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“The Sound of the Greater Day”

Terry Gifford

Résumé

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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Texte intégral

The Greater Day

1Some of Lawrence’s stories crackle with sound and silence for the reader. But it is unusual to be reading a story by Lawrence which was created by sound—the sound of the writer’s voice as he dictated it to his wife whilst in bed as a result of a doctor’s diagnosis giving him perhaps only a year more to live. His tuberculosis was identified by the doctor in Mexico City on 11 March 1925 with the instruction that Lawrence must not write or paint “or anything” (SM xxxiv). Either on that day, or very soon afterwards, Frieda began taking the dictation of the “unfinished” story “The Flying-Fish,” the first and only time that this happened. So, in the now lost manuscript of forty pages, which Powell (1937) and Tedlock (1948) recorded having seen, the first nine pages were in Frieda’s hand. It only took eight days without apparently any writing for Lawrence to take up his pen to resume his correspondence, so it may be at this point that he took over the writing of the story himself, argues the Cambridge edition editor Brian Finney (xxxiv). In reading the story now from its base text in the typescript prepared for the posthumous Phoenix, it is hard to distinguish the dictated voice from the written voice of the author.

  • 1 Lawrence was to use this mode of contrast again two years later in “The Escaped Cock”: “It was the (...)

2In “The Flying-Fish,” Gethin Day is in a “lost town of South Mexico” (SM 207) when he receives a cablegram from his dying sister calling him home to the family Elizabethan house in Derbyshire, Daybrook House, that he is about to inherit. He recalls The Book of Days, written by his ancestor who built the house, which has become “a sort of secret family bible” (SM 209), parts of which Day knows by heart. “In a dilettante fashion, he had always liked rather highflown poetry,” we are told. This taste for the portentous and symbolic, heightened, Lawrence suggests, by the fever of the malaria that Day suffers—“the poison that lurks in all tropical air” (SM 211)—invites the reader’s indulgence for the “rather highflown” tendency of Day’s thoughts in this story which centre upon a contrast between “the common day” of the everyday conduct of human civilisation and the notion of “the Greater Day”1 originating from The Book of Days:

Beauteous is the day of the yellow sun which is the common day of men; but even as the winds roll unceasing above the trees of the world, so doeth that Greater Day, which is the Uncommon Day, roll over the unclipt bushes of our little daytime. (SM 209)

3In the Mexicans around him, Day sees both “men of a dying race, to whom the busy sphere of the common day is a cracked and leaking shell” and “handsome, wide-eyed men left over from before the flood in Mexico” (SM 209). “In the faint permanent delirium of his malaria” (SM 211), Day sees the Mexican obsession with death—“Beautiful it is to be dead!” (SM 211)—as “the despair that comes when the lesser day hems in the greater” and a symptom of a process of “dying back” to a life in the Greater Day.

4The notion of “dying back” is not available to Day himself. Lawrence makes it clear that white Western intrusions into Mexico, from the Spanish to the later Americans, have been responsible for the depletion of Mexican life to a nihilism in the common day. But Day believes that by leaving Mexico and returning to England—even “small and tight and over-furnished” (SM 210) England—he now “dare face the sun behind the sun, and come into his own in the Greater Day” (SM 210). The phrase “come into his own” echoes an insight of his sister’s that Day’s wanderings about the world had at their root his inability to know how to “come into his own” at home in Daybrook House, the home also of The Book of Days. The challenge now for Gethin Day is to see through the cracks in his everyday world “the sun behind the sun.” But such moments come to him not only as sights—insights—but also as sounds. At a station on his train journey away from Mexico City an Indian, “a native, a big handsome man” evidently of the ancient Tlaxcala tribe (who had held out against the Aztecs, Finney’s note tells us) offers to sell Day an ice-cream:

“Quiere helados, Señor?” said the Indian, reaching a glass with his dark, subtle-skinned, workless hand. And in the soft, secret tones of his voice, Gethin Day heard the sound of the Greater Day. (SM 214)

5This is a trivial moment, if there can be such a thing in a Lawrence story. The character buys an ice-cream with a “Gracias.” Can it carry the weight Lawrence wants it to hold? The voice of this Indian, from a named ancient culture, is the voice of the past in the present at a train station. It is the voice of a humbled culture, but vibrant with connection to “the sun behind the sun.” It is a voice engaged in an everyday commercial transaction that carries deep echoes of a complex and ultimately unfathomable knowledge. Finally, it is a masculine utterance from “a native, a big handsome man” addressing an emasculated white man whose sister has seen that he does not know how to come into himself. Paradoxically, it is a living voice that speaks out of the silence of the deracinated land of death through which Day’s train has been passing:

The country was wild, but more populous. An occasional hacienda with sugar mills stood back among the hills. But it was silent. Spain had spent the energy of her little day here, now the silence, the terror of the Greater Day, mysterious with death, was filling in again. (SM 214)

6This is a silence that signals the end of a civilisation, but it is also the potent silence of renewal at work, “filling in again.” Renewal only comes through the mystery of the death process, which is not an end, but a cycle—“again.”

7One cannot but see this story as a response to the avowal of the onset of his own death process. Lawrence had written to Brett the day after Frieda had written to tell her about his illness, “You hear how my flu remains got tangled up with malaria” (5L 210). Malaria is underlined in an act of denial. Gethin Day is not Lawrence, but his thoughts and feelings, about Mexico and England, about the ordinary day and the Greater Day, about the processes around him of which he is a part, are the projections of Lawrence’s imagination at this significant point in his life when his personal death must be confronted. Yet the death process in this story is cultural and renewal is personal. As John Worthen has pointed out, “the part dictated to Frieda was haunted by a vivid distaste for the lost depths of Mexico and an intense nostalgia for the English Midlands” (322-323). That “distaste” is “vivid” because Lawrence communicates it with the sudden sound of a crack as Day realises that the everyday world around him in Mexico represents a cultural death process:

But in the last years, something in the hard, fierce finite sun of Mexico, in the dry terrible land, and in the black staring eyes of the suspicious natives had made the ordinary day lose its reality to him. It had cracked like some great bubble, and to his unease and terror, he had seemed to see through the fissures the deeper blue of that other Greater Day where moved the other sun shaking its dark blue wings. (SM 209)

8From the open door of his sick room Day hears the barefoot natives “flitting with silent rapidity” across the house patio, “mysteriously going nowhere.” His open window gives onto the street where natives pass and he hears “the soft, light rustle of their sandals” (SM 210) which represents “the silent swiftness of the Indian past,” in contrast with “the strange, endless, pullulating whimper” of a beggar sticking a hand through the grille. These are the mysterious sounds of a degraded culture in its death throes. Even the bells of the cathedral “sounded hollow” (SM 211).

9John Worthen writes that “It is probably not a coincidence that the remaking of England as a heavily mythologised, rural world, to which Lawrence clearly had a profound attachment, came just when the sentence of his own mortality had been pronounced: ‘he felt that home was the place’” (323). But home for Gethin Day, who is quoted here, is very much defined by the words of the Book of Days. It is not so much a house in Derbyshire as an outdoor space open to the natural sounds of the English countryside where men will “breathe deep, and be breathless in the great air” (SM 212). The closed house with the family around the hearth is characterised by the Book of Days as typical of “little days”: “And the time will come at last when the walls of the little day shall fall, and what is left of the family of men shall find themselves outdoors in the Greater Day, houseless and abroad” (SM 212).

10So on his journey by train to catch the boat, first to Cuba and then England, Day pays attention to the outdoors on view—the deer that knew they were safe, “wondered, away there in the Greater Day, in the manless space” (SM 213). Where there is a village he sees “Spain putting the bubbles of her little day among the blackish trees of the unconquerable” (SM 214). Day is reading a copy of the Book of Days which strangely mentions Vesuvius just as the train passes a volcano “that looked back at him” with a challenge explained in the book: “When earth inert lieth too heavy, then Vesuvius spitteth out fire. And if a nightingale would not sing, his song unsung in him would slay him” (SM 216). This latter expression especially encourages critics who read this story as Lawrence’s celebration of personal vitalism. But I want to argue that, as it stands, this story is rather a celebration of ecological relationality.

The Sound of the Mesh

11All of the foregoing prepares the reader for the exquisite descriptions of flying-fish and porpoises that exemplify the Greater Day, not only by being “outdoors,” but “abroad” in the medium of water. This study has thus far prioritised sound, and a very useful route into this particular story it has been. But what if we suspend that focus for a moment? Of course, especially outdoors, sound is only one part of the rich tapestry of signs and agencies in the ecology of the cosmos we inhabit and sensuously apprehend. The biosemiology we read intuitively all the time does not prioritise sound. What Timothy Morton calls “the mesh” we live in—more than two dimensional and more dynamic than the conventional static image of an ecological web—does not prioritise humans (15). I want to argue that it is anthropocentric editing to call this story “unfinished.” Lawrence himself might have wanted the story to have an ending that focussed upon the human, apparently saying that “The last part will be regenerate man, a real life in the Garden of Eden” (SM xxxv). And it has become usual to point, as Brian Finney does and Keith Sagar also does, to Lawrence’s saying this as he is revising The Escaped Cock, where this is indeed the predominant thrust of the narrative. But what if Lawrence did not, could not, “finish” this story because he sensed that, in some profound way that perhaps he could not admit, it was already finished?

12Keith Sagar wants the story to have a social, even a political meaning: “Lawrence was seeking some equivalent poise [to that of porpoises], harmony, first in an individual man, later in a society, a civilisation. Gethin Day was to have been such a man, perhaps with others” (209-210). The extrapolation here from porpoises to a civilisation needs to be challenged. But there is some justification for it in Lawrence’s two critiques of commerce in the story. The first is in his characterisation of the port of Vera Cruz: “It was a point where the wild primeval Day of this continent met the busy white-man’s day, and the two annulled one another. The result was a port of nullity, nihilism concrete and actual, calling itself the city of the True Cross” (SM 217). The second is his observation that second class boat passengers like Day, a man of “moderate income,” are more circumspect with “money and its power”:

For the lesser day of money and the mealy-mouthed Mammon is always ready for a victim, and a man who has glimpsed the Greater Day, and the inward sun, will not fall into the clutches of Mammon’s mean day, if he can help it. (SM 217)

13But these rather trite critiques of capitalist civilisation are not the point of the story. They are part of its preparatory structure of contrasts. The story is moving towards its gloriously positive, climactic perception of the Greater Day in the lives of the sea in Part II of the story titled “The Gulf.” It is the flying-fish and porpoises in their lived ecology in the Gulf of Mexico that are the point.

14Sagar performs a sleight of hand when he writes that “Lawrence’s notes tell us that Gethin Day was to marry on his return […]” (207). Actually these are notes for a different story called “The Weather-Vane,” with the same character. Under the title “The Flying-Fish” in these notes, transcribed by Tedlock, there is no plot summary. Finney suggests that is perhaps because Lawrence was already at work on it. But it might equally be because it was finished, or at least abandoned for the time being. The point is that these readings and desires for the story are anthropocentric and that an ecocentric reading of the story not only displaces this need for a human ending, but allows Lawrence’s sensuously spectacular ecological evocation of the mesh to be fully appreciated. And, in this reading, sound has its proper place in relation to the other senses. Sagar quite rightly draws attention to the rhythm of the prose, but the ecstatic quality of this sea life is also created by the completely integrated evocation of the senses:

Then suddenly the faint whispering crackle, and a cloud of silver on webs of pure, fluttering water was soaring low over the surface of the sea, at an angle from the ship, as if jetted away from the cut-water, soaring in a low arc, fluttering with the wild emphasis of grasshoppers or locusts suddenly burst out of the grass, in a wild rush to make away, and making it, away, away, then suddenly gone, like a lot of lights blown out in one breath. (SM 219-220)

15In this sentence, which begins with a strange low sound, the flying-fish appear as a cloud, on webs of water. Is the first “fluttering” of water a sound and the second “fluttering” a visual image? We have fish “soaring” and then “bursting” like grasshoppers. The sentence is itself certainly a wild rush, ended abruptly with a single breath which is both sound and action. Gethin Day, curled on the bow-sprit, is displaced by this multisensory experience of wild life at home in sea and air: “The soul pauses and holds its breath, for wonder, wonder, which is the very breath of the soul” (SM 220).

16If the flying-fish are able to be wildly relational with water and air, the porpoises are also relational with each other:

And still it was the same, the ship speeding, cutting the water, and the strong-bodied fish heading in perfect balance of speed underneath, mingling among themselves in some strange single laughter of multiple consciousnesses, giving off the joy of life, sheer joy of life, togetherness in pure complete motion, many lusty-bodied fish enjoying one laugh of life, sheer togetherness, perfect as passion. (SM 221)

17Of course the “laughter” here is not heard, but apprehended by sight, in an integration of the senses. And its striking feature is that a “strange single laughter” can be created by “multiple consciousnesses” in “sheer togetherness.” The motion of multiple bodies seems to eclipse any individuality so that they appear to be motionless in “a single laugh, yet each fish going his own gait” (SM 221). In this complex, communal laughter in the ocean is the sound of the Greater Day that is not found in “dying back,” but in the living present. It is an evolutionary advance beyond human capacities, Day thinks to himself: “The life in the deep waters is ahead of us, it contains sheer togetherness and sheer joy. We have never got there—” (SM 222).

“Man, with his tragedy”

18The final section of the story is titled “The Atlantic” and seems designed to dramatically contrast with the joy of “The Gulf.” The achievements of human civilisation in Havana are represented by rich Americans drunk in the gutters. They wear badges with their hotel details on so that they can be “carted home.” Day is depressed by the deadness of the concrete buildings. “The Yankees owned it all” (SM 223). For the first time we hear the ship’s engines “going before breakfast time” ready to take Day and his fellow passengers out into a contrasting ocean: “The Atlantic was like a cemetery, an endless, infinite cemetery of greyness, where the bright lost world of Atlantis is buried” (SM 224). A huge swell turns the ship into “a plague-ship, everybody disappeared, stewards and everybody” (SM 224). The sound of a futile mechanism dominates: “Up, up, up, heavingly up, till a pause. Ah!—then burr-rr-rr! as the screw came out of the water and shattered every nerve” (SM 224). The story ends: “On the third evening it began to rain, and the motion was subsiding. They were running out of the swell. But it was an experience to remember” (SM 225).

19Lawrence’s irony in this last sentence is at work not only in the referencing of the human mechanical means of moving through the ocean, compared with what he has just evoked in its fish, or the juxtaposition between human sickness and joyous animal life, but in the questioning of the scales by way of which what is memorable in human experience is to be measured. It was to be two years later that Lawrence visited the Etruscan tombs and celebrated another past culture in which humans might have come close to what he celebrates in the ocean in “The Flying Fish.” As Gethin Day reflected leaning over the bow-sprit:

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! What civilisation will bring us to such a pitch of swift laughing togetherness, as these fish have reached? (SM 222)

20The subtle “pitch of swift laughing togetherness” in the ocean is the real challenge lurking in the sound of the Greater Day. It is presented as an evolutionary challenge or indeed a rupture in the present towards a different future for human development. The models evoked in this story do not need an anthropocentric resolution, as apparently proposed by Lawrence in saying, “The last part will be regenerate man, a real life in the Garden of Eden.” In fact, the present structure of “The Flying-Fish” fits exactly the structure of a classic Lawrence short story such as The Virgin and the Gypsy, about which Lawrence wrote to Martin Secker, “I had a good whack at my gypsy story tonight, and nearly finished it: over the climax, and on the short down slope to the end” (5L 380). In the story the flying-fish and porpoises speak, in Lawrence’s amazing climactic prose, for themselves. Ship-board humans are merely the contrasting down slope to the end.

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Bibliographie

Lawrence, D.H. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence Volume 5: 1924-1927. Ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Lawrence, D.H. St Mawr and Other Stories. Ed. Brian Finney. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Lawrence, D.H. The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories. Ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge: Havard University Press, 2010.

Sagar, Keith. The Art of D.H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Worthen, John. D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider. London: Penguin, 2005.

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Notes

1 Lawrence was to use this mode of contrast again two years later in “The Escaped Cock”: “It was the life of the little day, the life of little people. And the man who had died said to himself: Unless we encompass it in the greater day, and set the little life in the circle of the greater life, all is disaster” (VG 153). By now Lawrence was concerned less with critique and its alternative than with integration in the mission of the man who died.

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Terry Gifford, « “The Sound of the Greater Day” »Études Lawrenciennes [En ligne], 57 | 2025, mis en ligne le 05 novembre 2025, consulté le 09 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/4227 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/158n9

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Auteur

Terry Gifford

Professor Terry Gifford is the author of D.H. Lawrence, Ecofeminism and Nature (Routledge, 2023) and is Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University’s Research Centre for Environmental Humanities, UK, and Profesor Honorifico at the University of Alicante, Spain. A co-founder of British ecocriticism, he has published Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (2nd edn CCC Press 2011), Pastoral (2nd edn Routledge, 2020) and Reconnecting With John Muir: Essays in Post-Pastoral Practice (University of Georgia Press, 2006). He has written or edited seven books on the poet Ted Hughes and has published eight books of poetry.

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