“The Sound of the Greater Day”
In the story “The Flying-Fish” a distinction is made between the “common day” of a dying civilisation in Mexico and the Western world which has debased it, and the “Greater Day” of revelation of “the sun behind the sun” to which Mexico is “dying back.” Gethin Day hears “the sound of the Greater Day”...
محفوظ في:
| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
Études Lawrenciennes
2025
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| الموضوعات: | |
| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | In the story “The Flying-Fish” a distinction is made between the “common day” of a dying civilisation in Mexico and the Western world which has debased it, and the “Greater Day” of revelation of “the sun behind the sun” to which Mexico is “dying back.” Gethin Day hears “the sound of the Greater Day” in the voice of an Indian of an ancient tribe. But indigenous Indian “dying back” is not possible for Gethin Day, who must instead attempt to “come into his own” in his home in England. On his boat trip across the Gulf of Mexico, Day hears and sees the “Greater Day” in the lives of flying-fish and porpoises. This paper argues that these images of ecological inhabitation and sensual integration are the climax of the story, the true “sound of the Greater Day,” and that the story is artistically finished and simply abandoned by Lawrence. To regard it as “unfinished,” as the Cambridge edition does, is to expect an anthropocentric ending and human regeneration which Lawrence’s actual ending demonstrates as hardly possible. The final section representing human life on the Atlantic ocean is a deliberate contrast of human sickness juxtaposed with the joyous animal life in the Gulf. Man has not reached the stage of evolutionary achievement of flying-fish and porpoises in their home environment. To read this story as an endorsement of individual vitalism is to miss the point, although one can understand the reasons for doing so. An ecocritical reading of the story, as it stands, is to recognise precisely the narrative pattern of climax and anti-climax that Lawrence described for The Virgin and the Gypsy. “No wonder Ocean was still mysterious, when such red hearts beat in it! No wonder man, with his tragedy, was a pale and sickly thing in comparison!” (SM 222) |
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