Tom Brangwen, blue-eyed and warm, sat in opposition to the youth.
‘How long are you stopping?’ the young husband asked his wife.
‘Not very long,’ she said.
‘Get your tea, lad,’ said Tom Brangwen. ‘Are you itchin’ to be off the moment you enter?’
They talked of trivial things. Through the open door the level rays of sunset poured
in,shining on the floor. A grey hen appeared stepping swiftly in the doorway, pecking,
and the light through her comb and her wattles made an oriflamme tossed here and
there, as she went, her grey body was like a ghost.
Anna, watching, threw scraps of bread, and she felt the child flame within her. She
seemed to remember again forgotten, burning, far-off things.
‘Where was I born, mother?’ she asked.(The ‘oriflamme’ was a pennon on a lance, in form like a gold flame.) After the men’s
antagonism, the sun shining through the old hen’s crest awakes in Anna a flickering
trace of her own birth, and she asks her question. This almost subconscious symbol-
ism, legible today, was subtle in 1915.
The Rainbow lies between the realism ofSons and Lovers and the symbolism of
Women in Love, an ambitious, intellectually schematic sequel to The Rainbow. It is
also typically modernist in its alienation, dislike of modern life, and satire on liter-
ary, social and intellectual élites.The Rainbow makes structural use of the symbol-
ism of the rainbow which appears after the Flood in Genesis. Lawrence made several
efforts to replace the Christian story.
James Joyce
James Joyce(1882–1941) is the central figure in modernist prose, as T. S. Eliot is in
modernist verse. He makes a contrast with Lawrence: both were rebels, exiles and
victims of censorship, but had little else in common. Joyce is an artist, deeply inter-
ested in the medium and form of his art. Each of his chief works – Dubliners (1914),
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916),Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake
(1939) – differs in language and approach from its predecessor. Joyce’s aim was to
leave an impersonal and objective work of art for the reader to interpret, an aim
shared with T. S. Eliot, James and Flaubert, but not Lawrence. ‘The artist’, Stephen
Dedalus pronounced in Portrait of the Artist, ‘like the God of creation, remains
within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of exis-
tence, indifferent, paring his fingernails’.
Portr ait of the Artist as a Young Man
Joyce was well educated at Jesuit schools and at University College, Dublin. He
became an ex-Catholic (as Lawrence became an ex-Protestant) and an exile, but not
an ex-Irishman. He lived in Trieste and Paris, remembering Dublin in his art. His
family were ex-middle class. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus
(the Artist) is asked what his father was.
Stephen began to enumerate glibly his father’s attributes.
—A medical student,an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a
small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a storyteller, somebody’s
secretary, something in a distillery, a taxgatherer, a bankrupt and at present a praiser of
his own past.
Cranly laughed, tightening his grip on Stephen’s arm, and said:
—The distillery is damn good.‘MODERNISM’: 1914–27 345