The Metaphorical Imperative: From Trope to Narrative in "The Rainbow"

Abstract

The plot of D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow has never been an object of much fascination since commentators have generally assumed that Lawrence's dispensing with plots was a major mark of his modernity. In so far as realist plots traded on vulgarities of a plausible concatenation-Samuel Beckett's phrase-then such an assumption is entirely justified. Marking the contrast with Middlemarch, where, as he puts it, the mechanics of the Raffles affair soak so much authentic, thematic interest, Frank Kermode rightly concludes that abandoned plot.' He rejected the types of plot which the Barthesian proairetic and hermeneutic codes activate-those based on cause and effect, action and consequence (proairetic), and those which identify enigmas, build up suspense through exploitation of false leads or trails, which delay the denouement (hermeneutic). He refused to invent stories which in Kermode's phrase explain how one thing leads to another.2 Drawing on what he terms a classic distinction, Barthes identifies these explanatory plots in which the narrative units are distributed along a horizontal axis with the figure of metonymy. Such plots organize details, clear up mysteries, and further the action in obedience to the logic of sequence in precisely the manner that Lawrence refused to accept. Barthes distinguishes these metonymic type plots from those which synthesize narrative units along a vertical axis: these he identifies with the figure of metaphor.3 Based on the paradigm of resemblance, such plots locate recurrences, integrate motifs and actions, identify similarities between elements which appear to be different, and intensify mysteries instead of clearing them up. It is with plots of this kind that we shall be preoccupied here. David Lodge once noted that Lawrence is essentially a novelist, whose writings, in Lodge's fine phrase, feed metaphorically upon his own metonymies. Each successive phrase, though apparently forwarded by contiguity, unfolds deeper significance of the same facts, and in so doing, accretes a vague metaphorical meaning.4 In effect, what one critic identifies as Lawrence's three representative techniques-patterns of recurrence, exposition by scenes, and repetitive style5-all carry strong metaphorical implications. In the first, patterns of