<\/p>\n
The following short paper was delivered at the international virtual symposium ‘D. H. Lawrence: Distance and Proximity’<\/a>, which was held 10th-14th July 2021 in substitute for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference ‘Lawrence’s 1920s: North America and the “Spirit of Place”‘<\/a>, which is to be held in Taos New Mexico and which was deferred by the Coronavirus pandemic first from 2020 to 2021, and then from 2021 to 17th-22nd July 2022. The panel of which this paper was part was entitled ‘Modernity as attraction and repulsion for Lawrence\u2019. The paper is also to be published in\u00a0the\u00a0Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies Online<\/em><\/a>\u00a0in October 2021.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n LAWRENCE AND GUNS<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wenn ich Kultur h\u00f6re … entsichere ich meinen Browning!<\/em>” “Whenever I hear [the word] ‘culture’… I take the safety catch off my Browning!” Thus a character in Hans Johst\u2019s 1933 play Schlageter<\/em>, though often attributed in modified form to Hermann G\u00f6ring.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It\u2019s tempting to say that whenever Lawrence heard the word \u2018gun\u2019 he reached for his sense of the living universe. But the power of modernity which has grown from of the barrel of a gun (Mao, 1927) ever since they were invented not only roused Lawrence\u2019s sense of revulsion.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He showed a range of attitudes towards them over his career, and these were mirrored by his metaphorical references – from the negative \u2018talk [which] went on like a rattle of small artillery\u2019 at Breadalby, to telling his readers to \u2018let the old guns\u2019 wielded by the likes of the idealist Melville rot, in order to \u2018Get new ones, and shoot straight\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now there are guns and guns, as those Americans who call for restrictions specifically on automatic and semi-automatic rifles acknowledge. And Lawrence seems to have felt something of the same.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What he\u2019s horrified by in his August 1914 Guardian article \u2018With the Guns\u2019, as extrapolated into a call for the outright abolition of guns in his 1918-20 essay \u2018Education of the People\u2019 and his and his 1921-22 \u2018Memoir of Maurice Magnus\u2019 are the long range military guns of which the men are extensions (\u2018as the butt is part of the rifle\u2019), rather than guns extending men. These shoot towards an unseen, unknown, unhated, agglomerated and passive enemy, and the action of firing has indeterminate moral status according to whether or not it meets its mark, as is never known. Quote \u2018It is so unnatural as to be unthinkable. Yet we must think of it\u2019 \u2013 as, arguably, we must today think about those developments in drone warfare which Lawrence would have condemned still more strongly and for the same reasons. \u2018Education of the People\u2019 by contrast enjoins \u2018fencing \u2026 wrestling \u2026 jiu-jitsu, every form of fierce hand to hand contest\u2019. Moreover the 1924 essay \u2018Pan in America\u2019 laments man\u2019s murder of Pan through his creation of \u2018engines or instruments which should intervene between him and the living universe, and give him mastery\u2019, and this includes<\/em> hunting guns.<\/p>\n And yet, \u2018we cannot return to the primitive life\u2026 and hunt with bows and arrows\u2019, \u2018And even a white man\u2019, if he is \u2018a born hunter, must fall into the Indians\u2019 state\u2019 of \u2018weird psychic connection between hunter and hunted.. Gun or no gun!\u2019 \u2013 because this connection enchants the prey into victimhood, so that \u2018Arrow [or<\/em>] bullet, it flies like a movement of pure will, straight to the spot.\u2019<\/p>\n Certainly, Lawrence himself is personally reluctant to use guns, as we see when he hesitates to kill a porcupine, and Mellors is reluctant to shoot owls, and Ursula says she couldn\u2019t pull the trigger of the emptiest gun in the world if someone was looking down its barrel. By contrast it\u2019s the Cain-like Gerald who lusts to join the soldiers shooting the miners. As those of you who have heard me speak about Lawrence and veganism will know, I believe that his passional being resisted shooting, and that it was his more intellectual and conscious self that approved the idea of doing it in certain circumstances. But through researching this paper I\u2019ve come to realise that his non-resistance to guns goes a little deeper than that.<\/p>\n We see it in his depiction<\/em> of Mellors, who is scarcely ever seen without his gun, so that it appears as an extension of him. His first appearance is, quote, as \u2018A man with a gun\u2019. Connie is alerted to his proximity by the gun\u2019s report, and she recognises his silhouette by its presence at his side; he lays it down to have sex and picks it up again afterwards, and though his phallus is generally non-violent, his gun is not free of phallicism. Moreover he tells Connie he would shoot the Berthas and Cliffords of this world \u2018with less qualms than I shoot a weasel\u2019.<\/p>\n But Lawrence nowhere lays such positive emphasis on the gun as in his 1918 novella \u2018The Fox\u2019.<\/p>\n Here Nellie is the household\u2019s misfiring and inhibited gun-wielder until Henry enters and takes over, enriching their larder with rabbits and wild ducks. Thereafter he becomes a hunter of March. It is with a freshly-shot rabbit dangling in his hand that he first thinks of marrying her. Thereafter he meditates that he must catch her \u2018as you catch a deer or a woodcock when you go out shooting.\u2019 His methodology is that reprised six years later in \u2018Pan in America\u2019 \u2013 one of psychological control over the pray: \u2018The bullet’s flight home is a sheer projection of your own fate into the fate of the deer\u2019, and he likewise acquires March, even though she is initially \u2018suspicious as a hare\u2019, and his first refused proposal elicits his reflection: \u2018He had missed\u2019. When Banford hears of the engagement she looks \u2018like a bird that has been shot\u2019. On the pretext of going to shoot the male fox\u2019s mate he obtains a private conversation with March, and her consent to marry him soon. When he hews down the tree he exerts the same mind control over Banford as he did when hunting March. When he disingenuously warns her to move she jeers that he can\u2019t hurt her with his axe, but she has not taken into account his distance weapon; in this case the tree replaces the gun. Afterwards \u2018he watched with intense bright eyes, as he would watch a wild goose he had shot.\u2019<\/p>\n Even this novella is not without the deeply Lawrencian revulsion from killing, as we see when Henry shoots the fox of which he is the avatar. But overall this novella and other of Lawrence\u2019s works support the NRA\u2019s argument that it isn\u2019t guns that kill people, it\u2019s people \u2013 that is, hand guns are value-neutral, they are what modernity gives us and we can\u2019t uninvent them. What matters is the spirit in which they are used.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The following short paper was delivered at the international virtual symposium ‘D. H. Lawrence: Distance and Proximity’, which was held 10th-14th July 2021 in substitute for the 14th International D. H. Lawrence Conference ‘Lawrence’s 1920s: North America and the “Spirit of Place”‘, which is to be held in Taos New Mexico and which was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4369,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[268],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3302"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3302"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4548,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3302\/revisions\/4548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catherinebrown.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}