D.H. Lawrence Conference 2007 - Archive

Paper Abstracts Monday Session J

Dimitar Angelov

University of Warwick, UK

Lawrence and the Native Americans: Perspectives on Performance and Cultural Difference in Mornings in Mexico

The paper will examine three of the essays in Mornings in Mexico – "Indians and Entertainment", "Dance of the Sprouting Corn" and "The Hopi Snake Dance"- where Lawrence discusses the difference between the European and the Native American psychology of performance, which he attributes to a fundamental discrepancy in ontology. If the European spectacle entails an alienating split of the subject's consciousness into a dramatic persona and an observer, the Native American performance is dominated by a non-cerebral experience that originates in the soma and transcends the physical boundaries of the individual. Corresponding to these two performative paradigms are two distinct types of subjectivity: one privileging the static ego, the other – the dynamism of the drive.

Although Lawrence criticises the European selfhood and being as predicated on the flawed interpersonal dynamics of the spectacle, he himself often lapses into the inauthentic position of the observer when arguing the Native American alterity, most of all in "Indians and Entertainment". The paper will aim to show that Lawrence sought to extricate himself from the precariousness of his situation by challenging the authority of the narrative voice in "Dance of the Sprouting Corn" and "The Hopi Snake Dance". In doing so, he performs a characteristic deconstructive gesture of separating method from truth, which allows him to create a more genuine representation of the intercultural self-other dynamics.

Jack Stewart

North Vancouver, Canada

Color, Place, and animism in 'Flowery Tuscany'

The landscape of "Flowery Tuscany" (1927) reflects an ecological balance between man and nature. Lawrence identifies over twenty flowering species as individual life-forms. He distinguishes pure intense blue, in the grape-hyacinths, from tonal variations and shows a painter's sense of interacting colors, related to shapes or markings or abstracted in the intense scarlet redness of anemones or the incandescent greenness of leaves. In his phenomenological vision, velvety texture combines with brilliant hue to form an "apparition." As color is a function of light, so resonance is of texture. Color stimulates Lawrence's acts of attention. He looks at flowers as a painter-botanist and his observations of colored light distinguish luminosity, radiance, translucence, opacity, and saturation. His penetrating study of green matches his study of red. The eye moves from one tone to another ("glossy green," "apple-green," "emerald"), before dissolving distinctions in a visionary aura. The adjective "green" becomes the plural substantive "greens," signifying endless variations, and finally the abstraction "greenness." The sensations Lawrence describes ultimately point to an ontological "isness" that can only be experienced.

Lawrence's floral imagery combines motion and sound with color, form, and texture in multi-sensory synaesthesia. The impact of massed bright colors in the crocuses gives an animistic impression of movement; Lawrence celebrates the principle of growth in their upthrusting energy. Touch and motion supplement sight and a sixth sense makes the invisible visible. Lawrence's holistic vision links flora and fauna: violets are "like tiny dark hounds" and "the translucent membranes of blood-veined leaves" are "like the thin wings of bats." X-ray vision supports animism: "the aspens have the . . . glow of living membrane." Man is part of this lexicon. Lawrence connects floral, animal, and human forms, emphasizing their uniqueness and "vital relatedness."

Jay A. Gertzman

USA

"The Lovely Lady and Noir Fiction"

The Lovely Lady has many Lawrentian themes: psychological enslavement of the younger to the older generation. The objective narrator's voice is slightly waggish, but the atmosphere behind it is sinister. Robert states, "There's a feeling almost of murder in the air."

There is much in this story that corresponds to the themes of the noir thriller, which in the late 1920s were in the formative stages. These include the sinister atmosphere, compounded of sexual frustration and a consequent morbid, prurient spectatorship; the substitution of victimhood for innocence; urbane sophistication masking willful domination ; a pervasive sense of dormant but brooding hostility ("murder in the air"); the irrelevance of legal justice, and the lack of dénouement even when the story's antagonist is gone. Lawrence's novella was a contribution to Cynthia Asquith's anthology of crime fiction, many stories in which are not typical British "cozies" or puzzle mysteries, but rather noirish instead. These include Asquith's own contribution, which was modeled after Lawrence's.

Lawrence's "Lovely Lady" is interesting to consider in the light of the contrasts between American and British mystery stories. His largely negative reviews of urban hard boiled realism by American writers such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, Dahlberg, and Van Vechten are relevant, as is his contempt for Maugham's Ashenden stories.

Antonio Traficante

Concordia University College of Alberta, Canada

Of Beast and Wo/man: The Trickster-Figure in D. H. Lawrence's The Fox

My discussion will look at the role of the Trickster-Figure (mentioned by Lawrence on at least two occasions ) as interpreted originally by Paul Radin, the translation of which appears in the chapter titled "On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure," in Jung's important volume, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Although Lawrence's novella The Fox continues to attract attention from critics (some of this Freudian) nearly nothing, to my knowledge, has been said of this enigmatic story from a Jungian perspective. Among the points of interest to be discussed is the idea of the Shadow, which, in relation to the Trickster-Figure "contains with it the seed of an enantiodromia, of a conversion into its opposite" (Archetypes, p. 272). Or, as some recent critic has explained, "Wherever and whenever he (the Trickster-Figure) appears, and in spite of his unimpressive exterior, he brings the possibility of transforming the meaningless into the meaningful." Lawrence's The Fox, I maintain, brilliantly and most subtly illustrates what has been stated in the quotations above in the love triangle between its three main characters: Henry, March, and Banford.

Louis K. Greiff

Alfred University, USA

Aesthetic Dialogues in Lawrence and Joyce

To consider a relationship between the aesthetics of Portrait and Sons and Lovers seems compelling since both novels portray their artists as young men, parallel in their turbulent growth, yet so very different in mind and heart. A more powerful relationship, however, juxtaposes Portrait not with Sons and Lovers but with Women in Love. Ursula's explosive response to Loerke's Lady Godiva appears also to embody Lawrence's rejection of Joycean aesthetics, at least as they find expression early on in Portrait. Lawrence's dismissal, through Ursula, of static art and the disinterested artist is noteworthy since he may have made it without ever having read Joyce's first novel. My presentation considers conflicting aesthetic discourse in Lawrence and Joyce, with primary focus on Women in Love and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I'll examine the choreography of such discourse as well as its content. Lawrence and Joyce possess opposing attitudes on art and express these attitudes as their characters dance in radically different styles and with radically different movements. Perhaps watching the dance will prove even more interesting than listening to the argument.

Jill Franks

Austin Peay State University, USA

'In Lawrence's novel Alice would be quivering with life and meaning': Parody and Reverence of Lawrence's Love Ethic in Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm (1932), Maureen Moore's The Illumination of Alice Mallory (1991), and Robert Roper's The Trespassers (1992)

As scholars who have dedicated a portion of our professional lives to studying and teaching Lawrence, we know how frequently he is mocked, both within and outside of the academy. In particular, his love ethic takes cheap shots and gets distorted, or alternatively, copied and revered. As a canonical, modernist Master, writers have been as interested in him as readers; his influence creates as much anxiety as any of the less controversial modern novelists. In this paper, I compare three twentieth-century novelists who answer back to Lawrence: 1930s British journalist Stella Gibbons, late twentieth-century Canadian novelist Maureen Moore, and 1990s Californian novelist Robert Roper. Focusing on questions of gender and genre, I will show that Gibbons parodies Lawrence's purple prose and social determinism, while Moore is more interested in satirizing Lawrence's love ethic directly. Both have much fun with the stereotypical male Lawrence scholar who uses the credo to get women into bed. Roper, on the other hand, does not parody Lawrence at all. He rewrites Lawrence with the minor changes necessary to reflect advances in technology, psychoanalysis, and feminism (perhaps), but essentially embeds the plot, character, and ethos of Lady Chatterley's Lover within his novel. The essay considers the social implications of gender and genre in Lawrence revisions.