Report of the Thirty-Ninth Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group
Julianne Newmark
The Border-Line
Thursday 12th December 2024
By Zoom
18.30-20.00 UK time
ATTENDERS
Around 22 people attended, including, from outside of England, Julianne Newmark in Tampere, Finland, Robert Bullock in Paris, Kathleen Vella in Malta, Muzamal Abbas in Pakistan, Jim Phelps in Cape Town, Philip Chester in Deep River, Ontario, Tina Ferris in Diamond Bar, California, and Jon Kaputinsky in Santa Fe, California
INTRODUCTION
‘My presentation historically situates the short story “The Border-Line” and offers a theory of Lawrentian endlessness, with this text as a principal study. I will invoke questions of ontological ends, stemming from theories associated with Heidegger and Agamben – though I will not delve too deeply into their philosophies during my talk. As Andrew Welch has usefully synthesized, Agamben “gesture[s] towards an ontology of endlessness” (156); it is around this configuration that I will build my analysis.
“The Border-Line” was completed and sent to Curtis Brown, Lawrence’s American agent, from the Kiowa Ranch, outside of Taos, New Mexico, once Lawrence returned to the American Southwest after a three-month stay in Europe (with time in England, France, and Germany, between November 1923 and March of 1924). Because of the biographical facts of Lawrence’s composition of this short story, and his own relational geographies in this period, I argue that it is fruitful to consider this story as a mediation on borders and transgression, finitude, and the nature of being as related to death, language, and narrative.’
READING
Giorgio Agamben’s Language and Death: The Place of Negativity
Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being
Keith Sagar, D. H. Lawrence: A Calendar of His Works
BIOGRAPHY
Julianne Newmark teaches at the University of New Mexico and has been an Officer of the DHLSNA since 2005. Currently, she teaches and conducts research at Tampere University, in Finland, as a recipient of the Fulbright-Tampere University Scholar Grant. She has written many articles and book chapters focusing on D. H. Lawrence’s New Mexico and Mexico writings. Her second book project, “Reports of Agency: Retrieving Indigenous Professional Communication in Dawes Era Indian Bureau Documents,” is underway. Her 2015 book The Pluralist Imagination from East to West in American Literature was published by University of Nebraska Press and featured a chapter of Lawrence and Willa Cather. Newmark is also the Editor-in-Chief of Xchanges, a Writing Studies ejournal.
PRESENTATION
Julianne’s thoughts on endlessness as manifest in Lawrence’s story were summed up in the concept of the human individual as the Tree of Life – ultimately non-human, and not confined by narrative structure, time or utterance. Throughout the story Alan is characterised as silent and stoic, and his silence is an act of authority that relates him to the trees and wind, non-narrativity and placelessness. Lawrence was persistently concerned with endlessness and insistent on silence and voicelessness; Agamben points to the importance of endless states of being for which there are no words.
Julianne noted the circumstances of the story’s composition in the wake of Frieda’s affair with John Middleton Murray. It was clear to him then that there was no clear end to one state of being before the beginning of the next, and that not even death was a clear end. In Lawrence’s post-war civilisation, death was everywhere and nowhere. This vision owes much to indigenous American thought, and the story is in part the attempt to transpose aspects of Quetzalcoatl to a German context. New Mexico ‘was a spectral site for Lawrence’ which he carried with him ‘as a troubling presence whilst he was back in Europe’, literally and metaphorically moving across borders.
DISCUSSION
David asked for clarification of the relevance of Barthes’s concept of the ‘punktum’. Julianne likened it to a caesura – something about a work which enforces a pause and attracts attention. David thought that the pine tree near Lawrence’s home in New Mexico was indeed an organising centre of Lawrence’s thought; Julianne added that trees are crucially bidirectional. David responded that Jesus was crucified on the tree of life because he rejected physical life. Terry wondered whether the Tree of Life could include the presence of the dead, prior to language, like the scient of a pine-tree; Julie thought that the story indeed suggests that it could, in its alternative configuration of life and death.
There was considerable discussion of potential literary antecedents. Shanee wondered whether the story might have been influenced by Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, which also has a protagonist called Farquhar. It also reminded Shanee of James Joyce’s 1914 story ‘The Dead’, which also concerns the ongoing presence of the dead. Catherine thought that the story might owe this aspect also to Wuthering Heights, and that the climactic scene might have been influenced by the Second Earl of Rochester’s extraordinary erotic poem ‘Mock Song’. She speculated on the significance of the location of Strasbourg as a geopolitical borderland, and on the live possibility, that existed in the post-war years, that those missing, presumed dead, might at any point reappear alive. She noted the heroine’s achievement for marrying for the second time in this period, when there was fierce competition amongst women for men.
Tina applauded the idea of the train as a borderline, running across place, time, life and death; Julianne agreed that trains are indeed compellingly transgressive, with their moving vehicle but static tracks. Shanee wondered about the relevance of Jung’s concepts of the impersonal life force, and of archetypes. Julianne agreed that Lawrence’s women do become something of an archetype based on Frieda, and that ‘The Border-Line’ itself is one of a group of stories with similar themes inspired by the same set of recent events. Collectively, these stories moved him on to a new understanding of being, related to the indigenous American worldviews to which he had recently been exposed.
