Reconstructing “The Nightmare” of WWI in D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo
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Chapter XII of D. H. Lawrence’s Australian novel Kangaroo (1923), entitled “The Nightmare,” is an analeptical account of the main character’s experience of war-time England, from 1916 to 1919. As pointed out by Bruce Steele in the Cambridge University Press edition of Kangaroo, the whole chapter, written in 1922, is largely autobiographical. A comparative study of this chapter and the letters which Lawrence wrote from 1916 to 1919, will therefore highlight the problematic process of reconstructing memories and rewriting them into a fictional work several years after the events took place. In addition to the common questions of truthfulness, embellishment and hyperbole, this semi-autobiographical analepse calls for an analysis of its narrative structure―how it is embedded in the general storyline using the trope of the “nightmare”―and of its relevance in the plot and the development of the main character, Richard Somers, an English writer who has travelled to Australia via Italy and India. Firstly, the chapter explores the beginning of Somers’s quest for self-reconstruction, after what is clearly depicted as a traumatic experience, through a painful yet necessary self-exploration and reconstruction of the past. Though the remembrance is presented as involuntary, the flow of repressed memories which suddenly resurfaces is examined in detail and organised around the central theme of fear, which initially triggered these war-time recollections. Secondly, the chapter relates the protagonist’s gradual emotional and intellectual break with the home country, caused by the spirit of “war effort” and the general climate of distrust and fear, patriotism and propaganda. However, the novel narrates the reconstruction of Somers’s paradoxical relationship with his home country, thanks to the disorientation, rootlessness and homesickness he endures in Australia.
Abstract
Chapter XII of D. H. Lawrence’s Australian novel Kangaroo (1923), entitled “The Nightmare,” is an analeptical account of the main character’s experience of war-time England, from 1916 to 1919. As pointed out by Bruce Steele in the Cambridge University Press edition of Kangaroo, the whole chapter, written in 1922, is largely autobiographical. A comparative study of this chapter and the letters which Lawrence wrote from 1916 to 1919, will therefore highlight the problematic process of reconstructing memories and rewriting them into a fictional work several years after the events took place. In addition to the common questions of truthfulness, embellishment and hyperbole, this semi-autobiographical analepse calls for an analysis of its narrative structure―how it is embedded in the general storyline using the trope of the “nightmare”―and of its relevance in the plot and the development of the main character, Richard Somers, an English writer who has travelled to Australia via Italy and India. Firstly, the chapter explores the beginning of Somers’s quest for self-reconstruction, after what is clearly depicted as a traumatic experience, through a painful yet necessary self-exploration and reconstruction of the past. Though the remembrance is presented as involuntary, the flow of repressed memories which suddenly resurfaces is examined in detail and organised around the central theme of fear, which initially triggered these war-time recollections. Secondly, the chapter relates the protagonist’s gradual emotional and intellectual break with the home country, caused by the spirit of “war effort” and the general climate of distrust and fear, patriotism and propaganda. However, the novel narrates the reconstruction of Somers’s paradoxical relationship with his home country, thanks to the disorientation, rootlessness and homesickness he endures in Australia.
참고문헌 (7)
- Delany, Paul, "D. H. Lawrence’s Nightmare: The Writer and His Circle in the Years of the Great War" (1979), Harvester
- Lawrence, D. H., "Kangaroo. Ed. Bruce Steele" (1994), Cambridge University Press
- Lawrence, D. H., "The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 2: 1913–16" (2002), Cambridge University Press
- Lawrence, D. H., "The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 3: 1916–21" (2007), Cambridge University Press
- Lawrence, D. H., "The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 4: 1921–24" (1987), Cambridge University Press
- Lawrence, D. H., "The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Vol. 8: Previously Uncollected Letters and General Index" (2002), Cambridge University Press
- Lawrence, D. H., "Studies in Classic American Literature" (2003), Cambridge University Press