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

Sheridan Burnside

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.