumph of infinity. And when she is on the verge, or in and about, what they once called ‘madness’ or being ‘beside yourself’, we get some very confused and disordered paragraphs. Each time, Ursula, like us, thinks she is the definitive Ursula—even sometimes right in the midst of the maelstrom of transformation. And each time she is right. And each time she is proven wrong.I will mention a couple of interesting motifs are worth exploring in terms of Lawrence’s project during Ursula’s time at the narrative helm, though there are many more. One is the idea of being real, or remaining true to what you are, and letting the world around you respond to that; or, realising what the world around you is like, what the world is truly, and adapting your-self to it. The motif is introduced most strongly when Ursula is introducing her teacher/lover, Winifred, to her Uncle Tom, and they discuss the colliery that Tom is manager of, and how the workers die and are so poorly treated, and how their women respond to it.The women knew it right enough, and take it for what it’s worth. One man or another, it doesn’t matter all the world. The pit matters. Round the pit there will always be the sideshows.The men adjust to the world of The Pit. They live in it without a sense of willing change. Both Tom and Winifred understand how bad this is... ‘...cynically reviling the monstrous state yet adhering to it...’ Ursula loses Winifred to Tom, and, The Pit. They both serve the machine of life, they... ‘...worshipped the impure abstraction, the mechanisms of matter...’ whereas this Ursula wants to reorder the machine. She wants to pick apart matter itself.The other motif is Lawrence’s use of light and dark in the relationship between Ursula and Skrebensky. Firstly, there are Platonic overtones regarding Ursula’s idea of normal society as people gathered around a campfire in the darkness:...ignoring always the vast darkness that wheeled round about, with half revealed shapes lurking on the edge.Yea, and no man dared even throw a firebrand into the darkness.The light of the campfire is ‘...an intensely gleaming light of knowledge’ which the current Ursula feels is an attraction to only those without the courage to face the dark ... the unmitigated Real. They are cowards. Later, Skrebensky, who has returned from the Boer War describes African darkness (in a very Conradian manner) as: ...massive and fluid with terror—not fear of anything—just fear. One breathes it, like a smell of blood. The blacks know it. They worship it, really, the darkness.And then, on the threshold of fornication:...in the utter, dark kiss, that triumphed over them both, subjected them, knitted them into one fecund nucleus of the fluid darkness.One feels the hand of Nietzsche, one feels the hand of Freud; but one is also transported by a narrative energy that Lawrence alone possesses. The prose regularly dips into poetry, and the repetitions that some people here lampoon are part of the mood, the development and devilment of a psyche through art and artifice. Why must one climb the hill? Why must one climb?Ursula almost becomes Sisyphus, and maybe we must imagine her happy.
Do You like book The Rainbow (2009)?
I revisited this as it was teenage angst novel and wanted to see if it held up. I am glad to say that it not only did, but reading the book 20 years later I now have more insight and got more out of the subtle nuances of relating and feeling in the romantic relationships that this book focuses on. It is a free flowing novel with the only plot to track the emotional lives of three generations of a family, much of the latter half of the book focusing on the maturation of Ursula Brangwen. It is interesting to compare how each generational couple relates to one another as Lawrence statements on what he thinks makes a good relaitonship. Most people focus on the sex in Lawrence's writing which Lawrence certainly did feel that to be the core of romantic relationships. And he viewed sex not only a physical pleasure, but a kind of spiritual union. However it is clear in reading this book that he did not think it was *all* the successful relationship was. Intellectual compatibility obviously counts of a lot in Lawrence's mind. It is also very interesting to read in his descriptions, how the merges the physical, spiritual, and emotional in every image. Not just in the people, but it permeates the very landscape. This is such a vital book filled with such emotional dynamic, it's almost an action novel for the heart. I think Lawrence wrote women better than any male author I have ever read. Barring the class issues, I related to Ursula at 16, and I still relate to her at 42. It's not a book for everyone, but I got a lot out of it.
—KiplingKat
Only half-way through so only superficial observations so far:Women are unexpectedly 3-dimensional. Since I've read feminists have problems with Lawrence, I'm surprised that the women are so fleshed-out and imperfect (human). Male characters may objectify women but Lawrence presents females as emotional/intellectual equals and even superior/more complicated in many instances. As another review mentioned, he def tells more than shows which is fine, but not my preference. The psychology of some of the characters can be a little inconsistent. While I find myself thinking "yes, I know that person--this rings true" with other novelists' characters, Lawrence's characters often puzzle me. Sometimes Anna despises her husband for his vague spirituality and unquestioning acceptance of religious dogma, then later hates him for so concretely dragging her out of the dreamy happiness of expecting her first-born. Not that a person can't appreciate the vague in one thing and hate it in another, but there seems to be somewhat of a disconnect that I can't quite put my finger on. Eh, maybe its my own annoyance with human foibles/contradictions.This would be a great book for a book club--if I ever showed up to the book clubs I always say I'll go to yet never do--I'd suggest it as the next title. So far.
—Liz
And here we have D.H. Lawrence's thorough account of three generations of a family who is doomed (blessed?) to have lots and lots of passionate, bad sex. This big novel was more palatable than I expected it to be, honestly. I've never been a huge fan of Lawrence's, but I found this more readable than some of his other works. (I was also delighted to rediscover Ursula and Gudrun, as I had read the apparent sequel to this book, Women in Love, when I was in high school. For fun.) This family is filled with very capricious, changeable people, but a few of them become endearing. Lawrence did a better job creating multifaceted women than I expected, and the glimmers of female homoeroticism were surprising but appreciated for his willingness to go there. There was also a surprising lot of religious struggle among these characters, and frequent discussions of Christian mysticism, which also took me off-guard, but I really liked those passages of inner grapplings. Overall, Lawrence's style is too pendulous and dramatic to sweep me off my feet, but he clearly knew what he was doing with The Rainbow.
—Abby
