The Rainbow & Women in Love

Ryu engages one of Lawrence's salient insights into the nature of fictive thought. It is that the novel is no moral fable; rather: "art must give a deeper satisfaction. It must give fair play all round.… Yet every work of art adheres to some system of morality. But if it really be a work of art, it must contain the essential criticism on the morality to which it adheres" (Phoenix, 476). In actively contradicting itself, art often contradicts its author. The artist, as Lawrence elucidates,

is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day.… The artist usually sets out—or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

(Studies in Classic American Literature, 2)

Does Ryu save The Rainbow and Women in Love from their creator? To some extent, yes. He rescues Women in Love, or at least engages it in contemporary conversation, more enthusiastically than he does The Rainbow. Do either of these novels need saving? Perhaps not. But they do repay—and repay in spades—our revisiting them, as they do their inclusion in the current critical dialogue. That Ryu does so is to our benefit and to his credit.

He follows the example begun by David Lodge (After Bakhtin, 1990) and others by applying Bakhtinian critical perspectives to Lawrence's novels. The connection of Lawrence's and Bakhtin's thought is natural and entirely unforced: Lawrence indisputably sees the creative act as a sometimes cantakerous, always lively dialogue between the work, its characters, its inclinations, and its author. What better critic, then, to borrow critical terminology from than Bakhtin, for whom the novel is thoroughly dialogic, playfully anarchic in its "polyphonic" multitude of voices? For Bakhtin, the novel affirms its dialogical inclusiveness and combativeness, its Rabelaisian playfulness in contradistinction to the sorts of "monologic" declaiming of the kind in which dictators, television commercials, or preachy novelists indulge. When Lawrence is on his best behavior, there is no more eloquent champion of polyphonic expression: "The beauty and great value of the novel" is that, unlike "philosophy, religion [or] science," the novel is not "busy nailing things down." Rather, it is the "highest example of subtle inter-relatedness" (Phoenix, 528).

For Lawrence, like Bakhtin, monologic rant, or even a multiplicity of monologic ranting characters do not a novel make, and Lawrence does try successfully, particularly in The Rainbow and Women in Love, to balance competing voices, his own included, whether thinly veiled in the guise of a Birkin or not. Ryu judges accurately Lawrence's efforts and their outcomes in these two novels, and glances helpfully at the failure of a later work, Aaron's Rod, to achieve a similarly truthful balance.

Most often, Ryu chooses his essentially Bakhtinian critical apparatus judiciously. He consistently explores Lawrence's self-critical inclinations, those that make his novels truly novels and not, as they increasingly become in his career, sermons uttered by the notorious Priest of Love (cf. The Priest of Love, H. T. Moore, 1974). One nevertheless regrets that Ryu does not make use of Bakhtin's seminal notion of unfinalizability. By neglecting it, Ryu may underestimate the extent to which Bakhtin may be most apposite to Lawrence. At his best, Lawrence, as Ryu well knows, is an accomplished novelist after Bakhtin's heart: he knows how in the novel to personify his passions, the more contradictory and contending the better; he knows both how to create and partake of the carnival atmosphere of many voices, not all (nor perhaps any of them) entirely his own. He knows the extent to which art can be a kind of raucous debate between the artist as a "damned...