ASSIGNMENT

NAME: HRISHIKESH SINGHA DEKA

ROLL NO: 191 (2016 BATCH)
PAPER: 6.3 (ARREAR)
CODE: A-16001, UNIVESITY ROLL NO: 0200

Lawrence's idea of "Pen"

D. H. Lawrence’s “Pan in America” is a sweeping inquiry into being and a sustained
consideration of humanity’s position alongside the many actors of the natural world. “Pan in
America” offers an apt coda to Green Modernism because it restates the book’s major themes:
nature is important to modernism, nature is a discursive force in modernist social negotiations,
and nature’s material presence has been swept under the carpet of consciousness. In the context
of Lawrence’s literary output from the 1920s, “Pan” is another place Lawrence redeems the
material world for a culture lost in instrumental and idealist paradigms of existence. “Pan”
describes—and in a sense prescribes—a lifeworld shared by human and nonhuman actors who
all have agency and mutually shape the pattern of experience. The rocks and the animals and the
image of Pan himself combine to displace the Cartesian orthodoxy of an inert world at the feet of
an active human subject. In its place Lawrence offers readers nature as a complex, material realm
where vigorous things interpenetrate human experience, and where “man” is redeemed by “a
ceaseless living relation to his surrounding universe”. “Pan” stakes out an ontological position
that subverts the romanticism of which Lawrence is accused and anticipates today’s discussions
of materialism, the nonhuman turn, object-oriented ontology, and the limits of poststructuralism.

The significance of Pan as a god representing nature and its many dimensions, accommodating a
quiet, bur responsive ambience has been well acknowledged in the Western cultural tradition.But
the reception of Pan has not always followed the same trajectory. Wordsworth, for instance,
sought to engage with Pan in terms of what nature suggested and offered for human conduct and
action, nature acting as one of the cornerstones in his poetic philosophy.

The mere engagement of an ethos that seeks to understand Nature in an all-encompassing role is
what Lawrence asks questions of.That is why he does not subscribe to the idea that the display of
affinity with Nature is the only way to make sense of the way life operates.A telling example of
this is evident when he is critical of the nineteenth-century American poet, Walt Whitman: "all
Walt is Pan, but all Pan is not Walt.” Lawrence is critical of the tradition in which Pan is placed,
especially when it comes to aesthetic representation, for he feels that there is a shift in focus, and
the association of Pan with Nature does not quite justify the way it should be done. For
Lawrence, there is a paradox at the heart of Pan, a figure whose emergence in Western culture
has often been taken to represent a quiet and innocuous nature.But Pan is not to be seen or
understood only in terms of its supposed calm and quiet aspects; for Pan has the aggressive side
too, which, once it is active, can overwhelm static modes of functioning.What Lawrence is trying
to argue is that the idea of Pan must be approached and accessed without disengaging that aspect
which complements his image as a quiet, calm god of Nature.

The multiple dimensions of Nature cannot be appreciated by just the idea of the picturesque and
calm that Pan is conventionally associated with, but the ignored side of the mythical figure must
brought to bear on the proper understanding of nature and the human response to it.
Lawrence's reappropriation of the Pan myth for a sustained, and involved response to the
environment is presented by means of an argument that draws on the practice of reciprocity.He
comes down on the problematic and partial representation of Pan in literature and art, suggesting
that the ways in which the Greek god has been reduced to a bystander occupied with a limited
space and range, such reduction does not present the balance that is at the heart of the mannature
relationship.

Lawrence looks at the need for a more nuanced and subtle understanding of the circumstances in
which the world of nature encompasses man and his activities.Failure to come to terms with the
environment can lead to a crisis from which recovery would be almost impossible. When he
looks at the parallel possibilities through the register of the oppositional terms of 'savage' and
'civilized' bo is not arguing for a return to the days prior to civilization.

What he is arguing for is a more accommodative response whereby it would be possible to

extend the human view beyond the merely mechanical. For such a holistic response to be
engendered in man, it is imperative that the world be seen for its organicity, and not simply
reduced to some form of space which is bounded by physical limits.

Lawrence calls for overhauling of that restrictive attitude which hampers the widening of the
human vision. Pan, for Lawrence, becomes a principle, one which constitutes the very idea of
freedom and a fetter free environment where no constraints impinge upon the very condition of
existence.He is, in other words, arguing for a form of life that does not subject itself to
mechanized formats, but rather, opens up to engage with the vast possibilities of living that a
sustained involvement with the environment facilitates.

In spite of the fact that this essay by Lawrence was published in 1924, almost a century ago, the
call for a reciprocal understanding of the world in which we live not only remains very vital to
the state of the world, it also brings to the limelight the importance of the joy of submitting
oneself freely to the environment that moulds us from the beginning.