Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Since the beginning of this century the issues of modernism and postcolonialism have begun to be addressed together, resulting in the term “postcolonial modernism.” Lawrence has benefited from this trend, as opposed to in the past, when the issues were discussed separately. Even so, a kind of extremism seems to characterize general assessments of Lawrence nowadays. On the one hand, Lawrence is regarded as a modernist who shared colonialist assumptions about the colonized, a complicity branded by Edward Said’s term “orientalism.” On the other, modernist Lawrence is said to have turned to the colonized’s culture for the regeneration of “finished” Western traditions. Therefore, this paper proposes to address the question, “How can these two seemingly incompatible assessments be attended to?” It will draw on insights Lawrence gave in his last work, “Apocalpyse,” in which he doubts the ethnological notion of “Urdummheit” (translated by Lawrence as “primal stupidity”), which he thinks might have been invented for an “offset.” Thus thinking of this “primal stupidity” as a “theoretical fiction,” to use Gayatri Spivak’s words, the paper compares the Lawrentian version of postcolonial modernism with versions forwarded by other modernist writers.