A Study of The Rainbow and Women in Love: As Expressions of D. H. Lawrence’s Thinking on Modern Civilization

By Nak-chung Paik

This study proposes to examine D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love as expressions of his thinking on modern civilization. The two main essays on the novels are preceded by an inordinately long “Introductory” chapter and followed by a relatively brief “Epilogue: Reflections on The Plumed Serpent.” The Introduction, which touches on a variety of topics, nevertheless attempts a sustained and consistent discussion of how Lawrence’s non-fictional work amounts to a body of cogent presentations and expositions of the thought-adventure most notably enacted by The Rainbow and Women in Love. The Epilogue’s reflections antedate the discourse of ‘post-colonialism’ and did evoke a number of post-colonialist themes.
Changbi Publishers
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Paik’s thesis remains a highly sophisticated vade mecum for reading Lawrence and, given its critical and intellectual heft, its lucid accessibility is equally remarkable. — Michael Bell, author of D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being and Professor Emeritus, University of Warwick
Why should we read D. H. Lawrence today? Nak-chung Paik has provided an answer to that question in this book of startling originality. — Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature, Duke University

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About the author:
Born in Korea in 1938 , Paik Nak-chung (also known as Nak-chung Paik in the English-speaking world) went to the United States after finishing high school in Seoul, received a B.A. (1959) from Brown University, Providence RI, and an M.A. (1960) and Ph.D. (1972) in English Literature from Harvard University, Cambridge MA. He joined the faculty in the English Department of Seoul National University in 1963 . In 1966 , he founded the literary-intellectual journal The Changbi Quarterly. As its editor and practicing critic, Paik has spearheaded the cause of national literature, while working to promote a systematic understanding and overcoming of what he calls the division system on the Korean peninsula. As a consequence, he often suffered persecution from the government, being dismissed from Seoul National University in 1974 for signing a demand for a democratic constitution, only to be reinstated in 1980. Also, The Changbi Quarterly was banned from 1980 to 1988.
Paik Nak-chung has authored numerous books in both literary criticism and social criticism. His more recent works The New Stage of National Literature(1990), Rewards of Korean Literature in the Age of Reunification(2006), The Path of Practice for Transforming the Division System(1994), The Division System in Crisis(1998), Unification Korean-Style, Present Progressive Tense(2006), Where Is the Middle Way and Wherefore Transformation?(2009), Questioning Again What Is Literature(2011), and D. H. Lawrence: Western Thinker of the ‘Great Opening’(2020). Paik has also published the seven-volume Conversations with Paik Nak-chung(2017), and in English, The Division System in Crisis: Essays on Contemporary Korea(University of California Press 2011).
Currently he serves as editor emeritus of The Changbi Quarterly, professor emeritus at Seoul National University, and honorary co-chair of the Korea Peace Forum, and continues to produce essays and columns of literary, social, and political analysis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Changbi Publishers
• Release date: Mar 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9788936493462

Book preview

Foreword

Nak-chung Paik (who also publishes as Paik Nak-chung) is publishing in English his Harvard thesis of 1972. This follows its publication in Korean translation in July 2020. Although the context of academic Lawrence studies has moved on since its original completion, and he would now engage with a different generation of critics, the positive argument of this book, remarkably to me, requires no up-dating. It remains a highly sophisticated vade mecum for reading Lawrence and, given its critical and intellectual heft, its lucid accessibility is equally remarkable. The author does not so much show as use a capacious knowledge of European, especially German, philosophy; international Marxist thought; British critical tradition; strains of Oriental philosophy, and postcolonial critique avant la lettre. These do not clutter the foreground but inform the view point, and the surefooted progress, of the argument.

It is also a book which obliges me to declare a personal interest. Paik engages the question of Being and draws particularly on Martin Heidegger to define what this means. I submitted a PhD thesis in 1970 engaging similar questions and focusing a Germanic philosophical lens on the same texts: The Rainbow, Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent. This was published in a revised and expanded form as Language and Being in 1992. By that time Lawrence had suffered the indignities of various ideologically based reproofs to the point of becoming persona non grata in the academy and it seemed to me necessary to set out the philosophical vision at the heart of his work in a way that even the previous generation of sympathetic critics had not sufficiently done. But had I been aware of Paik’s work at the time I would have had to acknowledge his study as perhaps the only significant parallel to my project. And moreover that he had achieved the philosophically informed authority at which I aimed. Happily for us both, however, it is indeed a parallel. Whereas my study was a close reading of language in the light of the question of Being, Paik achieves something similar through a more character and narrative based reading. In that respect it opens itself more readily to new, as well as seasoned, readers of Lawrence.

It is relevant to note that Nak-chung Paik is a distinguished commentator on the politics of Korea; not just on day-to-day politics, that is to say, but on their underlying conditions. More urgently than most countries, Korea lives within the seismic movements of global powers and Paik brings to bear on Lawrence the world perspective developed within his political concerns. The political for him is not a matter of particular opinions and individuals or social classes so much as the manifestation of wider historical forces. A besetting vice of much early criticism of Lawrence was parochialism: ideological, moral, social and literary. Paik is the exact opposite. He engages the small world of Cossethay, or the interactions of two couples in Women in Love, with a steady unfolding of how these are endowed with larger, indeed a world-historical, significance. When Gudrun sees Gerald as representing ‘a great phase of life’ the reader of this book can feel the proper force of the phrase.

As Heidegger argued, although Being may sound like a philosophical universal, it has history: what he called the forgetting of Being. Lawrence’s generational narrative traces a similar process and, by keeping his attention on the question of Being, Paik is able to show the inadequacy, at times indeed the incomprehension, of many previous commentators. Nor are these merely straw men: they include good critics of Lawrence, like Mark Spilka, and institutionally prominent ones such as Frank Kermode. That Lawrence manages to embed the history of Being within a vividly realistic narrative is a central feature of his genius although one that, by the same token, largely hides its own art. Paik exercises an exemplary esprit de finesse in bringing out the complexities and shifts of the Lawrencean theme. This enables him, for example, to scotch the common notion that Lawrence was simply hostile to industrialism and the machine. Using Heidegger’s thinking on the question of technology he indicates the inner disposition that is at stake. He also draws on Heidegger’s invocation of Hölderlin to focus one of the crucial qualities of Lawrence’s writing: ‘where danger is grows/ Also the saving power’. Even when excoriating his contemporary world, and amid the comprehensive tragedy of Women in Love, every sentence remains somehow life oriented, ultimately affirmative. Paik’s reading brings the nature of Lawrence’s achievement freshly to consciousness and provides the necessary criterion for assessing his failures and stridencies which come to seem an integral part of his struggle for expression.

This last point applies most strongly to The Plumed Serpent and it is in the discussion of this novel that Paik’s global viewpoint comes most explicitly to the fore. While endorsing the general view of the novel as seriously flawed, Paik indicates the difficulty and range of its ambition. The novel treats of one of the first great third world revolutions, and one in which the establishing of a native cultural tradition was a consciously central endeavour. It is a novel in which visionary, specifically utopian, motivation strains the integrity of its realist representation; a tension which Paik notes throughout Lawrence’s fiction. In the latter decades of the twentieth century it became widely recognised that non-realist modes, often in the form of ‘magical realism’, have a peculiar relevance to third world national histories. Paik invokes Frantz Fanon and shows how consciously this novel anticipates such a context. Here, as throughout, his penetrating and nuanced reading enters the spirit of Lawrence’s texts without losing its own critical poise and remains an invaluable guide to new readers.

Michael Bell

Author’s Preface

It takes some temerity for an author to publish practically unchanged what one wrote nearly half a century ago. The text, moreover, is one’s doctoral dissertation, usually stuff for extensive revision in the ensuing years. After submitting my dissertation at Harvard University in the summer of 1972 I did make some half-hearted attempts to find a publisher, but came home immediately to resume both my teaching at Seoul National University and the Editor’s duties at The Changbi Quarterly, which I had founded in 1966. From early 1974 on I also became deeply involved in the democracy movement against Park Chung Hee’s dictatorship, incurring dismissal from the university and banishment from the academia for several years.

I was thus hardly in a position to work on the revision even if some university press had accepted the manuscript. In truth, however, I had long ago made the decision to write primarily for the Korean folk, the decisive moment being when I chose in 1960 to interrupt my studies in the United States to come back to Korea. Nor did my priorities change since then, even though I went back to the U. S. twice in subsequent years, eventually finishing doctoral work in 1972. Of course, this would not fully excuse my limited output in English, but as I began in the late 1970s to write again on Lawrence, it was mostly in Korean, targeting the Korean audience.

But what and how to speak to Koreans about Lawrence—and make oneself heard as well? That remained for long an unresolved question, which, in addition to my commitment to other activities and generally deficient ability, accounts for the exorbitant delay in bringing out the long intended Korean book on Lawrence. Only last year did I finally manage to do so, together with the translation of my doctoral dissertation by four former pupils.

This is not the place to expatiate at length on the new work. I will only note that, while it addresses many topics not touched on in the dissertation and attempts to conduct a discussion more embedded in the local intellectual terrain (including works of fellow Lawrence scholars in the country), its most salient new feature would be an endeavor to relate Lawrence’s thought to the traditional Korean project for a ‘Late Day Great Opening’. Most salient, to be sure, but quite unpropitious for making the book accessible to English-speaking readers. The title itself is hardly translatable. I have provisionally rendered it for the benefit of my foreign friends and colleagues as D. H. Lawrence: Western Thinker of the ‘Great Opening’, which inevitably calls for additional explanations: that ‘Great Opening’ is a traditional East Asian term for the first opening of heaven and earth (somewhat like Creation but involving neither a supreme deity nor creatio ex nihilo); and that here, however, it refers to the more specifically Korean idea (since the mid-nineteenth century) of a radical transformation in thought and beliefs as well as in the nation’s (and eventually the world’s) social and political setup. The movement led to the great Donghak Peasants’ War of 1894, in which the peasant forces were defeated only by the intervention of the superior-armed Japanese army. Yet even after that defeat the movement for a ‘Late Day Great Opening’ has lived on through a number of indigenous religions, today increasing its presence in South Korea’s secular discourse as well.

That idea, whatever its merits, was the crucial enabling factor in finally bringing together into a single volume my various reflections on Lawrence over the decades. It won’t be any time soon, if ever, before I shall learn the response of international Lawrencian community, but the completion of the long-nourished project has given birth to a new ambition: to publish the original English version of my thesis as well, even if I must resign myself to its limited reach due to the impossibility of my reworking it to satisfy a reputable press overseas.

In terms of Lawrence’s texts, a crucial difference that the intervening half-century has made is the publication of the Cambridge editions. I had to work without their benefit and use versions available at the time. In the present volume I have kept the original references but offer corresponding pages in the Cambridge edition for those who wish to check. Readers who do will find considerable divergences and omissions in the earlier versions. In one quoted passage of Women in Love the Cambridge edition even provides a diametrically opposed reading [see p. 165 below]. Though I fully concur with the new reading, here too I opted to leave it unchanged, merely adding an author’s note to argue how my comments could be reconciled with the corrected text.

All this seems only to foreground the temerity of publishing an ancient document (correcting only the typing errors and adding a few new notes). But frankly, going over the text again, I found some reasons to fan my ambition and authorial vanity. I feel that, although much indeed has been written about The Rainbow and Women in Love over the past half-century, the kind of focused, not to say exhaustive, reading and analysis of the two novels with a full conviction of their making sense in terms of plot and character seems rather in short supply. This kind of reading might indeed be even more relevant today than when I wrote in 1971-72, for the current fashion in literary criticism and scholarship appears largely to favor processing of selective material in terms of some preferred theory or the critic’s personal leanings. It does not seem, either, that the world as a whole (though with scattered exceptions, to be sure) has grown any more attentive to Lawrence’s call for a radically new thinking and ‘thought-adventure’.

The two main essays on the novels are preceded by an inordinately long Introductory chapter and followed by a relatively brief "Epilogue: Reflections on The Plumed Serpent." The Introduction, which touches on a variety of topics, nevertheless attempts a sustained and consistent discussion of how Lawrence’s non-fictional work amounts to a body of cogent presentations and expositions of the thought-adventure most notably enacted by The Rainbow and Women in Love. The Epilogue’s reflections antedate the discourse of ‘post-colonialism’ and, though based on scant knowledge of the Mexican Revolution or the then ongoing socialist experiment in Salvador Allende’s Chile (the Cuban Revolution, on the other hand, was very much on my mind), did evoke a number of post-colonialist themes, while managing, as most of the post-colonial discourse hardly does, to provide some anticipations of the idea of ‘Late Day Great Opening’, a potential I try to bring to light in The Plumed Serpent chapter of my Korean book.

My sometimes flagging confidence in the worth of the present project was much bolstered by the Foreword contributed by my good friend Michael Bell, surely one of the most highly esteemed critics on Lawrence now writing. His generous introduction also kindles some hope that this edition might after all find more readers than I had originally contemplated. I am also grateful to my old friend Ariel Dorfman for his words of endorsement, both for their own sake and their helping to extend the book’s reach.

Many other personal debts occur to mind, beginning with memories of the initial readers of the dissertation, Professors Robert Kiely and the late Warner Berthoff of Harvard University. I shall not, however, try to name the numerous colleagues, friends and family who have been a source of inspiration and support through all these years.

In closing let me note that, although I am known as Nak-chung Paik by most Western friends, I have chosen to adopt the East Asian way of putting the family name first, as I believe each culture is entitled to its own manner of appellation.

Paik Nak-chung

Seoul, February 2021

z01

I

This study proposes to examine D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love as expressions of his thinking on modern civilization. The undertaking seems to call for certain preliminary considerations. For, while we can easily agree that the novels, whatever they may or may not express, must be read and judged as novels, and that art-speech rather than the artist ought to be attended to, it is not so easy to see what a novel, or art-speech in general, is.

In the novel Kangaroo, Lawrence offers one answer. Now a novel, he says, is supposed to be a mere record of emotion-adventure, flounderings in feelings. We insist that a novel is, or should be, also a thought-adventure, if it is to be at all complete.¹ But what is meant by thought-adventure? And what does it demand of us in our reading of the novels?

Lawrence’s remark cannot be interpreted as saying that thought-adventure is something added to a novel to keep its emotion-adventure from floundering. He means, rather, that an emotion-adventure, if it is not to flounder in feelings, must be a thought-adventure as well. This is hardly surprising, since in several essays Lawrence declares, Man is a thought-adventurer.² And it seems clear, at least if we take Lawrence at his word, that we shall learn to read his novels only by sharing in their thought-adventures and by becoming thought-adventurers ourselves, which, at the same time, is no more than what we, in our essence as human beings, already are.

But to what extent can Lawrence be taken at his word? Many of his own friends seemed to be ever ready to tell him that he could not think;³ and T. S. Eliot, with a more conscious hostility and perhaps with a poet’s genius for unintended suggestion, accused him, of an incapacity for what we ordinarily call thinking.⁴

Lawrence himself does call for a radical re-examination of what we ordinarily call thinking when he writes:

My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what-not. I conceive a man’s body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame, forever upright and yet flowing: and the intellect is just the light that is shed on to the things around. And I am not so much concerned with the things around—which is really mind—but with the mystery of the flame forever flowing, coming God knows how from out of practically nowhere, and being itself, whatever there is around it, that it lights up. We have got so ridiculously mindful, that we never know that we ourselves are anything—we think there are only the objects we shine upon. And there the poor flame goes on burning ignored, to produce this light. And instead of chasing the mystery in the fugitive, half-lighted things, outside us, we ought to look at ourselves, and say ‘My God, I am myself.’ That is why I like to live in Italy. The people are so unconscious. They only feel and want: they don’t know.⁵

Are we to see this as a repudiation of thinking in favor of feeling and wanting and what is vaguely called being? Does Lawrence make here a confessio fidei of an irrationalist, a primitivist, an anti-intellectualist? If the answer is yes, his later emphasis on thought-adventure would only demonstrate the incapacity of blood and all who believe in it to think and express themselves consistently. But what if the appeal to blood be in itself a call for thought-adventure,—a call on our thoughtfulness even at the very moment of our judging upon that appeal?

In any case, it should not be dismissed as a passing notion in a youthful letter. Inasmuch as the notion is one which recurs throughout Lawrence’s opus, the very fact that it occurs in such a letter demands greater, rather than lesser, care on our part in trying to ascertain his exact meaning—provided, that is, we have sufficient respect for that opus to give it a try.

A more careful reading shows, at least, that Lawrence is not espousing irrationalism in the sense of a thoughtless preference for the irrational while leaving the distinction between rational and irrational itself unthought. When his belief in the blood is further explained as a conception of man’s body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame, forever upright and yet flowing, it is clear that blood has little to do with blood as an object of physiology or scientific psychology; nor does the comparison of the intellect to the light that is shed on to the things around imply a necessarily hostile or degrading view of it, but rather suggest a certain delicate fulfilment of its own, in contrast to the Freudian notion of the conscious and the unconscious forever at war with each other. The main objection is to our forgetting ourselves in what we know. That is why, although some of Lawrence’s words may sound as though he were denying knowledge altogether, the above-quoted passage continues and modifies his emphasis:

We know too much. No, we only think we know such a lot. A flame isn’t a flame because it lights up two, or twenty objects on a table. It’s a flame because it is itself. And we have forgotten ourselves. We are Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. We cannot be. ‘To be or not to be’—it is the question with us now, by Jove. And nearly every Englishman says ‘Not to be.’⁶

But what is then to be—assuming always that Lawrence, in invoking that most indeterminate of verbs, has not reached the ultimate vacuity of thought? That he does have a determinate meaning in mind is fairly obvious both here and elsewhere—for example, in his Study of Thomas Hardy when Lawrence asks, Where is the source of all money-sickness, and the origin of all sex-perversion? and goes on to find the malady of whole Europe (just then amidst the throes of the First World War) in one’s failure "to be":

It is not a malaria which blows in through the window and attack us when we are healthy. We are each one of us a swamp, we are like the hide-bound cabbage going rotten at the heart. And for the same reason, that, instead of continuing our activity, satisfying our true desire, climbing and clambering till, like the poppy, we lean on the sill of the unknown, and run our flag out there in the colour and shine of being, having surpassed that which has been before, we hang back, we dare not peep forth.…

No wonder there is a war. No wonder there is a great waste and squandering of life. Anything, anything to prove that we are not altogether sealed in our own self-preservation as dying chrysalides.…

So we go to war to show that we can throw our lives away. Indeed, they have become of so little value to us. We cannot live, we cannot be.⁷

The general drift of the analysis seems clear, its acumen striking. But what shall we make of Lawrence’s insistence on putting the entire question as one of being? Does the word have a definite meaning of its own, apart from whatever content that the user chooses to put into it?

This question suggests a common view of Lawrence’s speculations as a whole, namely, that they constitute primarily a personal mythology of his own, probably indispensable to his creative process, often helpful to our reading of his poetry and fiction, but certainly not to be taxed for a precise and objective meaning, whether of being or of any other notion. It is true that Lawrence does insist on being taken as more than a private mythologist, but this very insistence, according to the common view, is only to be expected in someone whose ultimate test of truth was whether or not he could feel it in his solar plexus, whose motto was Art for my sake.⁸ Such a view can and often does go with a genuine respect for both the man and his art, but it does not fully face the task of discriminating genuine belief, and spurious belief, and half-genuine belief between which, as Lawrence observes, you’re as likely as not to be in a pickle.⁹ Indeed, Lawrence could have cited the eminent philosophical authority of Hegel to the same effect:

To follow one’s own conviction is certainly more than to give oneself over to authority; but by the conversion of opinion held on authority into opinion held out of personal conviction, the content of what is held is not necessarily altered, and truth does not necessarily take the place of error. In persisting within a system of opinion and prejudice, it matters little whether one bases himself on the authority of others or on personal conviction; the only difference is the vanity which is peculiar to the latter.¹⁰

Since Lawrence repeatedly claims truth, though not eternal truth, he could not escape the burden of Hegel’s observation nor, indeed, of Eliot’s strictures on trusting the Inner Light,¹¹ if his belief in the blood amounted to nothing more than a private opinion plus a display of personal force.

Another common view, at bottom not so different from the first, finds in Lawrence’s thought little that a person of good sense could not readily accept; not the substance but only some of its expressions would prove idiosyncratic—a minor failing which may be variously attributed to a superabundance of genius, to insufficiency of education, to his sense of isolation, etc. Now, insofar as Lawrence lays any claim to truth, he will also claim the assent of a person of good sense; he himself once wrote to a friend, I do write because I want folk—English folk—to alter, and have more sense.¹² But whether the claims can be met without re-examining and altering our very notions of good sense, is another question. The famous passage from the concluding pages of Apocalypse provides an example:

Man wants his physical fulfilment first and foremost, since now, once and once only, he is in the flesh and potent. For man, the vast marvel is to be alive. For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive. Whatever the unborn and the dead may know, they cannot know the beauty, the marvel of being alive in the flesh. The dead may look after the afterwards. But the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours, and ours alone, and ours only for a time. We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.¹³

Taken by itself, this may indeed amount to nothing more than an entirely sensible call for physical fulfilment and for our being most vividly, most perfectly alive. True, the living, incarnate cosmos gives a hint of more troubling thoughts that follow: I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me,¹⁴ and so forth. But, despite such rhetorical excesses, one may call the passage a beautiful hymn to life with which few would wish to argue, and which, if it errs at all, does so on the side of simplicity. And Lawrence has been criticized for just this error, or limitation, by Graham Hough:

To be alive in the flesh is magnificent, and Lawrence has expressed his sense of it magnificently. But if it is the only supreme value, man is irrevocably immersed in the transitory and the contingent, irremediably at the mercy of physical accident and physical change. And however much Lawrence may hate fixity and achieve a poetic and metaphysic exaltation by glorifying the flux, man is also a being who has a passion for the absolute, the changeless, the unconditioned.¹⁵

This objections, too, remains unanswerable so long as we remain with common-sense interpretations of being alive in the flesh or belief in the blood—that is, so long as we do not see it as a radical challenge to our very notions of flesh and blood, of living and being.

Our failure to see it as such could not, in any case, be blamed on Lawrence’s reticence on the matter. A deliberate distinction between being and existence is prominent in his writings, not the least of all in the essay, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine:

As far as existence goes, that life-species is the highest which can devour, or destroy, or subjugate every other life-species against which it is pitted in contest.

…

But let us insist and insist again, we are talking now of existence, of species, of types, of races, of nations, not of single individuals, nor of beings. The dandelion in full flower, a little sun bristling with sun-rays on the green earth, is a nonpareil, a nonesuch. Foolish, foolish, foolish to compare it to anything else on earth. It is itself incomparable and unique.

But that is the fourth dimension, of being. It is in the fourth dimension, nowhere else.¹⁶

Thus, to the critic’s objection cited above, the following inexorable law may serve