D.H. Lawrence's Border Crossing: Colonialism in His Travel Writings and 'Leadership' Novels (Studies in Major Literary Authors)

Studies in Major Literary Authors

Edited by

William E. Cain Professor of English Wellesley College

A Routledge Series

Studies in Major Literary Authors William E. Cain, General Editor A Singing Contest Conventions of Sound in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney Meg Tyler

Queer Times Christopher Isherwood’s Modernity Jamie M. Carr

Edith Wharton as Spatial Activist and Analyst Reneé Somers

Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception” Darwinian Allegory in Her Major Novels Paul J. Ohler

Queer Impressions Henry James’s Art of Fiction Elaine Pigeon

The End of Learning Milton and Education Thomas Festa

“No Image There and the Gaze Remains” The Visual in the Work of Jorie Graham Catherine Sona Karagueuzian

Reading and Mapping Hardy’s Roads Scott Rode

“Somewhat on the Community-System” Fourierism in the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne Andrew Loman Colonialism and the Modernist Moment in the Early Novels of Jean Rhys Carol Dell’Amico

Creating Yoknapatawpha Readers and Writers in Faulkner’s Fiction Owen Robinson No Place for Home Spatial Constraint and Character Flight in the Novels of Cormac McCarthy Jay Ellis

Melville’s Monumental Imagination Ian S. Maloney

The Machine that Sings Modernism, Hart Crane, and the Culture of the Body Gordon A. Tapper

Writing “Out of All the Camps” J. M. Coetzee’s Narratives of Displacement Laura Wright

Influential Ghosts A Study of Auden’s Sources Rachel Wetzsteon

Here and Now The Politics of Social Space in D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf Youngjoo Son

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing Colonialism in His Travel Writings and “Leadership” Novels Eunyoung Oh

“Unnoticed in the Casual Light of Day” Philip Larkin and the Plain Style Tijana Stojković

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing Colonialism in His Travel Writings and “Leadership” Novels

Eunyoung Oh

Routledge New York & London

Excerpts from Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, The Lost Girl, The Boy in the Bush, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, Mornings in Mexico, Etruscan Places, The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vols. 1-7 by D.H. Lawrence reproduced by permission of Pollinger Limited and the proprietor. From Sea and Sardinia by D.H. Lawrence, copyright 1921 by Thomas Seltzer, Inc.; renewed copyright 1949 by Frieda Lawrence. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. From Etruscan Places by D.H. Lawrence, copyright 1927 by Robert M. McBride & Co., Inc., copyright 1932 by Thomas Seltzer, Inc., renewed. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. From Twilight in Italy by D.H. Lawrence, copyright 1916 by B.W. Huebsch. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. From Aaron’s Rod by D.H. Lawrence, copyright 1922 by Thomas Seltzer, Inc., renewed 1950 by Frieda Lawrence. Used by permis‑ sion of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. From Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence, copyright 1923 by Thomas Seltzer Inc., renewed © 1951 by Frieda Lawrence. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. “Snake” by D.H. Lawrence, “Bibbles” by D.H. Lawrence, “Kangaroo” by D.H. Lawrence, from The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence by D.H. Lawrence, edited by V. de Sola Pinto & F.W. Roberts, copyright © 1964, 1971 by Angelo Ravagli and C.M. Weekley, Executors of the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. From The Lost Girl by D.H. Lawrence, copyright 1921 by Thomas Seltzer, Inc. Renewed copyright © 1949 by Frieda Lawrence. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. From The Boy in the Bush by D.H. Lawrence and M.L. Skinner, copyright 1924 by Thomas Seltzer, Inc. Copyright renewed 1952 by Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. From Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Edward McDonald, copyright 1936 by Frieda Lawrence, renewed © 1964 by The Estate of the late Frieda Lawrence Ravagli. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Extracts from The Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Vols. I, II, III and IV reproduced by permission of Laurence Pollinger Ltd., the Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravalgli and Cambridge University Press, © The Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, 1979, 1981, 1984, 1987, 1989, 1991, and 1993.

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑97644‑8 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97644‑2 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Oh, Eunyoung. D.H. Lawrence’s border crossing : colonialism in his travel writings and leadership novels / Eunyoung Oh. p. cm. ‑‑ (Studies in major literary authors) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN‑13: 978‑0‑415‑97644‑2 (acid‑free paper) 1. Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), 1885‑1930‑‑Criticism and interpretation. 2. Travelers’ writings, English‑‑History and criticism. 3. Imperialism in literature. 4. Colonies in literature. I. Title. PR6023.A93Z759 2006 823’.912‑‑dc22

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge‑ny.com

2006024744

In memory of my beloved father, Soohong Oh

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Lawrence’s “Spirit of Place” as a Postcolonial Concept

1

Chapter One Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

21

Chapter Two The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod: Exploring Italy as a New Place

61

Chapter Three Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness” in Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush

89

Chapter Four Lawrentian Doubleness: Rewriting Mexican Colonial History in The Plumed Serpent

123

Conclusion

159

Notes

163

Bibliography

187

Index

197

vii

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the faculty of the University of Tulsa, who have greatly helped me to shape my sense of English literature during my master’s and doctoral study. I have experienced how a literary text comes to life from Professor Robert Spoo’s reading of James Joyce. Professor Joseph Kestner provided me stimulating classes about canon theory, and classical and Victorian literature, which I had little chance to take in Korea. I am especially grateful to my advisor and mentor Holly Laird whose immense knowledge and passion for teaching and writing have always inspired me. Without Dr. Laird’s tremendous patience and effort, I cannot even imagine what I would have done here for a decade, including this dissertation. From Dr. Laird, I have learned how, and what, I can do in the future as a teacher and scholar. I would like to thank Professor William Kupinse for his invaluable suggestions and corrections on every stage of my dissertation. Dr. Kupinse’s editorial suggestions helped to make my dissertation much more refined and succinct in style. I also appreciate Professor Lars Engle’s reading of my final drafts, despite his very busy schedule. Along with my immense debt to these teachers, I would never forget Sandy’s “always, so kind” smile, which has never failed to recharge my heart. I dedicate this study to my parents who reluctantly allowed their daughter to go to America and have waited much longer than they expected. At the cost of my parents’ patience, money, and love, I was able to complete my study. I also thank my husband and my daughter, Serin, who had to live without her beloved father for seven months due to her Mommy’s study, for their patience and love.

ix

Introduction

Lawrence’s “Spirit of Place” as a Postcolonial Concept

As a significant part of colonial discourse, Western travel books—particularly adventure stories of Western imperialists—have been used to confirm the cultural and racial superiority of the West. Most critics would agree about the active involvement of travel literature with colonialist ideology. For instance, Wimal Dissanayake and Carmen Wickramagamage define Western travel writing as “a metonym for colonial expansion”: “Much of the Western travel writing can most profitably be understood in relation to the expansion of mercantile capitalism, the emergence of the world system, and colonialism.”1 David Spurr categorizes rhetorical conventions of travel writing as those of colonial narrative. And Elleke Boehmer, reading Conrad’s Lord Jim as “the drama of colonial heroism,” examines the way in which the British Empire worked, through travel books, a very popular genre in the Victorian era, to construct their people (especially British men) as colonial subjects.2 Interestingly, D. H. Lawrence’s travel books and “leadership” novels—all of which were written while traveling abroad—which I examine in this study often contradict the conventional codes of colonialist discourse that contemporary postcolonialists have defined; his works neither properly function as a metonym for colonial expansion nor dovetail with Spurr’s categorization of travel writing as colonialist. A postcolonial reading of Lawrence’s later works enables me to demonstrate how Lawrence resists the colonialist ideology of the British Empire, especially through his notion of “spirit of place.” This study is also interested in the paradox that Lawrence was necessarily involved with colonialist discourse of the time while resisting it. Lawrence’s sense of the relationship between people and place helps to explain his personal paradox, as revealed in his complex involvement with “Englishness” and his resistance to it. In order to examine Lawrence’s relationship to (post)colonialism, I will in this introduction redefine

1

2

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Lawrence’s term “spirit of place” as a postcolonial concept that carries the Lawrentian version of racial and cultural differences. This study focuses on how differently we can read Lawrence’s travel books and “leadership” novels by applying colonial/postcolonial perspectives to them. The problem is that conventional colonial/postcolonial theories are not useful in reading Lawrence’s later works, mostly written in the 1920s, because as an Englishman his involvement with racial others does not follow stereotyped routes, based on Western superiority. To understand Lawrence’s conflict and ambivalence in presenting racial others, we need to keep at a distance the conventional tendency to look at the impact of colonial experiences only in a one-sided direction from Western colonizer to the colonized. In her book titled Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Mary Louise Pratt highlights a more dynamic relationship between colonizer and colonized in the sense that they both are mutually influenced by each other; she argues, “Europe was constructed from the outside in as much as from the inside out. . . . While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery, . . . it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis.”3 Pratt helps us to see disrupted moments inside the metropolis as well as the periphery by questioning the conventional domination-submission paradigm of colonial discourse; although travel writing usually carries colonialist ideology, there are also moments when it betrays that ideology. As Pratt suggests, travel writing by Europeans does not have necessarily unified codes in its writing strategies; every piece of travel writing does not belong to the category that propagandizes colonialist ideas, and each contains to varying degrees the possibility of disrupting and unsettling colonialist ideology Given that Western travel writings provide profuse instances of heterogeneous moments of colonial discourse, Lawrence’s travel writings— Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), Mornings in Mexico (1927), and Etruscan Places (1932)—give us good examples of it. At a glance, these books do not look much different from other travel books in terms of the author’s reporting of his journeys to exotic places like Italy, Sardinia, or Mexico. However, Lawrence’s displaced position from privilege as a European male—as a psychological and physical self-exile, he did not really belong to any one society4—makes his travel books interesting. Even when he was in England, he was not only an insider but also an outsider in relation to the inherited social values of his society. His apocalyptic concern5—a longing for a new society which would be intact and untouched by Western industrialism and thus still contain a spark to revitalize Western society—exactly reflects his psychological split: that is, he desperately wanted to escape from his society,

Introduction

3

but ironically the root of his anxiety was always his own society. Although this irony makes him at once a typical colonialist and an anti-colonialist throughout his texts, his apocalyptic concern significantly triggers his desire for an active involvement with different cultures and peoples. In spite of his colonialist motivation, this also enables him to challenge and deconstruct the centrality of Western Christian civilization throughout his later works, rather than to propagandize the superiority of Western society. It is surprising that, despite the increasing critical attention to Western travel writing as colonial narrative, there are few attempts to read Lawrence’s travel books in relation to the issue of colonialism. To say nothing of colonial/postcolonial approaches to them, Lawrence’s travel books have not drawn much attention in general in comparison with his novels. This is probably because, as David Ellis suggests, travel books have usually been placed low on the ladder of literary hierarchy.6 Billy Tracy finds almost the same answer to the question why Lawrence’s travel writings have not received serious critical attention: “Because of their autobiographical importance, Lawrence’s travel books have usually been highly esteemed by his biographers. . . . Lawrence’s critics, on the other hand, have never quite known what to do with these works and have mainly used them to explain the fiction.”7 When Lawrence’s travel writings have received critical attention, critics usually have concentrated on his notion of “spirit of place.” They seem to agree that Lawrence’s “spirit of place” is different from picturesque description of exotic landscapes and cultures often considered a rhetorical convention of travel writing. But critics’ understanding of this notion in most cases does not go beyond their emphasis on Lawrence’s unrivalled “ability to capture the spirit that makes a place unique.” 8 Thus, critical attention to Lawrence’s sensitivity to geographical and cultural differences has rarely been extended to include his relationship to colonialism, even though Lawrence is deeply concerned with Western imperialism in these books. Despite the critical indifference to the political implication that Lawrence’s “spirit of place” contains, his concern with the “local” and “indigenous” spirit of a place needs to be understood as part of anticolonial discourse. For Lawrence’s travel books are, beneath his sensuous descriptions of the places he visited, based on his fierce criticism of the industrial and colonialist expansion of the West. In Twilight in Italy and Sea and Sardinia Lawrence, revealing his own fear of Western (especially American) imperial expansions, keeps searching for local cultures, which still have, even in part, an “organic” relationship between people and their

4

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

physical surroundings. Etruscan Places suggests an imaginable counterculture against Western imperialism through the contrast between ancient Etruscan culture and the Roman Empire. Mornings in Mexico presents the author’s acute observations about racial others as well as himself, seen through the eyes of others. But in the moment when Lawrence’s concern with different cultures involves racial others, Mornings in Mexico seems to be considered as degrading the tradition of Lawrence’s travel literature. In his essay reviewing Lawrence’s travel books, Edward Nehls never mentions Mornings in Mexico, which constitutes an integral part of Lawrence’s travel literature. If The Plumed Serpent (1926) is the main target of critical attacks even among Lawrence’s “leadership” novels, Mornings in Mexico is reluctantly mentioned by critics. Thus, for example, Paul Fussell says: Sea and Sardinia could be said to celebrate sheer kinesis, and to that degree it is at the center of Lawrence’s whole enterprise. More so, I think, than the unconvincing Mornings in Mexico (1927), which displays a more conventional leaning toward primitivism and the Dark Gods in the insistent programmatic mode that makes The Plumed Serpent so unwittingly comic, with its portentous free verse and the “sperm-like water” of the lake. Mexico somehow makes Anglo-Saxon authors go all to pieces, . . . When the writer has installed himself in Mexico, “programs” tend to take over, rhetoric grows flamboyant, the Mediterranean spirit vanishes. Anger and frustration mount, and things grow forced and simplified, . . . 9

Fussell’s reading of the “unconvincing” Mornings in Mexico contrasts with his praise of Sea and Sardinia as a travelogue. As the passage reveals, Fussell considers the “uncanny” spirit of Mexico, which “makes Anglo-Saxon authors go all to pieces,” as undesirable, while wishing for the Mediterranean spirit, abundantly presented in Twilight in Italy and Sea and Sardinia. The critical tendency to ignore Lawrence’s concern with racial otherness, as seen in Nehls’s and Fussell’s essays, paradoxically explains the necessity of introducing colonial and postcolonial perspectives in order fully to understand the visible presence of racial others in his later works. Even when critics do try to appreciate Lawrence’s racial concern, critics’ understanding of Lawrence’s “spirit of place” is often limited. An example of this limitation is found even in the text of a major Lawrence critic like L.D. Clark, one of the few critics who have mounted an adamant defense for The Plumed Serpent. Mentioning Kate’s journey to the

Introduction

5

lake in Chapter Four of The Plumed Serpent, Clark uses the term “organic description,” differentiating it from “spirit of place”: The technique employed we may call “organic description,” first in order to distinguish it from ordinary description, and second to avoid the term so often attached to Lawrence’s art when a passage of this kind appears: “spirit of place.” Organic description, as I am using the term, includes the body and spirit of the principal character involved: both in his individual and in his allegorical capacity, and the spirit of religious awareness embodied in the landscape—in “nature,” if you will. The words of Lawrence give the touch of life and immortality to all of these, and it is through such organic description that the dominant force of Lawrence’s genius expresses itself. If we do not understand this—and the critical approach that calls The Plumed Serpent a fine example of Lawrence’s skill in creating “spirit of place but . . .” does not understand it—then we fail to understand Lawrence.10

Seen from Clark’s perspective, Lawrence’s “spirit of place” does not properly represent the relationship between the body and the spirit, that is, physicality and spirituality co-existing in people. However, we need distance from the usual meaning of spirituality almost automatically imposed on the term. The spirit that Lawrence’s “spirit of place” implies cannot exist without the body of a people or their physical surroundings of landscape and the earth. In addition, Lawrence’s “spirit of place” serves very efficiently to represent racial differences: Every continent has its own great spirit of place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the homeland. Different places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a great reality. The Nile valley produced not only the corn, but the terrific religions of Egypt. China produces the Chinese, and will go on doing so. The Chinese in San Francisco will in time cease to be Chinese, for America is a great melting pot.11

For Lawrence, the differences between the Nile valley, China, and San Francisco come from physical and material differences, particularly belonging to that area, including climate, the soil, the landscape, food, religion, and so forth. In other words, everything, both spiritual and material, constitutes

6

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

the spirit of a particular place, and from this, Lawrence believes, a different blood-consciousness comes. In consequence, his notion of “blood-consciousness” should be understood, although it sounds abstract, in the context of this inseparable relation between spirituality and physicality of people and place. Lawrence’s “spirit of place” is a concept available for everyone and every place. Lawrence, however, does not mention the spirit of place of New York or London because the relationship of people and these highly industrialized cities is already too distorted and contaminated by machine civilization to recover its vitality. Thus, the Lawrentian sense of “spirit of place” has its proper meaning particularly in relation to ancient or marginalized people like the Etruscans, Native Americans, Mexicans, and Italian peasants. One might ask what Lawrence’s travel writings, which develop his notion of “spirit of place,” have got to do with his “leadership” novels, which many critics have thought of as authoritarian, masculine, and even fascist. Except for Twilight in Italy (1916), every travel book and “leadership” novel was written and published in the 1920s,12 the period when he was deeply concerned with spiritual regeneration of Europe and ultimately the recovery of the individual self from the obsession with machines and money. His travelogues and “leadership” novels, in spite of their generic differences, share this apocalyptic vision. Lawrence’s later novels also have in common the fact that they are based on Lawrence’s personal experience of geographic border crossings: Aaron in Aaron’s Rod (1922) travels around Italy, Somers in Kangaroo (1923) goes to Australia, the colony of the British Empire, and Kate in The Plumed Serpent (1926) goes to Mexico for a new life. In Chapter Two I include The Lost Girl (1920), a novel not categorized as a “leadership” novel in criticism of “leadership” novels; I include it because Alvina, the female protagonist of the novel, has a lot in common with Aaron as a self-exile: they both go to Italy, a cultural symbol of the opposite spirit to England. Lawrence’s “leadership” novels as well as his travel books follow the conventions of the travel book on the ground too that they deal with interracial encounters and representations of racial others. Lawrence’s sense of locality, developed through his notion of “the spirit of place,” is not limited to his travel books: Lawrence’s belief in the “local” spirit of a place deeply affects his presentation of various foreign places, although complicated by his idea of male leadership in his later fiction, in which he encounters the Australian bush and native Mexican Indians. Instead of disposing of the interracial contexts of these “leadership” novels, I would like to see how Somers approaches the colonial people and landscape of Australia, and how Kate represents Mexican “others.”

Introduction

7

To explore the complex intersection of Lawrence’s “spirit of place” with his “leadership” politics,13 we need to see how differently Lawrence conceptualizes a political power in his later fiction. I highlight in this study that Lawrence’s politics is constantly related to the matter of being, the matter of modern “souls,” not limited to the conventional sense of politics. Lawrence’s “leadership” politics in his later novels takes a form of continuous search for a new way of life. At the same time, his leadership idea limits its possibility as an alternative mode of being by excluding women’s voice and their desire; Lawrence in Aaron’s Rod provides a homo-social community of men as a specific form of male leadership; in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, he tries to include women’s voice but continuously fails to embrace women’s desire in his formula of a new way of life. In the following chapters two, three, and four, I will examine how the issues of gender and race shape Lawrence’s presentation of leadership politics. These chapters also pay attention to the way in which Lawrence’s sense of locality and his male “authoritarian” politics conflict with, contradict, and sometimes complement each other. In doing so, my reading of “leadership” novels will reveal how unsettled and disturbed Lawrence’s idea of “leadership” becomes in interaction with different landscapes and cultures. This reading might enable the reader to take a different approach to Lawrence’s male “leadership” politics; isn’t there any effective way of highlighting the fractures in Lawrence’s anxiety about male leadership and in his presentation of it in the fiction?14 Haven’t critics paid too much attention to this particular politics? Doesn’t this necessarily result in blurring Lawrence’s sense of difference and otherness? Trying to answer these questions, I will foreground Aaron as an aimless wanderer, Somers as a newcomer of the colony who suffers from his sense of nothingness, and Ramón of The Plumed Serpent as an anti-colonialist, rather than see them as quasi-fascist heroes representing male leadership politics. My reading of Lawrence’s later novels will show how his appropriation of the “local” spirit of each place— Florence in Italy, Australia, and Mexico—affects his alleged belief in male leadership; the intervention of Lawrence’s “spirit of place” in understanding his leadership politics will make it possible to challenge the established readings of Lawrence’s “leadership” novels. Reading Lawrence’s “leadership” novels, this study calls into question the very category of “leadership,” which critics have habitually used for his later novels. The categorization of Lawrence’s later novels—Aaron’s Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent—as “leadership” novels, I think, keeps us from reading these novels from various angles. For example, rather than exclusively reading Aaron’s Rod in terms of male politics, Aaron’s sense of “being lost” needs to be highlighted in that his aimless wandering reflects

8

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Lawrence’s sense of “being lost” after the war. Although at the end of the novel Lilly foreshadows the full development of Lawrence’s “leadership” politics in the following novels, Kangaroo, the next novel, in turn discloses a lot of disillusionment and distrust in politics, as opposed to our expectation. We also need to question the heavy critical attention on Ramón in The Plumed Serpent. If we see Ramón’s Quetzalcoatl movement as part of an anti-colonial project, the significance of Ramón as a political hero will be visibly reduced. Even though many critics have believed that Lawrence’s male politics is fully developed in The Plumed Serpent, Ramón is not the only person to energize the Quetzalcoatl movement. I think the strength of the novel comes from the role of Kate to criticize Ramón’s project and more significantly Cipriano’s role to focalize Kate’s western individuality through the eyes of Mexican natives. In other words, the complex setting of the novel does not allow the tyranny of Ramón, and Cipriano is not a mere “instrument” of Ramón’s.15 In short, this study aims to counter through postcolonial perspectives the heavy critical attention on, reinforced by the categorization of, Lawrence’s “leadership” politics that many critics have shown. Colonial and postcolonial perspectives in this study serve to deconstruct critical attention to the issue of politics, not to reinforce it. For the heavy critical attention to the “leadership” politics blinds readers to other critical issues possibly revealed in Aaron’s fading sense of identity, Somers’s sense of nothingness, or Cipriano’s sense of aboriginality as a Mexican Indian. So too we might have the impression that gender issues in Lawrence’s later novels can be easily dismissed because of his preoccupation with male leadership politics. But Aaron’s Rod is more concerned with conflicts between the sexes than the leadership politics, which Lilly preaches mostly at the end of the novel. The Lost Girl, which I will examine along with Aaron’s Rod, also offers a good example of how Lawrence deals with female subjectivity and sexuality in the transition of his concern from heterosexuality to homosexuality. Whereas Lawrence still allows a balanced relationship between Alvina and Ciccio as an English woman and a southern Italian man in The Lost Girl (1920), he makes a quite radical turn to the homosexual (or homosocial) relationship in Aaron’s Rod (1922). Kate, the female protagonist of The Plumed Serpent, plays a significant role of integrating gender issues into Lawrence’s leadership politics. Much more complex than the relationship between Alvina and Ciccio in The Lost Girl, the sexual tension between Kate and Cipriano cannot be understood without considering the sense of racial gap between them as a European and a Mexican Indian. The entangling of gender with race in Lawrence’s later novels entails the necessity of

Introduction

9

understanding Lawrence’s presentation of gender issue through colonial and postcolonial perspectives. As Ellis notes, Lawrence criticism has benefited from colonial/postcolonial readings following the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978).16 Especially with the rise of postcolonial studies in the 1990s, attempts to see Lawrence’s later novels—particularly The Plumed Serpent—in relation to his involvement with racial others have occurred. But much of the postcolonial reading of Lawrence has seen Lawrence’s interracial concern as typically colonialist, as Charles Rossman, Sandra Gilbert, and Wayne Templeton do. For example, examining how Lawrence reconstructs the reality, history, and myth of Mexico, Rossman concludes that The Plumed Serpent is “another ‘paleface overlay,’ one more white man’s version of what Mexico should be.” 17 Like Rossman, Gilbert and Templeton also define Lawrence’s racial concern as another version of cultural colonialism. According to them, the deep motivation behind Lawrence’s experiment is not to de-colonize the colonized Mexicans but to revitalize the declining Western civilization. This might be true, in part, as I explained above in terms of Lawrence’s apocalyptic vision, but this does not explain Lawrence’s whole motivation in The Plumed Serpent. For Lawrence, Western colonialism was a matter of the expansion of a mechanical way of life, rather than one of a social, political struggle between the West and its others. Lawrence transcodes the issue of colonialism as a matter of “being” or a matter of the modern “soul.” Lawrence breaks the conventional codes of politics, even if viewed in the context of postcolonial politics that challenge the traditional paradigm of the Western epistemology. Postcolonialists persistently have questioned and tried to unsettle the hierarchical relationship between Western colonizers and their colonized people, but they will hardly accept the view, as Lawrence did, that they both are victims of Western civilization. This unusual use of politics might produce the impression that Lawrence’s works do not square with postcolonial studies. But his work significantly contributes to revolutionizing the conventions in our way of thinking, including postcolonial perspectives, about self and other, or subject and object. Donald Gutierrez sees Lawrence’s understanding of “place” in terms of a philosophical challenge to the traditional subject/object (and self/other) paradigm which constitutes Western epistemology: “Lawrence’s ‘spirit of place’ can be regarded philosophically as a powerful interchange of not only subject and object but of subject and subject.”18 The environment of landscape, animals, and plants is in an equal relationship with people; they are alive and, like a human being, actively participate as subjects in the human

10

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

signifying process. For instance, Lawrence describes in Sea and Sardinia how the land is indissolubly bound up with human consciousness: Wherever one is, the place has its conscious genus. Man has lived there and brought forth his consciousness there and in some way brought that place to consciousness, given it its expression, and, really, finished it. . . . The land has been humanized, through and through: and we in our own tissued consciousness bear the results of this humanization. So that for us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery—back, back down the old ways of time. Strange and wonderful chords awake in us, and vibrate again after many hundreds of years of complete forgetfulness.19

For Lawrence, the land signifies beyond a background or an object to be appropriated and explored by people. As Lawrence’s own clause “the land has been humanized, through and through” indicates, the land and humanity are in an inseparable relationship with each other, so that, Gutierrez states, “humanity and place acquire a dynamized ‘subject-subject’ relationship.”20 Wayne Templeton’s understanding of Lawrence’s “spirit of place” strikingly contrasts with Gutierrez’s. On the premise that “the various Native peoples of the American Southwest are colonized people,”21 Templeton claims that Lawrence is “representative of a colonialist sensibility and his is the popular colonialist image of Indians.”22 He diagnoses Lawrence’s great mistake in understanding American Indians as resulting from his ignorance of “the primacy of land” in the Indian culture. Lawrence’s gravest mistake resulting from hastiness, generalization, idealism, fear and rejection of tribalism–and this has to do with what I believe to be his complete failure to recognize the primacy of land—was the assumption that Indians would no longer be able to function in traditional ways; that they must assimilate or disappear. Although at times he recognized that they are non-determinist peoples who do believe that as part of Nature they are able to affect its direction, he seemed not to understand, in spite of the socio-political activity surrounding him, the extent to which many Native Americans are staunchly protective of their traditions, cultures, religions, languages: that is of their identity as individuals, as tribal members, as inhabitants of this planet; peoples for whom their relation to Nature is one of give-and-take in which they are rewarded—the Hopis in the form

Introduction

11

of rain, for example; the Navajos with xojo—for being responsible and caring inhabitants of a natural world.23

This is a long way from many critics’ understandings of Lawrence’s “spirit of place.” While most critics have focused on the interrelatedness between people and place spread through Lawrence’s texts, Templeton argues as if Lawrence does not properly recognize Native Americans’ deep bonding with the land, their resistance to white civilization, their tribalism, and even their relation to Nature. It is true that Lawrence was not very interested in political activities in reality, as can be seen in his essay “Indians and an Englishman,” but this does not mean Lawrence wholly disregarded the political significance that Native Americans’ “ongoing” resistance to white civilization has implied. In a letter written in New Mexico, as Templeton expects, Lawrence says the spirit of the Southwest American Indians will be finally wiped out, but at the same time Lawrence emphasizes their unbreakable and imperishable spirit: “I do like having the big, unbroken spaces round me. There is something savage unbreakable in the spirit of place out here—the Indians drumming and yelling at our camp-fire at evening.—But they’ll be wiped out too, I expect—school and education will finish them. But not before the world falls.” 24 That is to say, Lawrence’s presentiments have both sides—Native Americans’ inevitable assimilation to white civilization and their ongoing resistance to it. Templeton foregrounds the one side of Lawrence as if he intentionally dismisses the last sentence. Lawrence, like Templeton, sees the “ongoing” interrelation between the American Indians and the land of America. Lawrence’s understanding of “spirit of place” in many cases is associated with a postcolonial situation of the conflict between “a new-comer” and “the old inhabitant”: A curious thing about the Spirit of Place is the fact that no place exerts its full influence upon a new-comer until the old inhabitant is dead or absorbed. So America. While the Red Indian existed in fairly large numbers, the new colonials were in a great measure immune from the daimon, or demon, of America. The moment the last nuclei of Red life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. At present the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians act within the unconscious or under-conscious soul of the white American, causing the great American grouch, the Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness

12

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing in the Yankee soul, the inner malaise which amounts almost to madness, sometimes. (Studies, pp. 40–1)

Viewed from Lawrence’s perspective on colonialism, Western colonizers have tried to destroy the organic relation between the spirit of place and the natives of that place; these violent attempts lead to the displacement of the organic relation, but never destroy it. The massacre of old inhabitants can neither eradicate the “indigenous” spirit of a place nor prevent the “unconscious or under-conscious” domination of it. The indigenous spirit of a place haunts newly arrived colonials after the massacre; the colonial projects of newcomers cannot reach a harmonized relationship with the land and become selfdestructive. Lawrence’s ambivalent feeling about America, full of tension, has something to do with the indigenous spirit of place still haunting the American continent: I still don’t know why the U. S. A. pulls one so tight and makes one feel like a chicken that is being drawn . . . Something in the air tightens one’s nerves like fiddle strings, screws them up, squeak-squeak! . . . till one’s nerves will give out nothing but a shrill fine shriek of overwroughtness. Why, in the name of heaven? Nobody knows. It’s just the spirit of place.25

Templeton’s reading of Lawrence reveals a characteristic of Western intellectuals often shown in their postcolonial reading of Western texts: a self-consciously sensitive response to their origin. At the end of his essay, Templeton finds the reason that he cannot help labeling Lawrence as a colonialist in his biological background as an Englishman: In Luther Standing Bear’s words, Lawrence’s observations were colored by his “primitive fears” as well as his ignorance, his desires, his nationality—his background, education, sensibility—all of which informed his definition of “Red Indian.” Indeed, it was his very obsession with the need to radically redefine Western culture that determined the degree to which his attitudes were infused with a sense of Western hegemony. Like most whites, while he observed details of Indian culture and landscape, his philosophical focus was always Western.26

This passage outlines why many critics have regarded Lawrence’s works as a part of Western colonialist discourse, rather than tried to see their possibilities as anti-colonial or postcolonial texts. Significantly, Templeton’s reading

Introduction

13

of Lawrence reveals Western postcolonial critics’—especially radical thinkers’—self-censorship about their concern with racial others. For instance, reading Julia Kristeva’s presentation of third-world women in About Chinese Women, Gayatri Spivak points out that, in spite of Western thinkers’ “occasional” concern with the other of the West, “their repeated question is obsessively self-centered.”27 In terms of criticizing their own ontological status, seeing themselves as necessarily potential colonialists, Templeton and Spivak share some intensity and thoroughness in their arguments. Yet unless Lawrence had come from a social and cultural vacuum, and consequently his Englishness had been a matter of his conscious choice (I am here repeating Howard Booth’s question), how could he be otherwise?28 It seems inevitable that Lawrence’s “philosophical focus was always Western,” and his background as an Englishman fundamentally affected his presentation of others. I am not defending or approving Lawrence as a colonialist; I am rather arguing that in applying a postcolonial perspective to Lawrence’s texts, Lawrence’s “spirit of place” is a useful concept in explaining his dilemma. As people and the spirit of place cannot be separated from each other, we cannot separate Lawrence (and his works) from the spirit of England, what we call “Englishness.” We need to track down his colonialist mentality inevitably imbricated in his texts, but we should not make it the whole story of Lawrence. It will be rather beneficial to see how he, despite his fundamental limits as an Englishman, tried to see things differently and criticize his inherited value systems. The spectrum of Lawrence’s perceptions and reactions to racial “others” varies from that of a typical colonialist to an anti-colonialist; interestingly, these various and contradictory shades of the spectrum often coexist in the same space. For example, the famous letter written to Lady Cynthia Asquith on 30 April 1922, in which, Booth argues, Lawrence “is identifying as a beleaguered British imperialist,”29 shows how disturbed Lawrence was in between the declining British Empire and strange black others: The east is not for me—the sensuous spiritual voluptuousness, the curious sensitiveness of the naked people, their black, bottomless, hopeless eyes—and the heads of elephants and buffaloes poking out of primeval mud—the queer noise of tall metallic palm trees: ach!—altogether the tropics have something of the world before the flood—hot dark mud and the life inherent in it: makes me feel rather sick. But wonderful to have known. We saw the Prince of Wales at the Kandy Perahera—a lonely little glum white fish he was sitting up there at the Temple of the Tooth with his chin on his hands gazing blankly down on all the swirl of

14

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing the east like a sort of Narcissus waiting to commit black suicide. (Letters, IV, p. 234)

In particular, Lawrence’s portrayal of the Prince of Wales, who represents the British Empire, shows his complex feeling about England. As a consequence of his disappointed involvement with native people in Ceylon, Lawrence becomes sympathetic to his native country. But, as the image of England captured through the Prince shows, his country is not quite competent and solid in its control of colonized people. Certainly, this is not the typical rhetoric of colonialist discourse that highlights the cultural (and even biological) superiority of the civilized man. Whereas colonialist sentiments definitely surface in this letter, it also contains Lawrence’s affirmation of the “spirit of place”: “The world of idea may be all alike, but the world of physical feeling is very different” (Letters, IV, p. 234). Still, although he mentions difference between peoples, his sense of difference here implies a certain kind of hierarchy between British people and these naked black people of Ceylon: I break my heart over England when I am out here. Those natives are back of us—in the living sense lower than we are. But they’re going to swarm over us and suffocate us. We are, have been for five centuries, the growing tip. Now we’re going to fall. But you don’t catch me going back on my whiteness and Englishness and myself. (Letters, IV, p. 234)

Considering that this letter was written under his sense of repulsion by Ceylon, and that Lawrence constantly shifted between his attraction to and repulsion by racial others, his colonialist statements and unusual sympathy with England are not surprising. In addition, the letter characteristically shows one significant aspect that allows the reader to define Lawrence as a colonialist in the representation of others. As in his noted statement “we can’t go back to the savages” (Studies, p. 145) in his Melville essay, Lawrence persistently presents the savage life as a regression or an “uncreated” life, and this tendency pervades most of Lawrence’s works written and published after the war. Despite any sympathy with the “savages,” he did not question the Euro-centric view that the life of the “primitives” was retrograde and thus inferior to his own life. Dissanayake and Wickramagamage define this sort of attitude of Europeans as a “cultural Darwinism,” which is “an enabling framework” to judge and measure up the ways of life outside the West:

Introduction

15

One way of domesticating the primitives that inhabit the worlds that Western travel writers visit is by placing them on an evolutionary ladder—that is, by seeing them as living in a stage of human development that the West has experienced centuries ago. This way the Western way of life is converted into the narrative center in relation to which all other societies and ways of life are judged. This narrativization is a vital strand in any colonial text.30

At a glance, it looks ironic that Lawrence keeps his own sense of white supremacy as an Englishman while desperately longing for the mystery in “primitive” lives. Yet, given that the meaning of “place” in Lawrence’s texts is beyond the individual’s will or choice, inseparably bound up with lives of people living in that area, this contradictory sentiment seems necessary. That is, despite his declaration that “England had lost its meaning for him,” Lawrence could not ultimately free himself from his Englishness, and his sense of Englishness keeps coming back in the midst of his desire to distance himself from it. When Lawrence makes a quite problematic statement, “We are, have been for five centuries, the growing tip” (Letters, IV, p. 234), as opposed to his usual feeling against Western civilization, he again seems to approve European standards in its way of life and its ideology of “progress.” Not only in his letters, we can also find the same attitude in his Epilogue to Movements in European History (1921): “For a thousand years Europe has led the world, and grows apace. But our spirit and our manhood begin to weaken. Our idea and our ideal begin to peter out. So the war came, and blew away forever our leading tip, our growing tip. Now we are directionless.”31 Certainly, Lawrence’s naturalized belief that “Europe has led the world for centuries” makes it hard to put his texts outside colonialist discourses of the day. Nonetheless, as Booth argues at the end of his essay, we need to see Lawrence’s involvement with colonialist ideas within the whole structure of Western colonial discourse, rather than hastily dismiss his complex sentiment as purely colonialist: The narrative of Lawrence’s journey given here, for all the range of positions adopted, suggests that there was always a reliance, to some degree, on colonialist assumptions. But could it have been otherwise: was it possible to think and write in the modernist period wholly outside colonial and racist discourses? I think not—though it must be stated that some positions at the time were certainly better than others, and that a number of writers were pushing in strongly anti-colonial directions.32

16

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Booth argues that nobody inside Europe—radical or conservative—has been immune from colonialist assumptions. This point of view may look essentialist; however, postcolonial discourse inside the West has to start from this line of thought.33 If Lawrence is a colonialist, what makes it possible to think of him as an anti-colonialist? Considering that many Victorian and modernist writers had already refused to follow the glorified path to industrial society, Lawrence’s position against industrialism or colonialism is also not surprising. What is refreshing in Lawrence’s texts, and does this differentiate him as an anti-colonialist from other writers? We can find that possibility in his sense of difference and relationship. Lawrence claims throughout his works that “the true relationship established between different things, different spirits” (Letters, II, p. 636) makes life creative and vital. Lawrence always questioned and tried to unsettle the values of Western Christianity since they make the relationship between things and peoples fixed and block the flows between them. The “true” relationship he means would be possible through the restoration of changeable flow in the relationship between different things and between different spirits: We should ask for no absolutes, or absolute. Once and for all and for ever, let us have done with the ugly imperialism of any absolute. There is no absolute good, there is nothing absolutely right. All things flow and change, and even change is not absolute. The whole is a strange assembly of apparently incongruous parts, slipping past one another. (Phoenix, p. 536)

Lawrence hardly mentions the terms “colonialism” or “imperialism” throughout his writings. His direct mention of imperialism in this passage, rather than conveying a political meaning, can be read as rhetoric to emphasize his argument against the fixed dogma that Western epistemology has produced to govern the relations of things and people. The Lawrentian version of colonialism, as in the passage quoted above, sounds abstract and politically neutral. But Lawrence’s writings from the 1920s show how seriously he tried to present an alternative vision for Western society. In terms of his deconstruction of Western Christian epistemology based on binarism and hierarchy, Lawrence was surely a revolutionary of his time, and his alternative vision to Western society could not be apolitical. The alternative vision that he attempted to construct can be summed up in his famous motto “different place has a different spirit” (Studies, p. 12), which offers a full-scale challenge against Western colonialist ideology.

Introduction

17

For all his emotional conflicts in contact with different people and cultures, Lawrence’s notion of “the spirit of place,” developed throughout his travel writings and “leadership” novels, foreshadows postcolonial ideas by insistently questioning the hierarchy between the West and the rest of the world. Lawrence claims that every people and place should be different and desirably self-centered without forcing any “strangle-hold” on any other people. Lawrence’s “leadership” politics neither determines nor dominates his writings by itself; it constantly conflicts with and complements Lawrence’s sense of locality, as represented in Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent. It should be remembered that, although we see the postcolonial possibilities in Lawrence’s works, his approach to local cultures and peoples is quite different from that of postcolonial critics as well as colonialists on the ground that he does not care much about actual political power struggles between races; Lawrence just says “every place has its own spirit.” This seemingly simple declaration can nonetheless be read as a reference point for contemporary postcolonial discourses. This is because this simple recognition of difference serves to problematize any artificial hierarchy between peoples and thus the illusion of “world-assimilation and world-oneness” (SS, p. 91), an unaccomplished dream of imperialists since the Roman Empire. Reviewing the critical essays dealing with Lawrence’s idea of “the spirit of place,” Chapter One explores the possibility of extending the concept into a postcolonial metaphor. Many critics who have focused on Lawrence’s notion of “the spirit of place,” I think, tend to pay attention to Lawrence’s unrivalled capability for sensuous rendering of the places he visited, rather than notice his concern with racial others and its political implication. Further, the fact that three travel books out of his four travelogues—Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, and Etruscan Places—are based on Italy, not on colonial frontiers, might make it seem almost impossible to read them through colonial and postcolonial perspectives. But his notion of “spirit of place” applied throughout his travel books shows how his sense of “place” is deeply engaged with his persistent resistance to industrial/colonial forces, which have distorted and destroyed the different local spirits and traditions of each place. With Lawrence’s “spirit of place” redefined as a postcolonial concept, I will attempt to demonstrate how we can read his travel writings differently. Twilight in Italy shows how Lawrence values the “organic” relationship between the native place and local people by foregrounding the physical and psychological displacement of local Italian peasants. Sea and Sardinia instances a resisting voice, which challenges the colonialist desire of colonial discourse, disguised in the name of “objectivity” and “neutrality.” Etruscan Places rewrites the history of Western civilization by imaginatively restoring

18

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

the “repressed” culture of the ancient “life-loving” Etruscans, wiped out by the Roman Empire. Mornings in Mexico, which deals with racial others and their different way of being, on the one hand, opens up a possibility of criticizing Lawrence’s own ontological status and thus going beyond the essentialist divide between the colonizer and colonized; on the other hand, Lawrence’s remaining sense of superiority as a European male limits this possibility. Consequently, in Mornings in Mexico rather than in any other Lawrence travelogue, the author’s own anxieties and confusions as a post-war traveler and self-exile become prominent. Chapter Two examines The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod, the so-called transitional novels, written during the period when Lawrence waited for his departure from Europe to America.34 These two novels reveal Lawrence’s bitter disillusionment with England, as Alvina’s and Aaron’s self-exile show. Focusing on Alvina’s border crossing and cultural/racial gaps that she feels in her contact with a different landscape and people, this section examines Alvina’s confrontation with the different spirit of the Italian mountain village in The Lost Girl. In light of the colonial and postcolonial perspectives, Alvina’s ambivalent response to the Italian village reveals her conflicting sense of identity as an English woman; she refuses to follow the English cultural values, and simultaneously she does not really adapt herself to the different spirit of the primitive world. The different settings of England and Italy bring about some confusion in established values between “civilized” and “savage” worlds, and, as the title of the novel suggests, she belongs to neither England nor the hinterlands of Italy. As the first work called a “leadership” novel, Aaron’s Rod also marks a transitional state from heterosexual to homosexual relationship. It seems to me that Aaron’s Rod is the most misogynist work among Lawrence’s “leadership” novels. Lawrence’s misogynist treatment of women in the novel shows how the author justifies the necessity of male leadership and develops the idea through marital and sexual conflicts. In this chapter, I will examine how Lawrence’s treatment of gender issues affects his presentation of leadership politics. At the same time, I will pay attention to how his leadership idea dominates over his sense of place; in describing Florence as an alternative place to England, Lawrence mostly relies on his leadership idea by featuring the city as “a town of men.” 35 Even though the different spirit of Florence provides him a possibility—though limited—for a new identity, released from the “repressive” English culture, Aaron remains in the middle of confusion and disorientation during his residence in Italy. Like Alvina, who comes to lose her sense of identity in the midst of two different worlds, Aaron is also suspended in between a civilized, heterosexual world and unknown, homosexual world.

Introduction

19

Chapter Three focuses on how Lawrence’s “male leadership” theme conflicts with his sense of locality in his Australian novel Kangaroo. This focalization allows me to demonstrate the way in which Lawrence’s presentation of the leadership idea undermines its categorization as a “leadership” novel, as exposed in Somers’s “detached” narrative voice and his futile relationship with Australian political leaders such as Kangaroo, Jack, and Struthers. As the novel unfolds, Somers’s increasing apathy about the social reality of the former set of colonies contrasts with his “uncanny” attraction to the Australian landscape, which from start to finish governs the atmosphere of the novel. Once we question Kangaroo’s status as a “leadership” novel, the main focus shifts from the leadership politics to the issues of colonialism: how Lawrence with a keen sense of “place” and “difference” approaches and appropriates the landscape and culture of Australia, a white settler nation under British dominion. Lawrence’s presentation of Australia provides a good chance to look into the sources of cultural conflict that Lawrence as an Englishman felt in presenting this British dominion. In Kangaroo, Lawrence objectifies his conflicting feelings about Australia and records his awakening sense of “otherness” especially through his appropriation of the Australian bush. In the last section of the chapter, I review Lawrence’s collaboration with a colonial writer, Mollie Skinner, in The Boy in the Bush (1924), focusing on the gradual change in his treatment of male leadership, notably revealed in each ending of Kangaroo and the collaborative work. Lawrence’s belief in male leadership becomes abruptly reinforced in the last chapters of The Boy in the Bush, which he added without permission from Skinner, while his indifference to leadership politics dominates the last half of Kangaroo. Chapter Four reads The Plumed Serpent as a postcolonial novel, attempting to correct the critical tradition of defining the novel exclusively as a “leadership” novel. My reading aims to change the critical attention on The Plumed Serpent from seeing it as a representative “leadership” novel, filled with sexual and racial hierarchies, to viewing it as a “postcolonial” novel in which Lawrence envisions a coexistence of two different worlds. This novel shows how Lawrence’s apocalyptic vision creates various conflicts and tensions between his colonialist sentiments as a British man and his anti-colonialist notions. The complexity and ambivalence in Lawrence’s presentation of leadership politics lead us to question the established judgments and impressions imposed on The Plumed Serpent as a representative “leadership” novel. Lawrence’s idea of “spirit of place” shapes his presentation of the “indigenous” spirit of Mexico through the ancient Mexican myth, Quetzalcoatl.

20

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Although critics have suspected the motives behind Lawrence’s appropriation of the Quetzalcoatl myth, this Mexican novel shows that the author’s greatest concern is with finding a new mode of life, which transgresses the limits of colonized experiences as well as those of colonialist perspectives. His effort to find a balance between different worlds leads to his equal distribution of significance between his male/female protagonists Ramón, Cipriano, and Kate. My reading of the novel questions the critical imbalance of attention to Ramón as opposed to Cipriano, while emphasizing the latter’s role as a Mexican Indian. I will also show that through Kate’s dissenting voice to the men’s business of the Quetzalcoatl movement, Lawrence does not dismiss women’s voices, though he continues to fail to embrace women’s desire within his vision for a new mode of life.

Chatper One

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

Lawrence’s journey to Italy, Ceylon, Australia, New and Old Mexico was not only a search for a new world but also a process of verifying his (sometimes idealized and abstract) notion of “spirit of place” in reality.1 Through his diverse encounters with Italian peasants, Ceylonese, English subjects of the new settler nation, American and Mexican Indians, he could materialize his idea that “[e]very continent has its own great spirit of place” (Studies, p. 12).2 Frieda Lawrence also testifies to her husband’s interest in place in a letter written just before they went to Mexico: “Lawrence wants to go to Mexico, he thinks he might write his American novel there—You [Adele Seltzer] know he would like to write a novel of each continent—if possible” (Letters, IV, p. 385). My aim in this chapter is to read Lawrence’s travels and his travel books through colonial and postcolonial perspectives as part of colonial (and also postcolonial) discourse, rather than as romantic and lyric expressions of his travels. This reading demands examining the way in which he, as a post-war traveler and self-exile, responded to and recorded the places that he visited—places represented in his travel books as the Lago di Garda, Sardinia, Mexico, Southwestern America, and Etruria. Through this reading, I will show how Lawrence’s conception of “spirit of place,” which embraces “difference” and “otherness,” becomes substantiated as a postcolonial metaphor. To understand Lawrence’s travels and his travel writings in relation to the issue of colonialism, we need to see the confusions and anxieties that Lawrence, as a British traveler, faced, particularly in colonial frontiers such as Ceylon, Australia, the American Southwest, and Mexico. Achsah and Earl Brewster remember in D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence that, during his sojourn in Ceylon, Lawrence was deeply concerned with racial differences—to use Lawrence’s word, the different blood consciousness of a different place. Lawrence was not happy there, but he believed that his 21

22

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

repulsion to the place and black strangers was caused by the different spirit of the place: “My being requires a different physical and psychic environment: the white man is not for this region: it is for the dark-skinned, whose flow of blood consciousness is vitally attuned to these different rays of the sun.”3 Lawrence’s description of Ceylon in his letters, as I showed in my Introduction, reveals how his idealized understanding of “spirit of place,” especially at this early stage of his travels, ironically co-exists with his physical repulsion to the “voluptuous” and “sensuous” naked people. Unlike Ceylon with its black naked people and tropical climate, Lawrence felt a sense of freedom in Australia, a white settler dominion of the British crown. He enjoyed, as a whole new experience, the nature and the landscape of Australia, a place which is relatively free from “[t]he great spiritual freight that weighs so heavily in Europe” (Letters, IV, p. 256). However, his sense of freedom did not last long since the spirit and the landscape of Australia did not allow Lawrence to approach and appropriate them, as shown in his “troubled” description of the Australian bush in Kangaroo: “It [the bush] was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, . . . he could not penetrate into its secret. He couldn’t get at it. Nobody could get at it. What was it waiting for?”4 Whereas Ceylon and Australia, for Lawrence, were “a sort of dream or trance,” as he notes in his essay “New Mexico,” the Southwest of America as a place was a totally different experience: “it was New Mexico that liberated me from the present era of civilization, the great era of material and mechanical development” (Phoenix, p. 142). But, after his first meeting with Apache Indians, which happened in September 1922, he had to adjust his ideal vision of the Red Indians, mostly influenced by James Fenimore Cooper’s “Leatherstocking” novels. His sense of elation presented in “America, Listen to Your Own,” written before he came to America, intriguingly contrasts with his confusion at the first encounter with the American Indians recorded in “Indians and an Englishman”5: Americans must take up life where the Red Indian, the Aztec, the Maya, the Incas left it off. They must pick up the life-thread where the mysterious Red race let it fall. They must catch the pulse of the life which Cortes and Columbus murdered. There lies the real continuity: not between Europe and the new States, but between the murdered Red America and the seething White America. (Phoenix, p. 90) I shall never forget that first evening when I first came into contact with Red Men, away in the Apache country. It was not what I had thought

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

23

it would be. It was something of a shock. Again something in my soul broke down, letting in a bitterer dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror, new root-griefs, old root-richnesses. (Phoenix, p. 95)

Of course, it took time for Lawrence’s feeling about and vision of the Red Indians to adjust and for him finally to see them not through Cooper’s idealized and distanced perspective but through his own—personally much more attached—perspective. For Lawrence, American and Mexican Indians were people who simultaneously gave him a clue for a future society and constantly tested his sense of superiority as a white European male. It is no wonder that the essay “New Mexico,” which can be read as a manifesto of his life in America, declares his sojourn in America as one of the most significant experiences in his life. Despite his sense of liberation from civilization, however, the spirit of America that white Americans emanated, along with a risk of American Indians’ assimilation to it, pushed Lawrence to more fundamentally “primitive” places than the American Southwest. As an alternative to white America, Mexico fully charged Lawrence with an apocalyptic vision of the New World. In a letter sent from Chapala in Mexico to his mother-in-law in Germany, he explains a part of the motive that stimulated him to write The Plumed Serpent: Yet Mexico is very interesting, a strange folk. Most are pure Indians, dark like the people in Ceylon, but much stronger. The men have got the strongest backbones in the world, I believe. They are half civilized, half wild. If they only had a new faith, a new hope, they would perhaps be a new, young, beautiful people. But as Christians they don’t get any further, are inwardly melancholy, live without hope, become suddenly cross, and don’t like to work. . . . And I find that wonderful, they are so little attached to money and possessions, here in America, where the whites are attached only to money and possessions. But not the peons. (Letters, IV, p. 452)

For Lawrence, Mexico was a significant place where he seriously attempted to experiment with his own version of politics and religion. At the same time, Mexico was also a place, like Ceylon, that confused him due to the gap between his idea of a New World and his actual contact with black strangers. Particularly in Mornings in Mexico and The Plumed Serpent, his sense of superiority as a civilized white man and his sense of repulsion to the white civilization are constantly in conflict or tension.

24

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Although Lawrence traveled around the globe, Italy was the foreign country that he visited most often during his lifetime. Lawrence’s three travel books, Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), and Etruscan Places (1932)— all, in fact, of his travel books except for Mornings in Mexico (1927)—are based on his personal trips to Italy, which happened before and after his sojourn in America.6 When Lawrence says in a letter written in the Lago di Garda, “[a]ll I want is to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what not” (Letters, I, p. 503), it seems that Italy, for Lawrence, was the only available country at that time (before his concern with primitive society went beyond Europe) that made possible his honest response to his own blood without intervention of mind. In other words, Italy represents what is absent and deficient in England and English people’s life, as Lawrence observes: The Italians here sing. They are very poor, they buy two pennorth of butter and a pennorth of cheese. But they are healthy and they lounge about in the little square where the boats come up and nets are mended, like kings. And they go by the window proudly, and they don’t hurry or fret. And the women walk straight and look calm. And the men adore children—they are glad of their children even if they’re poor. I think they haven’t many ideas, but they look well, and they have strong blood. (Letters, I, p. 460)

After the nerve-breaking experience of the war in England, when Lawrence finally settled down at Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, it is likely that he felt a sense of relief that he had escaped from industrialized Northern Europe: “I must say I like this place. . . . It isn’t quite like Europe. It is where Europe ends: finally.”7 (Letters, III, p. 488). Regardless of the sense of freedom he felt in southern Italy, one might ask, if both Italy and England are part of Europe, then how is it possible to apply the paradigm of the colonized and colonizer to Lawrence’s travel books? Probably this is the main reason that most readings of Lawrence’s travel books have not been concerned with the issue of colonialism. Critics rather have highlighted either “its lyric richness”8 in Twilight in Italy or “the sensuous quality of Sea and Sardinia.”9 Del Ivan Janik, emphasizing “the constant tension between two ‘infinites’” as its central theme, brushes off racial and political issues embedded in Twilight in Italy: “Lawrence’s view is ultimately apolitical; it is the view of the artist, the immediate observer. Despite Lawrence’s description of the book in his letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith, the role of ‘race’ in Twilight in Italy is not central.”10 Janik is quite right in point-

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

25

ing out that Lawrence was not especially concerned with the details of actual politics. But he too easily dismisses the fact that Lawrence struggles with the whole structure of Western civilization; considering that Western civilization has been sustained on the basis of industrial/colonial expansion, how could Lawrence’s view be apolitical in dealing with its governing structure? Reviewing the scholarship on Victorian and modern travel writing, Joanne Shattock states that “[t]he most fruitful time for travel writing in the twentieth century was, by general consensus, the period between the wars.”11 This statement is proved by Paul Fussell’s work entitled Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980), which Shattock praises as “[t]he single most significant contribution to the study of twentieth-century travel writing.”12 Fussell deals with Western travel writing from 1918 to 1939, which mostly registers the fantasies of flight and freedom that dominated the social atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s. The disastrous experience of the war triggered people’s desire to escape from modern, industrialized cities to primitive, sun-bleached places. Fussell even mentions the “psychological” effect of the climate, especially the British weather. It seems after the war, Fussell says, that the cold and foggy weather of England symbolically rendered its social climate and was seen by the imaginative and sensitive, like D. H. Lawrence, as intolerably “stuffy” and finally “uninhabitable.”13 Interestingly enough, Fussell regards Lawrence as “the vanguard of the British Literary Diaspora, the great flight of writers from England in the 20’s and 30’s.”14 War intensifies the innate Philistinism of the British especially, D. H. Lawrence thought. There is no doubt that he was put upon more than most during the war, and hardly any British civilian could equal him in intensity of perception, emotional violence, and the conviction that he had been deeply wronged. Yet for all his special white-hot outrage, Lawrence’s experience in wartime England and his almost continuous flight from it thenceforth—he returned only three times for brief visits—are emblematic of the behavior of many others propelled on their post-war travels as if by a wartime spring tightly compressed.15

In Questions of Travel, Caren Kaplan reviews “the British Literary Diaspora” in terms of “[t]he modernist critical tradition of conceptualizing exile as aesthetic gain.”16 Unlike Fussell who creates a canon of modern travel writing centering around “an elite group of British, male writers between the two World Wars,” Kaplan criticizes the ideology of modernist aesthetics by which the “historically generated subject becomes mystified and dehistoricized.” 17 Fussell’s description of Lawrence as a postwar travel writer shows an

26

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

example of what Kaplan condemns as “mystified and dehistoricized” rendering of modern travel literature. Like other critics, Fussell emphasizes Lawrence’s unrivalled instinct for the spirit of place: “Lawrence’s signature is his acute, almost neurotic, sense of place. . . . His sense of place makes him like no other writer.”18 But he dismisses political and racial contexts that not only Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place” but also the complicated motives behind his self-exile imply. Fussell hardly pays attention to the fact that, as a post-war traveler, Lawrence’s journey to foreign lands has something to do with his apocalyptic concern—a search for a new world—beyond his personally disastrous experience of the war. Consequently, Fussell’s reading of Lawrence’s travel writing presents Lawrence as an impulsive and talented traveler, rather than as a beleaguered exile. Not only as a “post-war” traveler but also as a self-exile, Lawrence’s journey to colonial frontiers is different from nineteenth-century European explorers in that his journey did not intend either to explore or to exploit Europe’s colonies. His journey rather features an escape from all mechanisms and systems that Europe represented. This is the context in which we can read Lawrence’s travel writing as a modernist text of a self-exile, rather than as a Victorian colonialist travelogue. Nonetheless, one might ask, is Lawrence’s search for a new world free from colonial implications and assumptions of the West? If his journey is different from that of nineteenth-century white explorers, how is it different? Mary Louise Pratt’s study, which explores the relation between nineteenth-century travel writing and colonialism, helps us to answer these questions. Examining nineteenth-century European travel writings (mainly about Africa), Pratt categorizes Western travel writing of the last century as “manners-and-customs descriptions,” the so-called “scientific, information-oriented branch of travel writing,” and “dramatic (sentimental) travel writing.”19 Pratt focuses on the fact that most European travel writing effaces people—Europeans as well as colonized others—and instead foregrounds the landscape of the colony. She comes to see, through her postcolonial reading of these landscape travel writings, the way in which landscape description of nineteenth-century travel writing pretends to be neutral, informational, and scientific, while hiding its desire for exploration/exploitation of the landscape: The explicit project of these explorer-writers, whether scientists or not, is to produce what they themselves referred to as “information.” Their task, in other words, was to incorporate a particular reality into a series of interlocking information orders—aesthetic, geographic, mineralogical, botanical, agricultural, economic, ecological, ethnographic, and so

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

27

on. To the extent that it strives to efface itself, the invisible eye/I strives to make those informational orders natural, to find them there uncommanded, rather than assert them as the products/producers of European knowledges or disciplines.20

Significantly, Pratt debunks this seemingly “neutral” description of the colonial landscape and argues that it ultimately aims to measure the possibility for the landscape’s future as a colony: “In scanning prospects in the spatial sense—as landscape panoramas—this [imperial] eye knows itself to be looking at prospects in the temporal sense—as possibilities for the future, resources to be developed, landscapes to be peopled or repeopled by Europeans.”21 Unlike Pratt’s description of European travel writing, Lawrence’s travel books do not seem to fit into these categories that Pratt has set. This might be because Lawrence’s travelogues, mostly written in the 1920s, do not fall within the “high” season of Western imperialism, the Victorian era, as well as because, perhaps as a partial social outcast, Lawrence had revolted against the ideology and propaganda of British imperialism. In addition, whereas most Western travel writing of the nineteenth century “centers landscape, separates people from place, and effaces the speaking self,”22 Lawrence’s travel writing persistently emphasizes the “inter-relatedness” of people and place. Further, if “the invisible eye/I”23 gazing at the landscape of the colony is a quintessential part of colonial project as a medium of desiring and appropriating others, Lawrence’s gaze at the landscape of the American West can be defined in a different way. For example, W. K. Buckley claims Lawrence’s gaze should be differentiated from other Europeans’ in terms of Lawrence’s critique of civilization.24 Lawrence’s looking at the desert of New Mexico, Buckley argues, is to be characterized as “a gaze that disentangle[s] itself from history in the ‘critique of culture,’” and rather serves to “subvert, like Cezanne, the ‘colonizing gaze,’ which insisted that our world be seen and described in official ways.”25 Thus Buckley declares, Lawrence “came looking at the American West in ways completely different from his British contemporaries.”26 John Alcorn in The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence (1977) also shows how twentieth-century travel writing differentiates itself from nineteenth-century travel writing. Without any suspicion of Western travel literature’s potential complicity with colonial assumptions, Alcorn reads Lawrence’s later works within the tradition of “the naturist movement—a movement which began with Hardy, and of which Lawrence is himself the culmination.”27 By removing “the traditional setting of the Victorian novel from the drawing-room into the open air of fields and woods,” Alcorn argues, the twentieth-century “naturist travelogue” rediscovers the vitalizing

28

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

power of nature.28 Thus, the theme of spirit of place, according to Alcorn, had dominated English fiction during the early twentieth-century: “By the time of Aaron’s Rod (1922) and The Plumed Serpent (1926), the climatic theme [the theme of spirit of place] has attained the status of a literary platitude, not only in the novel, but in every form of writing.”29 In short, Alcorn suggests that Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place” was a part of the literary mainstream of the time rather than Lawrence’s own creation. The naturist tradition Alcorn explains also emphasizes the interrelationship between people and place, but it mostly concerns the relationship between the narrating subject and the landscape, unlike Lawrence’s preoccupation with local people, including racial others. Lawrence’s travel writing, unlike either the travelogue of the previous century or the twentieth-century naturist travelogue, foregrounds people—Paolo and Maria, John, Il Duro, or Rosalino—as seen in Twilight in Italy and Mornings in Mexico. In Sea and Sardinia, Lawrence’s journey to the interior of Sardinia is ultimately achieved by his relationship, though temporary, with omnibus drivers and other passengers. Also, his archeological concern in Etruscan Places weaves together with local people’s life, such as that of local guides, peasants, and innkeepers. For this reason, Billy Tracy argues that “as a travel writer Lawrence belongs among the ethnologists” whose main concern lies in contact with people.30 Lawrence’s ethnological concern explains why the perspective on “spirit of place” presented in his later works is not to be confined to the naturist tradition that Alcorn describes. Even though Lawrence’s sensitivity to nature is almost unrivalled, as shown in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), this naturist movement does not fully account for the complicated motives and anxieties that Lawrence’s “spirit of place” presents: the issues, which Alcorn was blind to in his work, of Lawrence’s concern with racial otherness and his conflicting sense of identity as a selfexile as well as English citizen. With the exception of Mornings in Mexico, Lawrence’s travel books do not deal with colonial frontiers like those in Africa, Asia, or South America. But the marginal places like the Lago di Garda and Sardinia where Twilight in Italy and Sea and Sardinia are set also face the threat of the capitalist world system; not only colonized Mexicans (or Africans) but also Italian peasants are threatened by machine civilization, which relentlessly destroys an “organic” relationship with the land and local people. Although people have tended to associate colonialism mainly with bloody massacre or racial conflict, the motive behind the bloody history of Western colonialism was to secure a stable market and labor for the capitalist world economy. As Ania Loomba argues:

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

29

So far, we have defined colonialism as the forcible takeover of land and economy, and, in the case of European colonialism, a restructuring of non-capitalist economies in order to fuel European capitalism. This allows us to understand modern European colonialism not as some transhistorical impulse to conquer but as an integral part of capitalist development.31

For Lawrence, the issue of colonialism is a matter of expansion of a mechanical way of life. Against this seemingly invincible enemy of the “capitalist world system,” Lawrence tries to embrace locality and heterogeneity among different cultures. Although Lawrence gestures in most of his texts as if he is never interested in politics, nonetheless, his notion of “spirit of place” conveys his persistent resistance to the capitalist world system and the cultural monopoly of Western Christianity. This is the context in which Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place” can be extended into a postcolonial metaphor, which renders itself as a power of resistance. THE STORIES OF “DISPLACED” PEOPLE IN TWILIGHT IN ITALY Many critics have tried to see in Twilight in Italy, written in 1912 and 1913, the last peaceful traces of old Italy before the war, as Fussell mentions: “Twilight in Italy effuses something of Lawrence’s ecstasy and security. If not notable for its order and proportion, it is unforgettable for its lyric richness, visible first in the title.”32 The first few chapters of Twilight in Italy, though these were also much revised after the outbreak of the war, allow the reader to read them as part of traditional travelogue.33 But, except for “The Crucifix Across the Mountains” and “The Spinner and the Monks,” it is hard to find Lawrence’s sense of ecstasy and security in the rest of the book. The old Italy that Lawrence visited in 1912 and 1913 was at a crossroads, moving from the old agrarian society to the industrial future. Lawrence sees in Twilight in Italy the social changes of Italy, radically progressing in the early twentieth century, as a dilemma in their way of being because, for Lawrence, dissociation from the native land signifies alienation from life itself. In short, Twilight in Italy is Lawrence’s excruciating record of how the Western industrial/imperial expansion penetrates and finally uproots a traditional way of life. And this is the context in which his conception of “spirit of place,” which emphasizes the “organic” relationship between people and the land, cannot avoid carrying the power of resistance to Western colonialism. I will show in this section how Twilight

30

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

in Italy can be read as a (post)colonial discourse beyond the geographical focus that Lawrence’s sense of place implies. Following the traditional rendering of Italy in British literature, Lawrence considers Italy mainly in terms of the contrast between Southern and Northern Europe. Lawrence’s dualistic idea, as many critics have pointed out, stands out especially in Twilight in Italy (1916). The sensuous mode of life found in Italian highland peasants, throughout his first travelogue, contrasts with the Christianity of Northern Europe, which for Lawrence is one of the mechanisms that not only eliminates one’s self but also distorts a natural flow of desire within the self: We [Northern Europeans] continue to give service to the Selfless God, we worship the great selfless oneness in the spirit, oneness in service of the great humanity, that which is Not-Me. This selfless God is He Who works for all alike, without consideration. And His image is the machine which dominates and cows us, we cower before it, we run to serve it. For it works for all humanity alike. 34

In “The Crucifix across the Mountain,” Lawrence attempts to decentralize the monotheistic Judaism of Northern Europe through secularized and localized Christs, “who seemed the very soul of the place” (TI, p. 8). These local Christs embody Lawrence’s hope for multiple manifestations of religion and also show how religion can become indissolubly engaged with the spirit of the place; that is, these Crucifixes are “genuine expressions of the people’s soul” (TI, p. 9). Unlike the Selfless God of England, these secularized Christs do not demand the distinctions between body and spirit, between life and death. As the title “Twilight in Italy” suggests, what is at issue in this travelogue is not Lawrence’s dualism itself but his effort to resolve it, for example, by introducing the concept of the Holy Ghost “which relates the dual Infinites into One Whole, which relates and keeps distinct the dual natures of God” (TI, p. 46). Exposing the opposite relation of “the northern Infinite of the Not-Self ” and “the Italian habit of Self ” (TI, p. 74), Lawrence seeks the possibility of “communicating” and “relating” these incommensurable opposites. The metaphor of twilight “uniting sun and darkness, day and night, spirit and senses” (TI, p. 31) would eventually lead to the symbol of “the morning star” in The Plumed Serpent, which exists “on the threshold” and “across the border” like “a star between day and the dark.”35 These metaphors of “twilight” and “the morning star” significantly suggest the way Lawrence approaches and tries to overcome the fundamental binarism of

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

31

Western discourse. In New Mexico of Southwestern America, he finally sees the possibility of solving it in the American Indians’ way of being: With the Indians it is different. There is strictly no god. The Indian does not consider himself as created, and therefore external to God, or the creature of God. To the Indian there is no conception of a defined God. Creation is a great flood, for ever flowing, in lovely and terrible waves. In everything, the shimmer of creation, and never the finality of the created. Never the distinction between God and God’s creation, or between Spirit and Matter. Everything, everything is the wonderful shimmer of creation, . . . 36

It is therefore not really surprising that Lawrence declared, in the essay “New Mexico” written in December of 1928 in Southern France, “New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me for ever” (Phoenix, p. 142). Beyond Lawrence’s concern with Christianity and his metaphoric resolution of “twilight,” the antithesis of Italy and England in Lawrence’s text also questions the nineteenth-century Romantic tradition of Italy. Stefania Michelucci, for instance, argues that, even though Lawrence’s travel writing has often been discussed “in terms of a modern rendering of the Italy of the Romantic tradition of Shelley, Byron, Browning etc.,” Lawrence’s description of Italy as a place is rather “unconventional” and “unromantic.”37 Michelucci’s reading of Lawrence’s travel writing conflicts with earlier critics who paid attention to Lawrence’s lyrical and apolitical rendering of Italy. Most parts of Italy Lawrence describes—specifically the Lago di Garda and Sardinia—register the unromantic process of disintegration of old Italy caused by Europe and America’s capitalist expansion. Lawrence deplores in Twilight in Italy the role of the British Empire that has conquered the world “with her machines and her horrible destruction of natural life” (TI, p. 53). Whereas American Indians eventually offer Lawrence a clue to a future society, American imperialism presented in Sea and Sardinia is just “extremist in world-assimilation and world-oneness” (SS, p. 91). In fact, most of Lawrence’s anxiety throughout his travel writing is based on the conflict between Western industrial/ colonial forces and local cultures. Though Lawrence’s nostalgic feeling about old, medieval Italy is deeply embedded in Twilight in Italy, this feeling paradoxically comes from his fear of industrial expansion and from his pain in seeing the physical and psychological displacement of local people. At first, Lawrence’s sense of elation, especially in “The Crucifix Across the Mountains” and “The Spinner and the Monks,” does allow him to

32

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

idealize “the dark-skinned Italians” (TI, p. 31) as the sensuous opposites of the spiritual Northerners. This idealization of the Italians results in part from his understanding of European history: assuming that the Italians have hardly been influenced by social and cultural changes since the Renaissance, Lawrence places them almost outside the mechanical time of civilization. It is not until the third chapter “The Lemon Gardens,” in which Lawrence notices that “the machines were more to his [the padrone’s] soul than the sun” (TI, pp. 52–3), that a sense of despair begins to intervene in his idealization of the Italians. The outbreak of World War I also influenced his revision of Twilight in Italy during the summer of 1915, such that he added much “philosophy” and an apocalyptic vision to his previously pure travel sketches.38 Howard Booth, in writing of Lawrence’s apocalyptic concern, specifies the period when Lawrence developed his apocalyptic idea as between 1917 and 1925.39 But “The Lemon Gardens” of Twilight of Italy, written in 1913 and revised in 1915, shows that Lawrence already sensed the role of the British Empire throughout the world and began to develop an apocalyptic view in earlier years: Yet what should become of the world? There was London and the industrial countries spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine, it was intolerable. For away, beyond, beyond all the snowy Alps, with the iridescence of eternal ice above them, was this England, black and foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away. And England was conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of natural life. She was conquering the whole world. And yet, was she not herself finished in this work? She had had enough. She had conquered the natural life to the end: she was replete with the conquest of the outer world, satisfied with the destruction of the Self. She would cease, she would turn round; or else expire. (TI, pp. 53–4)

In spite of Lawrence’s desperate hope that England would turn its direction from the outer, material world to an inner, peaceful world, the ending of “The Lemon Gardens” strongly features an apocalyptic mood in his description of the “doomed” world, covered with “vast masses of machines” and “teeming swarms of disintegrated human beings” (TI, p. 54). If the outbreak of the war sparked Lawrence’s apocalyptic vision of the New World, this vision became specified and visualized through his conception of “spirit of place,” which encouraged him to value differences among different cultures and peoples. Although Lawrence’s idea of “spirit of place”

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

33

fully developed after the war, as seen in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), we can find his sense of “difference” between places even in the first page of “The Crucifix Across the Mountains,” originally written in 1912 and rewritten in 1915: “If only nations would realise that they have certain natural characteristics, if only they could understand and agree to each other’s particular nature, how much simpler it would all be” (TI, p. 3). In short, Lawrence’s wish for what Michael Ross calls “the inviolable autonomy of race and nation”40 was sustained from his first travelogue to his last: from Twilight in Italy to Etruscan Places, Lawrence’s defense of locality, heterogeneity, incongruity between cultures hardly changed. Most readings of Twilight in Italy have focused on Lawrence’s sense of “place” and his anxiety about modern Italy’s assimilation to the industrialized, mechanical world. But while critics have paid attention to the threat of industrial expansion into old, medieval Italy, they have seldom mentioned that this industrial expansion necessarily caused racial conflicts between different cultures, between less industrialized Italy and Northern European countries or America. The physical displacement from one’s native land to a foreign country usually demands fighting with all kinds of prejudices and hierarchies already set between dominant and subordinate cultures. In the episode “John,” the narrator talks about the pain and the psychological struggle that John went through in America as a “stranger and Dago”: We were shaken by the vivid, lambent excitement of the youth, we wished him to forget. We were shocked, too, in our souls to see the pure elemental flame shaken out of his gentle, sensitive nature. By his slight, crinkled laugh we could see how much he had suffered. He had gone out and faced the world, and he had kept his place, stranger and Dago though he was. (TI, p. 117)

Even though the narrator does not mention in detail Paolo’s and Il Duro’s life in America, it is not hard to infer that they have a similar story of their experience of America. The advice of the Madame, the leading woman of the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras Troupe in The Lost Girl, reveals a widespread prejudice about Italian men in the early twentieth century. Advising Alvina not to get married to Ciccio, Madame disparagingly repeats the prejudice about Italian men: they are “laborers in every country, just laborers and under-men always, always down, down, down—. . . And so—when they have a chance to come up—they are very conceited and they take their chance.”41 Lawrence’s idealized portrayal of Italian peasants described in the first few chapters is now replaced with the stories of “uprooted” people as seen

34

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

in “San Gaudenzio,” “John,” and “Italians in Exile.” Young Italians Lawrence met in Italy share the experience of emigration to the industrialized countries, mainly America. Il Duro had been in America for seven years and had come home with a fair amount of money; John (an American name of Il Giovann) had worked as a clerk in an American store for several years, came home for his required military service, and now plans to go to America again. The contrast between Il Duro and John in their experience of America is interesting. Whereas Il Duro can speak “a very little English” even though he had stayed in America for seven years, John, who had stayed there just for a couple of years, can speak English fluently. The experience of living in America has hardly influenced Il Duro’s psyche and personality. This is why, when he came home, he lived in an old way of life as if he had never been to America. Lawrence repeatedly compares Il Duro to “some strange animal god” (TI, p. 108) when he is among the vines, crouching before them: “It was like God grafting the life of man upon the body of the earth, intimately conjuring with his own flesh” (TI, p. 108). In contrast, John identifies his desire with the American material world, as his “degraded, sordid American clothes” symbolize. Lawrence grieves John’s inability to stick to his old life: Nothing was more painful than to see him standing there in his degraded, sordid American clothes, on the deck of the steamer, waving us good-bye, belonging in his final desire to our world, the world of consciousness and deliberate action. With his candid, open, unquestioning face, he seemed like a prisoner being conveyed from one form of life to another, or like a soul in trajectory, that has not yet found a resting place. (TI, p. 119)

These episodes, originally written in 1913, show that Lawrence already had his notion of “spirit of place” at this time and his belief that physical displacement from their native place affects people’s psychological life. Lawrence sees in most parts of Italy disastrous signals of the younger generation’s assimilation into the modern, industrialized world. Young Italians going to America for money and an Italian navvy “selling oneself to slave work” (TI, p. 165) are examples of people cutting themselves off from the spirit of their native place. While Paolo, Il Duro, and John were temporary residents of America, Italians exiled in Switzerland can never return to their homeland because they escaped from their required military service. Through these Italians “displaced” from their land, Lawrence explores how a different physical surrounding affects the spirit of people. Lawrence sees “a new spirit” particular

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

35

to Northern Europe—mechanical and senseless—growing in these Italian exiles: I could see these sons of Italy would never go back. Men like Paolo and Il Duro broke away only to return. The dominance of the old form was too strong for them . . . But ‘John’ and these Italians in Switzerland were a generation younger, and they would not go back, at least not to the old Italy. Suffer as they might, and they did suffer, wincing in every nerve and fibre from the cold material insentience of the northern countries and of America, still they would endure this for the sake of something else they wanted. They would suffer a death in the flesh, as ‘John’ had suffered in fighting the street crowd, as these men suffered year after year cramped in their black gloomy cold Swiss valley, working in the factory. But there would come a new spirit out of it. (TI, pp. 136–37)

He foresees that these young Italians will adopt a new spirit of industrial Northern Europe. But, for Lawrence, the physical and psychological displacement of these Italians is literally tragic and disastrous: “my soul was somewhere in tears, crying helplessly like an infant in the night” (TI, p. 138). Lawrence’s grief over “displaced” Italians foreshadows his own physical displacement from his homeland, which would happen several years later. Yet it is quite ironic that, seen in the context of his emphasis on the interrelationship between people and their native land, he hardly shows any sense of nostalgia for his own homeland. While James Joyce, another representative modern exile, was obsessed with the political reality of Ireland despite his physical dislocation, Lawrence was more obsessed with the outside world, beyond Europe, than the reality of England. Although the departure point of Lawrence’s apocalyptic vision was England (and Europe), England had already lost meaning as a place that he would finally return to. In turns, there exists a fundamental paradox between Lawrence’s own physical and psychological displacement and his conception of “spirit of place.” This paradox suggests that his notion of “spirit of place” can be, exclusively, applied to places outside highly industrialized Northern Europe and America. As Edward Nehls points out, “[o]f the three Italian travel books, Twilight in Italy is the most diffuse and depressing,”42; a romantic picture of Italian peasants is changed into a bleak picture of modern navvies who are “almost shockingly indifferent to their circumstances, merely callous to the dirt and foulness” (TI, p. 165). The old order represented by Paolo of San Gaudenzio, the old spinner, and the lemon garden, is relentlessly replaced

36

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

by the new order of industrial mechanism, the new spirit of Italy. New Italian high-roads symbolize “a quality that has entered Italian life now, if it was not there before” (TI, p. 164): that is, modern Italy is now entering into the capitalist world system. In Twilight in Italy, Lawrence might be recording a massive immigration of the Italians into America caused by the poverty of their homeland. Most young Italians are eager to learn English and plan to go to America as if all of their dreams depend on America, the Mecca of modern capitalism and imperialism: America “isn’t just a civilization, it is CIVILIZATION” (Phoenix, p. 115). The episode of “San Gaudenzio” starts with an upbeat story about Paolo and ends with Lawrence’s sense of despair about Giovanni’s choice of either America or the war: “it is all passing away. Giovanni [the first son of Paolo] is in America, unless he has come back to the War. . . . if they do not kill him in this War” (TI, p. 95). Perhaps this is why Lawrence, after the war, visits and records the more “primitive” and “unknown” Sardinia, a place that, he imagines, is freer from the net of European civilization than southern Italy. LAWRENTIAN SPONTANEITY AS A RESISTING VOICE IN SEA AND SARDINIA Unlike the long-planned and much expected journey to America, Lawrence’s trip to Sardinia occurred in January 1921 impulsively as an escape, in the middle of his ennui of his neighbors, from the stuffy Sicilian society full of expatriates and tourists. This impulsiveness, which characterizes the motive of his trip to Sardinia, permeates Lawrence’s second travel book, written in February 1921 immediately after his excursion. Even though the “upbeat” and “spontaneous” style of this travelogue has contributed to the popularity of the book, this “artful spontaneity” of the narrative can, I think, be read as a gesture of challenging the solemnity dominating the cultural authority of England.43 The “emotional” and “vulnerable” narrative voice of Sea and Sardinia interestingly contrasts with the traditional (objective) voice of other travel books. By focusing on the contrast of the narrative voice in Lawrence’s travel writing as opposed to other Western travel books, I will explore how Lawrence’s travel writing resists the myth of Western colonialist discourse disguised as “objective” and “neutral” narrative. While many critics have thought Twilight in Italy the most depressing travelogue among Lawrence’s travel books, they also agree about Sea and Sardinia (1921) as “one of the most delightful of Lawrence’s books” and “a travel-book in a more straightforward sense than Twilight in Italy.”44 Like Nehls, Kinkeed-Weekes points to the “artful spontaneity” of Sea and Sar-

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

37

dinia, which made it possible to transform what was annoying and uncomfortable in his travel experience into a dramatic, comic travel book.45 However, far from this stylistic vivacity, the period when Lawrence took his journey to Sardinia features his severe disillusionment with European civilization, which had deepened with his experience of the war. Consequently, more than any other works, Lawrence’s second travel book reflects his hope of finding a primitive society free from the net of European civilization. This is the context in which Lawrence in Sea and Sardinia builds up an imaginable space with “no history, no date, no race, no offering” in which to place Sardinia: Where then? Spain or Sardinia. Spain or Sardinia. Sardinia, which is like nowhere. Sardinia, which has no history, no date, no race, no offering. Let it be Sardinia. They say neither Romans, nor Phoenicians, Greeks nor Arabs ever subdued Sardinia. It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilisation. Like the Basque lands. Sure enough, it is Italian now, with its railways and its motor-omnibuses. But there is an uncaptured Sardinia still. It lies within the net of this European civilisation, but it isn’t landed yet. And the net is getting old and tattered. A good many fish are slipping through the net of the old European civilisation. Like that great whale of Russia. And probably even Sardinia. Sardinia then. Let it be Sardinia. (SS, p. 3)

Postcolonial critics have denounced the propensity of Western discourse to deny the history of the colonized as absence. But rather than because of his ignorance of the history of Sardinia or his colonialist intention to deny the history of Sardinia, it seems that Lawrence’s apocalyptic vision for a new world motivates his creation of Sardinia as an isolated island “with no history.” That is, Lawrence wanted to see in Sardinia a clue for a future society that would have been little influenced by the European civilization. As an old man of Sorgono, who is not sure of whether the war is over, symbolizes, the traditional life of Sardinia has little to do with the mechanical, linear concept of time. Lawrence’s creation of Sardinia “with no history and no date” reflects his desire to forget the time and the history of European civilization. It seems that Lawrence’s creation of Sardinia as a place, untouched by Western civilization, lies behind S. Ronald Weiner’s argument that Sea and Sardinia “offers the best illustration of Lawrence’s rhetorical use of travel.”46 Weiner claims that not only Sea and Sardinia but also Lawrence’s other travel books share the “fundamental urge that prompts his fiction: the conversion of his reader to an awareness of the living potential within and without.”47

38

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

But Weiner’s attempt to differentiate conventional (supposedly objective) travel writing from a “rhetorical use of travel” comes from his naturalistic belief that travel writing should consist of objective and factual descriptions. His argument thus does not sound much different from the ideology of Western travel writing as a colonial narrative, which has disguised its colonialist motives in the form of “science” or “information.” Just as the landscape travel writing of European explorers is, despite its narrative disguise, fundamentally a product of the colonialist project, Weiner’s distinction between objective reportage of travel and the “rhetorical use of travel” is also part of a Western colonialist (specifically modernist) discourse. In contrast to Weiner’s identification of travel writing with objective reportage, Wimal Dissanayake and Carmen Wickramagamage emphasize that “[t]ravel narratives, like any other form of writing, need to be seen as a form of complex verbal art.”48 If we see all travel literature as “products of rhetoricity,” they argue, the distinction between subjective and objective writing will break down.49 For instance, when, as Weiner claims, “Lawrence is less interested in showing his reader the island than in using his own experience of it to remake the reader,”50 how can we separate “showing” the island from “using” his own experience in Lawrence’s description of Sardinia? If some travel writer tries to “show” the place he/she visited, this process of “showing” the place always already includes the process of filtering it through the writer’s own social and cultural lens. In addition, Lawrence is little interested in “showing” (or objectively reporting) the island; he just says Sardinia has nothing to “show” as seen from the standard of the travel guide: There is nothing to see in Nuoro: which, to tell the truth, is always a relief. Sights are an irritating bore. Thank heaven there isn’t a bit of Perugino or anything Pisan in the place: that I know of. Happy is the town that has nothing to show. What a lot of stunts and affectations it saves! Life is then life, not museum-stuffing . . . I am sick of gaping things, even Peruginos. (SS, p. 150)

This passage succinctly shows what travel means to Lawrence and how he understands a sense of “traveling” in relation to a certain place: Lawrence does not seek any material—museum stuff—that would constitute a guidebook of Sardinia. He is instead interested in sauntering along “the rather inert, narrow, Monday-morning street” or seeing “the women having a bit of a gossip” and “an old crone with a basket of bread on her head” (SS, p. 150).

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

39

The sense of relief Lawrence feels because there is nothing to see in Sardinia captures the characteristic psyche of a traveler before modern tourism fully bloomed after World War II. Lamenting that we cannot go back to the sense of “travel” before tourism, Fussell distinguishes explorers (of the age of the Renaissance), bourgeois travelers, and modern tourists: “The genuine traveler is, or used to be, in the middle between the two extremes. If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché.”51 We can see Lawrence as belonging to the last generation of Fussell’s classic “traveler.” In “The Return Journey,” Lawrence confesses, “it is difficult to get a sense of a native population,” observing that “[e]verywhere are the hotels and the foreigners, the parasitism” (TI, p. 153). At the same time, he also finds there are local people who stick to their old way of life, living “isolated” from the industrialized world: “there is, unseen, this overshadowed, overhung, sordid mountain population, ledged on the slopes and in the crevices. In the wider valleys there is still a sense of cowering among the people” (TI, p. 153). This means that there was still a possibility of being a traveler in his time: as Anthony Burgess points out, “Lawrence’s journeys by post-bus or cold late train or on foot are in that great laborious tradition which produced genuine travel books.”52 As a traveler, Lawrence’s preoccupation with the traditional costume of Sardinia interestingly exemplifies his defense of local culture. Lawrence finds that the traditional black-and-white costume of Sardinia harmonizes with its wild, lonely landscape, which still keeps “[a]ll the strange magic of Sardinia” (SS, p. 71). He sees the great impact of the World War in the Sardinians’ change of clothing: Usually, however, the peasants of the South have left off the costume. Usually it is the invisible soldiers’ grey-green cloth, the Italian khaki. Wherever you go, wherever you be, you see this khaki, this grey-green war-clothing. How many millions of yards of the thick, excellent, but hateful material the Italian Government must have provided I don’t know: but enough to cover Italy with a felt carpet, I should think. It is everywhere. It cases the tiny children in stiff and neutral frocks and coats, it covers their extinguished fathers, and sometimes it even encloses the women in its warmth. It is symbolic of the universal grey mist that has come over men, the extinguishing of all bright individuality, the blotting out of all wild singleness. Oh, democracy! Oh, khaki democracy! (SS, p. 71)

40

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Universally distributed khaki war-clothing indicates that Sardinians’ traditional way of life has been destroyed by the imperialist/capitalist world economy which helped trigger World War I. For Lawrence, traditional clothing is not a matter of appearance; rather it symbolizes people’s mode of life, their history, and even their emotions. To a local tradesman asking “what he is doing in Sardinia,” Lawrence even answers, “[w]e [Lawrence and Frieda] have come to Sardinia to see the peasant costumes . . .” (SS, p. 109). A local, traditional costume is a symbolically significant part of what constitutes Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place.” It is thus not surprising to see that Lawrence becomes excited when he finds the long stocking-caps that local Sardinian men are wearing. On the way to Sorgono, a local town of Sardinia, Lawrence finds all the local men wearing long stocking-caps, which look like “a sort of crest, as a lizard wears his crest at mating time” (SS, p. 90). He does not overlook this seemingly worthless detail: It is a sign of obstinate and powerful tenacity. They are not going to be broken in upon by world-consciousness. They are not going into the world’s common clothes. Coarse, vigorous, determined, they will stick to their own coarse dark stupidity and let the big world find its own way to its own enlightened hell. Their hell is their own hell, they prefer it unenlightened. (SS, p. 91)

Throughout his trip to Sardinia, Lawrence feels a certain tension between the local culture of Sardinia and American imperialist force, which is ”extremist in world-assimilation and world-oneness” (SS, p. 91). Since his desire to find a new world, not contaminated by Western industrialism, is part of his goal throughout his travels, his anxiety about European and American expansionism is always there even when not on the surface. Although Lawrence is conscious that “[a]s sure as fate we are on the brink of American empire” (SS, p. 91), he nonetheless wishes that local Sardinians could keep their own tradition, their own locality, and thus do “the great fight into multifariousness” (SS, p. 92). The “Sorgono” episode also shows that Lawrence does not attempt to speak with any objective or authoritative voice, as do other Western travel books; his observations and descriptions of Sardinia are emotionally vulnerable and untrustworthy. In spite of his excitement with the long stocking-caps, his mood abruptly changes when he encounters an irresponsible host of a local inn and finds sordid streets in Sorgono:

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

41

I cursed the degenerate aborigines, the dirty-breasted host who dared to keep such an inn, the sordid villagers who had the baseness to squat their beastly human nastiness in this upland valley. All my praise of the long stocking-cap—you remember?—vanished from my mouth. I cursed them all, and the q-b for an interfering female. . . . (SS, pp. 99–100)

Instead of having a “neutral” and “objective” voice in describing Sardinia, the narrator has an extremely emotional and personal voice, based on Lawrence’s interactions with local people, and thus his sense of admiration and repulsion are constantly shifting. Not surprisingly thus, when he finds in the bar of that wretched inn “a big fire of oak-root, a brilliant flamy, rich fire” (SS, p. 100), Lawrence immediately forgives the dirty-breasted host and declares his rage gone. Along with emotional fluctuations, the lack of authority in Lawrence’s narrative reveals how Lawrence responds to the local culture and people during his journey. That is, by choosing the opposite narrative strategy to the “neutral” and “descriptive” voice of the conventional travel book, he refuses to let his travel writing be read as an authoritative text, which “represents” the place. Lawrence’s repudiation of the characteristic authority of travel writing probably has not a little to do with his challenge to the cultural authority of British Literature; the English, notoriously, censored The Rainbow and Women in Love. In addition, his critique of a “grand” narrative, which unifies small, personal voices with an indisputable authority53—to use Lawrence’s phrase, “imposing language”—is not irrelevant to his resistance to the colonialist desire of the West to build a unified world system: Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why his lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won’t last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him. (EP, p. 26)

In most readings of Sea and Sardinia, critics regard it as “perhaps the most charming of all the books Lawrence ever wrote” (Burgess, xii), but they seldom consider that its “spontaneous” narrative style, which is probably “never to be standardised” (EP, p. 32), is also related to his desire to avoid “imposing language” and “imposing works of art.”

42

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Toward Otherness: “A Little Ghost Inside You Which Sees Both Ways, or Even Many Ways” Haunting Mornings in Mexico Mornings in Mexico (1927), 54 written throughout 1924 except for the last episode, records Lawrence’s American life from 1922 to 1925 in Old and New Mexico. The first episode “Corasmin and the Parrots,” as if outlining the whole contents of the book, deals with a friction between different species or between different races.55 Through an (imagined) communication with Corasmin, the dog of his rented Mexican house, Lawrence realizes there are many different dimensions between the dog (Corasmin), the parrots mimicking Corasmin, the Indian Mozo (Rosalino), and Lawrence himself. But by using the term “dimension” instead of “hierarchy,” Lawrence here highlights differences between them without imposing any hierarchical order. Especially at the end of this episode, he calmly admits an unbridgeable gulf between a Mexican Indian, Rosalino, and a white British man, the narrator himself. And this recognition of difference extends into another recognition that no world, race, or species can everlastingly thrive on or rule others: Between us [Rosalino and the narrator] also is the gulf of the other dimension, and he wants to bridge it with the foot-rule of the threedimensional space. He knows it can’t be done. So do I. Each of us knows the other knows . . . With a grin, with a laugh we pay tribute to the other dimension. But Corasmin is wiser. In his clear, yellow eyes is the self-possession of full admission. The Aztecs said this world, our Sun, would blow up from inside, in earthquakes. Then what will come, in the other dimension, when we are superseded? (emphasis added, MM, pp. 16–7)

As many critics have agreed, Lawrence in Mornings in Mexico is concerned with the incompatibility between primitive and modern European consciousness, and, more importantly, explores the limits that both modes of life inevitably have. Lawrence does not lean either toward the primitive world or toward the civilized world, and his balancing between two incompatible worlds pervades his later works written in the 1920s. Lawrence embraces and respects the incompatibility originating from racial and cultural differences. The essay “Democracy,” written in 1919, shows that Lawrence’s recognition of “incompatible” individuality, an underlying theme throughout his works, is nothing other than his respect for the “otherness” of each individual, whether it is human or inhuman. In this essay, Lawrence anatomizes the ideology of the materially motivated, “self-betrayed” (Phoenix, p. 709) democracy of the West. Presenting Whitman’s idea of democracy—a

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

43

representative idea of American democracy—as “a horrible nullification of true identity and being” (Phoenix, p. 709), Lawrence tries to differentiate individuality as “the quick of the self ” (Phoenix, p. 709) from the false individuality of Western democracy. While redefining modern democracy in terms of “the living integrity of being” (Phoenix, p. 709), he argues for an irreducible “otherness” of individual things against all kinds of social categories and all the isms: Where each thing is unique in itself, there can be no comparison made. One man is neither equal nor unequal to another man. When I stand in the presence of another man, and I am my own pure self, am I aware of the presence of an equal, or of an inferior, or of a superior? I am not. When I stand with another man, who is himself, and when I am truly myself, then I am only aware of a Presence, and of the strange reality of Otherness. There is me, and there is another being. That is the first part of the reality. There is no comparing or estimating. There is only this strange recognition of present otherness. I may be glad, angry, or sad, because of the presence of the other. But still no comparison enters in. Comparison enters only when one of us departs from his own integral being, and enters the material-mechanical world. Then equality and inequality starts at once. (Phoenix, pp. 715–16)

Lawrence explains that the moment an evaluation system such as the superior and inferior enters, we fall into the material-mechanical world. He repudiates any social value or aim to abstract, generalize and compare human beings. More importantly, Lawrence’s sensitive response to the mystery of otherness is deeply related to his conception of “spirit of place,” which fundamentally calls into question homogeneous Oneness and universalization. Whereas postcolonialism problematizes the hierarchical relationship between center and periphery, Lawrence’s “spirit of place” makes the distinction itself between center and periphery invalid. Every place and people in Lawrence’s texts should be “self-centered” and has no need to force any “strangle-hold” on other places or people. Even though Lawrence and postcolonial critics use different terminologies, Lawrence’s awareness of “the strange reality of Otherness” can be understood in a postcolonial context that aims to remove any kind of hierarchy between the colonizer and colonized, and ultimately builds up a social atmosphere respecting differences between them. Since the essay “Democracy” was written before Lawrence’s actual contact with American and Mexican Indians, it is interesting to compare his idea of individuality in this essay with his presentation of native Mexicans in

44

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Mornings in Mexico. One might ask whether Lawrence’s belief in “irreducible” otherness of individuals includes racial others as well as Europeans. In “The Mozo,” Lawrence betrays his conflicting sense of identity as a white colonialist by parodying himself as a white monkey. Through this parody, Lawrence narrates the colonized history of Mexico and, more interestingly, contradictorily identifies himself with native Mexicans in some parts of this episode: So long as the devil does not rouse in us, seeing the white monkeys for ever mechanically bossing, with their incessant tick-tack of work. Seeing them get the work out of us, the sweat, the money, and then taking the very land from us, the very oil and metal out of our soil. They [white monkeys] do it! They do it all the time. Because they can’t help it. (MM, p. 36)

As Lawrence’s use of personal pronouns (“us” or “our soil”) shows, his shifting identity in this episode is intriguing. He wants to distance himself from white monkeys by emotionally identifying himself with Mexicans. He ridicules, from the native Mexican’s point of view, a Western social system (the “curious tricks” of white monkeys) in relation to white men’s conception of time, distance, and money. Nevertheless, he is acutely conscious of (and alert to) his own “white monkey-ness,” which used to treat the racial other as an inferior or a slave. His identification with Mexicans is necessarily disrupted when he becomes self-conscious about his social and biological status as one of the white monkeys: He [Rosalino] had been happy, therefore we were scheming to take another advantage of him. We had some devilish white monkey-trick up our sleeve; we wanted to get at his soul, no doubt, and do it the white monkey’s damage. We wanted to get at his heart, did we? But his heart was an obsidian knife.” (MM, p. 40)

As Lawrence compares Rosalino’s heart to an obsidian knife, which symbolizes an “invincible” spirit of Mexico, the narrator does not treat his mozo as a colonized victim. At the same time, Lawrence sympathizes and paradoxically identifies himself with Rosalino when he knows that his Indian mozo refused his military service: “He is one of those, like myself, who have a horror of serving in a mass of men, or even of being mixed up with a mass of men. He obstinately refused” (MM, p. 42). The episode of “The Mozo” starts with Lawrence’s

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

45

emphasis that his Indian mozo is different from other “masculine” Indian men. It seems inevitable that Lawrence would become sympathetic to Rosalino, who is shy, sensitive, and somewhat feminine; that is, Lawrence, who was also what the narrator calls here “a mother’s boy,” finds a self-reflected image in Rosalino: The difference lies in a certain sensitiveness and aloneness, as if he [Rosalino] were a mother’s boy. The way he drops his head and looks sideways under his black lashes, apprehensive, apprehending, feeling his way, as it were. Not the bold male glare of most of the Indians, who seem as if they had never, never had mothers at all. (MM, p. 32)

However, Lawrence’s description of Rosalino becomes double-edged between the narrator’s effort to see his Indian mozo as an equal human being and the narrator’s remaining sense of superiority. While white monkey-tricks are serious problems to Lawrence, he says that these tricks are just “amusing” to Rosalino. Thus, Rosalino looks as if he has no problem in working for the white monkeys and learning these white monkey tricks and their monkey-speech. Why does Lawrence take two different positions toward white monkey-tricks, the social values and systems of the West? Why is it not a problem for an Indian mozo to follow these tricks? Without knowing it, does Lawrence not allow himself to keep his sense of superiority so that he just patronizingly “gazes” at his Indian mozo willingly working for white monkeys and imitating their language like parrots? The portrayal of Rosalino captured in Mornings in Mexico reveals Lawrence’s mixed and conflicted sentiments about the Mexican others. Then again, we need to see that Lawrence is also aware that he is “observed” and “gazed” at by native people; the “centerless” eyes of the natives are always “staring” at Lawrence wherever he goes. There is always a mutual gaze in Lawrence’s texts between the narrator and racial others, even though it is usually a “mutual negation,” rather than a recognition of difference, otherness: “They [American Indians] stare at us as the coyotes stare us: the gulf of mutual negation between us” (MM, p. 90). Whereas the “colonial” gaze implicated in nineteenth-century travel writing usually does not allow any room for “the returning gaze of others,”56 Lawrence’s “gazing” at racial others, though it still contains his sense of superiority, includes his recognition of the returning gaze of others. That is, through his gazing, Lawrence abruptly encounters the reality of “otherness” of both himself and others, rather than, according to the European standards, onesidedly attempting to appropriate racial others and their different way of

46

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

being. Thomas R. Whitaker defines Lawrence’s awakening sense of racial otherness in Mornings in Mexico as “Lawrence’s Western path,” quoting Blake’s poem “Morning.”57 Whitaker sees Lawrence’s journey to the west as symbolizing the process of opening “the closed and self-sufficient [Western] ego,”58 encountering racial others, and finally accepting their “otherness.” Tracy also considers the published arrangement of Mornings in Mexico—not a chronological order—as emphasizing Lawrence’s awakening and gradually deepening sense of racial difference.59 Each episode of the first four chapters is bound up with one another as if they can be smoothly melted into one chapter. For example, in the first episode, the narrator describes the parrots yapping exactly like Corasmin, and in a later episode the image of the parrots overlaps with Rosalino mimicking a foreign language: But this is anticipating. In the obscurity of the zaguan he sits and pores, pores, pores over a school-book, learning to read and write. He can read a bit, and write a bit. He filled a large sheet of foolscap with writing: quite nice. But I found out that what he had written was a Spanish poem, a love-poem, with no puedo olvidar and voy a cortar—the rose, of course. He had written the thing straight ahead, without verse-lines or capitals or punctuation at all, just a vast string of words, a whole foolscap sheet full. When I read a few lines aloud, he writhed and laughed in an agony of confused feelings. And of what he had written he understood a small, small amount, parrot-wise, from the top of his head. Actually, it meant just words, sound, noise, to him: noise called Castellano, Castilian. Exactly like a parrot. (MM, p. 38)

To all the questions his master asks, Rosalino always gives, like a parrot, the same answer, “Come no, Senor? [How not, Senor?]” (MM, p. 18) As a writer with an acute sense of language, Lawrence perceives what it is like for a nonnative speaker to learn a foreign language; he knows that, for Rosalino, Spanish is “as foreign to him as Hindustani would be to an English farm-boy” (MM, p. 38). Rosalino’s parrot-like mimicking of Spanish has a lot in common with the sense of awkwardness that Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent feels in communicating with Kate. Despite Cipriano’s relatively fluent English, Kate, a native English speaker, feels his English is boring and trivial: “How trivial the words sounded! That was another boring thing about him [Cipriano]: his English seemed so trivial. He wasn’t really expressing himself. He was only flipping at the white oil that lay on his surface” (PS, p. 78). Lawrence has the same awkward feeling about John in Twilight in Italy who

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

47

had lived in America for several years: “Then ‘John’ began to talk, and he talked continuously, like a foreigner, not saying the things he would have said in Italian, but following the suggestion and scope of his limited English” (TI, p. 115). From his own experience of learning foreign languages like German, Italian, and even Spanish, Lawrence knows different nuances between languages lead to sometimes a very different understanding of and emotional responses to things and people. That is to say, language in Lawrence’s texts is another significant part that conveys the different “blood consciousness” of each place. Lawrence’s sense of otherness also allows him to sense that the local Mexican landscape is in discord with the remains of white Christian culture. In the wild landscape of Mexico in which “[t]he sense of nowhere is intense” (MM, p. 24), Lawrence finds Spanish Churches everywhere as marking points of the Mexican village, which otherwise has nothing to see. This Spanish church is a symbol of European colonialism and at the same time a symbol of “displaced” spirit: “The great church stands rather ragged, in a dense forlornness, for all the world like some big white human being, in rags, held captive in a world of ants” (MM, p. 24). Lawrence here uses the image of Mr. Gulliver held captive in the country of Lilliput.60 As Mr. Gulliver could not live with those tiny people in spite of mutual good will between them and him, Lawrence realizes the huge Spanish church disrupts the harmony between human life and landscape of Mexico: “Nowhere more than in Mexico does human life become isolated, external to its surroundings, and cut off tinily from the environment” (MM, p. 19). For Lawrence, the colonial symbol of the huge Spanish Church does not look grand or impressive enough to control the world of the others. As in The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence highlights a paradox of European colonialism: white colonizers have tried to conquer the world of racial others, but they have helplessly fallen into an inscrutable black hole, a self-destructive mechanism of colonialism. In “Indians and Entertainment” in which the incompatibility between the Indian and Western consciousness stands out, Lawrence gives warning to “leave off trying, with fulsome sentimentalism, to render the Indian in our own terms” (MM, p. 55). Then, what is Lawrence doing in his travel book? Isn’t Lawrence trying to present the Indian in his own terms? I think he is. The presentation of the American and Mexican Indians is Lawrence’s own version in that he tries to be honest about his own feeling about them. He quite often voices without hesitation his sense of repulsion from the strange black others. Yet, at the same time, although he translates “Indian Corn Dance” and “the Hopi Snake Dance” in an English version, he refuses to make any seemingly objective or authoritative gesture. Watching these

48

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Indian dances, he does not scruple to reveal that his understanding of them is limited: “What are they doing? Who knows? But perhaps they [American Indians] are giving themselves again to the pulsing, incalculable fall of the blood” (MM, p. 58). Although Wayne Templeton argues that “Lawrence claimed to be an authority [on Indians], . . . he is believed to this day to be an authority on Indians of the American Southwest,”61 it is unlikely that Lawrence himself “claimed” to be an authority on the American Indians. Rather than pretend to be authoritative and objective, Lawrence makes clear that he is making a lot of assumptions about the Indians while appropriating them through his own ideas about politics and religion. Lawrence also knows what is the problem with white man’s (generalized) presentation of the Indian: “You’ve got to de-bunk the Indians, as you’ve got to de-bunk the Cowboy. When you’ve de-bunked the Cowboy, there’s not much left. But the Indian bunk is not the Indian’s invention. It is ours” (MM, p. 54). Lawrence seemed aware that the generalized version of the Indians was the projection of Western (colonialist) desire—perhaps represented and proved by Lawrence’s projection of his own vision and desire onto the American and Mexican Indians. This is why he could not suggest any other possibility in representing the Indians besides the choice of “either sentimentality or dislike” (MM, p. 54). Several decades later, Robert Berkhofer in his work The White Man’s Indian (1979) confirms Lawrence’s perception of European “invention” of the Indian: Since the original inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere neither called themselves by a single term nor understood themselves as a collectivity, the idea and the image of the Indian must be a White conception. Native Americans were and are real, but the Indian was a White invention and still remains largely a White image, if not stereotype. According to a modern view of the matter, the idea of the Indian or Indians in general is a White image or stereotype because it does not square with present-day conceptions of how those peoples called Indians lived and saw themselves.62

The problem of generalization and idealism, which has been constantly raised in the representation of the Indians, should not be harshly attributed to Lawrence’s personal limitations. Templeton’s sentencing of Lawrence as a representative colonialist does not seem fair to Lawrence in that if anyone uses the term “Indian,” as Robert Berkhofer argues, he/she will never wholly escape from the pitfalls of generalization. As Templeton’s preoccupation with language in his essay reveals, a large part of the problem lies in the signifying system of Western discourse.

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

49

The view that every possible concern and involvement with racial others is ultimately colonialist, as many western “radical” critics see it, undesirably results in an unbridgeable gulf between colonizer and colonized. Lawrence, of course, pays attention to the difficulties implicated in the interracial encounter and stresses a definite gap, hard to cross and compromise over, between different cultures and races: The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united. They are not even to be reconciled. There is no bridge, no canal of connexion . . . To pretend to express one stream in terms of another, so as to identify the two, is false and sentimental. The only thing you can do is to have a little Ghost inside you which sees both ways, or even many ways. But a man cannot belong to both ways, or to many ways. One man can belong to one great way of consciousness only. He may even change from one way to another. But he cannot go both ways at once. Can’t be done. (emphasis added, MM, pp. 55–6)

While acknowledging difficulties of cultural communication between different peoples, he also opens up the possibility of criticizing his/her own identity, as hinted in his metaphor of “a little Ghost.” Although Lawrence argues that there is “no bridge, no canal of connexion” (MM, p. 55) between two different consciousnesses, this does not mean he sticks to an “essentialist” idea of colonizer and colonized. Lawrence himself proves the possibility of criticizing his own identity as a British citizen. He cannot “belong” to the Indian way of consciousness, but he can “see” the difference between the Indian and Western ways of consciousness and consequently “see” the limits that both ways of life have. Even while arguing that one cannot belong to two different blood-consciousnesses, Lawrence still does not give up the possibility that two different worlds might co-exist peacefully side by side: The Indians accept Jesus on the Cross amid all the rest of the wonders. The presence of Jesus on the Cross, or the pitiful Mary Mother, does not in the least prevent the strange intensity of the war-dance. The brave comes home with a scalp. In the morning he goes to Mass. Two mysteries! The soul of man is the theatre in which every mystery is enacted. Jesus, Mary, the snake-dance, red blood on the knife: it is all the rippling of this untellable flood of creation, which, in a narrow sense, we call Nature. (MM, p. 62)

50

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

The peaceful co-existence of two different worlds would be possible only under the condition that any side does not impose hierarchies on the other. In his imagined world, Christians do not degrade snake-dancers as inferior or superstitious people and do not force their conversion into Christians. This is a fantastically unrealistic and utopian world. What is important in this passage, however, is not to determine whether this kind of world is realistically possible but to see what kind of ideal society Lawrence was dreaming of. Whitaker regards “Market Day” as a climax of Mornings in Mexico, which “completes the gradual progress toward acceptance and true meeting.”63 Lawrence’s sense of elation in this episode—“An intermingling of voices, a threading together of different wills. It is life. The centavos are an excuse” (MM, p. 49)—seems at odds with his life-long isolation from people. However, as Lawrence’s emphasis on the Holy Ghost shows, the significance of “relating” oneself to others and to one’s physical surroundings is one of the most prevalent elements in Lawrence’s texts. Significantly, at the end of the episode, Lawrence introduces again the metaphor of the evening star as seen in Twilight in Italy and The Plumed Serpent: “Like the evening star, when it is neither night nor day. Like the evening star, between the sun and the moon, and swayed by neither of them. The flashing intermediary, the evening star that is seen only at the dividing of the day and night, but then is more wonderful than either” (MM, p. 52). The contacts between peoples in the market are nothing more than temporary and elusive, like the flowing of streams. Nonetheless, Lawrence considers this moment of physical contact a vital clue in our life. It seems that he thinks, only through this bodily exchange, can we overcome the “fixed” values and systems of Western society represented in the forms of binarism between the spirit and the body, and between the sun and the moon. LAWRENCE’S HISTORICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ETRUSCANS AGAINST IMPERIALISM IN ETRUSCAN PLACES Lawrence’s last travel book Etruscan Places (1932) was written in Italy two years after he finished his American life of three years in September 1925. 64 Some critics describe Etruscan Places as if it is almost completely estranged from Lawrence’s “leadership” politics and finally presents his “mature” idea about life and death, especially in relation to his impending death.65 This travelogue centered round the Etruscan tombs is certainly based on Lawrence’s preoccupation with matters of life and death. But, at the same time, Lawrence’s critique of the Roman Empire, which starts in the first page of the book, leads to his deep penetration into general aspects of Western imperialism. That is, Lawrence’s playful imagination of history evokes the “repressed”

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

51

culture of “life-loving” Etruscans while repudiating the Roman imperial history built on the basis of the desire for death, destruction, and domination. I will explore in this travel book how Lawrence’s historical imagination relates to his critique of the colonial history of Western civilization, which is, for Lawrence, indissolubly bound up with life and death. In doing so, I will show how politics in Lawrence’s texts is intimately involved with living; in other words, for Lawrence, the critique of imperialism is nothing other than a matter of life, rather than exclusively a matter of politics. In the midst of the search for a clue about the mystery of life and death in Etruscan Places, Lawrence questions all the demarcations between modern science and ancient religion, between a scientific discovery and an act of prayer. He sees these two seemingly opposite ways of thinking both as the result of practice of divination, that is, as “an act of pure attention.” 66 This questioning enables him to challenge, in a fundamental way, a formulated myth of “objectivity” in Western discourse, which also has supported the neutral/ objective voice of Western travel writing: It is the same with the study of stars, or the sky of stars. Whatever object will bring the consciousness into a state of pure attention, in a time of perplexity, will also give back an answer to the perplexity. But it is truly a question of divination. As soon as there is any pretence of infallibility, and pure scientific calculation, the whole thing becomes a fraud and a jugglery. But the same is true not only of augury and astrology, but also of prayer and of pure reason, and even of the discoveries of the great laws and principles of science. Men juggle with prayer today as once they juggled with augury; and in the same way they are juggling with science. Every great discovery or decision comes by an act of divination. Facts are fitted round afterwards. But all attempts at divination, even prayer and reason and research itself, lapses into jugglery when the heart loses its purity. (EP, pp. 55–6)

Lawrence’s positioning against the authority of pure reason and science provided him a certain sense of freedom to create Sardinia with no history; it also makes possible the reconstruction of the ancient history of Etruria with disregard to the authoritative version of European history. Through these recreations of local societies, Lawrence calls into question what is objective and what is historical fact available to modern people. By questioning and finally breaking down the distinctions between religion and science, between the subjective and objective, and between fiction and fact, Lawrence shows that our interpretation of facts and discoveries, through either modern science or

52

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

history, cannot be objective or neutral, as seen in his version of ancient Etruria, Etruscan Places. Tracy sees Lawrence’s imagined reconstruction of the Etruscan culture as mythmaking, far from historical fact. Taking evidence from George Dennis, a representative archeologist of ancient Etruria, Tracy argues that Rome was not Etruria’s opposite, but “actually its counterpart and heir.”67 What most concerned Lawrence, however, was not the “official” history of Rome and Etruria but his own way of seeing the history of Rome and Etruria. Many critics have said that the lack of written history of Etruria makes possible Lawrence’s reconstruction of this ancient society. But Lawrence’s way of understanding historical facts challenges our fixed and taken-for-granted way of thought in relation to (especially academic) authority. For example, we have learned, without any suspicion of the authoritative voice of history, that Greek and Roman culture is the origin of the European civilization. But Lawrence dares to denounce Greek and Roman culture and sees this as the main force changing forever our relationship with God and nature: The old religion of the profound attempt of man to harmonise himself with nature, and hold his own and come to flower in the great seething of life, changed with the Greeks and Romans into a desire to resist nature, to produce a mental cunning and a mechanical force that would outwit Nature and chain her down completely, completely till at last there should be nothing for free in nature at all, all should be controlled, domesticated, put to man’s meaner uses. (EP, p. 75)

Given that the Roman Empire has been considered the root of Western civilization, Lawrence’s restoration of the Etruscan culture as the main cultural heritage of modern Italy challenges in itself the established authority of European history. Although some critics have valued Etruscan Places as a philosophical book about life and death, rather than a travel book, it seems to me that its prominent feature lies in its “unconventional” way of reconstructing an ancient history of the Etruscans against the Roman Empire. Janik regards Lawrence’s Etruscan Places as a thematic turning point between his “leadership” novels and his last novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)68—a movement from his obsession with political power to “the overriding importance of physical contact—of touch” in the last novel.69 Janik sees this modification as a sign that Lawrence began to dissociate himself from his preoccupation with politics. Many critics seem to see Lawrence’s denunciation of the Roman imperialism in Etruscan Places as a sign of his disillusionment with politics, especially as presented in his

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

53

“leadership” novels. When Lawrence accounts for the cultural continuity between the Etruscan and the Italian of today, he looks less obsessed with, and more detached from, politics: And I thought again, how much more Etruscan than Roman the Italian of to-day is: sensitive, diffident, craving really for symbols and mysteries, able to be delighted with true delight over small things, violent in spasms, and altogether without sternness or natural will-to-power. The will-to-power is a secondary thing in an Italian, reflected on to him from the Germanic races that have almost engulfed him. (EP, p. 109)

Lawrence attributes the fascist mood surrounding Italy to German Nazism when he says that the modern Italians and the ancient Etruscans both have a temperament “without sternness or natural will-to-power.” However, it must be remembered that Lawrence always repudiated the will-to-power even in his “leadership” phase. Unlike fascists’ imposition of their will on other people, a Lawrentian political leader like Ramón in The Plumed Serpent searches for an ideal relationship with followers, not based on the domination-submission power relationship.70 The change of tone in dealing with Western imperialism in Etruscan Places, which is different from the prophetic voice of The Plumed Serpent, should not be identified as indifference to politics in general. Lawrence’s position toward the Roman Empire rather makes his critique of Western imperialism more obvious in Etruscan Places than in his earlier works. In other words, not only is Lawrence hardly uninterested in politics, but also his anti-colonial position, already seen in Twilight in Italy, is still present in his last travel book. Lawrence’s critique of the conquering history of Western imperialism became increasingly articulate during his sojourn in Southwest America and Mexico, and his critical voice remains in his last travel book Etruscan Places written in 1927. Opposed to the Western colonial authority which forces “suppression of difference,”71 Lawrence’s subtle sense of differences even inside the Etruscan culture goes beyond the conventional understanding of a culture as monolithic and uniform: It is interesting to find it so different from Cerveteri. The Etruscans carried out perfectly what seems to be the Italian instinct: to have single, independent cities, with a certain surrounding territory, each district speaking its own dialect and feeling at home in its own little capital, yet the whole confederacy of city-state loosely linked together by a common religion and a more-or-less common interest. Even to-day Lucca

54

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing is very different from Ferrara, and the language is hardly the same. In ancient Etruria this isolation of cities developing according to their own idiosyncrasy, within the loose union of a so-called nation, must have been complete . . . To get any idea of the pre-Roman past we must break up the conception of oneness and uniformity, and see an endless confusion of differences. (EP, pp. 37–8)

Lawrence’s acknowledgment of the co-existence of multiple cultures even within a society contrasts with the colonialist systems of Europe that standardized local, racial differences. If we sum up Western colonial projects as a desire for a grand Empire which attempts to make flat all the differences between widely separate geographical locales, Lawrence’s “spirit of place” can be understood as an impulse for “the odd spontaneous forms that are never to be standardised” (EP, p. 32), especially found in the Etruscan mode of life. Elleke Boehmer’s definition of colonialism, in particular, shows how Lawrence’s repudiation of an authoritative voice relates to the issue of colonialism. Boehmer defines colonialism as a process of achieving authority in the control of racial others, and she reveals how Western colonialists have read, interpreted, and finally controlled the “uncanny” differences of colonized others: Colonialism was not different from other kinds of authority, religious or political, in claiming a monopoly on definitions in order to control a diverse, unstable reality . . . dominance was gained first by the constant incorporation and suppression of difference, and then also by a vigorous reiteration of authoritative meanings.”72

As Lawrence’s celebration of an “endless confusion of difference” (EP, p. 38) shows, Lawrence would have been the last person to claim “a monopoly on definition in order to control a diverse, unstable reality.” If Western colonialism has been based on monopolistic administration of socio-economies and cultures, Lawrence challenges the very authority of colonialism through his defense of diversity and contradiction: “all creatures are potential in their own way, a myriad manifold consciousness storming with contradictions and oppositions that are eternal, beyond all mental reconciliation” (EP, p. 69). In a letter sent to Rolf Gardiner on 4 July 1924 from New Mexico, Lawrence also reveals how much he hates the “perfect,” “universal” picture of the world created by European Christian culture:

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

55

Myself I am sick of the farce of cosmic unity, or world unison. It may exist in the abstract—but not elsewhere. And we may all find some abstract ground to agree on. But as soon as it comes to experience, to passion, to desire, to feeling, we are different. And the great racial differences are insuperable. We may agree about abstract, yet practical ideas, like honesty, speaking the truth, and so on. And there it ends.—The spirit of place ultimately always triumphs. An American of pure English descent is different in all his reactions, from an Englishman. To tell the truth, I am sick to death of the Jewish monotheistic string. It has become monomaniac. I prefer the pagan many gods, and the animistic vision. . . . And I have known many things, that may never be unified: Ceylon, the Buddha temples, Australian bush, Mexico and Teotihuacan, Sicily, London, New York, Paris, Munich—don’t talk to me of unison. No more unison among man than among the wild animals— coyotes and chipmunks and porcupines and deer and rattlesnakes. They all live in these hills—in the unison of avoiding one another. As for ‘willing’ the world into shape—better chaos a thousand times than any ‘perfect’ world. (Letters, V, p. 67)

That is to say, the belief in the different spirit of a different place necessarily leads Lawrence to recognize that “the great racial differences are insuperable”; this recognition makes it possible to set himself constantly against the monotheistic, unified world picture. Boehmer’s criticism of the monopoly of colonialist epistemology is congruent with Lawrence’s critique of colonialist desire always justified in the name of civilization and Christianity. Although I will discuss in detail the nature of power presented in the “leadership” novels in the following chapters, understanding political power in a Lawrentian sense also helps us to read his travel writing. In order to understand Lawrence’s idea of politics, we should put aside a too narrow definition of political power. Lawrence regards power as natural and inevitable in human existence: “Power is there, and always will be. As soon as two or three men come together, especially to do something, then power comes into being, and one man is a leader, a master. It is inevitable.”73 Although Lawrence accepts power as positive, he also makes clear that power should be differentiated from “bullying” or “the worship of mere Force.”74 For Lawrence, politics and religion are not separable, and both are deeply involved with the mystery of life and death. The concept of political power in a Lawrentian sense is visualized in his creation of a political-religious leader, “the Lucumo, the religious prince” (EP, pp. 51–2) in Etruscan Places. Etruscan political/ religious leaders, Lucumones, are the people who embody “the living clue to

56

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

the pure fire, to the cosmic vitality” (EP, p. 51), not the people who perform practical, functional works. Lawrence believed that politics should exist for the purpose of saving people’s souls from the mess of money and machine; that is, politics in Lawrence’s texts, beyond our common sense, is indissolubly involved with people’s souls. Thus, even when the issue of politics does not stand out in his travel writings, Lawrence’s concern with politics is always there just under the surface. Lawrence does not use politically charged language even when he describes a political situation. As Lawrence betrays his rage against the Fascist mood of the Italian government in Etruscan Places, he just calmly says, “it is not for me to put even my little finger in any political pie” (EP, p. 100). In spite of Lawrence’s seemingly de-politicized gesture, Etruscan Places is fully charged with a cultural and political tension between simple, lifeloving Etruscans and all-conquering Romans. The discovery of the Etruscan quality inevitably leads to his outrage against the Roman who wiped out the Etruscans entirely “in order to make room for Rome with a very big R” (EP, p. 1). He gives a warning against the present Fascist regime of Italy, which considers itself as heir of the Roman Empire and attempts to revive its tradition. Even though Lawrence does not articulate the relationship of the Romans and the Etruscans as the colonizer and colonized, he obviously denounces the colonial history of the Roman Empire, and consequently the present Fascist mood of Italy. It can be confusing to see that Lawrence’s dethronement of the Roman Empire in Etruscan Places contradicts his position in the essay “Aristocracy” in which he admires Caesar and Cicero as natural aristocrats: “So Caesar and Cicero are both strictly aristocrats. Lacking these two, the fist century B. C. would have been far less vital, less vividly alive.”75 Lawrence’s “aristocrats” are the ones who “make a new connection” in the relation of man and the universe. In this essay, Caesar is defined as an aristocrat who “put men into a new relation with the universe” (Phoenix II, p. 477), not as a Roman conqueror who wiped out the Etruscans. This different evaluation of Caesar allows us to assume that there may have been a change in his allocation of hierarchy and conquest between this essay and Etruscan Places. In “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” and “Aristocracy,” written in July and early August of 1925, Lawrence accepts the hierarchy existing in the chain of being as a law of nature and even endorses the view that “one race of man can subjugate and rule another race” (Phoenix II, p. 468): It is nonsense to declare that there is no higher and lower. We know full well that the dandelion belongs to a higher cycle of existence than the

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

57

hartstongue fern, that the ant’s is a higher form of existence than the dandelion’s, that the thrush is higher than the ant, that Timsy the cat is higher than the thrush, and that I, a man, am higher than Timsy. What do we mean by higher? Strictly, we mean more alive. More vividly alive. The ant is more vividly alive than the pine-tree. We know it, there is no trying to refute it. It is all very well saying that they are both alive in two different ways, and therefore they are incomparable, incommensurable. This is also true. (Phoenix II, p. 467)

However, before we hastily sentence Lawrence as a colonialist who justifies a hierarchy between races, we need to see how his ideas would be different from other colonialist discourses. Defining hierarchies in the chain of being, Lawrence distinguishes the level of “species, of types, of races, of nations” from the level of “single individuals.” According to Lawrence, in the level of “individual being” (that is, in the fourth dimension), creatures are “incomparable and incommensurable” (Phoenix II, p. 467); in short, Lawrence’s conception of hierarchy is mixed between the self-contradictory ideas that creatures have hierarchies between them and simultaneously they have “incomparable and incommensurable” individuality. This confusion in Lawrence’s conception of hierarchy leads to another confusion in his justification of conquest. In the instance that any race destroys (or subjugates) other races, the determining factor dividing the destroyer and the destroyed is what he called “vitality.” The excuse by which Lawrence justifies conquest by a stronger race is quite different from that of typical colonialist expansion: “There will be conquest, always. But the aim of conquest is perfect relation of conquerors with conquered, for a new blossoming” (Phoenix II, p. 472). In other words, any race with strong vitality can destroy an old declining race under the excuse of revitalizing the latter, not for the forcible takeover of property and labor. Nonetheless, we want to ask, is Lawrence’s justification of conquest justifiable? Who decides which race is “more alive”? Isn’t this another version of colonialism? It is true that Lawrence embraces the hierarchal relationship between people, say, between a few aristocrats like Ramón and the mass. Problematically, his conception of hierarchy occurs throughout his “leadership” novels. As I mentioned in my introduction, one of the main goals in this study is to explore the complicated and contradictory relationship between Lawrence’s notion of hierarchy and his sense of “difference” implied in his notion of “spirit of place.” His idea of “spirit of place,” arguing that every place and people should be different and self-centered, evidently conflicts with his justification of domination, which necessarily causes “bullying” and “will-to-power.”

58

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

It is difficult to place his notion of hierarchy among his other ideas; still, while this contradicts his sense of difference and otherness, it does not exactly match with Western colonialist ideas because Lawrence’s definition of hierarchy, introducing his idea of “vitality” as its determining factor, is definitely different from colonialists.’ In fact, in human history the conquest that aims at a “perfect relation of conquerors with conquered, for a new blossoming” (Phoenix II, p. 472) has never happened; in these essays Lawrence’s statements sometimes sound like an incomprehensible rhetoric. If we follow Lawrence’s notion of hierarchy presented in the essay “Aristocracy,” it looks like Romans’ conquest of the Etruscans can be justified insofar as the former has strength and vitality. But Lawrence’s justification of conquest does not last long, whether in The Plumed Serpent or Etruscan Places. As I will show in Chapter Four, even though many critics might believe that Lawrence’s “leadership” novels embody a dominationsubmission paradigm, Lawrence consistently problematizes the hierarchy between races in these novels, especially in The Plumed Serpent. Lawrence sees the Europeans’ invasion into Mexico as unjustifiable and finally selfdestructive. He explores the self-destructive mechanism of Western colonialism from the inside, through the eyes of a European male writer. He tracks down in The Plumed Serpent how the colonial history of Europe has affected its own mode of being represented by Kate, his white Western protagonist, and Lawrence himself, as well as the mode of life of colonized Mexicans. Similarly, Lawrence’s anti-colonialist position against colonial conquest leads to his symbolic dethronement of the Roman Empire in Etruscan Places. That is, Lawrence is rewriting, through his historical imagination, the colonial history of Europe by switching the core of the European culture from the “imposing” Roman Empire to the “life-loving” Etruscan society. Lawrence’s anxiety about the industrial, colonialist expansion of the West throughout his travel books reflects his consistent concern with local people of various places. In the introduction to D. H. Lawrence and Italy, Burgess says “[i]t is the anonymous people in these Italian books who have become immortal for us.”76 In other words, it is local people in Lawrence’s travel books that make the places—the Lago di Garda, Sardinia, Mexico, and even Etruscan tombs—memorable and finally “immortal.” Burgess’ statement suggests how Lawrence’s sense of place is deeply engaged with people throughout his travel writings. As Fussell points out, if Lawrence belonged to the last generation of the classic traveler, then, Lawrence’s travel books contain the last traces of travel literature as a literary genre; Fussell’s classic sense of “travel” became almost out of the question after World War II. As a between-the-wars traveler and also a modern tourist, Lawrence records the

Place, Difference, and Otherness in Lawrence’s Travel Writing

59

last traces of local people who still have what he called an “organic” relationship with their land. This recording also includes his sense of despair and pain in seeing people “displaced” from their native land and helplessly “assimilated” to the capitalist world system. This is why his notion of “spirit of place” should not be understood, as earlier Lawrence critics thought, just as some sort of medium to guarantee his “sensuous” and “spontaneous” descriptions of diverse locales. Lawrence’s travel writings are not only his desperate (not objective) recording of local lives still available in some places, but also the record of his “ongoing” fight with increasingly expanded machine civilization. His critique of Western civilization is inevitably limited, but this limitation does not fundamentally undermine his effort to keep the locality of each place alive through his notion of “spirit of place.”

Chapter Two

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod: Exploring Italy as a New Place

Although Jeffrey Meyers points out that critics have ignored the crucial importance of The Lost Girl as a transitional novel,1 it seems to me that not only The Lost Girl (1920) but also Aaron’s Rod (1922) deserve more attention as transitional novels in terms of national and racial identity, the Lawrentian sense of place, and sexuality. With their transgression against what English culture has represented, Alvina Houghton and Aaron Sisson, the protagonists of The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod, respectively, both become “lost” to their civilized world and come to stand on the threshold of the “uncertain” world, turning from a stable status as a British citizen to an uprooted wanderer, from their attachment to their native places to their search for a new place, and from the heterosexual to the homosocial. Graham Hough rightly points to the significance of Italy as a new place for Lawrence around the time when Lawrence had written The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod: “What really interested Lawrence at this time, what was really making him live anew, was Italy and the fresh possibilities of life he had discovered there.”2 These two novels certainly explore those possibilities of Italy as a new place and a new way of life before Lawrence’s exploration of the spirit of Italy is, to use Phillip Herring’s words, “soon eclipsed by a new preoccupation: the ‘primitive’ mind and America.”3 Keeping in mind that The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod feature a transitional phase moving from the European mode of life to the “primitive” way of life (ultimately moving to the world of The Plumed Serpent), this chapter examines the importance of Italy as an alternative locale to industrialized Europe. Particularly focusing on the way in which Alvina’s and Aaron’s sense of disorientation—their sense of being “lost”—is related to the different spirits of England and Italy, this chapter will show how the spirit of each place shapes and determines the meaning of these protagonists’ self-exile. These novels, written in 1920 and 1921 when Lawrence was preparing for departure to America, significantly mark his dissociation from a 61

62

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

European mode of life while anticipating the burgeoning American life.4 Although Lawrence received Mabel Dodge Sterne’s invitation to America after he finished both novels,5 The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod exhibit many metaphors and implications related to American Indians and the future journey to America. For Lawrence, Italy was like a stepping-stone to the New World, where he ambitiously planned to explore the possibility of an ideal society, what he called Rananim. But this does not mean that Italy as an alternative place to Europe was insignificant in comparison to the American continent. As a literary background of Lawrence’s works, Italy was related to most of Lawrence’s writing career throughout his lifetime, and during his frequent stays in Italy he produced three travel books—Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia (1921), and Etruscan Places (1932)—and two novels—The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod—as well as a lot of essays and poems published in Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923). Despite the fact that Italy is geographically part of Europe, it has significance in Lawrence’s texts as the cultural opposite to England. The antithetic spirits of England and Italy dominate the “selfexiled” world of Alvina and Aaron, even though the significance of Italy as a place in Aaron’s Rod does not stand out as much as in The Lost Girl. Considering that Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place” is much concerned with local villages or towns, untouched by Western industrialism, rather than highly industrialized big cities, it is not surprising that Aaron, who travels around big cities of Italy, does not respond to and interact with the spirit of Italy as deeply as does Alvina, who is located in the primitive village of Pescocalascio. Lawrence in Aaron’s Rod is, rather, preoccupied with his attempt to reverse what he saw as the wrongly placed gender roles, the dominance of women after World War I. And this relative lack of concern with the spirit of place in Aaron’s Rod is also quite different from Lawrence’s later “leadership” novels, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent, where his leadership politics is bound up with the indigenous spirit of Australia and Mexico. Nonetheless, Alvina and Aaron both are self-exiled wanderers, to use Paul Fussell’s words, who “tak[e] flight to escape something hateful at home.”6 If exile signifies at once a voluntary and a forced absence from one’s native land,7 Alvina’s and Aaron’s exile to Italy, triggered by the “repressive” English culture, can be differentiated from exile usually enforced by political tyranny. This voluntary absence from their country makes the meaning of “exile” presented in these novels different from other cases of exile, especially in their relationship with native place. “Exile is predicated,” as Edward Said defines it in Culture and Imperialism (1993), “on the existence of, love for, and a real bond with one’s native place; the universal truth of exile is not that one has lost that love or home, but that inherent in each is an unexpected,

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

63

unwelcome loss.” 8 But “the universal truth of exile” of Said is not true of Alvina and Aaron’s relationship with their native country. On the one hand, they consider their exile not as “an unexpected, unwelcome loss” but as a transitional and welcome status that one necessarily faces in the search for a different way of life. On the other hand, despite their voluntary displacement from their native place, Alvina’s lingering superiority as an English woman and the cultural prejudices about racial others revealed through the voice of Rawdon Lilly, a male friend as well as a spiritual guide of Aaron, reveal that Lawrence’s heroes, like Lawrence himself, hardly free themselves from their Englishness. Alvina’s and Aaron’s exile are also different from the Italians’ massive emigration to the highly industrialized world, vividly described in Lawrence’s travel book Twilight in Italy.9 Whereas Italians at the turn of the century were forced to leave their country because of their poverty, Alvina and Aaron choose a voluntary dislocation from their native place, moving in the reverse direction from Italian emigrants, from England to Italy; Alvina’s and Aaron’s journey to Italy signifies that they go against the mainstream of this industrialized era. Although critics have paid little attention to the relevance of colonialism to Alvina’s and Aaron’s exile, their transgression against the English culture can be read as a challenge against the dominance of industrial/ imperial culture. That is, Alvina’s and Aaron’s exile to the marginal territory from the metropolis, opposed to third-world people’s massive migration to the industrialized center, deals with a postcolonial situation in which these protagonists attempt to redefine cultural hierarchies set between metropolis and periphery. The “repressive” aspects of the English culture, represented by Alvina’s “gloomy and a little sinister” (LG, p. 20) Manchester House and Aaron’s “changelessly pleasant” home (AR, p. 12), pervade these two novels. With the absence of a proper relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Houghton and Alvina as parents and a child, the Manchester House is actually run by Miss Frost, the governess, and Miss Pinnegar, the manager of James Houghton’s work-girls. The influence of these women who have embodied Victorian morality and sensibility is formidable in shaping not only Alvina’s British womanhood but also her resistance against it. This repressive mood of Woodhouse, a small mining town of the Midlands where Manchester House is located, represents the restrictive culture of England, which is particularly restraining for middle-class women like Alvina. The often-quoted passage of the chapter “The Journey Across” captures Alvina’s (Lawrence’s) complicated feeling about England and reveals what England represented by Woodhouse meant to her: “England, like a long, ash-grey coffin slowly submerging. She

64

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

watched it, fascinated and terrified. It seemed to repudiate the sunshine, to remain unilluminated, long and ash-grey and dead, with streaks of snow like cerements. That was England! Her thoughts flew to Woodhouse, the grey center of it all. Home!” (LG, p. 294). Whereas Alvina’s Manchester House epitomizes the Victorian repression of pre-war England, Aaron’s “always-pleasant” home captures the modern milieu of that repression after World War I. In particular, Fussell records the atmosphere of post-war England with a catch phrase “I HATE IT HERE”: The impulse to flee will be the stronger when the father (or mother) is one who closes pubs, regulates sexual behavior, devises the British Christmas (a strong propellant of Osbert Sitwell to Italy), contrives that the sun shall seldom be seen, and finds nothing wrong with the class system and the greedy capitalism sustaining it. An insistent leitmotif of writing between the wars, for both successful and would-be escapees, is I HATE IT HERE.10

Fussell regards “Lawrence’s miner Aaron Sisson” in Aaron’s Rod, along with Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), as “typical of the myth figures of this period.”11 Fussell’s description of the postwar atmosphere of England informs us how thematically important the first chapter of Aaron’s Rod is: this chapter penetrates “the innate Philistinism of the British”12 by showing its domestic landscape with film-like vividness. “The changeless pleasantness” (AR, p. 12) surrounding his house, which has never flinched even after the war, becomes unbearable to Aaron. Lawrence in these two novels explores how an individual self challenges the “restrictive” culture of a society and to what extent it would be possible to transform oneself from a western way of life to another—whether to a primitive mode of being as exemplified in Alvina’s transition into the hinterlands of Italy or to what Lawrence calls the power-urge in Aaron’s Rod. Alvina’s and Aaron’s desire to reach a new sense of self, not distorted by Christian, middle-class English morals, is deeply related to the spirit of place, that is, the different spirits of England and Italy. Their physical and psychological dislocation from England is not irrelevant to the fact that the spirit of England is charged with—actually “caged in”—rigid normative heterosexuality and racially discriminatory cultural assumptions. Aaron’s abhorrence of his sexual relationship with women and Lilly’s argument for the necessity to shift from the love-urge to the power-urge symptomatically indicate how English society has suppressed and controlled one’s sexuality. Alvina’s marriage to Ciccio

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

65

and her border crossing into Italy also expose the problems that the English culture has embodied in terms of sexuality, class, and race. Since Alvina and Aaron both are wanderers who journey to Italy, it is interesting to compare how Alvina and Aaron respond to the spirit of Italy. One of the big differences is that Alvina goes straight to a mountain village and stays there, while Aaron travels around the big cities of Italy such as Milan, Rome, and Florence; Aaron’s aimless wandering finally lands in the “alternative” place of Florence, which he calls “a town of men” (AR, p. 212). As shown in the way that Aaron describes Florence “a town of men,” Lawrence’s presentation of Florence is mostly determined by his idea of male leadership, rather than a realistic description of Florence as a place, whereas the presentation of the Italian village where Alvina is located is shaped by the “primitive” spirit of the place. These are the contexts in which, I argue, Alvina interacts more directly with the spirit of the new place than does Aaron. The sixteenth chapter of “Florence” is one of the few chapters in which Aaron apparently feels the difference between the spirit of Italy and England. This core chapter of the novel partly hints at why Aaron left his family and what he is looking for in Italy. In the middle of his big, bleak hotel room in Florence, Aaron feels relieved and comfortable since he finally escaped from “[t]he horrors of real domesticity” which “has stifled him till he felt his lungs would burst” (AR, p. 209). He feels the obvious difference between the Italian indifference to cozy homeliness and the English sense of home: “At home, in England, the bright grate and the ruddy fire, the thick hearth-rug and the man’s arm-chair, these had been inevitable. And now he was glad to get away from it all” (AR, p. 209). Like Aaron, Alvina also comes to recognize the difference between the British and Italian sense of home after she and Ciccio have settled down in Pescocalascio: A certain weariness possessed her. She was beginning to realize something about him: how he had no sense of home and domestic life, as an Englishman has. Ciccio’s home would never be his castle. His castle was the piazza of Pescocalascio. His home was nothing to him but a possession, and a hole to sleep in. he didn’t live in it. He lived in the open air, and in the community. (LG, p. 330)

In contrast to Aaron, it is ironic that even though Alvina has escaped from the “stuffy” domesticity of England, she feels she cannot live without it in this primitive Italian village. She cannot stand Pancrazio’s savage house, so she fills her room with civilized convenience and comfort and cocoons herself

66

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

in her “pleasant” room. Alvina’s interaction with the new place is limited and turns out negative. Her struggle with the spirit of the new place, compared with Aaron’s relatively easy declaration of his new self in Florence, keeps jeopardizing her civilized sense of identity, which is already destabilized in the conflict and tension between her sense of being “lost” and her Englishness. Despite general agreement about the necessity of a new place for Alvina to replace Woodhouse, many critics have thought of Pescocalascio, the Italian mountain village for which Alvina escapes from Woodhouse, as a negative place.13 Denying any possibility of this Italian village as a new place, Herring defines it as being as sterile and dead as Woodhouse: “In its own way, Pescocalascio is as dead as Woodhouse. . . . Pescocalascio is bleak, the local people, hospitable to strangers, are mean-spirited and slanderous with each other.”14 Even Julian Moynahan, whom Herring calls “one of the novel’s principal defenders,”15 does not consider the mountain village as much of an alternative place to England: “In fact, Italy proves to be no more than another part of Europe; and Califano, apart from its oppressive natural beauty, another Woodhouse without certain civilized conveniences.”16 Moynahan, rather, values Lawrence’s realistic use of the Italian village as something positive in the novel: “The final strength and honesty of The Lost Girl when compared to a novel like The Plumed Serpent lies just in Lawrence’s willingness to permit Italy to become actual, to permit the real world to break in upon a visionary and symbolic drama of salvation in the flesh.”17 The problem is that those critics, who see Pescocalascio as either “no more than another part of Europe”18 or “as dead as Woodhouse,”19 risk dismissing the geographical, cultural differences implied in the distinct spirits of England and Italy and thus blurring the significance of Alvina’s and Aaron’s self-exile. In spite of the “mixed marriage” of Alvina and Ciccio,20 the geographical continuance between England and Italy as part of Europe keeps critics from relating the racial conflict embedded in this novel to the issue of colonialism. For instance, Michael Ross, seeing Italy as an extended part of the British metropolis, argues, “The Lost Girl designedly exhausts the possibilities of escaping the moral confines of Imperial Britain while remaining within the ‘metropolitan’ bounds of the European continent.”21 But, as I will argue, it is hard to understand the way Lawrence presents the Italian mountain village and local peasants without the perspective of a colonial hierarchy existing between metropolis and periphery. In other words, Italy is described in Lawrence’s texts at once as an alternative place to the industrialized northern Europe and as a periphery of metropolitan England, a periphery which has been considered, wittingly or unwittingly, as something marginal and inferior. In consequence,

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

67

Lawrence’s ambivalence embedded in the complicated relationship to Englishness characterizes his description of the mountain village as a “primitive” yet “confined” world in The Lost Girl, particularly in the last chapters of the novel. In relation to the topic of this study examining the relation between Lawrence’s sense of place and colonialism, these last chapters are significant in that they foreground Alvina’s conflicting sense of identity in the contact with primitive others. 22 When Herring says that “[a]t the novel’s end, however, she [Alvina] seems lost again, but in a way Lawrence could hardly have foreseen in 1913,”23 he seems to recognize the significance of the last few chapters in the novel.24 If we imagined Lawrence finishing this novel in 1913, when his notion of “spirit of place” was not yet fully developed, “Lawrence might,” as Herring points out, “have ended The Lost Girl in ‘The Journey Across’ chapter.”25 Given that the novel consists of two parts—Alvina as a British middle-class woman and Alvina’s marriage to Ciccio as a head-on challenge to the British bourgeois culture—the second part would have been much less specific and convincing without the extended description of the Italian village. Meyers argues, “the novel becomes more lively, intimate, immediate in the last three chapters.”26 John Worthen further points out that during her journey across Europe, “the narrator vanishes, the experience becomes that of Alvina at first hand,” which means “Alvina is allowed to see and to experience with the acuteness of the narrator himself.”27 The last chapters of the novel, which describe Alvina’s journey from England to Italy and her encounter with a primitive world, also add another symbolic meaning to her status as a “lost” woman. If the early half of the novel is about the story that Alvina becomes “lost” to England, the rest of it deals with how she also becomes “lost” to Italy; as Herring points out, “Alvina, having survived several definitions of ‘lost,’ now appears most truly lost when Ciccio leaves her with child to become a soldier.”28 The last chapter hints that Alvina will become “literally” lost in the middle of the Italian village even without Ciccio, who is leaving for the impending war. Consequently, the meaning of being “lost” in the last chapters becomes different from the previous usages, which usually mark her transgression against the English norms of sex, class, and race. That is, Alvina becomes suspended between the civilized and primitive world, actually belonging to neither side. Her circumstance in this Italian village, displaced from England but not fully adapted to the new place, completes the meaning of the title The Lost Girl. In a letter written in Capri, Lawrence describes Picinisco, the original of Pescocalascio, as “beautiful beyond words, but so primitive, and so cold, that I thought we should die” (Letters, III, p. 442). The Lawrences had stayed

68

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

in Picinisco only nine days and moved to Capri because of the cold and the lack of civilized convenience. In spite of their fleeting stay in the mountain village, the primitiveness of the place offered Lawrence a model for an alternative place to Europe. As opposed to the critical underestimation of the Italian village as a new place, Lawrence gives the place a symbolic significance in the chapter titled “The Place Called Califano”: At Pescocalascio it was the mysterious influence of the mountains and valleys themselves which seemed always to be annihilating the Englishwoman: nay, not only her, but the very natives themselves. . . . At first she did not realize. She was only stunned with the strangeness of it all: startled, half-enraptured with the terrific beauty of the place, half-horrified by its savage annihilation of her. But she was stunned. The days went by. It seems there are places which resist us, which have the power to overthrow our psychic being. It seems as if every country had its potent negative centers, localities which savagely and triumphantly refuse our living culture. And Alvina had struck one of these, here on the edge of the Abruzzi. (LG, p. 314)

Although this is a very short chapter, the power of “savage annihilation” that this Italian village has seems essential to Alvina’s physical and psychological transformation from a civilized English woman to a part of the primitive world. Just as the spirit of the Indian village in Lawrence’s short fiction The Woman Who Rode Away (1928) makes possible the dissolution of the (unnamed) woman’s white self-consciousness, the spirit of Pescocalascio enables Alvina to undergo her transition from the “civilized” world to the “savage” world. Many critics have questioned whether Ciccio is the right counterpart to Alvina and whether her abrupt sexual submission to Ciccio is understandable, and most of them have agreed with Meyers: “The great weakness of The Lost Girl is that Lawrence does not make Alvina’s love for Ciccio convincing . . . or persuade us that Ciccio, though better than her five unsatisfactory lovers, is the right man for her.”29 Without the power of the “savage annihilation” that threatens to “overthrow” Alvina’s [un]consciousness as a British woman, her relationship with Ciccio does not really make sense as does the relationship of Kate and Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent. As Hough points out, Ciccio embodies the opposing world to what Alvina’s Woodhouse presents, rather than being described as a whole character: “He [Ciccio] is not individually very sympathetic or very

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

69

convincing, but as soon as he and Alvina leave England his background becomes superb.”30 Ciccio’s “lovely, rich darkness of his southern nature, so different from her own” (LG, p. 291) partly explains and even justifies Alvina’s sudden, incomprehensible submission to him. The spirit of Pescocalascio that Ciccio represents, as Lawrence says in a letter, is essential to Alvina’s “reunion with the dark half of humanity” (Letters, III, p. 521). In short, what is at issue in this novel is not Ciccio himself but the spirit of Pescocalascio, the power of savage annihilation which dissolves Alvina’s white consciousness. Dealing with the different spirits of Italy and England in the contrast of southern and northern Europe, Lawrence employs a number of cultural indications related to colonial hierarchy and metaphor. In order to see how this novel is involved with colonial discourses of the time, we need to examine carefully the way in which Lawrence presents the spirit of the mountain village and local people—especially, Pancrazio, Ciccio’s uncle, since he is a major figure, in addition to Alvina and Ciccio, in the last chapters. Pancrazio is an interesting figure in that he had lived for many years in England as a model for a British painter,31 and thus he knows both Italy and England well. Although Italy has always been outside the jurisdiction of the British Empire, the narrator takes for granted that Pancrazio as well as other Italian peasants thinks of Alvina as a superior being. A sense of superiority as a white northern European strongly lingers in Alvina’s voice. It is thus no accident that the narrative voice renders Pancrazio as a typical colonized other who submissively follows the hierarchical relationship of England and Italy as center and periphery: Alvina felt the curious passion in Pancrazio’s voice, the passion of a man who has lived for many years in England and known the social confidence of England, and who, coming back, is deeply injured by the ancient malevolence of the remote, somewhat gloomy hill-peasantry. She understood also why he was so glad to have her in his house, so proud, why he loved serving her. He seemed to see a fairness, a luminousness in the northern soul, something free, touched with divinity such as “these people here” lacked entirely. (LG, pp. 324–25)

This passage reveals how Alvina feels about herself among local Italian peasants while hardly giving up her sense of superiority as a British woman. Further, by borrowing Ciccio’s and Pancrazio’s voices, the natives of the place, Alvina juxtaposes “the social confidence of England” (LG, p. 325) with “the deep, bed-rock distrust which all the hill-peasants

70

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

seemed to have of one another” (LG, p. 324). This contrast between fair Englishness and malevolent hill-peasantry directly undermines the significance of this mountain village as a testing place for a new mode of life. This also denigrates the meaning of Alvina’s self-exile: she came to Italy following Ciccio in order to explore her desire and her self, which have been repressed by English bourgeois culture. Alvina’s remaining superiority as a northerner keeps her from intermingling with local life, and instead she keeps asking Ciccio to take her either back to England or to America. Her ambivalence about the primitive Italian village reflects her “ongoing” conflict in redefining what she is; she was a middle-class English woman and now an English Italian by getting married to Ciccio. What is striking in this novel, however, is that Alvina does not entirely dismiss the chance to see the English people, including herself, through racial others’ eyes. By introducing Pancrazio’s experience of working as a model for English painters, Alvina makes the character of Pancrazio a metaphor of the colonized other. An English painter asks him to take a very difficult posture of the crucified Christ; in this episode, the relation of a cruel, domineering English painter and an exploited foreign model embodies a hierarchy between the white colonizer and the colonized other: Well he [an English painter] kept me tied up, hanging you know forwards naked on this cross, for four hours. And then it was luncheon. And after luncheon he would tie me again.—Well, I suffered. I suffered so much, that I must lean against the wall to support me to walk home. And in the night I could not sleep, I could cry with the pains in my arms and my ribs, I had no sleep. (LG, p. 326)

The mock-crucifixion of Pancrazio, as a metaphor, symbolizes the pain and the grief that a colonized victim has to endure in his/her relationship with a white master. Pancrazio’s experience in England also indicates that the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized does not exclusively exist in the official relation of the metropolis and the colony. In other words, the British, whether it is their colony or not, have tended to subordinate all racial (and national) others even inside Europe as their colonized others.32 More significantly, Alvina does not ignore the possibility of rebellion by colonized others through her symbolic reading of Pancrazio’s “almost diabolic look”: “Alvina felt that if she were left much alone with him [Pancrazio] she would need all her English ascendancy not to be afraid

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

71

of him” (LG, p. 327). In the moment when Alvina recognizes Pancrazio as an object of fear, she comes to have an anxiety of losing her identity as an English woman. But Alvina’s fear of this Italian man as a racial other is not great enough to threaten her Englishness, not as threatening as what Kate in The Plumed Serpent feels about the primitive power of Cipriano, a Mexican Indian. Alvina’s conflicting feelings about Pancrazio—sympathy and fear— do not survive long, and the latter is rather described as a timid and generous Italian peasant. It is nevertheless worthwhile to notice that Alvina in Italy has the chance to see the privileged world of wealthy, English painters through Pancrazio’s story, that is, through a racial other’s point of view: “It was strange to look at the battered figure of Pancrazio, and think how much he had been crucified through the long years in London, for the sake of late Victorian art. It was strangest of all to see through his yellow, often dull, red-rimmed eyes these blithe and well-conditioned painters” (LG, p. 326). For Alvina, this is at once an uncanny experience and a process of self-awakening which makes possible a reciprocal understanding between the British and the racial others. But her relationship with Pancrazio does not reach the point of breaking down the wall of hierarchy set in between the southerner and the northerner inside Europe. Alvina stays in the mountain village mainly as an outsider and a traveling English woman. Alvina’s repulsion to the inside of an Italian church located in Casa Latina, the neighboring village of Pescocalascio, also reveals her fear of “primitive” others. In the introduction to The Lost Girl, Carol Siegel accounts for Alvina’s response to the inside of the church in terms of friction between English Protestantism and Italian Catholicism: “Until the English Ecumenical movement of the nineteenth century was well under way, English authors often expressed suspicion of and even horrified revulsion at Italian Catholicism.”33 But Alvina’s recoil from the inside of the church has rather something to do, beyond a matter of religious sensitivity, with her repulsion to the inside of local culture and life in general: Enough of Casa Latina. She [Alvina] would never go there again. She was beginning to feel that, if she lived in this part of the world at all, she must avoid the inside of it. She must never, if she could help it, enter into any interior but her own–neither into house nor Church nor even shop or post-office, if she could help it. The moment she went through a door the sense of dark repulsiveness came over her. If she was to save her sanity she must keep to the open air, and avoid

72

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing any contact with human interiors. When she thought of the insides of the native people she shuddered with repulsion, as in the great, degraded church of Casa Latina. They were horrible. Yet the outside world was so fair. Corn and maize were growing green and silken, vines were in the small bud. Everywhere little grape hyacinths hung their blue bells. (LG, p. 333)

The distinction between the inside and outside of the church becomes more striking in a binaristic form which describes the insides of local people as something malevolent and ugly, whereas the landscape of Pescocalascio is something beneficent and fair. This contrast highlights the influence of the primitive landscape on Alvina, while excluding the significance of her contact with local peasants. Seen from the outside, the landscape of the primitive mountain village and local people, like the church of Casa Latina, are very nice and beautiful. But when Alvina tries to reach the insides of all that, they are all suddenly horribly repulsive and even diabolic. The beauty of the place, for Alvina, is tricky and bewitching, and often compared to the image of “the fangs sheathed in beauty: the beauty first, and then, horribly, inevitably, the fangs” (LG, p. 334). Why is Alvina so afraid of approaching “the insides of the native people” (LG, p. 333)? Even though claiming that she “was lost to Woodhouse, to Lancaster, to England,—all lost” (LG, p. 306), why does she fear to adapt herself to the spirit of this primitive village? She keeps a distance from these native people and never really tries to intermingle with them, which shows how limitedly Alvina responds to the place, that is, the spirit of the place. The contrast between the beautiful landscape and the repulsive native people is a typical narrative convention often found in Western colonial discourses—a juxtaposition of the sublime, grand landscape and the diabolic, treacherous black others. I argued in chapter I that Lawrence’s sense of place in his travel books is deeply related to his concern with local people, whereas nineteenth-century Western travel writing tends to dismiss local people as well as white colonizers. Unlike his concern with the “inseparable” relationship between place and people highlighted in his travel writings, Lawrence’s usual adoration of the landscape in The Lost Girl parallels his estrangement from local people in the colonialist dogma of the beautiful outside and the repulsive, fearful inside. Although the meaning of being “lost” in this novel contains a rebellion against certain values, mainly those of English middle-class culture, Alvina’s desire for escape from the civilized world does not guarantee her complete transformation into the primitive world. If Alvina tries to escape

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

73

from her Englishness through her marriage to Ciccio and her border crossing into Italy, the last chapters of the novel show how she becomes “lost” again among primitive local peasants and in this foreign country, which is “savage” and “repulsive” in a different sense from Woodhouse. It seems unlikely that there is any possible way for Alvina to get into the inside of native people and to face “the shadow of the by-gone, pagan world” (LG, p. 333). Alvina’s sense of horror revealed in her encounter with the “inside” of the primitive people signifies her anxiety of losing her civilized identity, despite her repudiation of English bourgeois culture. That is, The Lost Girl shows how Alvina’s difficult position in this “savage” place is different from the traveler’s point of view that Lawrence takes in his travel books, which does not demand any responsibility for physical and psychological adjustment to the “foreign” place. If Alvina’s conflicting sense of identity is a major issue in this novel, her sexual relationship with Ciccio is another important issue to be dealt with. For example, Billy Tracy defines The Lost Girl as “a novel that celebrates female values” in comparison with Aaron’s Rod “which praises male companionship.”34 But many critics would be skeptical about this description and ask in what sense The Lost Girl celebrates female values. It seems impossible to resolve the debate on the inconsistency between Alvina’s sexual submission to Ciccio and Alvina as a “New Woman” revolting against British middle-class culture. Alvina is not a typical Victorian woman; she is rather closer to the “New Woman” with her own will and desire, but, strangely enough, in her sexual relationship with Ciccio, she becomes suddenly passive and submissive; and we know the author wants to emphasize Alvina’s submission to Ciccio. The problem in the novel is, moreover, that Ciccio is not strong enough to make Alvina his slave as described in the text; rather, Alvina leads him in their wedded life. There is a tension between Lawrence’s wishful thinking about submissive woman, particularly in her sexual relationship, and his presentation of Alvina as a New Woman. In other words, an Ursula-like modern woman—H. M. Daleski sees Alvina as “an uncanny reincarnation of Ursula”35—and a sexually submissive woman are combined in Alvina. Lawrence tries to present a woman who is different at once from the Victorian (sexually insensitive) woman and from the modern woman with strong self-will, but her traits do not combine well together. While most critics have considered Alvina’s sexual submission to Ciccio as unconvincing and offensive,36 Siegel rather emphasizes that Lawrence’s characterization of Ciccio is outside the conventional track of masculinity:

74

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing What makes Lawrence’s description of the triumphant male so original in both the poem and the novel is his insistence that seductive male power should come not from the traditional sources, masculine intellect or strength of character and body, but from a man’s beauty, grace and closeness to the natural world. . . . Despite the male chauvinism of some of his views, Ciccio is more like one of the flowers Persephone stoops to pick than he is like a patriarch. . . . Lawrence juxtaposes Ciccio’s subtle, flower-like embodiment of Italy’s seductive beauty with the conventional patriarchal power exemplified by Ciccio’s rival, Dr Mitchell, who offers Alvina ‘Honorable Engagement,’ as the eleventh chapter is entitled.37

Beyond the conventional code of masculinity, Siegel relates Ciccio’s maleness to the characteristics of the ancient Etruscan culture, which Lawrence in Etruscan Places describes as “small and dainty in proportion, and fresh, somehow charming instead of impressive” (EP, p. 26). As Siegel suggests, Ciccio and Dr. Mitchell, whom Alvina was engaged to before she is married to Ciccio, have each inherited the opposite traditions of the Etruscan society, which embodied, respectively, “the natural flowering of life” (EP, p. 49) and the “imposing” and “patriarchal” Roman Empire. Alvina’s choice of Ciccio signifies her psychological dissociation from Imperial Britain that has followed the cultural tradition of the Roman Empire. Most of Lawrence’s works, with the exception of Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo, deal with a balanced relationship between the sexes as a major theme, even though this theme contains a lot of tension. Whereas Lawrence still explores a balanced relationship between the sexes in The Lost Girl, he makes a radical turn into the homosocial world in Aaron’s Rod, as in the relationship between Aaron and Lilly, and in this homosocial world women have no place to intervene as the counterparts to men. In Aaron’s Rod (and in Kangaroo) women only have an adjunct place. Paying attention to the fact that The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod mark a “transitional” phase in Lawrence’s treatment of sexuality, I will explore how Lawrence’s idea of male leadership influences his presentation of sexuality in Aaron’s Rod. It is not easy, even confusing, to follow the way in which Lawrence in Aaron’s Rod, categorized as his first “leadership” novel, re-encodes the sexual themes of previous novels. Another problem with and in Aaron’s Rod is that in the middle of developing his idea of male leadership, Lawrence allows Lilly to present racially discriminatory notions about others. I will show how Lawrence’s presentation of racial others, along with the problematic exclusion of women’s voice, limits his search

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

75

for a new mode of life. I will also attempt to make clear in what sense Aaron’s Rod is categorized as a “leadership” novel and whether that categorization properly explains the nature of the novel. At a glance, Lawrence returns to the conventional codes of masculinity and femininity as exemplified in Aaron and Lilly’s espousal of what Hilary Simpson calls the “male renaissance and a new breed of manly man.”38 But the sexual codes that Aaron and Lilly try to establish are certainly different from the traditional sexual codes of England based on a restrictive Christian heterosexuality. And, despite Aaron’s abhorrence of the stuffy domesticity of England and Lilly’s revolt against sacred motherhood, Lilly ironically shows how he masters himself in playing women’s traditional role of a wife and a mother. When Aaron is seriously ill, Lilly takes care of Aaron as a mother does for her baby: “I’m going to rub you as mothers do their babies whose bowels don’t work” (AR, p. 96). His room, which is “clean and cosy and pleasant,” shows Lilly to be “as efficient and inobtrusive a housewife as any woman” (AR, p. 98). In short, Lawrence’s redefinition of masculinity in Aaron’s Rod does not entirely exclude certain characteristics traditionally considered as feminine. Not only the characterization of Lilly but also his name serve as examples that male/female values in this novel are not fixed but exchangeable and communicable. The name of Lilly becomes symbolically interesting when Meyers mentions that “the lily is the flower of Florence.”39 In this novel, the lily, traditionally considered a symbol of femininity, renders a new kind of maleness, which Aaron finds in Florence. The symbolic significance of lily (and Lilly) indicates that the characteristics of maleness in Aaron’s Rod are similar to the lovely, flower-like maleness of Ciccio in The Lost Girl rather than to the imposing, patriarchal masculinity that Dr. Mitchell embodies. We can easily see that either Lilly or Aaron does not belong to the category of “masculine” or “manly” man in a traditional sense, despite their preoccupation with male leadership politics. Furthermore, the redefined “manliness,” represented by Lilly, is immediately involved with a new mode of being, which, as I will show, he identifies with a “power-urge.” Lilly, like the lily, not only refers to a type of Lawrentian manliness but also implies a new mode of being: “As for considering the lily, it is not a matter of consideration. The lily toils and spins hard enough, in her own way. But without that strain and that anxiety with which we try to weave ourselves a life. The lily is life-rooted, life-central” (AR, p. 166). If Aaron’s self-exile signifies his revolt against the spirit of England and dilemmas in the western way of life, the character (and the name) of Lilly represents Florence as an alternative spirit of place. The care-free spirit of Florence relieves Aaron’s anxiety about his manliness, liberates his sense of

76

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

individuality stifled by British domesticity, and finally leads him to discover a new self. Aaron feels in Florence, in the Piazza della Signoria where the statue of David stands, as if he is born again as a man: he felt that here he was in one of the world’s living centers, here, in the Piazza della Signoria. The sense of having arrived—of having reached a perfect center of the human world: this he had. . . . Aaron felt a new self, a new life-urge rising inside himself. Florence seemed to start a new man in him. It was a town of men. (AR, p. 212)

Just as the “Florence” chapter is the center of the novel, Lilly, who symbolizes Florence, takes a central role in leading Aaron to a new way of life throughout his aimless wandering: Aaron finally finds his new self in Florence under the spiritual guidance of Lilly. While the southern primitive world that Ciccio represents enables Alvina to escape from the restrictive English culture, the spirit of Florence that Lilly symbolizes leads Aaron to encounter a new mode of being. Consequently, the characterization of Lilly keeps us from labeling Lawrence a representative male chauvinist of his time, and it also demands that we read his first “leadership” novel beyond the commonsensical definitions of masculinity and femininity. Along with the characterization of Lilly, which unsettles fixed gender roles, Lawrence’s language to describe the power-urge, what he suggests is a new mode of life, makes it hard to understand the “alternative” society that Aaron and Lilly search for. The language that Lawrence uses in his conception of the power-urge seems to explore the limit of the English language by connecting the new mode of life to the sphere of the unconscious, which can hardly be defined by the language we use. This connection of power and the unconscious raises a difficult question about redefining the meaning of “power” beyond the traditional use of the word. In chapter I, I pointed out that the concept of political power in Lawrence’s texts cannot be defined by conventional terms of politics, and that it is rather always related to the matter of people’s “souls,” the matter of being, for Lawrence. Lawrence’s “leadership” politics in Aaron’s Rod is hard to pin down or even to categorize as an issue of politics or sexuality or anything else; it seems mostly concerned with the issue of sexuality, but at the same time it challenges fundamental dicta imposed by the western way of life because Lilly’s argument for a transition from the love-urge to the power-urge aims to undermine the core of Christian morality. Thus, power as the opposite to love often refers to the return of pre-Christian history repressed by Christian culture, and this is one of Lawrence’s repeated arguments: “It was that great

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

77

dark power-urge which kept Egypt so intensely living for so many centuries. It is a vast dark source of life and strength in us now, waiting either to issue into true action, or to burst into cataclysm” (AR, p. 297). Lawrence’s famous poem “Snake,” contemporaneous with Aaron’s Rod, also shows his strong interest in the theme of “the return of the repressed” by using the symbol of the snake which comes from “the burning bowels of the earth.”40 The snake in this poem, a dominant image of evil in the western imagination, conveys Lawrence’s strong desire to restore the voice of others undervalued or unconsciously repressed by Christian civilization, as he says in the poem “Snake”: “For he [snake] seemed to me again like a king, / Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld, / Now due to be crowned again.”41 Thus, interestingly enough, the concept of power Lawrence uses in Aaron’s Rod has more to do with issues of sexuality than with those of politics. Even though Aaron’s Rod has been categorized as a “leadership” novel, some critics have disagreed with the view that political ideas dominate the novel. For example, Meyers argues that the novel “has very little to do with political leadership,” while Lilly’s “purely personal urge for power in love is based on the idea of male superiority and directed mainly against women.”42 Marguerite Beede Howe also defines Lilly’s notion of “power” in sexual terms: “In Aaron’s Rod the dynamic of a relationship between man and woman is ‘love’; between man and man it is ‘power.’”43 Then, what makes Aaron’s Rod a “leadership” novel? What aspects do create those critical confusions in defining Lawrence’s presentation of leadership politics in this novel? Against the current mode of life, dominated and controlled by Christian morality, Lawrence suggests the power-urge as an alternative mode of life. Lawrence argues that Lilly’s notion of male leadership—“the deep, fathomless submission to the heroic soul in a greater man” (AR, p. 299)—embodies that power-urge. Lawrence blends the gender issue and his leadership theme: Lawrence’s idea of a new life is based on his repudiation of the established heterosexual relationship. In the last chapter, Aaron justifies Lilly’s guidance to a new direction of life while blaming any relationship with women as something hopelessly negative: “As he [Aaron] lay pondering this over, escaping from the cul de sac in which he had been running for so long, by yielding to one of his pursuers: yielding to the peculiar mastery of one man’s nature rather than to the quicksands of woman or the stinking bog of society” (AR, p. 290). The negative implication of “the quicksands of woman” is visualized when Aaron blames his wife, Lottie’s strong self-will—“her terrible will, like a flat cold snake coiled round his soul and squeezing him to death” (AR, p. 161). Another example is Aaron’s treatment of Josephine Ford, whom he has an affair with: The novel describes

78

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Josephine as if she carries a disease by making Aaron seriously ill immediately after he has a sexual relationship with her.44 Predictably, it is Lilly who saves Aaron’s life from the fatal disease. As his treatment of female characters shows, Lawrence does not include women as the counterparts to men in building up a new society, and his idea of male leadership presupposes women’s unconditional submission to men. In doing so, Lawrence’s revolt against the normative sexuality of England, ironically, results in maintaining the status-quo of the patriarchal hierachies between the sexes. Even though much of his idea of male leadership is based on sexual conflicts between man and woman, Lawrence describes it in political terms, not only in sexual ones. During his preaching for male leadership at the end of the novel, Lilly takes pains to redefine the meaning of “leadership” while differentiating it from political leadership in a traditional sense: Now, in the urge of power, it is the reverse. The woman must submit, but deeply, deeply submit. Not to any foolish fixed authority, not to any foolish and arbitrary will. But to something deep, deeper. To the soul in its dark motion of power and pride. We must reverse the poles. The woman must now submit—but deeply, deeply, and richly! No subservience. None of that. No slavery. A deep, unfathomable free submission. (AR, p. 298)

In spite of Lawrence’s effort to redefine it, the abstract, gendered conception of leadership in this novel results in foregrounding women’s submission to male leadership. It is no wonder that when critics as well as readers try to define the nature of politics presented in Aaron’s Rod, they become confused about whether or not the two different issues of politics and gender are connected in this novel. Although Worthen sees Aaron’s desertion of his family as Lawrence becoming dissociated from his major theme of sexual, marital conflict,45 Lawrence’s presentation of male leadership in Aaron’s Rod is inextricably bound up with gender issues. Further, a serious problem we can find in this novel is that even while constantly foregrounding the sexual conflicts between woman and man, the author does not give women any chance to speak of themselves and their desire. In the process of developing the male leadership politics, Aaron’s Rod displays complicated—sometimes contradictory—aspects both in gender and politics. For example, Lawrence repudiates the normative sexual codes of England, yet he, paradoxically, reinforces the current order of patriarchal hierarchy, as can be seen in his description of women. His notion of hierarchy is also divided according to whether it is applied to the relationship

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

79

between man and woman, or the homosocial relationship between men. The novel justifies the hierarchy between man and woman, whereas the hierarchy between men does not stand out. We can hardly see in Aaron’s Rod a hierarchical relationship between Lilly and Aaron, or between Lilly and other male characters. The form of the novel, similarly to the narrative of a travel book, has not a little to do with this lack of authority in that Lilly and Aaron, Lawrence’s heroes, choose a “nomadic” way of life. Insofar as the novel has protagonists like Lilly and Aaron, wanderers and self-exiles, it is hard to build up any kind of authority or hierarchy in their temporary and unstable relationships. In other words, Aaron’s Rod (and Kangaroo) does not have a reference point for hierarchal leadership as does Ramón’s hacienda in The Plumed Serpent, the center where political leaders meet. It is thus erroneous to say that Lilly has a leadership quality in any conventional political sense, despite his guiding of Aaron to an alternative way of life. The inconsistency between Lilly’s preaching about “leadership” politics and his lack of leadership quality indicates that Lawrence in Aaron’s Rod was not saturated with this kind of politics as much as critics have assumed, and Lilly as a political leader is not as qualified as Ramón is in The Plumed Serpent. Aaron’s abrupt desertion of his family signifies that Lawrence’s concern with sexuality has shifted from a heterosexual relationship to a homo-social (or sexual) relationship. This transition becomes clear when compared with Lawrence’s positive description of heterosexuality in his following “leadership” novels, as shown in the relationship between Somers and Harriet in Kangaroo and between Kate and Cipriano in The Plumed Serpent. Although earlier critics, like Eliseo Vivas, denounced Aaron’s unexplained irresponsibility about his family as “the worst defect” that causes “radical incoherence” in the form as well as contents of the novel,46 Worthen rather sees it as a marking point which divides Lawrence’s early and later works: “It marks the end of the kind of concern with marriage which had dominated his novel-writing since early in 1913.”47 Certainly, Aaron’s desertion of his family does not mean that he frees himself from the marital, sexual issues that dominated Lawrence’s early works. But we can understand Worthen’s remark as an emphasis on the transitional character of the novel. That is, Lawrence in Aaron’s Rod searches for something to replace the then-current mode of English life, and his effort produces a transitional novel, moving away from a balanced relationship between the sexes to a male-dominated relationship, from heterosexual Christianity to homosocial community. In D. H. Lawrence and Feminism (1982), Simpson succinctly summarizes Lawrence’s changing attitude in the treatment of sexuality by differentiating the early Lawrence from the postwar Lawrence; Lawrence’s belief in “balance and relationship in the ‘Study of

80

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Thomas Hardy,’” written in 1914, is converted into “an abrupt espousal of male supremacy which coincides with the end of the war.”48 Cornelia Nixon also interestingly points out that the leadership politics of Lawrence’s later works has something to do with his latent homosexuality. Persistently exploring the overlapping territories between politics and sexuality, Nixon finds the origin of Lawrence’s male leadership idea in his homoerotic desire, which Lawrence could “neither accept nor kill”49 and therefore features, as Lawrence disparagingly says, as something “nasty . . . like black-beetles” (Letters, II, p. 321). According to Nixon, Lawrence’s male leadership politics was an efficient channel to express his “repressed” homosexual desire by taking a socially acceptable form of male companionship. Lawrence’s discovery of his own homosexual desire, which became clear after his encounters with Cambridge homosexuals, seems essential to account for his approach to leadership politics in his later works.50 If Lawrence’s latent homosexual desire triggered his male leadership politics, this male politics became further complicated by his self-contradictory notions and prejudices about racial others. While The Lost Girl deals with racial prejudices through Alvina’s marriage to Ciccio, a racial other, Aaron’s Rod appears more concerned with the issue of sexuality than the issue of race. However, Aaron’s Rod is also charged with the issue of race, and Lawrence’s text is deeply engaged in racially discriminatory cultural assumptions. When Aaron encounters an Indian doctor, a colonized other of the British, in a pub called “Royal Oak,” Lawrence lets this colonized other speak out on social, racial issues between England and India. To Aaron’s question of “what difference does it make whether they [the Indians] govern themselves or not?” the Indian doctor replies: “It matters.—People should always be responsible for themselves. How can any people be responsible for another race of people, and for a race much older than they are, and not at all children” (AR, p. 24). However, this minor episode of the second chapter, which happens shortly after Aaron leaves his family, seems contrived to deepen his sense of disorientation, rather than sharpening the issue of politics between England and India. Aaron as a Lawrentian hero is little concerned with this kind of politics: “He[Aaron] had not really listened to the doctor. The terms ‘British Government,’ and ‘bad for the people—good for the people,’ made him malevolently angry” (AR, p. 24). Not surprisingly, for Aaron, this kind of “talk,” related to the issue of class, politics, or race, is just “invariably maggoty with these secret inclinations to destroy the man in a man” (AR, p. 25). Aaron’s seeming indifference to the social, political discourse goes hand in hand with racial slurs voiced through Lilly. The contradiction between Aaron’s seemingly indifferent attitude toward politics and naturalized colo-

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

81

nialist assumptions reveals how Lawrence’s novel constitutes a part of colonial discourse of the British Empire: There’s a whole world besides this little gang of Europeans. Except, dear God, that they’ve exterminated all the peoples worth knowing. I can’t do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether. Only vermin teem by the billion. Higher types breed slower. I would have loved the Aztecs and the Red Indians. I know they hold the element in life which I am looking for—They had living pride. Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics—Even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers.—The American races—and the South Sea Islanders—the Marquesans, the Maori blood. That was the true blood. It wasn’t frightened. All the rest are craven—Europeans, Asiatics, Africans—everyone at his own individual quick craven and cringing: only conceited in the mass, the mob. How I hated them: the mass-bullies, the individual Judases. (AR, p. 97)

This is a part of Lilly’s monologue, which follows the famous episode of the novel where he rubs Aaron with oil and makes his patient fall asleep. Although critics have paid little attention to this racial slur, it is hard to overlook this colorfully discriminatory tone in that Lilly as a Lawrentian hero also represents Lawrence’s voice in the novel. This passage shows how Lawrence expresses racism about “the flea-bitten Asiatics” while revealing his preference for imaginary Aztecs and the Red Indians. This also discloses that Lawrence’s repulsion to the black, naked Ceylonese was not an aberration for him and that much of his presentation of the American Indian is shaped by his own personal version of them. The passage quoted above partly resembles the preface of Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922, abbreviated as Fantasia), though these two texts are also different in that the tone of the preface is at first not only more refined but also based on Lawrence’s respect for difference and otherness. Unfortunately, the balanced and refined voice in the preface of Fantasia does not last throughout the body of the work. As many critics point out, Fantasia exhibits a masculine version of the gender role, which is as conventional and clichéd as Ruskin’s version of masculinity and femininity.51 Lawrence returns to the Victorian sensibility in his understanding of gender roles: If the man, as thinker and doer, is active, or positive, and the woman negative, then, on the other hand, as the initiator of emotion, of feeling, and of sympathetic understanding the woman is positive, the man

82

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing negative. The man may be the initiator in action, but the woman is initiator in emotion . . . In love, woman is the positive, man the negative. . . . In knowing and in doing, man is positive and woman negative: man initiates, and woman lives up to it.52

According to the post-war Lawrence, the problem of the modern age primarily rests on the reversal of “this nicely arranged order of things”53 between man and woman. Lawrence’s understanding of sex and gender presented in Fantasia dominates his subsequent “leadership” novels. Like many critics, Simpson points to Fantasia, the essay that Lawrence wrote while revising Aaron’s Rod, as an official launching of Lawrence’s male leadership ideas. However, unlike other critics, Simpson pays attention to the generic difference existing between Lawrence’s essays and his “leadership” novels: In contrast to the dogmatism of the essays, however, the novels remain explorations, and rather tentative ones at that. Lawrence’s ultimate failure to be convinced by his own new theories is honestly set down in these novels; nowhere do we see the male comradeship and the male power which are talked of convincingly realized. His wavering allegiance and the impression that he is groping somewhat wildly for a set of values to sustain him in the nightmare of the post-war world contribute partly to the dubious quality of much of the writing of this period.54

In reading Lawrence’s “leadership” novels, it is important to distinguish the dogmatic voice that Lawrence’s essays present from the multiple, contradictory voices that his novels embrace. To recognize the significance of competing, opposing voices embedded in the “leadership” novels, as Wayne Booth notes, enables us not to “be accommodated to a simple, consistent, propositional portrait of ‘what Lawrence believed.’”55 This is also consistent with Lawrence’s separation of the tale from the artist in Studies of Classic American Literature (1923): “The artist usually sets out— or used to—to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals. The artist’s and the tale’s. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it” (Studies, p. 8). If the essay is a sort of monologue narrated by the author, the novel by nature consists of dialogues between characters. In this sense, the most damaging defect of Aaron’s Rod is, it seems to me, that there is no dissent-

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

83

ing voice to compete with Lilly’s dominant voice; in Kangaroo, Harriet provides a healthy, though minor, voice which questions Somers’ defense of men’s business, while Kate in The Plumed Serpent offers a consistently dissenting voice to the Quetzalcoatl movement led by Ramón and Cipriano throughout the novel. In particular, as the spokesperson of the novel, Lilly’s understanding of reality can undermine his role as the model of a superior leader. For example, despite Simpson’s account that not only Lawrence but also many other men had been threatened by the radically changing social status of women in the 1920s, it is hard for the modern reader to share Lilly’s sense of reality that “[m]an is the gift, woman the receiver. This is the sacrament we live by” (AR, p. 165). If we cannot share Lilly’s way of understanding reality, and thus we think of Lilly, who represents Lawrence’s voice, as unconvincing and unreliable, this judgment can fatally undermine the effectiveness of Aaron’s Rod as a “leadership” novel. At the end of the novel, Lilly preaches the necessity of shifting from the Christian love-urge to the dark, unconscious power-urge. But the last chapter titled “Words,” rather than reading as a prophetic talk, confounds the reader in understanding Aaron’s attitude toward language; that is, the thematic weight in Lilly’s “words” conflicts with Aaron’s distrust of “[f ]air, wise, even benevolent words” (AR, p. 25) in the second chapter. Not really listening to the racial, political talk of the Indian doctor, Aaron in the early part of the novel disparages any kind of talk (or words) as if they serve to destroy the “manliness” in a man. The sixth chapter titled “Talk,” which sounds evanescent and empty, renders the bohemian atmosphere of post-war England, as in the young bohemian group represented by Halliday in Women in Love. This novel is full of dialogues between Aaron, Lilly, and other men, yet these dialogues do not create dialogic moments between these men in that the marginal voices are not allowed to compete fully with Lilly’s dominant voice. Aaron usually takes a role of listener to what Lilly says, though he also tries to challenge the authority of Lilly, “the” speaker of the novel, by undermining Lilly’s “unconscious assumption of priority” (AR, p. 106) in the chapter “The War Again”: “You talk as if you were doing something special. You aren’t. . . . You talk, and you make a man believe you’ve got something he hasn’t got? But where is it, when it comes to? What have you got, more than me or Jim Bricknell! Only a bigger choice of words, it seems to me” (AR, p. 104). In response to this attack by Aaron, Lilly trivializes and finally ignores Aaron’s challenge against his authoritative voice by simply retorting, “You talk to me like a woman, Aaron” (AR, p. 105). In short, it is hard to find a strong dialogic in Aaron’s

84

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Rod, whereas Somers in Kangaroo keeps questioning not only his own desire to be a political leader but also the validity of his political ideas through the voices of other characters. It appears, thus, that Lawrence does not allow other minor voices, even Aaron’s voice, to undermine the authority that Lilly’s voice has. At the same time, Lawrence plots a bombing in the middle of “talk” between Lilly and other men. When the bomb smashes Aaron’s flute, which symbolizes his sexuality and individuality, it shatters Aaron’s whole sense of self. We can assume that Lawrence plots this bomb at the novel’s end in order to remove everything involved with Aaron’s old sense of individuality, and this certainly makes Aaron desperate for “a thread of destiny attaching him to Lilly” (AR, p. 288). But the gap between Aaron’s distrust of “words” and Lilly’s preaching is not convincingly resolved even in the last chapter: Aaron’s response to Lilly’s preaching hangs between sympathy and skepticism. Nor does the development of the novel prepare for Lilly’s didactic harangue at the end of the novel: “The novel ends inconclusively,” Meyers concludes, “with Aaron unconvinced by Lilly’s arguments and uncommitted to a movement or a leader.”56 Blanchard reads the unconvincing ending of the novel as evidence that Lawrence distances himself from his “leadership” politics in his later novels: In each of these [Aron’s Rod, Kangaroo, and The Plumed Serpent], Lawrence flirts with the idea of resolution through submission to a dictator of some sort, either in personal relationships or through political groups or in religion. Lawrence’s ideas in these novels are usually the ones most loudly rejected by his critics—but Lawrence himself also rejected them. By the end of each of these novels, the hero or heroine has either turned away from or is uncertain about the authoritarian choice as a way of resolving conflict.57

According to Blanchard, Lawrence intentionally undermines the validity of his leadership ideas by allowing Lilly the tyranny of his dominant voice. Whether it is intentional or not, Lilly’s dominant voice leaves little space for diverse perspectives in the search for a new mode of being, while also undermining the significance of Florence as an alternative place to England. The spirit of Florence, which allows relative freedom for an individual as compared with England, paradoxically becomes limited and restrictive by silencing other minor voices, including women’s. The novel does not exclude female values, but Lawrence’s leadership politics presented in this

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

85

novel do not include women as speaking subjects; women never have the chance to speak of the new mode of life that the novel suggests. If the dominance of Lilly’s voice undermines the carefree spirit of Italy, the transmutation of the Old Aaron Sisson in Italy must be limited and temporary. Aaron leaves his family in order to retrieve his sense of individuality, which has been repressed by the social, cultural norms. At a glance, it is hard to understand what Aaron’s diatribe against the modern woman with strong self-will has to do with his exploration of a new self in Florence, which enables him to discard the old sense of self: All his life he had hated knowing what he felt. He had willfully, if not consciously, kept a gulf between his passional soul and his open mind. In his mind was pinned up a nice description of himself, and a description of Lottie, sort of authentic passports to be used in the conscious world . . . Now at last, after years of struggle, he seemed suddenly to have dropped his mask on the floor, and broken it. His authentic selfdescribing passport, his complete and satisfactory idea of himself suddenly became a rag of paper, ridiculous . . . His mask, his idea of himself dropped and was broken to bits. There he sat now maskless and invisible. That was how he strictly felt: invisible and undefined, rather like Wells’ Invisible Man. He had no longer a mask to present to people: he was present and invisible: they could not really think anything about him, because they could not really see him. . . . So there. The old Aaron Sisson was as if painfully transmuted, as the Invisible Man when he underwent his transmutations. Now he was gone, and no longer to be seen. His visibility lost for ever. (AR, pp. 163–64)

Aaron’s search for a new self comes together with his denunciation of the normative heterosexuality of Britain, which means that the redefinition of sexuality is essential to the new sense of self; but Aaron’s revolt against the repressive heterosexuality is only partly accomplished on the grounds that it shocks the “homophobic” culture of England and it is nonetheless based on another exclusion of women’s voice and desire. Aaron knows that he is “crossing a certain border-line” (AR, p. 166) between the socially described conscious self and the unconscious. Identifying himself as “[socially] invisible and undefined,” Aaron wants to be “a thing [like the lily] which has its root deep in life, and has lost its anxiety” (AR, p. 166).

86

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

However, despite Aaron’s declaration of the dissolution of his old self in Italy, he seems deeply saturated in the world of ideas; Aaron and Lilly keep “talking” about the modern man and woman and keep “discussing” a vision of the future society. It is no wonder that Eliseo Vivas complains, “[w]hat we are given [in Aaron’s Rod] is an abstract discourse. . . . we never find out satisfactorily what Aaron means by his ‘isolate self-responsibility,’ his ‘aloneness.’”58 Lawrence’s concern with a new sense of self was also a major motif in The Lost Girl. The narrator emphasizes how different Alvina looks when she stays in Woodhouse and when she leaves it for her maternity training: Was Alvina her own real self all this time? The mighty question arises upon us, what is one’s own real self? It certainly is not what we think we are and ought to be. Alvina had been bred to think of herself as a delicate, tender, chaste creature with unselfish inclinations and a pure, “high” mind. Well, so she was, in the more-or-less exhausted part of herself. . . . She went through her training experiences like another being. She was not herself, said Everybody. When she came home to Woodhouse at Easter, in her bonnet and cloak, Everybody was simply knocked out. Imagine that this frail, pallid, diffident girl, so ladylike, was now a rather fat, warm-coloured young woman, strapping and strong-looking, and with a certain bounce. (LG, p. 34)

Just as Aaron’s discovery of his new self has something to do with the spirit of Italy, which is relatively free from social suppression by domesticity and normative sexuality, Alvina’s remarkable change of her self inside and outside Woodhouse anticipates her trial–deeper and more thorough this time—as she develops her “real” self in a different setting of Italy. Although Alvina’s attempt to be a part of the “primitive” society ends with an incomplete conclusion, her search for a new self is indissolubly bound up with the spirit of the new place, whereas Aaron’s sense of self looks more related to Lilly’s (and Lawrence’s) ideas of a new life, which he calls the power-urge, than to the new spirit of Florence. Alvina’s and Aaron’s search for a new self and for a new way of life, which respects one’s single individuality, is part of Lawrence’s repeated theme in his early works. “Aaron’s Rod in one sense,” Steven Vine points out in his introduction to the novel, “enacts Rupert Birkin’s fantasy in Women in Love (1920) of a life free from connections.”59 As opposed to Gerald Crich, a representative of modern industrialism, Birkin floats around with no job and

The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod

87

doing nothing in particular for most of the novel. Alvina’s and Aaron’s wandering, like Birkin’s, reflects Lawrence’s sense of helplessness and disorientation after the outbreak of the war: “he[Aaron] was not moving towards anything: he was moving almost violently away from everything. And that was what he wanted” (AR, p. 178). “Doing nothing” in Lawrence’s texts, including his “leadership” novels, can be strategically effective as a counterforce against Western industrialism. Alvina and Aaron willingly accept the unstable status of being “lost” and being “disenfranchised.” Somers in Kangaroo (1923) looks like he suffers from his sense of “nothingness,” but in a sense he enjoys it in the totally different landscape of Australia. Certainly, Lawrence is “doing something” in The Plumed Serpent (1926), but, with the standards of Western civilization based on money and labor, we can hardly say that he is doing something productive; critics say that he is just creating mumbo-jumbo nonsense. Nonetheless, it is hard to find enough examples to argue for the relevance of the issue of colonialism in The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod in comparison with Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent; Alvina’s transformation is, compared with Kate’s in The Plumed Serpent, limited, while Aaron is little interested in cultural hierarchies between England and Italy such as the metropolis and a periphery. Still, their self-exile in itself signifies their “insurrection” against the “unconscious assumption of priority” (AR, p. 106) of the English culture. Since their desertion of England as their native place was still emotionally unacceptable for the British people at that time, Alvina’s and Aaron’s acts of exile disturb and undermine cultural hierarchies set in the distinction between northern and southern Europe. Considering that The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod were influenced by his experience of the war, it is almost impossible to expect that Alvina and Aaron would find a perfect place for their future in Italy. Since Lawrence had already observed a dissociation between people and place in Italy as well as in England, it looks inevitable that Aaron finds little difference between England and Italy after the war: Many worlds, not one world. But alas, the one world triumphing more and more over the many worlds, the big oneness swallowing up the many small diversities in its insatiable gnawing appetite, leaving a dreary sameness throughout the world, that means at last complete sterility. Aaron however was too new to the strangeness, he had no eye for the horrible sameness that was spreading like a disease over Italy from England and the north. (AR, pp. 152–53)

88

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Despite Lawrence’s sense of despair implied in this passage, however, the author in these transitional novels is concerned with the “difference” between England and Italy rather than the sameness between these two countries. Alvina and Aaron at least succeed in exiling themselves to a foreign country and partly transforming their old English self into a new individual self, even though their transformations are limited and incomplete. As self-exiled wanderers, Alvina and Aaron prove how one’s sense of self is involved with the different spirit of each place. When Aaron asks, “Then what’s the use of going somewhere else? You [Lilly] won’t change yourself,” Lilly points out how the spirit of a different place influences and shapes one’s sense of self: “But there are lots of mes. I’m not only just one proposition. A new place brings out a new thing in a man. Otherwise you’d have stayed in your old place with your family” (AR, p. 103). Above all, Lawrence shows in these transitional novels how hard full achievement of the transformation of the old self into the new one could be: Alvina ventures into an interracial marriage with an Italian man and leaves her native place, but she becomes “lost” to both worlds, the old and new place; Aaron deserts his job, family, and nation in his search for a new single individuality, but his recognition of a new mode of being in a foreign place is still vague and abstract at the end of the novel. In addition, the limitation in Aaron’s search for a new self is related to the fact that the transition to a new mode of life, what Lawrence’s male leadership meant for, entirely eliminates women’s participation in it. The novels hint that Alvina and Aaron will keep moving to other places, either back to England or forward to America or an unexpected place like Australia.

Chapter Three

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness” in Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush

If Italy was for Lawrence a country featuring his transitional phase, which covers the period after he had felt completely “done” with Europe and before he experienced a different way of being in America, Australia was another country that he unexpectedly visited on his way to America: “Australia was a sort of dream or trance, like being under a spell, the self remaining unchanged, so long as the trance did not last too long” (Phoenix, p. 142). Since Australia as, formerly, a set of white British settler and penal colonies shared a common cultural and linguistic heritage with England, it is not easy to understand why Lawrence had such a strange feeling about Australia and people there: “I never felt such a foreigner to any people in all my life as I do to these. An absolute foreigner, and I haven’t one single word to say to them” (Letters, IV, p. 264). He himself confesses this feeling of alienation about Australia as “surprising” in the same letter. Perhaps readers may also wonder why Lawrence felt himself “an absolute foreigner” in such a culturally familiar country, as compared with other countries totally different from England in terms of language, religion, and cultural heritage such as Italy, Ceylon, or Mexico. Lawrence’s feeling about this British dominion is not only strangely alienated from it but also constantly shifting and ambivalent, as Lawrence’s letter to Else Jaffe, older sister of his wife, renders well: This is the most democratic place I have ever been in. And the more I see of democracy the more I dislike it . . . And it all seems so empty, so nothing, it almost makes you sick . . . Yet they are very trustful and kind and quite competent in their jobs. There’s no need to lock your doors, nobody will come and steal. All the outside life is so easy. But there it ends. There’s nothing else . . . Yet the weird, unawakened country is wonderful . . . here one doesn’t feel the depression and the tension of Europe. Everything is happy-go-lucky, and one couldn’t fret

89

90

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing about anything if one tried. . . . In a way it’s a relief—a relief from the moral and mental and nervous tension of Europe. (Letters, IV, pp. 263–64)

Lawrence’s ambivalence, revealed in this letter, exactly captures his presentation of Australia, which consists of various feelings, impressions, and wishful thoughts about this new continent. Lawrence’s Australian novels, Kangaroo (1923) and The Boy in the Bush (1924), a novel coauthored with the colonial writer Mollie L. Skinner, record his contradictory feelings between his superiority as an English newcomer and his awareness of his ignorance of the Australian nation, and between his sense of place and his political ideas. This chapter explores how Lawrence develops through these Australian novels his constant concern with the geographical, cultural difference that each place has. Kangaroo does not reach the full bloom of the leadership politics, as anticipated at the end of the previous “leadership” novel Aaron’s Rod. Richard Lovat Somers, the protagonist of Kangaroo, is rather attracted from start to finish to the new landscape of Australia, while recoiling away from the political reality of the former settler and penal colonies at the later part of the novel. My reading of Kangaroo questions the nature of the novel as a “leadership” novel by foregrounding Somers’s “self-reflective” narrative voice in dealing with the leadership theme and his futile relationship with Benjamin Cooley, nicknamed Kangaroo, a political leader of Australia. Once the relationship of Kangaroo to the “leadership” category is questioned, we can see that Lawrence’s awakening sense of otherness governs the narrative development of the novel. In relation to the issue of colonialism, I will examine how Lawrence, as an English newcomer, understands and records the cultural hierarchies of metropolis and colony and how he captures the different spirit of Australia, represented by the “uncanny” bush. The last section of the chapter reviews the collaboration process of The Boy in the Bush between Lawrence and Skinner. I will pay attention particularly to the way in which these two novels arrive at two strikingly different endings, which indicate the conflict between Lawrence’s sense of place and his political ideas. Lawrence’s idea of male leadership in Kangaroo wanes in a quite early part of the novel, contrary to his consistent concern with the land. On the other hand, at the end of The Boy in the Bush we can observe Lawrence’s obsession with his male leadership ideas, along with a sudden death of his concern with the new spirit of Australia. Thus Lawrence’s two novels about Australia prove and at the same time disrupt a truth of his statement, “The spirit of place ultimately always triumphs” (Letters, V, p. 67).

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

91

Many critics have not considered Kangaroo as one of the works in which Lawrence’s literary talent fully bloomed, while leaving out The Boy in the Bush from the list of his major works due to the stigma of collaborative work. It is not unusual that, as with other works of Lawrence written during the “leadership” period, the critical reception of Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush varies, and most of it has largely downgraded and ignored these novels.1 Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to see what native Australian critics have thought of Lawrence’s presentation of Australia. A. D. Hope in his essay “D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo: how it looks to an Australian” points to Lawrence’s ignorance of Australia and his inevitable limits as a tourist who stayed in Australia just for a few months. Hope contends that Lawrence underrates Australia as if “the primitive continent itself has dominated and reduced the population, drawn it back into the fern-age,” while describing Australians as “really sub-human.”2 Adding that the social and political life presented in this novel is “almost entirely factitious”3 and thus has nothing to do with the reality of Australia, he concludes that Lawrence’s portrait of Australia is based on a superficial impression of the country. Katharine Susannah Prichard, a contemporary Australian of Skinner, also emphasizes that Lawrence’s presentation of Australia in Kangaroo is just “typically Lawrentian,” and judges it as a novel that comprises “comments and conclusions drawn from so slight a knowledge of Australian history, character and conditions.”4 It is understandable that, as native Australians, Hope and Prichard are not pleased with Lawrence’s presentation of Australia. According to Hope, Lawrence’s concern, even when he describes a foreign land and unfamiliar people, is still fixed on himself and his personal problems; that is, the new spirit of Australia does not change him a bit. What is worse, Lawrence’s anxiety and fantasy of himself and his ideas are presented in the novel at the cost of his misrepresentation of the former settler colonies. But Hope and Prichard overlook the fact that the authentic representation of Australia as a place, which was actually impossible for Lawrence, was not what Lawrence tried to do in this novel. Of course, they notice and thus point out that this novel is a “characteristically” Lawrentian version of Australia, but they criticize Lawrence as if he at least tried to create an “authentic” portrait of the nation but failed to do it. Far from their critical expectations, Lawrence was never concerned with any “authentic” presentation of a place, including Australia, as instanced in his travel books. We need to acknowledge that the presentation of Australia is Lawrence’s personal version, which consists of his fantasies, desires, and impressions of the place. Lawrence attempts to transplant his ideas of leadership politics too into a different continent, Australia, which he believes is totally different from Europe. The nature and the landscape of

92

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Australia are indeed different, but Lawrence gradually comes to see that the social and political life is not much different from Europe. This recognition makes his protagonist, Somers, recoil from the relationship with Kangaroo. Yet if these social and political details depicted in Kangaroo are all made up by Lawrence, what was Lawrence then trying to do in this unfamiliar land through his fictitious presentation of Australia? Although Hope is critical of Lawrence’s presentation of Australia, his understanding of Kangaroo might help us see by contrast what Lawrence tried to do in this novel. Hope argues that Lawrence does not sympathize with his male protagonist in this novel as much as he had in his other works, and through this unusual distance between the author and the protagonist Lawrence aims to objectify himself and his personal problems: “In fact Lawrence treats him [Somers] with a good deal of almost hostile satire. It is as though for once he tried to record himself and his problems quite objectively so that he could play it back and see what it looked like from outside.”5 Lawrence certainly attempts to experiment with his leadership politics and even expose his fantasy of being a political leader in this “new” land. But this is not the whole story of what Lawrence tries to do through this novel. If the early half of the novel deals with Lawrence’s experiment with his political ideas, his sense of locality, which brings light on the new land as a liberating space free from all sorts of ideas, shapes and controls the emotional flow of the narrative from start to finish. Although it cannot be denied that the root of Lawrence’s anxiety lies within himself and his personal problems, the novel shows simultaneously how the new spirit of Australia affects him. As the novel develops, Lawrence comes to encounter the reality of the colonial “otherness” coming from different lives beyond himself. Through that process, he confirms his belief in “the different spirit of a different place” in this Australian novel. Lawrence’s recognition of otherness, of course, does not necessarily shape all the details of the novel. Most of the images and preconceptions about Australia that Lawrence employs in Kangaroo are made of both stereotypically colonialist tropes and his anti-colonial impulses. In the first part of the novel, for example, Somers’s response to Australia is not much different from a typical colonialist who is stuck in the dominant paradigm of seeing this former set of colonies as a periphery of the British metropolis: “It was all London without being London. Without any of the lovely old glamour that invests London. This London of the Southern hemisphere was all, as it were, made in five minutes, a substitute for the real thing. Just a substitute—as margarine is a substitute for butter” (K, pp. 25–6). For Somers, these British Australians are just “barbarians” (K, p. 26) without any

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

93

civilized class distinction: “[e]ven the heart of Sydney itself—an imitation of London and New York, without any core or pith of meaning” (K, p. 35). That is to say, Lawrence shows, through Somers’s typical colonialist mentality, an example of how newcomers from the Mother Country would think of, and feel about, their former settler and penal colonies. And yet Somers is different from a typical colonialist in that the former is never interested in the glorious destiny of the British colonial project and is entirely disillusioned by the old life of Europe: “That horrible, horrible staleness of Europe, and all their trite consciousness, and their dreariness . . . Australia has got some real, positive indifference to ‘questions,’ but Europe is one big wriggling question and nothing else” (K, p. 171). Somers’s repudiation of European values makes possible his anti-colonialist approach to the former set of British colonies, though it does not wipe out all trace of his sense of superiority as an Englishman. The novel starts with the scene in which Somers and his wife, Harriet, arrive in Sydney. Somers as a newcomer from the Old Country describes the people, culture, and landscape of Australia as those of one of the former British settler colonies. But the first scene of the novel interestingly opens through the eyes of “a bunch of [Australian] workmen,” and one of them catches the odd appearances of Harriet and Somers: Perhaps it was one of these faintly wafted squeals that made a blueoveralled fellow look around, lifting his thick eyebrows vacantly. His eyes immediately rested on two figures approaching from the direction of the conservatorium, across the grass lawn. One was a mature, handsome, fresh-faced woman, who might have been Russian. Her companion was a smallish man, pale-faced, with a dark beard. Both were well-dressed, and quiet, with that quiet self-possession which is almost unnatural nowadays. They looked different from other people. (K, p. 11)

This strange-looking English couple is objectified through the eyes of a colonized other. Given that most of colonial discourse depends on the description of the colony by a single European narrator, the first scene of Kangaroo in which the encounter between a British couple and colonized others is reciprocal, not one-sidedly dominated by a European, challenges the dominant paradigm of colonial discourse. If we imagine this opening page as the first scene of a film, the eyes of colonial others uncommonly set the first frame in which an English couple enter, not vice versa. This first scene, unsettling the self-other hierarchy between Europeans and colonial

94

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

others, suggests that Lawrence’s presentation of a formerly colonized British dominion will not follow the conventional narrative of colonial discourse. Although these Australian workmen, for Somers, are colonial others, they are outside the antagonistic relationship existing between the European colonizer and the black colonized because they descend from the white British settlers. “There was,” as Boehmer points out, “no anti-colonial struggle to speak of, no fight for independence” in the settler countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.6 But this does not mean there has not existed any effort to establish a cultural and psychological independence from the Mother Country. Boehmer, dealing with the disjuncture between the English language and natural environments of Australia, explains a colonial sense of cultural alienation that settler writers have felt about themselves as “essentially cultural migrants”: According to his own description, Patrick White grew up with the impression of being permanently at a remove from Australian reality (‘The Prodigal Son,’ 1958). The maxim ‘Only the British can be right’ governed his upbringing. Many shared his experience of alienation. Ian Mudie, one of the Jindyworobak poets, spoke of white Australians as being ‘merely aliens in our own land,’ not ‘oriented’ to the continent, lacking a ‘frame of native reference.’ ‘All the books we read were full of trees we had never seen,’ Thomas Keneally once remarked, Australians are ‘educated to be exiles’ in their own land.7

As the passage shows, Australians—especially colonial writers—have paid attention to the way in which their dominant cultural paradigm has justified cultural hierarchies between the metropolis and the colony, which consequently disrupts their interaction with their land and, more significantly, influences their sense of identity. We need to see here how Lawrence, as a British newcomer, understands and responds to this quintessential colonial experience—in Keneally’s words, the sense that “all the books we read were full of trees we had never seen”—in his Australian novel. The absence of a cultural frame with which the Australians can explain their colonial way of life has something to do with what Lawrence called “the absence of any inner meaning” (K, p. 33). The incongruity between culture and the land may be one of the reasons that Somers keeps saying, “Look at these Australians—they’re awfully nice, but they’ve got no inside to them. They’re hollow. How are you [Kangaroo] going to build on such hollow stalks?” (K, p. 146) While observing this cultural emptiness of Australia, Somers tries to understand in his way that the predicaments accompanying

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

95

colonial settlement might cause this absence of “inner life” (K, p. 33): “The Colonies make for outwardness. Everything is outward—like hollow stalks of corn. The life makes this inevitable: all that struggle with bush and water and what-not, all the mad struggle with the material necessities and conveniences—the inside soul just withers and goes into the outside” (K, p. 146). Despite his effort to understand it, however, it seems that Lawrence only thinks this absence of “inner life” comes from physical, material difficulties that colonial life necessitates, rather than from the incongruity between colonial culture and their native land. As a result, it seems unlikely that he really understands the way in which this cultural “emptiness” becomes related to Australians’ sense of crisis created in developing their identities as individuals as well as a community. Lawrence’s limited understanding of this colonial emptiness appears unavoidable; I do not think that there are many choices that Lawrence as an Englishman could have had in dealing with the cultural hierarchy between the metropolis and the former colonies, unless he had been a colonial writer who might, as a colonized other, have brought to the surface the complicated cultural contexts of this issue. It is inevitable that Lawrence does not feel the discrepancy between this colonial culture and the land as intensely as settler writers do. Nonetheless, we can see there exists a certain common feature in Lawrence’s and settler writers’ way of understanding the culture of each society. Although Lawrence’s sense of alienation from his society is surely different from the way that Australians feel “alienated” from their culture, they are similar to each other in that Lawrence as well as Australians share a sort of cultural crisis, which comes from their psychological displacement from their native land. That is, Australians have been culturally alienated from the land, while Lawrence is both culturally and physically displaced from his native place. Lawrence had experienced this cultural alienation at the level of the individual whereas for Australians it is a collective experience. Lawrence’s voluntary exile from both his native land and culture generates more complicated features than do the cases of Australians who have been at least attached to their land while having undergone “the settler experience of displacement and alienation.”8 Consequently, it looks quite natural that Lawrence, who revolts against the cultural values of Britain including the ideology of colonial expansion, reveals conflicting and contradictory responses to this settler colony; as a British citizen, he seems to take for granted the hierarchical relationship between the British and the Australian as exemplified in Somers and Harriet’s relation with the Australian couple, Jack and Victoria Callcott; on the other hand, he is well aware of his personal limits as a newcomer from the Old Country: “Perhaps after

96

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

all he was just a Pommy, prescribing things with over-much emphasis, and wanting to feel God-Almighty in the face of unborn events” (K, p. 164).9 Somers’s perception of the different spirit of Australia enables him to see how limited his knowledge of this new land is and thus how absurd it could be to describe it with his social and philosophical ideas. In other words, Somers at least knows that it is impossible for him to present (or even understand) this nation as it is. Somers’s recognition of “his Pommy stupidity and his pommigrant superiority” (K, p. 166) serves to differentiate Somers’s approach to, and appropriation of, Australia from those of typical colonialists. In spite of occasional interventions of stereotypical understanding of this British dominion, it is worthwhile to take notice of how Somers sensitively perceives the cultural “difference” between himself and colonial people. Introducing a local colloquial expression that “immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood ‘thins down,’ by their round and ruddy cheeks” (K, p. 165), Somers interestingly evokes a Lawrentian aphorism that every place has a different blood consciousness: Yet he [Somers] said to himself: ‘Do I want my blood to thin down like theirs?—that peculiar emptiness that is in them, because of the thinning that’s gone out of them? Do I want this curious transparent blood of the antipodes, with its momentaneous feelings, and its sort of absentness? But of course till my blood has thinned down I shan’t see with their eyes. And how in the name of heaven is this world-brotherhood mankind going to see with one eye, eye to eye, when the very blood is of different thickness on different continents, and with the difference in blood, the inevitable psychic difference? Different vision!’ (K, pp. 165–66)

According to Lawrence, the different spirit of a place means nothing less than a different blood consciousness, “unconsciously” and “collectively” formed by a certain culture, the land, the climate and so forth. His sensitive awareness of different blood consciousnesses enables him to admit that his leadership politics, basically fermented in the European soil, could be inadequate to this new land. This chapter titled “The Battle of Tongues,” which displays tedious tirades between Somers and Kangaroo, ends with Somers’s recognition of the unavoidable difference between himself and white settlers. Furthermore, Somers feels keenly, even more than any settler people, the need of a new life-source and a new language to describe the mystery of life that he believes this new country still has. Lawrence believes that the Australian as well as the British are blind to what is going on in their lives, and thus he tries to show through Kangaroo that the inherited

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

97

cultural values of England no longer fit the old country as well as this nation of former settler colonies. Lawrence’s diagnosis of what is wrong with Australia, although its main contents are in fact the conflict between himself and the world, starts with his adventure of encountering Australian political leaders. Most critical attention to Kangaroo, perhaps because of the label of the second “leadership” novel, tends to be fixed on Lawrence’s presentation of his leadership ideas. However, as opposed to our expectation of seeing Lawrence’s solid belief in male leadership in Kangaroo, we find instead a lot of disillusionment and distrust of politics. From the beginning, the possibility of political solidarity between Kangaroo and Somers is not great enough, especially due to the latter’s postwar disillusionment, as the “Nightmare” chapter convincingly portrays. Even before Somers meets Kangaroo, the novel shows a sign that the solidarity between these two men would be impossible: “And now, when true and good friends offered, he [Somers] found he simply could not commit himself, even to simple friendship. The whole trend of this affection, this mingling, this intimacy, this truly beautiful love, he found his soul just set against it” (K, p. 119). For all harangues about a new society by Kangaroo, Somers’s inability to intermingle with other men has not much improved as the novel develops. This means Lawrence, from the first, could not really sympathize with political leaders such as Kangaroo and Willie Struthers, a leader of the socialist party. Somers is rather mostly concerned with the integrity of his own individuality throughout the novel. As most critics have agreed, it would be fair to say that Kangaroo focuses instead on one man’s (Somers’s) consciousness, and his personal problems: “Poor Richard Lovat wearied himself to death struggling with the problem of himself, and calling it Australia” (K, p. 33). Since Kangaroo and Aaron’s Rod are the results of the same “leadership” period, it is not surprising to see that a substantial part of Somers’s political idea overlaps with Lilly’s argument for the transition from the love-urge to the power-urge. In the early part of the novel, Somers takes trouble to build up some sort of male leadership in Australia as a new way of life to replace the dominant mode of Christian love. After Somers’s political compromise with Kangaroo turns out to be a failure because he finally realizes that there exists a great gap between his expectation of a new life and the political, social reality of Australia, Somers’s statements heavily depend on repeated Lawrentian themes such as “a new recognition of the life-mystery” or “the Lord Almighty” (K, p. 334). In particular, most of Somers’s statement in the last part of the novel is identical with Lilly’s at the end of Aaron’s Rod. For example, the divide between mental, social consciousness and the unconscious, which Lawrence calls “the vertebral consciousness” (K, p. 331),

98

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

pervades the consciousness of Somers as “a thought-adventurer” (K, p. 246). In a similar way, Somers’s preoccupation with his single individuality is not different from Aaron’s; Aaron and Somers both long for relative release from intense social pressures. But the difference in Lilly’s and Somers’s ways of presenting the same idea of male leadership is also quite striking: if Lawrence allows Lilly to keep his dominant voice throughout Aaron’s Rod, the author in Kangaroo uses a form of self-parody to investigate the validity of his political ideas. Rather than taking the role of a spokesperson like Lilly, Somers consistently objectifies and sometimes mocks his self-image as a political leader—more exactly his desire to be—through Harriet’s voice. Harriet is a major figure who constantly calls into question Somers’s preoccupation with men’s business: Ha, the afterwards will make its own way, it won’t wait for you. It’s a kind of nervous obstinacy and self-importance in you. You don’t like people. You always turn away from them and hate them. Yet like a dog to his vomit you always turn back. And it will be the same old game here again as everywhere else. What are these people after all? Quite nice, but just common and—and not in your line at all. But there you are. You stick your head into a bush like an ostrich, and think you’re doing wonders. (K, p. 77)

Harriet’s dissenting voice, along with Somers’s self-mocking gestures, is perhaps the reason that Hope says, despite his numerous complaints of Lawrence’s presentation of his country, “Somers is in a sense the most detached of all the many self-portraits in Lawrence’s fiction.”10 Lawrence allows other characters like Kangaroo, Struthers, or Harriet, in addition to Somers, to share parts of whole arguments that Lawrence wants to present in this novel. In consequence, the narrative voice of Kangaroo is, compared with Lilly’s dominant voice in Aaron’s Rod, constantly unstable, often self-mocking, and self-reflective in presenting its male leadership theme. Lawrence’s effort to objectify his ideas is continued in Kangaroo and Somers’s political debate on the nature of a future society. It is hard to divide “which statements belong to whom” in many parts of the dialogue between Kangaroo and Somers. Kangaroo often rehearses Lawrentian themes such as “the sacredness and the mystery of life” (K, p. 125) and “a perfect equilibrium” (K, p. 149) between the sexes. When Kangaroo blames “the principle of permanency” for “the root of evil,” he reminds us of Lawrence himself11: “The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones round our

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

99

necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do” (K, p. 126). Beyond the attempt to objectify his political ideas and to make a balance between characters, it seems that this novel, as Tony Pinkney suggests, does not have a real hero in the sense that either Birkin or Ramón plays a role as a Lawrentian hero. “For the ‘hero’ of Kangaroo increasingly becomes,” Pinkney argues, “not any single character, nor even of the more or less successful male pseudo-pairings (Jack / Somers, Jack / Kangaroo, Somers / Kangaroo), but the reader of the novel, who increasingly is directly addressed in the closing chapters of the book.” 12 Unlike Lilly’s dominant narrative voice of Aaron’s Rod, the “self-mocking” and “self-reflective” narrative voice of Kangaroo reflects that Lawrence begins to question his attempt to transplant the leadership idea into this formerly colonized nation. Lawrence’s effort to objectify the idea gives birth to a different presentation of it in Kangaroo. Many critics have been in fact skeptical about the “political” character of the novel.13 For instance, Michael Wilding points out that although it is “not correct to style Kangaroo as anti-political novel,” this novel “resists enlistment into any ideology.”14 Wilding describes the nature of politics presented in this novel as “a politics totally outside the social world”: “His [Lawrence’s] theme is the commitment of one man to political action. But his emphasis results in a peculiar sense of the isolation, the irrelevance, of what remains as ‘political.’”15 Wilding’s paradoxical definition of Kangaroo as a political novel and simultaneously a novel “leaving outside politics” gives an idea of how, and to what extent, Lawrence uncommonly uses the conventional codes of politics in this novel. “Politics for Somers,” Wilding says, “is not a matter of particular practical aims, but of some general emotional, religious commitment.”16 Lawrence’s unusual use of politics in Kangaroo inevitably causes complaints from native Australians such as Hope and Prichard; for example, Hope argues, Lawrence “didn’t care to know about the country he was describing. The result is that Kangaroo as a novel set in a particular country and society is very much of a travesty.”17 Pinkney gives us another explanatory frame through which he shows how Lawrence’s leadership politics inescapably leads to a “doomed” project. He accounts for Lawrence’s peculiar presentation of modern politics within the structure of modernism, which had come closer at once to dilemma as a literary form and to ideological breakdown, especially after the war. Borrowing Jameson’s account of the “male pseudo-couple,” Pinkney argues that the relationship between Aaron and Lilly, Somers and Jack or Kangaroo, needs to be seen at a different level from the relationship of Birkin and Gerald in Women in Love, based on “a desirable social synthesis”18:

100

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing The relationship between the two broken subjects [Jack and Somers] subsists only in the dimension of irritation, hot debate, extended bouts of sulking. For as Jameson has insisted, the pseudo-couple is also a ‘pseudo-agon . . . a reification of struggle arrested and transmuted into static structural dependency. Lawrence’s texts, unlike Beckett’s [Mercier and Camier and Waiting for Godot], still exist sufficiently in the dimension of classical narrative time to need to show the pseudo-couple coming into being—the tentative initial approaches, aversions and returns of two characters who had not until then known each other; . . . But these humanist residues in Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo should not deceive us about the essentially synchronic nature of the male couples depicted; their relations have, structurally speaking, no beginning and no end— the latter aspect being finely captured by the frustrating non-conversation which ends Aaron’s Rod, and which is Lawrence’s equivalent of Beckett’s ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’19

Through the modernist tradition of the “male pseudo-couple,” Pinkney develops the context in which Lawrence’s idea of male leadership cannot help becoming “a doomed project from the start.”20 This frame effectively elucidates the way in which the “dreary metaphysical tirades”21 between Lilly and Aaron, Somers and Jack or Kangaroo turn out to be “having in the long run no substantive content of [their] own.”22 The literary frame of the pseudocouple also explains why women do not exist as major figures in Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo, a fact related to the modernist tradition of misogyny. But Pinkney’s direct connection of Lawrence’s male couples with the “absurd” universe of Beckettian modernism seems too extreme to coordinate with other humanist residues often found in Lawrence’s texts. Even if we admit that the male pseudo-couple is replacing the old narrative conventions, and that it reflects ideological collapses after the war, it is hard to discuss Lawrence’s Aaron and Lilly—or Somers and Kangaroo—on the same level with Beckett’s characters like Vladimir and Estragon. The metaphysical tirades between Somers, Jack, and Kangaroo look repetitive with no end, but that is not to say that these tedious dialogues “never reach any conclusion”23 because they surely reach some conclusions: the so-called Lawrentian themes, repeated in his later novels, such as the dark God, the integrity of the self, and natural-born superiors as his heroes. By revealing some confusion in defining Kangaroo as a political novel, and by showing that the relationship between Somers and Kangaroo is not substantial, Wilding and Pinkney unsettle the established view of Kangaroo as a “leadership” novel. Even if we still see it within a frame of the political novel,

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

101

Kangaroo has a lot of contradictory concepts and conflicts, which exist within Lawrence’s uncommon figuration of politics. In particular, the contradiction between Lawrence’s obsession with male leadership politics and his incessant argument for individuality is one of the difficult issues that readers repeatedly come to see in his “leadership” novels. Ideally understood, the problems of individuality and community cannot be separated from each other, as L. D. Clark suggests in terms of Lawrence’s apocalyptic view about the world and the self: “He [Lawrence] felt apocalyptic about his own life and about the life of England, indeed all of Europe . . . Suddenly, with the War, the problem of England became the problem of self, and neither problem could be solved in the present state of life.”24 But in reality and in Lawrence’s texts, these two elements keep contradicting and conflicting with each other. Leadership is necessarily associated with an authoritarian or dictatorial attitude over the masses, even though it does not mean to “bully” people, as Lawrence ceaselessly emphasizes. The authority accompanying a political leader figure, whether he/she wants it or not, tends to limit individual liberty. We need to track down here how Lawrence tries to solve this contradiction between male leadership and individuality. Murthy suggests that this kind of conflict between community and individuality cannot be resolved in Lawrence’s text, as in most other literary texts: he writes, “the nature of the ultimate destiny of man alone, and the other of man in society” are “the two polarities in constant tension in the novel [Kangaroo].”25 In Aaron’s Rod, Aaron Sisson, an isolated individual, tries to enter the unknown world of male leadership— an exclusive community of men—under Lilly’s guidance, whereas Somers in Kangaroo moves from a community of men back to his own isolated world while giving up all his efforts to live with other people. In these two “leadership” novels, the tension between community and individuality does not really create the third world of symbiosis where these two contradictory elements can subsist together. The fundamental conflict between community and individuality foreshadows a “doomed” future for Lawrence’s leadership politics. Lawrence’s leadership idea keeps registering his version of an ideal society while investigating the problems of the current mode of life. In addition, Lawrence’s configuration of a new society, based on male companionship, cannot help being a limited (rather than failed) project by excluding women and their desire. Although Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent tries to embrace women’s voice through Kate, he is still exclusively preoccupied with men’s phallic desire. Besides the limitation accompanied by the exclusion of women, Lawrence in Kangaroo hardly tries to solve the conflict between society and an individual self; Somers does not establish any meaningful relationship with other

102

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

people except for his wife. Lawrence’s temperamental friction against the world, which makes him obstinately stick to his isolated self, explains why he cast aside his leadership politics after The Plumed Serpent and returned to his usual concern with sexuality between the modern man and woman in his last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Although Lawrence’s leadership idea in the 1920s, characterized as his search for a new life and self, originates from his desire to replace the present mode of life, his attempts to change a community through his unusual idea of politics resulted in the re-emphasis of the individual self in his later novels. Even compared with his early novels like Sons and Lovers (1913) and The Rainbow (1915), which highlight human connections between generations, or between the sexes, Lawrence seems ironically more concerned with the issue of the integral self in his “leadership” novels—at least in Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo. In this context, Lawrence’s characterization of Kangaroo raises suspicion that perhaps from the first he could not intermingle with, or sympathize with, any kind of political leader. The character of Kangaroo as a political leader, which is closer to a caricature than a realistic character, confounds readers in judging whether Lawrence really believed in male leadership and thus tried to present its validity in this novel. First of all, given Lawrence’s frequent anti-Semitic statements, that Somers was attracted to Kangaroo, a Jew, is not any more convincing than that Somers, who has an allergy to the war as described in the “Nightmare” chapter, was attracted to the digger clubs, consisting of war veterans. The image of Kangaroo gradually changes from “a funny sort of Saviour” (K, p. 143) into “A great Thing, a horror,” not “a whole man” (K, p. 234), when Somers finally gives up understanding Kangaroo’s world, which happens right before the “Nightmare” chapter. The greatest gap in Kangaroo and Somers’s ideas about an ideal society is that the former is stuck in the unusual concoction of fascism and love while the latter is against both ingredients. For Somers, fascism is nothing more than a political form of “bullying” other people, and the mode of love is too clichéd to deliver Lawrence’s living energy of life. This is the obvious reason that Somers refuses to be a member of Kangaroo’s right-wing party. In many parts Kangaroo’s statements do not sound appealing to readers and sometimes hardly make sense, and Somers discloses his complete apathy to Kangaroo’s political attempt in the end of Chapter Six: “He did not care a straw what Kangaroo said or felt, or what anybody said or felt, even himself ”(K, p. 140). Much as Kangaroo’s statements connecting fascism and love do not sound convincing, the political thought of Jack, another representative of the digger clubs, resembles the fascist notion of the 1920s, which is racist,

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

103

exclusively white-male oriented, and against socialism: “There’ll be the Labour Party, the Socialists, uniting with the workers of the world. They’ll be the workers, if ever it comes to it. Those black and yellow people’ll make ’em work—not half. It isn’t one side only that can keep slaves. Why, the fools, the coloured races don’t have any feeling for liberty” (K, pp. 101–02). Surprisingly enough, Somers sympathizes with Jack’s absurd and discriminatory statement against racial others and workers: ‘Of course,’ said Somers. ‘What is Indian Nationalism but a strong bid for power—for tyranny. The Brahmins want their old absolute caste-power—the most absolute tyranny—back again, and the Mohammedans want their military tyranny. That’s what they are lusting for—wield the rod again. Slavery for millions. Japan the same. And China, in part, the same. The niggers the same. The real sense of liberty only goes with white blood. And the ideal democratic liberty is an exploded ideal. You’ve got to have wisdom and authority somewhere, and you can’t get it out of any further democracy.’ ‘There!’

said Jack. ‘That’s what I mean. We s’ll be wiped out, wiped out. (K, p. 102) This passage reminds us of Lilly’s racist statement in Aaron’s Rod, which I quoted in Chapter Two, and Somers’s colorful words of racial discrimination lead to his argument for the legitimacy of white male leadership. In his attempt to figure out what male leadership would be like, Somers’s racism, which Wilding calls “the casual racism,”26 comes and goes from one extreme to the other; on the one hand, Somers describes racial others as millions of vermin and gangs who threaten to wipe out the white race; on the other, he romanticizes and idealizes them as people who know “the mystery of lordship,” which here is little more than the other side of political tyranny: Yet he wanted some living fellowship with other men; as it was he was just isolated. Maybe a living fellowship!—but not affection, not love, not comradeship. Not mates and equality and mingling. Not bloodbrotherhood. None of that. What else? He didn’t know. He only knew he was never destined to be mate or comrade or even friend with any man. Some other living relationship. But what? He did not know. Perhaps the thing that the dark races know: that one can still feel in India: the mystery of lordship. That which white men have struggled so long against, and

104

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing which is the clue to the life of the Hindu. The mystery of lordship. The mystery of innate, natural, sacred priority. The other mystic relationship between men, which democracy and equality try to deny and obliterate. Not any arbitrary caste or birth aristocracy. But the mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority. (K, p. 120)

This passage reveals Lawrence’s idea of male leadership as not either fixed or specifically formed. Somers just keeps saying, “He did not know,” while ceaselessly invoking metaphysical words like “mystery” or “mystic” or “living,” and these tell that nothing is really certain in his notion of hierarchical leadership. In Kangaroo, Somers’s racism also affects his relationship with the native Australian couple, Jack and his wife, Victoria. The Somers couple’s relationship with these settler people is interesting in that this relationship shows a typical cultural hierarchy between Europeans and white settlers. The author describes the superior-inferior relation between these two households as natural by patronizingly comparing it to the conventional colonialist trope of child and parents27: She [Victoria] was rather wistful, after the vague coolness that had subsisted between the two households. She was so happy that Somers and Harriet were coming with her and Jack. They made her feel—she could hardly describe it—but so safe, so happy and safe. Whereas often enough, in spite of the stalwart Jack, she felt like some piece of fluff blown about on the air, now that she was taken from her own home. With Somers and Harriet she felt like a child that is with its parents, so lovely and secure, without any need ever to look around. (K, p. 85)

It is the voice of Victoria, not Jack, who carries this child-like feeling of colonial dependency on the Mother Country. There exist, of course, not a few cultural differences between Somers and Jack: “Jack just barely tolerated the quiet finesse of Somers, and Somers tolerated with difficulty Jack’s facetious familiarity and heartiness” (K, p. 67). But Jack is not treated as subsidiary and visibly inferior as in Somers’s treatment of Victoria. Along with his sense of superiority over colonial others, Somers even clandestinely enjoys his sexual fantasy over a colonized female other through the characterization of Victoria, who is, unlike Harriet, submissive and very feminine. Considering that Somers tries to build up a sort of comradeship with Jack and Kangaroo, colonized males, his treatment of

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

105

Victoria characterizes a typical feeling of European males about colonized women, who have been considered easily controllable and thus sexually available: She [Victoria] had such a charming, innocent look, like an innocent girl, naïve and a little gawky. Yet the strange exposed smile she gave him in the dusk. It puzzled him to know what to make of it. Like an offering—and yet innocent. Perhaps like the sacred prostitutes of the temple: acknowledgement of the sacredness of the act . . . He had to admit that he was flattered also. She seemed to see the wonder in him. And she had none of the European women’s desire to make a conquest of him, none of that feminine rapacity which is so hateful in the old world. She seemed like an old Greek girl bringing an offering to the altar of the mystic Bacchus. The offering of herself. (K, p. 39)

Somers’s condescending attitude to colonial people easily arouses his male fantasy. Victoria is never a major figure in the novel, but she becomes helplessly sexualized and objectified in terms of Somers’s masculine and colonialist desire. Somers’s sexual fantasy about Victoria, which Lawrence describes as if Victoria sexually desires Somers, not vice versa, parallels his habitual eroticisation of Australia as a virgin land: “Australia feels as if it had never been loved, and never come out into the open. As if man had never loved it, and made it a happy country, a bride country—or a mother country” (K, p. 87). As David Spurr argues, if “[t]he allegorization of colonized nations in terms of the female figure (bodily, rhetorical) has been a cliché of colonial history,”28 Lawrence’s sexual expressions in portraying this federated nation are a part of that clichéd colonial discourse. Lawrence’s sexual fantasy about the virgin land, projected through the female body of Victoria, betrays one of typical appropriations of the colony by Europeans. As shown in the way that Lawrence reveals his sexual fantasy over a colonized female other and the primitive land, and the tedious harangues between Somers and Kangaroo that have no logical consequences in the development of the novel, it is unlikely that Lawrence tried to disguise his experiences in Australia or was very concerned with the form of the novel. Kangaroo is rather like a travel book with a lot of philosophical ideas, like his travelogues Twilight in Italy and Etruscan Places. This nature of the narrative, similar to the travel book, might be the reason that critics have thought Kangaroo defective and careless as a novel. In particular, many earlier critics have pointed to the formal looseness of Kangaroo as a fatal defect of the novel. The judgment of Eliseo Vivas, an

106

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

adherent of modernist aesthetics—“Kangaroo is hardly a novel. It is at best an effort, a futile effort, to solve a problem”29—summarizes a tendency prevailing in modernist readings of Kangaroo. Quite interestingly, the critical judgment that Lawrence’s later novels consist of fragmented narratives is not exclusively limited to modernist critics. For example, Terry Eagleton, a Marxist critic, explains how “the fissuring of organic form” in Lawrence’s texts is related to his experience of war, which served to destroy his belief in organic wholeness: After the war, Lawrence’s near-total ideological collapse, articulated with the crisis of aesthetic signification, presents itself in a radical rupturing and diffusion of literary form: novels like Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo are signally incapable of evolving a narrative, ripped between fragmentary plot, spiritual autobiography and febrile didacticism.30

Unlike Vivas, Eagleton does not consider this fragmented narrative of Kangaroo as aesthetically negative or defective. Rather, reminding us of “[Bertolt] Brecht’s rejection of [Georg] Lukács’s nostalgic organicism, his traditionalist preference for closed, symmetrical totalities” in the 1930s, Eagleton argues that “the fissuring of organic form” is to be regarded as “a progressive act.”31 As we easily notice, Kangaroo does not have an organic form as The Rainbow and Women in Love do. But how to understand this lack of organic wholeness is a totally different matter, as exemplified in Eagleton’s view. Like Eagleton, U. R. Anatha Murthy also asserts, “we are not irritated by the looseness of the form of the novel; rather the lively casualness of tone made possible by the apparently loose form holds together the various changing moods of the novel which range from apocalyptic vision to wry humour.”32 The important thing is that this “loose” and “fragmented” narrative of the novel is intimately related to thematic elements such as Somers’s sense of disorientation after the war, his distrust of language, or his desire for “meaninglessness” (K, p. 367) against meaning, which is, Somers believes, “the most meaningless of illusions” (K, p. 366). Only this humanly uncontrollable, primitive land can offer Somers the nonhuman and anti-European values that he seeks, and these characteristically Lawrentian values affect the form as well as the contents of the novel. A famous digression of the novel, the twelfth chapter titled “The Nightmare,” not only exemplifies the nature of the “carefree” plot of the novel but also marks a visible sign that Somers’s concern is at this juncture transmitted from politics to the Australian landscape. At a glance, this chapter looks like just a digression without any connection with other parts of the book, but it is thematically carefully calculated as an essential part of the

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

107

plot of the novel. This digressional chapter effectively makes Kangaroo’s and Struthers’s political ideas non-sense, and in doing so, it supports the thematic significance of the following chapters in which Somers returns to his isolated world, while giving up any political attempts. The “Nightmare” chapter is, then, a turning point, shifting from Somers’s obsessive concern with men’s business to his desire to be alone in this vacant space of the new continent. In the later half of the novel, the existence of other people does not have any meaning for Somers’s inner life; even if people exist, they are no longer objects of Somers’s concern. Somers’s sense of emptiness and anti-humanism becomes reinforced by his encountering the vacant space of Australia, devoid of tensions and conflicts of human relations, towards the end of the novel. Not only this “careless” land but also the different way of colonial life supports his divorce from his expectation of a new political order and from spiritual residues of the old continent. His discovery of a different colonial life also signifies a beginning of his self-awakening to otherness, which becomes noticeable toward the end. For instance, the fourteenth chapter “Bits” describes how Somers’s longing for an instant—non-mental—life meets with different local lives, indeed different from the spirit of old Europe. Somers comes to see a clue for a different way of living through the local newspaper, the Sydney Bulletin: Bits, bits, bits. Yet Richard Lovat read on. It was not mere anecdotage. It was the sheer momentaneous life of the continent. There was no consecutive thread. Only the laconic courage of experience. All the better. He could have kicked himself for wanting to help mankind, join in revolutions or reforms or any of that stuff. And he kicked himself still harder thinking of his frantic struggles with the ‘soul’ and the ‘dark god’ and the ‘listener’ and the ‘answerer.’ Blarney—blarney—blarney! He was a preacher and a blatherer, and he hated himself for it. Damn the ‘soul,’ damn the ‘dark god,’ damn the ‘listener’ and the ‘answerer,’ and above all, damn his own interfering, nosy self. (K, p. 300)

Encountering the lives of local Australians, Somers realizes how he has been stuck in the self-sufficient frame of Western knowledge. Somers tries hard to distance himself from European epistemology, which has made everything, whether it is about the human or the nonhuman, the conscious or the unconscious, an object of science and philosophy. The different way of life Somers observes in Australia enables him to question even

108

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

his personal struggles with religious and political ideas that he has solidly believed in. More importantly, Somers’s resistance to the dominance of Western knowledge contributes to extending his perception of “otherness” among peoples: So, the Christian-democratic world prescribes certain motions, and men proceed to repeat these motions, till they conceive that there are no other motions but these. And that is pure automatism. When scientists describe savages, or ancient Egyptians, or Aztecs, they assume that these far-off peoples acted, but in a crude, clumsy way, from the same motives which move us. ‘Too much ego in his cosmos.’ Men have had strange, inconceivable motives and impulses, which were just as ‘right’ as ours are. And our ‘right’ motives will cease to activate, even as the lost motives of the Assyrians have ceased. Our ‘right’ and our righteousness will go pop, and there will be another sort of right and righteousness. (K, p. 325)

Lawrence’s critique of the ideology of Western anthropology is not limited to the academic world. Rather, it extends to his questioning of the tyrannical enforcement of the Western mode of life over other places outside “the Christian-democratic world.” His awakening sense of the racial other produces a prototype of future postcolonial knowledge. Elleke Boehmer credits Lawrence’s sense of “incompatibility” between different cultures as a rare quality among his contemporaries: “he [Lawrence] pointed to the unreadable aspects of otherness in a way that was unusually non-judgemental for his time. To Lawrence different forms of understanding were not naturally commensurate with one another.”33 As the passage quoted above shows, Lawrence’s exceptional sense of “otherness” in Kangaroo makes possible a proto-postcolonial tradition in which Lawrence’s rejection of industrial Europe, beyond a critique of Western civilization, joins with today’s anti-colonial discourse. Lawrence’s depiction of the Australian bush brings into relief his extraordinary sense of racial otherness and his ability to capture the different spirit of a different place, although his presentation of Australia cannot help being different from a native Australian’s. Kangaroo, written by a British writer, also raises debatable questions about cultural hierarchies, and their accompanying conflicts, between the metropolis and the former settler colonies as many other colonial discourses have done. At the same time, unlike other colonial texts, the novel as a characteristically Lawrentian

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

109

text focuses on what is wrong both in the metropolis and in the former colonies; through his encounter with Australian political leaders such as Jack, Kangaroo, and Struthers, Somers comes to see that the cultural and political reality of Australia is as clichéd and repressive as that of Europe. What is left for Lawrence as a hope is the land itself, which retains the mystery of the aborigines, like Red Indians in the American continent, although this primitive land is something “uncanny” and thus “inaccessible” to him: “Only it’s too far for me. I can’t reach so awfully far. Further than Egypt. I feel I slither on the edge of a gulf, reaching to grasp its atmosphere and spirit. It eludes me, and always would” (Letters, IV, pp. 272–73). Many critics argue that it is the Australian landscape, not the male “leadership” politics, which dominates the world of Kangaroo. For example, arguing that “Kangaroo cannot be defended as a political novel,” 34 Višnja Sepčić focuses on the psychological and symbolic dimensions of the landscape: Lawrence expressed with particular power and conviction a salient element of Somers’s make-up, namely his revulsion from humanity, his hatred of humanity. As the novel unfolds Lawrence builds up this element of Somers’s personality by several narrative devices: Somers’s meditations, discussions with the subordinate characters, but primarily and from the artistic point of view most powerfully expressed through a highly original use of the Australian landscape. Thus the landscape becomes a powerful interpreter of the turmoil of Somers’s psyche.35

Leo Gurko also points to the dominance of the landscape in this Australian novel: “Lawrence breathed the qualities of the land into the people—a kind of anthropomorphism in reverse. This is the novel’s central principle. It proves powerful enough to hold together a narrative which otherwise seems a fragmented hodgepodge of odds and ends.”36 On the other hand, comparing Kangaroo to Melville’s Moby-Dick, John Humma claims, Kangaroo is “the most narratively impressive and artistically successful novel of Lawrence’s last decade.”37 The evidence that Humma draws upon to characterize Kangaroo as “Lawrence’s Moby-Dick” comes from “the largeness and suggestive power of its symbols,” of which the Australian bush is the most important throughout the novel.38 In his essay, the bush is limitlessly extended into “the interior wilderness” or “the aboriginal, mysterious symbol of our ‘unconscious,’ ‘blood’ self,’” as in Melville’s symbol of Moby Dick.39 As Humma suggests, the bush in Lawrence’s text reaches variously symbolic and psychological levels and becomes a self-sufficient metaphor, “governing nearly every

110

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

development in the novel which is Lawrence’s ‘wilderness’ book.”40 As the novel develops, Somers gradually becomes obsessed with the primitive land without human traces, thus registering Lawrence’s usual preference for the world of the unconscious to the conscious, nerve-breaking visible world. As the critics mentioned above would agree, what most fascinates readers of this novel is Lawrence’s overwhelmed response to the Australian landscape, especially the Australian bush. For Somers, the Australian bush is a sort of “heart of darkness,” impenetrable and inaccessible by Europeans: Therefore he [Somers] let himself feel all sorts of things about the bush. It was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by bush fires: . . . And he could not penetrate into its secret. He couldn’t get at it. Nobody could get at it. What was it waiting for? . . . But the horrid thing in the bush! He schemed as to what it would be. It must be the spirit of the place . . . He felt it was watching, and waiting. Following with certainty, just behind his back. It might have reached a long black arm and gripped him. But no, it wanted to wait. It was not tired of watching its victim. An alien people—a victim. It was biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness, waiting for a far-off end, watching the myriad intruding white men. (K, pp. 18–9)

Seen from the aborigines’ point of view, any vestige or mark of actual aborigines does not exist in this novel except in Lawrence’s metaphoric use of the Australian bush; the traces of the aborigines only exist as a ‘ghost-like’ presence in the middle of the bush. Lawrence personifies the Australian bush as aborigines through the typical imagery of black savages and white men, which allegorizes the relationship between aborigines and white explorers. Only in the middle of the bush, the power relationship of reality is abruptly reversed; the aborigine/ the ghost watches for revenge and alien white people become victims. Importantly, this symbolic and psychological appropriation of the bush signifies Somers’s projection of his own anxieties and personal conflicts into the landscape. When Lawrence faces the “phantom-like” bush at night, he in a sense confronts a fearful existence of the unconscious that he, as one of the intruding white men, cannot otherwise encounter. The significance that the Australian bush has in this novel definitely involves much more than its geographical status as the landscape of the nation. In opposition to the white colonial civilization, which has destroyed the mystery of the land, the bush, which symbolically keeps evoking the mystery of black aborigines, renders the spirit of Australia a primitive land,

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

111

not a part of white civilization. When Somers says that “this land always gives me the feeling that it doesn’t want to be touched, it doesn’t want men to get hold of it” (K, p. 306), he emotionally sympathizes with the “untouched” aboriginal mystery of the land, rather than the colonialist desire of the Europeans. The aboriginal and rebellious power of the bush, still “watching the myriad intruding white men” (K, p. 19), permeates the novel. Lawrence’s description of the bush reveals thus also how he sees the British colonial penetration into this primitive land. Although Lawrence does not give any direct statements about the existence of the aborigines, he makes clear through his symbolic use of the bush that, before Europeans had begun to settle the land, original inhabitants already lived in this bush land. The Australian bush, still untouched by the European invasion, signifies a symbol of “unconquerable” primitiveness. In short, the absence of actual aborigines in Lawrence’s text ironically coexists with their metaphoric presence, which governs the moods of the novel as well as the spirit of Australia. Lawrence’s depiction of this landscape gives us some hints of where we might locate this novel in relation to other colonial discourses. For instance, Ania Loomba shows how the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), an authoritative voice of colonial discourse, defines the word “colonialism” and thus avoids “any reference to people other than the colonizers”:41 a settlement in a new country . . . a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state; the community so formed, consisting of the original settlers and their descendants and successors, as long as the connection with the parent state is kept up.42

As Loomba reveals, this definition is silent on the existence of native people who have lived long before European colonizers “discovered” the place. The only important thing for this white dictionary is the relation between the settler colony and its parent country. “There is no hint,” Loomba poignantly points out, “that the ‘new locality’ may not be so ‘new’ and that the process of ‘forming a community’ might be somewhat unfair.”43 Compared with the description of the OED about the settler colony, Lawrence’s presentation of this former set of British colonies features a characteristic of anti-colonialist discourse. Though his text is sometimes mixed with stereotypical descriptions of Australia, Lawrence’s novel at least keeps reminding us of an “implication of an encounter between peoples, or of conquest and domination”44 without entirely dismissing the history of conflicts between the original inhabitants and the newcomers. Lawrence’s metaphoric use of the Australian bush places

112

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

his portrait of Australia in a certain sense outside the conventions of colonial discourse. Lawrence’s poem “Kangaroo” further instances how his portrait of this British dominion is different from other colonialist discourses. The poem captures the spirit of Australia through the symbolic description of the animal, which represents the country. In this poem, people do not exist except for an aboriginal boy. The poem, saturated with evocations of wistfulness and silence, shows well what Lawrence wants to see in this unfamiliar land and how he wants to present it: Her [Kangaroo’s] sensitive, long, pure-bred face. Her full antipodal eyes, so dark, So big and quiet and remote, having watched so many empty dawns in silent Australia. ... Still she watches with eternal, cocked wistfulness! How full her eyes are, like the full, fathomless, shining eyes of an Australian black-boy Who has been lost so many centuries on the margins of existence! She watches with insatiable wistfulness. Untold centuries of watching for something to come, For a new signal from life, in that silent lost land of the South.45

The image of the kangaroo in the poem overlaps with the image of an Australian black boy with “the full, fathomless, shining eyes.” These overlapping images of the kangaroo and an aboriginal boy remind us that they are original inhabitants of this bush land, and what they have been waiting for is not the intrusion of white people who have destroyed their peaceful life. This poem effectively shows what Lawrence believes to be the spirit of Australia by conjuring up the aura of eternity, silence, and wistfulness that this marsupial animal evokes for Lawrence. Interestingly, this image of a kangaroo in the poem strikingly contrasts with that of Kangaroo, a character of the novel as well as a white settler, who is obsessed with contradictory ideas and possessed by a stubborn self-will. As in other “leadership” novels, Lawrence’s interest in the spirit of a place influences his presentation of male leadership. To examine the relation

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

113

of politics and place in Lawrence’s text, we need to remember again that his leadership politics was always characterized as an experiment with a new mode of being in general, not necessarily limited to political issues. What confounds readers in understanding Lawrence’s leadership theme is that it has both elements: propaganda for men’s business as an exclusive form of community and a possibility of extending this politics into an alternative mode of life while continuously exercising his sense of place. In the early part of Kangaroo, Somers’s preoccupation with the digger clubs of Australia, a homosocial community, exemplifies the propagandist tendency of the leadership idea. At the same time, Lawrence’s configuration of politics in Kangaroo takes the form of a search for a new way of life, inseparable from the Australian landscape. Somers finds a clue for a new life in Western Australia, but he describes it somewhat contradictorily as “tabula rasa”: The past all gone so frail and thin. ‘What have I cared about, what have I cared for? There is nothing to care about.’ Absolved from it all. The soft, blue, humanless sky of Australia, the pale, white unwritten atmosphere of Australia. Tabula rasa. The world a new leaf. And on the new leaf, nothing. The white clarity of the Australian, fragile atmosphere. Without a mark, without a record. (K, p. 365)

Lawrence’s description of Australia as an ahistorical space has received critical attention from a postcolonial theorist who has thought this remark typically colonialist. Tracking down the intimate relation between cartography and colonial exploitation, Simon Ryan places Lawrence’s text within the tradition of Western colonial discourse: “That Australia possesses the ‘white clarity’ of the empty page repeats exactly the explorers’ description of the land, but does so with far less confidence that a glorious destiny will be inscribed on it.”46 Although Ryan admits that Lawrence’s intention in using this colonialist trope is not identical with white explorers’ of the past, he as a postcolonial critic argues that the idea of Australia as tabula rasa has not been limited to the colonialist discourses of white explorers and that it is repeated, whether wittingly or unwittingly, by later generations as in Lawrence’s text. As we read this passage without considering the context, this description of Australia is indeed not much different from those of early explorers. But if we read this passage within the Lawrentian context, which emphasizes his appreciation of the land after his long and painful conflicts with people, we cannot comfortably consider this passage just as part of colonialist tropes. In Kangaroo, Lawrence’s description of Australia as an empty

114

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

space—especially humanless, whether aborigine or white settler—needs to be read as an emotional response to his futile effort to participate in men’s business, represented by Kangaroo’s fascism and Struthers’ socialism. The foregrounding of this blank slate reflects Lawrence’s desperate hope “[t]o be alone with a long, wide shore and land, heartless, soulless” (K, p. 365) and his hope to escape from “the soulful world where love is and the burden of bothering” (K, p. 366). However, even if we know Lawrence did not use the trope of tabula rasa for the purpose of displaying a glorious destiny to the colonial project, it is still disputable whether or not we can absolve Lawrence from the charge of complicity with colonialist discourses. Does Lawrence just unwittingly repeat these stereotyped images of Australia because of his limited knowledge of Australia, which he gleaned from some Australians whom he met on the ship from Sicily to Ceylon?47 If this is a matter of limited knowledge of Australia, one might blame Lawrence for his appropriation of the former colonies, which reveals that he, though a major writer with a keen sense of language, was ignorant of the colonialist usage of the English language. And yet, according to Boehmer, even in Australia, it was not until the Second World War that white settlers’ self-consciousness about their cultural identity started: “Following models suggested by the Jundyworobak movement, the poet Judith Wright, for example, began in the 1940s to discard images of Australia as an ahistorical space inimical to life. Instead she represented the land as humanly viable, its geography made complex by historical and spiritual associations.”48 This background informs us that not only Lawrence but also colonial writers in the 1920s were insensitive to stereotyped description of Australia as colonial. Even if Lawrence’s use of a colonial trope does not necessarily imply his personal limitations, his presentation of the Australian aborigines, especially in comparison with his following Mexican novel, is also vulnerable to postcolonial criticism; if Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent keeps evoking the spirit of Native Americans in order to regenerate America, why is he in Kangaroo not mentioning the presence of the aborigines as obviously and directly as in the following Mexican novel? As I mentioned earlier, Lawrence’s metaphorical appropriation of the bush indicates that he does not take for granted the British invasion of the aboriginal bush land. Nonetheless, we are still curious about why he does not problematize the colonialist mechanism of this white settler colony as much as he attempts to “de-colonize” the Mexican society in The Plumed Serpent. This is perhaps because the Australia he sees is so white, which makes it hard to disclose how violent and unjust the process of colonial settlement could be to the original inhabitants. Simply put,

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

115

these aborigines were almost invisible in the 1920s, as Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra points out: “The ‘typical Australian’ is all White and he occupies a landscape from which all Aboriginal traces have been removed.”49 This is the main reason that Lawrence’s approach to the Australian aborigines cannot help being different from his visual and physical encounters with the native Mexicans in The Plumed Serpent. In relation to Lawrence’s appropriation of the colonial landscape, Murthy also pays attention to the treatment of Australia as colonial while differentiating Kangaroo from other Western novels like A Passage to India, Kim, and Nostromo, “where a foreign landscape is also used.”50 To demonstrate the differences in the use of the landscape in Kangaroo and other novels, Murthy examines Lawrence’s treatment of Australia particularly in terms of “the relationship between imperialism and the novel with particular reference to the exploitation of the exotic in landscape”: Does a writer belonging to the imperial country writing about the colonized country tend to make (a) the landscape lush in compensation for his lack of understanding of the natives, (b) the people of the colonized country gentle, spontaneous and wise, in contrast to the cunning and efficient imperialist—which also provides a subtle apology for his domination?51

Murthy’s question about Europeans’ use of a foreign landscape (especially of their colonies) reminds us of the typical narrative of nineteenth-century travel writing, which foregrounds the landscape of the European colonies while effacing the natives. However, as Murthy also points out, Lawrence’s relationship with white settlers is much more complicated than the contrast between the naïve savage and the cunning imperialist often presented in typical colonial narratives. More importantly, his use of the colonial landscape is not purely metaphorical but based on his anti-colonial idea of “spirit of place,” which emphasizes the otherness of each place. Arguing that “[t]he landscape [of Kangaroo] exists in its own right, and is not an aspect of the anthropomorphic illusion,” Murthy concludes that Lawrence’s novel does not fall within “a variety of the European imperialist novel.”52 Lawrence’s presentation of the Australian bush, based on his belief in “the spirit of place,” further reveals his self-consciousness as one of the white men who have invaded this impenetrable bush. As a sign of his challenge to the Western colonial project, his text gives us an opposite example of “the domineering colonial eyes,” which used to govern other colonial narratives: that is, Lawrence’s emphasis on the “invisibility” of the Australian bush shows

116

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

how the reality of a colonial landscape and racial others, narrated by white intruders, could be a false description as well as a naïve delusion. When he depicts the bush, he entirely excludes the existence of the white settler society. For Lawrence, the (undistorted) spirit of Australia is always immediately associated with the aboriginal mystery and absence: And all this hoary space of bush between. The strange, as it were, invisible beauty of Australia, which is undeniably there, but which seems to lurk just beyond the range of our white vision. You feel you can’t see—as if your eyes hadn’t the vision in them to correspond with the outside landscape. For the landscape is so unimpressive, like a face with little or no features, a dark face. It is so aboriginal, out of our ken, and it hangs back so aloof. Somers always felt he looked at it through a cleft in the atmosphere; as one looks at one of the ugly-faced, distorted aborigines with his wonderful dark eyes that have such an incomprehensible ancient shine in them, across gulfs of unbridged centuries. And yet, when you don’t have the feeling of ugliness or monotony, in landscape or in nigger, you get a sense of subtle, remote, formless beauty more poignant than anything ever experienced before. (K, p. 87)

In contrast to the “colonizing gaze,” which appropriates racial others and the land of a colony according to colonialist desire, Somers confesses he cannot “see” the “uncanny” landscape of Australia, which is “beyond the range of our white vision.” In a letter sent to Australian writer Katharine Prichard, Lawrence also mentions how impossible it is for white people to see Australia as it is: “We went into the Art Galleries at Adelaide and Melbourne. But nobody has seen Australia yet: can’t be done. It isn’t visible” (Letters, IV, p. 273). Unlike Lawrence’s “bewildered” response to the bush, his relationship with white settlers, exemplified in his involvement with their politics, is described at a different level. Lawrence thus portrays this British dominion in Kangaroo as if it has two different layers, which are antagonistic to each other: the white settler society and the aboriginal landscape. According to Lawrence’s understanding of “spirit of place,” which emphasizes the “organic” relationship between the land and native people, these two layers can never harmoniously come to terms with each other. In this contradictory relation between the land and white people, Lawrence seems to sympathize more deeply with the land than with white settlers, especially at the end of the novel. More strangely, Lawrence’s portrait of Australian landscape, as compared with M. Skinner’s presentation of it in The Boy in the Bush,

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

117

is more conscious of the symbolic existence of aborigines. If Skinner, as a native Australian, was more familiar than Lawrence with the natural and local environments of Australia, she as a white settler seems also more used to the invisibility of the black aborigines. Lawrence’s account of the bush in Kangaroo may be constructively compared with Mollie Skinner’s natural description in The Boy in the Bush. A native-born Australian, Skinner met Lawrence in May 1922 when she operated a guesthouse in Western Australia. Here is a bush passage of The Boy in the Bush, whose hostile and malevolent power climaxes in a situation where Jack gets lost in the middle of the bush: There is something mysterious about the Australian bush. It is absolutely still. And yet, in the near distance, it seems alive. It seems alive, and as if it hovered round you to maze you and circumvent you. There is a strange feeling, as if invisible, hostile things were hovering round you and heading you off . . . Nothing was hidden. It was all open and fair. And yet it was haunted with a malevolent mystery. You felt yourself so small, so tiny, so absolutely insignificant, in the still, eternal glade. And this again is the malevolence of the bush, that it reduces you to your own absolute insignificance, go where you will. 53

It is hard to find in this bush passage, which is concise and realistic, any stylistic hyperbole like Lawrence’s psychological projections and metaphorical embellishments, based on his fear of and “uncanny” attraction to the bush. In addition, this description of the bush does not evoke any vestiges of the Australian aborigine, despite the usual connection between the bush and the aborigines. Helen Watson-Williams provides an interesting view of the differences in the bush passages of Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush. Observing that the bush passages of Kangaroo lack the immediacy of those presented in The Boy in the Bush (1924), she argues that the bush Lawrence wrote about in 1922 when he was in Australia is described “in abstract rather than imaginative terms and is consequently far less effective.”54 Given that Lawrence had stayed in Australia for only three months from May to August 1922, this lack of immediacy in his presentation seems inevitable. Watson-Williams’s essay unfortunately reveals a critical difficulty in reviewing a collaborative text when she ignores the existence of Skinner as a co-author by reading The Boy in the Bush as Lawrence’s text alone. For example, when she talks about the different presentations of the bush in Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush, Watson-Williams entirely ignores the fact that the latter novel was coauthored with Skinner and that the bush passages of The

118

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Boy in the Bush could be written by Skinner: “it would seem rather that the impact of the bush on him [Lawrence] took time to define and comprehend. Nothing in Kangaroo, written on the spot as it were, in 1922, has the immediacy of the bush passages in The Boy in the Bush (1924).”55 The absence of the original manuscript, written by Skinner, creates a critical dilemma because tracking down which words belong to which writer is fundamentally out of the question.56 Further, since this study does not aim to examine detailed compositional matters like “who contributes more to the novel,”57 The Boy in the Bush is considered in this study as a collaborative text, with the exception of the last two chapters for which we have the evidence that Lawrence wrote them.58 Most of my arguments will focus on these last chapters that Lawrence either added or heavily revised. We can see that Jack’s position in The Boy in the Bush—to use Lawrence’s words, an English pommy—is similar to Somers’s (and Lawrence’s) in Kangaroo, which must have provided a stimulating motive for the collaboration with Skinner. Maybe this similar background of Jack and Somers made Lawrence willingly participate in this collaboration process. But the process itself was not based on mutual agreements and dialogues between Lawrence and Skinner, probably due to their physical distance and the difficulties of correspondence of the day. A still greater obstruction to dialogic collaboration lay in the hierarchical relationship, which was imposed, between an established English writer and a little-known colonial writer. In this collaboration between Lawrence and Skinner, which gives an example of what Holly Laird has called “hierarchies within multiple authorship,”59 we can easily imagine Skinner’s anxiousness about this process as an unknown writer “under the shadow of [a] more famous male coautho[r].”60 Lawrence received Skinner’s manuscript in the middle of the summer of 1923 and asked her approval to revise it in a letter written on September 2 because he thought that she had “no constructive power”: “If you like I will take it and recast it, and make a book of it.—If you give me a free hand, I’ll see if I can’t make a complete book out of it. If you’d rather your work remained untouched, I will show it to another publisher: but I am afraid there isn’t much chance” (Letters, IV, pp. 495–96). However, before he had her permission to revise it, he had already gone through Skinner’s manuscript during his second trip to Mexico, from September to November. Without her approval, his recasting of Skinner’s novel was in progress, and Skinner did not even know that the revised version had already been sent to the printer before March. Physical distance between the two collaborators was certainly a problem in the 1920s, but what is more at issue is that Lawrence’s patronizing attitude to this colonial writer dominated the collaboration process. It is no wonder that Skinner

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

119

was shocked when she found that Lawrence “had altered the construction and pulled it out of focus towards the end.”61 Despite the rough collaboration process, Lawrence and Skinner both had a lot in common in characterizing the protagonists of their novel, Somers in Kangaroo and Jack Grant in The Boy in the Bush, as social outcasts and in emphasizing the way in which the different spirit of Australia shapes the psychological development of these English newcomers. It is intriguing to see how a British newcomer and a native Australian variously represent the spirit of the same land. The difference is that Lawrence is in Kangaroo mostly concerned with Somers’s single consciousness and his conflicting feelings about Australia, while Skinner seems to emphasize Jack’s relationship with the Ellis family as well as the new land, as her original title “The House of Ellis” evokes. Skinner and Lawrence’s collaborative work, The Boy in the Bush, is a Bildungsroman in which both writers describe how an English-born boy becomes a man—actually a Lawrentian hero—in the bush: It was like a narcotic. The old, English alertness grew darker and darker. He seemed to be moving, a dim consciousness and an unyielding will, in a dark cloud of heat, in a perspiring, dissolving body. He could feel his body, the English cool body of his being, slowly melting down and being invaded by a new tropical quality. Sometimes, he said to himself, he was sweating his soul away. That was how it felt: as if he were sweating his soul away. And he let his soul go, let it slowly melt away out of his wet, hot body. Any man who has been in the tropics, unless he has kept all his mind and his consciousness focused homewards, fixed towards the old people of home, will know how this feels. Now, Jack did not turn homewards, back to England. He never wanted to go back. There was in him a slow, abiding anger against this same ‘home.’ Therefore, he let himself go down the dark tide of the heat. He did not cling on to his old English soul, the soul of an English gentleman. He let that dissolve out of him, leaving what residuum of a man it might leave. But out of very obstinacy he hung on to his own integrity: a small, dark, obscure integrity. (BB, pp. 155–56)

Like Alvina in The Lost Girl and Aaron in Aaron’s Rod, Jack revolts from start to finish against social conventions of the white settler colony as well as England. Lawrence’s revulsion against the world, especially against England, which necessarily breeds his insistence on inalienable individuality, is in fact the common territory between Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush. Skinner

120

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

also seems to understand Jack’s repugnance for his society, as she says in her autobiography: “The Boy in the Bush would never have been written if I had not known the boy Jack [her younger brother]. Though born in Ireland, he was essentially a son of Australia, unbroken, free, courageous in his fight for his own individuality.”62 The problem is that Lawrence’s new ending goes far beyond Skinner’s idea of what is integrity of the self: “I [Jack] thought they [Tom and Lennie] would love me for the me as they want me to be. They only love me because they get themselves glorified out of me. I thought at least they would give me a certain reverence, because I am myself and because I am different, in the name of the Lord” (BB, p. 379). Jack’s phallocentric fantasia, recast by Lawrence, certainly went beyond his collaborator’s expectations. In Lawrence’s new ending, Jack keeps dreaming of becoming Abraham, a patriarch, in a new—at once patriarchal and polygamous—world. Furthermore, the character of Hilda Blessington who satisfies Jack’s desire for polygamy in the last chapter makes the ending much more arbitrary and implausible.63 This new ending not only gave his collaborator a great shock and a sense of alienation from their collaboration but also provided the novel an unmanageable gap between these last chapters and the rest of the book. Before the novel reaches these last chapters, the focal point of this narrative is how Jack, an English pommy, communicates and interacts with white settlers and the land. At the end of the novel Jack becomes, all of sudden, a Lawrentian hero, saturated with Lawrentian ideas, rather than a new white settler communicating and struggling with the outside world. As a little-known writer of Australia, Skinner’s complicated sense of identity for herself and her colonial society permeates her novel through the characterization of Jack, even though it is also recast later by Lawrence. Like Kangaroo, The Boy in the Bush displays an interesting mixture of cultural hierarchy between England and Australia, which consists of Skinner’s sense of superiority as of English descent and her colonial repudiation of the old English culture. It is her love of the land that makes her overcome her cultural ambivalence about the differences between England and Australia. Although she had spent her early years in England, her affection for Australia as her native place, as her autobiography titled The Fifth Sparrow (1972) reveals, enables her to highlight an intimate interrelation between Jack’s psychological development and the land. Lawrence’s belief in “the different spirit of a different place” had the chance to meet with Skinner’s deep concern with people and the land through their collaboration on this novel. But, contrary to his preoccupation with the primitive land at the end of Kangaroo, the ending of The Boy in the Bush that Lawrence added and

Lawrence’s Journey to the “Heart of Darkness”

121

revised shows how exclusively he sticks to the world of his ideas while putting aside his sense of place. The fact that Lawrence revised Skinner’s manuscript immediately after he had finished Quetzalcoatl, an unpublished version of The Plumed Serpent (1926), which critics agree shows Lawrence’s leadership idea in full bloom, partly explains his preoccupation with male leadership ideas at the end of this collaborative novel. What is different is that the ending chapters of The Boy in the Bush Lawrence contributed are, abruptly, full of Lawrentian ideas, whereas the narrative of The Plumed Serpent keeps balancing throughout the novel between the spirit of Mexico and his leadership idea. Unlike the ending of The Boy in the Bush, it is in the “new” land, represented by the Australian bush and the ocean, not his political ideas, that Somers at the end of Kangaroo finds a possible solution to his diagnosis of the wrong direction in which both Europe and Australia were headed. After the “Nightmare” chapter, Somers’s desire to return to a “humanless” and “soulless” world, devoid of human connections, reaches a peak. Somers immerses himself in a characteristically Lawrentian—solipsistic—world, while calmly reflecting on his unsuccessful engagement with Kangaroo: “Kangaroo wants to be God Himself, and save everybody, which is just irritating, at last. Kangaroo as God Himself, with a kind of marsupial belly, is worse than Struthers’ absolute of the People. Though it’s a choice of evils, and I choose neither. I choose the Lord Almighty” (K, p. 334). What is interesting is that, although Somers criticizes Kangaroo’s desire to be “God Himself,” he is actually making fun of his own desire to be a savior for everybody since his involvement with Kangaroo was an attempt to “objectify” his fantasy of a natural-born leader in a country outside Europe. What has fascinated Somers in Australia, however, is not either the diggers’ clubs or Kangaroo, but “the profound Australian indifference” (K, p. 379), which is so different from the social atmosphere of Europe: “The indifference—the fern-dark indifference of this remote golden Australia. Not to care—from the bottom of one’s soul, not to care” (K, p. 203). This indifference of the land psychologically dovetails with Somers’s sense of disorientation after the war, as well as with his obsession with the individual self. It seems likely that, perhaps from the first, Somers is not ready to intermingle with other people. In other words, many pages of Kangaroo are filled with Lawrence’s political and philosophical ideas, but his presentation of politics in this novel does not give readers the impression that he aims to privilege these ideas. Rather, this novel is better read as a book full of meditations about Lawrence himself, what Lawrence calls “unremitting inwardness” (K, p. 172). Lawrence’s ceaseless self-questioning about himself

122

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

ends in his final reconciliation with himself, which also signifies a process of curing his feeling against the world: “When he [Somers] was truly himself he had a quiet stillness in his soul, an inward trust. Faith, undefined and undefinable. Then he was at peace with himself. Not content, but peace like a river, something flowing and full. A stillness at the very core” (K, p. 172). In the last chapter, Somers plans to go to America, “a country that did not attract him at all, but which seemed to lie next in his line of destiny” (K, p. 375). Although his experiment with his political ideas turns out to be a failure in Australia, Somers does not enjoy a sense of emptiness for long, as a minor character called Jaz hints: ‘Go into the middle of Australia and see how empty it is. You can’t face emptiness long. You have to come back and do something to keep from being frightened at your own emptiness, and everything else’s emptiness. It may be empty. But it’s wicked, and it’ll kill you if it can. Something comes out of the emptiness, to kill you. You have to come back and do things with mankind, to forget’ (K, p. 227).

If Kangaroo emphasizes Lawrence’s desire for nothingness and indifference, certainly influenced by the different spirit of Australia, this passage foreshadows that Lawrence will attempt to do things with people in his following novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926). Lawrence did not feel that he had “done” with his political experiment in his brief experience of the Australian federated nation. In Italy and Australia where Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo are set, Lawrence could not clearly be cut off from Europe in a psychological and cultural sense, in spite of his numerous declarations that “Europe is finished for me” (Phoenix, p. 118). In this context, it is not difficult to understand his subsequent feeling about his Mexican novel—“my ‘Quetzalcoatl’ novel lies nearer my heart than any other work of mine” (Letters, V, p. 264)—and his expectations about the American continent: “What I want in America is a sense of the future, and be damned to the exploited past. I believe in America one can catch up some kind of emotional impetus from the aboriginal Indian and from the aboriginal air and land, that will carry one over this crisis of the world’s soul depression, into a new epoch” (Letters, IV, p. 157).

Chapter Four

Lawrentian Doubleness: Rewriting Mexican Colonial History in The Plumed Serpent

This chapter explores a possibility of reading The Plumed Serpent (1926) as a postcolonial text, rather than following the established critical convention of defining the novel exclusively as a “leadership” novel. What I mean by “postcolonial” is that I focus on the novel in terms of its problematization of Western binarism and hierarchy, sustained in the prevailing colonial relationship between metropolis and colony.1 There are several attempts to read the novel in relation to the issue of colonialism. But, in contrast to my reading, contemporary Lawrence critics such as Charles Rossman and Sandra Gilbert have defined this novel either as “the most recent instance in Mexico’s long history of cultural imperialism” 2 or as “a new and brilliant kind of colonization.” 3 Given Lawrence’s constant belief in the “indigenous” and “local” spirit of a different place, however, his presentation of Mexico cannot be simply dismissed as another kind of cultural imperialism. My reading of the novel, in short, examines the way in which Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place” contributes to his rewriting of the colonized history of Mexico. The postcolonial reading of the novel also enables me to show how Lawrence’s presentation of leadership politics creates the complexity of the text, which makes impossible absolute criticism or absolute praise of his work. When Lawrence’s leadership theme is entangled with the issue of colonialism, it is hard to see Ramón Carrasco and Don Cipriano as pseudofascist political leaders, as established readings of the novel do. In light of Lawrence’s unusual presentation of Western colonialism, I consider Ramón as an anti-colonialist, rather than regarding him as a natural-born aristocrat or another kind of paleface imperialist. At the same time, I will try to correct the critical imbalance in attention to Ramón and Cipriano; even though they are a pair, critics have focused on Ramón’s role as a political leader, while ignoring Cipriano as a functional aide by simplifying the image of the latter as a god of war. In this critical structure, Cipriano is nothing more than a 123

124

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

cruel, savage evil figure, hardly forgiven by Western readers. My reading also focuses on the role of Kate Leslie as a dissenter to the Quetzalcoatl movement led by Ramón and Cipriano, which is, I think, her raison d’être in this novel, despite her active participation in the movement. From the woman’s point of view, Kate integrates gender issues into the men’s business of Quetzalcoatl, while criticizing Lawrence’s exclusion of women’s desire in his building of a new society. The anti-colonialist stance that Lawrence holds onto in describing the American and Mexican Indians, especially in his later works, cannot be properly understood without appreciating his belief in a “different” spirit of each place. In a letter to E. M. Forster, written in New Mexico, Lawrence articulates “a great strange” spirit of the American continent: “You asked me if I found ‘individuals’ out of England, since I don’t find’ em in. No, I don’t [sic] But one does find a great strange spirit of place, and a different raceimpulse out here. It seems much bigger, with open gaps that go away into the unknown. England’s tight to me like a box” (Letters, V, p. 116). Lawrence believed that European imperialism had attempted to destroy the original spirit of Mexico and an “organic” life between the native people and the land. But the enforced transplantation of the European mode of life could not fit into the non-European places: “And the Spanish white superimposition, with rococo church-towers among pepper trees and column cactuses, seems so rickety and temporary, the pyramids seem so indigenous, rising like hills out of the earth itself. The one goes down with a clatter, the other remains” (Phoenix, p. 106). This passage contains Lawrence’s firm belief in the vitality of the “indigenous” spirit of Mexico: Western colonialism had tried to eradicate it, but ultimately could not succeed. When Lawrence says in a short essay “Au Revoir, U. S. A.,” written in April 1923 when he headed for Mexico, “[t]he great paleface overlay hasn’t gone into the soil half an inch” (Phoenix, p. 105), his decision for a future project to rewrite the colonized history of Mexico looks determined. Mexico for Lawrence was a place that provided him, to borrow Sandra Gilbert’s words, “a geography and culture into which he could project many of his most radical fantasies and anxieties.”4 More specifically, this primitive land offered Lawrence a refreshing possibility to explore his notion of blood consciousness, what Charles Rossman calls “pre-European forms of consciousness.”5 Lawrence found an example of a pre-European form of consciousness in the ancient Mexican god called Quetzalcoatl, who legendarily existed before the Spanish Conquest: “Quetzalcoatl! Who knows what he meant to the dead Aztecs, and to the older Indians, who knew him before the Aztecs raised their deity to heights of horror and vindictiveness?” (PS, p.

Lawrentian Doubleness

125

54) Through this Quetzalcoatl myth, Lawrence substantiates his idea of a “different” form of consciousness and a “new” way of living, which transgress the limits of Western consciousness and life. The Quetzalcoatl myth, restored by Lawrence’s literary imagination, signifies a political, sexual, and religious rebirth of both the imperialist metropolis and the colonized world. In Lawrentian context, this Mexican myth functions as an efficient framework to challenge the basis of Western epistemology and Western ways of thinking about human and non-human relationship in general. In contrast to Western hierarchy and binarism, the ancient Quetzalcoatl myth of Mexico describes the core of a new society as doubleness, metaphorized by the “Lord of the Two Ways” (PS, p. 254), between the morning and the night, the soul and the body, and the colonizer and the colonized. Lawrence’s configuration of the Quetzalcoatl movement has a lot in common with today’s postcolonialism on the grounds that both criticize hierarchical relationships between metropolis and colony and both search for an alternative epistemology, which goes beyond the colonized experience as well as the colonialist perspective. Postcolonial perspectives,6 especially redefined in the context of Lawrentian doubleness, can help free us from preexisting judgments of The Plumed Serpent as a representative “leadership” novel, full of phallocentric and hierarchical ideas. Lawrence’s idea of leadership politics, as presented in The Plumed Serpent, reflects his apocalyptic vision—a desire for a “new” way of revitalizing modern civilization—which requires in his text the reconnection of the civilized world to the primitive world. For Lawrence, to “de-colonize” the lives of colonized Mexicans, sterilized by the imperialist desire of Europe, is vital to recuperating the problems of the industrialized world because it serves not only to undo the damage but also to recognize what has been wrong with Western civilization. Lawrence’s de-colonization of Mexico in this novel has two sides: it was at once triggered by his apocalyptic vision for Western civilization and complicated by his notion of “spirit of place” through which he claims “[e]very continent has its own great spirit of place” (Studies, p. 12). As Rossman and Gilbert have suspected, it might be said that Lawrence’s motivation behind the Quetzalcoatl movement is fundamentally western-oriented. But Lawrence’s ongoing apocalyptic vision for the West does not fully explain his complex rendering of Mexico, his appropriation of its “local” spirit. This “strange” “local” spirit of Mexico, specified through the Quetzalcoatl myth, is for Lawrence a key to an alternative society, which liberates both the colonizer and the colonized from the Western capitalist and imperialist systems. The ancient Mexican myth is, as it were, an imaginary product combining both Lawrence’s appropriation of the spirit

126

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

of Mexico and his apocalyptic vision of a new society. Whereas in his other previous “leadership” novels Lawrence’s sense of locality constantly conflicts with his leadership politics, place and politics in this last “leadership” novel are complementarily bound up with each other, although these seemingly contradictory notions sometimes give birth to an ironic mixture of typically colonialist and anti-colonialist statements. Not only The Plumed Serpent but also the essays and poems that he wrote in Old and New Mexico show how Lawrence approaches and tries to appropriate American and Mexican Indians, the native people of the American continent. In the poem titled “The Red Wolf,” written in Taos, Lawrence parodies himself as “thin red wolf of a pale-face” who holds a dialogue with a dark old demon, the spirit of Southwestern America: Well, you’re a dark old demon, And I’m a pale-face like a homeless dog That has followed the sun from the dawn through the east, Trotting east and east and east till the sun himself went home, And left me homeless here in the dark at your door. How do you think we’ll get on, Old demon, you and I? You and I, you pale-face, Pale-face you and I Don’t get on. Mightn’t we try?7

The poem shows Lawrence’s emotional status as “homeless” and his hope to contact this dark old demon, the spirit of the native Indians. In describing Red Indians of the American continent, Lawrence often invokes ghost-like spirits of the place, as in “The Red Wolf ” and “Spirits Summoned West,” or depicts them, as in “Men in New Mexico,” as caught in “a membrane of sleep,”8 which they cannot get out of. The images that words such as “spirit,” “ghost,” or “sleep” evoke indicate that Lawrence can contact the “indigenous” spirit of native Americans only in limited ways. Unlike native American Indians in the U. S. who had been totally displaced from their native land, it is likely that Lawrence saw a strong possibility of restoring “this great aboriginal spirit the Americans must recognize again, recognize and embrace” (Phoenix, p. 90) in native Mexicans who still stuck

Lawrentian Doubleness

127

to their traditional way of living. The recognition of the aboriginal spirit of Mexico allows him to see how the cultural influence of Western Christianity brought about a major problem of colonized Mexico, as he mentions in a letter to his mother-in-law: “If they [the Mexicans] only had a new faith, a new hope, they would perhaps be a new, young, beautiful people. But as Christians they don’t get any further, are inwardly melancholy, live without hope, become suddenly cross, and don’t like to work” (Letters, IV, p. 452). In fact, it was Western Christianity to which Lawrence, whether he was in Europe or in other places, attributed all the responsibility for modern Western civilization losing its vitality. In a third-world country like Mexico, the dominance of Christianity as an essential part of the colonialist project of Europe could make things much more complicated than in Western countries. This is the context in which Lawrence’s restoration of ancient Mexican gods inevitably has a cultural, political implication as a “postcolonial” project. If Lawrence’s appropriation of the Australian aborigines in Kangaroo should be characterized as metaphorical, his approach to native Mexicans in The Plumed Serpent is much more literal and realistic than in his previous novel. But this visible presence of primitive others has brought about controversy as to whether Lawrence’s presentation of native Mexicans should be seen either as a literary construct or as a false representation of racial others. Critical reviews of Lawrence’s version of Mexico have been divided between mostly harsh criticism and a few defenses.9 Charles Rossman, for instance, severely criticizes “Lawrence’s imagination [as] creating a Chapala/Sayula that did not exist outside the novel.”10 Although most critics have agreed that Lawrence had “invented” Mexico in The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence’s presentation of Mexico has been often misunderstood as mystical nonsense among early Lawrence critics, or suspected to be another version of cultural imperialism among contemporary critics. Despite the usual degrading of the novel, some critics have tried to defend Lawrence’s invented reality of Mexico as a literary product. As a major defender of Lawrence’s Mexican novel in the 1960s, L. D. Clark argues Lawrence’s wild imagination of the place should be understood in terms of a right of the artist who can “use whatever means he sees fit to give scope to his vision.”11 Lawrence’s complex and ambivalent portrait of Mexico makes it almost impossible to read the whole novel within a certain single theoretical frame. As Virginia Hyde describes it, “a book like The Plumed Serpent contains more than one voice—and even more than two or three.”12 The multiple voices of the novel are constantly conflicting with and contradicting one another. So too the interpretations of Ramón vary from viewing him as a proto-fascist to a great leader with natural superiority; Kate is regarded either as a Mexican

128

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

goddess in equal relationship with Mexican god-men or as a passive woman caught in the manipulation of these men; the Quetzalcoatl movement is considered either “all mystical mumbo-jumbo”13 or an inspirational project to revive Western civilization and Christianity. Ellis’s statement that “no work Lawrence ever wrote divides his admirers as sharply as The Plumed Serpent”14 is not surprising at all. The point is that Lawrence’s novel has all these contradictory aspects. As one way of better understanding Lawrence’s complicated rendering of Mexico, David Ellis suggests that postcolonial studies can help to read Lawrence’s Mexican novel. In his biography about Lawrence’s later years titled D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922–1930, Ellis mentions a possibility of rereading The Plumed Serpent in the cultural context of “burgeoning” colonial/postcolonial studies, even though he simultaneously points out that the novel does not smoothly fit into the postcolonial theories: More recently, both L. D. Clark and J. P. Pichardie have written impressive accounts of why The Plumed Serpent should be regarded as a great novel; and there are increasing signs of it beginning to benefit from the burgeoning interest in ‘part-colonial studies.’ Firmly anti-colonial in its hostile attitude to the effects on the Indian population of the Spanish Conquest, The Plumed Serpent is nevertheless a tricky text for workers in this field to handle because the postcolonial future it imagines for Mexico is so far from being conventionally liberal.15

In applying postcolonial theories to Lawrence’s last “leadership” novel, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a representative text of colonial discourse, is often compared with Lawrence’s text. In fact, Lawrence’s Mexican novel has some traces of Conradian metaphor in its description of primitive black others, which we can identify. When Lawrence portrays the Mexican Indians, he repeatedly emphasizes their “centerless” eyes both in the manuscript16 and in the published version of his Mexican novel: “The soft, full flame of life in dark eyes. But centreless, the eyes centreless and helpless, sometimes demonish, diabolical”17; “Their big, bright black eyes that look at you wonderingly, and have no center to them” (PS, p. 72). These void, centerless eyes of the Indians signify that, for Lawrence, Indians are unknowable and unapproachable others. Further, in the early version, Lawrence tries to bridge the “unknowable” world of the Mexican Indians and the “hollow” world of Western modern men by using the metaphor of Conradian hollowness: “The pit! The bottomless pit of hollowness where the soul should be, in a man and in a woman” (Q, p. 44).18 Again in the published

Lawrentian Doubleness

129

version, we can find other evidence that Lawrence might use Conrad’s text: “As he [Ramón] gazed back at all the black eyes, his eyes seemed to have no expression, save that they seemed to be seeing the heart of all darkness in front of him, where his unknowable God-mystery lived and moved” (emphasis added, PS, p. 336). Tony Pinkney, reading The Plumed Serpent as a modernist text, interwoven with reality and myth as in Ulysses, argues that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is “inter-textually present throughout” Lawrence’s Mexican novel: In its own prose, The Plumed Serpent employs the phrase ‘heart of darkness’ and repeats it with variations. More important than this, it several times sums up the plot of Conrad’s novella, as if this were one possible shape its own narrative might take. If the German hotel-keeper at Sayula is one of Conrad’s ‘pilgrims,’ displaying that abject ‘look of defeat characteristic of the European who has long been subjected to the unbroken spirit of place’ (PS, 129), then Lawrence’s Mexico initially threatens to operate upon Kate as disastrously as Conrad’s Africa upon Kurtz; it is ‘the great continent of the undoing, and all its peoples the agents of the mystic destruction’ (PS, 110). ‘In attempting to convert the dark man to the white man’s way of life,’ the novel lectures us, ‘the white man has fallen helplessly down the hole he wanted to fill up’ (PS, 111)—which is Kurtz’s fate exactly.19

In spite of some phrases evoking Conrad’s text, however, it seems to me that Pinkney’s comparison of these two novels overlooks Conrad’s and Lawrence’s different approaches to the primitive world. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad, to use Patrick Brantlinger’s words, “offers a powerful critique of at least some manifestations of imperialism and racism.”20 On the other hand, although Lawrence also criticizes Western colonialism as a main cause of sterility in modern lives, he in The Plumed Serpent looks more interested in his experimenting with a possibility of bridging the gap between totally different worlds, between the civilized and the primitive. For Conrad, Africa is neither an ideal world nor an alternative one to European civilization. Whereas Conrad self-reflectively records the violence of European imperialist projects and its accompanying psychological self-destruction by imperialists themselves, Lawrence is more concerned with the possibility of spiritual regeneration reviving both the civilized and colonized worlds since he believes both are degraded by white civilization. Therefore, it is not right to characterize Kate and Ramón just as Kurtz-like figures; Lawrence’s Mexico is not as disastrous as Conrad’s Congo, and Ramón should not be simply identified with Kurtz, “who wants to get himself worshipped by the natives.”21

130

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Viewed from Lawrence’s anti-colonialist position against Western hierarchy, his notion of hierarchy between people looks problematic. It nonetheless remains hardly changed throughout his “leadership” novels in that Lawrence focuses on a few “selected” male/female protagonists with whom he identifies himself emotionally and ideologically. In The Plumed Serpent more than in any other work, Lawrence’s notion of what he calls the “natural aristocracy” stands out. Ramón and Cipriano are no doubt the prototypes of innate aristocrats, notably distinguished from the Mexican Indian masses. At the same time, we can see that the models of the “natural aristocrat,” Lawrence suggests, are not limited to his beloved protagonists. The examples, as seen in Lawrence’s characterization of the Mexican crippled boatman or Kate’s Mexican housemaid, betray our assumption that Lawrence’s obsession with the natural aristocrat is a product of self-projected fantasy—that is, he wanted to proclaim himself a natural aristocrat. Lawrence’s desire to set himself up as a natural aristocrat is only partly accomplished in that the Mexican boatman and housemaid are, unlike the highly educated Ramón and Cipriano, not characters Lawrence can identify with. Further, when Lawrence defines natural aristocracy, he emphasizes “an aristocracy inside the souls of some men,”22 differentiating it from hereditary nobility, based on class or origin. For Lawrence, hierarchies exist among individuals, whether they are Westerners or primitives, not between different races. And the hierarchy between people in Lawrence’s text is determined according to how one is faithful to one’s sense of self or whether one can “recognize the spark of noblesse inside us.”23 In other words, Lawrence’s conception of hierarchy should be understood in a different way from the common uses of social categories such as hierarchies between classes, sexes, or races. His challenge against Western hierarchy between races, thus, does not necessarily contradict his idea of the “natural aristocrat.” In the essay “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” which sums up Lawrence’s idea of natural hierarchies between creatures, the reader has the impression that Lawrence is setting up a hierarchy between different races: Lawrence says, “Life is more vivid in me than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me” (Phoenix II, p. 468). But this statement should be understood within the whole context of the essay; that is, Lawrence in this essay keeps comparing one creature with another, comparing a dandelion with a palm tree, a snake with a butterfly, the Mexican with horses, and so on. These comparisons between creatures, as I pointed out in Chapter One, are hardly convincing and become vague when we try to understand his notion of “vitality” as determining the hierarchies between these creatures. Nonetheless, what is important to notice here is that Lawrence does not compare

Lawrentian Doubleness

131

the Mexican and himself in terms of the assumed hierarchy between races, that is, between the European and the non-European. Considering that right before this statement, he says, “Life is more vivid in the Mexican who drives the wagon than in the two horses in the wagon” (Phoenix II, p. 468), we are able to see that the focus in the comparison between the Mexican and Lawrence does not lie in the hierarchy between races, but in the quality of their ways of living: the Mexican has to do a mechanical and functional work, whereas Lawrence is free from it. While Lawrence attempts to build up hierarchies between creatures in the essay quoted above, interestingly, Lawrence’s portrait of the crippled boatman in The Plumed Serpent, who rows Kate across the lake, does not allow a literal comparison between the Mexican boatman and Kate, in spite of the fact that their relationship is very similar to that of Lawrence and the Mexican driving horses. In contrast, Kate for the first time feels “the mystery of the natives, the strange and mysterious gentleness” from this native boatman. Kate experiences a kind of “frail, pure sympathy” (PS, p. 90) between herself and native Mexicans such as the boatman and naked Quetzalcoatl men, whom she encounters in the middle of the lake: “In the boat, she [Kate] had glimpsed the superb rich stillness of the morning-star, the poignant intermediate flashing its quiet between the energies of the cosmos. She had seen it in the black eyes of the natives, in the sunrise of the man’s rich, still body, Indian-warm” (PS, pp. 92–3). Kate’s relationship with the boatman, though temporary, is described as natural and beautiful without any preconception or prejudgment about racial others. This episode features a sort of “epiphany” that Kate experiences in her contact with the native Mexicans. Still, this unusual epiphany does not happen often in the novel. Kate is for the most part overwhelmed by the “heavy” and “malign” spirit of Mexico, so different from the cosmopolitan Mediterranean atmosphere that she has been used to. When Kate arrives in Mexico City, she immediately realizes that it will not be easy for her, as a European, to adjust herself to a Mexican atmosphere. For Kate, Mexico is “something so heavy, so oppressive, like the folds of some huge serpent” (PS, pp. 18–19): “The spirit of place was cruel, down-dragging, destructive. . . . There was the dark undertone, the black, serpent-like fatality all the time” (PS, p. 45). What is nonetheless striking in her description of Mexico is that she keeps evoking the image of the serpent and connecting it with the Mexican landscape. Why does Kate (and Lawrence) obsessively try to connect Mexico and the serpent? Lawrence’s famous poem “Snake” tells that the snake is the animal living closest to the center of the earth, which perhaps, for Lawrence, keeps evoking something unconscious, mindless, and subterranean:

132

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

“He [snake] reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the / gloom / . . . Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels / of the earth.”24 In The Plumed Serpent, the “dark” and “earthy” and even deadly image of the snake is symbolically important to the novel’s whole design to restore the indigenous Mexican spirit, repressed by imported Christian culture, which always orients itself in the opposite direction from the earth. This “down-dragging” heaviness that the Red Indian’s way of living embodies is also revealed through the characteristic style of the Indian dance, which Lawrence observes. In the essay titled “New Mexico,” watching the American Indians’ dancing, Lawrence notices their dance features “the ceaseless down-tread, always to the earth’s center, the very reverse of the upflow of Dionysiac or Christian ecstasy” (Phoenix, p. 145). In Quetzalcoatl, Lawrence even identifies the Mexican gods with the serpent: “What would I do? I will bring back the Mexican gods with all their anger. The snake that the white men have killed I will set up again” (Q, pp. 100–01). Here the snake sums up all mysterious and primitive Mexican spirits, undistorted by the imperialist Christian culture of Europe and America. As Lawrence’s symbolic use of the snake shows, his appropriation of “religion” constantly transgresses the cultural codes of Western Christianity. Elaine Feinstein observes, “Lawrence’s sense of wonder at life in all its forms was rooted in a religious impulse, though he had not shared his mother’s Congregational faith since adolescence, and no longer believed in a personal God.”25 Lawrence’s religious impulse comes to the fore in The Plumed Serpent. Although Lawrence repudiates Christianity as a “religion of the spirit” (PS, p. 261), his description of Mexican native Indians is religious and highly abstract. For instance, Ramón, a Lawrentian hero, defines himself as a man “who yearns for the sensual fulfilment of my soul” (emphasis added, PS, p. 271). This definition indicates that Lawrence attempts to solve the dissociation between the body and the soul, rather than indulging himself in onesided emphasis on the body. This also means that Lawrence does not dismiss a desire for religion, even though he distinguishes the soul of the Mexican Indians from the Christian soul. It would be rather right to say that Lawrence tries to redefine the established religion by changing “a God of one fixed purport” to “gods” who, he believes, should be “iridescent, like the rainbow in the storm” (PS, p. 54). The Lawrentian sense of religion means “sheer naked contact” with nature and the mystery of the universe, “without an intermediary or mediator” (Phoenix, p. 147), as Lawrence repeats in the essay “New Mexico” as well as in Apocalypse: “the very ancient world was entirely religious and godless . . . the whole cosmos was alive and in contact with the flesh of man, there was no room for the intrusion of the god idea . . . the

Lawrentian Doubleness

133

conception of a God arose, to intervene between man and the cosmos.”26 For Lawrence, the American and Mexican Indians are the only people who have the potential to live religiously and thus are “religious in perhaps the oldest sense, and deepest, of the word” (Phoenix, p. 144). The Plumed Serpent is in this sense Lawrence’s attempt to reestablish a vital relationship with the cosmos by restoring ancient, primitive gods, banished by the Christian God. At issue in The Plumed Serpent is that Christianity as an institution has been indissolubly involved with the whole social, political formations of the West, particularly as a significant part of imperialist projects. As Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness shows, it is Christian “pilgrims” that Western imperialists sent to their colonies in the early stage of their colonial projects. Through the Bible, colonialists established the authority of colonial order and affirmed the cultural hierarchies by labeling savage gods superstitious and inferior. What Lawrence tries to do in The Plumed Serpent is the reverse of colonialist eradication of indigenous religion. The restoration of ancient Mexican religion necessarily accompanies Lawrence’s critiques of Western colonial projects. The colonized reality of Mexico, presented in The Plumed Serpent, is told mainly through the hymns of Quetzalcoatl, written by Ramón, which constitute a subtext within the novel. Although these hymns contribute to great difficulty in the Western reader’s approaching the novel, as Holly Laird emphasizes, “[t]he novel cannot, however, be absolved from collaboration with its poetry; they are too closely interwoven.”27 If Lawrence sticks to his notion of the “natural aristocrat” throughout the novel, he at the same time suggests the way that his leadership politics comes into contact with the masses. The vital channel connecting the political leader to the masses is the hymns that the Mexicans enjoy and appropriate in their terms, as instanced in chapter XV titled “The Written Hymns of Quetzalcoatl.” In the moments when illiterate Mexicans enjoy the hymns like folk tales or folk songs of the locale, these Quetzalcoatl hymns replace the Bible as an authoritative signifier. The hymns also allow Lawrence to dramatize, blasphemously but humorously, an awakening moment in which a different race has different spiritual needs by showing the way in which the native Mexicans understand Jesus Christ. In the middle of the reading of a hymn, they interrupt the reading and even begin to gossip: “Listen!” exclaimed Juana, awestruck. “El Senor is a gringito, and His Holy Mother is a gringita. Yet, one really knows. Look! Look at the feet of the Nina! Pure feet of the Santisima! Look!” Kate was barefoot, wearing sandals with a simple strap across the foot. Juana touched one of the

134

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing Nina’s white feet, fascinated. “Feet of the Santisima. And She, the Holy Mary, is a gringita. She came over the sea, like you, Nina?” ... “Think of it! The Santisima is a gringita, and She came over the Sea like the Nina, from the countries of the Nina!” Juana spoke in a wicked wonder, horrified, delighted, mocking. “And the Lord is a Gringito—pure Gringito?” barked Concha. “And Nina—- It was the gringos who killed El Senor? It wasn’t the Mexicans? It was those other gringos who put Him on the Cross?” “Yes!” said Kate. “It wasn’t the Mexicans.” (PS, p. 223)

What stands out in this dialogue is a racial distinction between the gringos and the Mexicans. Of course, it is Lawrence’s plan to foreground the racial difference in order to emphasize his claim that “different people must have different Saviours” (PS, p. 359). Nonetheless, this scene in which Kate and some Mexicans are talking about the God of white people brilliantly defamiliarizes the religious fusion between El Senor and the Mexicans, and thus also uncovers a homogenizing desire embedded in Western Christianity. Through the hymns that narrate how Western Christianity has replaced the Mexican myth of Quetzalcoatl, Lawrence allegorically describes the Western imperialist appropriation of Mexico: “‘Quetzalcoatl has gone. Even his star has departed. We must listen to this Jesus, who speaks in a foreign tongue. So they learned a new speech from the priests that came from upon the great waters to the east. And they became Christians’” (PS, p. 222). Similarly to the way that Lawrence allegorizes the colonizing process of indigenous religion by Christianity, Homi Bhabha in the essay “Signs Taken for Wonder” introduces a story of “the sudden, fortuitous discovery of the English book [the Bible].” 28 Based on a true story, which he found in a missionary book,29 Bhabha explains how Christianity and the English language have established the authority of colonial order through the Bible, while destroying native culture and religion: Written as they are in the name of the father and the author, these texts of the civilizing mission immediately suggest the triumph of the colonialist moment in early English Evangelism and modern English literature. The discovery of the book installs the sign of appropriate representation: the word of God, truth, art creates the conditions for a beginning, a practice of history and narrative. But the institution of the Word in the wilds is also an Entstellung, a process of displacement,

Lawrentian Doubleness

135

distortion, dislocation, repetition—the dazzling light of literature sheds only areas of darkness.30

In the colony, the English book becomes a signifier of authority, and at the same time, as Bhabha points out, it becomes destabilized by the intervention of colonial differences, to use Lawrence’s words, a different spirit of the place. The native’s approval of the superiority of the English book always accompanies a colonial uncertainty: “These books . . . teach the religion of the European Sahibs. It is THEIR book; and they printed it in our language, for our use.”31 Once colonial difference intervenes in the authority of colonial order, the “native” Bible and “native” Christians, as a “colonial doubling,” cannot escape becoming “enigmatic, inappropriate signifiers,” which “disarticulat[e] the structure of the God-Englishman equivalence.”32 The awkward, displaced sense of “native” Christians is also confirmed by Lawrence’s words in Quetzalcoatl: “A European Christian may be a man true to his own blood, whole in his own spirit. But an Indian Christian, or a Chinese Christian, is just a man deflected from his own nature, waiting pathetically for the day when the great God will give him back to himself ” (Q, p. 116). Lawrence attempts to replace Christianity spread out through Mexico not only because it does not match the Indian blood, but also because Christianity, as the lord of one way, is problematic even in the West. Ramón’s declaration of Quetzalcoatl as the “Lord of the Two Ways” (PS, p. 254) implies that the Quetzalcoatl myth is related to Lawrence’s vision of border crossing between the civilized and primitive worlds: “I am on the threshold. I am stepping across the border. I am Quetzalcoatl, lord of both ways, star between day and the dark” (PS, p. 227). The Quetzalcoatl myth also provides a different model in Lawrence’s presentation of the leadership theme, especially in the relationship between his sense of place and politics. The previous “leadership” novels like Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo do not smoothly incorporate Lawrence’s sense of place into his idea of politics. In Aaron’s Rod, Lawrence “preaches” the necessity of male leadership through the voice of Lilly, rather than combining it with the different spirit of Italy. Lawrence’s sense of locality in Kangaroo continuously conflicts with his political ideas: Somers at first tries to involve himself with the political movement of the colony and then renounces his desire to establish a “new” politics in Australia. I concluded in Chapter Three that it is Lawrence’s sense of the Australian landscape, not his male leadership politics, which dominates the novel. Unlike the unhappy marriage between Lawrence’s place and politics in Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo, Lawrence’s presentation of politics in The Plumed Serpent interlaces with his sensuous perception of

136

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

the Mexican landscape and its “uncanny” spirit. The ancient Mexican myth of Quetzalcoatl, which embodies a spirit of Mexico, provides Lawrence an effective framework to explore a different way of life and a different blood consciousness of the primitive Mexicans. Through the Quetzalcoatl myth, defined as the “Lord of the Two Ways” (PS, p. 254), Lawrence’s vision for a New World goes beyond Western civilization, based on “definite meanings” and “a God of one fixed purport” (PS, p. 54). Not only Lawrence’s configuration of the Quetzalcoatl myth but also his understanding of the aboriginality of native Mexicans disclose his attempt to capture the indigenous spirit of Mexico. Especially in the chapter titled “Casa De Las Cuentas,” Lawrence gives full swing to his interest as a writer in portraying others—here, Kate’s housemaid, Juana, and her family. Lawrence’s humorous portrait of this specific Mexican household is filled with an effort to find a balance between his attraction to and repulsion from native Mexicans. At the same time, despite his efforts to show two sides of this different world, this chapter reveals that the author does not free himself from stereotyping images of these people. This ambivalence constantly incorporates the novel into a part of colonial discourse of the day. As David Spurr points out, once the eyes of the Western writer reach the interiors of this Mexican family, Lawrence’s faceto-face contacts with Mexicans inescapably subject them to “the penetrating inspection of the Western eye.”33 Spurr explains how this kind of colonial surveillance works in a colonial discourse: But even where the Western writer declares sympathy with the colonized, the conditions which make the writer’s work possible require a commanding, controlling gaze. The sympathetic humanitarian eye is no less a product of deeply held colonialist values, and no less authoritative in the mastery of its object, than the surveying and policing eye.34

Spurr’s perspective on the “commanding, controlling” colonial gaze surely limits the cultural, political implication that Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place” embodies. According to Spurr’s understanding of colonial surveillance, Lawrence is, despite his conscious effort to “de-colonize” native Mexicans, just another typical white Westerner with “deeply held colonialist values,” and consequently his presentation of the Quetzalcoatl myth cannot help being limited by his embedded cultural values. Nevertheless, it is not fair to say that Lawrence’s ambivalent presentation of the Mexicans conveys entirely typical colonialist valuation of the Westerners. For, if Wimal Dissanayake and Carmen Wickramagamage define a colonial gaze as “a gaze of superiority

Lawrentian Doubleness

137

that transcodes difference into inferiority,”35 a Lawrentian gaze inscribed in the novel is mixed between his assent to typical white supremacy and his painstaking effort to see difference between different peoples as difference, not as inferiority. To see native Mexicans’ everyday life, vividly portrayed through Juana and her family, is one of the most entertaining experiences in the reading of The Plumed Serpent. In describing the relationship between Kate and Juana, the author shows their relation from variant angles: from Kate’s point of view as a European and also from the native Mexicans.’ The ways of living of Mexicans and English people are so different that the lives of Mexicans are hard to measure or judge by Western standards. Kate experiences the “unbridgeable” gap in ways of being between the European and the non-European through her relationship with Juana; for Kate, Juana and her family are “the clue to all the native life” (PS, p. 148). Kate’s relationship with Juana is not exactly one of dominance-submission as seen in the typical relation of a white master and a black slave. The third-person narrator makes clear that Kate is, for Juana and her family, “a source of wonder and amusement”—“a half-incomprehensible, half-amusing wonder-being”—but “never a class superior” (PS, p. 138). Nonetheless, ironically, Kate always feels some kind of superiority to native Mexicans. It is a real wonder, for Kate, to see them sleeping out on the ground like a dog or sitting in their doorway delousing one another: The dark races belong to a bygone cycle of humanity. They are left behind in a gulf out of which they have never been able to climb. And on to the particular white man’s levels they never will be able to climb. They can only follow as servants. While the white man keeps the impetus of his own proud, onward march, the dark races will yield and serve, perforce. But let the white man once have a misgiving about his own leadership, and the dark races will at once attack him, to pull him down into the old gulfs. To engulf him again. Which is what is happening. For the white man, let him bluster as he may, is hollow with misgiving about his own supremacy. Full speed ahead, then, for the debacle. (PS, p. 145)36

This passage reveals that Lawrence approves the hierarchy between the dark races and the white people as given and natural. Kate (and Lawrence) feels superior to and repulsed by “lice-picking, down-dragging people” (PS, p. 145), and this is a typical, and maybe honest, response of “civilized” people

138

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

to the natives. It is not surprising to hear that Billy Tracy says, “Lawrence was too intellectual, too squeamish, too snobbish, too English to fit successfully into a more primitive culture.”37 For all this negative feeling about native people, Lawrence’s white supremacy does not follow the conventional direction to the self-sufficiency and bourgeois self-conceit of typical Westerners. In the second chapter “TeaParty in Tlacolula” Kate meets several white foreigners—typical white colonialists—such as the American Major and the American Judge couples. In particular, she is enraged with the Judge and his wife because of their arrogance and prejudice, which come from their belief in the existing hierarchy between white people and dark people. When the Judge insists that Chinese jade appears only in a green color, as opposed to Kate and Owen who maintain that “there’s every imaginable tint—white, rose, lavender—“ (PS, p. 40), he does not try to understand the differences and diversities between ideas or between peoples. Even though he lives in Mexico, his understanding of Mexico is exclusively one-sided, full of prejudice, and malevolent: “‘But that’s what it is,’ said the Judge. ‘They want to turn the country into one big crime. They don’t like anything else. They don’t like honesty and decency and cleanliness. They want to foster lies and crime. What they call liberty here is just freedom to commit crime. That’s what Labour means, that’s what they all mean. Free crime, nothing else’” (PS, p. 33). The Judge is, as it were, a prototype of the typical colonialist who does not have any desire to understand differences between people. On the way to her hotel, Kate finds herself sympathizing more with the native Mexicans than before due to her rage with the “awful ill-bred” Judge couple: She was a bit afraid of the natives, not quite sober, who were waiting for the car in the opposite direction. But stronger than her fear was a certain sympathy with these dark-faced silent men in their big straw hats and naïve little cotton blouses. Anyhow they had blood in their veins: they were columns of dark blood. Whereas the other bloodless, acidulous couple from the Middle-West, with their nasty whiteness . . . ! (PS, pp. 42–3)

Unlike Kate’s ambivalent feelings about native Mexicans, the narrator describes Americans like Owen and Villiers, to say nothing of the American Judge couple, in a negative and slighting manner. The “American automatism and American flippant toughness” (PS, p. 89) that Kate feels from white Americans keeps contrasting with “a certain delicate, tender mystery” (PS, p. 89) that she senses from the native Mexicans. The early part of The Plumed

Lawrentian Doubleness

139

Serpent strongly carries Lawrence’s consistent hostility toward white America and Americans, as often revealed in his essays and letters written during his sojourn in America. As a European lingering on the borderline between the civilized and primitive world, Lawrence warns of the dilemma of white supremacy and of the dead end that white imperialist civilization faces. In Quetzalcoatl as well as The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence does not recoil from his conviction that Western imperialism has been self-destructive to the imperialists themselves: “the white men have not been able to fuse the soul of the dark men into being. Instead, in his attempt to overwhelm and convert the dark man to the white way of life, the white man has lost his own soul, collapsed upon himself ” (Q, p. 44). This passage, which criticizes colonialism from the inside of the West, reveals how Lawrence’s imaginative reconstruction of the Quetzalcoatl myth is involved with and originates from his apocalyptic notion of Western civilization. As many critics such as Wayne Templeton, Charles Rossman, and Sandra Gilbert, have pointed out, it is likely that Lawrence’s version of the Quetzalcoatl movement ultimately contributes to the revitalizing of Western civilization, rather than the de-colonization of third-world Mexico. But, more importantly, Lawrence is concerned with both sides, not discarding one side and taking the other, as he says in the letter sent to his mother-in-law: “I must go back and forth, through the world. I must balance Germany against Mexico, and Mexico against Germany. I do not come for peace. The devil, the holy devil himself has peace round his neck” (Letters, IV, pp. 531–32). Although Lawrence specifies Germany instead of other Western countries since this letter was written to his German mother-in-law, the letter reveals what he intended to do in his novel. The problem is that critics sharply divide along a political, racial line between the colonized and the colonizer, a division of which Lawrence disapproves. Another problem is that critics have grudged giving credit to Lawrence’s perception of racial otherness and his effort to restore the indigenous spirit of place. Without appreciating Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place,” critics inescapably suspect Lawrence’s motivation behind this Quetzalcoatl project. But strikingly in The Plumed Serpent Lawrence constantly tries to value both sides of the conflict between spirit / body, man / woman, and Western civilized world / primitive world. According to Lawrence’s double perspectives, neither Mexican primitivism nor Ramón’s idealized leadership is a perfect and absolute alternative to modern Western civilization. Just as Mexico, for Kate, is an object of fear as well as an object of mystery and beauty, Ramón is, though he is a great leader, also described as a sultan in the relationship with his second wife, Teresa. Lawrence’s greatest concern in The

140

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

Plumed Serpent is not with the search for a primitive and masculine world either replacing the Western world or overthrowing the Magna Mater, but with the search for the coexistence of opposite worlds and of opposite values. Lawrence’s presentations of primitive others are also surprisingly balanced in describing the virtue and wickedness that he had found in them. For instance, when Kate observes native boys molesting a water-fowl, she feels she can bear no more “the horrible uncreate elementality, so uncouth, even sun and rain uncouth, uncouth” (PS, p. 218), the world that Mexican people instinctively inhabit. At the same time, the narrator uses the same adjectives in describing the white people in the following paragraph: “terrible uncouth things called gringos, white people, and dressed up monsters of rich people, with powers like gods, but uncouth, demonish gods” (PS, p. 218). When Kate describes Juana and her family, her point of view in judging racial others does not lose a sense of balance: Everything they did must be fun, or they could not do it. They could not abstract themselves to a routine. Never. Everything must be fun, must be variable, must be a bit of an adventure. It was confusion, but after all, a living confusion, not a dead, dreary thing. Kate remembered her English servants in the English kitchens: so mechanical and somehow inhuman. Well, this was the other extreme. (PS, p. 147)

For all his efforts to find a balance between two different worlds, it is still impossible to summarize neatly how Lawrence “presents” racial others; as a European man, Lawrence describes native Mexicans as left far behind modern civilization, but this does not necessarily mean that white Europeans are superior to them. Perhaps, Lawrence himself was caught in the dilemma that he describes in Mornings in Mexico: “It is almost impossible for the white people to approach the Indian without either sentimentality or dislike. The common healthy vulgar white usually feels a certain native dislike of these drumming aboriginals. The highbrow invariably lapses into sentimentalism like the smell of bad eggs” (MM, p. 54). Lawrence tries to avoid these typical Western approaches to the primitives in his novel; so he tries to refine his repulsive feeling about them, while trying “not to romanticize” them as noble savages. Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny that his presentations of the primitive come and go in between honest repulsion and refined idealization. Lawrence’s awareness of racial otherness becomes still more complicated in his controversial presentation of gender in the novel. Compared with the previous “leadership” novels, which almost exclude women as main characters,

Lawrentian Doubleness

141

Lawrence’s presentation of racial others in The Plumed Serpent is tangled with the issue of sexuality. Many critics—especially feminist critics—have agreed that Ramón’s religion is entirely masculine and patriarchal. For instance, Judith Ruderman argues, “the religion of Quetzalcoatl signifies the overthrow of the Magna Mater and the ascension of the Pater Magnus to the throne.”38 She reads Ramón’s attempt to bring back ancient Aztec gods as a manifestation of Lawrence’s obsession with the phallic mystery. According to Ruderman, Kate Leslie, the protagonist of the novel, who is “a human representation of the white Madonna,”39 is doomed to be subservient to Ramón and Cipriano and to be a goddess of the masculine religion. But Kate representing Western civilization cannot be simply subsumed in the ancient primeval world, represented by Ramón and Cipriano. Her existence is rather essential to the creation of the native religion, which means a reunion of the opposite worlds. Given that through the ancient myth of Quetzalcoatl Lawrence attempts to “bring opposites together again, in a new unison” (PS, p. 418), it is unlikely that Kate merely represents a white Madonna who is to be replaced by the native masculine myth. In addition, Kate’s critical voice should not be easily dismissed because of its structural and narrative significance; her comments consistently point to the potential risk that Ramón’s native religion can fall into a self-contained and monolithic entity. Marianna Torgovnick gives another persuasive reason for the need to keep at a distance the sweeping conclusion that the Quetzalcoatl movement is exclusively a masculine project. Defining The Plumed Serpent as “the perfect book to understand what ‘the primitive’ could do for D. H. Lawrence,”40 Torgovnick places Lawrence’s consistent concern with the primitive within the tradition of modern primitivism of Western discourses; Lawrence’s interest in the primitive is neither unusual nor new. She nonetheless points to a significant change in the development of Lawrence’s presentation of the primitive between his early and later novels: At the time he wrote Women in Love (1913–19), Lawrence associated the primitive with conventional ideas of the feminine, an association entirely typical of modernism. By the time of The Plumed Serpent (1923–25), the product of his sojourns in Mexico and the American Southwest, Lawrence associated the primitive with conventional ideas of masculinity. The regendering of the primitive was crucial; it loosed the Lawrentian knots by facilitating the substitutions charted above, which link late works like The Plumed Serpent with early works like Sons and Lovers. Lawrence’s gendered versions of the primitive retell in personalized terms the two major stories about primitive peoples he inherited from

142

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing the nineteenth century: primitive peoples as dangerous and irrational, something to be feared; primitive peoples as the idealized noble savages, something to be emulated. The first, for Lawrence the “feminine” version, is the primitive as degeneration, as a cautionary tale for the modern West; the second, “masculine” version, is the primitive as regeneration, as the last best hope for the modern West.41

The problem is that the characteristics Torgovnick divides as the “feminine” and “masculine” versions of the primitive are mixed up together in Lawrence’s Mexican novel. Lawrence scatters throughout the novel the characteristics of the “feminine” version, which sees the primitive as something dangerous, irrational, and deadly. In addition, even in his “masculine” version Lawrence is very careful not to slip his presentation of the primitive into a sentimentalized version of the “noble savage.” Lawrence’s search for an ideal version of primitive masculinity stands out in this novel, but the exclusive highlighting of the “masculine” version in The Plumed Serpent risks simplifying Lawrence’s conflicting presentation of Mexico. Despite the risk of simplification, Torgovnick’s study of the transition from the “feminine” to “masculine” version of the primitive in Lawrence’s novels brings to light the way in which Lawrence’s treatment of primitive others is deeply engaged with his apocalyptic vision. She sees Lawrence’s desperate hope for primitive masculinity in the context of modern apocalypse of the West, rather than understanding it as originating from his misogynist intention: “Like Conrad, he [Lawrence] fumbles at ideas he is not quite able or willing to express. . . . In this sense, Conrad and Lawrence are typical moderns and truly ‘one of us.’”42 Although Torgovnick admits that Lawrence’s preoccupation with male desire in building an alternative society “deserves” harsh feminist critique, she also argues that in understanding his presentation of gender we need to consider a sense of urgency of the dilemma of Western civilization Lawrence felt in the 1920s. Torgovnick’s deep sympathy for Lawrence comes from the fact that Lawrence’s effort to appropriate the primitive world in Western terms was basically out of the question. Thus she sees the difficulty in presenting the primitive as fundamentally associated with the limitations of the whole system of Western discourse, rather than reflecting the personal limits of Lawrence: Lawrence aims at a perfect balancing of self and other. But within traditional European systems of thought and language, to identify “others” is to invoke a “hierarchy”; humans exist in relations of mastery, rather than reciprocity, with other humans and with the world. In studying

Lawrentian Doubleness

143

primitive societies or in inventing versions of them, Westerners pretend to learn about or to create alternate, less oppressive ways of knowing, all the while establishing mastery and control over those other ways of knowing. Primitive societies and systems of thought which might critique Western ones are instead processed in Western terms. Thinkers like Lawrence yearn for, but lack the ground for, radical critique.43

Torgovnick’s astute diagnosis of the limits found in Lawrence’s presentation of racial others explains in part why Lawrence comes and goes from one extreme to another in describing the primitive and thus why his version of Mexico contains such contradictory ideas, both conventional ones and unconventional. If traditional readings of The Plumed Serpent, defining it as Lawrence’s “representative” leadership novel, have focused on the relationship between the two male heroes, Ramón and Cipriano, I think a more important relationship is established around Kate and these two men. First of all, Kate’s relationship with these Mexicans is much more interactive, whereas the relationship between Ramón and Cipriano is based on the latter’s one-sided submission to the former. Cipriano never criticizes Ramón’s leadership, but Kate criticizes Ramón and Cipriano, and vice versa. Kate is a pivotal mediator who intervenes and thus undermines Ramón’s authoritative voice. Kate’s intervention in the Quetzalcoatl movement makes it possible for readers to empathize with Ramón’s project: without Kate as a dissenter, the novel could easily fall to the level of propagandist literature. In the last chapter, Kate fully accepts the necessity of tension and conflict in relationship with other people: “I must not recoil against Cipriano and Ramón, they make my blood blossom in my body. I say they are limited. But then one must be limited. If one tries to be unlimited, one becomes horrible” (PS, p. 439). Kate’s submission to Cipriano and Ramón should not be characterized as submission to masculine supremacy since Kate also limits the authority and self-will of these Mexican men in much the same way that they limit Kate’s. Kate’s dissenting voice throughout the novel enables the reader to recognize that Lawrence is not easily identified with either Ramón or Kate. Thus, the fact that the myth of Quetzalcoatl reflects Lawrence’s strong desire for a return to the ancient phallic world does not necessarily lead to the judgment that the narrative of the novel is exclusively masculine. Kate, as Frank Kermode points out, consistently plays a role of undercutting “the doctrinal pronouncements of both the author and his fictional spokesmen.”44 The masculinity of the Quetzalcoatl movement is constantly revealed through Kate’s dissenting voice, filtered through her female consciousness.45

144

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

In the earlier version of the novel, Quetzalcoatl, Kate is more hostile to, and suspicious of, the Quetzalcoatl movement; she refuses to get married to Cipriano and to be an Aztec goddess. Although Kate in the published version looks more pliant and less resistant to the Mexican men’s project, her dissenting and contradicting voice, still strong in The Plumed Serpent, serves to turn the sometimes outrageously fantastic project of the men into a realistic and plausible one. Critics who have focused on Kate’s role in the Mexican pantheon and her marriage with Cipriano have suggested that in his last “leadership” novel Lawrence is gradually breaking away from his “leadership” theme. For instance, Hyde, arguing that Lawrence is “working toward mutuality rather than dominance”46 in this novel, sees Kate’s intervention in the Quetzalcoatl project as essential, not subsidiary, in rebuilding the ancient Mexican myth: Kate, who seemingly becomes a member of the neo-Aztec pantheon in the Mexican novel, is essential to these methods in The Plumed Serpent. Providing the reader’s general perspective, sometimes even at apparent odds with the narrator/author, she is outspokenly oppositional to the “heroes,” affecting them, perhaps, as much as they affect her.47

Kate’s dissenting voice, as compared even with Harriet’s in Kangaroo, thoroughly integrates itself into men’s business, the building of the Quetzalcoatl movement. Pinkney even argues that by the end of the novel “Kate is the only faithful Quetzalcoatlian left,” while Ramón and Cipriano, who announced themselves as the Lords of Two Ways, ironically “decline into . . . interpretative monism” by making doctrinal gestures at the end of the novel.48 Perhaps more problematically, the solid authority of Ramón in the Quetzalcoatl movement does not really allow any challenge from Cipriano, whereas in the early manuscript Ramón asks Cipriano to share the authority of the Quetzalcoatl movement: “If I [Ramón] fail to lead you, swear to kill me” (Q, p. 124). Lawrence in the published version deprives Cipriano of co-authority in the project. As Louis Martz suggests, Lawrence’s final design to create “a book of prophecy, with all the urgent rhetoric that prophecy commands to enforce its message”49 might have forced Ramón to take the whole responsibility for the project. In Quetzalcoatl, Ramón is described as a “dark Indian” man: “Senor [Ramón] Carrasco, a big, handsome, dark man, was also silent and quite impassive, though his silence was perfectly courteous. When he sat down, Kate noticed the beautiful poise of his head, and the handsomeness of his thighs: something almost god-like, in an Indian, sensuous, statuesque way” (Q, p. 17).

Lawrentian Doubleness

145

But Lawrence makes a radical change in characterizing Ramón in The Plumed Serpent by portraying him as “almost pure Spaniard” (PS, p. 59). More correctly speaking, he is a Mexican of Spanish descent, not a Spaniard. Considering that Lawrence says, “an American of pure English descent is different in all his reactions, from an Englishman” (Letters, V, p. 67), Ramón is a Mexican with Spanish inheritance who should be different both from native Mexicans and white Europeans. Nonetheless, the narrator of The Plumed Serpent makes a farfetched connection between Kate and Ramón as Europeans: “Kate looked round. Don Ramón was flashing his knowing brown Spanish eyes, and a little sardonic smile lurked under his moustache. Instantly Kate and he, Europeans, in essence, understood one another” (PS, p. 36). With the exception of Kate’s frequent insistence on Ramón’s European origin, however, the novel does not show any similarity between Kate and Ramón as Europeans. Why did Lawrence change the origin of Ramón from a “dark Indian” man to an “almost pure Spaniard”? More importantly, what difference does this change make in our reading of The Plumed Serpent? The position of Ramón is tricky in the published version; he was educated at Columbia University in America, and his sons attend a school in America. He owns a hacienda and other property, though money comes mainly from his first wife’s mine. Lawrence creates a lot of confusion in defining Ramón in a racial and cultural context, as Michael Ballin describes it: “Though Ramón is the dedicated saviour of Mexico, he is presented as culturally alien because of his education and European culture and viewed as an alien rebel by the majority as well as by his Christian wife and the Mexican bishop.”50 What adds confusion is that both Ramón’s demeanor as a political leader and his way of seeing the world, presented in The Plumed Serpent, do not remind us of any connection to his American education and European origin. If Lawrence had not changed the image of Ramón as a dark Indian man, as presented in Quetzalcoatl, the racial structure of the novel would have been much simpler: two dark Indian men and a European woman. And yet this simple structure would probably not have provided space to enable Lawrence to sympathize more intimately with Ramón as an ideal leader of a new world, and this could partly explain why Lawrence changed Ramón’s racial origin. Although she is cautious in defining it while keeping in mind other possibilities about Ramón as a political leader, Sandra Gilbert ultimately defines Ramón as “an incarnation of the imperialist spirit.” But as Gilbert also suggests, there is a strong possibility that Lawrence creates Ramón as “a sort of mediator,” like himself, between two different worlds, mediating, in his turn, between Kate, a European, and Cipriano, a native Indian:

146

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing Might we, then, define the “almost pure Spaniard” Ramón as a kind of repentant colonialist? Has he donned the guise of born-again Indian, “First Man of Quetzalcoatl,” in order to expiate for the predations of his ancestors? Or, as a spiritual and spiritualized mestizo (we should recall that Ramón is almost “pure Spanish” and thus “probably” has a jot of the “blood of Tlaxcalan Indians in his veins” [59]), does he function as a sort of mediator between the “white” and “dark” races in just the way that the bird-serpent god intervenes between heaven and earth, day and night, “With the bright wing on the right/And the wing of the dark on the left”? (176)51

Ramón always looks detached from both sides, Europe and Mexico; it is not hard to assume that Lawrence intentionally makes Ramón refuse to be enrolled in any side, just as Lawrence does not belong to any society.52 Although Ramón has a background in common with white colonialists, we risk an essentialist fallacy if we consider him as one of them in terms of his Spanish origin. It could be said that these elements affect (or even undermine) his position as a political leader. But whether or not Ramón is an imperialist should be judged by his relationship with native Mexicans and his role as a political leader in the Quetzalcoatl movement, not automatically by his origin and social class. Interestingly, rather than a “fascist-like” leader or “god-like” prophet, Ramón sometimes looks more like a “vulnerable” man who is easily criticized by Kate, or by the reader, throughout the novel. This implies that the author, as in Kangaroo, tries to keep some psychological, emotional distance from his male protagonist and also from the alternative Quetzalcoatl movement. Kate sees Ramón both as an alternative god replacing Western Christianity and a sultan in relationship with his second wife. Lawrence apotheosizes Ramón into a native Mexican god with a potentially redemptive force replacing Christ, the single Savior: “Only the man of a great star, a great divinity, can bring the opposites together again, in a new unison. And this was Ramón, and this was his great effort” (PS, p. 418). But, at the same time, Lawrence allows Kate to see that Ramón, who blamed his first wife’s death-like will, also embodies the “manifestation of pure will” (PS, p. 385). By pointing out that Ramón’s new religion, like other institutionalized religions, might risk falling under “The Will of God” (PS, p. 385), Kate provides a critical voice in Chapter XXIV “Malintzi,” challenging the masculine definition of the human history: The Will of God! She [Kate] began to understand that once fearsome phrase. At the centre of all things, a dark, momentous Will sending

Lawrentian Doubleness

147

out its terrific rays and vibrations, like some vast octopus. And at the other end of the vibration, men, created men, erect in the dark potency, answering Will with will, like gods or demons. It was wonderful too. But where was woman, in this terrible interchange of will? Truly only a subservient, instrumental thing: the soft stone on which the man sharpened the knife of his relentless volition: the soft lodestone to magnetise his blade of steel and keep all its molecules alive in the electric flow. (PS, pp. 385–86)

Teresa’s relationship with Ramón reflects the woman’s position as subservient and instrumental. Through the eyes of Kate, Teresa is described as “a woman living just for the sake of a man” (PS, p. 412), while giving up her individual self. More problematically, both Ramón and Cipriano perceive the woman only in light of an ideal wife—her existence is dependent on, and determined by, the man—rather than acknowledging her as an individual. Kate reveals that Ramón and Cipriano’s understanding of the woman is still caught in a patriarchal principle. The moment when Kate perceives Ramón as a sultan is symbolically important in that she perceives the danger of excluding women (and female desire) from a new religious movement, which limits this alternative vision to Western civilization. Moreover, although Ramón represents an unchallengeable authority in the Mexican pantheon, this does not mean that he dominates the Quetzalcoatl movement. Metaphorically put, this alternative movement features a musical orchestra led by a trio, Kate, Ramón, and Cipriano. The lack of one of these in the trio brings about a fatal discord to this project. In particular, viewed from postcolonial perspectives, it is possible to say that Cipriano as a pure Indian plays a more important role than Ramón does in this spiritual and political de-colonizing process of Mexico. While Ramón is usually detached and distanced from the Mexican masses, Cipriano plays a role of bridging the gap between Ramón and the masses and the gap between the civilized world Kate represents and his primitive world. Despite all this significance of Cipriano’s role in the Quetzalcoatl business, Cipriano has been overlooked by critics, as compared with Ramón and Kate, for example, in Sandra Gilbert’s comment: “if Ramón is an incarnation of the imperialist spirit, Cipriano, a native boy, represents the instrument of the imperialist will.”53 If the reader considers Cipriano just an instrument for Ramón, his/her reading of the novel easily leads to the assumption that, because of Ramón’s European origin (including Kate’s and the author’s), the novel is no more than another version of cultural imperialist invasion. Most critics, who either dismiss the significant role of Cipriano within the Quetzalcoatl movement or regard him

148

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

as an irreparably sinister figure, belong to this case. These readings disregard the role of Cipriano as a pure Indian who reveals the dilemma of the western way of being that Kate represents in the eyes of the Mexican Indians. It is thus important to explore Cipriano’s aboriginality as a native Mexican in reading this novel as a postcolonial text. Although he is a highly educated man—he even studied in England—his Oxford education does not affect the root of what he is as a Mexican Indian: “His education lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness” (PS, p. 78). Moreover, it is Cipriano who interprets the meaning of the Quetzalcoatl movement in the contact with Mexican Indian masses, that is, through his relationship with soldiers. Although the colonized history of Mexico is told through the hymns, written by Ramón, Cipriano explains in his own terms the reality of Mexico to the Indian soldiers. Where the Mexican dance, which Kate observes in the plaza of Sayula, contributes to her initiation into the Quetzalcoatl movement, the dance of Cipriano and the Mexican soldiers in the chapter “The Living Huitzilopochtli” marks another epiphanic moment in which the boundary between self and other, between an individual and a community, has dissolved: “‘I am not of myself,’ he [Cipriano] would say to them [Indian soldiers]. ‘I am of the red Huitzilopochtli and the power from behind the sun. And you are not of yourselves. Of yourselves you are nothing. You are of me, my men’” (PS, pp. 364–65). Cipriano’s intermingling with Mexican soldiers is a significant sign that Lawrence is seeking a meeting point where individuality and community deeply interact with each other. Donald Gutierrez also recognizes a change in Lawrence’s attitude to society in this novel: “it is only in The Plumed Serpent and Etruscan Places that Lawrence attempts to unite individual and societal realization.”54 Especially in the latter part of the 1920s, Lawrence was more concerned with the individual’s integration into society, which is obviously different from his usual insistence on the separation of the individual from society. Even in Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo, Lawrence foregrounds the conflicts and tensions between his male protagonists and society, while emphasizing Aaron’s and Somers’s “inviolable” individuality. But his preference for the “isolated” individual changes in his Mexican novel through representation of the Quetzalcoatl movement. His emphasis on the correlation between individuality and society matures in his imaginative interpretation of a political-religious leader, “the Lucumo, the religious prince” (EP, pp. 51–2), who existed in the ancient Etruscan society, and finally culminates in his last writing, Apocalypse (1931). In the final part of Apocalypse, written in December 1929, three months before he died, Lawrence says:

Lawrentian Doubleness

149

My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the waters. So that my individualism is really an illusion. I am a part of the great whole, and I can never escape. But I can deny my connections, break them, and become a fragment. Then I am wretched.55

Considering Lawrence’s life-long animosity toward society, this passage looks like a great reversal in that he highlights the collective side of one’s nature. But we need to remember that beneath his sometimes uncontrollable fury at his own society there was always Lawrence’s desire for “connecting” himself back to his society. This passage is thus deeply Lawrentian in that he did not, to the very end, give up his effort to connect the individual to one’s social, physical surroundings. In The Plumed Serpent, Cipriano not only plays a pivotal role connecting political leaders to the masses, but also represents the indigenous spirit of Mexico. From the beginning, Kate sees in Cipriano a symbolic image of the snake, hostile and fatal, which she cannot find in Ramón: There was something undeveloped and intense in him [Cipriano], the intensity and the crudity of the semi-savage. She could well understand the potency of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya imagination. Something smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in this man suggested the heavy-ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins. That was what it was, the heavy-ebbing blood of powerful reptiles, the dragon of Mexico. (PS, p. 63)

Given Lawrence’s design to bridge the civilized and primitive worlds, Cipriano, identified with “the heavy-ebbing blood of [the] powerful reptile” of Mexico, is doomed to be related to Kate. Although Kate at first feels more comfortable with, even more sexually attracted to, Ramón than Cipriano— “perhaps Ramón is the only one I couldn’t quite escape from, because he really touches me somewhere inside” (PS, p. 204)—the relationship between Cipriano and Kate as a native Mexican and a white European becomes more important than her relationship with Ramón. Most importantly, it is Cipriano, not Ramón, who criticizes Kate’s way of being as a white European woman: “You [Kate] can only think with

150

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

American thoughts . . . So when you say you are free, you are not free. You are compelled all the time to be thinking U.S.A. thoughts—compelled, I must say. You have not as much choice as a slave” (PS, p. 204). Especially in the first part of the novel, Kate insists on her “Euro-centered” way of thinking in observing Mexican people and their lives: “Aztec things oppress me,” she [Kate] said. “They are oppressive,” he [Cipriano] answered, in his beautiful cultured English, that was nevertheless a tiny bit like a parrot talking. “There is no hope in them,” she said. “Perhaps the Aztecs never asked for hope,” he said, somewhat automatically. “Surely it is hope that keeps one going?” she said. “You, maybe. But not the Aztec, nor the Indian to-day.” He spoke like a man who has something in reserve, who is only half attending to what he hears, and even to his own answer. “What do they have, if they don’t have hope?” she said. “They have some other strength, perhaps,” he said evasively. “I would like to give them hope,” she said. “If they had hope, they wouldn’t be so sad, and they would be cleaner, and not have vermin.” “That of course would be good,” he said, with a little smile. “But I think they are not so very sad. They laugh a good deal and are gay.” “No,” she said. “They oppress me, like a weight on my heart. They make me irritable, and I want to go away.” “From Mexico?” “Yes. I feel I want to go away from it and never, never see it again. It is so oppressive and gruesome.” “Try it a little longer,” he said. “Perhaps you will feel differently. But perhaps not,” he ended vaguely, driftingly. (PS, p. 35)

Through Kate’s way of understanding racial others, Lawrence shows how Europeans are caught in a self-centered mode of knowing: rather than perceiving differences between races, Kate insists on adapting the same European values to Mexican people, such as hope, a very abstract cultured concept, or hygiene, often identified by Europeans with civilization itself. From the viewpoint of a native Mexican, Cipriano keeps pointing out how absurd and awkward Kate’s appropriation of Mexico is. In a similar way, when Kate sees the moon of Mexico as something hostile, Cipriano leads her to see the other side of her feeling:

Lawrentian Doubleness

151

“But the moon,” she said, “isn’t lovely and friendly as it is in England and Italy,” “It is the same planet,” he replied. “But the moonshine in America isn’t the same. It doesn’t make one feel glad as it does in Europe. One feels it would like to hurt one.” He was silent for some moments. Then he said: “Perhaps there is in you something European, which hurts our Mexican moon.” “But I come in good faith.” “European good faith. Perhaps it is not the same as Mexican.” Kate was silent, almost stunned. “Fancy your Mexican moon objecting to me!” she laughed ironically. “Fancy your objecting to our Mexican moon!” said he. “I wasn’t,” said she. (PS, p. 232)

This dialogue not only reveals Kate’s constant fear of the Mexican landscape but also shows how hard it is for Kate to free herself from her European background. In the first chapter, describing Mexico as an ugly, squalid, crawling sort of evil, Kate desperately wishes for a “debonair” Italy-like cosmopolitan world. Kate’s transformation from a European woman, obsessed with the Western logic of “a complete self” or “an accomplished I” (PS, p. 103), into someone who can communicate with the “inaccessible soul of the Indian” (PS, p. 113) cannot happen without the personal intervention of Cipriano. In light of the origin of Malintzi in the ancient Aztec myth, the relationship between Kate and Cipriano is intriguing. L. D. Clark has shown that one model of Lawrence’s Malintzi is the real-life mistress of Cortés: There was no such Aztec goddess as Malintzi, but the name itself has held a ubiquitous symbolic prominence in Mexico almost from the time Cortés landed. Its origin is obscure and its variant forms—Malintzi and Malinche—are the result of cross-corruption between Nahuatl and Spanish. According to Bernal Díaz, the Indian princess redeemed from slavery to become the mistress of Cortés took the name of Marina at baptism, though he does not explain why . . . Whether or not this it true, when Doña Marina arrived with the Spaniards in Tenochtitlán, the local effort to pronounce her name, with addition of the–tzi suffix of respect, produced Malintzi, which in turn became Malinche in Spanish.56

According to this version of history, Doña Marina (Malintzi) was a prototype of the native traitor as well as a mistress of the white conqueror. Clark

152

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

sees Lawrence rewriting the history of Malintzi, where “the traditional image amounted to the rape of a weaker race by a stronger one,”57 through Kate, a white female adventurer.58 In Lawrence’s gender reversal, the woman is European and the man is Mexican. Significantly, Kate and Cipriano do not repeat the relationship, fraught with sexual violence and enforcement, between Malintzi and Cortés as an Indian slave woman and a white conqueror. Lawrence is rather replacing white imperialist masculinity, armed with the conqueror’s “iron heel and iron will” (PS, p. 75), which Cortés represents, with native Mexicans’ black masculinity—“[s]omething dark, heavy, and reptilian in their silence and their softness” (PS, p. 118)—which climaxes in Cipriano’s phallic mystery. In relation to black masculinity that Lawrence presents here, it is an intriguing question why Lawrence chose Kate, rather than Ramón or Cipriano, as the center of consciousness of the novel. Kate plays a role of not only introducing gender issues to the Quetzalcoatl movement but also legitimizing the author’s attraction to native Mexican men within the traditional, heterosexual codes. Kate is throughout the novel fascinated with native Mexicans’ masculinity and their “black” male bodies, untouched by white modern civilization. It is Mexican men, not native women, who fascinate Kate, as seen in the dancing scene of the plaza. Through Kate’s sexualized gaze at the native men, the readers can see that it is the author himself who is fascinated with the “dark” and “strong” body of the native Mexican: Kate, standing back in the doorway, with Juana sitting on the doorstep at her feet, was fascinated by the silent, half-naked ring of men in the torchlight. Their heads were black, their bodies soft and ruddy with the peculiar Indian beauty that has at the same time something terrible in it. The soft, full, handsome torsos of silent men with heads softly bent a little forward: the soft, easy shoulders, that are yet so broad, and which balance upon so powerful a back bone ; shoulders drooping a little, with the relaxation of slumbering, quiescent power ; the beautiful ruddy skin, gleaming with a dark fineness ; the strong breasts, so male and so deep, yet without the muscular hardening that belongs to white men ; and the dark, closed faces, closed upon a darkened consciousness, the black moustaches and delicate beards framing the closed silence of the mouth ; all this was strangely impressive, moving strange, frightening emotions in the soul. (PS, p. 118)

Lawrence’s secret and thrilling desire for dark Indian men, seen through Kate’s eyes, has not a little to do with Cornelia Nixon’s argument that Lawrence’s

Lawrentian Doubleness

153

male leadership is an acceptable means of expressing his desire for other men.59 In other words, Lawrence’s use of Kate as the center of consciousness of the novel is an efficient strategy for leading his desire for native men into a safe, socially acceptable channel by showing it through the heterosexual lens. Hazel Carby’s study of “modernist evocations of race, nation, and manhood, as these were inscribed upon the body of Paul Robeson during the 1920s and 1930s”60 shows that Lawrence’s sexualized presentation of the black “male” body is not unusual in his time. Though Carby’s examination of black masculinity focuses on American popular arts, particularly in photography of the black male body, Lawrence’s idealistic and utopian presentation of the male body in The Plumed Serpent can be seen as part of the modernist invention of “black masculinity as tropes of utopian possibility.”61 Carby’s concern with the modernist use of black masculinity is motivated by her effort to reveal the way in which idealistic presentation of male body removes the violence and cruelty inscribed in the black history of America. Following Carby’s critique of the modernist version of black body, Lawrence’s presentation is also problematic. Even though he is dealing with the colonized reality of Mexico, Lawrence idealizes black masculinity as if it has hardly been associated with any violence or any negative side of Mexican history. But insofar as Lawrence’s text is not really concerned with specific historicity, the point of the argument over black masculinity needs to be refocused. Lawrence’s main concern with the black male body lies in his exploring an alternative value to replace white modern masculinity. In light of a trope of “utopian possibility,” Kate’s constant evocation of Cipriano’s male body as an embodiment of “the ancient god-devil of the male Pan” (PS, p. 309) is significant in her sexual relationship with Cipriano. Unlike the early version of Kate in Quetzalcoatl, who keeps distancing herself from Cipriano, in The Plumed Serpent she is described as entirely overwhelmed by the ancient, black masculinity of Cipriano. The identification of blackness and maleness, which Pamela Caughie acutely notices in her reading of “The Woman who Rode Away” (1928), is also prevalent in Lawrence’s Mexican novel: “Because maleness for Lawrence is an elemental force, not an individual attribute, blackness or darkness suggests not a racial category but a primal spiritual state.”62 White men are excluded in Lawrence’s conception of maleness in his later writings, especially those written during his residence on the American continent, since he believed that white males had already irremediably lost their sexual vitality. Kate’s marriage to Cipriano, presented as “a living male power, undefined, and unconfined” (PS, p. 308), signifies her submission to “the ancient Pan world” (PS, p. 310). In a way, Kate’s “voluntary” submission

154

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

to Cipriano’s phallic mystery, which happens suddenly without any special motivation, is not smoothly integrated into the narrative, considering that Kate has a strong sense of individuality. Kate’s sudden understanding of Cipriano’s phallic world reminds us of Alvina’s abrupt sexual submission to Ciccio in The Lost Girl. In Chapter Two, I point out that Alvina’s submission to Ciccio needs to be understood in terms of the different spirit of the primitive world that Ciccio represents, rather than in light of traditional masculinity; moreover, Lawrence takes pains to redefine Ciccio’s masculinity in a different way from that of patriarchal values. Like Ciccio’s redefined maleness, Cipriano’s primitive phallic power is definitely beyond the tradition of patriarchal masculinity. What is at issue here is, however, not whether Cipriano’s phallic world is different from the established masculinity of the West, but why Kate’s sexual submission to Cipriano is given such significance in Lawrence’s text and how we understand this enforced submission. As in Ruderman’s feminist reading of the novel, Margaret Storch points out that there exists a significant problem in Kate’s relationship with Cipriano: Lawrence’s sympathies with Native American culture are not so much political as an assertion of masculine strength. In his work, anti-colonialism or the embrace of a dark non-dominant culture, is very often synonymous with anti-feminism . . . This over-determined masculinity is the central driving force of the key works of fiction that he wrote in the Southwest, up to and including The Plumed Serpent.63

It is hard to ignore Lawrence’s anti-feminist turn in describing the relationship between Kate and Cipriano, as in Alvina’s enforced submission to Ciccio in The Lost Girl. Lawrence’s anxiety about women’s radical social changes during the 1920s triggered his problematic obsession with women’s (sexual) submission to men. Against the values of both white modern femininity and masculinity that Western society had implanted, Lawrence suggests black masculinity as a “utopian possibility” in The Plumed Serpent. Black maleness in Lawrence’s last “leadership” novel becomes, beyond the issue of race and sexuality, a convenient password for an alternative mode of being. But, given the significance of Kate’s role as a dissenter and Lawrence’s anti-colonialist stance, her role does not necessarily signify his anti-feminist turn against modern women. As opposed to Ruderman’s or Storch’s persistent highlighting of Lawrence’s anti-feminist presentation of Kate, Kimberly VanHoosier-Carey focuses on the transformation of Kate from a passive woman in the early manuscript, quite detached from Ramón and Cipriano’s

Lawrentian Doubleness

155

Quetzalcoatl business, into a woman who voluntarily participates in it in The Plumed Serpent. Kate’s active involvement with the spiritual rebirth, along with her strong sense of self as a modern Western woman, allows VanHoosierCarey to connect Kate with Lawrence’s other female protagonists such as Ursula in Women in Love and Constance in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. More importantly, VanHoosier-Carey argues that this reconnection of Lawrence’s Mexican novel through Kate to his other novels, before and after The Plumed Serpent, makes possible differentiating this novel from other “leadership” novels in terms of a recovery of Lawrence’s concern with the male-female relationship64: The move from the manuscript to the published version of The Plumed Serpent, then, allows us to view the novel as part of a trajectory which begins with Women in Love and ends with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a trajectory focused on Lawrence’s concern with both male-male and malefemale relationships and each partner’s participation in the various levels (emotion, sexual, and spiritual) of the relationship. . . . Because the move from manuscript to published version of The Plumed Serpent indicates the increasing importance of Kate and also the increasing importance of conveying the experience to the reader, the novel no longer has to be grouped only with Lawrence’s other novels of the early twenties, Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo, novels marked by a consideration of male leadership and male experience. Instead, Kate becomes a transitional figure standing between Ursula and Constance and demonstrating Lawrence’s concern with representing female as well as male experience.65

Critics’ concerns with Lawrence’s characterization of Kate have resulted in different views about Kate’s role in the Mexican pantheon; some critics see Kate as an independent woman, who still holds to her strong sense of self despite her integration into the Quetzalcoatl movement, and others regard Kate as a puppet-like character, caught in Ramón’s and Cipriano’s manipulation. Despite these various judgments about Kate, however, most critics seem to agree that Kate’s sexual submission to Cipriano is problematic because it appears enforced by Cipriano (and Lawrence).66 In defining the relationship between Kate and Cipriano, an essential issue is how to understand Lawrence’s use of the word “phallic.” Hilary Simpson gives us some hints about appreciating Lawrence’s redefined notion of “phallic”: It is true to say, therefore, that ‘phallic’ came to take the place of ‘sexual’ in Lawrence’s vocabulary, . . . Lawrence felt the same desire to do

156

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing away with the word ‘sex’ that so many people have felt about the word ‘love.’ . . . In Lawrence’s usage, moreover, ‘phallic’ loses its association of thrusting aggressiveness and takes on feminine connotations. . . . In the novel [The Plumed Serpent], however, he does develop another theme which is not, at this stage, specifically related to the phallus, but which I have indicated as important in the growth of his ideas. This is the notion that tenderness, grace, beauty, humility and so on are masculine attributes; and, moreover, intrinsic attributes, rather than essentially feminine qualities which in an ideal man might be grafted onto his masculinity. . . . In the novel Lawrence consistently uses words such as ‘soft,’ ‘full,’ ‘delicate,’ ‘vulnerable’ and ‘pure’ to describe men, balancing the other images of violence and power more traditionally associated with masculinity.67

Similarly to the way that Lawrence in The Lost Girl redefines a traditional sense of masculinity through the characterization of “flower-like” Ciccio, he tries to modify the conventional meanings that the phallus evokes by incorporating its signifying structure into primitive Mexican Indian culture. Lawrence’s notion of “phallic mystery,” which includes feminine attributes as well as masculine ones, matches his insistence on double perspectives. In dealing with the issue of sexuality, Lawrence is much more concerned with male desire than with female sexuality. Although he sometimes allows Kate to problematize it, this does not fully compensate for all his preoccupations with male, phallic sexuality, which accompany the exclusion of women’s desire. Still, although Lawrence failed in reconstructing sexual values in an equal and fully communicable way, this failure should not be an excuse for dismissing his efforts to challenge the order of things of the day. Lawrence’s insistence on double perspectives in seeing the world inevitably leads him to question the limits of the language in presenting what he calls blood consciousness—an “unrepresentable” knowledge, deeply related to the body and the unconscious. If Lawrence experiments with a different form of consciousness through the Quetzalcoatl myth, his presentation of this Mexican myth accompanies a necessary conflict with the linguistic conventions of English: without revolutionizing the conventional norms of language, it is impossible to change a way of life and thought. It is worthwhile to note that the myth of Quetzalcoatl uses a language different from the semantic structure of English. Lawrence’s “unfamiliar” and “gibberish-like” use of language, especially in the Quetzalcoatl hymns, has received harsh critical responses. David Holbrook, for example, bitterly criticizes Lawrence’s idea

Lawrentian Doubleness

157

of the Quetzalcoatl myth as “all mystical mumbo-jumbo” which “shows no close acquaintance with the various forms of quest among various civilizations for meaning.”68 In fact, it is hard to understand Ramón’s language, used in the hymns of Quetzalcoatl, with our conventional information about English. First of all, Quetzalcoatl’s language breaks down a representative distinction between the subject and the object, which grounds Western language: “I am neither here nor there. I am thyself . . . I said to myself. I am new man. I am younger than the young and older than the old” (PS, p. 225). At the same time, Ramón’s language, which deliberately blurs the boundary between absence and presence of the subject, or between the past and the present, confuses the notions of time and space in Western thought. Lawrence’s intentional twisting of the conventional usage of English has a lot to do with his ridiculing of “the tricks of white monkey-show” in Mornings in Mexico, a work contemporaneous with the revision of Quetzalcoatl69: “time of the day, coin of money, machines that start at a second, work that is meaningless and yet is paid for with exactitude, in exact coin. A whole existence of monkey-tricks and monkey-virtues” (MM, p. 35). Lawrence’s experiment with language in The Plumed Serpent has been frequently misunderstood and ridiculed as indecipherable metaphysics or jumbled nonsense. An excerpt from De-Scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality (1994), a recently published work of postcolonial criticism, enables us to acknowledge not only how heroic Lawrence’s effort at linguistic renovation was at his time but also how his challenge against Western binarism and hierarchy leads to the current postcolonial project: Postcolonial critics and theorists have found it difficult to postulate a way for the colonized to circumvent the cognitive patterns by which their world has been structured. The quest to defeat, escape or circumvent the pattern of binaries which has been identified as foundational to Western thought, for example, is seldom, if ever, attained.70

Lawrence’s challenge to the conventions of Western thought, for all the critical misunderstanding that has attended it, makes possible the placing of the Quetzalcoatl myth outside and/or in the midst of every kind of opposite, such as up and down, earth and sky, the sun and the moon: “I am on the threshold. I am stepping across the border. I am Quetzalcoatl, lord of both ways, star between day and the dark” (PS, p. 227). Lawrence, through the myth of Quetzalcoatl, tries to find a new epistemological possibility beyond Western knowledge. This new possibility is deeply related to a new mode of

158

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

life, which Lawrence finds in the “dark, collective, and non-individual” (PS, p. 128) life of the native Mexicans under the influence of Quetzalcoatl. Lawrence often appears conscious in this novel of his contradictory and conflicting positions, which derive from the dilemma that he has to find an alternative world from underneath the West. This dilemma has something to do with the fact that his notion of “spirit of place” contains a fundamental irony on the personal level: he had displaced himself from his native land while emphasizing in his texts the “organic” relationship between people and the land. But he could not return to the center of the industrialized and imperialist world, except for several temporary visits. Instead of choosing to return physically to England, Lawrence tried to provide in The Plumed Serpent a “new” and “different” spirit for both the metropolis and the colony. But just as Lawrence lingered on the threshold between two different worlds, Ramón’s new religion is caught in a conflict between male/female principles, and individualistic/collective modes of being. Apparently, Lawrence attempts to reconcile and thus reunite the opposites; but at the same time he does not intend to solve and harmonize them. This is because Lawrence views the tensions and the conflicts between the opposites as inevitable and irresolvable. The last Quetzalcoatl hymn, sung by a Mexican singer in the last chapter, conveys Lawrence’s positioning between separateness and reconciliation between things, between people: “My way is not thy way, and thine is not mine. / But come, before we part / Let us separately go to the Morning Star, / And meet there” (PS, p. 441). To Lawrence who did not really belong to any white civilized society or to any primitive world, his Mexican novel might be the only way that he could solve his endless struggle with the world. The Plumed Serpent, however, succeeds in revealing the difficulty and the complexity that the alternative vision might contain, rather than succeeding in producing an alternative vision to replace Western civilization.

Conclusion

In D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’ (2003), Amit Chaudhuri pays attention to the ways in which “Lawrence’s poetic discourse embodies a ‘difference’ that struggles against the misinterpretations of canonical readings, and inhabits a ‘different’ cultural space.” 1 On the ground that Chaudhuri foregrounds Lawrence’s cultural difference, his way of reading Lawrence’s poetry has a lot in common with my thesis in this study; I also focus on Lawrence’s sense of otherness and difference, embedded in his notion of “spirit of place” throughout his travel writings and later fiction. But when Chaudhuri highlights Lawrence’s “non-Englishness,” the basic structure lies in “the conflict between [other British writers’ or critics’] ‘whiteness,’ or Englishness, and Lawrence’s own cultural difference.”2 He hardly talks about Lawrence’s paradoxical engagement to “Englishness,” which I have tried to show in this study. Instead of describing Lawrence’s cultural difference as an oppositional concept to typical cultural assumptions of England as Chaudhuri does, I have tried to understand it, especially filtered through colonial and postcolonial perspectives, in terms of a more complicated and conflictual relationship between his attachment to Englishness and his rebellion against it. This study has attempted to demonstrate that Lawrence’s “spirit of place”—his belief in the “local” and “indigenous” spirit of a place—needs to be understood as part of anti-colonial discourse. Reading Lawrence’s travel writings, I have emphasized his sensitive responses to cultural and geographical differences as his challenge to the Western colonialist desire for a homogenized world system. In his “leadership” novels, I have questioned the automatic imposition of the “leadership” category on his late fiction, which I think mislabels these works. Even when we understand Lawrence’s idea of male leadership as his desire for an alternative mode of being, not simply a political matter, the “leadership” category makes it hard to approach these novels from various angles. For example, this category makes readings 159

160

D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing

of Lawrence’s later fiction concentrate on his male leadership theme, while blinding us to his sensitivity to “difference” and “otherness.” Howard Booth sees the critical tendency to ignore Lawrence’s relationship to colonialism as a structural problem pervading Lawrence criticism: “At first sight it may appear a forced move to read Lawrence from a colonial and post-colonial studies perspective. However, wider issues of race and empire are present in Lawrence—it is simply that they have been occluded by the structuring of knowledge about his life and work.”3 In consequence, the categorization of Lawrence’s later fiction is one of “the structuring[s] of knowledge” that prevent colonial/postcolonial approaches to his later works. Lawrence’s ideas of “spirit of place” and “leadership politics” are intimately related to his apocalyptic vision, characterized as his search for a new society, which stimulated his active engagement with different cultures and peoples in the 1920s. This vision is fundamentally Western-oriented, but deeply complicated by his idea of “spirit of place”: Lawrence’s apocalyptic vision might have a colonialist dimension, but his sensitivity to the different spirits of different places makes him keep challenging the established hierarchy between metropolis and colony. Each section of this study has tried to track down Lawrence’s colonialist assumptions as an Englishman and at the same time rescue his efforts to envision a new society from the critical suspicions degrading them either as mystical nonsense or as another colonialist project. Lawrence’s personal paradox as an insider and outsider of his society often makes it hard to put a rigid division between his typically colonialist mentality and his anti-colonialist impulse. Nonetheless, Lawrence’s belief in diversity and in the locality of each place provides him an efficient footing for criticizing the imperialist desire of the West to build up a homogenized world system. For all the critical indifference to Lawrence’s relationship to colonialism, it is no wonder that his “sense of place” intersects with today’s postcolonial knowledge. This study has also tried to articulate the fractures in Lawrence’s masculine anxiety and in his presentation of leadership politics in the fiction; we need to differentiate his personal desire for male leadership, exposed in the letters and essays, from his presentation of the theme in the fiction. Lawrence’s “masculine” anxieties, as presented in his novels, are constantly self-reflective and self-contradictory because when he “preaches” on male leadership, the author keeps watching himself (and his protagonist) as a preacher, and thus does not allow the dominance of the preaching voice—with the exception of Lilly’s at the end of Aaron’s Rod. Lawrence’s complicated and ambivalent presentation of male leadership in his fiction enables us to read it counter to established critical judgments and widespread impressions about his later

Conclusion

161

novels, largely considered as excessively constructed around political and sexual hierarchies. As a social outcast as well as an exemplar of Western civilization, Lawrence’s personal paradox brings about further complexities and self-contradiction in his approach to the racial other. Nonetheless, Lawrence’s complicated positioning allows him to trespass the fixed boundaries between center and periphery, or between the “civilized” and the “primitive.” It is certain that Lawrence could not see the colonized world in the same way that the colonial other sees it. But Lawrence’s idea of “spirit of place”—his immediate perception of the different blood consciousness of a place—enables him to be aware of differences between himself and the “other” in seeing the world. For Lawrence, the racial, geographical difference is something to be respected and valued, not to be subsumed by Western civilization. Lawrence believed that every place has a different spirit and thus should not be controlled by the homogenizing machines of Western industrialism and imperialism. To restore the indigenous spirit of a place, marginalized by the order of the capitalist world system, means for Lawrence not only decolonizing the colonized but also avoiding the dead end of modern Western civilization.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Wimal Dissanayake and Carmen Wickramagamage, Self and Colonial Desire: Travel Writings of V.S. Naipaul (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1993), p. 14. 2. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 63. Although Boehmer draws some limits by clarifying that “his study is chiefly concerned with literature written in English on the British Empire especially during the past two centuries,” the scope of time and space the book is dealing with is very wide: “This is a book about the writing of empire, and about writing in opposition to empire. . . . Our subject, ‘colonial and postcolonial literature,’ would on a superficial reading seem to embrace the majority of the world’s modern literatures. If we agree that the history of Europe for the past few centuries has been profoundly shaped by colonial interests, then there is a sense in which much of the literature produced during that time can be said to be colonial or postcolonial, even if only tangentially so” (1). Boehmer makes some distinctions between colonial/postcolonial terms such as colonial, colonialist, postcolonial or post-colonial. I will follow these distinctions in this study: “Colonial literature, which is the more general term, will be taken to mean writing concerned with colonial perceptions and experience, written mainly by metropolitans, but also by creoles and indigenes, during colonial times. Controversially, perhaps, colonial literature therefore includes literature written in Britain as well as in the rest of the Empire during the colonial period. Even if it did not make direct reference to colonial matters, metropolitan writing—Dickens’s novels, for example, or Trollope’s travelogues—participated in organizing and reinforcing perceptions of Britain as a dominant world power. . . . colonialist literature in contrast was that which was specifically concerned with colonial expansion. On the whole it was literature written by and for colonizing Europeans

163

164

Notes to the Introduction

3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8.

about non-European lands dominated by them. It embodied the imperialists’ point of view . . . Rather than simply being the writing which ‘came after’ empire, postcolonial literature is that which critically scrutinizes the colonial relationship. It is writing that sets out in one way or another to resist colonialist perspectives. . . . the postcolonial must be distinguished from the more conventional hyphenated term post-colonial, which in this book will be taken as another term designating the post-Second World War era” (2–3). Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 6. The position that emphasizes the mutual influences of colonial experience between colonizer and colonized can bring about some critiques of traditional postcolonial critics who think the position based on mutuality results in blurring and even dismissing violent exploitations enacted by Western colonizers. This is why major postcolonial critics like Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, or Gayatri Spivak (with the exception of Homi Bhabha) are trying to make a clear dividing line between colonized and colonizer. Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), pp. 82–98. Lawrence’s physical self-exile had happened between October 1917 and November 1919; he was ordered to leave Cornwall within three days on October 12, 1917. But it took almost two years for Lawrence to go into self-exile. On November 1919, he left England forever except for several temporary visits. In his essay “ Lawrence in doubt: a theory of the ‘other’ and its collapse,” Howard Booth specifies the period that Lawrence had developed his apocalyptic idea as between 1917 when he began his long-planned Studies in Classic American Literature and 1925 when he left America and returned to England. Less specifically, L. D. Clark sees that it was not long after the outbreak of the war that “the conviction of apocalypse entered Lawrence’s imagination, and in its early stages it was a lurid and almost unnerving vision. He felt apocalyptic about his own life and about the life of England, indeed all of Europe. . . . Suddenly, with the war, the problem of England became the problem of self, and neither problem could be solved in the present state of life.” For further information, see Clark’s “D. H. Lawrence and the American Indian,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 9, No. 3 (Fall 1976), 311. David Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 223. Billy Tracy, D. H. Lawrence and The Literature of Travel (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), p. 1. Edward Nehls, “D. H. Lawrence: The Spirit of Place,” in The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence, eds. Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry Moore (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), p. 281.

Notes to the Introduction

165

9. Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 158–59. 10. L. D. Clark, Dark Night of the Body: D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), p. 56. 11. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; New York: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 12. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, Studies, and page, parenthetically in the text. 12. It was February 1920 when Lawrence began work on the manuscript of The Insurrection of Miss Houghton, originally written from January to March 1913. Considering Lawrence’s writing speed, Aaron’s Rod took an exceptionally long time from, probably, November 1917 and May 1921. Lawrence wrote some parts of The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod in the 1910s, but finished their final version in the 1920s. Lawrence wrote Sea and Sardinia in February 1921. For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. 13. Many critics have defined Lawrence’s idea of male “leadership” as proto-fascist. It is widely known that Bertrand Russell in his autobiography defines Lawrence as a representative fascist: “The World between the wars was attracted to madness. Of this attraction Nazism was the most emphatic expression. Lawrence was a suitable exponent of this cult of insanity.” For further information, see Russell’s Portraits from Memory (London: Beorge Allen & Unwin LTD, 1956), p. 108. John R. Harrison’s judgment of Lawrence—“Lawrence’s views on social leadership are inherently close to the fascist conception of society”—lies in the same line of thought as that of Russell. For further information, see Harrison’s The Reactionaries (London: Victor Gollancz LTD, 1967), p. 187. There are, of course, many other critics who have believed that Russell’s judgment was wrong. For example, Eugene Goodheart, in spite of his confusion about Lawrence’s political/religious experiment in The Plumed Serpent, makes a great effort to differentiate the nature of power presented in Lawrence’s “leadership” novels from the widespread fascist idea of the early 20th century. For further information, see Goodheart’s The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 142–45. In mentioning Lawrence-defenders of the 1960s, we cannot leave out Clark who reminded the readers of the necessity to reread Lawrence’s most misunderstood works, especially The Plumed Serpent. For further information, see Clark’s Dark Night of the Body. 14. Cornelia Nixon examines the relation between Lawrence’s notion of leadership politics and the intellectual atmosphere of the time after the war. For further information, see Nixon’s Introduction to Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and The Turn Against Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 1–18. 15. Sandra Gilbert, “D. H. Lawrence’s Mexican Hat Dance: Rereading The Plumed Serpent,” in Rereading Texts/Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays

166

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Notes to the Introduction in Honour of H. M. Daleski, eds. Shlomith Rimmo-Kenan and Leona Toker (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997), p. 297. Gilbert suggests in her essay, “ if Ramón is an incarnation of the imperialist spirit, Cipriano, as native body, represents the instrument of the imperialist will” (297). Ellis, p. 219. Charles Rossman, “D. H. Lawrence and Mexico,” in D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration, eds. Peter Balbert and Phillip L. Marcus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 198. Donald Gutierrez, “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Spirit of Place’ as Eco-monism,” D. H. Lawrence: The Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society (1991), 41. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921; New York: The Viking Press, 1972), p. 123. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, SS, and page, parenthetically in the text. Gutierrez, p. 48. Wayne Templeton, “’Indians and an Englishman’: Lawrence in the American Southwest,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 25, No. 1–3 (1993 & 1994), 27. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 26. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 7 vols., ed. James T. Boulton, George J. Zytaruk, Andrew Robertson, Warren Roberts, Elizabeth Mansfield, David Farmer, Gerald M. Lacy, and Keith Sagar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979–1993), vol. 5, 47. Subsequent references of the Letters will be cited by short title, Letters, volume number, and page, parenthetically in the text. Lawrence, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers, ed. and intro. Edward D. McDoanld (1936; New York: Penguin Books, 1978), p. 104. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, Phoenix, and page, parenthetically in the text. Templeton, 29–30 Gayatri Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), p. 137. Howard J. Booth, “Lawrence in Doubt: A Theory of the ‘Other’ and Its Collapse,” in Modernism and Empire, eds. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2000), p. 219. Ibid., p. 210. Dissanayake and Wickramagamage, p. 13. Lawrence, “The Epilogue,” Movements in European History (1925; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 257. Booth, p. 219. Like Booth, Said sees Orientalism as colonial discourse in terms of the whole structure of Western representation system: “Orientalism was such a system of truths, truths in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. It is therefore correct that

Notes to Chapter One

167

every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” For further information, see Said’s Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 204. 34. I mean by “transition” Lawrence’s temporary stay in Italy from February 1920 to May 1921 when he waited for departure to America. This period is featured by instability (in other words, Lawrence’s sense of “being lost” as seen in The Lost Girl and Aaron’s Rod) and by his sense of existing between the end of a European mode of life and the beginning of American life. 35. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, ed. Mara Kalnins and intro. Steven Vine (1922; New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 212. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, AR, and page, parenthetically in the text.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. It was during the war that Lawrence began the essays of Studies in Classic American Literature. He published the first essay of the book, “The Spirit of Place,” in The English Review in October 1918. According to Keith Sagar, Lawrence finished the book in June 1918, but he revised it in September 1919 and June 1920 and completely rewrote it in November and December 1922 after he arrived in U. S. A. For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. Considering that Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place” became specified after the war, we cannot deny the huge influence of this idea throughout the travel writings and “leadership” novels, mostly written in the 1920s, which I read in this study. More importantly, as his several revisions reveal, his idea of “spirit of place” was often modified by his contact with various places. 2. Although Lawrence’s idea of “spirit of place” was sharpened after the war, I will show in this chapter that he already developed this idea in earlier years, as in Twilight in Italy, written in 1912 and 1913. 3. Earl and Achsah Brewster, D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence (London: Martin Secker, 1934), p. 47. 4. Lawrence, Kangaroo, intro. Richard Aldington (New York: Penguin, 1980), pp. 18–9. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, K, and page, parenthetically in the text. 5. Lawrence wrote “America, Listen to Your Own” in September, 1920, in Italy, and “Indians and an Englishman” in September, 1922, immediately after his return from the Apache trip. For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. 6. Lawrence’s first travelogue, Twilight in Italy, is based on his first trip to Italy when he eloped with Frieda during September 1912 to April 1913. Lawrence was preoccupied with the writing of The Rainbow and Women in Love during the second stay in Italy from October 1913 to June 1914. After the war, the Lawrences left England in November, 1919, for Italy;

168

Notes to Chapter One

7.

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

they traveled to several places like Florence, Rome, Capri—probably Aaron Sisson’s travel route—until they finally settled down in the Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, Sicily, in March, 1920. Fontana Vecchia was their temporary house for almost two years until they departed for America in Februrary, 1922, through Ceylon and Australia. Sea and Sardinia was written during his third visit in Italy, in 1921. After his sojourn in America and Mexico, he returned to Italy again, and wrote his last travel book, Etruscan Places, in 1927 at Villa Mirenda, Florence. For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. 3, eds. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 488. Subsequent references of the Letters will be cited by short title, Letters, volume number, and page, parenthetically in the text. Fussell, p. 149. Nehls, p. 281. Del Van Janik, The Curve of Return: D. H. Lawrence’s Travel Books (Canada: University of Victoria, 1981), p. 186. In the letter to Lady Cynthia Asquith dated on 5 September, 1915, Lawrence writes: “Meanwhile I am writing a book of sketches [Twilight in Italy], or preparing a book of sketches, about the nations, Italian German and English, full of philosophising and struggling to show things real.” For further information, see The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 386. Joanne Shattock, “Travel Writing Victorian and Modern: A Review of Recent Research,” in The Art of Travel: Essays on Travel Writing, ed. Philip Dodd (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1982), p. 151. Ibid., p. 161. Fussell, p. 21. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., pp. 10–11. Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourse of Displacement (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 39. Ibid., pp. 54, 40. Fussell, p. 145. Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 140–51. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 144. W. K. Buckley, “D. H. Lawrence’s Gaze at the Wild West,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 25, No. 1–3 (1993 & 1994), 44. In order to support his point

Notes to Chapter One

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

169

of view, Buckley introduces a passage of Lawrence’s letter: “Here on this ranch at the foot of the Rockies, looking west over the desert, one just knows that all Pale-face and Hebraic monotheistic insistence is a dead letter” (Letters, V, p. 67). Ibid., 43–4. Ibid., 44. John Alcorn, The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 77. Ibid., p. 70. Ibid., p. 62. Billy Tracy, D. H. Lawrence and the Literature of Travel (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), p. 8. Ania Loomba, Colonialism / Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 20. Fussell, p. 149. Lawrence had written the Italian sketches of Twilight in Italy from September 1912 to October 1913, while revising them from July to October 1915. For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. Lawrence, Twilight in Italy, in D. H. Lawrence and Italy, intro. Anthony Burgess (1916; New York: The Viking Press, 1972), p. 41. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, TI, and page, parenthetically in the text. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent (1926; New York: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 227. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, PS, and page, parenthetically in the text. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico (1927; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960), p. 61. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, MM, and page, parenthetically in the text. Stefania Michelucci, “D. H. Lawrence’s Discovery of the Etruscans: A Pacific Challenge Against Imperialism,” in Moving the Borders, eds. Marialuisa Bignami and Caroline Patey (Milan: Unicopli, 1996), pp. 374–75. For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works, pp. 63–5. Booth sees Lawrence pursuing his concerns with racial others and different cultures specifically between 1917 and 1925: “ Between 1917 and 1925 Lawrence developed the view that engaging with other cultures and peoples could renew the self and Europe. He pursued this theory in extended travels and in writing, oscillating between insisting on his position and, increasingly doubting it. At the end of the period Lawrence withdrew back to Europe and concentrated on thinking about the future in terms of the past of the continent.” For further information, see Booth’s “Lawrence in Doubt,” p. 197.

170

Notes to Chapter One

40. Michael L. Ross, “Losing the Old National Hat: Lawrence’s The Lost Girl,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 30, No. 1 (2001), 6. 41. Lawrence, The Lost Girl (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 180. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, LG, and page, parenthetically in the text. 42. Nehls, p. 271. 43. In a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, dated 5 November, 1915, the date when the British authorities ordered the suppression of the sale of The Rainbow, Lawrence confesses, “I feel awfully queer and trembling in my spirit, because I am going away from the land and the nation I have belonged to: departing, emigrating, changing the land of my soul as well as my mere domicile. It is rather terrible, a form of death. But I feel as if it were my fate, I must: to live” (Letters, II, 428). This letter shows that Lawrence’s psychological displacement from his native land is deeply involved with the cultural atmosphere of England in the early 1920s. The legal proceedings of the suppression of The Rainbow were still ongoing in 1920, when he was writing The Lost Girl and tried to republish The Rainbow. With the aftermath of legal suppression of The Rainbow, Women in Love, finished in October 1916, was unable to be published until 1920. For further information, see The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. III, 459, 517. 44. Mark Kinkead-Weekes, D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile, 1912–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 622. 45. Ibid., p. 622. 46. S. Ronald Weiner, “The Rhetoric of Travel: The Example of Sea and Sardinia,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 2, No. 3 (1969), 232. 47. Ibid., 244. 48. Dissanayake and Wickramagamage, p. 2. 49. Ibid., p. 2. 50. Weiner, 233. 51. Fussell, p. 39. 52. Anthony Burgess, Introduction to D. H. Lawrence and Italy (New York: The Viking Press, 1972), p. x. 53. I owe the idea of “grand” narrative to Jean-François Lyotard. For his critique of metanarrative, see Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (1979; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 54. Mornings in Mexico was written throughout 1924 except for the last episode; the first four chapters were written in December, 1924, and “Indians and Entertainment” and “Dance of the Sprouting Corn” in April, 1924, “The Hopi Snake Dance” in August, 1924, and lastly “A Little Moonshine with Lemon” was written in November, 1925 in Sportorno of Italy. For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. 55. Lawrence’s third travel book almost overlaps in time with essays such as “Aristocracy” and “Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,” written in July

Notes to Chapter One

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

69.

171

and early August of 1925. For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works, pp. 140–45. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 220. Thomas R. Whitaker, “Lawrence’s Western Path: Mornings in Mexico,” Criticism, 3, No. 3 (1961), 234–35. Ibid., 235. Tracy, p. 58. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. and intro. Paul Turner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Templeton, 30. Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 3. Whitaker, 225. Lawrence began to plan Etruscan Places around April 1926. He traveled to the places belonged to the ancient Etruria with his American friend, Earl Brewster, from March to April 1927. Immediately after he went back to the Villa Mirenda, he began Etruscan Places and finished it in June 1927. Although Lawrence planned the second trip to Etruria as well as a larger version of Etruscan Places, it was never made because of his poor health. For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. For the critical views emphasizing the “mature” voice of Etruscan Places, see Nehls’s “D. H. Lawrence: the Spirit of Place,” pp. 287–88; Fussell’s Abroad, pp. 163–64. Lawrence, Etruscan Places, in D. H. Lawrence and Italy, intro. Anthony Burgess (1932; New York: The Viking Press, 1972), p. 55. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, EP, and page, parenthetically in the text. Tracy, p. 121. Even though Tracy points to Lawrence’s “unconventional” reconstruction of the ancient Etruscan culture, he at the same time understands why Lawrence tried to do it: “He [Lawrence] was concerned with the task of reawakening modern society, not with the exactitudes of scholarship.” For further information, see Tracy’s D. H. Lawrence and the Literature of Travel, p. 126. The time, from 1926 to 1927, when Lawrence planned and wrote Etruscan Places overlaps with the period when he wrote the first and second version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He began the third and final version of the last novel in December 1927. Although Etruscan Places was written earlier than Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it was not until 1932 that his last travelogue was published. For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. Janik, p. 199.

172

Notes to Chapter Two

70. The role of Ramón and the nature of political power in The Plumed Serpent still need much debate. I will discuss this in detail in the last chapter. 71. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p.167. 72. Boehmer, p. 167. 73. Lawrence, Apocalypse, intro. Richard Aldington (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 16. 74. Lawrence, Epilogue to Movements in European History, p. 263. 75. Lawrence, Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose, ed. and intro. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), p. 477. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, Phoenix II, and page, parenthetically in the text. 76. Burgess, p. xii.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. Jeffrey Meyers, D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 95. 2. Graham Hough, The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957), p. 93. 3. Phillip Herring, “Caliban in Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas, 12, No. 4 (1979), 19. 4. After Lawrence began his long-planned Studies in Classic American Literature around August 1917, he repeatedly expressed his strong hope for going to America in his letters. In the middle of the war, Lawrence tried to get his passport to America, but failed: “I would come to America tomorrow, if they would let me. But they won’t give passports” (Letters, III, p. 160). In a letter written to Amy Lowell in December 1918, Lawrence repeats his hope for visiting to America: “England is wintry and uncongenial. Towards summer time, I want to come to America. I feel I want to be in a new country. I expect we shall go to Switzerland or Germany when Peace is signed . . . But I want to come to America, I don’t know why. But the land itself draws me” (Letters, III, p. 314). Lawrence’s long-expected journey to America was actualized by the invitation from Mabel Dodge Sterne, a wealthy American woman. 5. Lawrence received the invitation letter from Mabel Dodge Sterne on 5 November 1921 when he had already finished Aaron’s Rod as well as The Lost Girl: “I had your letter this afternoon and read it going down Corso: and smelt the Indian scent, and nibbled the medicine: the last being like licorice root, the scent being a wistful dried herb. Truly, the q-b and I would like to come to Taos—there are no little bees. I think it is quite feasible. . . . I think we may leave here in January or February. I think we will come to Taos” (Letters, VI, p. 110–11).

Notes to Chapter Two

173

6. Fussell, p. 15. 7. Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, tenth edition (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, Incorporated, 1994), p. 406. 8. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 407. 9. Ibid., p. 403. Said makes clear that the intellectual and artist in exile should be distinguished from massive migration: “There is a great difference, however, between the optimistic mobility, the intellectual liveliness, . . . and the massive dislocations, waste, misery, and horrors endured in our century’s migrations and mutilated lives. . . . And while it would be the rankest Panglossian dishonesty to say that the bravura performances of the intellectual exile and the miseries of the displaced person of refugee are the same, it is possible, I think, to regard the intellectual as first distilling then articulating the predicaments that disfigure modernity—mass deportation, imprisonment, population transfer, collective dispossession, and forced immigrations.” 10. Fussell, p. 16. 11. Ibid., p. 15. 12. Ibid., p. 10. 13. Most essays that I have reviewed in relation to The Lost Girl regard this Italian village as another dilemma for Alvina: Herring, “Caliban in Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl,” pp. 16–7; Julian Moynahan, The Deed of Life: The Novel and Tales of D. H. Lawrence, pp. 138–39; Jeffrey Meyers, D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy, pp. 102–03. I have found one exceptional view about this village in Hilary Simpson’s book, in which she emphasizes a liberating energy of that place. For further information, see Simpson’s D. H. Lawrence and Feminism, pp. 77– 8. 14. Herring, 16–7. 15. Ibid., 9. 16. Julian Moynahan, The Deed of Life: The Novel and Tales of D. H. Lawrence (Pinceton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 139. 17. Ibid., p. 139. 18. Ibid., p. 139. 19. Herring, 16. 20. Herring in his essay explains that Lawrence considered other titles for The Lost Girl: “Lawrence considered three titles before The Lost Girl finally stuck: ‘The Insurrection of Miss Houghton,’ ‘Mixed Marriage,’ and ‘The Bitter Cherry.’ The final title having been selected, some titular ambiguity still remained, for the novel is about a woman who becomes ‘lost’ to stodgy bourgeois society by finding a new life with an exotic mate below her station.” For further information, see Herring’s “Caliban in Nottingham,” pp. 9–10. 21. Ross, 12.

174

Notes to Chapter Two

22. The last three chapters of the novel consist of chapter XIV titled “The Journey Across,” chapter XV “The Place called Califano,” and chapter XVI “Suspense.” 23. Herring, 10. 24. Herring details the complex circumstances of composition in relation to The Lost Girl: “Late in 1912, after he had finished Sons and Lovers, Lawrence began, then abandoned, a novel based on the life of Robert Burns; thereafter between December 1912 and March 1913, he wrote two hundred pages of The Lost Girl, which was soon left behind in Germany. In the meantime, there was a world war. The manuscript was recovered in January 1920, completed in May and published by Martin Secker in November.” For further information, see Herring’s “Caliban in Nottingham,” pp. 9–10. 25. Ibid., 16. 26. Meyers, p. 102. 27. John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel (New York: Macmillan, 1979), p. 114. 28. Herring, 17. 29. Meyers, p. 101. 30. Hough, p. 93. 31. In the only letter written in Picinisco to Rosalind Baynes, Lawrence mentions Orazio, the original of Pancrazio: “Orazio is a queer creature—so nice, but slow and tentative. . . . If the weather turns bad, I really think we must go on, to Naples or Capri. Poor Orazio!” (Letters, III, p. 432). “Orazio Cervi had acted,” James T. Boulton notes, “as artist’s model for Rosalind Baynes’s father, the sculptor Sir Hamo Thornycroft.” For further information, see The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, compiled and edited by James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 172. 32. In the introduction to The Lost Girl, Carol Siegel accounts for the social status of Italian immigrants in England in the early twentieth century: “By the end of the nineteenth century the population increase in Italy was the highest in Europe, resulting in massive emigration of labourers. By Lawrence’s time record numbers were leaving: for instance 530,000 in 1910. However, even in the early Victorian period there had been so many Italian immigrants in England that the Italian became the figure for the immigrant outsider.” For further information, see Siegel’s introduction to The Lost Girl, p. xxi. 33. Ibid., p. xxi. 34. Tracy, p. 52. 35. H. M. Daleski, “The Encoding of The Lost Girl,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 30, No. 1 (2001), 19. 36. Herring, “Caliban in Nottingham,” pp. 12–4; Michael Ross, “Losing the Old National Hat: Lawrence’s The Lost Girl,” pp. 8–9; H. M. Daleski, “The Encoding of The Lost Girl,” pp. 23–5; Hillary Simpson, D. H. Lawrence

Notes to Chapter Two

37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

175

and Feminism, pp. 76–7; Jeffrey Meyers, D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy, p. 101. Surprisingly, Julian Moynahan describes Alvina’s sexual submission to Ciccio as positive for her psychological transformation. For further information, see Moynahan’s The Deed of Life, p. 134. Siegel, pp. xxv-vi. Hilary Simpson, D. H. Lawrence and Feminism (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 104. Meyers, p. 113. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, collected and edited with an introduction and notes by Vivian De Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), p. 349. Ibid., p. 351. Meyers, p. 116. Marguerite Beede Howe, The Art of the Self in D. H. Lawrence (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1977), p. 87. Ibid., pp. 81–4. Howe explains Lawrence’s misogyny presented in Aaron’s Rod in relation to his fear of disease and sex: “In Aaron’s Rod the balance [in understanding the relation of reality and the self ] has swung far to the side of invasion and death; the women are plague-bearing monsters because the self is diseased. The underlying assumption of the novel is that reality is a source of infection, hence women, who represent that reality, are carriers of disease.” (82) Worthen, p. 124. Eliseo Vivas, D. H. Lawrence: The failure and the triumph of art (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1960), p. 23. Worthen, p. 124. Simpson, pp. 65–6. Although Simpson gives us a clear outline of some changes in Lawrence’s treatment of sexuality, her outline sometimes risks simplifying some other elements, complicated by Lawrence’s characterization of his hero or heroine as in Lilly of Aaron’s Rod and in Kate of The Plumed Serpent. I will discuss in the last chapter Kate’s complex role within the Quetzalcoatl movement, which serves to destabilize the “male supremacy” of the post-war Lawrence. Cornelia Nixon, Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and The Turn Against Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 14. For further information, see Letters II, pp. 320–21. Lawrence’s understanding of gender roles presented in Fantasia is very similar to John Ruskin’s, one of the major literary critics in the Victorian era. For example, Ruskin says in his Sesame and Lilies: “The man’s power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary. But the woman’s power is for rule, not for battle,—and her

176

Notes to Chapter Three

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision.” For further information, see The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, selected, edited, and with an introduction by Harold Bloom (New York: Anchor Books, 1965), pp. 193–95. Lawrence, Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922; New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 97–8. Ibid., p. 98. Simpson, p. 109. Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 448. Meyers, p. 116. Blanchard, p. 434. Vivas, pp. 26–7. Vine, Introduction to Aaron’s Rod, p. xvii. (Zagreb, Yogoslavia, 1969), 131.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. In contrast to most harsh critical reviews of Kangaroo, Robert Darroch argues that Lawrence’s portrait of Australia “has to be looked at in a different light” and this novel is “a much more remarkable book than has hitherto been recognized.” Darroch also introduces J. D. Pringle’s praise of this novel in the fifties and Anthony Burgess’s in the eighties: “At this time it would be a particular pity, for it is only fairly recently that we started to more fully understand what J. D. Pringle in the mid-fifties called ‘the most profound book written about Australia’ and about which Anthony Burgess thirty years later wrote: ‘No novel, not even by a native Australian, has caught so well the spirit of a place whose magic has been virtually denied by the inarticulate culture that has been dumped upon it.’” For further information, see Darroch’s “D. H. Lawrence’s Australia,” Overland, 113 (December 1988), 34–7. Like Darroch, Murray S. Martin, a New Zealand academic, defends Lawrence’s version of Australia as a realistic simulation of the country, not a false construct. Describing Australia, famous for Australian mateship, as a homosocial society, Martin argues “[t]he activities described in the novel appear to parallel real events and Lawrence’s reaction to them, and to have had a profound effect on his thought.” For further information, see Martin’s “Kangaroo Revisited,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 18, No. 2–3 (Summer/Fall 1985–86), 203. 2. A. D. Hope, “D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo: How It Looks to an Australian,” in The Australian Experience: Critical Essays on Australian Novels, ed. W. S. Ramson (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974), p. 162. 3. Ibid, p. 167.

Notes to Chapter Three

177

4. Katharine Susannah Prichard, “Lawrence in Australia,” Meanjin, 9 (1950), 255. 5. Hope, p. 170. 6. Boehmer, p. 213. 7. Ibid., p. 214. Boehmer explains the historical context of the “Jindyworobak” movement: “In Australia, the nationalistic climate that developed after the Second World War had stimulated the writing of poetry that was selfconsciously Australian. . . . To resolve the dilemmas of settler displacement, writers experimented with a variety of techniques. These ranged from piecemeal experiments with vocabulary to a more thorough revision of conventional perceptions of the land. The first and most obvious strategy was to ground ill-fitting cultural equipment in the ‘new’ geography by incorporating indigenous referents, local plant and animal imagery, and details of local habits and customs which had become characteristic of settler life. Precedents for this approach had been set earlier in the century.” For further information, see Boehmer’s Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, pp. 216–17. 8. Ibid., p. 215. 9. Lawrence explains in Kangaroo the etymological origin of a word “Pommy”: “A Pommy is a newcomer in Australia, from the Old Country . . . Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country” (K, pp. 164–65). 10. Hope, p. 170. 11. In his essay “Poetry of the Present,” Lawrence says: “Life, the ever-present, knows no finality, no finished crystallization. The perfect rose is only a running flame, emerging and flowing off, and never in any sense at rest, static, finished. . . . If you tell me about the lotus, tell me of nothing changeless or eternal. Tell me of the mystery of the inexhaustible, forever-unfolding creative spark. Tell me of the incarnate disclosure of the flux, mutation in blossom, laughter and decay perfectly open in their transit, nude in their movement before us.” For further information, see Lawrence’s The Complete Poems, p. 182. 12. Tony Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence and Modernism (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), p. 122. 13. The “leadership” category applied to Kangaroo makes critics as well as readers almost automatically see the novel as a political novel. But since Lawrence’s idea of male leadership cannot be limited to political matters in a conventional sense, many critical attempts to define the nature of the novel entail confusions. 14. Michael Wilding, “‘A New Show’: The Politics of Kangaroo,” Southerly: A Review of Australian Literature, 30 (1970), 20. 15. Ibid., 28–9. 16. Ibid., 29.

178 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Notes to Chapter Three Hope, p. 169. Pinkney, p. 105. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 107. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 107. L. D. Clark, “D. H. Lawrence and The American Indian,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 9, No. 3 (Fall 1976), 311. Murthy, 49. Wilding, 39. Jo-Ann Wallace examines the way in which the idea of childhood becomes extended into a colonial metaphor which serves to naturalize the superiorinferior order between Europeans and racial others. For further information, see Jo-Ann Wallace “De-Scribing The Water-Babies: ‘The Child’ in Postcolonial Theory,” in De-scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 171– 84. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 171. Vivas, p. 16. Terry Eagleton, Criticism & Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (Norfolk, Thetford Press Limited, 1975), p. 160. Ibid., p. 161. U. R. Anantha Murthy, “D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo as an Australian Novel,” Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Bulletin, 4, No. 4 (1976), 44. Boehmer, p. 149. Višnja Sepčić, “The Category of Landscape in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Kangaroo,’” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia, 27–28 (Zagreb, Yogoslavia, 1969), 131. Ibid., p. 138. Leo Gurko, “Kangaroo: D. H. Lawrence in Transit,” Modern Fiction Studies, 10, No. 4 (1964–65), 350. John Humma, “Of Bits, Beasts, and Bush: The Interior Wilderness in D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo,” South Atlantic Review, 51, No. 1 (January 1986), 84. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 89, 94. Ibid., 85. Loomba, p. 1. Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 2.

Notes to Chapter Three

179

44. Ibid., pp. 1–2. 45. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, pp. 393–94. 46. Simon Ryan, “Inscribing The Emptiness: Cartography, exploration and the construction of Australia,” in De-scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality, p. 129. 47. For this episode, see Introduction to The Boy in the Bush, ed. Paul Eggert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. xxi- xxii. 48. Boehmer, p. 217. 49. Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991), p. 23. Hodge and Mishra use the word “genocide” in describing the visible decline of the Australian aborigines: “‘Genocide’ is an emotive term, but it is not inappropriate for a pattern that saw the Aboriginal population of perhaps 300,000 in 1788 reduced to 66,000 by 1901, to reach a low point of 60,000 by 1921 (Rowley 1970: 384–5)” (38). 50. Murthy, 45. 51. Ibid., 46. 52. Ibid., 46. 53. D. H. Lawrence and M. L. Skinner, The Boy in the Bush (1924; New York: Penguin, 1963), pp. 320–21. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, BB, and page, parenthetically in the text. 54. Helen Watson-Williams, “Land into Literature: The Western Australian Bush seen by some Early Writers and D. H. Lawrence,” Westerly, 1 (1980), 72. 55. Ibid, p. 70. 56. Charles Rossman details the process of Lawrence’s collaboration with M. Skinner in The Boy in the Bush by examining the copy of the typescript, corrected by Lawrence: “Even though Mollie Skinner’s original manuscript (from which Lawrence fashioned the published novel) has apparently disappeared, enough evidence survives for us to make an informed estimate of Lawrence’s particular contributions to the collaboration. There is, for instance, the recently discovered holograph manuscript, and two copies of the typescript are extant, both corrected in Lawrence’s hand, one at the University of Texas and the other at Columbia. But most important is the copy of the novel that Mollie Skinner marked for Edward Garnett, soon after publication, to indicate Lawrence’s share of the book. Such valuable documents are illuminated by the surviving correspondence between Lawrence and Skinner, as well as by Skinner’s own memoirs.” For further information, see Rossman’s “The Boy in the Bush in the Lawrence Canon,” in D. H. Lawrence: The Man who Lived, eds. Robert B. Partlow Jr. and Harry T. Moore (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), p. 185. 57. In relation to the collaboration between Lawrence and Skinner, see the articles as follows: Harry T. Moore, Preface to The Boy in the Bush (Southern

180

Notes to Chapter Four

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Illinois University Press, 1971), pp. vii-xxviii; Charles Rossman, “The Boy in the Bush in the Lawrence Canon,” pp. 185–94; Introduction to The Boy in the Bush, ed. Paul Eggert, pp. xxi-Ixiii; Harriet Gay, “Mollie Skinner: D. H. Lawrence’s Australian Catalyst,” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 3, No. 4 (1980), pp. 331–47. In a letter to Mollie Skinner on March 3, 1924, Lawrence wrote: “You may quarrel a bit with the last two chapters. But after all, if a man really has cared and cares, for two women, why should he suddenly shelve either of them? It seems to me more immoral suddenly to drop all connection with one of them, than to wish to have the two” (Letters, IV, p. 596). Rossman also points out that, compared to the early half of the book, Lawrence’s revision of the novel becomes more often and extensive near the end: “Nearly ninety of the last hundred pages are all, or nearly all, Lawrence’s writing. Of the final sixty pages, Skinner claims only one, page 329, as containing her unrevised words. Lawrence therefore appears to be responsible for the creation of Hilda Bessington, for the death of Easu at Jack’s hands, and for the final stages of Jack’s development, which reveal him as a ‘Lord of Death’ living in a state of extreme psychological isolation, suspicious of everyone but nevertheless desiring two or more women simultaneously as his mates. Mollie Skinner felt such a jolt at Lawrence’s new ending that, as she confessed, ‘I wept.’” For further information, see Rossman’s “The Boy in the Bush in the Lawrence Canon,” pp. 188–89. Holly Laird, Women Coauthors (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 4. Ibid., p. 3. Skinner, The Fifth Sparrow: An Autobiography, foreword by Mary Durack (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1972), p. 128. Ibid., p. 17. In the chapter titled “The Offer to Mary,” Mary Ellis refuses Jack’s proposal to become his second wife. Unlike Mary, Hilda, who Lawrence created without consulting Skinner, voluntarily offers to become another wife for Jack. The theme of polygamy dominates the last two chapters Lawrence added. In her autobiography, Skinner describes the shock she felt when she read the last two chapters for the first time as follows: “When at last I brought myself to read the script, I found that Lawrence had twisted its tail, even adding a new character [Hilda Blessington] . . . Jack, the hero I had drawn, would never have ridden a snorting stallion amongst the old shellbacks, intent on seducing their daughters.” For further information, see Skinner’s The Fifth Sparrow, p. 128.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. I think that the labeling of “postcolonial” for the novel is appropriate on the ground that Lawrence’s main concern is with the envisioning of a “new” world in which both the metropolitan center and the periphery free

Notes to Chapter Four

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

181

themselves from the current systems of Western colonialism. See also note 2 of my Introduction. Rossman, p. 198. Gilbert, p. 299. Ibid., p. 293. Rossman, p. 192. According to Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, post(-)colonialism can be roughly divided into two main streams: “The first, and more readily recognizable, is what we call oppositional postcolonialism, which is found in its most overt form in post-independent colonies at the historical phase of ‘post-colonialism’ (with a hyphen). This usage corresponds to the OED’s definition of the ‘post-colonial.’ The second form, equally a product of the processes that constituted colonialism but with a different inflection, is a ‘complicit postcolonialism,’ which has much in common with Lyotard’s unhyphenated postmodernism: an always present ‘underside’ with colonization itself.” For further information, see Mishra and hodge’s “What is Post(-)colonialism?” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, eds. and intro. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 284. Lawrence’s presentation of Western colonialism, however, distances itself from both contemporary postcolonialisms. While oppositional postcolonialism focuses on the specific historicity and political economy in the relationship between center and periphery, Lawrence was not really interested in this materialistic specificity of Europe and the colony. On the other hand, Lawrence’s notion of “spirit of place,” which emphasizes racial and geographical otherness, does not allow an easy, comfortable syncretism, unlike complicit postcolonialism, based on the concepts of hybridity and syncretism between metropolis and colony. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, p. 404. Ibid., p. 407. For typically negative criticism of The Plumed Serpent, see Rossman’s “D. H. Lawrence and Mexico,” pp. 180–209; H. M. Daleski, The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence (Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1965), pp. 251–52; David Holbrook, Where D. H. Lawrence Was Wrong about Women (London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1992), pp. 293–311; Vivas, D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art, pp. 65–117. Rossman, p. 197. Clark, Dark Night of the Body, p. 79. Clark argues that the writer should be allowed to create a literary text according to his/her imagination, rather than being confined to cultural, historical facts: “That he [Lawrence] was not trying to reconstruct Mexico as it is, in the realistic sense, is admitted by most. The world of The Plumed Serpent, though it may

182

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Notes to Chapter Four at times look like the common world of Mexico, is far from being so. Even if some of the details are similar, it is not the Mexico of the social scientist, or the politician, or the tourist, or the ordinary citizen of the modern-day Republic. Yet it is one of the possible Mexicos, projected by Lawrence from the assumption that the mythical past is still alive in the land and the people. If he had set his novel in Conquest times, with a Cortes who really was Quetzalcoatl and a Pedro de Alvarado who was Huitzilopochtli, I suppose he would not have been accused of violating imaginative possibilities, even though he had chosen to set history aside” (78). Virginia Hyde, “Kate and the Goddess: Subtexts in The Plumed Serpent,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 26, No. 1–3 (1995 & 1996), 265. Holbrook, p. 303. Ellis, p. 219. Ibid., p. 219. This original manuscript was finally published in 1995 with Lawrence’s original title Quetzalcoatl. Lawrence, Quetzalcoatl, ed. and intro. Louis L. Martz (New York: A New Directions Book, 1995), p. 44. Subsequent references of this book will be cited by short title, Q, and page, parenthetically in the text. Quetzalcoatl has another example of Conradian metaphor: “‘I am a man,’ he [Ramón] said venomously–‘I am a man, and therefore I will not be like the whited sepulchers of the pale-faces’” (Q, 99–100); in Heart of Darkness, Marlow says: “In a very few hours I arrived in a city that always makes me think of a whited sepulcher.” For further information, see Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (1899; New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), p. 13. Pinkney, pp. 159–60. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 25. Pinkney, p. 160. Lawrence, Epilogue to Movements in European History, p. 265. Ibid., p. 266. Lawrence, The Complete Poems, p. 349. Elaine Feinstein, Lawrence’s Women: the Intimate Life of Lawrence (London: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 113. Lawrence, Apocalypse (1931; New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 101. Holly Laird, Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988), p. 159. I agree with Laird’s argument for the function of the hymns as an integral part of the narrative: “The lineated verse of The Plumed Serpent is excerpted and anthologized by the editors of The Complete Poems (nos. 1–26), so that it is possible to examine the poems without being distracted by the narrative.

Notes to Chapter Four

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

183

But in the process much is lost, especially the graduated changes, from prose to prose poetry to psalm to song, and back again” (161). Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 102. In his endnote, Bhabha reveals the source of the story he is using as follows: The Missionary Register, Church Missionary Society, London, January 1818. Bhabha, p. 105. Ibid., p. 103. Ibid., pp. 119–20. Spurr, p. 21. Ibid, p. 20. Dissanayake and Wickramagamage, p. 21. This passage shows how the voice of the implied author, filled with philosophy and meditation about the world, controls Kate’s perspective even as she is operating as the narrative’s center of consciousness. When Lawrence describes his version of the history of colonized Mexico or the relationship between the white and dark races, he seems to directly address the readers. Although Kate and Ramón often represent Lawrence’s ideas, Lawrence surely produces a critical distance from these protagonists by allowing them to see the limits of each other. Tracy, p. 75. Judith Ruderman, D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother: The Search for a Patriarchal Ideal of Leadership (Durham: Duke UP, 1984), p. 144. Ibid., p. 145. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 168. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., pp. 168, 174. Ibid., p. 173. Frank Kermode, D. H. Lawrence (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 117. Torgovnick sees Lawrence’s constant concern with sexual others as manifested in Kate as the center of consciousness of the novel, and she calls this “narrative transvestism”: “the narrative transvestism of some of Lawrence’s writing, including The Plumed Serpent—the tendency I have noted for him to write third-person prose from within the mind of female characters—may be more significant than incidental. Gregory Bateson suggests that transvestism, when it is not motivated by a desire to be a member of another sex, may express a sense that certain ideas, values, or actions are coded as belonging to another sex by a culture. For someone engaged in those ideas, values, or actions, cross-dressing is a symbolic expression of sharing, temporarily, in matters culturally coded as sexually other. In portions of his work, Lawrence thinks thoughts not traditionally

184

46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

Notes to Chapter Four associated with masculinity; he may therefore adopt the feminine voice, strategically, at times. We might compare Lawrence to Henry M. Stanley on this point: when filled with ‘well-nigh uncontrollable emotions,’ Stanley identifies his feelings with boyishness and represses them (see chap. I); when filled with inchoate longings, Lawrence drops into a different kind of otherness—the otherness of what he imagines as the ‘female’ consciousness.” For further information, see Torgovnick’s Gone Primitive, pp. 172–73. Hyde, p. 251. Ibid., p. 250. Pinkney, pp. 158–59. Martz, p. 298. Michael Ballin, “Lewis Spence and The Myth of Quetzalcoatl in D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 13, No. 1 (1980), 68. Gilbert, p. 296. Kate keeps insisting that Ramón is European, rather than belonging to Mexico. But Lawrence does not give a clear answer to this: “Don’t you [Ramón] consider yourself white people?” (PS, p. 186); “I [Kate] don’t think he [Ramón] is Mexican . . . He seems to me to belong to the old, old Europe” (PS, p. 203); “Don Ramón isn’t really Mexican, . . . He feels European” (PS, p. 236). Gilbert, p. 296. Donald Gutierrez, “The Ideas of Place: D. H. Lawrence’s Travel Books,” University of Dayton Review, 15, No. 1 (Spring 1981), 150. Lawrence, Apocalypse, intro. Richard Aldington (1931; New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 126. Clark, Dark Night of the Body, pp. 70–1. Ibid., p. 71. Compared with the origin of Malintzi, Clark describes Kate’s relationship with Cipriano as follows: “If the dark mother forced by the white father is the history of the amatory conquest of Mexico, what takes place in The Plumed Serpent is the reversal of history necessary for a fresh start; it is a new fusing of the white spirit coming over from Europe and the dark spirit of the American continent, with opposite identification of the sexes; not conquest by the strong subjugating the weak but conquest by mutual submission to the gods.” For further information, see Clark’s Dark Night of the Body, p. 72. Hyde’s interpretation of the origin of Malintzi is different from Clark’s. According to Hyde, Malintzi was the abandoned sister of Huitzilopochtli, and Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent restores the abandoned and repressed female leader as an Aztec goddess. Opposed to the views of most critics that Lawrence’s Mexican novel is masculine and patriarchal, Hyde sees Lawrence rewriting misogynist Aztec history, and thus she disagrees with those who

Notes to Chapter Four

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

185

consider Kate’s apotheosis “no more than a new form of male manipulation”: “ In a complex mesh of Aztec history and legend, there is a tale of overwhelming physical dominance in which the Aztecs suppressed their women leaders and subjugated their neighbors. But Lawrence presents neither of these extremes, revising and sometimes inverting their traces in his work. In light of this novel’s reputation for dogmatism and power politics, misogyny and even fascism, it is surprising how it gestures toward balance— between physical and spiritual, dark and light, male and female elements— in a combination more commonly identified with The Rainbow . . . Her own deific name is Malintzi, and I argue that it not only looks back to the historic Malintzi (interpreter and consort of Hernan Cortes in the Spanish Conquest) but may also recall the ancient Aztec goddess Malinalxoch. As the banished sister of Huitzilopochtli, Malinalxoch represented the female principle omitted from the Aztec patriarchy . . . If Lawrence had simply wished to denigrate women, the Aztec pantheon seems to have offered him the opportunity . . . But he had found in the native myths a conflict between the patriarchal and the matriarchal that could not fail to interest him; and I believe it piqued his resolve to develop Kate’s deity on a par with that of her companions—a feature that remains unexplored in the earlier Quetzalcoatl.” For further information, see Hyde’s “Kate and the Goddess,” pp. 250–55. Nixon, pp. 14–15. Hazel Carby, Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 45. Ibid., p. 47. Pamela L. Caughie, Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), p. 154. Margaret Storch, “‘But Not the America of the Whites’: Lawrence’s Pursuit of the True Primitive,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 25, No. 1–3 (1993 & 1994), 54. Although she does not differentiate The Plumed Serpent from other “leadership” novels, as VanHoosier-Carey does, Hilary Simpson points to a return of Lawrence’s preoccupation with male-female relationship in his Mexican novel: “we see in The Plumed Serpent the beginning of a return to a preoccupation with the relationship between men and women rather than that between men and men. The centre of interest in the novel shifts from the political and social plans of Ramón to the relationship between Kate and Cipriano, where Lawrence explores the voluntary return to submission by women which he had prophesied in Aaron’s Rod and Kangaroo.” For further information, see Simpson’s D. H. Lawrence and Feminism, p. 115. Hyde also points out that “Lawrence was beginning to break with his “leadership” novels by making his main quester a woman, returning to the marriage theme of The Rainbow (1916) and Women in Love (1920),

186

Notes to the Conclusion

65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

70.

and strengthening Kate’s position through mythic resonances.” For further information, see Hyde’s “Kate and the Goddess,” p. 250. Kimberly VanHoosier-Carey, “Struggling With the Master: The Position of Kate and the Reader in Lawrence’s ‘Quetzalcoatl’ and The Plumed Serpent,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 25, No. 1–3 (1993 & 1994), 116. In spite of her argument that Kate in The Plumed Serpent as an independent woman establishes an equal relationship with Ramón or Cipriano, Kimberly VanHoosier-Carey points out that Kate’s sexual relationship with Cipriano is not as balanced as in her search for a new life-form through the Quetzalcoatl movement: “Kate agrees to similarly abandon her old self and her old language which isolates her in this culture, and to marry Cipriano. She and Cipriano both put off their old lives in order to take on the new clothing of Quetzalcoatl . . . Yet the union between Kate and Cipriano is still not exactly balanced. She is the earth beneath his feet, he is the sky above her. Kate puts on Cipriano’s shoes for him while he puts on her sash ‘so that he shall never leave [her], and [she] will always be in his spell’ (PS, 363). Thus Kate is still partially ‘the woman bound’ as she was in the manuscript, yet they have moved away considerably from Cipriano’s harsh commands to drink his blood . . . Though he says he cannot be fully godlike without her (PS, 391), he still desires to establish his superiority over her by insisting that she adopt his notion of sexual experience rather than adopting or adapting to hers; he also tries to teach her supposedly better ways of connecting and combining themselves.” For further information, see VanHoosier-Carey’s “Struggling With the Master,” pp. 111–12. Simpson, pp. 133–35. Holbrook, p. 303. In December 1924, Lawrence was revising his manuscript of The Plumed Serpent while writing four chapters of Mornings in Mexico, including “The Mozo.” For further information, see Sagar’s D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works, pp. 140–41. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, Introduction to De-Scribing Empire: Postcolonialism and Textuality, eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 6.

NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION 1. Amit Chaudhuri, D. H. Lawrence and ‘Difference’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 6. 2. Ibid., p. 138. 3. Howard Booth, “‘Give Me Difference’: Lawrence, Psychoanalysis, and Race,” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 27, No. 2–3 (1997 & 1998), 172.

Bibliography

Alcorn, John. The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983. Ashcroft, Bill, and John Salter. “Modernism’s Empire: Australia and the Cultural Imperialism of Style.” In Modernism and Empire. Eds. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. 292–323. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge, 1989. Ballin, Michael. “Lewis Spence and the Myth of Quetzalcoatl in D. H. Lawrence’s the Plumed Serpent.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 13, no. 1 (1980), 63–78. Bell, Michael. D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Berkhofer, Robert F. Jr. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian From Columbus to the Present. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Blanchard, Lydia. “Love and Power: A Reconsideration of Sexual Politics in D. H. Lawrence.” Modern Fiction Studies, 21 (1975), 431–43. Bloom, Harold, ed. The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin. By John Ruskin. New York: Anchor Books, 1965. Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Bonadeo, Barbara Bates. “D. H. Lawrence’s View of The Italians.” English Miscellany: A Symposium of History, Literature and the Arts, 24 (1973–1974), 271–97. Booth, Howard J. “‘Give Me Differences’: Lawrence, Psychoanalysis, and Race.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 27, no 2–3 (1997–1998), 171–96. ———. “Lawrence in Doubt: A Theory of the ‘Other’ and Its Collapse.” In Modernism and Empire. Eds. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. 197–223.

187

188

Bibliography

Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Bose, S. C. “D. H. Lawrence’s Travel Books and Other Writings: Parallels in Themes and Style.” In Essays on D. H. Lawrence. Ed. T. R. Sharma. Meerut: Shalabh Book House, 1987. Pp. 235–43. Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830– 1914. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Brewster, Achsah, and Earl. D. H. Lawrence: Reminiscences and Correspondence. London: Martin Secker, 1934. Brotherston, J. G. “Revolution and the Ancient Literature of Mexico, for D. H. Lawrence and Antonin Artaud.” Twentieth Century Literature, 18 (1972), 181–89. Buckley, William K. “D. H. Lawrence’s Gaze at the Wild West.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 25, no. 1–3 (1993–1994), 35–47. Burland, Cottie A. The Gods of Mexico. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967. Burns, Aidan. Nature and Culture in D. H. Lawrence. London: The MacMillan Press, 1980. Bynner, Witter. Journey with Genius: Recollections and Reflections Concerning the D. H. Lawrences. New York: The John Day Company, 1951. Carby, Hazel. Race Men. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Carrasco, David. Quetzalcoatl and the Irony of Empire: Myths and Prophecies in the Aztec Tradition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Carswell, Catherine. The Savage Pilgrimage: A Narrative of D. H. Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Caughie, Pamela L. Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999. Cavitch, David. D. H. Lawrence and the New World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Chaudhuri, Amit. D.H. Lawrence and ‘Difference.’ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Clark, L. D. Dark Night of the Body: D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964. ———. “D. H. Lawrence and the American Indian.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 9, no. 3 (Fall 1976), 305–72. ———. “The Continent of the Afterwards: Lawrence and New Mexico.” In D. H. Lawrence 1885–1930: A Celebration. Ed. Andrew Cooper. Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence Society, 1985. Pp. 51–61. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Robert Kimbrough. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1988. Cowan, James. D. H. Lawrence’s American Journey: A Study in Literature and Myth. Cleveland and London: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1970. ———. Lawrence and the Trembling Balance. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.

Bibliography

189

Daleski, H. M. “The Encoding of The Lost Girl.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 30, no. 1 (2001), 15–26. ———. The Forked Flame: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965. Darroch, Robert. “D. H. Lawrence’s Australia.” Overland, 113 (December 1988), 34–8. Das, G. K. “Lawrence and Forster: Their Vision of a ‘Living Religion.’” In The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies. Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1988. Pp. 154–62. Delavenay, Emile. D. H. Lawrence: The Man and His Work. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1972. Dissanayake, Wimal, and Carmen Wickramagamage. Self and Colonial Desire: Travel Writings of V. S. Naipaul. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Doherty, Gerald. “The Throes of Aphrodite: The Sexual Dimension in D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent.” Studies in the Humanities, 12, no. 2 (December 1985), 67–78. ———. “White Mythologies: D. H. Lawrence and the Deconstructive Turn.” Criticism: A Quarterly for literature and the Arts, 29, no. 4 (Fall 1987), 477–96. Draper, Ronald. “The Lawrentian Voice.” In D. H. Lawrence 1885–1930: A Celebration. Ed. Andrew Cooper. Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence Society, 1985. Pp. 63–71. -—-, ed. D. H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970. Eagleton, Terry. Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. Norfolk: Thetford Press Limited, 1976. Edmond, Rod. “Home and Away: Degeneration in Imperialist and Modernist Discourse.” In Modernism and Empire. Eds. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. 39–63. Eggert, Paul. “Comedy and Provisionality: Lawrence’s Address to His Audience and Material in His Australian Novels.” In Lawrence and Comedy. Eds. Eggert and John Worthen. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 131–57. ———. “D. H. Lawrence and Literary Collaboration.” In D. H. Lawrence: Critical Assessments. Eds. David Ellis and Ornella De Zordo, 1992. Pp. 683–89. ———. Introduction to The Boy in the Bush. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Eliot, T. S. After Strange Gods. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934. Ellis, David. D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922–1930. Cambrige: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. “Lawrence in Australia: The Darroch Controversy.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 21, no. 2 (summer 1990), 167–74. Feinstein, Elaine. Lawrence’s Women: the Intimate life of Lawrence. London: HarperCollins, 1993. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: The Scapegoat. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935.

190

Bibliography

Fussell, Paul. Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Gay, Harriet. “Mollie Skinner: D. H. Lawrence’s Australian Catalyst.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 3, no. 4 (1980), 331- 47. Gilbert, Sandra. Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. ———. “D. H. Lawrence’s Mexican Hat Dance: Rereading The Plumed Serpent.” In Rereading Texts/Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H. M. Daleski. Eds. Shlomith Rimmon- Kenan and Leona Toker. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997. Pp. 291–304. Goggin, Joyce. “D. H. Lawrence, the Nazis, and Michel Foucault.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 26, no. 1–3 (1995–1996), 289–304. Goodheart, Eugene. The Utopian Vision of D. H. Lawrence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Gordon, David J. “Sex and Language in D. H. Lawrence.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal, 27, no. 4 (Winter 1981), 362–75. Green, Eleanor H. “Blueprints for Utotia: The Political Ideas of Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence.” Renaissance and Modern Studies, 18 (1974), 141–61. Gurko, Leo. “Kangaroo: D. H. Lawrence in Transit.” Modern Fiction Studies, 10, no. 4 (1964–65), 349–58. Gutierrez, Donald. “D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Spirit of Place’ as Eco-monism.” D. H. Lawrence: The Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society (1991), 39–51. ———. “The Ideas of Place: D. H. Lawrence’s Travel Books.” University of Dayton Review, 15, no. 1 (Spring 1981), 143–52. Harrison, John. The Reactionaries. London: Victor Gollancz LTD, 1967. Herring, Phillip. “Caliban in Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence’s The Lost Girl.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Comparative Study of Literature and Ideas, 12, no. 4 (1979), 9–19. Hirsch, Gordon D. “The Laurentian Double: Images of D. H. Lawrence in the Stories.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 10, no. 3 (Fall 1977), 270–76. Hodge, Bob, and Vijay Mishra. Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and The Postcolonial Mind. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991. Holbrook, David. Where D. H. Lawrence Was Wrong about Women. London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1992. Hope, Alec D. “D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo: How It Looks to an Australian.” In The Australian Experience: Critical Essays on Australian Novels. Ed. William S. Ramson. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974. Pp. 157–73. Hough, Graham. The Dark Sun: A Study of D. H. Lawrence. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1957. Howe, Marguerite Beede. The Art of the Self in D. H. Lawrence. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1977. Humma, John B. “Of Bits, Beasts, and Bush: The Interior Wilderness in D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo.” South Atlantic Review, 51, no. 1 (January 1986), 83–100.

Bibliography

191

Huxley, Aldous. “D. H. Lawrence.” In The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Frederick J Hoffman and Harry T. Moore. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953. Pp. 63–87. Hyde, Virginia. “Kate and the Goddess: Subtexts in The Plumed Serpent.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 26, no. 1–3 (1995–1996), 249–74. James, Clive. “D. H. Lawrence in Transit.” In D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet. Ed. Stephen Spender. New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1973. Pp. 159–69. Jameson, Fredric. “Modernism and Imperialism.” In Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Derry (Ireland): Field Day Theatre Co., 1988. Pp. 43–66. Janik, Del Ivan. The Curve of Return: D. H. Lawrence’s Travel Books. Canada: University of Victoria, 1981. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourse of Displacement. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. Kermode, Frank. D.H. Lawrence. New York: Viking, 1973. Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. “An Affair into Art: A Question of Boundaries.” In Rereading Texts/Rethinking Critical Presuppositions: Essays in Honour of H. M. Daleski. Eds. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan and Leona Toker. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997. Pp. 275–90. ———. D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ———. “The Gringo Senora Who Rode Away.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 22, no. 3 (Fall 1990), 251–65. Knapp, James F. Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Kulkarni, H. B. “Snake Imagery and the Concept of Self in the Selected Works.” South Asian Review, 4 (1980), 28–36. Kullmann, Thomas. “Exotic Landscapes and Borderline Experiences in Twentieth Century Fiction: D. H. Lawrence, Karen Blixen and Malcolm Lowry.” In Anlistentag 1992 Stuttgart: Proceedings. Eds. Hans Ulrich Seeber and Walter Gobel. 1993. Pp. 377–87. LaChapelle, Dolores. D. H. Lawrence: Future Primitive. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1996. Laird, Holly. Self and Sequence: The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. ———. Women Coauthors. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Lawrence, D. H. Aaron’s Rod (1922). New York: Penguin, 1995. ———. Apocalypse (1931). New York: Penguin, 1976. ———. The Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1964). Eds. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. New York: Penguin, 1993. ———. Etruscan Places (1932). New York: The Viking Press, 1972. ———. Kangaroo (1923). New York: Penguin, 1980.

192

Bibliography

———. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. 7 Vols. Eds. James T. Boulton, George J. Zytaruk, Andrew Robertson, Warren Roberts, Elizabeth Mansfield, David Farmer, Gerald M. Lacy, and Keith Sagar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979–1993. ———. The Lost Girl (1920). New York: Penguin, 1995. ———. Mornings in Mexico (1927). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960. ———. Movements in European History (1921). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ———. Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers (1936). Ed. Edward D. McDonald. New York: Penguin, 1978. ———. Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose Works. Ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore. New York: The Viking Press, 1971. ———. The Plumed Serpent (1926). New York: Vintage Books, 1992. ———. Sea and Sardinia (1921). New York: The Viking Press, 1972. ———. Studies in Classic American Literature (1923). New York: Penguin, 1977. ———. Twilight in Italy (1916). New York: The Viking Press, 1972. ———, and Mollie L. Skinner. The Boy in the Bush (1924). New York: Penguin, 1963. Lee, Robert. “D. H. Lawrence and the Australian Ethos.” Southerly: A Review of Australian Literature, 33 (1973), 144–51. Lee, Robin. “The ‘Strange Reality of Otherness’: D. H. Lawrence’s Social Attitudes.” Standpunte, 102 (1972), 3–10. Lewiecki-Wilson, Cynthia. Writing against the Family: Gender in Lawrence and Joyce. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994. Lok, Chua Cheng. “The European Participant and the Third-World Revolution: Andre Malraux’s Les Conquerants and D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent.” In Discharging the Canon: Cross-Cultural Reading in Literature. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1986. Pp. 101–11. Loomba, Ania. Colonialism / Postcolonialism. London: Routledge, 1998. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979. Macleod, Sheila. Lawrence’s Men and Women. London: Heinemann, 1985. MacNiven, Ian S. “D. H. Lawrence’s Indian Summer.” In D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Lived. Eds. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. and Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Pp. 42–6. Martin, Dexter. “D. H. Lawrence and Pueblo Religion: An Inquiry Into Accuracy.” Arizona Quarterly, 9, no. 3 (Autumn 1953), 219–34. Martin, Murray S. “Kangaroo Revisited.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 18, no. 2–3 (Summer/ Fall 1985–86), 201–15. Martz, Louis L. “Quetzalcoatl: The Early Version on The Plumed Serpent.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 22, no. 3 (Fall 1990), 286–98.

Bibliography

193

Meyers, Jeffrey. D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. ———. “The Plumed Serpent and the Mexican Revolution.” Journal of Modern Literature, 4, no. 1 (1974), 55–72. Michelucci, Stefania. “D. H. Lawrence’s Discovery of the Etruscans: A Pacific Challenge Against Imperialism.” In Moving the Borders. Eds. Marialuisa Bignami and Caroline Patey. Milan: Unicopli, 1996. Pp. 374–81. Moynahan, Julian. The Deed of Life: The Novel and Tales of D. H. Lawrence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963. Murthy, U. R. Anantha. “D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo As an Australian Novel.” Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies Bulletin, 4, no. 4 (1976), 43–9. Nehls, Edward. “D. H. Lawrence: The Spirit of Place.” In The Achievement of D. H. Lawrence. Eds. Frederick J. Hoffman and Harry Moore. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953. Pp. 268–90. Nixon, Cornelia. Lawrence’s Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Papin, Liliane. “This is Not a Universe.” The Modern Language Association of America, 107, no. 5 (October 1992), 1253–65. Pinkney, Tony. D. H. Lawrence and Modernism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. Pollnitz, Christopher. “‘I Didn’t Know His God’: The Epistemology of ‘Fish.’” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 2, no. 1 (Spring 1982), 1–50. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. ———. “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen.” In “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. Pp. 138–62. Prichard, Katharine Susannah. “Lawrence in Australia.” Meanjin, 9 (1950), 252–59. Ramey, Frederick. “Words in the Service of Silence: Preverbal Language in Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent.” Modern Fiction Studies, 27, no. 4 (Winter 1981–1982), 613–21. Raskin, Jonah. The Mythology of Imperialism. New York: Random House, 1971. Ross, Michael L. “Losing the Old National Hat: Lawrence’s The Lost Girl.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 30, no. 1 (2001), 5–14. Rossman, Charles. “The Boy in the Bush in the Lawrence Canon.” In D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Lived. Eds. Robert B. Partlow, Jr. and Harry Moore. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Pp. 185–94. ———. “ D. H. Lawrence and Mexico.” In D. H. Lawrence: A Centenary Consideration. Eds. Peter Balbert and Phillip L. Marcus. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Pp. 180–209. Ruderman, Judith. D. H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother: The Search for a Patriarchal Ideal of Leadership. Durham: Duke University Press, 1984.

194

Bibliography

Russell, Bertrand. Portraits from Memory. London: George Allen and Unwin LTD., 1956. Ruthven, K. K. “The Savage God: Conrad and Lawrence.” Critical Quarterly, 10 (1968), 39–54. Ryan, Simon. “Inscribing The Emptiness: Cartography, Exploration and the Construction of Australia.” In De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality. Eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London: Routledge, 1994. Pp. 115–30. Sagar, Keith. D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage, 1994. ———. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. Schorer, Mark. “Lawrence and the Spirit of Place,” In A D. H. Lawrence Miscellany. Ed. Harry T. Moore. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1959. Pp. 280–94. Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Sepčić, Višnja. “The Category of Landscape in D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo.” Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia, 27–28 (1969), 129–52. Shattock, Joanne. “Travel Writing Victorian and Modern: A Review of Recent Research.” In The Art of Travel: Essays on Travel Writing. Ed. Philip Dodd. London: Frank Cass and Co. Ltd., 1982. Pp. 151–64. Siegel, Carol. “Border Disturbances: D. H. Lawrence’s Fiction and the Feminism of Wuthering Heights.” In Men Writing the Feminine: Literature, Theory, and the Question of Genders. Ed. Thais E. Morgan. New York: Albany State University of New York Press, 1994. Pp. 59–76. ———. Lawrence among the Women: Wavering Boundaries in Women’s Literary Traditions. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1991. Simpson, Hilary. D. H. Lawrence and Feminism. London: Croom Helm, 1982. Skinner, Mollie L. The Fifth Sparrow: An Autobiography. Foreword. Mary Durack Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1972. Spilka, Mark. Renewing the Normative D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Progress. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993. Standing Bear, Luther. Land of the Spotted Eagle. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. Stewart, Jack. “ Lawrence’s Peasant Portraits in Twilight in Italy.” Studies in the Humanities, 25, no. 1–2 (June-Dec 1998), 24–37. Storch, Margaret. “‘But not the American of the Whites’: Lawrence’s Pursuit of the True Primitive.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 25, no.1–3 (1993–1994), 48–62.

Bibliography

195

———. Sons and Adversaries: Women in William Blake and D. H. Lawrence. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Street, Brian V. The Savage in Literature: Representations of ‘Primitive’ Society in English Fiction 1858–1920. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975. Templeton, Wayne. “’Indians and an Englishman’: Lawrence in the American Southwest.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 25, no.1–3 (1993–1994), 14–33. Tiffin, Chris, and Alan Lawson, eds. De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Tindall, William York. D. H. Lawrence and Susan His Cow. New York: Columbia University Press, 1939. Torgovnick, Marianna. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Tracy, Billy. D. H. Lawrence and the Literature of Travel. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983. Trotter, David. “A Horse Is Being Beaten: Modernism and Popular Fiction.” In Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism. Ed. Kevin J. H. Dettmar. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Pp. 191–219. ———. “Modernism and Empire: Reading The Waste Land.” Critical Quarterly, 28, no. 1–2 (Spring/Summer 1986), 143–53. VanHoosier-Carey, Kimberly. “Struggling with the Master: The Position of Kate and the Reader in Lawrence’s ‘Quetzalcoatl’ and The Plumed Serpent.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 25, no. 1–3 (1993–1994), 104–18. Veen, Berend K. Van der. “The Origin of D. H. Lawrence’s Idea of Male Leadership.” In D. H. Lawrence 1885–1930: A Celebration. Ed. Andrew Cooper. Nottingham: D. H. Lawrence Society, 1985. Pp. 89–96. Vivas, Eliseo. D. H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1960. Walker, Ronald G. Infernal Paradise: Mexico and the Modern English Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Wallace, Jo-Ann. “De-Scribing The Water Babies: ‘The Child in Post-colonial Theory.” In De-scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality. Eds. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. London: Routledge, 1994. Pp. 171–84. Watson, J. R. “’The Country of My Heart’: D. H. Lawrence and the East Midlands Landscape.” In The Spirit of D. H. Lawrence: Centenary Studies. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1988. Pp. 16–31. Watson-Williams, Helen. “Land Into Literature: The Western Australian Bush Seen by Some Early Writers and D. H. Lawrence.” Westerly: A Quarterly Review, 25, no. 1 (March 1980), 59–72. Weiner, S. Ronald. “The Rhetoric of Travel: The Example of Sea and Sardinia.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 2, no. 3 (1969), 230–44. Wexler, Joyce. “D. H. Lawrence Through a Postmodernist Lens.” The D. H. Lawrence Review, 27, no. 1 (1998), 47–64.

196

Bibliography

Whitaker, Thomas R. “Lawrence’s Western Path: Mornings in Mexico,” Criticism, 3, no. 3 (1961), 219–36. Whorf, Benjamin L. Language, Thought, and Reality. Ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The M. I. T Press, 1956. Wilding, Michael. “’A New Show’: The Politics of Kangaroo.” Southerly: A Review of Australian Literature, 30 (1970), 20–40. Williams, Patrick. “’Simultaneous Uncontemporaneities’: Theorising Modernism and Empire.” In Modernism and empire. Eds. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. 13–38. -—-, and Laura Chrisman, eds. Colonial Discourse and Post- colonial theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Worthen, John. D. H. Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel. New York: Macmillan, 1979. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

Index

A Aaron’s Rod, xvii, xxviii, 81, 115 Aaron’s sense of ‘being lost,’ xvii−xviii Lilly’s dominant voice, 63−64 power urge, 44, 56−57, 63, 66 Aborigines, 90, 94−95, 97 Alcorn, John, 7−8 Ambivalence, Lawrence’s, 69−70 America, 102, 104 American and Mexican Indians, 2−3, 27−28, 61, 104, 106−107 Anthropology, 88 Anti−humanism, 87 Anti−Semitism, 82 Anxiety, Lawrence’s ‘masculine,’ 140−141 Apocalypse, 112−113, 128−129 Apocalyptic vision, xii−xiii, xvi, 6, 12−13, 81, 105−106, 122 Aristocracy, 36 Australia, 2, 69 Authenticity, 71 Authoritarian politics, see Leadership politics Authority academic, 32 of British literature, 21 political, 34, 81

B Ballin, Michael, 125 Beckett, Samuel, 80 Being, Lawrentian sense of, xvii, xix; see also Soul; Colonialism; Politics Berkhofer, Robert F. Jr., 28

Bhabha, Homi, 114−115 Bible, 113−115 Bildungsroman, 99 Binarism, 10−11, 30, 52, 103 Birds, Beasts and Flowers, 8, 42 Blake, William, 26 Blanchard, Lydia, 64 Blood consciousness, xvi, 27, 76, 104, 141 Boehmer, Elleke, xi, 143−144n.2 on colonialism, 34, 35 on colonial sense of cultural alienation, 74 on Jindyworobak movement, 94, 157n.7 on Kangaroo, 88 Booth, Howard J., xxiii, xxv, 12, 140, 144n.5, 149n.39 Booth, Wayne, 62 Border crossings, xvi, 43, 53 Boy in the Bush, The, xxix, 97 collaboration with Molly Skinner, 98−99 ending of, 100−101 Brantlinger, Patrick, 109 Brecht, Bertolt, 86 Brewster, Achsah and Earl, 1−2 British dominion, xxix, 69 British Empire, xxiii−xxiv, 11, 12 British Literary Diaspora after World War I, 5 British settlers, 74−75, 96−97 Buckley, William K., 7 Burgess, Anthony, 19, 38

C Caesar, Julius, 36 Canada, 74

197

198 Carby, Hazel, 133 Cartography, 93 Catholicism, Italian, 51 Caughie, Pamela, 133 Censorship, 21 Ceylon, xxiii−xxiv, 1−2, Chaudhuri, Amit, 139 Chauvinism, male, 56 China/Chinese, xv Christianity, xxvi; see also Religion and colonialism, 107, 113−115 and power−urge, 56−57 Cicero, Marcus, 36 Clark, L. D., 107, 144n.5, 161−162n.11 on ‘organic description,’ xiv−xv on the origin of Malintzi, 131−132, 164n.58 Collaboration, 97−100 Colonial and postcolonial perspectives, xi−xii, xiv, xviii, xix Colonial emptiness, 75 Colonialism, 8−9, 91, 161n.6; see also Being; Soul and Lawrence’s later works, xii and travel writing, 6−7 Lawrence’s view of, xix, xxvi−xxvii, 8−9 Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence, The, 157n.11 ‘Kangaroo,’ 92 ‘Men in New Mexico,’ 106 ‘Snake,’ 57, 111−112 ‘Spirits Summoned West,’ 106 ‘The Red Wolf,’ 106 Conquest, 37−38 Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness, 90, 108−109, 113 Lord Jim, xi Nostromo, 95 Conradian hollowness, 108 Contradiction, 34 Cooper, James Fenimore, 2−3 Cortés, Hernán, 132 Cynthia Asquith, Lady, xxiii, 140n.10

D Daleski, H. M., 53 Darroch, Robert, 156n.1

Index Darwinism, cultural, xxiv−xxv Democracy, American and Western, 22−23 Dennis, George, 32 Desire, see also Voice phallic, 134−136 women’s, xvii, 65, 81, 104, 127 Differences, 68, 76, 139, 141 geographical, 13, 46 racial, xxiii−xxiv, xv, 1−2, 33−34, 130 Digression, 86−87 Dimension, 22 Disorientation, 41, 60, 67, 86 Displacement, see also Self−exile Lawrence’s own, 15, 75 physical and psychological, 11, 13−15, 43, 44, 75 Dissanayake, Wimal, and Carmen Wickramagamage, 18 on colonial gaze, 116−117 on cultural Darwinism, xxiv−xxv on Western travel literature, xi Diversity, 34 Domination−submission paradigm, xii, 38 Doubleness, Lawrentian, 105, 119−120 Dualism, Lawrence’s, 10

E Eagleton, Terry, 86 Ellis, David, xiii, xix, 108 Emigration, the Italian’s massive, 14, 16, 43 England, xxviii, 43−44 Englishness, xi, xxiii−xxvi, 43, 47, 53; see also Paradox Epiphany, 111 Epistemology alternative, 105 monopoly of colonialist, 35 Western, xix, xxvi, 87 Essentialism, xxv−xxvi, 29 Ethnology, 8 Etruria, 31−32 Etruscan culture, xiv, 33−34, 36 Etruscan Places, xxvii−xxviii, 54 critique of Western imperialism, 33−35 Lawrence’s conception of hierarchy, 36−38 Lawrentian sense of power, 35−36

Index Europe, southern and northern, 10, 15, 49, 67 European civilization, 17, 32, 73 Exile, 42−43 Expansion, Western imperial, xiii−xiv, 9

F Fantasia of the Unconscious, 61−62 Fascism, 33, 36, 82−83 Feinstein, Elaine, 112 Femininity, 55−56 Fifth Sparrow, The, 100 Florence, xxviii, 45, 55−56, 64 Fontana Vecchia, Taormina, 4 Forster, E. M. 104 Frontiers, colonial, 8 Fussell, Paul, 9, 42 on classic sense of travel, 19, 38 on Mornings in Mexico, xiv on postwar atmosphere of England, 44 on Western travel writing between the wars, 5−6

G Gardiner, Rolf, 34 Gaze, 7, 25, 95−96, 116−117, 132 Gender, xviii, 42 120−124; see also Sexuality German Nazism, 33 Gilbert, Sandra, xix, 103, 104, 125−126, 127 Goodheart, Eugene, 145n.13 Grand narrative, 21 Greek and Roman culture, 32 Gulliver’s Travels, 27 Gurko, Leo, 89 Gutierrez, Donald, xix−xx, 128

H Harrison, John, 145n.13 Herring, Phillip, 41, 46, 47, 153n.20 Heterogeneity, 9, 13 Heterosexuality, 44, 55, 57−58; see also Homosexuality, Hierarchy, 98, see also Metropolis and periphery between people, 36−37, 51, 110−111

199 racial, xxiv, xxvii, 36−38, 72−74, 84, 100, 117 sexual, 58−59 Hodge, Bob, and Vijay Mishra, 95, 161n.6 Holbrook, David, 136−137 Holy Ghost, 10, 30 Home, the English sense of, 45 Homelessness, 106 Homogeneity, 23 Homophobic culture of England, 65 Homosexuality, xviii, 54−55, 59−60; see also Heterosexuality Hope, Alec D., 71−72, 79 Hough, Graham, 41, 48−49 Howe, Marguerite Beede, 57, 155n.44 Humma, John B., 89−90 Hyde, Virginia, 107, 124, 164−165n.58

I Identity, shifting, 8, 24, 41, 46−47, 74 Imperialism, 7, 20, 30−33, 119 Incompatibility, 22, 27, 37, 88 Incongruity among cultures, 13, 88 between culture and land, 74−75 India, 60 Indigenous spirit, xiii, xxii, 104, 112 Individuality, 77−78, 128−129; see also Otherness conflict between community and, 81−82 incompatible, 22−23 new sense of, 64−65 Invisibility, see Gaze Italy, 41−42 as the cultural opposite to England, xvi, 4 romantic tradition of, 11

J Jaffe Else, 69 Jameson, Fredric, 79 Janik, Del Ivan, 4−5, 32 Joyce, James, 15 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 44 Ulysses, 109

200 K Kangaroo, xvii−xviii, xxix, 67, 81, 115 Australian bush, 2, 88−91, 95−96 Benjamin Cooley nicknamed Kangaroo, 82 Somers’s self−reflective voice, 78−79 Somers’s sense of nothingness, xvii, 67 Somers’s sexual fantasy, 84−85 tabula rasa, 93−94 Kaplan, Caren, 5−6 Kermode, Frank, 123 Kim, 95 Kinkead−Weeks, Mark, 16−17 Kristeva, Julia, xxiii

L Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 32, 82, 135 Lago di Garda, 4, 8 Laird, Holly A., 98, 113, 162−163n.27 Language, 56, 63, 136−137 Lawrence, Frieda, 1 ‘Leadership’ politics, xvii, 79−81, 105, 140−141, 145n.13 and gender, 58 category of leadership, xvii−xviii, 139−140 ‘leadership’ novels, xvi, 77 Locality, Lawrence’s sense of, xiii, xvi, xvii, xxix, 9, 13, 72 Loomba, Ania, 8−9, 91 Lost Girl, The, xvi, xxviii Alvina’s relationship with Ciccio, 48−49, 53, 134 meaning of being ‘lost,’ 47, 52−53 Pancrazio, 49−51 Pescocalascio, 42, 45, 46−49 Lukács, Georg, 86 Lyotard, Jean−François, 150n.53

M Magna Mater, 120 Male leadership, see Leadership politics Maleness/Manliness, see Masculinity Male pseudo−couple, 79−80 Martz, Louis L., 124 Martin, Murray S., 156n.1 Masculinity

Index black, 132−134 primitive, 122 traditional code of, 55−56 Mediterranean spirit, xiv, 111 Melville, Herman, xxiv, 89 Metonym, xi Metropolis and periphery, 50, 67, 105; see also Hierarchy dynamic relationship between, xii England and Australia as, 70, 72−74 redefinition of the hierarchy between, 43, 46 Mexico, 3, 104 Meyers, Jeffrey, 41, 48, 55, 57, 64 Michelucci, Stefania, 11 Misogyny, xxviii, 80, 122 Moby−Dick, 89 Modernist aesthetics, 5−6, 86 Mornings in Mexico, xiv, xxviii, 120, 137 ‘Corasmin and the Parrots,’ 22 ‘Indians and Entertainment,’ 27−28 ‘Market Day,’ 30 ‘The Mozo,’ 24−26 Movements in European History, xxv Moynahan, Julian, 46 Murthy, U. R., 81, 86, 95

N Naturist movement, 7−8 Nehls, Edward, xiv, 15 Neutrality, 6−7, 16; see also Objectivity New Mexico, 7, 11 New Woman, 53 New Zealand, 74 Nixon, Cornelia, 132−133 Noble savage, 122 Nomadic way of life, 59

O Objectivity and colonial discourse, xxvii, 16 and travel writing, 18, 21 myth of, 31 Obsidian knife, 24 Ontology, xxiii, xxviii Organic relationship, xxii, xxvii, 8, 39; see also Spirit of place

Index

201

Organic wholeness, 86 Otherness, see also Individuality; Others colonial, 72 individual, 22−24 racial, xiv, 25−26, 87−88 Others, racial, xxiii−xxv, 50−51, 60−61, 120; see also Otherness Ottoline Morrell, Lady, 150n.43 Oxford English Dictionary, 91

Power, Lawrence’s concept of, 35, 56−57 Pratt, Mary Louise, xii, 6−7 Prichard, Katharine Susannah, 71, 96 Primitivism, 121−122 Prince of Wales, xxiv Protestantism, English, 51 Pseudo−fascist political leaders, xvii, 103 Psychological split, Lawrence’s, xii−xiii

P

Racism, 60−61, 83−84 Rainbow, The, 21, 82 Rananim, 42 Regeneration, spiritual, xvi Relationship, xxvi Religion, see also Christianity ancient, 31 Lawrentian sense of, 112−113 Renaissance, 12, 19 Reportage, objective, 18 Repression, the Victorian, 44 Rhetoricity, 18 Roman Empire, xiv, xxviii, 30−31, 54 as the origin of the European civilization, 32−33 dethronement of, 36, 38 Ross, Michael L., 13, 46 Rossman, Charles, xix, 103, 104, 107, 159n.56, 160n.58 Ruderman, Judith, 121 Ruskin, John, 61−62, 155−156n.51 Russell, Bertrand, 145n.13 Ryan, Simon, 93

Paradox, Lawrence’s own, xi, 140, 141; see also Englishness Passage to India, A, 95 Phallic mystery, 121, 135−136 Phoenix ‘America, Listen to Your Own,’ 2 ‘Au Revoir, U. S. A.,’ 104 ‘Democracy,’ 22−23 ‘Indians and an Englishman,’ 2−3 ‘New Mexico,’ 11, 112 Phoenix II ‘Aristocracy,’ 36−38 ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine,’ 36, 110 Physicality, xv−xvi Pilgrims, Christian, 113 Pinkney, Tony, 79−80, 109, 124 Place, xix−xxi, xxv Plumed Serpent, The, xviii, xix, xxix−xx, 63, 67, 94, 101, 102 aboriginality of native Mexicans, 116−118 black (or primitive) masculinity, 122, 132−134 gender politics, 120−122, 133−136 hymns of Quetzalcoatl, 113−114 Kate’s dissenting voice, 123−124 origin of Malintzi, 131−132, 164−165n.58 Quetzalcoatl, the early version of, 112, 115, 124−125 Quetzalcoatl myth, xviii, 104−105, 115−116, 137 Politics, Lawrentian sense of, xvii, 79, 81 Postcolonial critics, xxiii, 17 Postcolonial studies, xix, 103, 108

R

S Sagar, Keith, 144n.4, 147n.1, 147−148n.6, 151n.64 Said, Edward W., xix, 42−43, 146−147n.33, 153n.9 Sardinia, 8, 16−17 Science, modern, 31 Sea and Sardinia, xiii−xiv, xx, xxvii against a neutral and objective voice, 20−21 artful spontaneity, 16−17 traditional costume, 19−20 Self−exile

202 Alvina’s and Aaron’s, xxviii, 43 Lawrence’s, xii, 6, 75 Sepčić, Višnja, 89 Sexuality, 41, 132−136; see also Gender and leadership politics, 60 and repression, 44−45 female, xviii Shattock, Joanne, 5 Siegel, Carol, 51, 53−54, 154n.32 Simpson, Hilary, 55, 59, 62, 135, 165n.64 Skinner, Mollie, xxix, 70, 97−101, 160n.63 Solipsism, 101 Sons and Lovers, 82 Soul, Lawrentian sense of, xvii, 36; see also Being; Colonialism Southwest America, xx−xxi, 2, 33, 106 Spirit of Place, xi−xii, xiii−xvi, xxi−xxii, 104, 139−140 and Lawrence’s Englishness, xxiii and postcolonialism, xxvii critics’ understanding of, xiii Lawrence’s description of, xv−xvi Spirituality, see Physicality Spivak, Gayatri, xxiii Spurr, David, xi, 85, 116 Sterne, Mabel Dodge, 42, 152nn.4−5 Storch, Margaret, 134 Studies in Classic American Literature, xv−xvi, 13, 62, 147n.1 Subjectivity, female, xviii Superiority of the West, xi, xiii, 49−50, 117−118 Sydney Bulletin, 87

T Taos, 106 Templeton, Wayne, xx−xxii, 28 Tiffin, Chris, and Alan Lawson, 137 Torgovnick, Marianna, 121−123, 163−164n.45 Tourism, see Fussell Tracy, Billy, xiii, 8, 32, 53, 118 Transitional phase in Lawrence’s literary career, 41

Index in Lawrence’s treatment of sexuality, 54, 59−60 Travel, rhetorical use of, 17−18 Travel literature, xi, 5−7 as colonialist narrative, 6−7 Lawrence’s, xiii, 7−8 Twilight in Italy, xxvii ‘Italians in Exile,’ 14−15 ‘John,’ 13−14 ‘The Crucifix across the Mountain,’ 10 ‘The Lemon Gardens,’ 12 ‘The Return Journey,’ 19

U ‘Uncanny’ spirit, xiv, 34, 89, 97 Unconsciousness, 56, 89−90 Universalization, 23 Utopian possibility, 133−134

V Vanhoosier−Carey, Kimberly, 134−135, 166n.66 Vertebral consciousness, 77; see also Unconsciousness Victorian morality and sensibility, 43 Vine, Steven, 66 Virgin land, 85 Vitality, 37, 110−111 Vivas, Eliseo, 59, 66, 85−86 Voice, women’s, xvii, 64−65, 81, 123; see also Desire

W Wallace, Jo−Ann, 158n.27 Watson−Williams, Helen, 97−98 Weiner, S. Ronald, 17−18 Whitaker, Thomas R., 26, 30 Whitman, Walt, 22−23 Wilding, Michael, 79, 83 ‘Will−to−power,’ Lawrence’s concept of, 33, 37 Woman Who Rode Away, The, 48, 133 Women in Love, 21, 66−67, 135 World War I, 12, 20, 44 Worthen, John, 47, 58, 59