Mythic reconstruction: The new beginning of D. H. Lawrence's late work.

World War I and the expatriate status it conferred upon D. H. Lawrence coalesced to produce a mythopoetic direction in his writing. The new beginning he invokes after the war is conceived as a religious imperative. For the next decade, Lawrence searches for an antidote for what ails modern society. The restorative he prescribes to recreate personal meaning and to reconstruct socio-political order is a religious revaluation. This is Lawrence's post-war poetic, the interdependence of religious philosophy and art, a formula he applies rigorously from Kangaroo through Apocalypse. With these late works, Lawrence announces himself as a myth-maker. Lawrence excavates the past for the edification of the present by importing mythic artifacts into his writing. He maintains that history, if we attend to it, has a utilitarian function. He reaches out in an historically retrogressive direction appropriating an eclectic collection of classical and primitive myths and symbols from the Navajoes and Aztecs, the Etruscans and Egyptians. He animates religious history, thereby informing modernity. Lawrence stabilizes political, social and personal meaning through his religious reassessment. In the post-war canon, he achieves several points of epiphany. He rejects the concept of linear or progressive time and conceives of time as cyclical; thus every social infrastructure, including religion, evolves naturally to extinction. Christianity, though flawed, is not uniquely corrupt. Lawrence proposes a revivification of religion catalyzed by the ancient wisdom contained in our collective past. Further, the problem of an appropriate socio-political system in the modern world is solved through a religious aristocracy. To be efficacious, a religion-- and its god--must be indigenous to its worshippers. If the purpose of Lawrence's writing can be so singularly synopsized, he is intent on theorizing the possibilities of the human relationship. The relationship of the first order in the late work is the self plus God, stabilizing all others. Finally, Lawrence endorses a stunning transference: he rejects religion's eschatological function and makes its domain the time between birth and death. He forces an expansion of religious sensibilities which accommodate the human condition and the ethereal is sacrificed to the phenomenal.PhDBritish and Irish literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161918/1/8821576.pd