Abstract

In light of Julia Kristeva's delineation of abjection's 'vortex of summons and repulsion', the structure and experience of which she likens to an 'inescapable boomerang', D. H. Lawrence's novel Kangaroo can be seen to boomerang inescapably between maternal and masculine symbolic space. Hopping across old and new worlds, the novel also boomerangs between haunting aboriginal sites - Cornwall and the Australian bush - that have the power to place the subject "beside" itself. In ambivalently negotiating its "Celtic" fringe, Lawrence's work exhibits the imperial legacy of an "old England" that must confront the strangeness at its heart.