The Deaf Sentence in “The Last Laugh”
The fascination with the rich realm of sounds in Lawrence’s works may be viewed as his attempt to intensify a person’s sensual communication with the world. Lawrence was deaf in one ear—the evidence coming from Frieda, from himself in Fantasia of the Unconscious, as well as from Catherine Carswell....
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| I publikationen: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence, |
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| Huvudupphovsman: | |
| Materialtyp: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Språk: | Anglais |
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Études Lawrenciennes
2025
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| Länkar: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sammanfattning: | The fascination with the rich realm of sounds in Lawrence’s works may be viewed as his attempt to intensify a person’s sensual communication with the world. Lawrence was deaf in one ear—the evidence coming from Frieda, from himself in Fantasia of the Unconscious, as well as from Catherine Carswell. Deaf characters occasionally appear in Lawrence’s fiction. Though David Lodge in the novel Deaf Sentence reminds his readers that blindness is tragic and deafness is comic, Lawrence’s stories of the blind and the deaf do not seem to illustrate this theory since the author turns both blindness and deafness into the markers of contact with a different world.In the short story “The Last Laugh,” the deaf female character Miss James and her friend Mr Marchbanks come in touch with the unknown in the form of a demonic laughing sound at the “gothic” hour—midnight, and near the “gothic” place—an old church shattered by a storm. The man’s transformed appearance, his flesh-creeping laugh and “queer, gleaming, goat-like eyes” represent his being possessed by Pan. This takes him to a prostitute and brings about his sudden death, while simultaneously “punishing” the young policeman with a clubbed foot and rewarding Miss James by restoring her hearing.My argument will concern Pan’s sentence: it looks as if Miss James’ deafness has been the sign of a deeper form of communication with “blood consciousness,” while Marchbanks, who limits their contacts to friendship only, seems to have been deaf to the girl’s inner calling and her love for him. Thus deafness to the natural will of the great Pan may become a punishment, a sentence. |
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