Report of the Fiftieth Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group

 

Patrick Armstrong

 

D. H. Lawrence and Optics

 

April 23rd 2026, by Zoom, 18.30-20.00 UK time

 

ATTENDERS

19 people attended, including, outside of England, Patrick Armstrong in Paris, Shirley Bricout in Britanny, Kathleen Vella in Malta, Lucas Campoli in Quebec, Philip Chester in Ontario, Tina Ferris in California and Shanee Stephakoff in Connecticut.

 

INTRODUCTION

Patrick writes: ‘This talk explores the relationship between Lawrence and optics; this capacious term encompasses the science of seeing and the study of light, while also hinting at the ways in which Lawrence is perceived. Situating Lawrence’s work within a wider historical and literary context, I reconsider his complicated attitude towards science and optical technologies. Through a series of close readings, I suggest that Lawrence’s writing can be read as being about optical devices as well as acting as a form of optical device itself, shifting unexpectedly between scales of vision. The first half of the talk focuses on Lawrence’s descriptions of Ursula’s experiences in the laboratory of The Rainbow; the second half turns to Lawrence’s late poetry, particularly ‘Anaxagoras’, which I will read alongside Apocalypse Fragment 2. By focusing on prose and poetry, I examine the vital tensions between sensory perception and scientific knowledge in Lawrence’s work.’

 

READING

Pages 410-19 of The Rainbow (CUP 2013 edition) and the poem ‘Anaxagoras’.

 

BIOGRAPHY

Patrick Armstrong is an Assistant Professor of English at Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. He is the author of Microscopy, Magnification and Modernist Fiction: Micro-Modernism from Hardy to Beckett (Bloomsbury, 2025), which includes a chapter on microbiology in The Rainbow. He holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, modernism, and the intersections between science and literature. He has published work on Beckett, Hardy and D. H. Lawrence; most recently, ‘Lawrence and Scale’ was published in Terry Gifford, ed., Reading D. H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene (EUP, 2025). He is the Book Review Editor for the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies. He has taught at the University of Cambridge, the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, and the University of Orléans.

 

PRESENTATION

Patrick started by emphasising that he would not be talking about the optics of Lawrence (how he is generally perceived, or how it is perceived to speak about him), but by considering his relationship to optics in the post-sixteenth century sense of the study of light. Lawrence was interested in optical instruments at least from the period when he studied botany under ‘Botany’ Smith at University College Nottingham 1906-8, and his relationship to them is one way of focalising the question of Lawrence’s relationship to the natural sciences more broadly.

On the one hand, Lawrence felt a tension between scientific knowledge and sense perception. In the essay ‘Art and Morality’ he denounces the fact that ‘man sees what the kodak has taught him to see. And man, try as he may, is not a kodak’; in Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious he praises children for not being little cameras, but instead for intuitively understanding reality. Clifford Chatterley, by contrast, was ‘like a man looking down a microscope, or up a telescope. He was not in touch’.

On the other hand, Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow acts instinctively when she looks through a microscope in one of the novel’s ‘The Widening Circle’ chapters, and then draws what she sees. In Lawrence’s college notebooks, his notes on the structures and chemical components of various plants were interspersed with his poems. Patrick likened Lawrence to J. H. Prynne – whom he mourned as having died the previous day (April 22nd 2026) – whose poems likewise revealed his deep understanding of botany and other branches of science. Lawrence had a sense of what science should properly be (as aware of the livingness of plants, and as in the deepest sense religious), which contrasted to the mechanistic scientific understanding of the novel’s Dr. Frankstone, yet he was not ignorant of or hostile to the findings of science; rather, he relied on them. The novel’s manuscript reveals that he revised the microscope scene intensely, not only in order to reach for a new kind of prose to convey Ursula’s responses, but to make the scene more scientific; ‘nucleolating’ is added in one of the later drafts to the description of the kiss between Ursula and Skrebensky. Across Lawrence’s works (as Patrick, and Catherine, have discussed elsewhere) he plays with the sense of scale (he describes the novel as a microscopic world, and humans as mere cells within the universe) in a way which depended on his experience with the microscope. Lawrence disagreed with scientific positivism only at a surface level, whilst committing to it and transforming it at a deeper level.

 

 

Patrick then turned to Lawrence’s arguments in 1928 with Julian Huxley over scientific positivism. These fed into Aldous Huxley’s depiction of Rampion in Point Counter Point as hostile to science, but they were also an important context for Lawrence’s late poem ‘Anaxagoras’ and the November 1929 Apocalypse ‘Fragment 2’. Patrick characterised both texts as attempting to yoke together the religious and scientific, and aggregative and disaggregative, ways of knowing (in ‘Fragment 2’ he writes ‘there need be no quarrel between our two ways of consciousness’). Recent science, including that of Einstein and quantum physics, made this yoking the more possible; Lawrence once wrote to Kot that he admired Einstein for removing the axis from the universe. In ‘Anaxagoras’ he responds to the pre-Socratic philosopher’s attempt to theorise colour with a demonstration of poetry’s potential to hold contradictory thoughts in suspension, and with an apprehension of language itself as an instrument with which to think and see. After all, Lawrence in his essay ‘The Novel’ had described the novel as a medium of discovery ultimately ‘far greater than Galileo’s telescope’.

 

DISCUSSION 

Michael Bell suggested that it would be helpful to keep in mind the distinction between science and scientism – the latter being the application of science in domains where it is not appropriate, and something of which Lawrence considered both Huxley brothers guilty. Regarding the concept of language as an instrument, Michael (drawing on Heidegger) preferred to think of it instead as the historical medium in which we live, and something which therefore uses us rather than the reverse. Most of us, most of the time, are walking clichés; AI holds the mirror up to this fact. Great writers, however, can animate and control this historical medium. By using language which draws on the past they bring the past into the present and project it into the future. Science is not able to do anything equivalent. Patrick responded that the analogy of language as optical instrument did not work equally well for all writers, and that it actually worked better for Proust, who thought in such terms, than for Lawrence. Michael thought that Lawrence was less driven by science itself than inclined to use scientific metaphors (such as gravity and electricity) in the service of emotional investigation. Kathleen Vella observed that Lawrence’s electrical metaphors were derived second hand from the Futurists, and Patrick agreed that the Futurists had an influence on Lawrence.

Michael then (drawing on Ernst Cassirer) described humans as symbol-making animals. The earliest symbols that humans made allowed them to see nature as alive. When ‘religion’ replaced ‘myth’, power no longer resided in nature but above it. In the scientific age, the top layer was dispensed with. Symbols now served the ends of scientific investigation (‘law’, as applied to science, is itself a metaphor), and the human sense of connection with the universe was consequently lost. Humans learned to perceive themselves as outside that which they perceived. Lawrence understood and lamented this, and wished to restore the early sense of connectedness to the world alongside a modern understanding of it, through aesthetic symbol-making. Lawrence’s and Cassirer’s perceptions were further developed by Susan Langer in her Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (1941).

Those of us who knew him agreed that the vastness of the themes that we had discussed this evening were appropriate to the immediate aftermath of the passing of J. H. Prynne.