Nebula4.1, March 2007 Lawrence writes The Rainbow from the rifts in an ideational shift in which conventional religious dogmas ceased to encompass human consciousness, finally arriving at their original status as fictions. The dissolving of the supremacy of traditional religious fictions created the need for new fictions. George Lukacs charts how this ideational shift destroyed the epic and identifies the novel as the appropriate form for modern human consciousness. In The Rainbow, Lawrence does not merely portray the exposed consciousness of modernity, but creates a new fiction to help human beings navigate the world. Vaihinger sketches the use of "as if" as follows: "This formula…states that reality as given, the particular, is compared with something whose impossibility and unreality is at the same time admitted" (93). Later he simplifies the device, claiming that "as" sets up an equation between two things, and "if" "affirms that the condition is an unreal or impossible one" (258). Vaihinger locates the value of using "as if" in the fact that it allows human beings to act; it allows people to act "as if" a certain fiction were true. Lawrence's primary objective is to construct a state of being in which Law and Love not only exist on equal planes but are also ultimately synthesized. Lawrence asserts in The Study of Thomas Hardy, "It seems as if the history of humanity were divided into two Epochs: The Epoch of Law and the Epoch of Love," concluding that "what remains is to reconcile the two"3 (123). Already Lawrence uses "as if" to introduce the terms of his theory, marking it as a fiction of the history of humanity. However, creating a fiction that synthesizes Law and Love directs humanity towards an organic state. The use of "as if" carries over into The Rainbow, establishing new grounds on which people can act. When Tom Brangwen saw Lydia Lensky for the first time, he "felt as if he were walking again in a far world, not Cossethay, a far world, the fragile reality" (29). On one level, a Brangwen's quest for reality begins; on another level, Law begins its pursuit of Love. As action happens in the physical world, metaphysical elements react; as the drama of the novel unfolds, so do Lawrence's metaphysics. Lawrence places Cossethay and "reality" on the same plane, but leaves a "far" distance between them. Tom can come to understand his world in terms of this reality, but the inhabitation of that world remains impossible. The fiction, however, propels Tom along through the world, and the Epoch of Love continues towards the Epoch of Law.

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