1

In Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) Lawrence makes something of a prophecy:

While the Red Indian existed in fairly large numbers the new colonials were in a great measure immune from the daimon, or demon of America. The moment the last nuclei of Red life break up in America, then the white men will have to reckon with the full force of the demon of the continent. At present the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians act within the unconscious or under-conscious soul of the white American, causing the great American grouch, the Orestes-like frenzy of restlessness in the Yankee soul…. Up till now, the unexpressed spirit of America has worked covertly in the American, the white American soul. But within the present generation the surviving Red Indians are due to merge in the great white swamp. Then the Daimon of America will work overtly, and we shall see real changes.^[2]

About a century further on, the absolute decline in the number of the Native American population seems to have been halted (or reversed, the so-called Red Indians becoming increasingly visible since the founding of American Indian Movement in late 1960s). In proportional terms and in relation to the overwhelming dominance of the mainstream white culture, it is nonetheless arguable that surviving Red Indians have virtually been “merge[d] in the great white swamp.” The point, however, is whether or not we in the twenty-first century witness Lawrence’s ‘real changes’, and to what extent they may be attributed to ‘the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians’.

But let me first indicate that my discussion rests on the premise that, despite the talk of the demons of the place and ghost of dead Indians, the book presents a cogent historical narrative tracing the history of the United States since the colonial days. For all its idiosyncratic language, Lawrence’s approach seems essentially in line with that of ‘historical materialism’, namely, attending to the actual motives and their material consequences rather than the historical actors’ own perceptions and ideals. Thus he begins the book by challenging the myth of Puritan settlers first coming to New England in search of freedom of worship:

He [the settler from England] didn’t come in search of freedom of worship. England had more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had. Won by Englishmen who wanted freedom, and so stopped at home and fought for it. And got it. Freedom of worship? Read the history of New England during the first century of its existence.

Freedom anyhow? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that’s my freedom.… (SCAL 14-15)

And he goes on to reflect on the nature of freedom: 

Men are less free than they imagine; ah, far less free. The freest are perhaps least free.

Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. Men are free when they are obeying some deep, inward voice of religious belief. Obeying from within. Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealised purpose. Not when they are escaping to some wild west. The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom. (Ibid., 17)

Nor did the white settler come to ‘discover’ an empty continent. The myth of an ‘empty continent’ (terra vida) is another prominent feature (with appropriate variations) of what is increasingly identified as ‘settler colonialism’: distinguished from ordinary (‘classical’ or ‘franchise’) colonialism. Unlike the latter, ‘settler colonialism’ tends to be relatively (though of course not absolutely) indifferent to exploiting the colonized population, aiming mainly at taking the land of the original occupants, expelling and where necessary eliminating them. The case of white settlers in North America and their dealings with Native Americans would fit this pattern.^[3] Cases of ordinary colonialism abound both in pre-modern conquests and modern imperialism. We may note that within the United States enslavement of and racial discrimination against African Americans would constitute an internal racist variant of classical colonialism. Lawrence focuses on white settlers’ dispossession of the Native Americans, though he is not unaware of the plight of the black slaves (as shown in the Whitman chapter).

Another premise underlying my reading of Lawrence’s book is that his understanding of American history through its ‘classic’ literary works manages to reach an uncommon depth precisely because the literary criticism, again for all its idiosyncrasies, represents a serious attempt at objective analysis and true judgment. Indeed, we may observe once again that Lawrence’s readings come closer to classical literary practice of attending to the text itself rather than to the author’s conscious intentions: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale” (SCAL 14) is a dictum most critics would espouse. In fact, the very notion of American authors’ ‘duplicity’ could be seen as a strong version of Friedrich Engels’ ‘triumph of realism’ in Balzac’s novels, even though Lawrence’s term represents a much stronger version inasmuch as elements of the tale itself actively work to undermine its own ‘triumph’, a peculiar feature of classical American literature owing to the impediments to honest self-understanding caused by America’s peculiar history.

Here I will adduce Michael Bell’s remarks on F. R. Leavis’s critical practice to support my appraisal of Studies in Classic American Literature. Not that I feel certain that Bell himself would agree with my view of Lawrence’s critical practice. For in his discussion of the Dana chapter (ch. 9), he focuses on the ‘mythopoeic’ understanding through which Lawrence in a sense rewrites Dana’s sober scientific narrative (Bell, 2023). He also remarks on the contrast between Leavis’s critical readings and “the more overt case of D. H. Lawrence, whose reading of Hardy or the American writers is frankly that of a creative artist.” (Bell, 2016, 184)^[4] Yet I find what Bell terms the ‘heart of Leavis’s practice’ to be essentially Lawrence’s as well, for all the difference in style and the relative distance from ‘common sense’:

I believe the peculiar intensity of Leavis’s reading of a text lies in his habit of putting himself imaginatively into the condition of its nonexistence. He does not just follow the lines of the work but invokes the sometimes stupendous process of its creation. 

This is not, of course, the literal process as understood biographically, nor a scholarly reconstruction as from successive drafts…. It is something more counterfactual and abyssal. To imagine the world without this work having been written, or without this author having lived, would be in many instances extraordinarily difficult. … Can we imagine a world of which Shakespeare’s plays are not a part? To put it in this way provides a further clue, perhaps, to how a given work might be judged as “major.” If it is easy to imagine its nonexistence, then it is not of this order. Where it is impossible to imagine its nonexistence, however, the work is likely to be major but also, for that very reason, the more likely to be threatened with banality. Not so much banality at the level of appreciating quality, as we can always be newly moved by a fresh performance or rereading, but banality at the radical level of taking its existence for granted. The banality in question is that of assuming a given field, however much connoisseurship it may sustain, as opposed to sustaining the aesthetic virtuality of the field itself. (Ibid., 183)^[5]

But would not these striking and to my knowledge highly original observations on Leavis apply also to Lawrence’s ‘quarreling’ with his favored authors like Hardy and the classical Americans? Bell remarks in an earlier passage of the same essay: “The resulting mixture of evaluative asseveration and apparent personal aggression has constantly distracted attention from the fact that he had a powerful and coherent conception of reading. … I believe it is not ultimately an idiosyncratic conception but deeply representative, and his effect is often, like that of Socrates and the later Wittgenstein, to expose common-sense wisdom” (172).

If Lawrence’s finest criticism lacked this ‘deeply representative’ quality, Leavis’s estimation of Lawrence as probably the greatest critic (as well as novelist) of his time would hardly be justified.

2

The combination of these two features, namely Lawrence’s essentially ‘materialist’ reading of history and the ‘deeply representative’ nature of his literary criticism, produces invaluable insights regarding both America’s past and contemporary global reality. Yet another distinction of Lawrence’s book is that it presents also a radical alternative rather than stopping at diagnosis. We shall address this particular aspect later in relation to the ‘Open Road’expounded in the Whitman chapter.

To return to settler colonialism, Lawrence finds a typical example of the settler colonialist mentality in the first ‘classic’ American writer he takes up, the author of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, one of the Republic’s ‘founding fathers’, a successful businessman, inventor, diplomat, and Post-Master General in George Washington’s first cabinet. Franklin is not (and Lawrence does not consider him) a creative writer, hence the method of reading him resembles not so much a creative quarreling as that of a deconstructionist who focuses on a detail in the text to expose the “first dummy American” (SCAL 20) and his smug illusions. 

On his travels to the frontiers of his home state Pennsylvania, Franklin spent a night enduring the tumult of Indians drinking, quarreling and fighting among themselves. In the morning they sent emissaries to apologize, but claiming that since the Great Spirit made rum, it must be for some use, that is, for the Indians to get drunk with. Whereupon Franklin reflects: “And, indeed, if it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth, it seems not improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited all the sea coast—.” (25)

Lawrence rejoins:

This from the good doctor, with such suave complacency, is a little disenchanting. Almost too good to be true.

But there you are! The barbed wire fence. “Extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the earth.” Oh Benjamin Benjamin! He even “used venery” as a cultivator of seed.

Cultivate the earth, ye gods! The Indians did that, as much as they needed. And they left off there. Who built Chicago? Who cultivated the earth and it spawned Pittsburgh, Pa.? (SCAL 26)

As a matter of fact, in most settler colonial studies the United States does not constitute a prominent topic, probably because in this almost inaugural instance^[6] settler colonialism was so successful in its aim of expropriating the land and making indigenous people (mostly) vanish, rather than appropriating markets and labor for the purpose of exploitation (as in classical colonialism and imperialism). Indeed, the indigenous population largely vanished from the white settlers’ consciousness as well—even in the pages of progressive historians condemning the injustice and racism against African Americans. 

But Lawrence’s prediction we noted at the beginning of this article emphasizes that it is by no means the end of the story. In the opening sentences of Chapter 4 “Fenimore Cooper’s White Novels” Lawrence succinctly formulates the abiding consequences:

Benjamin Franklin had a specious little equation in providential mathematics:

Rum + Savage = 0.

Awfully nice! You might add up the universe to nought, if you kept on.

Rum plus Savage may equal a dead savage. But is a dead savage nought? Can you make a land virgin by killing off its aborigines?

The Aztec is gone, and the Incas. The Red Indian, the Esquimo, the Patagonian are reduced to negligible numbers.

Où sont les neiges d’antan?

My dear, wherever they are, they will come down again next winter, sure as houses.

Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America again. At least I presume not. But his ghost will. (SCAL, 42)

The Red Indian’s ‘ghost’ would certainly strike the modern reader as idiosyncratic, even superstitious. But, whether or not the historian and social analyst accommodates the term, we need to note that Lawrence’s focus is on the aftereffects of the dispossession and virtual elimination of the native population, rather than on the crime of genocide as such or on current issues of relations with Native American survivors within the United States. In other words, he aims at the study and diagnosis of the continuing psychic trauma in American history. 

Indeed, it would be hard to deny that some ‘real changes’ have occurred over the past decades both in the U.S. foreign relations and on its domestic scene, including interracial relations. The U.S. policy toward hostile nations has always shown greater affinity with settler colonialism than classical colonialism and imperialism, but in the age of neoliberalism and America’s global domination, outright dispossession of poor nations and what the Australian scholar Lorenzo Veracini calls ‘accumulation without reproduction’ have become the rule rather than exceptions (Veracini, 2019). On the domestic scene the slogan Black Lives Matter dramatically brings out the changes that have occurred in the Black-White relations. For in the past, especially in the days of slavery but also for a long time afterwards, black lives did matter very much to the whites, as property and/or exploitable labor force. Now they have increasingly become expendable, objects of containment, elimination or expulsion. The state is, says Veracini, 

not aiming at sustaining an unequal relation as it once did. It is now aiming at discontinuing that relation. This state (i.e., the United States) is no longer a colonial state (for example, a state that supervises a type of internal colonialism); this state is a settler-colonial state. It always was, of course, but primarily and foundationally against indigenous peoples; now it is aiming at discontinuing relations with other constituencies as well and is treating black people more and more like American Indians. (Veracini, ibid., 131)^[7]

Nor are the victims confined to blacks and minorities: the whole U.S. society now appears helplessly paralyzed before endemic gun violence. Though frequently motivated by racial hatred, it also indiscriminately targets white children and teenagers as well, recalling Lawrence’s prediction about the ‘great American grouch’ coming to work more fatally and overtly. 

At this point the contemporary case of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine deserves a special consideration, particularly in view of the genocidal actions being perpetrated in the Gaza strip. From the very beginning in 1948 (‘Nakba’) it was notable for its blatant occupation of another people’s land and forcible expulsion of the native Arabs, culminating in the massacre of women and children as well as male civilians (en plein jour so to speak) in the newest military actions since October 2023. What makes this possible would require careful analysis. But surely the unquestioning support by the original settler colonial power USA and the global dominance of that power now increasingly reverting to the settler-colonialist mode (rather than the standard imperialism, which of course it also practices) reinforces the settler-colonialist nature of Israel’s occupation and perhaps presages the final downfall of both Zionism and the larger colonial project of ‘Western civilization’. If that should ever happen,^[8] Lawrence’s prediction of ‘real changes’will have come true with a vengeance.

3

Benjamin Franklin’s ‘extirpating the savages’, however, signifies only one side of the settler colonialist mentality. Crèvecoeur’s romantic glorification of Red Indians represents the other side (SCAL, ch. 3). Fenimore Cooper’s ‘Leatherstocking novels’ manage to project “the nucleus of a new society … a new human relationship” (SCAL 58) but only as “a myth, not a realistic tale” (63), while Edgar Allan Poe grimly faces and records the process of disintegration, “rather a scientist than an artist” (66). Hawthorne carries on the story of disintegration-processes further, but being a greater artist produces in The Scarlet Letter “one of the greatest allegories in all literature…. Its marvellous under-meaning! And its perfect duplicity” (95). Having reached that artistic apex but no true relatedness yet with the American soil, “in the next great move of imaginative conquest, Americans turned to the sea” (106): thus on to Dana (chapter 9) and Melville (chapters 10-11). 

This final great quest in the sea ends in the sinking of the Pequod, the whaling ship with 

[A] maniac captain and his three mates, three splendid sea-men, admirable whale-men, first class men at their job.

America! 

…

A maniac captain of the soul, and three eminently practical mates.

America!

Then such a crew: Renegades, castaways, cannibals:…

America! (137) 

The white whale itself Lawrence sees as “the deepest blood-being of the white race” (146), and “the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul”(147). But if so, Lawrence asks, what comes after? 

But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what’s been happening ever since?

Post mortem effects, presumably. (147)

Lawrence’s answer in the final Whitman chapter of Studies in Classic American Literature is by no means a simple yes or no. In an earlier version of the essay (1921-2) he called Whitman “the last and the greatest of the Americans” (SCAL 403), “great like a great Greek” (414). But the final version of the Whitman essay returns to the pending question:

Post mortem effects?

But what of Walt Whitman?

The “good grey poet.”

Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?

…

What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.

So that you see, the sinking of the Pequod was only a metaphysical tragedy after all. The world goes on just the same. The ship of the soul is sunk. But the machine-manipulating body works just the same: digests, chews gum, admires Botticelli and aches with amorous love. (148)

Lawrence’s literary-critical appraisal of Whitman’s poetry seems particularly attractive and judicious because, on one hand, he demystifies much of the work of ‘the poet-laureate of American democracy’ and shows it to be indeed post-mortem effects, a continuation of the idealist claims and assertions ingrained in the American psyche. Lawrence even notes a vestige of settler colonialist mentality in Whitman’s utter disregard, when he chants ONE IDENTITY, of the Red Indian: “ALLNESS! shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whizz over an unwary Red Indian” (152). 

Yet Lawrence also identifies a different, authentic and truly original achievement in Whitman’s oeuvre. I concur with Lawrence’s high valuation of poems like “Scented Herbage of My Breast,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” I wish, however, to turn to “Song of the Open Road,” in which Lawrence finds the “heroic message of the American future” (157): “Whitman’s essential message was the Open Road. The leaving of the soul free unto herself, the leaving of his fate to her and to the loom of the open road. Which is the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself”. (158)

It is a rather long poem, in fifteen stanzas, and contains the expansive cataloguing familiar in Whitman’s poetry. But the point no longer is ‘merging’with the objects catalogued but letting them be what they are and where they are: 

The earth, that is sufficient, 

I do not want the constellations any nearer, 

I know they are very well where they are, 

I know they suffice for those who belong to them. (Whitman, “The Song of the Open Road,” ll. 8-11)

In contrast to the liberal creed of ‘doing what one likes’ (castigated by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy), the free soul journeying on the open road gives full consideration to what others say, “Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,/ Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me” (Ibid., ll. 56-57). She thus comes to possess wisdom of a new kind: “Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,/ Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having to another not having it,/ Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof,” (ll. 77-79). 

Lawrence praises Whitman for being the “the first to break the mental allegiance” (SCAL 156) to the old morality that all American artists suffered from:

The Open Road. The great home of the soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not “above.” Not “within.” The soul is neither “above” nor “within.” It is a wayfarer down the open road.

Not by meditating. Nor by fasting. Not by exploring heaven after heaven, inwardly, in the manner of the great mystics. Not by exaltation. Not by ecstasy. Not by any of these ways does the soul come into her own.

Only by taking the open road. (156)

The radical break with Christian (and indeed any monotheistic) religion and morality is quite obvious. The emphasis on the journey and wayfarer reminds one of the East Asian notion of the Way (dao), but Whitman’s open road firmly rejects any fixed social hierarchy such as was assumed in Confucianism and in most traditional societies. Buddhism’s practice of the Way would come closer, but not the Southern or Theravada vision of the peace through individual self’s extinction at the end of the road; for both Whitman and Lawrence, wayfaring per se is the thing. Certain strands of Northern Buddhism, however, would show a greater affinity, a subject for further study and exploration.^[9]

But what about democracy? All types of modern democracy (liberal democracy, social democracy, socialism, communism) have espoused equality, and so does Whitman eminently, but the latter’s is the equality of free souls possessing wisdom of a new kind, that “cannot be pass’d from one having to another not having it,” and “not susceptible of proof.” Only those who have taken to the open road, throwing away all outmoded allegiances, will have it—including the ability to recognize others who have it, and wisdom to recognize greater wisdom should they encounter such on the open road. 

Here Lawrence finally manages to resolve the age-old dilemma of equality vs. real democratic leadership—though somewhat belatedly, for even in the 1921-22 version Lawrence was harping on “the last, the final leader of men, the sacred tyrannus” (SCAL 416). But in the published final version he comes to a ringing affirmation of true democracy:

The true democracy, where soul meets soul, in the open road. Democracy. American democracy where all journey down the open road. …

The love of man and woman: a recognition of souls, and a communion of worship. The love of comrades: a recognition of souls, and a communion of worship. Democracy: a recognition of souls, all down the open road, and a great soul seen in its greatness, as it travels on foot among the rest, down the common way of the living. A glad recognition of souls, and gladder worship of great and greater souls, because they are the only riches. (161)

Will America produce enough great souls and “white aboriginal[s]” (157) in time to build Whitman’s (and Lawrence’s) true democracy, reversing its leading role in the globalization of settler colonialism? At the moment the prospects seem fairly dim, though whatever positive signs, however isolated, ought not to be disregarded. Indeed, one could question how firmly Lawrence himself was convinced, outside these truly memorable passages in the final version of the Whitman essay. For the idea does not figure prominently in his subsequent works. As a matter of fact, The Plumed Serpent (1926), the highly ambitious novelistic venture immediately following the Whitman chapter and contemporaneous New Mexican essays, embarks on an attempt to narrate and describe a ‘real’ political and religious movement of indigenous Mexican people involving the ‘return’ of Aztec gods. The venture can hardly be deemed an artistic success. But it shows Lawrence was a serious enough thinker and artist not to rest satisfied with the declaration of principles concerning the Open Road and exposition of “the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself” (158).

Humanity’s survival will not depend on what happens in a single nation or country. Struggle for true democracy comparable to Whitman’s and Lawrence’s vision is going on in other lands, including Korea, and these multifarious endeavors will have to somehow converge in order to transform the world. But what happens in the United States certainly will affect greatly the upshot for the entire world.

Works Cited

Bell, Michael. “Creativity and Pedagogy in Leavis.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 40, no. 1, 2016, pp. 176-88.

_______. “Lawrence, Dana and the Destructive Element.” Études Lawrenciennes, vol. 55, https://doi.org/10.4000/lawrence.3548. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Englert, Sai. Settler Colonialism: An Introduction. Pluto Press, 2022.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. “Racism as Structure: A Framework for Comparative Studies of U.S. Race and Gender Formation.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 52–72.

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature, edited by Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen. Cambridge UP, 2003.

Leavis, F. R. “‘Life’ is a Necessary Word.” Nor Shall My Sword. Chatto and Windus, 1972.

Lordon, Frédéric. “End of Innocence.” New Left Review blog ‘Sidecar’, 12 April 2024, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/end-of-innocence. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Paik, Nak-chung. “Lawrencean Buddhism? An Attempt at a Literal Reading of ‘The Ship of Death’.” D. H. Lawrence Review, vol. 40, no. 2, 2015, pp. 103-19.

Pappé, Ilan. “The Collapse of Zionism.” New Left Review blog ‘Sidecar’, 21 June 2024, https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/the-collapse-of-zionism?pc=1610. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Veracini, Lorenzo. “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity: Settler Colonialism in the Global Present.” Rethinking Marxism, vol. 31, no. 1, 2019, pp. 118-40.

_______. “Germany’s Anti-Antisemitic Complex and the Question of Settler Colonialism.” Islamophobia Studies Journal, vol. 7, no. 1, 2022, pp. 96-107.

_______. “Introducing: Settler Colonial Studies.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1-12.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass, Norton Critical Edition, edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett, W. W. Norton, 1974.

Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, pp. 387-409.

Settler Colonialism and the ‘Open Road’: 
Apropos of Studies in Classic American Literature

Abstract

Nak-chung Paik

This paper begins by citing Lawrence’s prediction in Studies in Classic American Literature that in the near future the influence of dead Native Americans on U.S. society will begin to work in earnest and that some “real changes” will occur. I then go on to examine whether or not we in the twenty-first century actually witness Lawrence’s ‘real changes’, and to what extent they may be attributed to “the demon of the place and the unappeased ghosts of the dead Indians”, as asserted by Lawrence. This examination rests on two assumptions regarding Lawrence’s Studies: 1) that its historical narrative represents a highly iconoclastic yet essentially coherent rendering of the history of white settlers in North America and their settler colonialism; 2) that his readings of classic American authors too, for all the idiosyncrasy of expression, manage to capture the deep meaning behind the ‘duplicity’ that characterizes creative American works. In this narrative the sinking of the whaling ship Moby-Dick marks the final destruction of the white man’s ‘blood being’. Lawrence’s greatness lies, however, in his going beyond mere diagnosis and in finding in Whitman’s ‘Open Road’ a new vision of true democracy, “the bravest doctrine man has ever proposed to himself.”

Key Words

Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence, settler colonialism, Melville, Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”, F. R. Leavis.

백낙청

서울대학교 영어영문학과 명예교수

---

 * An earlier version of this essay was presented orally at Session 5 of the 15^th International D. H. Lawrence Conference in Taos, New Mexico, USA, July 19, 2022. It has been considerably revised and expanded, but the basic argument remains unchanged and the original title also has been retained.

^[2] Lawrence, 2003 (henceforth SCAL), 42-43.

^[3] Pioneers in settler colonialism studies would include Wolfe, 2006, and Veracini, 2011. More recently, objections have been raised against the “sharp distinction between settler and franchise colonialism on the basis of elimination and exploitation” (Englert, 2022, 15), as hardly squaring with the diverse examples of settler colonialism, and as possibly minimizing the liberation struggle of surviving indigenous populations. I do not feel competent to join this debate, but there seems no doubt that Lawrence’s book offers an identification avant la lettre of Wolfe’s and Veracini’s ‘settler colonialism’ in an unusually pure form. Regarding parallels and contrasts with contemporary Israeli occupation of Palestine, I shall have more to say later.

^[4] The quotation goes on: “Lawrence takes over these authors’ projects by quarrelling with their interpretation of their own material. Leavis, by contrast, scrupulously observes the protocols of critical impersonality yet communicates, at his best, a comparable sense of the precariousness of the heuristic process.” (Idem.)

^[5] I may note in passing that I share Leavis’s demurral at the term ‘aesthetic’, for aesthetics after all is a branch of properly Western (i.e., post-Socratic) philosophy, which Heidegger calls ‘metaphysics’, and thus must fall short of doing full justice to Leavis’s ‘anti-philosophic’ notion of artistic creativity. Leavis himself opts for the academically even more dubious term ‘life’ (Leavis, 1972, “‘Life’ is a Necessary Word,” 11–37).

^[6] Some may take issue with the term ‘inaugural’, citing the instance of the Spanish conquest of Latin America that preceded the white settlement in North America. However, as the use of the word ‘conquest’ (conquista) implies, the invasion and settlement by the Spaniards more resembled pre-modern conquests than a phenomenon of capitalist modernity. The flow of American wealth thus did not bring about development of capitalist institutions in Spain, and the Netherlands proved the main beneficiary in that respect to become the first real hegemon of the new world-system.

^[7] Evelyn Nakano Glenn introduces the gender dimension into settler colonialism, but endorses the thesis that the racism against Blacks in U.S. history derives from the ‘red-white binary’ in the foundational settler colonialism (even employing the word ‘ghosts’ though not so literally as does Lawrence): “Given the transformation of Native Americans into ghosts, it is not surprising that everyday conceptions of race came to be organized around a black-white binary rather than a red-white binary” (Glenn, 2015, 60).

^[8] See the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé’s “The Collapse of Zionism,” in the New Left Review blog ‘Sidecar’ (Pappé, 2024). The French economist and philosopher Frédéric Lordon (who cites Pappé on ‘settlement-based colonization’) asserted in an earlier posting in the same blog, “End of Innocence,” 12 April 2024: “What we are witnessing is moral suicide. … It turns out that the time for symbolic reckoning is coming for everyone, especially for this colonial project which calls itself the West and claims a monopoly on civilisation, yet wages violence in the name of its principles.”
Lorenzo Veracini also has explicitly linked the problem with settler colonialism, focusing on the unusually fervent support for Israel on the part of Germany and the blatant suppression there of all pro-Palestine expressions, indeed of any serious interest in the question of Palestine as such. See Veracini, 2022, 96-107.

^[9] For an initial effort see my essay, “Lawrencean Buddhism? An Attempt at a Literal Reading of ‘The Ship of Death’.”

영미문학연구
Journal of English Studies in Korea
47 (2024): 24-25
http://doi.org/10.46562/jesk.47.1