No tradition. No culture history. Introduction to Lawrence's 'America, Listen To Your Own'

In his ‘America, Listen to Your Own’, analysed by Cristina Consiglio, D. H. Lawrence invites America to recover her past, her ‘native’ culture. For him, ‘native’ means primitive, wild, what remains of the Indian culture, inscribed in the soil, the land of the ‘New World’. First conceived and originally planned as a ‘Foreword’ to an early version of Studies in Classic American Literature, this brief essay was written by D. H. Lawrence in Florence, before he travelled to America, and it was published as ‘America, Listen to Your Own’ in The New Republic on 15 December 1920. Lawrence’s interest in American writers grew gradually alongside his desire to see America with his own eyes. At the end of 1916, in a well-known letter to his friend Catherine Carswell, he wrote that he wanted to leave England forever to go to the New World, and his aim was ‘to transfer all his life there’. His belief in America had been framed in part by the American authors he had been reading from his childhood on, and partly by the idea of producing a set of essays which would be publishable in America at a time when he found it almost impossible to get his work published in England. In this essay, Lawrence uses America as a metaphor to disrupt and revise what he saw as a predominantly Eurocentric consciousness. The main themes are power, beauty, tradition and the connection between history, culture and literature. Each new wave of becoming was looked down on as barbarian by the older culture, which then, in turn, had to make way for the next kind of beauty. Beauty is seen as something fluid, ever-growing, not limited by tradition. In Lawrence’s words ‘there are no limits to the human race’. The lack of tradition was and still has to be considered an opportunity, a blank space to be filled with creative ideas and actions.