It’s June 1922. Adolf Hitler begins serving a prison sentence for assault. Judy Garland is born. And Leopold Bloom wanders around Dublin for the day in a book that many readers will never finish. Meanwhile, Lawrence is in Australia.
He kicks off June with a letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne, informing her that he’s started a new novel and can’t visit until it’s finished. He estimates the end of August. He’s fed up with his current predicament and craves a change of scenery: ‘I do hope I shall get from your Indians something that this wearily external white world can’t give’[i].
He’s living in Thirroul, New South Wales, in the coal mining region of Illawarra. Consequently, ‘it is rather like the Midlands, the life very familiar and rough’[ii]. Frieda ‘is very happy with her house’[iii] and enjoying the rare pleasure of being settled. Albeit temporarily. As always, he politely reassures his dear Schwiegermutter that they’ll be back in Europe soon: ‘I tell you again, the world is round, and brings the rolling stone home again. And I must go till I find something that brings me peace.[iv]’ By peace he means somewhere he is able to knock out a couple of books, as he was able to do the previous year in Ebersteinburg where he wrote Aaron’s Rod and Fantasia of the Unconscious[v].
‘Wyewurk’ in Thirroul, NSW. Photo A.D. Forrester
Lawrence is enamored with the cost of meat in Thirroul, eagerly informing: ‘Two good sheep’s tongues, 60 pfennigs – and a great piece of beef, enough for twelve people, two marks’[vi] However, everything else is ‘exorbitantly expensive’[vii]. With only £31 to live off, he gives his literary agent Robert Mountsier a comprehensive breakdown of his living costs and requests a loan of at least £160 for when they set off to America as he can’t travel second class as ‘these boats are so small there is practically no deck accommodation’. All of which means he needs to get Kangaroo[viii] finished as soon as he can.
Lawrence is insistent that nobody is informed of his plans to visit America[ix] and revels in the splendid isolation of Australia. ‘We live mostly with the sea – not much with the land – and not at all with people…we don’t know a soul on this side of the continent…for the first time in my life I feel how lovely it is to know nobody in the whole country…One nice thing about these countries is that nobody asks questions. I suppose there have been too many questionable people here in the past.[x]
Lawrence is highly critical of democracy throughout his letters in Australia. And ‘the more I see of democracy the more I dislike it. It just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices, electric lights and water closets and nothing else’.[xi] He identifies a frenetic aspect to the culture where people ‘are always vaguely and meaninglessly on the go’ in ‘smart boots’, ‘silk stockings’ – don’t get Lawrence started on stockings – and ‘motor cars’[xii]. Although it’s easy to dismiss Lawrence as a killjoy, things are always more complex and nuanced. ‘That’s what life in a new country does to you: it makes you so material, so outward, that your real inner life and your inner self dies out, and you clatter round like so many mechanical animals’.[xiii] Lawrence doesn’t need anyone or anything as ‘the sea is extraordinary good company’[xiv].
Despite these reservations, he’s intrigued by the place. The landscape reminds him of a Puvis de Chavannes (1824 – 98) painting as it is ‘so apparently monotonous, yet when you look into it, such subtly different distances, in layers, and such exquisite forms – trees, flat hills, – strange, standing as it were at the back of the vision.’[xv] Much has been written about the duality of Lawrence’s personality and so it’s no surprise that he should feel so conflicted about his current abode. ‘Often I hate it like poison,’ he writes to Catherine Carswell, ‘then again it fascinates me, and the spell of its indifference gets me. I can’t quite explain it: as if one resolved back almost to the plant kingdom, before souls, spirits and minds were grown at all: only quite a live, energetic body with a weird face.’[xvi]
Living in such a vast open country which ‘tempts one to disappear’[xvii] both the Lawrence’s are aware that cabin fever awaits them in New Mexico. In a joint letter to Mabel Dodge Sterne, Frieda warns ‘don’t give us too little a place to live in, we are much too quarrelsome – it’s quite fatal’ whereas Lawrence, channeling Basil Fawlty, advises ‘we both like to keep sufficiently clear of one another’.[xviii]
Oh Mabel, what have you let yourself in for?
To see other video essays from 1923 see our playlist here. To read from the original source, see The Cambridge Edition of The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vol IV 1921 – 24 edited by Warren Roberts, James T. Boulton and Elizabeth Mansfield.
Image Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock. Design James Walker.
What role does D.H. Lawrence play in the life of a literary translator in Alison Moore’s novel about loss, memory and ghosts…
Following a family tragedy, Jessie Noon moved from the Fens to the Midlands and currently lives on the Scottish Borders with a cat, dog and – so she believes – a ghost. To compel matters, she hasn’t seen her son for years and is receiving mysterious messages stating, ‘I’m on my way home’. Perhaps her fortunes will change when she strikes up a relationship with Robert, a local outreach worker.
As a literary translator, Jessie is in a position of responsibility, consumed with finding the right words to ensure clear communication. She understands how structures and syntax create meaning. But her own life is harder to categorise and define – particularly when seemingly solid structures around her begin to disintegrate and crack. We learn that a child has gone missing, a boy is in a coma, and then there’s the unborn baby…
There are both implicit and explicit references to D.H. Lawrence in this short novel. Moore gives a nod to Lawrence when she used the line, ‘the wind muttered at the window and the trees shook off the last of their leaves’ which is taken from Lawrence’s poem ‘At the Window’. The most obvious reference, though, is having the main protagonist Jesse reading her third biography of Lawrence, despite knowing she will have to endure him die all over again. She informs us that Lawrence is always ‘poised between worlds’ – new and old, rural v industry and that characters from his books are always ‘torn between staying and leaving, torn between this world, this life, and another.’
Jesse Noon is also caught between places and stuck in a kind of emotional limbo given her personal circumstances. The novel is full of transient descriptions such as childhood memories of ‘crossing the invisible border between France and Germany’ and how writers are hidden behind agents and editors. We later discover that her husband Will, who walked out on her a year ago, left a goodbye message written in steam on the bathroom mirror, that would eventually disappear, like him. This is very different to a handwritten note which would give solidity to the facts and allow her to ponder the words. A recurring theme in Moore’s novel is being present yet absent.
Moore uses the biography of Lawrence as a narrative device to mirror events in Jesse Noon’s life. For example, when her husband leaves her, it’s at the point she’s reading about Lawrence eloping with Frieda. When she later has an affair with Robert she observes, ‘He had no curtains, just wooden blinds. He had no cushions. She supposed that the hard, bare surfaces were easier to keep clean’. She feels guilty because she has left her dog on its own and it needs feeding and so returns home. Later she reads her Lawrence biography: ‘She read a chapter, in which Lawrence mistreated a dog, and Jessie loved the book for its kindness, for how it tried to understand and forgive Lawrence for his flaws’.
There are implicit references to Lawrence as well. Moore is a writer of meticulous detail, much of which simmers below the surface, and so I don’t believe these are coincidental. She is too good a writer to leave anything to chance. Let’s start with Noon, the surname of the main protagonist. Is this a nod to Mr Noon, Lawrence’s unfinished novel published posthumously and if so, how does this add extra layers of meaning? Firstly, choosing to refer to an ‘unfinished’ novel fits with the uncanny and unresolved issues raised in Missing. Secondly, there are ethical questions around publishing ‘unfinished’ work. Finally, there is the issue of critics interpreting this work and imposing their own meaning on to it. Lawrence biographer Benda Maddox argues Mr Noon is a ‘factually accurate and barely fictionalized account of Lawrence and Frieda’s early sexual relations’. All of these ambiguities reinforce various themes raised in Moore’s novel, which is why I believe the title is a deliberate nod to Lawrence’s 1934 novel.
Jesse Noon is a translator, as was Lawrence. Lawrence had a superb command of language. He could speak German, French, Spanish and Italian and translated the works of Giovanni Verga. He even attempted Russian but found it too difficult and so had to collaborate with S.S. Koteliansky. Moore has made her main protagonist a translator not to echo Lawrence’s life but because of what the profession implies. Translation involves interpretation and communication (and miscommunication).
We learn that Jessie has three versions of The Outsider, each with a different translation of the opening line. Even something as solid and tangible as a book has a degree of uncertainty about it. Likewise, Ulysses was meddled with years after James Joyce’s death. There are multiple versions of books. Nothing is ever final. This allows Moore to make the sinister observation that ‘she would once have said death, death was final, but she was no longer sure about that’.
The opening to Missing sees Jesse attend a Halloween party dressed as someone who had died of TB – the disease that eventually took Lawrence’s life in 1930. It is such an odd choice of fancy dress, particularly given that TB is no longer the threat it once was, is this another intertextual reference?
Jessie grew up in the suburbs and longed to live in either the centre of London or on a farm, some kind of extreme, but she finds herself living in neither, still somewhere between. Lawrence lived a nomadic life and always seemed happiest when he was in a boat, neither here nor there, enjoying liminal space on his way to the next adventure.
Moore is clearly either a fan of Lawrence or knowledgeable about him as he is also mentioned in her 2016 novel He Wants. She is a nuanced author who ensures every sentence counts and so the implicit references, no matter how tangential, are worth considering. Readers are the ultimate interpreters – we bring our own history to the text and this, to some degree, informs how we perceive those squiggly patterns of ink on a page. The author provides structures and signposts to push us in a very particular direction so that we don’t get lost in ourselves.
David Herbert Lawrence dived deep into the psychology of the Australian landscape in Kangaroo. Flickr/Duncan~
In this guest blog, originally published in The Conversation, Christopher Pollnitz of University of Newcastleexplores how the Australian landscape has been described and used in Lawrence’s 1923 novel, Kangaroo. If nothing else, argues Pollnoitz, Lawrence makes “us look, and look again, at the environment. For that, he is worth a medal”.
The indifference — the fern-dark indifference of this remote golden Australia. Not to care — from the bottom of one’s soul, not to care. Overpowered in the twilight of fern-odour. Just to keep enough grip to run the machinery of the day: and beyond that, to let yourself drift, not to think or strain or make any effort to consciousness whatsoever.
D. H. Lawrence, from Kangaroo (1923)
As D. H. Lawrence circled the globe, he made a point of going to the barber’s – this despite his trademark beard – and of buying a pot of honey. The barber in Thirroul, he noted, was an unusually intelligent young man, au fait with political trends in the 1920s and able to put an English visitor in touch with social life in the NSW South Coast village. The honey he would taste to commune with the vegetative spirit of place.
Lawrence tried defining the “spirit of place” in his Studies in Classic American Literature. It was, he contended, a “great reality,” albeit one that operated via emanations or effluences. It produced a race or a nation as much as it was produced by a people seeking to establish themselves in terms of their homeland. Tied up with Lawrence’s thinking about spirit of the place was a melange of ideas about indigenousness, race theory, and occult universal wisdom. Such ideas all speak at once, and are questioned, discarded, and reformulated, in Lawrence’s Kangaroo, a novel he wrote in ten weeks – all but the last chapter – while living under the Illawarra Escarpment in Thirroul.
Morning light on the Illawarra Escarpment, which runs behind Thirroul. Flickr/Kaptain Kobold
He sailed into Circular Quay and disembarked on 27 May 1922, close to the spot where his medallion used to be on the Writers’ Walk. It is unclear when the medallion was deleted from the Walk, but its disappearance probably had more to do with the perceived sexual politics of Lawrence’s other fiction than with any concern about the writing of place in Kangaroo.
A Scottish writer and influential academic in Australia, J.I.M. Stewart, wrote in early praise of the novel’s descriptions of nature. Poet Judith Wright took it further; comparing Kangaroo with Patrick White’s Voss, Wright commended Lawrence’s insight into what she too thought was missing from the psychology of twentieth-century white-colonial Australians – any appreciation of how the continent itself, its flora and fauna, might provide the platform for a grounded sense of national identity.
Strange, then, that in the twenty-first century some have found it desirable to expunge from Australian literary history a writer who, as well as setting a novel on the east coast, has had an impact on the finest Australian-born poets and novelists. Strange and futile. Attempts to censor Lawrence out of consciousness are counter-productive, as the Lady Chatterley trial proved fifty years ago. A better plan of action is to engage with his ideas.
Kangaroo includes a succession of quirky bush vignettes, starting with one in the Perth Hills. Lawrence stayed there a fortnight, and met and talked with Mollie Skinner. He later co-wrote The Boy in the Bush with Skinner, or rather rewrote her first draft. In the first chapter of Kangaroo the Lawrentian character, Richard Lovatt Somers, recalls night-walking in the West Australian bush, and romanticises –that’s to say, lets himself be frightened by – the “huge electric moon” and the bush “hoarily waiting.” He senses the bush “might have reached a long black arm and gripped him.” Fortunately, as this colonial fear fantasy never eventuates, Somers’s feeling for the landscape grows progressively more nuanced.
Somers-Lawrence also observes tree trunks charred by bush fires and a burn-off as he returns from his night-walk, the red sparks glowing under the southern stars.
Once Somers reaches Thirroul, renamed Mullumbimby in Kangaroo, the novel develops a plot and complication. Will Somers let himself be recruited to the Diggers, a right-wing paramilitary organisation?
Thirroul glimpsed from the Illawarra Escarpment. Flickr/davidlkel
By now a reader, curious whether the “long black arm” of Chapter I was an over-extended Aboriginal limb, will be noticing that indigenous characters are conspicuous by their absence, while white characters are indifferent to any activism not directly reflecting northern-hemisphere political contests and wars.
In Chapter X, after a “ferocious battle” with his wife Harriett, Somers climbs the Escarpment and looks back down over a dark mass of “tree-ferns and bunchy cabbage-palms and mosses like bushes” to the narrow coastal strip. A relic of the coal age, the vegetation tempts Somers to enter into a “saurian torpor,” to succumb to “the old, old influence of the fern-world,” under which one “breathes the fern-seed and drifts back, becomes darkly half-vegetable, devoid of pre-occupations.” What would now be called the New Age rhetoric of this passage conflates geological periods with the millennia in which human societies began developing cosmogonic myths. The dodgy subtext might be that, to attune itself to the Escarpment’s spirit of place, colonial Australia needs to dumb down its Western consciousness – dumb it down until it can vibrate in indigenous accord with the spirit of place.
While the botanically trained Lawrence knew perfectly well that ferns reproduce from spores, he also knew, from J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, that he who takes the mythical fern-seed between his lips has the power to become invisible and see into what is hidden in the earth. Giving Lawrence the benefit of the doubt, another subtext is that European Australians need to develop new ways of apprehending an ancient environment.
As for tree-ferns being survivors of the dinosaur age, Lawrence might have also noticed that the Escarpment was, and remains, a lively skink habitat.
Lawrence’s knowledge of the initiation rituals which showed Aranda men their spiritual identities in the Central Australian desert came from another of Frazer’s anthropological works, Totemism and Exogamy. The climax of Kangaroo, a blood-letting in the streets of Sydney, is a hideous parody of such rituals. This clash between Diggers and unionists brings neither victors nor victims a jot closer to belonging to the continent.
Disillusioned by the riot, Somers and Harriet make a last springtime excursion, to the Loddon Falls. The Loddon rises above the Escarpment and flows inland, disappearing underground into a “gruesome dark cup in the bush.” That alien spirit of place to which European consciousness must learn to accommodate is still being registered. But the passage joins others, in Twilight in Italy and “Flowery Tuscany,” as an ecstatic hymn to floral abundance and variety. It’s great fun for local readers, who have to guess at misnamed flowers (the “bottle-brushes” are banksias) or unnamed flowers from their descriptions. My guess is that the “beautiful blue flowers, with gold grains, three petalled … and blue, blue with a touch of Australian darkness,” are Commelina – common name, scurvy grass, probably because it is useless for fodder.
“ Blue, blue, with a touch of Australian darkness.‘ Flickr/Kate’s Photo Diary
Admittedly, Lawrence described the stems of this blue-flowering creeper as “thin stalks like hairs almost,” making it sound more like the Austral bluebell or even Dianella. Possibly he was conflating more than one flower in memory, for the whole wildflower paean in the last chapter was written from recollection, after he arrived in New Mexico.
There is nothing utilitarian, then, about the descriptions of the Australian bush in Kangaroo. Or perhaps there is, marginally. At least one council has begun to use Commelina as an ornamental ground cover, so helping distinguish it in the public mind from bush-suffocating infestations of the South American Tradescantia. What can be claimed for Lawrence’s brilliant botanical shorthand – “blue flowers … gold grains, three petalled” – is that even now he has the power make us look, and look again, at the environment. For that, he is worth a medal.
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we his time in Australia? Do we have space for some prehistoric ferns? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact, get involved and submit ideas here
In this guest blog, originally published in The Conversation, Sue Rabbitt Roff of University of Dundee, explains how “a watershed in British obscenity law had been achieved without any discussion about the illegal sex acts central to the novel”. Skip to page 258 of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to see if you would have made the same gamble as barrister Jeremy Hutchinson…
Jeremy Hutchinson, who has died at 102, was one of England’s finest criminal barristers. He was counsel of choice for some of the most high-profile cases of his era. He defended the likes of Christine Keeler and Great Train robber Charles Wilson and also obscenity cases against novels like Fanny Hill and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Later known as Lord Hutchinson of Lullington, his role defending Penguin Books after it published the unexpurgated version of the DH Lawrence classic is particularly memorable. It remains the landmark case in British obscenity law.
But look at the details and something extraordinary emerges: Penguin’s decision to publish 200,000 copies on the advice of Hutchinson and joint lead counsel Gerald Gardiner was a massive gamble. It set up a case that were it not for the incompetence of the prosecution could easily have gone the other way.
Obscenity and England
Lady Chatterley’s Lover had only ever been legally published in abridged versions in the UK, starting in 1932. Though by 1960 the unexpurgated edition was sold in Europe and America and could be obtained under the counter in London if you knew where to go, Penguin co-founder Allen Lane wanted to publish a cheap paperback of the full thing.
The idea was to put it out at 3s 6d, the same price as ten cigarettes, to make it affordable for the “young and the hoi-polloi”. The excuse was the 30th anniversary of Lawrence’s death from tuberculosis at the age of 45.
When Penguin consulted Hutchinson and Gardiner, the lawyers retreated to reflect. A trial under the new Obscene Publications Act seemed inevitable. The act’s first paragraph stated that material will be deemed obscene if it contains elements that tend as a whole “to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely … to read, see or hear” it.
The act included a new defence in cases where the offending segments were “for the public good on the ground that [they are] in the interests of science, literature, art or learning”. In consultation with several literary experts, Hutchinson and Gardiner felt most of the racy scenes and bad language – including (30) “fucks” and (14) “cunts” – could fall under this defence. Lawrence, after all, was one of the most highly regarded writers of his era.
Hutchinson was concerned about page 258, however, where anal sex crops up – albeit obliquely. It has Oliver Mellors, the lover in the book’s title, trying to divorce his wife Bertha Coutts and being accused by her “of all unspeakable things”. Clifford Chatterley writes a letter to his own wife saying that Coutts has aired details about her marriage to Mellors which are “usually buried down in the deepest grave of matrimonial silence”.
But, he comments:
Humanity has always had a strange avidity for unusual sexual postures, and if a man likes to use his wife, as Benvenuto Cellini says, ‘in the Italian way’, well that is a matter of taste.
Lady Chatterley has pause for thought:
Connie remembered the last night she had spent with [Mellors], and shivered. He had known all that sensuality, even with a Bertha Coutts! It was really rather disgusting. It would be well to be rid of him, clear of him altogether.
Her friend Duncan Forbes then makes light of it:
If he’s made love to his wife all ends on, hasn’t he a right to? She ought to be proud of it.
While homosexual anal sex between consenting men was legalised 50 years ago in the UK, the heterosexual equivalent became legal only at the millennium in England and Wales and was highly illegal in 1960. (The 2001 film Bridget Jones’ Diary celebrated legalisation with a pretty explicit scene between Renée Zellweger and Hugh Grant.)
Illegal acts could still potentially use the public good defence, but Hutchinson feared it made the case much harder to win. Gardiner and the experts at the meeting dismissed his fears. In these more innocent times, they were betting that the prosecution wouldn’t grasp the point and omit it from their case. Hutchinson agreed to go ahead and advised Penguin accordingly.
The defence called 35 professors of literature, authors, journalists, editors, critics, publishers and child education experts, and four Anglican churchmen. Each declared the book had sufficient literary merit to deserve publication for the public good. (Those less convinced of Lawrence’s genius begged off – Enid Blyton declared she had never read the book and “my husband said no at once”.)
Lead prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones cross-examined only 14 of the 35. He lost most of those rounds, and sometimes his temper in the process. It was only in his closing speech he said to the jury:
Would you look at page 258. It is a passage which I have not – and I do not think anybody has – referred to during the course of cross-examination, or indeed at any time during this trial. It … describes what is called the ‘night of sensual passion’.
He read out the whole passage remarking: “Not very easy, sometimes, not very easy, you know, to know what in fact he is driving at in that passage.”
It’s not clear how many jurors understood the passage; some were said to be visibly shocked. Certainly Griffith-Jones had missed the significance entirely, having referenced it only to underline the book’s general depravity. Mr Justice Byrne summed up with no reference to anal sex either. The issues were, he said, promiscuity and adultery described in words that were “normally obscene”.
The jury returned in three hours and found Penguin not guilty. Neither the clergy nor any of the other experts had been examined on anal sex and it is not clear whether they realised they were implicitly defending it or not. A watershed in British obscenity law had been achieved without any discussion about the illegal sex acts central to the novel.
In the wake of this case, publishing in Britain became considerably more liberal. Had Hutchinson not agreed to advise Penguin to take that extraordinary gamble, things could have panned out very differently.
In this blog, originally published in The Conversation, Claudine van Hensbergen, of Northumbria University, Newcastle argues that “the purpose of literature is to make us feel, and to give us new ways of experiencing and thinking about the world around us.” When D.H. Lawrence spoke openly about sexual relations he was labelled obscene. Similarly, argues van Hensbergen, the Earl of Rochester has been unfairly perceived as pornographic due to his use of language…
The judge’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover used in the landmark 1960 obscenity trial of DH Lawrence’s famous novel is to be sold at auction in October. The paperback copy will be sold with a fabric bag, hand-stitched by the judge’s wife Lady Dorothy Byrne so that her husband could carry the book into court each day while keeping it hidden from reporters. The lot includes the notes on significant passages that Lady Byrne had helpfully marked up on the book for her husband, and a four-page list of references she had compiled on the headed stationery of the Central Criminal Court.
After six days of evidence and only three hours of deliberations, the jury found in the favour of Penguin Books, its verdict allowing the publisher to print copies of the novel for the first time. The trial was seen as a victory for liberal ideas over the old establishment. In literary terms, it signalled the opportunity for authors to write with a new type of language and freedom.
First edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1060. Twospoonfuls via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC
But was Lawrence really the first writer to use obscenity in literature? And were liberal readers of the 1960s the first to appreciate the literary potential of obscene words and sex scenes? In short, the answer is no. The literary world which Lawrence and his fellow modernist writers inherited was that of the Victorian establishment. An establishment that had silenced earlier writers who, like Lawrence, used obscenity for literary ends.
One of the most important writers to be wiped from the publishing record during the 19th century was the poet John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Even today, we continue to find the obscene language and images found in Rochester’s poetry shocking. Take, for example, his A Satyr on Charles II a critique of the monarch as a man governed by his penis:
‘Tis sure the sauciest prick that e’er did swive,
The proudest, peremptoriest prick alive.
Though safety, law, religion, life lay on ’t,
‘Twould break through all to make its way to cunt.
Restless he rolls about from whore to whore,
A merry monarch, scandalous and poor.
Following his death in 1680 publishers scrambled to produce editions of Rochester’s poems – correctly perceiving the public appetite for his verse. An initial run of pirate editions of Rochester’s poetry was quickly supplanted with an authoritative collection, produced in 1691 by the leading literary publisher of the day, Jacob Tonson. Tonson is credited with popularising John Milton’s (up to that point, fairly unsuccessful) poem Paradise Lost and also producing the first footnoted editions of William Shakespeare’s collected plays.
So why did a respectable publisher such as Tonson take the gamble of printing Rochester’s verse? The answer lies in the recognition of Rochester’s poetry as literature rather than obscenity. Just as with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, we need to read past the obscene language and images of the work to understand what Rochester is really saying.
The animal in human skin
Rochester is a poet of the human condition. He strips man down to his barest drives and desires to see the animal lurking underneath. In this way, he was much like the contemporary philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who famously pronounced that life was “nasty, brutish and short” and that underneath it all man was a beast like any other.
For Rochester, the sexual realm is just another place where we see (and feel) this stark reality. Rochester strips away all sense of love and romance from his depicted sexual encounters. And there are many of them. His images are those of the mechanics of sex, its failures, disappointments and disease. Take his notorious poem, The Imperfect Enjoyment, a work that opens with a scene indicating the sexual promise to come:
Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms,
I filled with love, and she all over charms …
Quickly, this promise is destroyed. The poem’s speaker prematurely ejaculates:
But whilst her busy hand would guide that part
Which should convey my soul up to her heart,
In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,
Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.
A touch from any part of her had done ’t:
Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.
The speaker’s lover encourages him to try again, but to no success:
Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.
The obscene language Rochester employs in The Imperfect Enjoyment – and the sexual act on which it focuses – led generations of readers to view the work as pornographic. But this is to misread the poem. The clue is in the title: the poem portrays the ultimate failure of desire. The emptiness of human experience. And its cold, clinical and obscene language (sperm, spend, pore, cunt) is contrasted throughout the poem with phrases that point to the scene’s absent romance (the sexual act “should convey my soul up to her heart”, but it doesn’t).
The beast within
Rochester is often seen as a dangerous or obscene writer in the way he glamorised the licentious world of the Restoration court. But when we read his poetry more closely, we find little glamour in the language expressed. His verse exposes human feeling and behaviour, showing the superficiality of our social world with all its polite manners and codes of behaviour. And the use of obscene language is key to that project. As Rochester succinctly phrased it in his correspondence, “Expressions must descend to the Nature of Things express’d”.
The Victorians couldn’t cope with Rochester’s poetry, and there were no editions of his work published in the 19th century. It wasn’t until 1963, in the wake of the Chatterley trial, that American scholar David M. Vieth began work on a modern uncensored edition. Vieth gave us back the real Rochester and made it possible for readers to access his poems once again.
Obscenity might not make for comfortable reading, but that’s often its point. The purpose of literature is to make us feel, and to give us new ways of experiencing and thinking about the world around us. For Lawrence this involved using a new language that cut across class and gender in celebrating the sexual act – for Rochester it involved looking into the mirror and confronting the beast within.
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we represent his struggles against obscenity laws and censorship and the right to freely express ideas? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact, get involved and submit ideas here
Lawrence’s 1923 novel Kangaroo refers to the nickname of Benjamin Cooley, leader of a fascist paramilitary organisation, the “Diggers Club”. It is an unsettling novel and has led Donna Mazzato argue that the “twitching ears of kangaroos are, perhaps, reminders of that uneasiness the settlers felt”. In this blog, kindly republished from The Conversation, Mazza explores the often negative representation of this animal in fiction.
Kangaroos are the most visible of Australia’s unique animals, but despite their charm and national icon status, Australian writers perpetually kill them off.
A kangaroo appears struggling in a rabbit trap, doomed and dying in Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things, while Tim Winton has one killed on the road, dissected and fed to dogs in Breath. These are just two of many Australian authors who have represented the kangaroo as a victim.
Kangaroos were a creature of wonder for early European explorers such as Dampier and Banks, but it didn’t take long for their public image to descend to that of a pest. Early settlers considered them competition, nibbling all the best pasture quicker than their sheep and cows, and they soon took up arms against the bounding menace.
The wild kangaroo population of Australia is still commercially slaughtered for dog food. In New South Wales, landholders and volunteers can be simply licensed to kill them for reasons of damage control, and some parts of Western Australia have an open permit system for non-commercial shooting. On any given day, there are usually several being mashed into the blue metal of highways, surrounded by crows and in various states of decomposition.
The expendable nature of the kangaroo may be a widely held view in Australia, but it’s a bitter irony that the creature which defines us to the rest of the world is perpetually under siege, in life and in literature.
Fiction’s dead roos
In Stephen Daisley’s 2016 novel Coming Rain, the author kills off a kangaroo with “a great thump” against the side of a truck, giving a gruesome description of the sweetening of the tail for stew.
The live joey almost has its head smashed against a tree but, owing to its “cuteness” it becomes a pet, wearing a straw hat. The stereotype of the cute joey is alive and well in children’s fiction too, but in adult fiction the kangaroo is dead.
In Tim Winton’s Breath, narrator Pikelet comes across surf guru, Sando, who has hit a kangaroo with his Kombi ute. Sando finishes it off with the jack handle from the car, pounded a couple of times into its head. His response to this act is very matter-of-fact: “This is what happens. And it isn’t lovely.”
Sando drags the “roadkill” into the tray of his ute and takes it home to butcher it. He is prepared for this, with a meat hook hanging from a tree, and he skins and guts the kangaroo. Pikelet observes this with some emotional discomfort, “shrinking from him a little” but accepts the flourbag of meat to take home to his parents who “wouldn’t eat roo meat in a million years”. He “hoiks” the meat into the bushes on the ride home.
Charlotte Wood considers the horror of roadkill in The Children, where Australian animals are killed by passing traffic and compared to contaminated “cushions”. Wood also kills a kangaroo (and a lot of rabbits) in The Natural Way of Things. Central character Yolanda snares a “large grey kangaroo” in a rabbit trap and finds it still alive:
Vainly, the kangaroo shifts and scuffles again. Then it lowers its head and lengthens its mighty neck, black eyes fixed on them, and lets out three long, hoarse snarls. Its snout fattens, nostrils flared.
Fearful of the sharp claws on its “delicate forefeet” they sit beside it, wondering how to set it free and instead bring it water and leave it to die slowly.
The image of the kangaroo is linked to death through earlier works from Australian authors too. The iconic 1940 poem, Native-Born by Eve Langley presents a detailed account of a dead kangaroo, while Randolph Stow’s 1958 novel To the Islands features kangaroos and wallabies being shot and eaten.
Australian fiction is, so often, deeply entangled with nature. Anxiety around the bush, as described in D.H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo back in the 1920s, is a feature of settler Australian fiction, tied together with violence, trauma and a sense of the uncanny.
Docile and violent all at once, the watchful gaze and twitching ears of kangaroos are, perhaps, reminders of that uneasiness the settlers felt.
The fact that Australian literature seems intent on killing off this national icon is deeply disturbing – but it is also deeply ingrained.
In contrast with kangaroos, thylacines are well and truly alive in Australian literature despite being extinct since 1936. They appear in over 250 works listed in the AustLit database of Australian literature, including 18 novels since 1988.
Among these are Julia Leigh’s The Hunter, Sonya Hartnett’s Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf and Louis Nowra’s Into That Forest, as well as children’s fiction, drama, film, short fiction and poetry. These thylacines often meet with violent ends, but their aliveness in fiction is astounding compared to the kangaroo.
Contemporary Australia is sentimental about the thylacine as a strange creature lost because of “ignorance”. They are now a thing of wonder, destroyed by misguided colonial settlers who are long gone. But if they weren’t extinct, would we treat them any better? Would we protect them? Often that is the point writers are trying to make by invoking the extinct “tiger” in the first place.
Our relationship with kangaroos (and thylacines), both in fiction and in reality, is symptomatic of what Stow called our “bitter heritage”. So perhaps it is unsurprising, given the violence of colonisation, that it has had (and is still having) an impact on the way writers represent the Australian landscape and all who inhabit it.
This article is based on research published in a forthcoming article for Antipodes.
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts. How do we go about representing his novel Kangaroo given the challenging subject matter? In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact submit ideas here.
Just another pair of traditional romantics. BBC Pictures/Hartswood Films
The following article was published on 7 September 2015 in The Conversation. Here Andrew Harrison of University of Nottinghamasks viewers to be cautious of Jed Mercurio’s adaptation of Lawrence’s iconic novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover as it “reinforces precisely the traditional values that Lawrence was trying to unpick”.
The latest adaptation of D H Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover has predictably prompted significant media interest. Strong and contradictory reactions appeared in the newspapers weeks before it aired (on September 6). The Sun called the BBC film “so steamy it borders on porn”, while the Telegraph noted that the sex scenes are “soft-focus” and expressed surprise at the omission of the novel’s infamous four-letter words.
Its writer and director, Jed Mercurio, must have anticipated such responses. In producing another adaptation of this iconic novel he knew that he stood either to outrage viewers by the inclusion of sex scenes and four-letter words, or to disappoint them by their omission. The Guardian cited his own reaction to the issues at stake:
It did not feel that today we would be breaking new ground if we were to use those [four-letter] words. If you want to use certain words you have to justify them, and it did not seem relevant … The idea was to tell this as a love story, a love triangle – to concentrate on the emotions of the characters.
On one level, Mercurio’s assertion of his right to focus on those aspects of the novel which seem to him most “relevant” is wholly justifiable. Lawrence wrote three versions of the novel between 1926 and 1928, and viewers are arguably more likely to be familiar with previous adaptations by Just Jaeckin (1981), Ken Russell (1993) and Pascale Ferran (2006) than the written source. Perhaps an adaptation should be judged on its originality.
But this adaptation not only departs from the original text, but also reinforces precisely the traditional values that Lawrence was trying to unpick.
Constance Chatterley (HOLLIDAY GRAINGER), Clifford Chatterley (JAMES NORTON) BBC Pictures/Hartswood Films
Soft edges
As ever, it comes down to sex. In the novel, Lawrence’s unflinching depiction of the life of the body – and the fragility and tenderness of sex – is presented as a counterblast to the damaging abstractions of industrialism and modernity. But Mercurio’s film resolutely sidesteps this in order to tell the straightforward story of Constance Chatterley’s choice between her crippled aristocratic husband (Sir Clifford) and his virile gamekeeper (Oliver Mellors). To make that choice a tad more interesting, Sir Clifford is depicted in a much more sympathetic light than in the novel and Oliver Mellors is made far less complex and compelling.
Lawrence’s novel examines in great detail the difficulties Connie faces in reaching out to Mellors, an educated man in his late 30s disgruntled by his past sexual experiences, who has moved among the officer classes during the War but deliberately chooses to speak the Derbyshire dialect and take up an isolated working-class life. Mercurio passes over Mellors’ estrangement from his wife in a flash and class is dealt with in very 21st century terms: as something rather irksome which can be overcome if only you set your mind to it.
In the novel, Mellors is initially reluctant to involve himself in an affair with Connie, and he uses his dialect to distance himself from her: he has been hurt in the past, and he is sensitive to being patronised or used by his employer’s wife. In this film, any doubts the very young gamekeeper has are quickly overcome and his righteous anger at the ruling classes does not unduly affect his relationship with Connie.
Oliver Mellors (RICHARD MADDEN) BBC Pictures/Hartswood Films
Into the sunset
But perhaps the most striking thing about the adaptation is the way it champions romantic love. Lawrence was constantly trying to redefine the terms of marriage and relationship. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover he shows two damaged individuals finding a connection in spite of themselves – through their physical tenderness for each other. Mellors dislikes mouth kisses and Connie comes to share his hatred of masturbation. They bond through their conflictual and shifting desire for each other and through their dogged opposition to the world as it is. There is no happy ending – only some blessed hope that they will be able to make a life together despite all the practical barriers they must overcome.
D H Lawrence.
In contrast, Mercurio’s film gives its audience exactly what it wants on a Sunday evening: romance, straight and simple. His Mellors is quite happy to kiss Connie on the mouth, and is not averse to giving her oral sex too. Flames dance around the screen when they first have intercourse. If Lawrence’s stated intention in writing the novel was to enable “men and women to … think sex, fully, completely, honestly, and cleanly”, Mercurio seems content to provide romantic escapism.
By taking all the rough edges off the sex scenes and omitting the four-letter words, Mercurio has effectively removed those features of the novel which have made it so challenging, memorable and influential since its publication in 1928. Lawrence’s novel was addressed squarely and combatively to the England of his day. Mercurio’s film unashamedly passes over the battles it fought, finding them no longer relevant.
This is fair enough, I suppose: the film is quite effective and inoffensive as a conventional romantic costume drama. But as Mellors and Connie drive off together at the end of this adaptation, with Sir Clifford’s blessing for their new-found love still ringing in their ears, it is hard to erase from one’s mind Lawrence’s constant warnings against the bland prescriptions of a neutered and castrated modern consciousness.
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we represent the relationship between Mellors and Lady Chatterley? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact, get involved and submit ideas here
It’s fair to say that British culture is defined by indecision. Presently, this is most evident with Brexit. On June 23, 2016 17.4 million voters (51.9 percent of the votes cast), backed leaving the EU while 16.1 million voters (48.1 percent of votes cast), favoured staying. The referendum proved one thing: the country was completely split. Nobody was entirely sure what they wanted. And so that split continues now, with talk of a second referendum and the countless permutations of possible exits. This has led the Tory party to implode as they squabble over who should be the next non-elected PM. We shouldn’t be surprised, though. This indecision was prevalent during the Civil War. In 1649 we executed Charles I for treason; had a very puritanical republic for eleven years under Oliver Cromwell; then restored Charles II to the throne in 1660.
As a nation, we oscillate with ease between seemingly binary opposites. We switch positions like musical chairs, and when the chairs have gone, we sit on the floor. I mention this because English PEN have launched a crowdfunding campaign to keep an annotated copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the UK. The copy was annotated by Lady Dorothy Byrne, wife of the Hon. Sir Laurence Byrne, the presiding judge of the 1960 obscenity trial against Penguin books.
The Arts minister, Michael Ellis, has determined that the book should stay in the UK and not be exported abroad. It is now deemed a national treasure, part of our literary heritage. The irony is not wasted on Lawrence scholars, given that the British government did everything it could to keep the novel out of print for so long. Lawrence was of regular interest to the censor. Other novels, poetry collections and a set of thirteen painting were all deemed unfit for public purpose, with copies of The Rainbow burned and the paintings locked up in a prison cell. It is little wonder that Lawrence dedicated so much energy towards getting out of England as quickly as he could and as far away as he could – travelling across Europe, Australia, and the Americas.
Philippe Sands QC, President of English PEN, said:
“D.H. Lawrence was an active member of English PEN and unique in the annals of English literary history. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was at the heart of the struggle for freedom of expression, in the courts and beyond. This rare copy of the book, used and marked up by the judge, must remain in the UK, accessible to the British public to help understand what is lost without freedom of expression. This unique text belongs here, a symbol of the continuing struggle to protect the rights of writers and readers at home and abroad.”
The copy was recently sold at auction to an overseas bidder for £56,250. English PEN have created a ‘Go Fund Me’ page to match the bid and keep it in Blightly. It is with this in mind that we have produced another short film for you that addresses parochialism and Lawrence’s views of the British. Written in 1924, Lawrence was infuriated that “an island no bigger than a back garden” should have such an inflated sense of grandeur. How true that sentiment remains today.
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we represent the Lady Chatterley Trial? How do we determine what is obscene and what should be censored? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here
David Brock with the Phoenix tapestry. Photo: James Walker
In this guest blog, David Brock explains how the phoenix became an iconic symbol of Lawrence’s intellectual and spiritual struggles, as well as being a familiar sign used by local businesses close to his birthplace of Eastwood. David also discusses how he came to become the owner of a phoenix tapestry created by Lawrence and Frieda during their troubled stay in Cornwall.
The phoenix was a frequently employed symbol in D. H. Lawrence’s day. Insurance companies, in particular, favoured it. There were Phoenix Cottages in Eastwood, and a Phoenix Coffee Tavern. The famous mythical bird featured in the catalogue produced by Haywoods, the surgical goods factory in Nottingham, where Lawrence worked as a clerk for a few months, in 1901, before leaving due to illness.
Owing to its association with Lawrence, the phoenix is still a familiar sight to Eastwood residents and visitors, clearly visible on canopies, set as metal studs into the pavement and as the name of the local snooker hall. And many companies large and small throughout the country employ it, even those as seemingly mundane as Phoenix Mould Tools Ltd. or Phoenix Damp Proofing!
Images of phoenix related symbols and businesses in Eastwood.
But, Lawrence was first seriously struck by this ancient symbol, and drawn to adopt it as his life-long and dearly-held symbol of regeneration, on being given a book containing Christian iconography. From being connected to the sun-god in Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilisations, the pagan phoenix becomes an image of resurrection used by Christianity, representing the triumph of life over death, as in the Easter story.
It became D.H. Lawrence’s own great religion of life that man must die away from the disastrous living-death of mass industialism in order to be reborn into a more complete existence, and the phoenix represented his hope for this regeneration of humanity splendidly. In Lawrence’s fiction, many of his characters break down and lose their former consciousness before achieving individual renewal. The central character and eponymous hero of Aaron’s Rod, for instance, must undergo the phoenix experience, having “to go to destruction to find his way through from the lowest depths”.
A century ago, in order to distance himself from horrendous critical attacks – his great novel, The Rainbow, had been prosecuted, banned and burned in the streets of London, outside the courthouse, by the Public Hangman, rather deterring publishers from taking on any other of his works – Lawrence moved to that most pagan part of the country, Cornwall. While living near Zennor, and helping on the farm at Higher Tregerthen, Lawrence embroidered a tapestry of a phoenix. It represented his deep desire to found a new community, leading to a new civilisation, from what he regarded as the ashes of the old. He gave this phoenix to his young farmer friend, William Henry Hocking, who was very much impressed by Lawrence and Frieda, never having previously come across such lively free spirits. I am now the proud owner of the tapestry phoenix, as you can see in the picture, which I purchased from an auction a long time ago.
David organises a D.H. Lawrence reading, study and performance group, The Lawrence Players, which meets fortnightly, between 5 and 7 pm in Chapel-en-le-Frith library (16th, 30th May and so on). Any enquiries, please contact David at vegan.lawrentian@gmail.com
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we represent the phoenix or Lawrence’s ideas on community and creating a new civilisation? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here
To celebrate Easter, David Brock takes a look at Lawrence’s controversial take on the Crucifixion in the essay ‘Resurrection’ and how Easter eggs led to the novel The Man Who Died.
In our so-called ‘Christian country’, we’re told fewer couples choose to marry in church. But let’s welcome this greater honesty. And while Easter is a commercial bonanza now. . .the stores stacked with machine-laid eggs – Easter is symbolic of Oestrus, and the Pagan origin of our great spring festival.
Unsurprisingly, D.H. Lawrence – who was brought up steeped in the Bible and Christian mythology, and has been depicted as a Christ-like figure himself, even described by some as ‘messianic’ – offers some challenging, alternative suggestions when it comes to the Church, the Easter Story and the Resurrection. What he says can help us all to rise up again, achieving fuller being, at this most regenerative time of year.
Inspired by the sight of eggs at Easter, and at first called The Escaped Cock, the subsequent title of Lawrence’s controversial fictional version of Christ coming back to life, and emerging from the tomb, The Man Who Died, tells us quite a lot. This is a mortal ‘Man’, rather than a Saviour, King of Kings or Son of God. This ‘Man’ has died the death of his old self, and his new, individual, flesh and blood self, has returned to life. He is taking the first hesitant steps away from a past he now repudiates, towards his difficult but vital human resurrection. He is becoming ‘The Man Who Lived’, rather than ‘The Christ Who Died’.
In a short essay, ‘Resurrection’, Lawrence berates fellow writer, Tolstoy, for wanting Christ to go on ‘being crucified everlastingly’, and urges all of that ilk to ‘Put away the Cross; it is obsolete.’ For the ‘stigmata’ are ‘healed up’. And ‘The Lord is risen,’
The Cross has become the ‘Tree of Life’ again, Lawrence insists. It has taken root and is issuing buds. However, the multitudes are mistakenly putting their Lord on the Cross again.
Whereas those who are prepared to rise along with the Risen Lord can do so as lords themselves. Facing inwards towards the ‘Whole God’ – which is, our central living integrity, the hub of our being – on the ‘Wheel of fire’, we can all be lit up with ‘bright and brighter and brightest and most-bright faces’, Lawrence believes.
In his poem, ‘The Risen Lord’ Lawrence’s Jesus opens his eyes ‘afresh’, seeing for the first time ‘people of flesh’. Having conquered the fear of death, he must now ‘conquer the fear of life’ – living as a ‘man among men’. He rejects the old denial of substance and physical desires – ‘never can denial deny them again.’
This vision in Lawrence of us all as Lords of Life is infectious. The last of his Pansies, ‘Prayer’, written as his health declined, expresses an extraordinary wish. . .one we might share – ‘Give me the moon at my feet / Put my feet upon the crescent, like a Lord!”
David organises a D.H. Lawrence reading, study and performance group, The Lawrence Players, which meets fortnightly, between 5 and 7 pm in Chapel-en-le-Frith library (18th April, 2nd, 16th, 30th May and so on). The ultimate aim of the group is to raise the profile of this radical exciting author by performing his work on stage. Any enquiries, please contact David at vegan.lawrentian@gmail.com
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we get across Lawrence’s indifferent relationship with religion or the self-deification of his later works? Will chocolate eggs melt inside our memory theatre or hatch and rise from the flames? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here
D.H. Lawrence lived in Cornwall from 30 December 1915 to 15 October 1917 in what he hoped would be a new beginning. It didn’t quite work out as planned. His short tenure on the edge of Britain would have a profound effect on his ideas, not least his developing fascination with cosmic vibrations and the mysterious secrets of primitive cultures emanating from the dark black granite coastline.
Prior to the move, Lawrence married a German woman called Frieda Weekley, a distant relation of Manfred von Richthofen, the ‘Red Baron’, on 13 July 1914, 15 days before the outbreak of WWI. The Rainbow, published in September 1915 lasted two months in print before being seized under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. Prosecutor Herbert Musket declared it ‘a mass of obscenity of thought, idea, and action’. Critic JC Squire suggested Lawrence’s characters were under ‘the spell of German psychologists’, for daring to question fundamentals of their life (religion, love, relationships), and by implication were anti-British in nature. Judge Sir John Dickinson therefore ruled that the book ‘had no right to exist in the wind of war’, and that Lawrence was in effect mocking the very principles British men were fighting to defend. With no sense of irony, copies of The Rainbow were publicly burned, while ‘our’ boys fought for freedom on the Western Front.
If this wasn’t enough to rile the easily riled Lawrence, his passport was seized, meaning he was unable to fulfil his dream of moving to Florida to begin a new life, a new way of being. Cornwall represented his stepping stone to this other world. Lawrence described Cornwall as “outside England…Far off from the world”. Nick Ceramella writes that “in those nightmarish Great War years, he thought that Cornwall, with its calm atmosphere, was a welcoming shelter far from the war, the madding London crowd and its intellectuals, and the national institutions.” But he was wrong. He would face more parochial forms of prejudice, and the ignominy of being expelled under the Defence of the Realm Act, all of which would provide material for the ‘Nightmare’ chapter of Kangeroo (1923).
While in Cornwall, Lawrence started to develop his own philosophy of man’s place in the world. He described this as blood consciousness, whereby we should yield to our more inherent and intuitive nature, the opposite of mental consciousness – the kind of logic that resulted in his books being banned. These ideas weren’t new. In 1913 he wrote “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as wiser than the intellect”. But now he had time to develop it further.
Jane Costin argues that Lawrence’s views on blood consciousness begin to change during his time in Cornwall. In particular, he senses a life force in the rocks, a latent energy that can connect blood consciousness with the primitive tribes that went before. He describes the landscape as belonging “still to the days before Christianity, the days of Druids, or of desolate Celtic magic and conjuring” (2L 493) and that the water “is so white and powerful and incomprehensible under the black rock, that is not of this life. I feel as if there were a strange, savage, unknown God in the foam – heaven knows what God it be” (2L 501).
Lawrence sounds very much like he is undergoing some form of epiphany, inspired by the landscape that is ‘like the first craggy breaking of dawn in the world, a sense of the primeval darkness just behind, before the Creation’. The phoenix is rising.
Lawrence was under an incredible amount of stress during this period, both financially and creatively, so it’s hardly surprising that the environment took on greater resonance. He was also isolated. His hopes of creating Rananim with John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield were short-lived, forging wounds that never quite healed. It was also difficult for friends to visit due to wartime costs. Two return train tickets from London to Cornwall costs £7 whereas his entire rent of a cottage in 1916 was £5. It is for this reason that Andrew Harrison argues that in analysing Lawrence’s time in Cornwall we must ‘understand how desperately important the idea of Cornwall was to Lawrence.’
Zennor coastal path: photograph James Walker
When Lawrence and Frieda moved to Zennor, they were effectively isolated between the sea and the Moors. A lack of roads meant their cottage was cut off. This allowed the locals to retain old traditions, languages, and a ‘primitive’ way of life that felt very different to the metropolis. Lawrence, believing he had found new kin, would observe that ‘race is ultimately as much a question of place as heredity’.
The Zennor coastline is home to large lumps of granite that Lawrence felt ‘had its own life force’ and sent out ‘vibrations that could be detected by people who were sensitive to their own blood-consciousness and not dominated by mind-consciousness.’
Design James Walker.
Lawrence’s essay on Edgar Allen Poe, published in 1918, draws on these feelings developed in Cornwall: ‘Surely all material things have a form of sentience, even the inorganic: surely they all exist in some subtle and complicated tension of vibration which makes them sensitive to external influence and causes them to have an influence on other external objects, irrespective of contact.’
The concept of a vibrating material world would be addressed more thoroughly in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), but it also gets a thorough working through in Kangaroo (1923), where we are informed ‘the body has its own rhythm, with the sun and with the moon. The great nerve ganglia and the subtle glands have their regular times and motions, in correspondence with the outer universe’.
The thing is, not everybody is able to tune into these vibrations, as Somers points out in Kangaroo: “I haven’t got only just the two eyes in my head that can tell the kettle from the teapot. I’ve got another set of eyes inside me somewhere that can tell real differences, when there are any. And that’s what these people don’t seem to have at all. They’ve only got the outside eyes.”
Lawrence’s characters, like Lawrence, can be condescending, arrogant and preachy, while warning others not to be condescending, arrogant and preachy. Kangaroo also opens itself up to some pretty harsh criticisms, and rightly so. But if we put the observations of people as ‘ants’ and ‘canaille’ to one side for a moment, the novel is also an attempt to outline a new religious idea. The great ideas of modernity weren’t working and had simply led to war and industrialisation. Radical alternatives were needed, and Lawrence was prepared to offer up suggestions. To do this, he draws heavily on his experiences of Cornwall and WWI in Kangaroo.
Richard Lovat Somers is a bearded ‘thought adventurer’ essayist and poet who has left England after being detained there during World War I. He was harassed for his independent ideas and his political opinions and faced prejudice and suspicion because he was married to a German wife. Sound like someone we know….
Somers is frustrated by his contemporaries who he diplomatically describes as ‘carrion-eating, filthy-mouthed canaille, like dead-man-devouring jackals’. Realising he can’t change the rest of humanity – and that they’re probably not worth saving anyway – he discovers the great secret: ‘to stand alone as his own judge of himself’ and to leave ‘the mongrel-mouthed world’ to ‘say and do what it liked’.
Somers is absolutely seething at how he has been treated by humanity and can feel his spine sending ‘out vibrations that should annihilate them–blot them out, the canaille, stamp them into the mud they belonged to’. But we also learn that having a proper strop is actually very cathartic: ‘the death-hot lava pours loose into the deepest reservoirs of the soul. One day to erupt: or else to go hard and rocky, dead’. i.e. We can either use our rage to transform ourselves or we can allow it to solidify and render us passive.
It’s at this point in the book that some readers will have had enough of Somers tantrums and thrown the novel onto the fire. Mistake. This is the exact moment the novel takes on another layer of sophistication and broadens out into a scathing attack of ideology. ‘Say what you like, every idea is perishable: even the idea of God or Love or Humanity or Liberty–even the greatest idea has its day and perishes. Each formulated religion is in the end only a great idea. Once the idea becomes explicit, it is dead’.
Yes, we must have ideas but ‘persisting in an old, defunct ideal’ is what eventually brought down Rome, Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire, and ‘now our turn’. Can we apply this logic to the current political climate? Is capitalism, monarchy, national identity, gender, or the EU (I voted remain BTW) defunct ideals that are no longer worth persisting in? Answers on a postcard please…
Somers warns us (sounding a bit like a trailer for the new series of Game of Thrones) ‘If you sow the dragon’s teeth, you mustn’t expect lilies of the valley to spring up in sweet meekness’, therefore he decides to cut himself off from humanity altogether, and focus his attention on ‘the old dark gods, who had waited so long in the outer dark’. Winter is definitely coming…
The God in church is an ideal God. A product of mental consciousness. A human, oh so human invention. As is the money God, and modernity with its fallacious claims of progress. We are all wrapped up in our ‘nice, complete, homely universe’, worrying about ‘running their trains and making their wars and saving the world for democracy’ and consequently do not hear the ‘throb-throb-throb’ of something else calling. This throbbing, this vibration, offers a different way of being, a different connection with the world, and a way of acknowledging a dark unknowable God.
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we get across these cosmic vibrations and connections with the old dark Gods? Is there a place for blood consciousness and if so, how do we convey this? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here
In this guest blog, Stephen Alexander, author of Torpedo the Ark, attempts to relate Lawrence’s work to recent trends in philosophy; speculative realism and object-oriented ontology.
Indeed! This would be queer, wouldn’t it? And yet this is precisely the phenomenon that I wish to discuss: what might be termed solar sexuality or sun-fucking. Like many forms of edgeplay, if such a practice promises bliss and fulfilment, so too does it risk death. Indeed, one of the arguments that I wish to put forward is that in learning how to love and be loved by the sun in a cosmic-carnal sense, one is left dehumanised and stripped naked before an uncaring universe wherein integral being ceases and life is soon extinguished. Thus what I’m offering here is a not simply a mixture of Lawrentian fantasy and pagan astro-porn, but a counter-vitalism that can be thought of either as a perverse form of speculative realism, or an aggressive material nihilism. What I’m not interested in is the sun understood mythologically, or as an object of religious veneration. For me, the sun is neither alive, nor is it a god.
For Lawrence, however, as for many other people who share his predilection for vitalism and divinity, the sun is more than a material object that can be adequately described and understood by physicists and astronomers. And if, primarily, Lawrence is concerned with the relationships between men and women, he nevertheless insists on the importance of the relation between humanity and the sun. Thus the first question that arises is how might we best define or determine this relationship? Is it, as the story ‘Sun’ suggests, potentially erotic in character? Might we really talk of ‘sex’ between a woman and the sun? Certainly we might, if we choose to subscribe to Lawrentian metaphysics. For Lawrence explicitly states that sex is solar in origin, describing it as a “majestic reserve in the sun”.[2] This is an interesting and novel definition and one that obliges us to think of sex in a far wider sense than usual; as something “so much more than phallic, and so much deeper than functional desire”.[3]
Because Lawrence thinks of sex as a type of solar activity within the living tissue of men and women, perhaps the term that best describes our relation to the sun is correlation. For there is clearly a notion of mutual interdependence between the sun and humankind in Lawrence’s work: we can’t think one without thinking the other. And yet, correlation – something which, as a philosophical concept, we’ll be returning to in the closing remarks – doesn’t sound a very Lawrentian term and I think Lawrence would be happier speaking about correspondence.
For correspondence, implies a far closer level of intimate proximity between terms: they become not merely interdependent, but analogous at a certain level. There is also a vital implication: abstract figures or ideas correlate; living things correspond and communicate. And so it’s not surprising to find this term, correspondence, being used frequently within Lawrence’s work when he wishes to discuss human relationships with non-human bodies and forces. To give but one example of many, in the first version of his essay ‘The Two Principles’, he writes:
“There certainly does exist a subtle and complex sympathy, correspondence, between the plasm of the human body … and the material elements outside. The primary human psyche is a complex plasm, which quivers, sense-conscious, in contact with the circumambient cosmos.”[4]
Correspondence, we can therefore agree, is a privileged term in the Lawrentian vocabulary. And doubtless its appeal lies in the fact that it is the more religious term: for correspondence is an essentially theological doctrine, associated with Emanuel Swedenborg, who believed in a correspondence between spiritual and natural forces extending to all objects in the physical world. If, for Swedenborg, ultimately everything corresponded to God, then, for Lawrence, all things seem to refer back to the sun, understood as a religious symbol, rather than a real object.
Not only does Lawrence wish to reject modern cosmology, he hopes to reverse it. In particular, he wants to reverse the idea that life evolves from matter. On the contrary, he argues, the material universe results from the breakdown of primary organic tissue. This is the central claim of his anti-scientific vitalism and Lawrence insists on this point in full knowledge that it is, as a matter of fact, not the case.[5]
Unfortunately, Lawrence is not alone in this opposition. Rather shamefully, many philosophers have also often been antagonistic and condescending towards science, accusing it, for example, of dogmatism or naïve realism. But, unlike Lawrence, I do not believe a so-called ‘life-mystery’ has ultimate control over the mechanistic and material universe, nor: “If it be the supreme will of the living that the sun should stand still in heaven, then the sun will stand still.”[6] This is simply an occult conceit: the frankly preposterous belief that there can be a magical suspension of the laws of physics at the behest of human will power.[7]
That said, I understand Lawrence’s objection to positivism and his response to the inhuman scale of the universe as given to us within astronomy. When you first encounter the facts and figures of the universe you can indeed become “dizzy with the sense of illimitable space”.[8] But I think we should accept the challenge of this and affirm our ‘imprisonment’ – Lawrence’s word – within an indifferent, uncaring, essentially godless universe. Nihilism is not something to fear, or seek to overcome, but, as a form of intellectual integrity, something to affirm.[9]
Lawrence, I know, wants imaginative wonder and release and would rather have religious myth than scientific description, as the former guarantees him this. Essentially, he’s a theo-humanist and a fantasist, who dismisses empirical evidence in favour of subjective ‘truth’ as he feels it. And so he prefers astrology to astronomy. And why not, when the former is so much more flattering to our sense of self-importance? For astrology gives us man translated in onto-cosmic terms. Lawrence writes:
“In astronomical space, one can only move, one cannot be. In the astrological heavens … the whole man is set free, once the imagination crosses the border. The whole man, bodily and spiritual, walks in the magnificent field of the stars … and the feet tread splendidly upon … the heavens, instead of untreadable space.”[10]
The first sentence is doubtless true: our being is mortal and terrestrial and we do cease to exist in human terms once we venture into the “horrible hollow void”[11] of outer space. But I don’t like Lawrence’s desire to place his feet upon the heavens – it seems an impertinence and embarrassingly allzumenschliches. Small and insignificant, Lawrence wants to project himself into “the great sky with its meaningful stars and its profoundly meaningful motions”.[12] He wants to declare his unity with the cosmos. But this is surely the same kind of transcendental egoism that Lawrence ridicules Whitman and others for. He boasts that he is not afraid to feel his own nothingness “in front of the vast void of astronomical space”,[13] but, actually, he does seem afraid when confronted with reality and ontological hollowness.
However, scared or not, Lawrence at least knows what it is he wants: a release of the imagination in order that it might make him “feel stronger and happier”.[14] Science doesn’t provide this, he asserts. At best, it satisfies the intellect, even as it gives us a sun and a moon that are “only thought-forms … things we know but never feel by experience”.[15] This, I have to say, is a bit rich. For so too are the sun and moon given us by astrology only thought-forms – and, arguably, nothingbut colourful thought-forms, whereas the sun spoken of within astronomy has some actual basis in material reality.
So if, in a sense, I agree with Lawrence that we have ‘lost the sun’ in the same manner and for the same reason we have lost all things as things in themselves,[16] still I might question what the best way to recover the sun is: poetry, astrology, eroticized sunbathing? Or perhaps a speculative and material form of philosophy that will liberate us from the personal entanglement of correlationism.
D.H. Lawrence’s Sun
Originally written in 1925, ‘Sun’ was significantly revised three years later and it is this ‘unexpurgated’ text to which I’ll be referring here. The central protagonist, Juliet, is an embryonic Lady Chatterley: rich, bored, and sexually frustrated. However, instead of taking a human lover, she establishes an erotic relationship with the sun, that strangest of strange attractors. Such a relationship is both pleasurable and dangerous: the sun kisses us into life, but it cares nothing for the personal, the egoic, or the human. In fact, as we shall see, it incinerates these things and, as one commentator rightly notes, whilst the sun helps Juliet overcome her depression, it also challenges her pale-faced American idealism and her status as a modern independent woman. For whilst the Italian sun is rather less fierce and demanding than the Aztec sun that thrives upon blood, nevertheless it is just as relentless and Juliet’s body “is made to acknowledge its subjection to the inexorable processes of fertility and procreation, in spite of her will’s resistance”.[17] Clearly, there’s a sexual politics being promoted in this biological fatalism, though whether it’s solar or simply sexist in origin is debatable.
The story opens with Juliet’s husband and mother being instructed by her doctors to take her away into the sun. Despite her initial scepticism, she allows herself to be carried away from the New World to the Old: from a land of steel, to a land of olive trees and lemon groves. It sounds lovely – and it is lovely. But initially, Juliet is unimpressed:
“She saw it all, and in a measure it was soothing. But it was all external. She didn’t really care about it. She was herself just the same, with all her anger and frustration inside her, and her incapacity to feel anything real.” [20]
We have already noted this loss of world and the feeling of being somehow out of touch with things in the phenomenal universe; certain only of our own subjective thoughts and feelings; our own rage, rather than the physical reality of objects. Again, the question is what can we do about it. For Lawrence, it invariably seems to involve taking your clothes off: “‘You know, Juliet, the doctor told you to lie in the sun, without your clothes. Why don’t you?’ said her mother.” [20] Juliet responds aggressively to this suggestion: “‘When I am fit to do so, I will. Do you want to kill me?’” [20], she demands.
It seems a slightly hysterical overreaction, but, actually, she’s quite right to fear for her mortal well-being. For the sun will destroy her, even when she feels strong enough to go naked before it. In becoming sun-woman, Juliet sets off on an “adventure into the material universe”[18] and hers is not a story of a being among beings, nor a tale of human self-discovery, but, rather, a flirtation with death. As we will see, her soul “is in a sense dehumanised”[19] in its encounter with the sun in its stark reality and her story offers us a “vision of life hovering tiny and isolated”[20] against a solar system where individuality is spent and meaningless.
Sun-Gazing
Juliet’s solar affair begins one morning “when the sun lifted himself molten and sparkling, naked over the sea’s rim” [20] and she finds herself transfixed whilst lying in her bed:
“It was as if she had never seen the sun rise before. She had never seen the naked sun stand up pure upon the sea-line, shaking the night off himself, like wetness. And he was full and naked. And she wanted to come to him.
So the desire sprang up secretly in her, to be naked to the sun. She cherished her desire like a secret. She wanted to come together with the sun.” [20]
There are a couple of points I’d like to comment on here. Firstly, note the typical engendering of the sun. In most cultures and languages the sun is invariably male. This lazy sexual dualism, that divides everything into polarised male and female forces, is not only untenable, but it fosters and perpetuates a deeply reactionary sexual politics. Happily, even within loyalist Lawrence circles such binary thinking is today met with suspicion and deserved hostility.
Secondly, I’d like to say something about the odd practice of sun-gazing. Throughout the story Juliet continually looks at the sun and there is an esoteric practice that advocates precisely this: staring at the rising or setting sun for unusually prolonged periods, in order to gain physical and spiritual well-being. The fact that looking directly at the sun, even for a short time, can cause solar retinopathy and lead to permanent damage or blindness, is not something that seems to cause proponents of sun-gazing any real concern. They don’t deny such risks, but they do play them down and many assert that, if done with due diligence, sun-gazing can actually improve eyesight.[21] Indeed, some sun-gazers claim that not only does the practice make you feel happier and healthier, but it can directly increase your energy levels and thus radically reduce the need for food: that one can, as it were, meet one’s nutritional requirements directly from sunlight, a bit like a plant. The fact that people don’t possess chlorophyll and so cannot photosynthesise is discreetly overlooked and, as with other forms of inedia, there is no credible scientific evidence to support this claim.
Sun-Fucking
Having decided to give herself to the sun in order to fulfil her desire, Juliet attempts to find a suitable spot where she may consummate her solar-sexual relationship. She realises that it will have to be away from the house – and away from people. But it is not easy finding a place in the modern world in which one may go hidden and alone in order to have “intercourse with the sun” [21].
However, find such a place she does and here, in a series of explicitly eroticised passages, Lawrence describes how Juliet strips naked and gives herself to the sun, exulting in the fact that ‘he’ was no human lover: “She could feel the sun penetrating into her bones: nay, further, even into emotions and thoughts.” [21] She is left feeling not only sun-kissed, but sun-dazed, and sun-fucked. If Lawrence’s language, with its incantatory rhythm and its porno-poetic quality encourages us to think more fully the nature of solar-coition, so too does it have something troubling about it: something voyeuristic and, indeed, sexually violent. For Juliet is stripped and subject not just to the gaze of the sun, but also to the gaze of the reader, who is invited and encouraged to stare at her nakedness just as the sun looks down upon her body laid bare and described in detail. As Juliet is penetrated by the sun, “she lay stunned with the strangeness of the thing that was happening to her” [21]. Can a woman, we might ask, ever give consent to sexual intercourse with the sun? It’s debatable. Indeed, we might also enquire, as in the case of Leda or the Virgin Mary, is this not ultimately a form of rape to which we bear witness?
Less disturbing, but perhaps more surprising, is Lawrence’s sometimes rather crude use of sexual punning and double entendre. When he tells us that Juliet wanted to have intercourse with the sun and come with the sun, I think he fully intends for the sexual connotation to be heard and understood. The verb, to come, for example, meaning to orgasm, would certainly have been familiar in the 1920s, although probably not used in polite society. I’m surely not the first reader to find this peculiar mix of mytho-religious language and sea-side postcard eroticism (taken to its climax in the Chatterley writings) less than successful.
Design James Walker.
Becoming Sun-Woman
Despite being ravished by the sun during this first encounter and left feeling dazed and violated by the sun’s power, Juliet’s only vital concern is now for the sun: “She was thinking inside herself, of the sun in his splendour, and his entering into her. Her life was now a secret ritual.” [23] And so, every day, she went at some point to her secret spot among the cactus, wearing only a light wrap and sandals, so that “in an instant … she was naked to the sun” [23]. Soon, she feels as if she knows the sun “in every thread of her body” [23] and she becomes increasingly confident and carefree: “Her heart of anxiety … had disappeared altogether … And her tense womb, though still closed, was slowly unfolding, slowly, slowly, like a lily bud under water, as the sun mysteriously touched it.”[23]
This is followed by a passage crucial to the anti-humanism of the story:
“With her knowledge of the sun, and her conviction that the sun was gradually penetrating her to know her, in the cosmic carnal sense of the word, came over her a feeling of detachment from people, and a certain contemptuous tolerance for human beings altogether. They were so un-elemental, so un-sunned. They were so like graveyard worms.” [23-4]
This seems a bit harsh – and Juliet isn’t only thinking of sophisticated urbanites, or middle-class persons such as herself and her husband, for even the local peasants “with their donkeys, sun-blackened as they were, were not sunned right through. There was a little soft core of fear … where the soul of man cowered in fear of death, and still more in fear of the natural blaze of life. … All men were like that. – Why admit men!” [24]
Why indeed? And yet, fairly soon after reaching this conclusion, this is exactly what Juliet decides to do: to disappointingly admit a man; a sun-darkened peasant with a donkey and a wife and a hard-on.[22] We’ll meet this peasant and his erect penis shortly. But what I want to stress here is how her new contempt for sun-fearing mankind results in Juliet being far less cautious about being seen naked by the local people and increasingly insouciant: all she cared about was being thought beautiful by the sun and not the judgement of society. This might be thought liberating, but we must remember, of course, that the sun doesn’t care about her in the least: this is just her fantasy and conceit.[23]
As her misanthropy and insouciance continue to develop side-by-side, so too does her skin begin to change colour: “all her body was rosy, rosy and turning to gold. She was like another person. She was another person.” [24] This makes her sun-proud and sun-happy: to lose that white, un-sunned body that the Greeks thought fishy and unhealthy and to become at last a transhuman sun-woman:
“It was not just taking sun-baths. It was much more than that. Something deep inside her unfolded and relaxed, and she was given to a cosmic influence. By some mysterious will inside her, deeper than her known consciousness and her known will, she was put into connection with the sun, and the stream of the sun flowed through her, round her womb. She herself, her conscious self, was secondary, a secondary person, almost an onlooker. The true Juliet lived in the dark flow of the sun within her deep body, like a river of dark rays circling, circling dark and violet round the sweet, shut bud of her womb.” [26]
It’s interesting how Lawrence is at pains to stress that what Juliet is doing is something entirely different to and so much more than the sunbathing indulged in by millions of other women around the world: interesting, but not entirely convincing. Clearly, for Lawrence, becoming sun-woman isn’t just a matter of removing your clothes and lying naked in the sun.[24] Indeed, for Lawrence, most modern women have no nakedness and if they strip it is merely to flaunt their bodies in a peculiarly non-physical, optical aspect. Today, says Lawrence, in or out of her knickers makes very little difference to her desirability: “She’s a finished off ego, an assertive conscious entity, cut off like a doll from any mystery. And her nudity is about as interesting as a doll’s.”[25]
Leaving aside this slight towards modern women – and indeed towards dolls – the key point is that, for Lawrence, if you want to have sex with the sun then you have to do more that seek out yourself in the sky: you have to discover solar otherness and accept the cost and the consequence of so doing. If you only seek out yourself in your relationships – be it with human or non-human lovers – then it is just a form of narcissism and you may as well just masturbate.
As Juliet becomes increasingly subject to the sun, or, perhaps, we should say sexually objectified by the sun, she spends more and more time naked, admiring her own red-gold breasts and thighs, and aware that, in spite of herself, her womb was beginning to open “wide with rosy ecstasy, like a lotus flower” [28]. It’s at this point she encounters the peasant and her desire switches from sun to man: a man who is in her eyes the sun made flesh. As he looks at her, transfixed by her nakedness, she experiences the same “blue fire running through her limbs to her womb … spreading in helpless ecstasy” [29] as she feels before the sun. This fire flows between them: “like the blue, streaming fire from the heart of the sun. And she saw the phallus rise under his clothing” [29].
Phallic Philosophy
Strangely, it always becomes necessary to speak about the phallus when thinking about the sun: for what is an erection other than the body of man declaring: IamtheSun. As Bataille writes, the verb to be and the integral erection tied to it, is ultimately nothing other than an articulation of amorous solar frenzy.[26] For the erection, like the sun, is something that rises and falls and scandalizes, being equally obscene, equally demanding; a quasi-miraculous phenomenon resulting from a complex interaction of factors, often triggered by some form of sexual stimulation, though this need not always be the case. Indeed, Lawrence explicitly challenges the idea that love calls potency into being. On the contrary, he suggests, it is power that gives rise to love: and it’s not love, but power – which is essentially solar power – that is the first and greatest of the ‘life mysteries’. Arguably, this is what Juliet is after: a taste of power that comes to us from outside; not something self-generated, or which can be bought with American dollars: “However smart we be,” writes Lawrence, “however rich and clever … it doesn’t help us at all. The real power comes in to us from beyond. Life enters us from behind, where we are sightless, and from below, where we do not understand.”[27] And so, to be sun-fucked is, also, to be sodomised and some of us might once more think of Bataille and his notion of the solar anus at this point.
Juliet wants to live, and to live she must have life and life is power. Or, perhaps more precisely, it is the feeling of power [Machtgefühl] – which comes, ironically, through the expenditure and exercise of power, not from its possession. When one is powerful, like the sun, one gives oneself away: the solar economy is supremely wasteful: it shines and shines to no end on one and all. Lawrence writes:
“We must live. And to live, life must be in us. It must come to us, the power of life, and we must not try to get a strangle-hold upon it. …
But the life will not come unless we live. That is the whole point. ‘To him that hath shall be given’. To [her] that hath life shall be given life: on condition, of course, that [she] lives.
And again, life does not mean length of days. Poor old Queen Victoria had length of days. But Emily Brontë had life. She died of it.”[28]
This is a profoundly provocative thought: Life kills! Energy eventually escapes its entrapment within form and is liberated back into the solar flux and that’s all life is; a temporary arrest of sunlight. And that’s all death is; a release of sunlight. And those who live with the greatest intensity and imitate the sun often die young, burning out like tiny stars. Those who go on and on into old age either lack vitality, or they are monsters of stamina like Picasso. As a rule, it is better to live fast and die young than live like one who has never known the power of the sun, or the love of another in whom the sun can be glimpsed.
So, Juliet wants life and to feel the power of life in herself. She achieves this primarily via a direct relationship with the sun, but she also toys with the possibility of fucking a man in whom the sun is embodied: in whom she sees the sun rise – or at least the penis stir into tumescence. First, we might say, she opens her womb to the sun; then she thinks about opening her legs to the man. For the phallus, according to Lawrence, is the bridge not just between man and woman, or the present and the future, but also between humanity and the cosmos: it is the phallus which connects us sensually to the stars and which is the symbol of our unison with all things as things.[29] And it’s this that Juliet wants – not the man per se.
Initially, however, Juliet retreats from this first encounter and attempts to collect herself – which is not so easy when your womb is “wide open like a lotus flower … in a radiant sort of eagerness” [29] and sexual desire for the sun, the man, and the sun-in-man, dominates your consciousness. Not, as I have said, that she is personally interested in the peasant. As a human being, he doesn’t exist for her and is far too much of “a crude beast” [30] to take seriously. However, “the strange challenge of his eyes had held her, blue and overwhelming like the blue sun’s heart. And she had seen the fierce stirring of the phallus under his thin trousers” [30]. Thus, for Juliet, he is the sun on earth and she feels him so powerfully, that she can’t ignore him: “And her womb was open to him.” [30]
However, despite their mutual attraction, “she had not the courage to go down to him” [30] and he lacked the courage to approach her. As in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, there are three things standing in the way of love: class, culture and convention. But, before we get too carried away, we might like to stop and ask, as one critic asks, just what precisely would be demonstrated “by a middle-class woman’s odd half-hour of anonymous sex with a peasant”?[30]
Would it really have shown ‘courage’ to have let herself be fucked by the latter? Wouldn’t it have just been exploitative: a form of sex tourism and sexual objectification? We might argue that just as Juliet is objectified by the sun into an impersonal sun-woman and open womb, then so too is the peasant objectified by her into a walking dildo and sperm bank. I’d like to say a little more on this idea of sexual objectification, as it is central to any discussion of the wider sexual politics of this story.
Screenshot of Lee Tonk’s website featuring the collection Objectification. Visit the website here to see more.
Objectification
Whilst within philosophy objectification refers to the process by which abstract concepts are treated as if they were concrete objects, it is more commonly understood to refer to the manner in which people – human subjects – are treated as things: things to be exploited, for example, in the labour market; things to be fucked in the bedroom; or things to be disposed of in the death camps: tools to be used, toys to be played with, corpses to be burnt.
Thus, usually, and with good reason, objectification is seen as a badthing and people don’t like to be treated as objects. That is to say, they don’t want to be stripped of their humanity by which they mean, amongst other things, their autonomy, their agency, their individuality, etc. These things are what most people pride themselves on and upon which they assemble a whole series of human rights. Thus to be seen or treated as an object or thing is, in a word, degrading.
Often, it is within the amorous realm that this question of objectification continually comes to the fore. Indeed, for many feminists objectification is always sexualobjectification and is a form of violence in itself, closely tied to fetishism, in which the body, parts of the body, or qualities such as shape, size, and colour are invested with greater erotic fascination than the person as a whole.
But if we are to rethink the object and rethink relations in terms of seduction, then this issue is no longer so straightforward. We might then ask for example: What’s wrong with being appreciated physically and impersonally? Why is it any better to be valued for one’s ideas, rather than one’s breasts? What’s wrong with judging by appearance? These are questions rarely raised, however, and objectification remains one of those issues that seems to unite critics across the political spectrum, although there are maverick commentators, like Camille Paglia, who contend that the ability to see other people as objects is a species speciality closely tied to our ability to conceptualise and think aesthetically (i.e. it’s a good thing and is that which, ironically, makes us distinctly human).
Paglia, however, belongs to a small minority of thinkers. Most who discuss objectification continue to regard it as a morally and politically problematic issue, often tied to discussions around pornography, but which has its philosophical roots in the work of Immanuel Kant, who believed that all forms of extramarital sex invariably resulted in objectification. Obviously, therefore, Kant would almost certainly not have approved of Juliet’s projected dalliance with an Italian peasant. For Kant, all human beings have an absolute ‘inner worth’ or dignity and it’s morally imperative that each person respects not only their own humanity, but the personhood of others. And this means never merely treating them as a means, but always as an end in themselves. Like Lawrence, he strongly objects to instrumental sex in which one of the partners is treated as a mere toy or tool for the other’s own pleasure and purposes.
Personally, I find it difficult to share this concern about diminished personhood and loss of integrity etc. I don’t see what’s so great about being a subject, or what’s so objectionable about being an object. In fact, I’m almost tempted to agree with Alan Soble who argues that human subjectivity is simply an anthropocentric conceit and that no one can therefore be ‘objectified’, as no one actually possesses any higher ontological status. Thus, for Soble, there can be no moral objection to Juliet’s proposed sexual exploitation of the Italian peasant. Indeed, it might be argued that very often people like feeling useful; to feel that they have no instrumental part to play in society is what makes many men and women feel unhappy. Clearly the peasant is sexually interested in Juliet and one doubts very much whether he – unlike Mellors – would have any objection to becoming ‘her ladyship’s fucker’. Probably he would be more than happy to serve as a willing stud-animal and solar substitute to the rich, beautiful foreigner. With that thought, let us now return to the tale and to its conclusion.
Fate
Juliet now has a problem: “The sun had opened her womb, and she was no longer free” [30]. And then, unexpectedly, her husband, Maurice, arrives on the scene. At first she has to struggle to remember him and the fact that she was married. But with her troublesome womb-flower in full bloom she thinks to herself ‘at least he’s a man’ – even if, in his dark-grey business suit, he looks “pathetically out of place” [32] on the Italian hillside: “like a blot of ink on the pale, sun-glowing slope” [32].
Understandably, Maurice is rather taken aback by the sight of his sun-ravished wife. She looked like an obscene goddess: “standing erect and nude … glistening with the sun and with warm life” [32]. And yet, somehow, “she did not seem so terribly naked” [32]. It was as if she were clothed in the fire of the sun, like the Scarlet Woman of Revelation. Nevertheless, she makes him nervous: for it was a new woman he saw before him, with her “sun-tanned, wind-stroked thighs” [33] – not the white-skinned woman he had waved off months earlier from New York harbour. Nervous or not, he felt a strange desire “stirring in him for the limbs and sun-wrapped flesh of the woman … It was a new desire in his life, and it hurt him” [33] as all new feelings do:
“He was dazed with admiration, but also, at a deadly loss. He was used to her as a person. And this was no longer a person, but a fleet, sun-strong body, soulless and alluring as a nymph …” [33]
To Juliet, however, her husband is now revealed as “utterly, utterly sunless!” [34] and he casts a cold, grey shadow over the flower of her womb. She tells him that she can never go back to New York and her old life: that she cannot abandon the sun. He, to be fair, agrees that it would be best for her to stay. But, really, how can she stay? Stay and do what? Sunbathe for the rest of her days until she is old and wrinkled? Stay and be pleasured by a sun-vital peasant who exists for her only as a kind of “inarticulate animal” [37] whom she might fuck? Admittedly, the latter idea still tempts her. For sex with the peasant: “would be like bathing in another kind of sunshine, … and afterwards one would forget … It would be just a bath of warm, powerful life … the procreative bath, like sun” [37].
And for Juliet, this would be most welcome. For she was “so tired of personal contacts, and having to talk with the man afterwards” [37]. With the peasant, she could take her satisfaction and have done. And, should she conceive a child with him, well, so what? Why shouldn’t she? It would, she tells herself, “be like bearing a child to the unconscious sun” [37]. This thought again arouses her desire: “And the flower of her womb radiated. It did not care about sentiment or possession. It wanted man-dew only …” [37]
But, despite the promptings of her sperm-thirsty womb, Juliet refuses this solar-biological destiny and chooses instead to submit to a more conventional fate: to remain married to Maurice and to bear his children: “She was bound to the vast, fixed wheel of circumstance, and there was no Perseus in the universe, to cut the bonds” [38], writes Lawrence.
And that is how the tale ends: with circumstance and society more powerful even than the sun, or the desire for impersonal sex. This suggests, surprisingly perhaps, that solar-erotic forces are pretty feeble after all. Or, alternatively, that Juliet was not the sun-woman that Lawrence dreamed of, but just another bored, rather selfish and narcissistic middle-class woman flirting with the possibility of a foreign affair, before settling back into a bourgeois life that promised to always pop an olive into her vodka martini.
Design James Walker.
Coda: On Correlationism (Towards a Speculative Realism)
I’d like to close this paper on a contemporary philosophical note and return to an idea that I briefly mentioned in the opening remarks, namely, the idea of correlation:
“By ‘correlation’ we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other. We will henceforth call correlationism any current of thought which maintains the unsurpassable character of the correlation so defined. Consequently, it becomes possible to say that every philosophy which disavows naive realism has become a variant on correlationism.”[31]
I think Lawrence often falls into this correlationist trap. Indeed, he often willingly jumps into it. For he’s not really interested in the stars, animals, trees, or other objects, but only in their relation to man, who, in turn, cannot be considered outside of his relation to the world. That’s the contradiction or paradox at the heart of his writing. For whilst he repeatedly insists that he wants to know the great outside – that inhuman space of the savage exterior etc. – like all critical thinkers after Kant, Lawrence too is fundamentally interested in consciousness and language and these concerns keep him tied to a form of correlationism.
Quentin Meillassoux writes that if so many recent thinkers have insisted so adamantly that their thought is entirely oriented towards the outside, “this could be because of their failure to come to terms with a bereavement … For it could be that contemporary [thinkers] have lost the … absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us … existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not …”[32]
Lawrence has lost the sun as a thing-in-itself and he knows it. And like a lot of recent theorists, whilst he might rage against ideas of representation, this in no way means he is prepared to abandon the more originary correlation between thought and being, or Dasein and world. Perhaps this is why he ‘instinctively’ hates the statements made by science such as ‘the universe is 13.5 billion years old’, or ‘the sun is 4.6 billion years old’, because these statements obviously posit a pre-human and non-human cosmos and Lawrence, for all his professed anti-humanism, simply doesn’t want (or know how) to think such ideas.[33]
But whilst we may not like what empirical science tells us about the universe and those events that are “anterior to the advent of life as well as consciousness”,[34] the fact is that these statements exist and present a very real and very serious challenge to those philosophies that are reliant upon some form of correlationism. For they tell us something about an independent reality that has been met with scepticism and contempt for over two hundred years. Further, they oblige us to ask how we are to grapple with scientific statements “bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life – posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world?”[35]
Put simply, the sun pre-dates us: it has ancestral reality, i.e. a reality that comes before “the emergence of the human species – or even anterior to every recognized form of life on earth”.[36] Lawrence, as I have said, seems not to want to admit this, or is careless of its significance. For if life is in fact “inscribed in a temporality”[37] within which it is just one rare event among others, then it is far from being the crucial and determining factor that vitalists believe; it is simply a stage, rather than an origin. Lawrence flatly denies this: but then, as I have said, he’s not interested in that which is factually correct, but only in that which is imaginatively true for him as a human being. He wants a meaningful universe and the universe is meaningful “only as a given-to-a-living (or thinking)-being”.[38] He wants to know the sun; but he wants to know the woman naked beneath the sun to whom the latter is made manifest still more. He hates idealism, but he is himself a subjective idealist par excellence. For ultimately, argues Meillassoux, “every variety of correlationism is exposed as an extreme idealism, one that is incapable of admitting … what science tells us about … occurrences of matter independent of humanity”.[39] [18].
Of course, it might be asked what harm does it do for our philosophers and poets to remain idealists at heart? The answer is that it does the very greatest possible harm; for it lends credibility and support to the forces of stupidity and fundamentalism: “And our correlationist then finds herself dangerously close to contemporary creationists: those quaint believers who assert today, in accordance with a ‘literal’ reading of the Bible, that the earth is no more than 6,000 years old”.[40]
Surely no one wants this? At any rate, I don’t want it. And that’s why I have become increasingly frustrated with much of Lawrence’s thinking and, indeed, uncomfortable with a good deal of modern European philosophy – including works by authors who are still often uncritically cited as intellectual authorities in academic circles.[41] What then do I want? Well, like Meillassoux, whilst obviously wishing to “remain as distant from naive realism as from correlationist subtlety”,[42] I ultimately want the very thing that Lawrence claims he wants: i.e., to achieve what modern philosophy has been telling us for the past two centuries is impossible to achieve: “to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not”.[43] I want, in other words, to think a world without thought and to think things as things.
Further, like Ray Brassier, I wish to push nihilism – understood not as something to be overcome, but as a vector of intellectual discovery – as far as possible. For rather than trying, like Lawrence, to safeguard the experience of human meaning and value from the incursions of scientific discovery, I think philosophy today should deploy its full intellectual resources to facilitate the disenchantment of the world. So, yes, I want to know the sun, but not a mythological sun, or a metaphorical sun, or the ideal sun of Plato. I want to know the real sun: the sun that will never know humanity, even as it burns the earth to a cinder and fucks us all. For we would do well to remember in closing Nietzsche’s fable:
“Once upon a time, in some remote corner of that universe which is dispersed into innumerable twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowledge. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history’, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever animals had to die.”[44]
– And when the human adventure into thought is all over, nothingwill havechanged.
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. Stephen is one of our featured writers and has submitted something. You’ll have to wait to find out what it is. In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact get involved and submit ideas here
Notes
[1] D. H. Lawrence, ‘Sun-Women’, in The Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, (Penguin Books, 1977), p. 525.
[2] D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Novel’, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 190.
[3] Ibid., p. 189. Despite this remark, Lawrence cannot resist offering us a phallocentric model of sex in ‘Sun’ as we will see.
[4] D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Two Principles’, First Version, 1918-19, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 260.
[5] Lawrence is not alone in developing a metaphysics that rests upon some organic, sentient, or vital term: Hegel gives us Geist; Schopenhauer, Will; Nietzsche, Will to Power; and Deleuze, Life. The thing that unites these thinkers is that they simply cannot accept or take seriously “the possibility that there is nothing living or willing in the inorganic realm”. In other words, there is an underlying agreement (rooted in Kant’s transcendental idealism) that “anything that is totally asubjective cannot be”. And this is so even in writers like Lawrence who are otherwise highly critical of traditional metaphysics and notions of the subject. See Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, (Continuum, 2009), p. 38.
[6] D. H. Lawrence, ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance’ (1920-1), Appendix IV: Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 395.
[7] Ultimately, we might suggest that Lawrence is not simply concerned with questions of correlation or correspondence between mankind and the cosmos, but in exercising the direct control of mind over the material universe, the independence of which he describes as illusory. Thus, whilst he is not interested in the scientist’s attempt to understand the laws that govern the latter, he remains fascinated by the magician’s attempt to exert ‘life-power’ over mechanistic forces and matter.
[8] D. H. Lawrence, ‘Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse, by Frederick Carter, in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 46.
[9] I find myself in agreement here with Ray Brassier, who argues that nihilism is an important “speculative opportunity” and an “unavoidable corollary of the realist conviction that there is a mind-independent reality”. See the Preface to his Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. xi.
[10] D. H. Lawrence, ‘Introduction to The Dragon of the Apocalypse, by Frederick Carter, in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, p. 46.
[16] Actually, I’m not sure that even here I agree with Lawrence. For he suggests that we have lost the sun by coming out of ‘responsive connection’ with it, but how could that be? For if we are connected, as he says, via an “eternal vital correspondence between our blood and the sun”, then we surely couldn’t break such a relationship, any more than, for example, we could choose to ignore the laws of gravity. Lawrence, however, insists that once we exchange our religious-mythical understanding of the sun for a scientific conception, then it no longer revitalises us, but, on the contrary, subtly disintegrates the very blood within our veins. See Apocalypse, p. 77. See also Fantasia of the Unconscious, where he pushes his correlationism to the extreme and insists that: “The sun sets and has his perfect polarity in the life-circuit established between him and all living individuals. Break that circuit, and the sun breaks. Without man, beasts, butterflies, trees, toads, the sun would gutter and go out like a spent lamp.” Psychoanalysis of the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 188.
[17] Neil Reeve, ‘Introduction’ to D. H. Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Penguin Books, 1996), p. xxxi. Note that page references to the story ‘Sun’ as it appears here (based on the Cambridge edition of 1995), will be given directly in the text.
[18] D. H. Lawrence, ‘Dana’ (intermediate version, 1919), Studies in Classic American Literature, p. 320.
[21] I’m thinking here of the so-called Bates Method, a form of alternative eye-care developed by William Bates (1860-1931), who counted the visually-impaired Aldous Huxley amongst his famous followers.
[22] This turning to the man is, I think, rather disappointing, but predictable to anyone who knows anything about Lawrence’s sexual politics. I’m fairly relaxed about Juliet losing her ‘independence’ and indeed her humanity in order to become a sun-woman. But I’m a little more troubled by the idea that even sun-women ultimately need to find men for validation and need, in particular, for men to gaze upon them with desire. Lawrence falls back into a conventionally phallocentric way of thinking the moment he tells us that whilst sun-women might not belong to their husbands, they remain subordinate nevertheless to sun-men: “walking each in his own sun-glory / with bright legs and un-cringing buttocks.” See ‘Sun-Men’, The Complete Poems, p. 525.
[23] To be fair to Juliet, many women within our society are encouraged to develop a high degree of narcissism, due to the fact that they are endlessly judged on their physical appearance, rather than on their ideas and achievements. This preoccupation with always looking young, slim, sexy and attractive, leads to a form of self-objectification: women adopt a male attitude towards their bodies and find erotic satisfaction in displaying their own flesh and being gazed at. Of course, men are also increasingly subject to powerful regimes that determine their masculinity and appearance: in fact, it might be argued that within consumer culture we are all objectified and narcissistic as a consequence.
[24] As Lawrence makes clear in Apocalypse, the only way modern men and women can get back the sun is via a form of religious worship: “We can’t get the sun in us by lying naked like pigs on a beach.” Indeed, according to Lawrence, the sun hates sunbathers who have failed to strip themselves of “the trash of personal feelings and ideas” and get down to their genuinely “naked sun-self” and it destroys them even as it bronzes their skin. See pp. 76-8.
[25] D. H. Lawrence, ‘…… Love Was Once a Little Boy’, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 346.
[26] See Georges Bataille, ‘The Solar Anus’, in Visions of Excess, ed. Alan Stoekl, (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 5-9.
[27] D. H. Lawrence, ‘Blessed are the Powerful’, in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, p. 325.
[29] See, for example, what Lawrence writes in Lady Chatterley’s Lover Version I, in The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 132-33.
[30] Neil Reeve, ‘Introduction’ to D. H. Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, p. xxxi.
[33] Just to be clear on this important point: it doesn’t matter whether Lawrence chooses to think such statements true or false, but the fact that he is completely unconcerned with the status of a discourse – namely, the modern scientific discourse – which “renders the verification or falsification of such statements meaningful”, does bring shame upon him. As Meillassoux argues, what’s at stake here is empirical science in general and the remarkable fact that only the latter allows us to have a rational and meaningful debate “about what did or did not exist prior to the emergence of humankind, as well as what might eventually succeed humanity”. It is science and only science – not myth, religion, or poetry – that posits dia-chronic statements and makes dia-chronic knowledge possible (i.e. knowledge of a world without witness). Whether Lawrence likes it or not, no man, god, or sentient being need be on the scene for the world of objects to exist and to carry on just as it has always carried on; solar activity, for example, occurs irrespective of life. See After Finitude, pp. 113, 114.
[35] Ibid., pp. 9-10. Again, note that there are of course not just ancestral statements concerning events that occur in a pre-human time, but also ulterior statements which refer to possible events in a post-human era. As indicated above, Meillassoux uses the term dia-chronicity to refer to all such statements that describe events that are either anterior or ulterior to our own relation to the world.
[41] These philosophers – and I prefer not to name names – are ones who have, if you like, hastily surrendered the right to refute religious belief on the ground of logic. Meillassoux writes: “It is important to understand what underlies this attitude: religious belief is considered to be beyond the reach of rational refutation by many contemporary philosophers not only because such belief is deemed by definition indifferent to this kind of critique, but because it seems to these philosophers to be conceptually illegitimate to undertake such a refutation.” In other words, subscribing to a strong model of correlationism results in lending support to the notion that “reason has no right to deploy its own resources to debate the truth or falsity of dogma”. It thus – often inadvertently – collaborates with irrationalism and allows for a return of a return of fundamental religious faith. This has been an ironic consequence of postmodernism. See After Finitude, p. 44.
[44] Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Non-moral Sense’, in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. Daniel Breazeale, (Humanities Press International, 1979), p. 79. Note that I have modified the translation.
He is Conjoint Senior Lecturer, 
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts to try to understand this complex writer. How do we his time in Australia? Do we have space for some prehistoric ferns? In 2019 we begin building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact, get involved and 
In the DH Lawrence Memory Theatre we want to address various aspects of Lawrence’s life through artefacts. How do we go about representing his novel Kangaroo given the challenging subject matter? In 2019 we will be building our Memory Theatre and retracing Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage both physically and digitally. If you have an idea for an artefact 
D.H. Lawrence: A Digital Pilgrimage 
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