Lawrence & the Bible

BOOK REVIEWS Lawrence & the Bible T R. Wright. D. H. Lawrence and the Bible. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. x+ 274 pp. $64.95 IN D. H. LAWRENCE'S novel The Boy in the Bush, it is said of the main character that "the Bible was perhaps the foundation of his consciousness ." The thrust of T. R. Wright's book is that the same statement could be made of the novel's creator. This much has long been known: readers with even the slightest familiarity with the Bible can recognize the salience of Lawrence's central religious themes—the fall from grace, the end of the world, the resurrection of the body, and the return to Paradise —and the prevalence across his career of references to biblical figures and quotations. In addition, it seems natural to speak of Lawrence's characters, and of Lawrence himself, as would-be prophets or saviors. T. R. Wright, an editor of the Journal of Literature and Theology and an authority on the relationship of these two subjects, adds a great deal to Lawrence studies by dint of his own thorough grounding in biblical text and scholarship. Using a chronological approach, he examines the biblical themes, images, and quotations in a large number of Lawrence's works, including some, like Mr. Noon and The Boy in the Bush, that are less commonly discussed. Wright also points to the "mediating intertexts " of such well-known forebears as Renan, Nietzsche, Frazer, and Blavatsky and such lesser-known figures as Charles Doughty, R. H. Charles, and Alfred Loisy. Finally, he highlights Lawrence as a "precursor of postmodernism," anticipating Bloom, Derrida, and deconstructionism . One may occasionally get bogged down in this work's countless details , but details form the foundation of the arguments and one ultimately finds them edifying. Indeed, Wright discloses a wealth of references in Lawrence's works that many readers less conversant with the Great Book might easily miss. Thus, his study contains an element of surprise, at least for this reader, who marveled on several occasions at phrases from Lawrence that I had no idea originated in the Bible. Wright has done a service both to Lawrence and to readers of Lawrence, who will gain a greater appreciation of the strong but complex links between the subject of this book and the seminal text of his youth. One is sometimes tempted to characterize that link quite simply as an appropriation of biblical text for purposes of inversion and subversion . After all, Lawrence's gods were under-worldly: he was a devil wor107 ELT 45 : 1 2002 shiper in a sense, singing his hymns to lusty Pan rather than to chaste Jesus. The snake becomes the hero in his version of Eden, portrayed in such works as the poem "Snake" and the novel The Plumed Serpent. In the latter work, the protagonist, a sort of reincarnation of Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent god of ancient Mexico, discards the Christian symbols from the local church and prepares to revivify the country with the new-old religion. The late novella The Man Who Died surely contains one of the most blasphemous (and some would say ridiculous) passages in all of modern fiction, when the Jesus figure exclaims, "I am risen!" at the potency-restoring touch of the priestess of Isis. In fact, Wright does highlight the point that throughout his life, Lawrence "employ[s] biblical images against the grain of their conventional Christian interpretation." But his study is more nuanced than that. About The Plumed Serpent, for example, Wright argues that "the new religion draws much of its material from the Bible, partly as an act of postmodern bricolage, employing the tools that lie to hand, partly to indicate the common source of all religion, and partly (one cannot help suspecting ) because Lawrence himself is so saturated with the language of the Bible as not always to be aware how much his own writing echoes it." He notes of St. Mawr how at times the variations on biblical sources serve as parody—not of the Bible itself but rather of the stultified society that purports to live by Christian values. In these ways, Wright reveals the richness of Lawrence...