D.H. Lawrence Conference 2007 - Archive

Paper Abstracts Friday Session D

Michael Bell

University of Warwick, UK

Lawrence on the One and the Many: Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine

The question of the one and the many, whether reality is ultimately unity or difference, has exercised philosophers since ancient times, as in the fragments of Parmenides, and William James thought it the fundamental issue for any philosophical thinker. Although Lawrence did not engage this question in a formally philosophical way, he did so informally in so far as his relation to the world involved an intense awareness of the unifying value of life along with an equally vivid appreciation of difference in all living beings. In this respect he can be compared to Gerard Manley Hopkins who shared some of this concern and who, as a priest, had a theologically trained responsibility for thinking the question in philosophical terms. Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine perhaps provides the occasion on which Lawrence came closest to engaging the question philosophically, and reading the essay in that light helps to explain some of its otherwise peculiar features. Indeed, it is appropriate to read the apparently factual account in the essay as a piece of creative writing making its point through concrete instantiation rather than what Lawrence, with misleading modesty, calls reflection.

William Garry Watson

University of Alberta, Canada

On desire: where Lawrence remains most challenging today

He [Birkin] was not very much interested any more in personalities and in people … they were all enclosed nowadays in a definite limitation he said … They acted and re-acted involuntarily according to a few great laws, and once the laws, the great principles, were known, people were no longer mystically interesting ... None of them transcended the given terms.

--D.H.Lawrence (Women in Love 305)

To my knowledge at least, the only texts that ever discovered mimetic desire and explored some of its consequences are literary texts. I am speaking here … of a relatively small group of works. In these works, human relations conform to the complex process of strategies and conflicts, misunderstandings and delusions that stem from the mimetic nature of human desire. Implicitly and sometimes explicitly, these works reveal the laws of mimetic desire.

--René Girard ("To double business bound" vii-viii)

This paper comes in two parts. In Part One I will argue that, judging by what Lawrence himself shows us both in Women and Love and in many of his other major works also, the "few great laws" which Birkin thinks largely determine the behaviour of people nowadays are best understood as the laws of what Girard calls sometimes mimetic, and sometimes triangular, desire. Think, for example, of the moment in "The Ladybird" when we are told that, "as so often happens, in this life based on the wicked triangle, Basil could not follow his enthusiasm for the Count save in his wife's presence" (204). Or consider Gudrun's attempt to persuade herself towards the end of Women in Love that Gerald's death should not be seen as "an example of the eternal triangle" in action since "the presence of the third party [Loerke] was a mere contingency—an inevitable contingency perhaps, but a contingency none the less" (477). If, as Gudrun concedes, this contingency is inevitable then it would seem that the triangle in question has exerted a determining influence after all.

But if, on the one hand, Lawrence's major works show human relations conforming time and time again (and in richly fascinating ways) "to the complex process of strategies and conflicts, misunderstandings and delusions that stem from the mimetic nature of human desire," they also show characters escaping the negative effects of the laws governing mimetic desire, characters who remain "mystically interesting" precisely to the extent that they manage to transcend the given terms. It is the significance of this achievement, which I take to constitute a major challenge to Girard's argument for Christianity (his Antropology of the Cross), that I will be focussing on in Part Two of the paper.

Chiyo Fujiwara

Kobe College, Japan

Lawrence's Reading of George Eliot's Modern Tragedy: from The Mill of the Floss to Sons and Lovers

D. H. Lawrence at the beginning of his writing career was greatly influenced by George Eliot's early works and he was particularly fond of The Mill on the Floss during his Eastwood period.

Sons and Lovers can be read as a 'modern tragedy' because Paul's inward struggle and unconscious yearning for liberation from his mother is deeply connected with the great change at the turn of the century both in the social structure and in people's consciousness. Similarly, in The Mill on the Floss, Eliot delineates the growth of her moral conscience which ironically drags her into a tragic destiny. Maggie strives to protect and share against the threat from the changing economic structure and new greed and grievances, but which is too narrow to allow her independent spiritual quest through emotional and intellectual dilemmas. Here Lawrence must have found a 'modern tragedy'.

Both authors handled their personal history as literary materials for their works, and tried to produce tragic novels which represent the clue to the problems of modern British society. Furthermore, I would examine Lawrence 's interpretation of the term 'tragedy', as it appears in his writing, and compare it with that of Eliot who loved Greek tragedies and Aristotle's Poetics.

George Bahlke

Hamilton College, USA

Dualities in E. M. Forster's "The Longest Journey" and D. H. Lawrence's "Sons and Lovers" Dualities; Forster; Lawrence

Not only did E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence admire one another's work (in his Aspects of the Novel [1927] Forster placed Lawrence among novelists he considered prophetic, Emily Bronte, Dostoyevsky, and Melville), but also each one wrote an autobiographical novel, Forster, "The Longest Journey," and Lawrence, "Sons and Lovers." Both novels reveal that their writers were not entirely aware of their novels' true subjects. The subtext in "The Longest Journey" is that Rickie Elliott, its failed.

See-Young Park

Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Korea

Professor Alfred Kramer and Neo-Kantianism in Mr Noon

The autobiographical elements in Mr Noon are pervasive enough to allow Lawrence biographers and critics to read the novel as 'thinly disguised' autobiography. Certainly Lawrence makes Mr Noon a vehicle of autobiography, but the authorial subject in the novel is distributed among several figures who variously separate and converge as the text unfolds. Relevant to this is the narrator's rejection of descriptive autobiographical detail. The narrator erases such detail and subverts verisimilitude, the basis of autobiography. This subversion of mimetic representation cautions us to separate biographical revelation from fictional improvisation in characterization. In this paper I look at the refraction in Mr Noon of the real life figures such as Edgar Jaffe and Alfred Weber. They are significant not only for our appreciation of the author's creative flair but also in the context of Lawrence's endorsement of Lev Shestov's objection to neo-Kantianism. In August 1919 Lawrence, with S. S. Koteliansky, completed the translation of a book by the Russian philosopher. In Mr Noon Lawrence represents German intellectuals in connection with their neo-Kantian credentials. The reconstruction of the German Professor Kramer in Mr Noon is, in my opinion, given a decisive impetus by the Shestov translation.

Colm Kerrigan

'Homer sometimes nods': Lawrence in Trento

This paper examines Lawrence's brief stay in the city of Trento in 1912, with shorter references also to his passage through Vipiteno (Sterzing) and Bolzano on the way there and, afterwards, at Riva del Garda. The 'nods' in the title refers to the fact that Lawrence, normally an indisputed master of the travel genre, in this journey through what was then the Tyrol and is now Italy, seems to have had very little idea of the significance of what he was seeing. Why is this worthy of interest?

The main omission from his account of this journey is any mention of the irredentist movement. Irredentism refers to the return of Italian-speaking regions outside Italy to the Kingdom of Italy. At the time Lawrence and Frieda were there, it was the burning social and political issue of the day in the Austro-Hungarian Empire's province of Trentino, or Southern Tyrol, of which Trento was the main city. For the Italian majority in Trentino, the issue was, briefly, whether they should be able to maintain an Italian identity within the Empire or whether the Trentino should become part of the Kingdom of Italy.

Despite direct manifestations of the issue (eg, the surly waiter who would not speak German, the vast Austrian military presence, the provocative statue of Dante by the station), Lawrence makes no mention of irredentism in his letters or in Mr Noon. Almost as surprising as this omission is the failure of his biographers and commentators to point it out. This paper explains what irredentism is and why an understanding of it is necessary to make sense of some of the encounters of Lawrence and Frieda between Vipiteno and Riva, but particularly in Trento, the centre of irredentism at the time.

I conclude that writing about Trento in 1912 without taking irredentism into account would be rather like writing about Ireland in the same year without mentioning Home Rule.

David Game

Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

'The Lost Girl: A Return to Eastwood with Australia on the Horizon'

In March 1920, Lawrence, writing from Taormina, informed the Scottish author Compton Mackenzie, that he "had about 30,000 words" completed of the novel which became The Lost Girl (Letters, iii. 490). A substantial part of the novel is set in and around Lawrence's heartland, Eastwood, and although Lawrence wrote The Lost Girl while abroad, the novel may be seen as a "return" by Lawrence to Eastwood. For Lawrence, however, this return was fraught. Drawing on his recollections of people and places, Lawrence subjects his English characters to a withering critique, exemplifying his own rejection of post-war England. In keeping with his decision to live abroad, Alvina Houghton in The Lost Girl rejects her confined, middle class existence and also looks abroad for fulfillment, eventually marrying an Italian. Carol Siegel has noted Lawrence's "use of Italy as a site of regeneration" in the novel (LG, xix), however, while Italy is central to this vision, The Lost Girl, in the character of the Australian, Dr Alexander Graham, also reveals Lawrence's developing interest in Australia as regenerative destination, two years before his own journey there in 1922. In this paper I will argue that The Lost Girl provides evidence that Lawrence's decision to travel to Australia was not, as is generally accepted, simply the bi-product of his "desire to land on the Pacific coast" of America (Letters, iv. 127), but the result of an accumulating curiosity and intention to investigate Australia as an alternative, not only to England, but to Europe and America as well.