Carrie Rohman
University of Pittsburgh, USA
"'Not the measure of creation': The Limits of Human Epistemology in D. H. Lawrence's 'Fish'"
At the beginning of Lawrence's poem, "Fish," this aqueous other is framed as a being that has no differentiated consciousness, no sexual desire, and no knowledge of the metaphysical. The elemental fish is contrasted with the nerve-conscious, intersubjective human. But at the poem's halfway mark, the narrator shifts into a consideration of the process of naming and describing non-humans. Ultimately, the narrator "left off hailing" the fish, whose creator is other than his own. This moment is notable since it signals the Western rationalist subject naming its epistemological limit and relinquishing a position of mastery and autonomy typically articulated along species lines.
This paper examines the way Lawrence's poem acknowledges the radical alterity of the fish and further analyzes how the piece offers a rare poetic indictment of man's sacrificial relationship to non-humans. I further contextualize this poem alongside Lawrence's other animal poems which should be valued not only because they call into question what Derrida has recently discussed as the "abyssal limit of the human," but also because they narrate the very tension between abjecting, confronting, and recuperating the animal that characterizes modernism's ambivalent engagement with the discourse of species.