Balancing on the Margin, or The Ex-Centric Topographies in D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo

D.H. Lawrence was a modernist writer whose name and works were often labeled “eccentric.” His novel Kangaroo (1923) evoked radically opposing responses: as Lawrence’s fantasy intertwined with his biography whereby he virtually exercised his own charismatic mission of a leader (Harrison), and regarding the book as the author’s “mapping” of Australian landscapes to match those of his own mind (Deggan). I intend to show that in Kangaroo Lawrence makes his semi-autobiographical character Somers balance on the marginal topographies of space and psyche. With the former, everything in Australia proves eccentric: the nature-beaten house, countryside, sea and the bush. With the latter, authoritarianism (represented by the imaginary leader Benjamin Cooley, Kangaroo) brings to light highly eccentric psychic structures, such as Kangaroo’s discourse: it soars to the margins of intelligibility and switches to the rhetoric of eccentricity, making imagination approximate obsession. The novel pits the choice of oneself against the choice of other selfness, in Sartrian terms, or alien ideologies. In this context, it is also a very contemporary novel: it foreshadowed the radical, fundamentalist eccentricities of today.