D. H. Lawrence's Aaron's Rod records the main character Aaron Sisson's breaking away from 'home' and the subsequent nomadic adventure in a strange country. The abrupt dislocation, as if a total negation of 'home', creates a structural rupture in the novel. The second half of the novel is featured by the intrusive and self-referent narrator. The disjunctive and jerky narration exposes the failing authoritative narrative which cannot configure Aaron's adventure. Yet the structural complicity of Aaron's Rod defeats any easy application of postmodern narratology which is predicated on the notion of the novel as a linguistic autonomy constitutive of the endless deferral of meaning. This structural oddity rather reveals the nature of the writer's quest for a new mode of representation, which revolves around the concerns about community and individuality. The conflation of structural oddity and theoretical engagement with community invites Jean-Luc Nancy's reflection on 'unworking' and totalitarianism in connection with the Western metaphysics. Nancy's totalitarianism denotes the tendency to view a community as an embodiment of the essence or spirit. Nancy suggests the immanence of totalitarian worldview will be destroyed by reviving 'a thinking of community'. Nancy calls this process 'unworking' of community, which belongs to the anti-philosophical tradition of 'ungrounding'. In so doing, Nancy alludes 'unworking' to the 'unended and unending' literature. Here Nancy's anti-philosophical notion of literature, with a strong resonance of Lawrence's reiteration of the novel as a means to debilitate totalitarianism, sheds new light on the the intrusive narrator of 'word-user'.

D. H. Lawrence is one of the writers whose oeuvre has to be perceived as one organic system. In other words, intertextuality is the very key to grasping his often paradoxical, sensational, and controversial works of art. For example, “Snake,” one of the representative animal poems published in Birds, Beasts, and Flowers (1923), “You Touched Me,” a weird wedding story published in England, My England (first written in 1919, published in 1920 and 1922), and “Sun,” another bizarre story in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories (written around 1920 to 1922, published in 1926 and 1928) share the writer's life-long ambition to create mythology of his own: the myth which attempts to revolutionize the fixed mind that has long been exposed to the tradition of Western civilization. As a radical mythologist, whose goal is to play with the grand narratives and deconstruct the conventional belief system, he re-writes the story of Genesis with a view to rescue the demonic creature “snake” into the real world. In this paper, I would demonstrate that he performs the role of a mythologist which Roland Barthes explores in his 1957 collection of essays, Mythologies; and by understanding the intertextuality of Lawrence's mythopoeic narratives, I would argue that he creates a world where what he calls “a revolution for fun” takes place.

This paper aims to explore some similarities between Maurice Merleau-Ponty and D.H. Lawrence in terms of their evaluation of historical achievements of Paul Cézanne. Merleau-Ponty holds the basic view that human perception arises from the interaction between the human body and the object, not from the Cartesian cogito. In “Cézanne's Doubt,” he also points out that Cézanne is faithful to the phenomenon itself and takes the actual perceptual point of view. Merleau-Ponty sees reality as something active and inexhaustible, and argues that Cézanne made his lifelong struggle to grasp and represent reality as it is. Similarly, Lawrence says that Cézanne's apple realizes the “appleyness” because it is presented just like it “really exists” breaking away from scientist, objectivist, or anthropocentric assumptions of the apple. Lawrence and Merleau-Ponty also have something in common in that they emphasize that human body inextricably intervenes in the act of perception. Nevertheless, unlike Merleau-Ponty, Lawrence relatively devalues the achievement of Cézanne's later watercolor paintings, and this is because Lawrence is mainly committed to criticizing idealism in “The Introduction to These Paintings.” While Merleau-Ponty's arguments are fundamentally based on the theoretical researches of the “primordial perception,” Lawrence directly goes into the kernel of Cézanne as a man and painter, and makes us keenly feel his struggle and appreciate the rarity of his achievement. In spite of these differences, Lawrence's view that imagination is basically “physical and intuitive perception,” obviously has a significant affinity with Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological approach which demands a return to “living experience.”