Structurally, the coordinate title Sea and Sardinia suggests metonymy and synecdoche. As Lawrence remarks at the outset of a later of travel sketches: says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town.... All it amounts to is one little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down at the page of his exercise book (Mornings 3). through selection and combination, one moment can stand for many and one place for a country or ethos. What Lawrence called Spirit of Place is born of a momentary interaction between the writer's perspective powers, shaped his experience, and external geography. In this encounter the strange and the familiar throw each other into relief; the traveler looks inward as well as outward and compares the scene before him with remembered scenes. stimulus of unfamiliar landscapes can activate the deepest desires, dreams, and values (cf. Tracy 2-3). Mark Schorer affirms, is probably no other writer in literary history whose works responded so immediately to his geographical environment as Lawrence, and certainly there is no other modern writer to whose imagination `place' made such a direct and intense appeal (282). In his review of H. M. Tomlinson's Gifts of Fortune, Lawrence proclaims: We travel, perhaps, with a secret and absurd hope of setting foot on the Hesperides.... One gradually gets a new vision of the world, if one goes through the disillusion absolutely. It is a world where all things are alive (Phoenix 343, 345). To Lawrence, the quest for the Hesperides gave way to the challenge of self-discovery. traveler brings his perceptual habits and expectations with him, but his vision is renewed new scenes. Sea and Sardinia fully exploits Lawrence's volatile, hypersensitive temperament. suppose one carries one's own self wherever one goes, he writes. But one undergoes a metamorphosis also (Letters III: 353). self, scenes in memory or geological strata, is many-layered. Aware of his own changeable responses, Lawrence acknowledges that Italy has given me back I know not what of myself, but a very, very great deal. She has found for me so much that was lost: a restored Osiris. But, he adds, apart from the great rediscovery backwards . . . there is a move forwards. There are unknown, unworked lands where the salt has not lost its savour (Sea 131). Such primordial landscapes include the Sardinian moors. Lawrence considered Sea and Sardinia an exact and real travel book: no stunt, rather a marvel of veracity, and pretty vivid as a flash-light travel book (Letters IV: 27, 35, 58-59). reality and vividness of the writing are based on immediate perception; Lawrence relives his travels in the act of writing them. We are always in the smithy, says Anthony Burgess, watching the verbal hammering (110). Burgess, who finds Sea and Sardinia by far the best introduction to [Lawrence's] oeuvre, adds: The sharpness of Lawrence's eye is incredible. flexible prose combined with sharp observation in loosely articulated structures suggests a writer on holiday from more strenuous tasks. Metonymy dominates in travel writings, where direct visual experience precedes commentary and reflection. there are frequent shifts from metonymy to metaphor (Jakobson) and from thing-in-itself to things as geographical,, psychological, or cultural signs. Objects juxtaposed in space on the combinative axis of perception (metonymy) fuse with projections on the substitutive axis of imagination (metaphor). Lawrence's visual representation is so vivid that Sea and Sardinia can be seen in spatial terms, unrolling the journey, or like a highly colored Oriental processional scroll, crowded, brilliant, clearly drawn, largely objectified and curiously detached (Weiner 233). form is mimetic but the vision is open to continuous transmutation. Lawrence launches Sea and Sardinia with a list of items to be packed. …
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Jun 1, 1995
Gilian Wohlauer + 1
