1The conventional use of auditory imagery as a fictional device may apply to a broad range of literary works. The fascination with the rich world of sounds in Lawrence’s novels and short stories may be viewed as his attempt to intensify a person’s sensual communication with the world. Thus, for example, in the opening scene of The Rainbow (1915), he describes the Brangwen women: “But the women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken1 world beyond. They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen” (R 18). In other instances too, characters stand still to listen intently to the far-off sounds of something they cannot identify.
2However, the reverse of the auditory imagery is the theme of deafness, a subject that recently received particular attention among literary scholars. In 1987, an anthology The Quiet Ear. Deafness in Literature was compiled by Brian Grant and prefaced by Margaret Drabble, who writes: “[…] it is much easier to imagine oneself as blind and therefore easier to sympathise with the more obvious problems of the blind” (2). This compilation contains an amazing array of essays, letters, autobiography, drama, fiction and poetry. Among the most prominent fictional passages are those by D. Defoe, W. Scott, T. Smollet, V. Hugo, A. de Musset, Ch. Dickens, I. Turgenev, W. Collins, M. Twain, G. de Maupassant, J. Conrad, K. Mansfield, E. Hemingway, V. Nabokov, Ch. P. Snow, N. Gordimer, etc. It is noteworthy that the overwhelming majority of these pieces are comic and humorous episodes involving conversations with the deaf, interspersed with classic anecdotes, aphorisms and famous quotes. The tragic pieces are the scenes that deal with war and similar trauma-generating events.
3D.H. Lawrence’s place in presenting deafness as an affliction or a metaphor may not be very prominent. However, it is worth mentioning that when describing his stay at the Ad Astra sanatorium in Vence in her book Not I, But the Wind (1934), Frieda mentioned that Lawrence was deaf in one ear: “Lawrence was a little deaf” (263). This evidence also comes from the writer himself in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922): “After all, words must be very different after they’ve trickled round and round a long wire coil. Whatever becomes of them! And I, who am a bit deaf myself, and may in the end have a deaf-machine to poke at my friends, it ill becomes me to be so unkind, yet that’s how I feel” (73). Catherine Carswell also mentions Lawrence’s affliction referring to his “flu and tropical fever” (222), to his caring “not a straw about his greatly increased deafness” (240). She muses philosophically that “with his outward ears he was hearing rather more than he wanted, and […] some degree of deafness was to be desired as a protection against the wearisome chatter of the world” (240).
4David Lodge in his novel Deaf Sentence (2008) reminds his readers that blindness is tragic and deafness is comic (what I tentatively referred to earlier): “Of course, you could argue that blindness is a greater affliction than deafness. If I had to choose between them, I’d go for deafness, I admit. But they don’t differ only in degrees of sensory deprivation. Culturally, symbolically, they’re antithetical. Tragic versus comic. Poetic versus prosaic. Sublime versus ridiculous. One of the strongest curses in the English language is ‘Damn your eyes!’ […] ‘Damn your ears!’ doesn’t cut it” (25).
5Deaf characters occasionally appear in Lawrence’s fiction: a deaf woman in The White Peacock (1911), James in The Lost Girl (1920), Walter Rosen in Aaron’s Rod (1922), Hilda Blessington in The Boy in the Bush (1924). The passing mentions of deafness do not affect the plot, the action or the theme. Lawrence’s stories of the blind and the deaf, however, do not seem to tap into this binary of the tragic and the comic; rather, the author turns both blindness and deafness into the markers of contact with a different world. Isabel in “The Blind man” (1922) notes, however: “They say it is much worse to be stone deaf” (255).
6“The Last Laugh” (1926) is often ranked as one of Lawrence’s gothic or “strange” short stories together with “Glad Ghosts,” “The Border Line,” “The Lovely Lady” and “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” Strange coincidences, lurking ghosts, mysterious and inexplicable conclusions group these texts in the magic realism genre. The characters seem to take the mysteries happening to them as revelations of something deep and sacred, or diabolic and portentous. Joyce Wexler notes that “[t]he connection between mind and body in Lawrence’s work also characterizes magic realism” (25). One of its poetic manifestations is Lawrence’s investing “ordinary action with symbolic meaning” (32). Michael Bell, when speaking of magic realism in Márquez and Lawrence, points out:
Márquez’ “magical realism” is likewise, in its own way, a creation of narrative hyperbole. The hyperbole, that is to say, cannot be isolated as an effect of style because it constitutes the substance of the action. The very events are hyperbolic. For Márquez is also attempting not so much to describe a known world as to expand and enrich the sensibility in which any such “world” is perceived. It is important to both writers that their fiction not be isolate as mere fantasy. Nor should it, of course, be read too literalistically. (59)
7In the short story “The Last Laugh,” the deaf female character, an artist called Miss James (recognisably based on Dorothy Brett) and her friend Mr Marchbanks, after leaving the house of a Lorenzo, “a thin man with a red beard,” “grinning like a satyr” (833), come in touch with the unknown in the form of a demonic laughing sound at the “gothic” hour of midnight, and near a “gothic” place—an old church being shattered by a storm at this very time. At first, Mr Marchbanks hears a most “extraordinary” laughter, which the slightly deaf Miss James and the policeman passing by cannot hear. But the woman then sees that same laughing man among the bushes, whose appearance she cannot later remember or describe and whom none of the other characters can see. However, she acquiesces to his right to be in this part of London during the spring storm, and she makes it sound as if she has been waiting for his appearance: “‘I always knew I should see him,’ she said triumphantly to herself” (TLL 837).
8The scenes in the story’s plot take place within a very limited location in Hampstead. The unsettling laughter triggers a fit in Marchbanks, and, inexplicably, he finds himself joining in. The sound leads him, as if by fate, to the doorstep of a woman of a questionable reputation. Meanwhile, the policeman asks the young lady to be let into her house to make himself warm, or rather, escape from the fearful sights and sounds evoked by the storm. The little church nearby is racked by the wind, and the sounds resemble human voices amid which they also hear that extraordinary laughter. The morning brings tragic transformations: the young policeman discovers he cannot walk as his foot has suddenly become lame and resembles that of some animal; the returning Marchbanks is seized by a strange possession: “‘I knew it was he!’ And with a queer shuddering laugh he pitched forward on the carpet and lay writhing for a moment on the floor. Then he lay still, in a weird, distorted position, like a man struck by lightning” (TLL 848).
9The vague and mystical description of the creature that makes its presence visible alludes, no doubt, to the ancient god Pan. Lawrence wrote the first version of his late essay “Pan in America” in May 1924, and followed it with a second version in June of the same year. “The date is notable,” writes Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy in Green Modernism (2015), “because in the mid-1920s Lawrence’s fiction repeatedly measured modernity’s chances for renovation and repeatedly made nature part of its vision for renewal” (200). Lawrence described Pan in the second version of his essay (1926) in the following way: “Down the long lanes and overgrown ridings of history we catch odd glimpses of a lurking rustic god with a goat’s white lightning in his eyes. A sort of fugitive, hidden among leaves, and laughing with the uncanny derision of one who feels himself defeated by something lesser than himself” (PIA 22). Thus, the presence of this deity in the short story is marked by the sound of laughter.
10It is remarkable that it is the young man, Mr Marchbanks, who is the first to hear that sound, as the deaf Miss James fails to. Marchbanks’ appearance becomes transformed, his flesh-creeping laugh and “queer, gleaming, goat-like eyes” (TLL 835) represent his being possessed by Pan. This takes him to a prostitute and brings about his sudden death the next morning. In “Pan in America,” Lawrence provides a sort of guidance for reading “The Last Laugh.” Terry Gifford, discussing trees and gardens in Aaron’s Rod, observes that “potentially the forces of Pan could be at work in this kind of ‘grove’ and it is Josephine who mediates those forces through the sense, not of smell here, but sound” (§15). D.H. Lawrence’s essay has prompted scholars like Gifford and Fiona Fleming to highlight the importance of the connection between humans and trees, a motif they described in Lawrence’s fictional works. In “The Last Laugh,” however, as I would like to point out, Lawrence is concerned with a different superstition he phrased in the essay: “A man who should see Pan by daylight fell dead, as if blasted by lightning” (PIA 22). Consequently, the laughter of Pan proves fatal for Mr Marchbanks, while the young policeman, having also been exposed, is left with the mark of a clubbed foot.
11The first doubt about the avatar of Pan in the short story is whether Lawrence sends the old god of nature to these few selected people in Hampstead as a miracle, a joke, a prank—or does he punish the vanity of the London dwellers with the Pan who
[…] became old and grey-bearded and goat-legged, and his passion was degraded with the lust of senility. His power to blast and to brighten dwindled. His nymphs became coarse and vulgar. Till at last the old Pan died, and was turned into the devil of the Christians. The old god Pan became the Christian devil, with the cloven hoofs and the horns, the tail, and the laugh of derision. Old Nick, the Old Gentleman who is responsible for all our wickednesses, but especially our sensual excesses—this is all that is left of the Great God Pan. (PIA 23)
12The story seems to hint at the image presented above. Answering the question of why Mr Marchbanks is selected as a tragic victim, I might refer to a suggestion hidden in his description and characterisation:
- 2 Underlinings in the quotation are mine (M. R.)
As he ducked for his hat he showed a bald spot, just like a tonsure, among his dark, thin, rather curly hair. And when he looked up at her, with his thick, black brows sardonically arched, and his rather hooked nose self-derisive, jamming his hat on again, he seemed like a satanic young priest. His face had beautiful lines, like a faun, and a doubtful, martyred expression. A sort of faun on the cross, with all the malice of the complication.2 (TLL 834)
13These phrases present a conspicuous image of the repressed sexuality of a faun, a son of Pan, hiding beneath a monk’s skin.
- 3 Underlinings in the quotation are mine (M. R.)
14What is of the utmost importance here is the sound of laughter. Lawrence is particular about this. Pan’s laughter is transmitted to the young man with goat-like eyes: “[…] the most extraordinary laugh came bursting out of him, like an animal laughing. It was a strange, neighing sound, amazing in her ears. She was startled, and switched her machine quieter” (TLL 835). It is also rather perplexing that the “most extraordinary” sound of laughter should transform other characters too: “At the sound of the laughter something roused in the blood of the girl and of the policeman: ‘It’s the most marvellous sound3 in the world’” (TLL 836).
15The vision of Pan—someone who is not mentioned by name in the story—is the privilege of the deaf woman only: “She had in front of her eyes the dark face among the holly bushes, with the brilliant, mocking eyes” (TLL 840). Then, it seems, Lawrence reworks the old superstition: it is not the mere sight of Pan in daylight that dooms a person, but rather the inherent nature of the one who beholds him. Pan inflicts his mischief upon those who are alienated from nature and their own blood-consciousness. However, those who retain this essential connection, like Miss James, might instead be blessed, as evidenced by the apparent restoration of her hearing following the encounter.
And she looked away with brilliant eyes, into the dark holly bushes. She must see something, for she smiled faintly, with subtle satisfaction, and she tossed her erect head in all the pride of vindication. […] There was a certain brilliance of triumph and vindication in all the poise of her slim body.
“I always knew I should see him,” she said triumphantly to herself […] turning round her soft, arch, nymphlike face anxiously.” (TLL 837)
16Sukey Fontelieu analyses the figure of Pan, pointing out that “Pan is associated with panic and all its myriad psychological burdens” (3). As is known from the myth, Pan was marked by both rejection and worship from the very moment of his birth. As the Homeric hymn recounts, “[a]nd in the house she bare Hermes a dear son who from his birth was marvellous to look upon, with goat’s feet and two horns—a noisy, merry-laughing child. But when the nurse saw his uncouth face and full beard, she was afraid and sprang up and fled and left the child” (see Hymn 19). Hermes, however, “received him and took him in his arms […] And he went quickly to the abodes of the deathless gods, carrying his son wrapped in warm skins of mountain hares, and set him down beside Zeus” (Hymn 19). Fontelieu considers that
the themes of panic and self-absorption dogged Pan throughout his myths. His unbridled sexuality created panic in the objects of his desire. The nymphs are chased and when the union is not consummated they are indifferently set aside as “collateral damage,” left behind in the myth, forever vegetating as pine trees or river reeds. They freeze and are forgotten. (3)
17Here is another point where Lawrence’s story breaks the mythological pattern. Miss James is definitely one of the nymphs. Lawrence constantly reiterates this epithet in the characterization of this heroine: “She had an odd, nymphlike inquisitiveness,” “her odd, bright-eyed, deaf nymph’s face lifted with blank listening,” “with a certain nymph-like voluptuousness,” “with the sharp eyes of a deaf nymph,” “turning round her soft, arch, nymph-like face anxiously” (TLL 834, 837, 838). But it looks as if Pan’s union with her is not really consummated. Instead of “vegetating” in trees, she constantly catches the smell “a most marvellous scent of almond blossom” (TLL 842). The almond, as different sources tell us, “is highly revered in traditional cultures of several countries” (Parle and Bhoria 147).
[It] symbolizes watchfulness and promise of new life, as this tree is the first to burst into bloom in many countries. For the Jews, the almond branch was the model for the menorah, and for the Christians, it is a symbol of Jesus’ virgin birth. The almond blossom is also a symbol of bravery and courage, purity, hope, and love. From Greek mythology, the almond blossom is a symbol of eternal true love, unconquerable by death. (Spear)
18In the short story, Pan seems to cherish the young woman’s deep sense of connectedness to the vital life symbolised by her deafness. “And the whirling, snowy air seemed full of presences, full of strange, unheard noises. She was used to the sensation of noises taking place which she could not hear. This sensation became very strong. She felt something was happening in the wild air” (TLL 840).
19In the concluding scene, Miss James actually meets with the spirit of Pan:
Voices were calling. In spite of her deafness she could hear someone, several voices, calling and whistling, as if many people were hallooing through the air:
He’s come back! Aha! He’s come back!”
There was a wild, whistling, jubilant sound of voices in the storm of snow. Then obscured lightning winked through the snow in the air. (TLL 840)
20The moment when her hearing is restored is also resonant of magic realism, too: “‘Now I hear the laughing,’ she said suddenly. It came from the church: a sound of low, subtle, endless laughter, a strange, naked sound” (TLL 841). However, a more scientific explanation is applicable as well. Thus, in her research on archetypes, Fontelieu gives scientific names to some mythological conditions: “Pan was said to have caused panolepsy, a seizure that brought laughter and ecstatic rapture. The nymphs were also, and more commonly, associated with inducing altered states in humans. Both panolepsy and nympholepsy were believed to be a gift that inspires” (90-91). To clarify the terms further, panolepsy causes inspirational states of mind, including abilities of a mantic nature; and nympholepsy is the belief of the ancient Greeks that individuals could be possessed by the nymphs. In modern culture, nympholepsy is also defined as “passion aroused in men by beautiful young girls.”4 To some extent, Lawrence re-enacted the panoleptic state in his characters. Both Marchbanks and Miss James are possessed by this laughter: he laughs with “the wild, neighing, animal laughter,” and she—“in a long, rippling laugh, till the yellow canaries like faded daffodils almost went mad in an effort to sing louder. The girl’s long, rippling laugh sounded through the house uncannily” (TLL 836, 843).
21The story’s title invokes the denouement. Miss James muses about the wonders of the night before, the laughter and voices that pursue her even in the morning, the restored sense of hearing, and the transformation.
“What a wonderful face it was! I shall never forget it. Such laughter! He laughs longest who laughs last. He certainly will have the last laugh. I like him for that: he will laugh last. Must be someone really extraordinary! How very nice to be the one to laugh last. He certainly will. What a wonderful being! I suppose I must call him a being. He’s not a person, exactly.
“But how wonderful of him to come back and alter all the world immediately! Isn’t that extraordinary. I wonder if he’ll have altered Marchbanks. Of course, Marchbanks never saw him. But he heard him. Wouldn’t that do as well, I wonder! I wonder!” (TLL 844)
22The transformation of Marchbanks is ironic: he spends a night with a prostitute, which is, no doubt, the result of Pan’s pranks. Like the stories of the original mythological Pan, this union, in Lawrence’s text, does not seem to bear any fruit. Marchbanks is still that very sardonic self-absorbed type, trying to save his soul, while all that is needed, is to lose it. Miss James muses that “she and he were such friends. They had been friends like that for almost two years. Never lovers. Never that at all. But friends. And after all, she had been in love with him: in her head” (TLL 844). In this free indirect discourse lies the very truth about giving oneself to the deepest impulses of one’s nature, something the self-conscious Marchbanks cannot do. Calling his friend by her last name is another oddity of his: “He was in the hall below. His resonant voice was calling, rather imperiously: ‘James! Are you coming down?’” (TLL 845).
23The story also re-enacts the image of Pan that Lawrence called “the Christian devil”: “‘There’s been a great storm, blew out the windows and doors of the church outside here, and pretty well wrecked the place.’ ‘I saw it. A leaf of the church Bible blew right in my face—from the Book of Job.’ She gave a low laugh” (TLL 846). The biblical text alluded to addresses the problem of the suffering of the innocent. The reason a leaf from this very book lands on Marchbanks’ face is ambiguous. Maybe it is a reminder of the young woman’s affliction as a form of deprivation and suffering. Or is it also her suffering the unrequited love and then being healed from it by Pan who took away the girls’ heart pain by giving back her ability to hear? Or it might be an ironic reworking of a leaf of a tree, something Lawrence poetically mentions in “Pan in America”: “Give me your power, oh tree, to help me in my life. And I will give you my power: even symbolized in a rag torn from my clothing” (26).
24Hence, my argument concerns Pan’s “sentence”: Miss James’s deafness appears to signify a profound connection with “blood consciousness” and the mystical natural environment, suggesting that her sensory difference facilitates a unique form of communication. In contrast, Marchbanks, who confines his interactions with her to mere friendship, seems deaf to her inner calling and affection. Consequently, a lack of awareness or openness to the natural will of the great Pan may entail a “sentence” as a form of retribution for spiritual “deafness.” This interpretation posits physical deafness not as a limitation, but as a potential conduit to deeper understanding, while those who fail to perceive the “inner calling” are truly sensorially deprived.