Jeff Wallace

Educability and Art: D. H. Lawrence, Paul Cézanne, Herbert Read

“But I do think we ought to begin to paint good pictures, now that we know pretty well all there is to know about how a picture should be made. You do agree, don’t you, that technically we know almost all there is to know about painting?” (LEA 215). D.H. Lawrence claims this to be a proposition made to him by a “young English painter, an intelligent and really modest young man,”at some time prior to the drafting (between late December 1928 and early February 1929) of the essay, “Introduction ...

Posthuman D.H. Lawrence

In ‘Why the Novel Matters’ (1925), an essay on the special kind of ‘knowledge’ possessed by the novelist, Lawrence chips irreverently away at the foundational status of the Cartesian mind-body dualism. Why should he look at his hand, as it writes, and conclude that it is ‘a mere nothing compared to the mind that directs it’? The hand ‘flickers’ with a life of its own, and comes to learn and know things through touch. It slips along, jumps to dot an i, gets cold or bored — in fact, has its own ‘rudiments’ of thought. ‘Why should I imagine that there is a me which is more me than my hand is?’ (P 533)

‘The stern task of living’: Dubliners,Clerks, Money and Modernism

In the Dubliners story `Two Gallants’, Lenehan presents an enigma: `No one knew how he achieved the stern task of living.’4 James Joyce himself knew enough, it seems, about the ‘stern’ or ‘delicate’ task of keeping body and soul together. By 1904, the year Joyce met Nora Barnacle, the rapid financial decline of John Joyce’s family had led them from independent propertied income to the virtual poverty of 7 St Peter’s Terrace, Dublin, where the cramped space was occupied by the recently-widowed father and his nine children. When Oliver Gogarty inquired about the illness which had caused his friend’s disappearance for two days, Joyce cited ’inanition’.5 The procurement of money through ingenuity and stealth, coupled with ’a remarkable capacity to fall from every slight foothold, to teeter over every available precipice’,6 becomes the keynote of Joyce’s early adulthood and beyond. He writes, in his first letter to Nora, of his home as ‘simply a middle-class affair ruined by spendthrift habits which I have inherited’.

Introduction: ‘Somebody is trying to think …’

This volume contributes to the continuing effort to evaluate and extend the project of Raymond Williams’s work. It is entirely appropriate that this effort has so far been characterized by a sense of having to maintain momentum1, for Williams’s writing was a ‘project’ in the strictest sense — always purposive, embodying a sense of work to be done, its value often seeming to lie in sketching future developmental possibilities or in suddenly highlighting, through a felicitous conjunction or realignment of knowledges and disciplinary procedures, new fields of enquiry into the cultural past. But also implicit in Williams’s own work is the necessity of a constant critical vigilance towards that project, and therefore an obligation to justify any re-evaluation from the emergent perspectives and demands of the present.

Language, Nature and the Politics of Materialism: Raymond Williams and D. H. Lawrence

Raymond Williams returned regularly in his writing to the life and work of D. H. Lawrence. If, as it often seems tempting to do, we were to use the 1979 New Left Review interviews, Politics and Letters, as a kind of of master-narrative with which to decode certain developments in Williams’s own work, then a fairly clear movement in his attitude to Lawrence would seem to present itself. In response to the suggestion that he had changed his mind ‘very drastically’ about Lawrence, Williams admitted; ‘I got much harder about Lawrence over the years.’1