Continuities (Routledge Revivals)

Sir Frank Kermode

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317555711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

Continuities, first published in 1968, is a collection of reviews by Frank Kermode that appeared from 1962 to 1967. Kermode discusses a variety of novelists, poets, and critics, including T. S. Eliot, Northrop Frye, Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, and Wallace Stevens. History and politics are two important aspects that are discussed in regards to these writers. This book is ideal for students of English literature.

Chapter Five Novelists

DOI: 10.4324/9781315732688-5

XIII D. H. Lawrence and The Apocalyptic Types

Writing novels is more like writing history than we often choose to think. The relationships between events, the selection of incident, even, in sophisticated fictions, the built-in skepticism as to the validity of procedures and assumptions, all these raise questions familiar to philosophers of history as problems relating to historical explanation. One such problem is explanation by types. They are obviously important in novels, for without them there would be no ‘structure.’ How do they work in history? How do we recognise a revolution? The events of a selected series cease to look random when we assimilate them to other selected series which have been identified and classified under some such term as ‘revolution.’ Similarly for series which can be filed under ‘crisis,’ or under ‘transitional epoch.’ There is the complication that personalities involved in the events under consideration may very well have done the typing themselves, as revolutionaries generally do, and this means that historical, like fictive events, can in some measure be caused to occur in conformity with the types. Furthermore, since everybody’s behaviour is indeterminately modified by the conviction that he is living through a crisis, it might be argued that history can, though with unpredictable variations, be prepared for such a conformity, even without the intervention of conscious theory. But the element of indeterminacy is so gross that we can perhaps forget this.

There are, very broadly speaking, two quite distinct and mutually hostile ways of considering ‘typical’ explanations. One is to assume that, with varying and acceptable degrees of ‘displacement,’ histories and fictions cannot avoid conforming with types, so that the most useful thing that can be done is to demonstrate this conformity. However sophisticated and cautious the exponent of this doctrine may be, his thinking is likely, in the last analysis, to be sentimentally ritualistic and circular. He is nowadays much more likely to be a critic of fiction than an historian. Historians and modern theologians nowadays employ typology in a much more empirical way, a way consistent with a more linear notion of history. The historian will agree that the discovery of a motive in some action or series of actions involves classifying it as belonging to a certain type. Unless that is done it will not appear that a motive has been discovered. Of course he will also, as a rule, agree that the material available is not always so classifiable; and so will the novelist. The distinction between these kinds of event is roughly that defined by Bultmann in respect of biblical history as a contrast between what is historisch and what is geschichtlich.¹ The novelist, as a rule, has rather more interest than the historian in the latter, that is, he more completely ignores the multitude of events that might be supposed to have occurred along with the ones he chooses to treat as specially significant. His position is neatly put by Conrad: ‘Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing. But it is also more than that; it starts on firmer ground, being based on the reality of forms.’ Forms are systematised typological insights; they are, or should be, always under very critical scrutiny, because they can tempt us into unjustified archaism.

1 I have borrowed some notions and terms from A. C. Charity’s Events and Their After Life (C.U.P., 1966). For a fuller discussion see Novel, Summer 1968.

The modern theologian is forced to understand the difference between sentimental or archaistic typology and the kind which is appropriate to a belief which has had to emigrate, like the Jews, from myth into history. He professes to use the old scriptural types only as indices of the contemporaneity of the New Testament, and not as elements in a miraculous plot, devised by the Holy Ghost, to keep Old and New Testaments, and the whole of history, in a condition of miraculous concord. Of course there are atavistic theologians as well as atavistic historians, literary critics, and novelists, though it is to me an interesting reflection that modern theology got really deeply into de-mythologising at about the time when literary critics began to go overboard for mythology.

I will not pursue that, but ask why literary people should be so liable to this atavism. One reasonably simple explanation is that our immense skepticism, our deep concern with the nature of the tools we are using, is only one of the traditions to which we are heirs. Another is a tradition of mythological primitivism which has branches of many kinds: occultism, Frazerian Cambridge anthropology, and of course Freud and Jung. In the period which was formative for us there was also a fashionably circular historiography, provided by Spengler; a revival of primitive art; and, a large and seminal literature which was in various ways primitivistic and favourable to archaic typologising. Thus, when novels are closest to history we may still ask whether their fidelity to certain types is wholly consistent with a just representation of human history.

I begin with this dogmatic introduction in order to make it clear in what relations I am considering D. H. Lawrence. Among the reasons why he continues to be thought of as a particularly important novelist is this: he believed himself to be living in a time of cosmic crisis, and partly justified this conviction by archaic typologising. History was for him a plot devised by the Holy Ghost, and ‘scientific’ explanations (which would first examine and then reject this as a fiction) he found hateful. Unlike George Eliot, a predecessor in The Great Tradition, he could not separate the intuition that he lived in the great age of transition from explanations devoid of empirical interest but interesting enough to all primitivists, and indeed to historians of ideas. He knew a great deal (anti-intellectualists need to) and was exceptionally aware of the nature and history of his typologies; for example, he was a great student not only of mystery rituals but also of Apocalypse, and commentary on Apocalypse. This essay is about what he knew, and how it is expressed in various books, notably Women in Love.

In the ‘Study of Thomas Hardy,’ which belongs in time to much the same period as The Rainbow and Women in Love, Lawrence observed that a man can only view the universe in the light of a theory, and since the novel is a microcosm it has to reflect a micro-theory, ‘some theory of being, some metaphysic.’ Of course this metaphysic mustn’t obtrude and turn the novel into a tract, nor must the novelist make himself a metaphysic of self-justification, and then ‘apply the world to this, instead of applying this to the world,’ a practice of which he found a striking instance in the ascetic Tolstoi, whom he describes as ‘a child of the Law.’ The fact is that Lawrence was at the moment when he wrote that passage troubled about the ‘metaphysic’ of the work he had in hand. That he should use so curious an expression of Tolstoi—‘a child of the Law’—gives one a strong hint as to the character of that metaphysic.²

2 It is worth remembering Lawrence’s capacity for having things both ways. He balances his more extreme metaphysical and occult fantasies with a sophisticated pragmatism; the effect in his fiction is to have passages that jeer at Birkin’s doctrines. This hedging of bets I occasionally refer to, but it gets in the way of exposition, and the reader might like to re-introduce it into his reflections if he finds something that seems unexpectedly and positively absurd in my account of Lawrence’s crisis-philosophy.

Lawrence was obsessed with apocalypse from early youth, and he remembered the chiliastic chapel hymns of his childhood. During the war the apocalyptic coloration of his language is especially striking; sometimes it strongly recalls 17th-century puritanism. He considered the world to be undergoing a rapid decline which should issue in a renovation, and expected the English to have some part in this, much as Milton put the burden on God’s Englishmen; Lawrence, however, dwelt more on the decadence, and seemed to think the English were rotting with especial rapidity in order to be ready first. He spoke of the coming resurrection—‘Except a seed die, it bringeth not forth,’ he advises Bertrand Russell in May, 1915. ‘Our death must be accomplished first, then we will rise up.’ ‘Wait only a little while’; these were the last days, the ‘last wave of time,’ he told Ottoline Morell. There would be a new age, and a new ethical law.

The nature of Lawrence’s pronouncements on the new age and the new ethic is such that he can very well be described as a ‘moral terrorist’; Kant’s term for historians who think that the evident corruption of the world presages an immediate appearance, in one form or another, of anti-Christ. But he was also what Kant, in the same work (The Disputation of the Faculties) calls an ‘abderitist,’ namely one who explains history in terms of culture-cycles. More specifically, and perhaps more recognisably, he was a Joachite.

Where Lawrence, who was to call himself Joachim in The Plumed Serpent, got his Joachitism from one can only guess. A possible source is Huysmans’ Là-Bas (‘Two of the Persons of the Trinity have shown themselves. As a matter of logic, the Third must appear’). But Joachitism is a hardy plant, and as Frank E. Manuel says in Shapes of Philosophical History, it was particularly abundant in the literature of the French decadence and so could have formed part of that current of occultist thinking to which Lawrence was so sensitive. The doctrine varies a bit, but broadly it postulates three historical epochs, one for each person of the Trinity, with a transitional age between each. The details are argued out of texts in Revelation.

It is hardly too much to claim that the vague and powerful assumptions we all make about historical transition have their roots in Joachism; in Lawrence, however, the relation is much more specific. The wartime Hardy study speaks of our having reached an end, or a ‘pause of finality’ which is not an end. It is the moment of Transition. There has been an epoch of Law, and an epoch of ‘Knowledge or Love,’ and out of the synthesis of the two will develop the new age, which will be the age of the Holy Spirit. As in some early Joachite sects, the sexual implications of this are especially important. Lawrence holds that the principle of Law is strongest in woman, and that of Love in men (which is worth remembering when one considers Ursula and Birkin). Out of their true union in ‘Consummate Marriage’ will grow that ethic which is the product of Law and Love but is a third distinct thing, like the Holy Ghost. Although there is every sign that we have reached the point of transition, the art which should reflect it has not yet been invented. Obviously the big double novel he was working on was to be the first attempt at this appropriate art.

Now I daresay that some admirers of Lawrence will go a long way towards allowing one to speak of his thought, on sex and other matters, as having a strong apocalyptic colouring, yet draw the line at this very schematic and detailed application of the idea. Yet it is, I think, incontrovertible. When Lawrence spoke of ‘signs’ he did not mean only that everything was getting very bad, he meant that there were apocalyptic images and signs in the sky. The Zeppelin was one: ‘there was war in heaven…. It seemed as if the cosmic order were gone, as if there had come a new order…. It seems our cosmos has burst, burst at last … it is the end, our world has gone…. But there must be a new heaven and a new earth.’ This is from a letter to Lady Ottoline Morell, in September, 1915. A few days later he again calls the Zeppelin ‘a new great sign in the heavens.’ When he came to write the famous chapter ‘Nightmare’ in Kangaroo he again remembered the Zeppelin, ‘high, high, high, tiny, pale, as one might imagine the Holy Ghost.’

In Kangaroo the Holy Ghost is patron of a new age which will dispense with democracy and bosses and be dominated by ‘vertebrate telepathy’ from a leader. As always in apocalyptic historiography, this renovation is preceded by a decadence; the ‘new show’ cannot happen until there has been some smashing. Lawrence’s image of the transitional smasher was the terrible ‘non-metal’ mob, often symbolised by the troglodyte miner, one of his recurrent figures and an object of hate and love, fear and admiration. Continually reflecting on the apocalyptic types, Lawrence produced his own brand of Joachitism, as distinctive as that of Blake in The Everlasting Gospel, but easily identifiable, just as one can readily see the conformity between his more general apocalyptic thinking and the whole tradition. For convenience one can identify three aspects of this, in addition to the specifically Joachite notion of transition and crisis. They are: the Terrors (the appalling events of dies ilia, the last day); decadence and renovation, twin concepts that explain one’s own discontent and one’s own hopes for another Kingdom, somewhere; and finally what I call clerkly skepticism, the reluctance of the literate to credit popular apocalyptism in its crude forms, with consequent historiographical sophistications.

In Lawrence there is a very personal ambiguity in these matters; he was a clerkly writer, but the popular apocalypse fascinated him just the same. He had a doctrine of symbolism which helped him to bridge this gap, and sometimes his allusions are so inexplicit that only if you are a naïve fundamentalist (in which case you probably wouldn’t be reading Lawrence) or are on the lookout (in which case you are reading abnormally) will you pick them up. A good example of this is the passage in St. Mawr, which is in general an apocalyptic story, where Mrs Witt discusses with Lewis ‘a very big, soft star’ that falls down the sky. Lewis is led on to talk about the superstitions of his countryside, and finally to explain what the star means to him_ ‘There’s movement in the sky. The world is going to change again.’ When Mrs Witt reminds him of the physical explanation of shooting stars, mentioning that there are always many in August, he just insists that ‘stones don’t come at us out of the sky for nothing.’ Whatever Lewis has in mind, Lawrence is certainly thinking of Rev. vi.13, ‘And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth,’ which happens at the opening of the sixth seal, when ‘the great day of his wrath is come.’ Lawrence is explicit enough about the general apocalyptic bearing of the horse itself, and perhaps too explicit about the decadence and the possibility of a new show and Lewis’s superior understanding of the situation, but in this little episode there is a set of variations on a hidden apocalyptic symbol which is in some ways even more characteristic.

What we have to see, I think, is that, explicit or inexplicit, this, the apocalyptic, is the chief mould of Lawrence’s imaginative activity. In the work of the 1920s it grows increasingly explicit, for example in the Whitman essay, or in the study of Melville, where the sinking of the Pequod is called ‘the doom of our white day.’ There had always been a racial aspect to his apocalyptic thinking, as we shall see; even in his essays on Dahlberg and Huxley’s Point Counter Point he affirms the exhaustion of the white racial psyche, the disintegration that will lead to a new show. From 1923, mostly in letters to Frederick Carter, he was offering elaborate interpretations of Revelation, based on a study of conventional exegesis (which he despised) and on less orthodox treatments, such as those of James Pryse, Madame Blavatsky, and Carter himself. In 1924 he wrote some articles on the subject, and in his last years worked hard on Apocalypse, his own commentary.

In Apocalypse Lawrence acknowledges that the book of Revelation, and other parts of the Bible, with which he was saturated in childhood, remained in his mind and ‘affected all the processes of emotion and thought.’ But in the meantime he had come to loathe it, and his long essay is an attempt to explain why, consciously and unconsciously, this ‘detested’ book could play so large a part in his most serious work. It has to be separated from mere vulgar credulity and subjected to a clerkly skepticism that is still not mere rationalism. Years of labour went into Lawrence’s theory that the version we read in the Bible, the hateful book, ‘Jewy’ and ‘chapel,’ meat for underdogs, was a horribly corrupt version of an earlier work which must have related the ritual of an authentic mystery religion. What he tries to do is to remove the ‘Judeo-Roman screen’ and penetrate to the fundamental rite, as it was represented in the imagery of the original pre-Christian text. This rite would be a guide to ‘emotional-passional knowledge’; the editorial sophistications stood for the non-vital Christian universe. The original was quick, though the corrupt version was dead. And of course Lawrence found in Revelation his mystery ritual. There was the Great Mother, whom the Jewish and Christian editors had dissociated into one good and one bad, the Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Scarlet Woman. There was the ritual descent into hell, and the rebirth. And this katabasis was the type of the one the world was at present undergoing. As in the mystery rite, the contemporary harrowing of hell is to be accomplished by a sexual act. In the epoch of the Holy Ghost we shall revert ‘towards our elementals,’ as Lawrence put it in that curious homage to the Paraclete, Fantasia of the Unconscious; to Adam reborn, love will be a new thing; the man-woman relationship will be remade. But first there has to be death and rebirth.

Although his commentators pay very little and then only embarrassed attention to it, Apocalypse is ideologically a climax of Lawrence’s work. But because he never ceased to feel that it was not enough merely to describe the crisis, the terrors, the death and rebirth, he wrote over the same years a novel, a novel which should be impregnated with this sexual eschatology. That novel was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As I tried to show in an essay published four or five years ago, that book enacts the sevenfold descent into hell and the climactic rebirth by sex. I shan’t dwell on it now, because I want to talk about better books, and especially about one in which the apocalyptic types have a peculiar historical force, namely Women in Love.

Ritual descent into hell, followed by rebirth—that is the character of Lawrence’s transitional period. The reason why the world misunderstands what is happening is that it knows only a corrupt Apocalypse—it sees, with Mellors, that ‘there’s a bad time coming, boys,’ but thinks that the smashing-up will be a way of dislodging the proud, and setting the underdogs u...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• The Modern
• Types and Times
• Poets
• Critics
• Novelists
• Epilogue