D.H. Lawrence Conference 2007 - Archive

Paper Abstracts Sunday Session E

Gaku Iwai

Japan

Re-reading Movements in European History in the Social and Political Contexts of 1910s Britain

I would like to analyze Movements in European History by putting it into the social and political contexts of the time when it was produced, that is, during and after the First World War. Curiously enough, the episodes of the Great War were not included in Movements, even when Lawrence was asked to bring the narrative up to date as an Epilogue. However, the contemporary ideologies on the Great War are inscribed in the text.

Apart from Movements, several history books were written by novelists from the 1910s to the early 20s: A School History of England by Rudyard Kipling (1911; with C. R. L. Fletcher, who was to refuse Lawrence's "Epilogue" later), A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton (1917) and Outline of History by H. G. Wells (a few months before Movements). I shall compare Movements in European History with these works in terms of education, patriotism, the Great War and the concept of history, and examine how Lawrence's treatment of wars and his apocalyptic vision were influenced by, or differed from, the contemporary views on the war.

Masako Hirai

Kobe College, Japan

Rilke, Lawrence and the Spirit of the Age

The affinity between Rilke and Lawrence has not been fully explored. A few biographical references may not be enough to prove their mutual influences. However, they had common friends, literature and art, and similar ideas about solitude, travelling, death, sex, death of Christianity, the Apocalyptice vision of historty, and interest in the non-human life. Their phrases, in German and English, were sometimes strikingly similar. These 'connections' best reveal the Spirit of the Age.

Alasdair Menmuir

The University of Sheffield, UK

Reactions to Conscription in D. H. Lawrence and John Rodker: A Shared Nightmare

D. H. Lawrence and John Rodker shared similarly disastrous personal experiences during the conscription effort for the First World War. Analysing Lawrence's striking chapter of his novel Kangaroo, entitled 'The Nightmare', in comparison with Rodker's long poem 'A C.O.'s Biography', I will attempt to trace similarities and divergences of reaction to a nation's mass movement into war. Through analysis of these depictions of the non-conscript or conscientious objector I will seek to extract a depiction of the modernist dissident, whose identity is essentially set in opposition to the state and against the masses. Located at the point of antipathy towards the masses and the 'herd instinct' contemporaneously theorised by Gustave Le Bon and Freud, the identity of the two modernists will be viewed as part of the crisis of selfhood engendered by the state and populace's support and activity in the Great War. Reading Lawrence and Rodker's work alongside the revolutionary philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari will provide further insight into the state's restrictions and privations as experienced by individuals in the authors' texts. Further to such philosophical supporting material, I will examine the extent to which the authors construct Deleuzo-Guattarian 'machines' that oppose or link in with particular ideas of nationhood, totalitarianism and identity. The presentation will involve a short clip from the film version of Kangaroo

, directed by Tim Burstall.

Matthew Gaughan

University of York, UK

Individual Experience and the Industrial Community: The Personalized Realism of Sons and Lovers

In this paper, I consider the manner in which Lawrence drew upon his working-class community in Eastwood to forge a realism that conforms to the social reality only in ways that follow Lawrence's thematic intentions. The experience of Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers is shaped by social, regional, and cultural dislocations. Lawrence incorporates these dislocations into Sons and Lovers in order to give a realist presentation of an industrial community in the process of radical transformation due to the advance of modernity. I argue, however, that Lawrence's focus on individual experience affects the realist presentation of the novel and undermines the novel's reliability as a social document. This tension between realism and modernism is emblematic of the crises of modernity present within Sons and Lovers: the divide between the rural and the industrial; tradition and the modern; social representation and individual experience. I explain that Lawrence deliberately does not resolve these conflicts in order to subvert the traditions of realism and to explore the volatility of personal experience.

Ron Granofsky

McMaster University, Canada

"His father's dirty digging": The Significance of Dirt in Sons and Lovers

Dirt is frequently associated with Walter Morel in Sons and Lovers and plays a pivotal role in the symbolic recuperation of the masculine ideal. Mary Douglas's explains that dirt is "matter out of place" and "essentially disorder." For Gertrude, order and cleanliness are necessary to protect her precarious sense of self, so Walter's habits are galling to her. When intoxicated, he upsets the order of the house just as his pit dirt sullies its cleanliness. The children internalize their mother's outrage at the dirty father, so Paul faces a dilemma as he reaches out to integrate a masculine component into his sense of identity. The text does the work of identification by indirect means through its imagery and dramatization of scenes such as Paul's burning of Annie's doll until its blackened arms resemble Walter's, or the "carbonizing" of the baking loaves. Very shortly after Paul feeds his mother poisoned milk to end her suffering, his father becomes the nourisher offering milk to his son, and Paul accepts. In Lawrence's later writing, the pattern of recuperation of the masculine through dirt is also evident as I will show by looking briefly at two poems and one scene in

Women in Love.

Hilary Hillier

Community, family, 'Morel': a dialect approach to Sons and Lovers

This paper will suggest that a linguist's examination of Lawrence's use of contrasting dialect patterns in Son and Lovers can give us an illuminating perspective on the novel. It will claim that, although aimed at a middle-class readership and framed by its mainly Standard English narration, Sons and Lovers was written from inside the working-class experience. The language of the working class is in fact the linguistic 'norm' for Bestwood, the social community represented in the novel, that linguistic norm being the language of Lawrence's own home territory, specifically the accent and dialect grammar of Eastwood and the Erewash Valley.

The paper will explore the implications of these fundamental assumptions for Lawrence's depiction of the Morels - as individuals and as a family - in terms of their relationship to the surrounding community. It will examine how Lawrence describes and represents the social background and speech patterns of the various voices heard in the novel. It will identify Walter Morel as a natural user of the local language, and therefore as an integral part of the community, and Gertrude Morel as a somewhat isolated 'Standard English' speaker. It will suggest that linguistic conflict between the couple is symbolic of the tragedy at the heart of their marriage, and will ask how far the consequences of that linguistic conflict might be detected in Lawrence's treatment of the children of the marriage, principally William Morel and Paul Morel, the 'sons and lovers' of the title.

Masashi Asai

Kyoto Tachibana University, Japan

To Know, or Not To Know, That is the Question: Lawrence's "Blood Consciousness" and "Mental Consciousness" Reconsidered

Lawrence's clearest motto concerning the issue of the action called "knowing" is epitomized in his words: "The final aim is not to know, but to be. There never was a more risky motto than that: Know thyself.... You've got to know yourself so that you can at least be yourself. 'Be yourself' is the last motto" (Fantasia, 68). This motto is untiringly supported by his life-long assertion that "blood consciousness," or knowing through the blood, is more essential than "mental consciousness" or knowing through the intellect or reason. This assertion varied from time to time, but the essence of his message is: man has an innate core of being which he calls "naïve core," but over time this core is cumulatively covered, and eventually dominated, by man's later attainment of intellect, and this phenomenon has overturned the original balance that man once had, resulting in the present human ailment of self-consciousness and the loss of spontaneity. What we need to do, then, is to recover this balance. The latter part of this message seems very sound, but the premise of his assertion needs reconsideration. What does Lawrence mean by saying that "blood consciousness" is dominated by "mental consciousness"? Presuming that this is true, is it such an abominable thing as he asserts? Aren't there any positive aspects in the phenomenon? An important question to be asked is whether or not Lawrence's dichotomy of "blood consciousness" and "mental consciousness" on the issue of "knowing" is still valid. An even more fundamental issue is his dichotomy of "to know" and "to be," or to expand the question, his dichotomic world view itself. Having become so familiar with these dualities or parallelisms in his works, we tend to take them for granted. In this paper I reconsider the relationship between the two concepts and the validity of such world view.

Reiko Kamiishida

The Paradox in Lawrence's Speculative Writings: 20th Century Anti-Idealism of Bergson, William James and D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence refused to fix life through ideas. Throughout his various writings, he persisted in denying absolute ideas and pursued instead 'the living relationship' between humans and animals. In one of his essays, he says "The novel is a perfect medium for revealing to us the changing rainbow of our living relationships." Lawrence, however, did not utterly abandon "the Absolute."In his speculative writings, a perpetual and complicated conflict evolves between the absolute and the relative.Lawrence's language is destined to fall into paradox because it puts relativity in the place of the ideal absolute. After all, he cannot do without replacing the Absolute Idea with the transcendental Origin from which all mutable things flow.

This essay will study his highly speculative writings on the absolute and relativity, and on the origin of being.It will end by examining the paradox of his representation. The essays "The Crown" (1915), which belongs to his early period, and "The Novel"(1925), "Him with His Tail in His Mouth"(1925), which he produced in his maturity, will be compared in order to trace the change in his ways of thinking.In order to understand the cultural background behind Lawrence's anti-idealism, Einstein's theory of relativity and the philosophy of Henri Bergson and William James will be taken into consideration.