Jae-kyung Koh: D. H. Lawrence and the Great War. The Quest for Cultural Regeneration

• Andrew Harrison

In the “Introduction” to this study of Lawrence and the Great War, Jae-kyung Koh claims that his book will focus on “the polymorphous effects, social, political, psychological, of the war, on and in Lawrence’s work” (p. 15). The book begins with an overview of Lawrence’s response to the Great War, before concentrating on readings of texts directly related to it (or containing themes connected with it). Koh discusses Lawrence’s sense that the Great War represented the end of a Christian civilization which had privileged the “love-mode” at the expense of the “power-mode”, repressing pre-Christian pagan forces and unleashing destructive, reactive violence in the process. Lawrence is said to view destruction as a necessary prelude to a new mode of life and a new kind of being. This is the origin of a comparison Koh draws between Lawrence and Michel Foucault: Koh claims that “Lawrence’s historical vision parallels Michel Foucault’s paradoxical vision of historical development as an endlessly repeated movement of discontinuity and continuity” (p. 15).

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