Removing the serpent's tail from its mouth

D. H. Lawrence's vision of embodied consciousness

pp. 113-135

in: Brook Miller, Self-consciousness in modern British fiction, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Ghiselin's pronouncement about D. H. Lawrence highlights an aspect of Lawrence's thinking closely related to the themes of this book: Lawrence's profound interest in the totality of consciousness and the material and experiential strata which generate it. Lawrence railed against reductive representations of consciousness. In this chapter, I trace how Lawrence's belief in dynamic, embodied consciousness manifests in his essays and last long novel. I hope to contribute to a partial reconciliation of Lawrence's polemics against the modernist novel with the similarities between his models of embodied consciousness and those articulated by the very modernists he dispraised.