Dimitar Angelov
University of Warwick, UK
Lawrence and the Native Americans: Perspectives on Performance and Cultural Difference in Mornings in Mexico
The paper will examine three of the essays in Mornings in Mexico – "Indians and Entertainment", "Dance of the Sprouting Corn" and "The Hopi Snake Dance"- where Lawrence discusses the difference between the European and the Native American psychology of performance, which he attributes to a fundamental discrepancy in ontology. If the European spectacle entails an alienating split of the subject's consciousness into a dramatic persona and an observer, the Native American performance is dominated by a non-cerebral experience that originates in the soma and transcends the physical boundaries of the individual. Corresponding to these two performative paradigms are two distinct types of subjectivity: one privileging the static ego, the other – the dynamism of the drive.
Although Lawrence criticises the European selfhood and being as predicated on the flawed interpersonal dynamics of the spectacle, he himself often lapses into the inauthentic position of the observer when arguing the Native American alterity, most of all in "Indians and Entertainment". The paper will aim to show that Lawrence sought to extricate himself from the precariousness of his situation by challenging the authority of the narrative voice in "Dance of the Sprouting Corn" and "The Hopi Snake Dance". In doing so, he performs a characteristic deconstructive gesture of separating method from truth, which allows him to create a more genuine representation of the intercultural self-other dynamics.