D. H. LAWRENCE AND THE BIBLE T. R. WRIGHT published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb22ru, UK www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011±4211, USA www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia Ruiz de AlarcoÂn 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain # T. R. Wright 2000 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2000 Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Baskerville 11/12.5pt ce A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 0 521 78189 2 hardback Contents Abbreviations page vi Acknowledgements ix 1 `The Work of Creation': Lawrence and the Bible 1 2 Biblical intertextuality: Bakhtin, Bloom and Derrida 14 3 Higher criticism: Lawrence's break with Christianity 21 4 Poetic fathers: Nietzsche and the Romantic tradition 36 5 Pre-war poetry and ®ction: Adam and Eve come through 57 6 Re-marking Genesis: The Rainbow as counter-Bible 84 7 Double-reading the Bible: Esoteric Studies and Re¯ections 110 8 Genesis versus John: Women in Love, The Lost Girl and 129 Mr Noon 9 Books of Exodus: Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo and The Boy in 140 the Bush 10 Prose Sketches, `Evangelistic Beasts' and Stories with 162 biblical `Overtones' 11 Prophetic voices and `red' mythology: The Plumed Serpent 188 and David 12 The Risen Lord: The Escaped Cock, Lady Chatterley's Lover 214 and the Paintings 13 Apocalypse: the con¯ict of love and power 228 14 Last Poems: ®nal thoughts 245 List of references 252 Indices 264 v Abbreviations All references to Lawrence's work, unless otherwise stated, are to the Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence, published by Cambridge University Press, using the following abbreviations of their titles: A Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, 1980. AR Aaron's Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins, 1988. BB The Boy in the Bush, ed. Paul Eggert, 1990. CP The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts, 2 vols, London: Heinemann, 1962. EC The Escaped Cock, ed. Gerald M.Lacy, Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1978. EE England, My England and Other Stories, ed. Bruce Steele, 1990. EP Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simo- netta de Filippis, 1992. Fant Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. FLC The First Lady Chatterley, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Fox The Fox / The Captain's Doll / The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl, 1992. JTLJ John Thomas and Lady Jane, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. K Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, 1994. LAH Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen, 1987. LCL Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires, 1993. Letters The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James Boulton and others, 7 vols, 1979±93. vi Abbreviations vii LG The Lost Girl, ed. John Worthen, 1981. MEHa Movements in European History, ed. James T. Boulton, Oxford University Press, 1971. MEHb Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton, 1989. MM Mornings in Mexico and Etruscan Places, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. MN Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey, 1984. Phoenix Phoenix, The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Edward McDonald, London: Heinemann, 1936. Phoenix II Uncollected, Unpublished and Other Prose Works, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore, London: Heinemann, 1968. Plays The Plays, ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen, 1999. PM `Paul Morel', the manuscript of the second version of the novel at the Humanities Research Center at Austin, Texas. PO The Prussian Of®cer and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen, 1983. PS The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, 1987. Q Quetzalcoatl: The Early Version of `The Plumed Serpent',ed. Louis L. Martz, Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1995. RTheRainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, 1989. Ref Re¯ections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays,ed. Michael Herbert, 1988. SCAL Studies in Classic American Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. SL Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron, 1992. SLC Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal, London: Heinemann, 1967. SM The Symbolic Meaning: The Uncollected Versions of `Studies in Classic American Literature', ed. Armin Arnold, Arundel: Centaur Press, 1962. SS Sea and Sardinia, ed. Mara Kalnins, 1997. StM St Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, 1983. STH Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, 1985. T The Trespasser, ed. Elizabeth Mans®eld, 1981. TI Twilight in Italy and Other Essays, ed. Paul Eggert, 1994. WL Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, 1987. WP The White Peacock, ed. Andrew Robertson, 1983. viii Abbreviations WRA The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, 1995. All biblical quotations, unless otherwise stated, are taken from the Authorized or King James Version, with standard abbreviations of individual books. Abbreviations of the titles of other works by Friedrich Nietzsche and Helena Blavatsky will be found in the references at the end of the book. chapter 1 `The Work of Creation': Lawrence and the Bible In one of his Last Poems, `The Work of Creation', Lawrence makes the familiar Romantic comparison between the divine creation of the world and the artistic process of writing. `Even an artist', he claims, knows that the `mystery of creation' is not a conscious or controlled process, the deliberate realisation of a carefully planned intention: he could never have thought it before it happened. A strange ache possessed him, and he entered the struggle, and out of the struggle with his material, in the spell of the urge his work took place, it came to pass . (CP 690) The poem characteristically reverts to the somewhat archaic biblical phrase, `it came to pass', from the King James or Authorized Version, where it occurs more than thirty times (Cruden 1954: 99), to introduce the idea that even God `knows nothing before-hand' but acts spontaneously: `His urge takes shape in the ¯esh, and lo! / it is creation'. `Lo', of course, has an equally biblical ring, which is again appropriate, for much of the material with which Lawrence's own writing struggles is biblical. It is a commonplace of modern literary criticism that all writing is intertextual, that every text involves the `absorption and transformation of another text' or texts (Newman 1995: 2). It is equally a commonplace of Lawrence criticism, of course, that the Bible is the text which his own work most obviously and most often reworks. His writing, at all stages of his career, contains frequent references to biblical characters and symbols while, even when not invoking any particular passage from the Bible, his language is permeated by the rhythms of the Author- ized Version. The aim of this book is to explore this truism more carefully, to pay close attention to the details of this `struggle' of 1 2 D. H. Lawrence and the Bible creation, to see what `comes to pass' in Lawrence's work as a result of this creative and critical struggle. There is a broader concern here too, for this intertextual wres- tling, as I hope to demonstrate, amounts to a powerful, wide-ranging and sustained critique of the Bible in the light of modernity, the application of the most `enlightened' thought to the foundational text of western civilisation. Lawrence, I will argue, anticipates many of the problems facing all of us belated postmoderns as we enter the new millennium, in particular in the west, as we are forced to address the complexity of our relationship to the Judaeo-Christian tradition. However much we may struggle against it, we de®ne ourselves, we understand ourselves, whether in acceptance or rejec- tion (or somewhere in the spectrum between these two poles) in terms of its language and mentality. One of the discomforting aspects of reading Lawrence is that he reminds us of this. Even if we lack his detailed familiarity with every part of the Bible, we are forced by his constant reference to it to reassess our own attitude to it. We are forced to reread it as well as him. Lawrence's `decidedly radical stance' both towards what he saw as `a limiting Christian orthodoxy' and towards scienti®c modernity, `the secularist and rationalist ideologies of bourgeois society', offers a challenge to all of us. For he pressed the truth `that God ®nally transcends language . to an unacceptable extreme' while still managing `to com- municate a richer sense of God than almost any other twentieth- century author' (Eagleton 1973: 87, 100). Lawrence's relationship to modernity in the sense of `progress' and technology, of course, was as ambivalent and problematic as his attitude to the Bible. In some respects, he can more accurately be described as a precursor of postmodernism than as a modernist. His playful reworking of biblical material, redeploying fragments of the crumbling Judaeo-Christian tradition in his own creative writing, can be read as a form of postmodern bricolage, building provisional beliefs with the otherwise discredited tools that lie to hand. His deconstruction of the western metaphysical tradition, as I hope to show, anticipates (in a less technical, more accessible way) the work of such postmodern theorists as Derrida. His reading of Nietzsche, chronicled in chapter 4, provides perhaps the most signi®cant bridge to Derrida. He was familiar, however, as I show in chapter 3, not only with the results of higher criticism and the pioneers of religious anthropology such as Frazer, but also with less `scienti®c' religious `The Work of Creation' 3 writers such as Madame Blavatsky and other theosophical revampers of rabbinic and kabbalistic traditions.