著者

川端 喬

出版者

帯広畜産大学

雑誌

帯広畜産大学学術研究報告 第2部 人文・社会科学篇 (ISSN:03857735)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.4, no.4, pp.p245-274, 1976-02

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(1) Lawrence's The Rainbow was published on the 30th September, 1915, and prosecuted by The Public Morality Council as 'a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action throughout', and forbidden to be sold on the 13th November, 1915. Lawrence says in one of his letters that "he had inside him a sort of answer to the want of to-day : to the real, deep want of the English people, not to just what they fancy they want". And he says in another letter that "the characters in the novel were not described in a certain moral scheme, but from the point of view that what they are as some greater, inhuman will. So we cannot find an old stable ego in them, but an another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable, and passes through allotropic states which are states of the same single radically unchanged element". (2) Tom and Lydia Lawrence describes their first meeting as a tacit coming together in concert of their two lives through the medium of inhuman will or soul's logic. To Tom women are the symbol for the further life which comprises religion, love and morality, and the fulfilment of his sensual desire. This conflict between spiritual and sensual life is sublated by dismissing his self-conscious ego and recognizing an otherness which cannot be controlled by a self-conscious ego. They consummated their relationship and their love surged and went down according to the rhythm of nature. Lawrence shows their relation as an ideal one. (3) Anna and Will Their relation is shown as a relationship which turns out to be egoistic through the opposition and contention of light and darkness, intellect and anti-intellect. It is ideal that Anna's world of intellect or light and Will's world of anti-intellect or darkness should be in an equilibrium. When the equilibrium between them is destroyed, their life becomes anti-life. Anna triumphed by destroying Will's mystical world, attacking it by intellect. But the result for her was only an ill-balanced self. She glorified and apotheosized her ill-balanced self as a perfect self. She danced trium-phantly before her Lord, egoistic God. Will lost his mystical world and gave himself up to a sensual life and pursued egoistically absolute beauty by his self-conscious ego and went in the direction of anti-life, sexual perversion. (4) Ursula and Skrebensky Lawrence seems to be trying to resurrect the life of modern man which almost suffccates by 'the average Self' which modern mechanical civilization forces us to be under. Ursula knows that the real world has lost its vivid life to 'the average Self' the commonplace. Things claimed as the highest good of the community are 'a general nuisance, representing the vulgar, conservative materialism at a low level', Skrebensky is the symbol for this ugly world. Debating with him, Ursula felt a deadness, a sterility around him. The lingering indefiniteness in their intercourse up to the time of his flight shows her conflict between loving him on the moral scheme of daytime consciousness and rejecting him or his anti-life world by her unconscious will. The firmness of being, the sense of permanency she had when she rejected Skrebensky completely and was in some way the stone at the bottom of the river, gives her a knowledge that instead of mad pursuit of eternity or absoluteness far away from the infinite God, we should accept God's creation and His love uncondionally and be at oneness with the infinite God. This basic relationship between God and man is understood as the point where man has to come back from his highly developed mechanical civilization.