ENGLISH: Revelations of truth in the work of DH Lawrence and Samuel Beckett
By James Crook
How far should we take revelations of truth in modernist fiction at face value?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘revelation’ as ‘the disclosure or communication of knowledge, instructions, etc., by divine or supernatural means’.[1] While revelations of truth in both Samuel Beckett’s Dante and the Lobster and D.H. Lawrence’s The Thimble do not necessarily come from divine sources, they do give way to knowledge of the wider aspects of society, and the damned nature of man (as in the former), and the instructions on how to better society after a catastrophic war harms both the men and women that inhabit it (as in the latter). These come through smaller realisations of everyday life – such as recognising a failed marriage – and giving way to larger and more pressing ideas that will help improve the world we live in, subject to whether those experiencing the revelation act on the experience.
The final revelation of Dante and Lobster is when Belacqua, ready to begin preparing the meal with his aunt, ‘saw the creature move’[2] and realises that he had been carrying a live lobster who had ‘in the midst of its enemies […] breathed secretly’ (pp.13). At face value, the revelation is that the lobster is not dead, and Belacqua has been mutilating the animal by carrying it with the belief that it is. However, the true meaning behind this discovery, particularly through the sudden preservation that our protagonist feels for the lobster, runs through into a more biblical realisation of everyday life, meshing both Belacqua and the animal he carried, thus turning his attitude towards the animal into a type of self-preservation. Critic Jean-Michel Rabate connects Belacqua’s ‘ethical shock’ to the question of ‘how to reconcile a grand scheme of things in which we move from God’s compassion facing Cain to scenes […] where we meet damned souls who are plunged in boiling blood’, connecting these souls with ‘mundane or everyday life concerns’.[3]. The everyday in this text is the lunch, the buying of the lobster, the interaction with the grocer who ‘had his pride’ (pp.7), the ‘poorly dressed couple’ (pp.11). They are represented by the lobster who, after surviving ‘in the midst of its enemies’ was about to go ‘alive into scalding water’ (pp.13), a fate that all these sinful people, such as the grocer with his ‘pride’ and ‘[p]oor McCabe’ who ‘would get it in the neck at dawn’ (pp.12), share.
This blending of animal and man comes from the line, ‘Take into the air my quiet breath’ (pp.13), which is so ambiguous in its delivery that the reader does not know who says it: narrator, Belacqua or lobster. The excerpt comes from John Keats’ poem Ode to a Nightingale, the full stanza reading;
‘I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain’.[4]
The inspiration from Keats does not appear obvious, and it is tempting to subconsciously attribute these lines to the lobster who has a mere ‘thirty seconds to live’ (pp.13). Thangam Ravindranathan offers insight into this small, seemingly insignificant line, stating that within moments like these, ‘speakers do not add up […] voices and bodies may not line up’,[5] thus concluding that the hidden revelation is that both Belacqua and the lobster’s bodies and voices speak and mesh together. Belacqua subconsciously asks for ‘easeful death’2 as repentance for his treatment towards the lobster, asking it for forgiveness and the hope that it also will receive a ‘quick death’ (pp.13), while the lobster itself, referencing Keats, asks for a death ‘with no pain’.2 The reference of the lobster, lying as ‘exposed cruciform on the oilcloth’ (pp.12), directly relates back to Jesus Christ who ‘died for our sins’,6 suggesting a sense of innate forgiveness from the lobster, simply keeping to its place on the food chain. Despite this, Belacqua feels pity for the animal, saying to his aunt ‘‘you can’t boil it like that’ (pp.12), later grasping for one final moment of reconciliation, or even justification for his actions, defeatedly stating that ‘it’s a quick death, God help us all’ (pp.13). This attempt is hewn down by the narrator who, through three monosyllabic words, states ‘it is not’. (pp.13). The reader can then assume, through the omniscient narrator who has the final say in the text, that the true revelation of the lobster testifies to the idea that, even through mundane everyday experiences – such as preparing a meal – each individual makes decision that may damn them to hell, the soon-to-be boiling lobster acting as a symbol for the ‘damned souls who are plunged in boiling blood’ that Rabate references.
Rabate’s quotation of moving away ‘from God’s compassion facing Cain’ contradicts several references to biblical forgiveness within Dante and the Lobster, for example, Belacqua’s preparation of lunch where Beckett references Cain, more specifically, ‘the first stigma of God’s pity, that an out-cast might not die quickly’ (pp.4), the reader not yet realising that the outcast is, of course, the lobster, who has been taken from the ocean and survives unknown until it reaches a different body of water in the ‘cruel pot’ of ‘scalding water’ (pp.13), of which will eventually kill it. Again, when Belacqua encounters the grocer, who instead ‘of simply washing his hands like Pilate, flung out his arms in a wild crucified gesture’ (pp.6) directly referencing Pontus Pilate, who ‘took water and washed his hands […] saying, “I am innocent of the blood of [Jesus]”’,[6] suggesting a self-forgiveness that the grocer feels for not giving into Belacqua’s demands of a ‘rottener bit’ (pp.6) of cheese. And finally, when pondering on the
‘poorly dressed couple’ (pp.11), Belacqua laments on ‘Jonah and the gourd and the pity of a jealous God on Nineveh’ (pp.12), referencing the man Jonah who became stuck inside a whale, thus once again connecting man and sea-creature. However, Belacqua himself admits to his own wrongdoing when lamenting on the strangers on the way to his aunt’s house, thus admitting to a specific kind of guilt that removes him from forgiveness. According to Sighle Kennedy, Belacqua ‘can even admit that he himself is fully involved, although so far unknowingly, in violence against fellow-creatures. He has been mauling for hours the live lobster he is to eat for supper’,[7] therefore making him no different to the executioner who is to hang McCabe in the morning. These small moments that reference forgiveness, and yet completely contradict their circumstances, solidify the small revelation of accidentally carrying a live lobster for hours, giving way to a bigger revelation of society; that no matter any single individual’s position, whether that be a grocer, executioner, or simply a hungry man; no one is deserving of forgiveness.
Turning now to D.H. Lawrence’s, The Thimble, we see again that the reader cannot take moments of revelation at face value, and that even such a small act such as finding a thimble can mean vast changes for the individual. The text opens with Beckett’s heroine, Mrs. Hepburn, awaiting her husband to come home from the war, aware that he ‘was wounded, his jaw smashed and his face cut up by the bursting of a shell’, herself also having been ‘ill with pneumonia’. [8] The face-value of The Thimble comes when she realises that ‘she knew nothing of this man she had married’, only being able to ‘remember him with a peculiar distinctness, as if the whole of his body were lit up by an intense light’ (pp.54), this moment lending itself a particular irony as, when she eventually sees her husband he has, of course, physically changed, as his ‘mouth was […] sunk in at the bottom, with half the lip cut away’ (pp. 58). As a result of both her realisation and her husband’s physical appearance, Mrs. Hepburn becomes closed off from her husband, giving him short answers such as ‘I found it here’ (pp. 59), ‘it is a treasure trove’ (pp.58), referencing the thimble and the sofa she finds it in, respectively.
The further revelation comes after Mrs. Hepburn realises she does not love her husband, when, not realising ‘what she was doing’ (pp.57), moves her hand down the side of the sofa and discovers a thimble. The revelation does not come from the thimble itself, but rather the process of its discovery, which alludes to sexual intercourse and masturbation. It is written that ‘her long white fingers pressed into the fissure, pressed and entered rhythmically’ (pp.57), the repetition of ‘pressed’ suggesting a desperate need to get to the thimble – or the climax – while Mrs. Hepburn’s mind is in a ‘trance of suspense’ (pp.57), relating back to the animalistic focus on sexual desire. It is not till her fingers ‘touched a little extraneous object’ that her ‘consciousness awoke’, and then begins to work ‘more insistently’, more ‘determinedly’ (pp.57) to reach the object. When she finally grasps the thimble, she brings it up out of the sofa, reflecting excitedly that ‘it was coming’ – a phrase too akin to sexual innuendo to be ignored – and her ‘heart relaxed from its tension, now her aim was being achieved’ (pp.57). The thimble, therefore, represents Mrs. Hepburn’s sexual individuality and the femininity that she had lost by marrying a man she does not love. Gaku Iwai writes about a similar concept, stating that ‘the thimble retrieved from the sofa on which she sits symbolises romance, and its excavation is related to the discoverer’s unfulfilled sexual desire’.[9] It is likely, however, that it is not simply generic sexual desire that she desires, but the need for individuality and the need to fulfil her desire her own way, evident when she ‘put the thimble on her sewing finger’ (pp.57) and her reluctance to share her discovery with her husband, the only part of whom she is attracted to being ‘his khaki trousers and his brown shoes’ (pp.58). At the end of the text, her husband takes the thimble and, ‘with a strong movement of the arm and shoulder, […] threw the thimble out into the murky street’ (pp.63), denying his wife her individual sexuality in favour of looking after and restoring one another. The reader then sees that the hidden revelation of Mrs. Hepburn’s story is that she desires sexual gratification from the self, while her husband – now too disfigured to give it to her himself, as she experiences ‘a hot pain’ (pp.59) when she looks at him or when he speaks – appears set on taking that individuality away from her.
According to Laurence Steven, there is a reason for Mr. Hepburn’s enforcement of sexual ideals onto his wife, the predominant theme of the text being ‘Lawrence’s hope for a new world’ through ‘a young couple experiencing the central revelations – true awareness of the other, and, consequently the possibility of real love’, the author deliberately negating any mention of a ‘larger context’ outside of the young couples’ room. It is true that these characters are living in a state of disability, unable to accept the world that they live in, which is stricken with war and marriages between individuals who do not love one another, but that the further revelation comes when the two individuals decide whether or not to rebuild themselves and, therefore, symbolically rebuild the world after the First World War. Mrs. Hepburn is constantly ‘in a trance’ throughout the passage, ‘her overlying dream-consciousness’ taking over in a state of shock that denies the real world from ever reaching her, only just being ‘on the point of waking, for the first time in her life’ (pp.58-59) when her husband comes home. This repetition of being caught in ‘the imprisoning film of the dream […] struggling unborn, struggling to come to life’, of having ‘a spasm of pure unconsciousness’ pass over her (pp.59) works to connect her with her husband, who looks ‘like a child that belongs more to death than to life’ (pp.59). Her husband is also cut off from the real world, speaking ‘with a sort of muffled voice […] rather mouthlessly’ and interacting with his wife through ‘white’ and ‘trembl[ing]’ hands, inside of which ‘nerves were broken’ (pp.58). It is written that ‘her soul divined that he was waiting vaguely where the dark and light divide, whether he should come in to life, or hesitate, and pass back’ (pp.59). The speaking of the soul to the individual plays into the classic moments of divine revelation, while the imagery of being on the crisis – the tipping point – between light and dark connects both Mr and Mrs. Hepburn, she who slips in and out of dark consciousness and he who is still stuck on the frontline and therefore the place of his injury. The light represents the new society, and thus the final, hidden revelation of the text; the need to rebuild their world, realised when Mr. Hepburn claims that they are both ‘a helpless baby’, but that they shall grow ‘into a man’ and ‘into a woman’, therefore choosing to rebuild both themselves and society through the willpower to ‘come to life again’ (pp.62). Leo Gurko believes that this justifies the discarding of the thimble, that represents ‘modern life [which] tends to shrink human beings into objects and abstractions, and that it is the mission of art to reverse this process, to restore men to their original […] wholeness’, [10] while Iwai believes that this works to ‘denounce brief love affairs and relationships found in wartime melodrama’.[11] So, the final revelation, hidden within the tangles of a young, wartime marriage, is whether to continue with the struggle and work towards the new world, or give in to the darkness. This final decision to move towards the light is solidified in her question, ‘Am I going to love you?’ (pp.62), after which they touch hands, and ‘the touch lay still, completed there’ (pp.63).
To conclude, there are revelations within Modernist literature that the reader may take at face value, whether that be the carrying of a live lobster or the death of a woman’s love for her husband, but often these momentary revelations give way to much larger societal understandings, by spiritual and otherworldly understanding in the case of Dante and the Lobster, or practical and regenerative understanding within The Thimble. This literature may then help us understand and, therefore, help better society, specifically in the classes of religion that damns the sinners and of the struggles that are faced after a war that breaks society’s inhabitants.
[1] Oxford English Dictionary, < https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/164694?redirectedFrom=revelation#eid > [accessed 16 January 2023].
[2] Samuel Beckett, “Dante and the Lobster”, More Pricks than Kicks (London, Faber and Faber, 2010), pp.11. All further references to this edition will be given after quotations within the text.
[3] Jean-Michel Rabate, “Love the Lobsters: Beckett’s Meta-Ethics”, The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, vol.1 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp.1.
[4] John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, Vol.1 (London, Penguin Random House UK, 2017), pp.75.
[5] Thangam Ravindranathan, “Bating the Lobster”, differences, Vol.1 (Providence, Brown Unversity, 2017), pp.81. 6 The Holy Bible, New King James Version, 1 Corinthians 15:3 (Thomas Nelson Inc, 1983), pp.1290.
[6] The Holy Bible, Matthew 27:5, pp.1108.
[7] Sighle Kennedy, “Beckett’s “Schoolboy Copy” of Dante: A Handbook for Liberty”, Dalhousie French Studies, Vol.19. (Halifax, Dalhousie University, 1990), pp.14.
[8] D.H. Lawrence, “The Thimble”, The Thimble and Other Stories (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984), pp.54. All further references to this edition will be given after quotations within the text.
[9] Gaku Iwai, “Wartime Ideology in ‘The Thimble’: A Comparative Study of Popular Wartime Romance and the Anti-Romance of D. H. Lawrence”, D. H. Larence, his Contemporaries and the First World War, Vol.1 (Open Edition Journals, 2015) <https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/236#quotation> [Accessed 15th January 2023]
[10] Leo Gurko, “D.H. Lawrence’s Greatest Collection of Short Stories – What Holds it Together”, Modern Fiction Studies, vol.18 (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp.177.
[11] Gaku Iwai, “Wartime Ideology in ‘The Thimble’: A Comparative Study of Popular Wartime Romance and the Anti-Romance of D. H. Lawrence” [accessed 15th January 2023].
Bibliography
Beckett, Samuel, “Dante and the Lobster”, More Pricks than Kicks (London, Faber and Faber, 2010)
Gurko, Leo, “D.H. Lawrence’s Greatest Collection of Short Stories – What Holds it Together”, Modern Fiction Studies, vol.18 (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1972)
Iwai, Gaku, “Wartime Ideology in ‘The Thimble’: A Comparative Study of Popular Wartime Romance and the Anti-Romance of D. H. Lawrence”, D. H. Larence, his Contemporaries and the First World War, Vol.1 (Open Edition Journals, 2015) <https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/236#quotation> [Accessed 15th January 2023]
Keats, John, “Ode to a Nightingale”, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems, Vol.1 (London, Penguin Random House UK, 2017)
Kennedy, Sighle, “Beckett’s “Schoolboy Copy” of Dante: A Handbook for Liberty”, Dalhousie French Studies, Vol.19. (Halifax, Dalhousie University, 1990)
Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence, “The Thimble”, The Thimble and Other Stories (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984)
Rabate, Jean-Michel, “Love the Lobsters: Beckett’s Meta-Ethics”, The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett, vol.1 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015)
Ravindranathan, Thangam, “Bating the Lobster”, differences, Vol.1 (Providence, Brown Unversity, 2017)
The Holy Bible, New King James Version, 1 Corinthians 15:3, Matthew 27:5 (Thomas Nelson Inc, 1983)
Oxford English Dictionary,
<https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/164694?redirectedFrom=revelation#eid> [accessed 16 January 2023]
