D.H. Lawrence Conference 2007 - Archive

Paper Abstracts Sunday Session F

Patricia Pérez Borrero

Spain

D. H. Lawrence and Italy

"Italy has given me back I know not what of myself but a very, very great deal.
She has found for me so much that was lost: like a restored Osiris" (Sea and Sardinia, p.123)

Lawrence never had a permanent place of living. He spent all his life travelling, probably in search of some kind of Eden, a place where he could live according to his ideals:

"We travel, perhaps with a secret and absurd hope of setting foot on the Hesperides or the Garden of Eden (...) This hope is always defeated. There is no Garden of Eden never Hesperides were. Yet, in our very search for them, we touch the coasts of illusion and come into contact with other worlds" (Letters, p.713)

He went through Europe, Australia and America, exploring and observing the different societies he was in contact with. He remained an outsider almost all his life. One of the places he loved was Italy.
He spent a third part of his life living in Italy. This country gave him the clues to interpret human self and life around him. From the very first of his journeys, which was marked by a strong feeling of liberation (escaping from a restrictive atmosphere to live his love affair with Frieda in an unknown place), to the mature last ones, every journey to Italy meant a way of discovering important elements of human existence. His life and thought, and consequently his work, were highly influenced by the key concepts he observed in Italy.

His travel books are a subjective and extremely remarkable documents about it. The three ones are centered upon his experience in this country. They give an accurate and sincere account of his trips and the different moments of his life in which they took place. I will pay attention to these three books, (Twilight in Italy,1916; Sea and Sardinia, 1921 and Etruscan Places, 1932) and, in a very general way, to the influence of this country on his work.

Dorrit Einersen

University of Copenhagen, Denmark

The Reception of D. H. Lawrence in Denmark

Together with professor Arnt Lykke Jakobsen (Copenhagen Business School) I have written an article on "The Reception of D.H. Lawrence in Denmark" for the volume on "The Reception of D.H. Lawrence in Europe", Continuum 2007.

Lady Chatterley's Lover was the first Lawrence novel to be translated into Danish (1936) in a truncated and harmless version, and this novel is the only one to have been retranslated in 1950 in a faithful but unpoetical version, but still it is remarkable that the complete text was rendered into Danish as early as 1950 – 10 years before the Penguin trial of the novel.

In 1935 a fine translation of Sons and Lovers by the wellknown Danish writer Tom Kristensen appeared, and this was followed by Elias Bredsdorff's ponderous translation of Women in Love in 1936, as well as a dated translation by Ove Brusendorff of The Rainbow in 1943. Apart from these only Aaaron's Rod has been translated (1937).

Strangely enough Apocalypse has been translated twice into Danish, in 1969 and 1996, but the novels need to be translated or retranslated.

The reason why this has not happened may be either that those who are interested in Lawrence prefer to read his texts in English – because the general command of English is reasonably good in Denmark – or that Lawrence is not considered a difficult writer like Joyce or that he is considered a sexist misogynist after Kate Millett's Sexual Politics was translated into Danish in 1971.

It is perhaps symptomatic that the only recent publication (apart from Apocalypse from 1996) is Elaine Feinstein's trivial and popularized Lady Chatterley's Confession from 1996. A Lawrence revival in Denmark is definitely overdue, but outside the Danish universities – where interest in Lawrence is still kept alive – the general reading public seem to have moved away from him.

Izabel Brandão

Universidade Federal de Alagoas, Brazil

Lawrence's homeless hero: an ecocritical-feminist reading ofKangaroo

Kangaroo is one of Lawrence's most criticized novels. Despite its arguably reactionary political content, flawed characters and plot, it shows the writer with a fine hand for matching changes of environment changes with the main male character's conflict. This is possible because the Lawrentian hero, Richard Lovat Somers, is 'derelict'. I would therefore like to approach the novel in terms of Lawrence's homeless hero. The idea is to consider Somers's time in Australia as if it were a sort of limbo, or border (in Bhabha's term), after his being 'expelled' from England due to the war, which is mediated by his relation to the environment (the harbour, the sea, the bush) till the moment he boards a ship for the United States, with all that such a mediation entails. The notion of non-place (Augé 1991; Buel 2002) as demarcatory of identity can be associated to Somers's sense of homelessness (no-placeness) as opposed to Harriet's being in-place anywhere in the world. This might mean that the woman, yet again in (or perhaps in spite of) Lawrence is the one with whom stability lies. Thus the paper will provide a feminist reflection on the scope of this notion as associated to Somers's (by extension to Harriet too) sense of place and his choice for being an outsider, a loner, even whilst he tries to work on his man-to-man relationship, and his frustrated attempt to ban the woman from 'serious' issues in his life.

Terry Gifford

University of Chichester, UK

'A Playful Novel of Reprise: An Ecofeminist Reading of Kangaroo'

'"You won't give in to the women, and Australia is like a woman to you." […] "Why Mr Somers!" laughed Jaz; "seems to me you just go round the world looking for things you're not going to give in to." ' (348)

Despite what Neil Roberts calls 'its odd reputation as a blood-dimmed fascist polemic' (Roberts 2004: 61), Kangaroo is a novel with a sense of humour that is also returning to some of the most complex issues in Lawrence's previous work in the relaxed distancing context of an Australian novel. Such issues include: the means of social change; alternative idealisms; what social role, if any, the concerned individual should have; the practice of 'star-polarity'; and the ultimate nature of Lawrence's individual quest. To regard this as a playful novel of reprise is to be able to engage fully with its shifting dialogic strategy that Roberts calls a 'narrative of contingency' (2004: 60-73), or what David Ellis describes as 'the illusion that what his protagonists experience is being recorded as it occurs' (Ellis 1998: 42).

A dialogic strategy allows for multiple fictional modes and a variety of 'non-fictional' tones to work in relation to the themes in this novel in a more purposefully playful manner than the conventionally understood notion of a 'travel narrative' working against a 'political plot' in Kangaroo. The role of land in particular acts as both distancing and testing of notions explicitly debated in the 'political plot' so as to render the latter inadequate without a full engagement with the former. That is, relations between human beings (man-woman, man-man, social-individual) require, in Australia especially, to be understood in terms of their relationship with land. Inevitably, this must become a gendered understanding and this paper seeks to explore the dialogue between land, gender and the social issues in Kangaroo.

In Annette Kolodny's classic work The Lay of the Land (1975) she recognises that the metaphor of 'the land-as-woman' in American literature, more than simply being a transposition of Old World pastoral discourse into New World writing, was actually an archetype from a 'universal grammar' (Kolodny 1975: 150) of writing about land. In Kangaroo the New World land is a female of a distinctly anti-pastoral cast, as is established while Harriet and Richard Lovatt Somers are settling into their new home. It is the Australian Jack's observation that his countrymen 'treat the country more like a woman they pick up on the streets than a bride, to my thinking' (77). Harriet says that she doubts whether, in that case, she could love an Australian. In reply Jack makes the point that becomes a challenge that Lawrence sets for his narrator to explore in Kangaroo: 'But it's no good loving Australia if you can't love the Australian' (78).

While the 'fern-world' of the bush is an ancient pre-human one, it has its effect upon the psyche of those who live on its fringes and who, indeed, seek to develop a society that is distinctively of their land - an Australian form of society that is the subject of the political debate in the novel. That this debate is conducted by males, in the case of the Diggers to the deliberate exclusion of women, and that the land is associated with the female early in the novel, indicates that discourses of land, gender and society are closely intertwined in Kangaroo. This paper will argue that the dialogic play between them creates an exhilarating, if ultimately flawed novel that is unique in Lawrence's ouvre for its tonal shifts between irony and seriousness in dealing with thematic shifts between the pre-cultural presence of land and the intense cultural debates about ideals and social strategies for change; between the male desire for mates and the need for the female; between the undercutting female knowingness and the male drive for idealistic contribution; between finding a social role and being independently alone; and ultimately between where the (upper) democratic impulse leads and where the (lower) dark gods lead in their parallel vagueness of formulation and questing drives.

Pamela Wright

Texas A&M University-Kingsville, USA

Shouldering the Weight of A Country: The Artist at War in D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo and Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of The Floating World

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman [or artist] who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events. -Sir Winston Churchill

What if an artist gets involved with unsavoury characters and dangerous convictions? What if he allows his art to become tainted by these same acquaintances and ideas? What if, in retrospect, he regrets allowing such a sullying of his work? Does he then have a responsibility to the public or, perhaps most importantly, to himself, to repent? Will his atonement break his slavery? These are important questions that Richard Lovatt Somers, the writer in Kangaroo, and Masuji Ono, the art professor and painter in An Artist of The Floating World, strive to answer.

Both artists somehow find themselves buying into a dangerous rhetoric that influences their art, only to later suffer for their association with such ideas. Interestingly, though Lawrence's novel deals with the times surrounding and succeeding World War I while Ishiguro's work deals with the years immediately following World War II, both novels seem to carry the same sense of shame and guilt. Somers allows his writing to become a mouthpiece for a radical movement in post World War I Australia only to question his involvement when he sees its effects. Similarly, Ono, Ishiguro's protagonist, begins to believe in the imperialist movement of World War II Japan; when he leaves the purely aesthetically pleasing work he once painted, his work becomes more propagandist in nature. The major action of the novel, however, takes place from 1948 to 1950, when the older Ono questions and expresses some regret for his participation in the imperialist objective. Like Lawrence's Somers, he feels lost, a bit hurt, confused and used by such fascist concepts.

This paper then proposes to examine these issues in both novels. Ishiguro's work seems to echo Lawrence's, and reading the novels together in this light only serves to raise larger questions about implication, guilt and propagandist art in all wars from World War I to the most recent global conflicts.

Oliver Taylor

Durham University, UK

"'S got no ballocks!": Body Language, Ventriloquism, and "Home" in the Letters

In three letters written in the early months of 1913 Lawrence self-consciously uses phrases attributed to his father. This paper will look at how body language and ventriloquism of Nottinghamshire dialect is made use of in the Letters as Lawrence gives accounts of making and remaking his home on the continent. Drawing on Steven Connor's cultural history of ventriloquism, the first part of the paper takes up further instances of it throughout the letters in relation to home and shows how, through ventriloquism, Lawrence acknowledges dialect as a way of situating the body in relation to space and a signifier of where it has come from, in order to write about and cope with often uncertain destinations. The second part looks at how the body language of the letters is often necessary for Lawrence to conceive of abstract distances, spaces, locations, and homes. It weighs up the benefits Lawrence may have seen in grounding an understanding of space in the body and situates his poetics of home in letters amongst ideas such as Heidegger's "dwelling" and Bourdieu's "habitus".

Dawid de Villiers

Stellenbosch University, South Africa

The Metaphysics of Return: Lawrence's Struggle with the Problematic of Home vs Frontier

In this paper I aim to trace the impact of Lawrence's return to England—in 1923 and again in 1926—on what I have elsewhere characterised as his "frontier metaphysic" (as shaped by his revitalising, if typically fraught, experiences in the United States and Mexico). In particular I will consider how we are to read Lawrence's notable use of the terms, "home" and "heart," in relation to this metaphysic and the assumptions regarding the destiny of European civilisation that underpin it. While the discursive writings from the period—from "On Coming Home" to the much later "Return to Bestwood"—reiterate his critique of England, there are also signs (notably, Lady Chatterley's Lover) of a renewed interest in the world he grew up in. In short, while I intend to establish the significance of the trope of the "frontier" in Lawrence's metaphysic at the time, I will specifically consider the ways in which the actuality of the English landscape and people on some level poses a challenge to the terms of this metaphysic as it developed abroad, and serves to qualify or problematise the idea of an ineluctable destiny of Western decline.

Nicola Tarrant-Hoskins

University of Kentucky, USA

Departing Eastwood – far from a miner's son

"I wish from the bottom of my heart, the fates had not stigmatized me 'writer.' It is a sickening business…One sheds one's sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one's emotions to be master of them." And yet in the final pages of his final novel, D. H. Lawrence ends with Mellors writing a love letter to Connie Chatterley – "Well, so many words, because I can't touch you…" The final version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel fully embodying Lawrence's philosophy of connection and the physicality of love, ends not in touch but in the written word. Mellors turns to the pen. In A Propos of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," Lawrence writes "…we know that the oneness of the blood-stream of man and woman in marriage completes the universe, as far as humanity is concerned, completes the streaming of the sun and the flowing of the stars." This oneness is not guaranteed between Mellors and Lady Chatterley, but Mellor's letter offers hope in the possibility. Mellors clearly represents Lawrence himself in these final pages. In tracking the three versions of Lady Chatterley, one sees how Lawrence's intentions change, how his final novel moves far away from the original Parkin and a critique of class issues, to a tender, albeit quite naive love story, a love story that symbolizes Lawrence's hopes for humanity. Mellors, the epistolary lover, sums up Lawrencian philosophy in a nutshell. Looking at Lawrence's last pilgrimage to Eastwood, the topological inspiration for his final novel, and charting the radically thematic differences and clearly the author's priorities in the very last years of his life, this paper examines the transformation of the three versions of Lady Chatterley. One can view these texts as Lawrence's final departure from Eastwood. In the end he was less concerned with class struggles and his own humble genesis as a miner's son; in the end Lawrence was a writer, a writer of love letters.