Nebula4.1, March 2007
As If: The Construction of a Practical Fiction in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow.
By Jordan Sanderson
"There was a look in the eyes of the Brangwens as if they were expecting something unknown," writes D. H. Lawrence in the second paragraph of Chapter One, "How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady" (Rainbow 9). Not only does the line offer an impression of the Brangwens, it also introduces a stylistic device, the use of "as if," that pervades the novel and clarifies Lawrence's relationship with the "modern world," highlighting his role in constructing a practical fiction as theorized by Hans Vaihinger. Lawrence, like the Brangwens, lived in a rapidly changing England: suburbs threatened the countryside1, technological progress destabilized the dogmas of the land2, gender roles quaked, and materiality took precedence over the inner life of the individual, all of which forced people to address the kinds of ontological questions Lawrence seeks to answer in The Rainbow. Through the use of "as if," Lawrence writes a practical, modern fiction that resurrects the "unknown" in humanity and gestures towards a balance of Law and Love. Hans Vaihinger's The Philosophy of 'As If' rests on the premise that we can never know reality; rather, we construct fictions that point toward reality and function as guides. He writes, "the object of the world of ideas as a whole is not the portrayal of reality – this would be an utterly impossible task – but rather to provide us with an instrument for finding our way about more easily in this world" (15). Thus, all ideas are fictitious. Vaihinger argues that "ideational shifts" occur in which fictions progress first to the level of hypothesis, then to the level of dogma; the process, then reverses itself, and the idea arrives back at the level of fiction(). It takes a supreme mind, Vaihinger claims, to avoid positing one's fiction as a hypothesis or elevating it to the level of dogma.
1
In The Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love: A History, Charles Ross observes Lawrence revising the novel to emphasize "the hellishness of modern industry and the complete disappearance of the compromise between rural England and the collieries that he had described in (earlier texts)" (79). He claims Lawrence employs a technique in which he repeats "a sort of checklist of evocative adjectives, like 'amorphous,' 'chaotic,' 'rigid,' and 'mathematical'" (79) to render the modern, industrial world. 2 Georg Lukacs' Theory of the Novel addresses this problem in aesthetic terms. Sanderson: D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow… 198

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