Terry Gifford
University of Chichester, UK
'A Playful Novel of Reprise: An Ecofeminist Reading of Kangaroo'
'"You won't give in to the women, and Australia is like a woman to you." […] "Why Mr Somers!" laughed Jaz; "seems to me you just go round the world looking for things you're not going to give in to." ' (348)
Despite what Neil Roberts calls 'its odd reputation as a blood-dimmed fascist polemic' (Roberts 2004: 61), Kangaroo is a novel with a sense of humour that is also returning to some of the most complex issues in Lawrence's previous work in the relaxed distancing context of an Australian novel. Such issues include: the means of social change; alternative idealisms; what social role, if any, the concerned individual should have; the practice of 'star-polarity'; and the ultimate nature of Lawrence's individual quest. To regard this as a playful novel of reprise is to be able to engage fully with its shifting dialogic strategy that Roberts calls a 'narrative of contingency' (2004: 60-73), or what David Ellis describes as 'the illusion that what his protagonists experience is being recorded as it occurs' (Ellis 1998: 42).
A dialogic strategy allows for multiple fictional modes and a variety of 'non-fictional' tones to work in relation to the themes in this novel in a more purposefully playful manner than the conventionally understood notion of a 'travel narrative' working against a 'political plot' in Kangaroo. The role of land in particular acts as both distancing and testing of notions explicitly debated in the 'political plot' so as to render the latter inadequate without a full engagement with the former. That is, relations between human beings (man-woman, man-man, social-individual) require, in Australia especially, to be understood in terms of their relationship with land. Inevitably, this must become a gendered understanding and this paper seeks to explore the dialogue between land, gender and the social issues in Kangaroo.
In Annette Kolodny's classic work The Lay of the Land (1975) she recognises that the metaphor of 'the land-as-woman' in American literature, more than simply being a transposition of Old World pastoral discourse into New World writing, was actually an archetype from a 'universal grammar' (Kolodny 1975: 150) of writing about land. In Kangaroo the New World land is a female of a distinctly anti-pastoral cast, as is established while Harriet and Richard Lovatt Somers are settling into their new home. It is the Australian Jack's observation that his countrymen 'treat the country more like a woman they pick up on the streets than a bride, to my thinking' (77). Harriet says that she doubts whether, in that case, she could love an Australian. In reply Jack makes the point that becomes a challenge that Lawrence sets for his narrator to explore in Kangaroo: 'But it's no good loving Australia if you can't love the Australian' (78).
While the 'fern-world' of the bush is an ancient pre-human one, it has its effect upon the psyche of those who live on its fringes and who, indeed, seek to develop a society that is distinctively of their land - an Australian form of society that is the subject of the political debate in the novel. That this debate is conducted by males, in the case of the Diggers to the deliberate exclusion of women, and that the land is associated with the female early in the novel, indicates that discourses of land, gender and society are closely intertwined in Kangaroo. This paper will argue that the dialogic play between them creates an exhilarating, if ultimately flawed novel that is unique in Lawrence's ouvre for its tonal shifts between irony and seriousness in dealing with thematic shifts between the pre-cultural presence of land and the intense cultural debates about ideals and social strategies for change; between the male desire for mates and the need for the female; between the undercutting female knowingness and the male drive for idealistic contribution; between finding a social role and being independently alone; and ultimately between where the (upper) democratic impulse leads and where the (lower) dark gods lead in their parallel vagueness of formulation and questing drives.