The Savage Pilgrimage: D.H. Lawrence’s Dialogic Journeys upon Monte Verità, the Mountain of Truth

Abstract

At the center of D.H. Lawrence’s enormous corpus of poetry, short stories, novels, and literary criticism is Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one of a long line of censored classics described in a recent work as Dirt for Art Sake. Despite the popularity of Lawrence’s writings, however, and the notoriety he
gained from legal proceedings initiated against him in the name of censorship, few critics have situated his literary and cultural quest as regards his intense intellectual engagement with contemporary counter-culture in Germany and in Switzerland and many, perhaps as a consequence, deride or shun his more bawdy work. In this paper, I will argue that examples of contemporary counterculture, and in particular his engagement with ideas emanating from the anarchist, bohemian, nudist, sun-worshipping, vegetarian, artistic colony at Monte Verità, were key catalysts for the dialogic and carnivalesque qualities of works such as Sun and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This talk will trace the historical and ideological tentacles that connect Lawrence’s work to contemporary counter-culture, and then conclude by linking his approach to the writings of M.M. Bakhtin, whose corpus reads like a ‘how-to’ manual for readers willing to truly engage Lawrence’s bawdy, earthy, dialogic writing.