Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006
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Burack, Charles, D. H. Lawrence’s Language of Sacred Experience: The Transfiguration of the Reader, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 206 pages, ISBN 1-4039-6845-4, £40.
Reviewed by
Royal Holloway, University of
London
This is the sort of book which makes one glad to be an academic, which is
to say it is a pleasure to read and demonstrates the added value that original
scholarship can bring to works of literature.
Charles Burack’s book is well-written and persuasively argued.
His thesis is that the mature novels of D. H. Lawrence, from The
Rainbow onwards, employ linguistic strategies of mortification and
revitalization, as part of their efforts to bring about a transformation of the
reader’s consciousness. Lawrence
advocates a new way of being in and being aware of the world, which harks back
to a surmised ancient mode of existence. His
ideal model for human consciousness is that of the pre-lapsarian Adam and Eve,
who existed in instinctive, unselfconscious union with the natural world.
Burack shows how Lawrence perceives the way to recover this way of living
to be through mutually fulfilling personal relationships, and specifically
through the “sacred experience” of sexual intercourse.
According to Lawrence, the novel is the literary form par excellence capable
of mediating this sacredness, and Burack demonstrates the “hierophantic”
faculty of Lawrence’s novels, meaning that they seek to bring the reader into
contact with the divine.
Burack affords a comprehensive anatomy of the sexual encounters in four
of Lawrence’s novels, starting with his final masterpiece Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, and then jumping back to The Rainbow, its
sequel Women in Love, and the critically disputed novel, The Plumed
Serpent. He argues that Lady
Chatterley’s Lover is the exemplary text in which we can best observe the
twin processes of destruction and vivification at work.
Together with the reader, the novel’s protagonists are novitiates in a
progressive process of awakening to a new understanding of sacred communion with
others. Before they can have access
to the privileged sacred consciousness, their habitual patterns of thought and
perception must be broken down, particularly where these tend towards
logocentrism or what Burack terms “oracularcentrism”.
Burack emphasises Lawrence’s critical portrayal of Lady Chatterley’s
attitude to sex before she meets Mellors, in which she equates verbal intimacy
with sexual intimacy, and in which sex is reduced to the inevitable consequence
of certain kinds of conversation. Burack
identifies a paradox at the heart of Lawrence’s enterprise, in that he seeks
to communicate to us through language, a dimension of experience which is
necessarily beyond language. Unlike
21st century relationship counsellors who advocate the path to
marital bliss through relentless verbal communication, especially before,
during, and after sex, Lawrence espouses a non-verbal shared feeling,
particularly before, during and after sex.
The revitalization process in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is
controlled by a different narrator, who guides readers through the new territory
of erotic experience. Burack argues
that although Lawrence intended that his readers participate vicariously in the
erotic acts described in his texts, this participation was supposed to be
holistic rather than specifically sexual.
Following two opening chapters dealing with Lady Chatterley’s Lover,
Burack’s third chapter on The Rainbow discusses Lawrence’s engagement
with the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition. Burack
maps the characters in The Rainbow onto concepts in Kabbalistic cosmology
and shows how their actions and relationships, and their sexual encounters in
particular, are elucidated by these correspondences.
He contrasts the use of mystical language in the revitalization phases of
The Rainbow with that of magical language in the succeeding mortification
phases. In the fourth chapter, on Women
in Love, Burack explores Lawrence’s critique of mechanistic science,
inspired by the First World War, and his prescribed antidote in the form of
Hindu yogic discourse. In this
novel, for the first time, we find mechanistic language being used to describe
sexual relations. Lawrence
associates modernity with a loss of feeling and the rise of a superficial visual
culture. Burack’s thoughtful linguistic analysis uncovers an
association between mortifying-mechanical repetition and revitalizing-rhythmic
repetition in the descriptions of sex in Women in Love. The fifth and final chapter, in which Burack defends The
Plumed Serpent against various critical charges of inadequacy, makes for
less compelling reading, largely because of its unmitigated defence of Lawrence.
Throughout his book, Burack catalogues the textual effects marshalled by
Lawrence in order to convey the fluctuations of feeling to his readers. Diction is important here, but perhaps less so than the
cadence of the prose and its structural organisation, which is the nearest
approximation to the ebb and flow of the Lawrentian characters’ feelings in
the space beyond linguistic meaning. This
is the realm of existence referred to in one of the words most frequently used
by Burack: “numinous“. The
significance of this word lies in its dual reference to the mood evoked in
Lawrence’s novels in moments of sacred experience, as well as to the feeling
Lawrence wants to inspire in his readers. Reader-response
is at the heart of Burack’s analysis. He
seeks to reverse the broad trend in scholarship on Lawrence, in which
narratology is examined without reference to readership.
This strategy is largely effective, although his assumption of a unitary,
universal reader is sometimes off-putting.
Lawrence’s project was to make possible an earthly experience of
divinity for his readers, and from Burack’s rapturous advocacy of his
endeavours, it is clear that at least one reader‘s consciousness has been thus
transfigured, with this though-provoking book as its result.