Victor Vargas
USA
Telling an Eastern fable: Lawrence's perineum, the literary initiate, and the novel as the guru's mantra
D. H. Lawrence notes in his letters during the writing of Women in Love, a novel that thematically appropriates Kundalini and Tantra yoga, that he envisioned a structure through which the British novel would be distributed in a closed-off initiatory type scheme. The transmission of literary knowledge that Lawrence envisioned resembled that of the Guru's imparting of the mantra to the initiate.
This concern with a typology of initiation seems to become a paramount theme in his late works, including The Plumed Serpent.
Beyond literary concerns, Lawrence also came to advocate a very Kundalini-inspired conception of the body politic ("a new age with a downward return to the great dark centres, past the diaphragm and the navel, where was to be found the throne of power and the scepter of rule").
Working from Leela Gandhi's notion in "Postcolonial Theory" that the movement from East to West involved processes of textualization, I want to propose the idea that Lawrence, instead of "appropriating" the Eastern body or its spiritual practices through new literary genres and processes of textualization (such as with WB Yeats during his "Indian Phase" and Christopher Isherwood, both of whom instituted the form of the yogi autobiography) instead sought yogic schemes by which the Western form or body itself would take shape. Of course, it should be noted that Lawrence's idea of what was Eastern esoteric was very much by way of the Western-led Theosophical society. I will be working from those Lawrentian scholars of Eastern esoteric influences- Gerald Doherty, Thomas Miles, Chaman Nahal, Charles Burack. I will also be considering the interesting notion proferred by Wolfgang Iser on the sensory affect of modernist literary practices as it relates to Lawrence's technique in the above mentioned novels.