Oliver Taylor
Durham University, UK
"'S got no ballocks!": Body Language, Ventriloquism, and "Home" in the Letters
In three letters written in the early months of 1913 Lawrence self-consciously uses phrases attributed to his father. This paper will look at how body language and ventriloquism of Nottinghamshire dialect is made use of in the Letters as Lawrence gives accounts of making and remaking his home on the continent. Drawing on Steven Connor's cultural history of ventriloquism, the first part of the paper takes up further instances of it throughout the letters in relation to home and shows how, through ventriloquism, Lawrence acknowledges dialect as a way of situating the body in relation to space and a signifier of where it has come from, in order to write about and cope with often uncertain destinations. The second part looks at how the body language of the letters is often necessary for Lawrence to conceive of abstract distances, spaces, locations, and homes. It weighs up the benefits Lawrence may have seen in grounding an understanding of space in the body and situates his poetics of home in letters amongst ideas such as Heidegger's "dwelling" and Bourdieu's "habitus".