This lecture introduces one of the most important and vexed issues in D.H. Lawrence’s thought and practice: the proper uses and limits of consciousness. On the one hand, Lawrence believed that moments of unconsciousness – in sex, or another kind of ecstasy – were essential to fulness of living; on the other hand, by making this point he was bringing it into consciousness, and indeed he thought that it was essential that we recognise consciously the proper limits of consciousness. His writing – with all its contradictions, and acknowledgment of these contradictions – attempted to explain and exemplify this idea.
