In January 1921, D.H. Lawrence and the ‘Q-B’ left Sicily for Sardinia. Six weeks later Lawrence penned his infamous travel book in which he puts forward a series of fanciful claims about the country he spent a total of nine days in. Lawrence is literature’s number one mard arse, raging against everyone and everything. He has made moaning an art form. The late Kevin Jackson described him as ‘the John Cleese of literary modernism’ in an essay I commissioned for Dawn of the Unread and Geoff Dyer applied what can only be described as ‘method writing’ when he imitated Lawrence’s restlessness in Out of Sheer Rage. Lawrence, however, is also incredibly perceptive, intelligent, and poetic, a writer quite like no other – though not for everyone.
Having read Sea and Sardinia numerous times, not least to mark the centenary of its publication, I created the above video which references Lawrence’s comical raging. There are eleven references to rage in the book, most of which are triggered by impudence – which gets fourteen references.
The video was created in Canva, a graphic design template programme which has a simple drag and drop interface. It uses a fremium model, and so you might want to subscribe to unlock some of the special features, but so far, I’ve managed to cobble stuff together via the basic subscription. The animations are really useful, and you can upload your own images if you can’t find what they have in their database.
In terms of identifying patterns in literary texts, this has become a lot easier with digitisation. The book is out of copyright and available online so you can copy and paste it into Word to find key words. To think that once upon a time, I used to go through a book with a highlighter pen…
This is our 35th YouTube video. Check out the others at our YouTube channel D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage. If you like the book, you might want to take a look at Return to Sea and Sardinia, a film which retraces Lawrence’s steps via the vivid images of photographer-director Daniele Marzeddu.
D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage 