Professor David Peimer
D.H. Lawrence
Summary
Desire is a common theme in DH Lawrence’s work. He feared the increasing compartmentalisation of emotion, intellect, body and the transactional life. Is Lawrence naive and only speaking to delayed adolescent rebellion? Does he even seem quaint? Does he still inspire an urgent passion for living?
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Yeah, I think he did understand, that’s why I don’t think he romanticises it or idealises in a simplistic way, what he called reaction to the abstraction to the physical. In other words, diving into the passionate, the sexual, the erotic, all of that. I don’t think the irrational, I think he saw its limits. I do. And I think that he saw, but he saw the beauty of it, not only the horror. There is the fatal fascination with fascism. No question, I agree Jack completely. And it’s just there all the time, but I think he saw the other side of it. And I think coming out of the First World War, which is his defining era, is trying to find a non-mechanistic way of living, which is less compartmentalised than, this is emotion, this is intellect, this is his intuition, this is instinct, body, all split. ‘Cause that ironically makes it easier for fascism to kick in.
I think that Victorian literature goes less into inner life of character. And what really drives inner life of character? Irrational, instinctive, messy, complex motives, passions, desires compared to the more structured novel from the Victorian era where it’s a little bit more rational and logical in the way that we access character, motivation, and the structure of plot. And secondly, in the Victorian’s, the story is very, the whole story written in the novel is plot-driven structure. But in the modernist era, it’s mood, atmosphere, more emotion driven.