| Title | : | The Plumed Serpent |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0679734937 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780679734932 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 464 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1926 |
The Plumed Serpent Reviews
-
The most loathed of Lawrence’s novels, The Plumed Serpent is a hot mess, a vision of a new Mexican-Indian religion based upon repackaged Aztec Gods. The protagonist, Kate Leslie, a mash-up of Frieda and D.H., suffers from that British problem of hanging around far too long on holiday, ending up the missus of a frightening general calling himself Huitzilopochtli when she should have cut the trip short a week sooner. We’ve all been there. Repetitive, maddening, rambling, and repugnant, a novel where all the men wear serapes and the women rebozos, among other overused Mexican words, the book is ambitious and bold in equal measure. Among the famous loathers of this novel include Katherine Anne Porter (“catastrophe”), Harold Bloom (“fascist”), Anthony Burgess (“unconvincing”), F.R. Leavis (“bad”), Kate Millett (“protofascist”), Marianna Torgovnick (“overblown”), L.D. Clark (“perplexing”), Enrique Krauze (“fascist”), Paul Eggert (“pretentious”), Donna Przybylowicz (“anti-democratic”), Lydia Blanchard (“puzzling”, “turgid”, “wooden”, “improbable”), Karen McLeod Hewitt (“nonsense”), Jad Smith (“protofascist”), Vladimiro Rivas Iturralde (“failure”), Debra A. Castillo (“racist”), and David Barnes (“authoritarian”). Then again, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Michel Foucault, and E.M. Forester were admirers.
D.H. Lawrence RANKED -
OK. It's a mad book, no doubt about it. It's full of ferocity and discontent. And it does seem to ask us to take its ideas about cults and gods and blood seriously. It has stupid notions about race. It is infected with a misanthropic disdain for most people. But it is also struggling with all this, fighting against these damaging instincts. It is rescued, as a book, by its ambivalences and self-questioning. It is also dramatic and powerful. It is a kind of challenge, a kind of poison, but it is something, not nothing, not a novel about petty, dull, self-important people. More a novel about grand, pompous, absurd, self-important creatures. I'm happy I've read it. I would not re-read it.
-
A novel about a forty year old Irish widow, Kate Leslie, who travels to Mexico and meets the intellectual, spiritual and political leader Don Ramon, and General Cipriano, a pure bred Indian. There are many paragraphs of well described landscape and individuals reflecting on who they are and what they want. The first half of the book has a travel writing style as Kate Leslie journeys through parts of Mexico. There is a dramatic short section in the middle of the novel. I found this book a slow read. There is little plot momentum.
Readers new to D. H. Lawrence should firstly read ‘Sons and Lovers’. -
D.H. Lawrence came from a day and age when writing was self discovery. It was a way to find out who you were, a way to open up new worlds within yourself. And the people loved reading about it. You grasped a sense of a writer's psyche, his mind, his emotions and soul.
Reading The Plumed Serpent you get all that and more. Lawrence is most famous for Lady Chatterley’s Lover but The Plumed Serpent is by far the superior novel. Always an autobiographical writer, The Plumed Serpent catches Lawrence in the midst of his famed "savage pilgrimage's" North American swing, specifically Mexico.
Well, let me tell you, Lawrence will put you there! You'll be sweaty and a bit dirty too. The flies will buzz and bite your ankles. The sun shining off the matador’s sword will blind you.
Simply put—it's an experience.
And, oh yeah, there's a story running through it too. A woman from Ireland, Kate Leslie, is exposed to the brutality of Mexican culture. The novel opens at a bullfight in Mexico City, and you need to remember that Lawrence is no ordinary writer. Catch this description of how a bull runs into the bullfighting ring for the first time:
He ran out, blindly, as if from the dark, probably thinking that now he was free. Then he stopped short, seeing he was not free, but surrounded in an unknown way. He was utterly at a loss.
Back to the story. Kate Leslie (the Irish woman) is repulsed by what she sees, but then she meets General Cipriano, a pure-bred Indian, and then eventually is introduced to his friend, Don Ramon, a political leader. Both men want to revive the old pagan ways (and this is where Lawrence, obsessed with sexuality and blood, comes in with his phallic power notions), and little by little Kate is drawn under their spell.
The book will impact you. It is powerful and yes, in a pagan, rudimentary, life-force way.
In this snippet Kate begins to realize General Cipriano' primeval appeal:
In the shadowy world where men were visionless, and winds of fury rose up from the earth, Cipriano was still a power. Once you entered his mystery the scale of all things changed, and he became a living male power, undefined, and unconfined. The smallness, the limitation ceased to exist.
The Plumed Serpent is pure Lawrence. It may be a bit strong for some, but for others, perhaps the majority, it will be a welcome literary wallop. -
I could only get through the first 45 pages of privileged white Americans (and one Irish woman) who move to Mexico and then complain about the Mexicans. Nobody has time for that shit.
*2020 Edit: Guess what? Books about whiny white people are fucking boring. Comments from Whiny White People are also boring, and will be deleted. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ -
I was torn between giving this book 3 or 4 stars, really I want to give it 3.5. I read this way back in high school so I am a bit fuzzy on details. I picked up this book on my own after hearing about the author. The book gets weird in some places, but raises some interesting thoughts about religion.
-
DH Lawrence takes a trip to Mishima Country! This was so crazy I just had to love it.
It's about Kate, Irish widow, who is in Mexico and pretty much hating it and everyone in it. We open at a bullfight (Mishima loved a good matador!) where everything's a bit sad and unEuropean. Kate goes on to say lots of racist things about Mexicans. Which is a downer. But then she meets a local warlord, and then his warlord boyfriend (Mishima loved a man in uniform!), moves to a lakeside villa, and starts falling in love with them and their unique brand of pagan fascism (Mishima loved fascism!).
So crazy. The words "erect", "manhood" or "sperm" are on almost every page. No prizes for guessing what the plumed serpent represents.
But Mexico seems really beautiful. And I'd love to know if Mishima read it.
Mishima bits:
"Cipriano was watching Ramon with black, guarded eyes, in which was an element of love, and of fear, and of trust, but also incomprehension, and the suspicion that goes with incomprehension."
and
"With Cipriano he was most sure. Cipriano and he, even when they embraced each other with passion, when they met after an absence, embraced in the recognition of each other's eternal and abiding loneliness; like the Morning Star.
But women would not have this. They wanted intimacy - and intimacy means disgust. Carlota wanted to be eternally and closely identified with Ramon, consequently she hated him and hated everything which she thought drew him away from this eternal close identification with herself. It was just a horror and he knew it."
and
"'When he comes, all you who strive shall find the second strength. And when you have it, where will you feel it? Not here!' - and he struck his forehead. 'Not where the cunning gringos have it, in the head, and in their books. Not we. We are men, we are not spiders. We shall have it here!' - he struck his breast - 'and here!' - he struck his belly - 'and here!' - he struck his loins."
and
"Ramon knelt and pressed his arms close round Cipriano's waist, pressing his black head against his side. And Cipriano began to feel as if his mind, his head were melting away in the darkness; like a pearl in black wine, the other circle of sleep began to swing, vast. And he was a man without a head, moving like a dark wind over the face of the dark waters."
and
"She walked across the beach to the jetty, feeling the life surging vivid and resistant within her. 'It is sex,' she said to herself. 'How wonderful sex can be, when men keep it powerful and sacred, and it fills the world! Like sunshine through and through one!'" -
O calatorie minunata prin Mexicul mai multor timpuri. Extraordinara, mistica, impletirea prezentului si trecutului. Calatorim in Mexicul legendelor, al ritualurilor, al zeilor puternici si nemuritori care au uman si divin in ei si vorbesc cu oamenii si cu Iisus deopotriva, care ii invata despre spiritualitate, pace si toleranta si, in acelasi timp, ii invata sa fie puternici si sa lupte pentru credinta lor, sa isi asculte chemarea sufletului. Un Mexic fantastic, misterios, in care realul si irealul convietuiesc fiecare cu tumultul sau. Este cu atat mai interesant cu cat toate acestea le privim prin ochii unei femei puternice si independente, straina Mexicului, o irlandeza ajunsa sa locuiasca in aceasta tara si sa se lege de ea prin tainice transformari ale fiintei si experiente unice de viata.
-
Often referred to as Lawrence's American novel, this book amounts to a perfect Lawrencian hell in its depiction of life whether in connection with religion, politics, or the existential and psychological states of its characters. At the same time, it offers a rich and diverse study of the modernist culture, politics, the psychology of religion, alienation, class estrangement, the fear of death, and many other topics.
A great part of the novel deals with existential and psychological anxieties such as the fear of death and the meaninglessness of life. Kate Leslie, the widow of an Irish patriot and the central character of the book, is prompted by a feeling of restlessness, caused by her arrival to the threshold of middle age, to travel to Mexico and lose herself in what seems to her a "mysterious vitality of a mysterious race".
Even during her sojourn in Mexico, the fear of death and the meaninglessness of life continued to oppress her in the guise of an antipathy formed towards the passiveness with which the native people lived their lives. The people's custom to live from day to day with no care for the future frustrated her already troubled psychology, which at forty had deemed every hour of every day way too precious to be lost in aimless wandering.
Religion is another pillar in regard to the plot, for it serves two causes in the novel. The first is its universal role of shielding the human psychological foundation against the overwhelming influence of death and a life spent in meaningless suffering. In this capacity, Kate seeks the comfort of a religious belief and accepts the office of Malintzi (The goddess of fertility in the creed of Quetzalcoatl). The second role is political, for it transforms religion into a means to control people in accordance with Friedrich Nietzsche's views on how is morality the best way to lead Mankind by the nose.
In this manner, the novel emphasizes the role of religious and political movements in annihilating the individual, and burry his will in the midst of the masses, which leads to the widespread of herd morality.
When it comes to social phenomenon, the novel analyses alienation between classes and races. At the bullfight, people from different backgrounds could not enjoy the spectacle in the same way. While some had looked upon it as a virile exciting exercise, other only regarded it as a debasing form of entertainment.
The concept of otherness accompanies that of alienation through the struggle between the native Mexicans and the upper class of English and American subjects staying in Mexico.
In connection with Modernism, the use of mythology and the god-figure of Quetzalcoatl serves as a prototype of the rebirth which Lawrence found necessary in a degenerate modernist atmosphere. -
As a writer, Lawrence emits a sense of greatness, of towering above the ordinary and rendering nearly everyone else small-minded by comparison; this is thoroughly in keeping with the attitudes of this very Nietzschean novel. It is the intensity and passion of Lawrence's vision, complemented by astute acerbic insight, that makes him a giant. His stance does tower above more modern, more reasonable, more charitable ones. Do not dismiss him on account of his unpleasant conclusions. It's not what he believes in, it's how he believes in it that matters.
Lawrence is not a slick storyteller, nor does he write with a consistently fluid style. Story, style and Lawrentian philosophy synthesise to produce true greatness at intermittent moments; elsewhere the going can be tough, but there's is always a latent sense of true power. Lawrence's almost relentless misanthropy almost gets too much, but his passion for a life - albeit as an abstract or unrealistic ideal - almost justifies it. By comparison to today's norms, it is perhaps his uncompromising high seriousness that ultimately most appeals. How he would loathe postmodernism.
After a brilliant description of a bullfight in the first chapter, The Plumed Serpent seems to decline into a sour fictionalised travel memoir (of Mexico), but the plot gradually picks up again, from about a third of the way through. I find Lawrence's short stories the most compelling, and I agree with the consensus that Sons And Lovers, The Rainbow and Women In Love are his greatest novels, but The Plumed Serpent is a powerful, memorable work by a most vital original master, with whom it is bracing to engage. -
NOT REALLY CONVINCED
D.H. Lawrence has always been fascinated by women confronted to love. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover, then Women in Love, and then The Plumed Serpent, the main character or characters is or are women in love, in a way or another. The top-aristocrat in love with a plebeian. Two middle-class women in coal country in love with two men, one small intellectual and the other a mine landlord. And here one Irish woman, married twice already with two grown-up children from her first marriage and her second husband, a military activist on the Irish republican Army side who died fighting for what is not yet completed, the independence of Ireland. And here she is in Mexico. She falls in love with the country, with the Indians, after the Mexican revolution, and yet she is not able to really integrate this country because somewhere she sees it as a trap for her individuality, for her Irishness.
From her total rejection of a corrida at the beginning, she will become more and more submissive for all the wrong reasons, and despite her desire to leave and go back to Ireland, she will stay, and yet she will mentally and rhetorically manage to make herself the victim of some kind of hypnotic power of the Indians, a hypnotic power she qualifies as sexual and exclusively sexual. She finds with general Cipriano the perfect husband she needs that enables her to let herself go into the delicate and intense pleasure she finds in her tactile contact with the man she married as a challenge, a crazy dare. She thus becomes the witness of and participant in the revival of the old Mexican gods, in fact, Aztec gods, Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli. In this old religion, they try to revive, the gods are directly represented by living humans who become the living gods. Ramon becomes the living Quetzalcoatl and Cipriano becomes the living Huitzilopochtli. But each living god needs a wife to be real. Ramon is rejected by his own European-minded Christian zealot of a wife and his two children. When she dies, he marries Teresa, the daughter of a neighbor who had just died in the closest hacienda. Cipriano marries our Irish heroine, Kate, alias Caterina.
I am not sure she is completely convincing in her search for real human happiness because she lives the full contradiction between her deeper mental conviction she has to go back to Ireland because she is being swallowed here in Mexico, on one hand, and on the other hand, the extreme and unique pleasure she finds in the hands of Cipriano, though the price she has to pay is her total abandon in his hands, to his desire, in his know-how as for processing a woman to pleasure and she cannot reach it if she does not drop her individuality, even her personality, her unique self contained in itself that controls her. She has to accept to receive and not to take. I never feel her as being able to get to that point. And yet she stays, after having bought her passage to Ireland on a transatlantic liner.
The vision of the Mexican Indians and consequently of Mexico is today absolutely unacceptable. It is racist, highly segregational, extremely hostile, and short-sighted. It is the maimed vision of a European who is not able to get out her white skin, out of her breakfast-lunch-tea-and-dinner-or-supper, out of her bacon and eggs, lamb roast with mint sauce, and so many other things that are the typical European, British, Irish mental chains that cannot be dropped nor broken. There is not one page without such remarks of hostility and rejection, or such visions of blindness and deafness. She cannot in any way feel any empathy for them, even at the end when she yields to her desire, she must find a way to make herself superior:
“You won’t let me go!” she said to him (Cipriano).
She thus is the victim, and what’s more, the victim of a “crime” is always superior to the victimizer because the victim has committed no crime. I am afraid D.H. Lawrence did not reach the full understanding he claims of what Mesoamerica is, and what Indians are in Mesoamerica. He shows them as barbaric in the end, and nothing else, and when they are not barbaric when they are in love, they become or go back to their boyhood, infancy, at best teenage, and that is why they can suddenly explode into violence and extreme cruelty that makes them kill humans as easily as I would crush a mosquito.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU -
Meh.
A long rambling waffling book about two men who found a neopagan religion in Mexico and an Irishwoman who marries one of them, and spends half the book trying to decide whether to marry him, and the other half wondering whether she ought to have done so.
Kate Leslie, a wealthy middle-aged Irish tourist on holiday in Mexico, meets a Mexican general, and his friend, a wealthy landowner, and goes to visit there part of the country, where she extends her stay indefinitely. She helps to rescue the landowner from some would-be assassins, and is asked to marry the general and join the pantheon of their neopagan religion, in which the landowner is Quetzalcoatl, the eponymous plumed serpent deity, while the general is Huitzilopochtli. Kate is ambivalent about her assigned role as divine consort to Huitzilopochtli, and remains so to the end.
There are some good descriptive passages in the book, but they are spoilt by going on for too long, being repetitive, and eventually becoming boring. Lawrence seems to get carried away by his own verbosity, and doesn't know when to stop. And the descriptions of the neopagan religion also become very preachy, overdone and boring (see what I did there? That's one of Lawrence's little tricks -- as I repeated "boring", so Lawrence repeats words in his descriptions).
And as Kate is indecisive throughout the book, Lawrence (or at least his characters) can't make up their minds and expound inconsistent ideas. The white and the dark-skinned races should never meet, and should have their own religions, their own cultures, their own way of life -- "own affairs" as the old apartheid ideology used to put it. But this will eventually lead to a new man, with new blood and all will be one. Oh yes, there's lot about blood in this story. It's a very bloody book, starting from the opening bullfight scene and drifting off into the obscure philosophy about how white blood and black blood should never mix, but will eventually become one, or something.
For an expanded version of this review,
see my blog post here. -
Remember Mexico was still fresh from revolution. Lawrence does tap into the 'political' here, but from that vision of his always textured with body-psychology. Any reader not expecting immersion in liquids denser than simple bathwater should be forewarned.
Lawrence comes as close as any, for a man, to getting at a woman's psyche. Granted, all relationships for him reverberate in a mind encased by nature and saturate the mind with a nature humid with August and not devoid of insects. His world smells and gets felt, annoys and perturbs. In short, it means itself in a context that strikes a reader as seriously real.
Is it possible for moderns to become Aztec gods? Is it possible for two men and a woman to find their 'place' together? We, ourselves, are so blanched with 'science' -- the overnight anchovy left over on the kitchen platter -- that when we reach for myth to explain ourselves, we find cartoons.
DHL records the succulence of life. Sometimes it's pretty, and it's largely frightening. -
My rating: 3,5 stars
Free download available at
eBooks@Adelaide.
Quotations:
She felt again, as the felt before, that Mexico lay in her destiny almost as a doom. Something so heavy, so oppressive, like the folds of some huge serpent that seemed as if it could hardly raise itself.
"There is no such thing as liberty,The greatest liberators are usually slaves of an idea. The freest people are slaves to convention and public opinion, and more still, slaves to the industrial machine. There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master." -
A curious mess. Racist, misogynistic, proto-fascistic, misanthropic disdain for most all people, no real understanding or appreciation of the ancient Mexican gods that were to be restored. More a nightmare than a dream.
-
Thank you, Mr Lawrence – I think.
Much to think about here, but also much that isn’t acceptable or comfortable in a 21st Century world. As the academic wrote in the Introduction to my edition: “if you want a handbook for how to set up your own Fascist group this has it all.” The main theme of this book is the establishment of a Fascist group in Mexico using pre-European type gods to influence the native Indian population to join. The publication date is really important when reading this book, because if you don’t then you can easily run along claiming Lawrence is a supporter of Mussolini & Hitler. The fact that he pre-empts them for almost 10 years says a lot. Intellectual adults who had survived the Great War wanted a change in how governments were run: they felt the previous types – monarchy & democratic capitalism had failed the people. It was a common belief that a charismatic person could rise & save the populous; the two extreme ways were socialist/ communism, or right-wing oligarchies. It is really important that people in Britain thought Mussolini & Hitler were doing great things as they repatriated Italy & Germany. So, I feel we must not condemn Lawrence for his intellectual experiment in this novel. Why he supported an oligarchy of men, ruling over others is a little beyond me- especially as he was a collier’s son.
The concepts of “eugenics” in a broad sense (so, no mixing of blood/ races), new order that uses old religions to break down the power of the Europeans and their corrupt ways - culture, ideas and religion – and thus anti-colonialism, and feminism, are all played out here. The serious problem is Lawrence doesn’t deal well with any of these: he waivers from point of view within the characters and not between the characters. And even her, he is heavy handed. Kate, the European women getting bound up in the all the fervour and excitement is a good case in point. I have no problems with Kate vacillating between getting away from the Mexican madness and joining the cult, but for a satisfactory outcome for the reader, she needed to make a decision on that final page! And then there is the feminist aspect – he produces a free-thinking, independent woman, who then considers being a second fiddle to the men. Really, Mr Lawrence!!!!
Finally, there is the sensuality & sexuality in the book. The men spend most of their bare from the waist up (all very titillating for the early 1920s), the word sperm is used to describe the colour of the water at least 4 times, and we have esoteric metaphysical descriptions of the blood rush when one is sexuality roused, for both men and women. Everywhere the feeling of sensuality abounds – in the raw descriptions of the plants and flowers, the animals, particularly the stallion and oxen scenes. It has that exotic, steamy tropical sensual excitement about it.
My other problem with this novel is the writing style. Lawrence is stodgy. I always forget how stodgy he can be – think swimming through molasses or porridge. For this reason, he can slow down action and description to a boring mess of sentences. However, on the other hand, there are moments of poetic brilliance and beauty. Some of the sentences, aiming to be poetic, instead do feel contrived.
Will I recommend this others?? No. However, if you want to read a book about fascist ideas from an English intellectual, or you want to read all of Lawrence’s novels, then go for it. -
If ever one day you give D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow a try out of curiosity, and it makes rainbows come out of your eyes and sends you on a five-month-long tear of just devouring his writing, not that I'm speaking from personal experience or anything, I have some advice for you. If that ever happens to you, I heartily recommend giving The Plumed Serpent a miss, no matter how intent you are on reading everything he wrote. Let the happy memories of the transcendence you experienced reading The Rainbow and Women in Love and Sons and Lovers and, heck, even The Trespasser and The Lost Girl remain intact and untainted by this racist and sexist cesspool of a novel that's unsatisfying from a literary perspective as well because of its implausible narrative and cop-out ending. It's too bad, because it has the breathtaking descriptions of landscapes and the engrossing snapshots of characters' psyches that are typical of Lawrence.
If you must read at least some of it, put it down after chapter 22 when Kate affirms her identity as being the name she was born with and not the names that men have foisted upon her throughout her life, and then make up your own ending. You'll do a better job than Lawrence did. You'd do a better job if you threw a piece of broccoli at a typewriter.
As for the racism, hoo boy. Pages and pages of the patronizing white protagonist’s inner monologue of reductive and dehumanizing "observations" on the "nature" of indigenous Mexicans. That alone wearisomely* bogged down the novel long before it turned into an anti-woman screed propping up the subjugation of women and the sublimation of their identities.
I know that reading Lawrence and being disappointed by sexism and gender essentialism is like
looking into a bag labelled Dead Dove: Do Not Eat (though he did give us Ursula "I'm a bolter" Brangwen, whom I adore), but he really outdid himself here. And the extent to which he did is confusing because it contradicts the idea you see again and again in his writing about how couples should exist in a "star-equilibrium," with each person being a separate, individual entity.
The GR blurb for Quetzalcoatl, an earlier version of TPS, calls it "one of Lawrence's most feminist works," which boggles my mind, considering the published version is by far the most sexist of his novels.
...But all told, it still didn't make me as mad as E.M. Forster's Howards End!
*If Lawrence gets to add "-ly" to words that aren't usually adverbified, then I reserve the right to do the same. -
Often described as "toxic" and "protofascist", and with Lawrence's obsession with the vitality of Blood, one would expect this book to be more lively, bombastic and interesting than it is. Parts of it are very well written, and I liked the first chapter quite a lot, but the book drags on for too long and gets repetitive. I'll confess to skimming the last 70 or so pages, but I doubt I missed much of note.
Lawrence shows the same fascination (fetishism?) with "the noble savage/primitive" as is shown in other work, with the main character altering between "I hate common people (...) How I detest them!" to "These handsome natives! Was it because they were Moloch-worshippers that they were so uncowed and handsome?" To "she knew he was more beautiful to her than any blond white man". I see this has been missed by other reviewers who quit after 50 pages, preferring novels with likable protagonists.
Lawrence was a controversial author at his time, and many of his views are even less accepted now. In this work he commits the great sin of being both controversial and boring. -
Although one hesitates to give any book by D. H. Lawrence two stars, in this case I must. The Plumed Serpent is no Son’s and Lovers. This late Lawrence book is filled with long-winded, pretentious and repetitive passages of ersatz Aztec religious claptrap and equally ill-conceived mysticism about the savage Mexican Indian as a race. Couple these with a sort of proto-fascism, and one has a pretty nasty book. Lawrence’s take on gender relations in this world of neo-Aztec revival is equally unattractive. At the same time, there are the descriptive passages of great lyric beauty that are pure Lawrence and some earnest wrestling with questions of individualism versus the commonality of humankind. I didn’t like the book, but I’m glad I read it.
-
Extremely difficult to rate this work, not least because of a myopic cultural view, which I freely admit. This is a complex, deep, unhappy piece of writing. Lawrence is undeniably a genius, in my opinion (which is worth very little of course) possibly the greatest writer of the 20th century, and The Plumed Serpent only underlines his astonishing power. But that does not mean we have to agree with him. In fact, I agree with DHL on very little, philosophically, politically, even emotionally. But his capacity for seeing beauty and humanity was unparalleled. His message is always ruined, where it is ruined, by his bitterness. This is understandable, he was treated abominably by the British government for marrying a German woman and went into an unwanted exile for his last years. His health deteriorated, so he was sick and far from home. He found himself eventually in Mexico and this novel is the result.
There are many correlations here with the shorter and more succinct
The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories which dwells on the same themes. The subjugation of the white consciousness under a smothering barbarian spirit.But down on it all, like a weight of obsidian, comes the passive negation of the Indian. He understands soul, which is of the blood. But spirit, which is superior, and is the quality of our civilization, this, in the mass, he darkly and barbarically repudiates.
Our heroine is gradually, and almost sickeningly overcome. Her spirit is subsumed inevitably, because it cannot stand against the primal consciousness. This makes for a powerful and palpable sense of discomfort, but more uncomfortable are the political ideas, and the clash of man against woman. This is the clash within all of DHL's works, but here there is an awkward racial element. I would not say that this work is racist, although it might be interpreted as such, rather it is a product of its time. In many ways Lawrence admires and proclaims the aboriginal powers of Mexico here. He uses songs, chants and hymns, and a great deal of poetry to evoke the subterranean heart of Mexico. Often it is powerful and evocative, and occasionally brutal and disturbing. This becomes yet another expression of his by now classic war of the sexes and his oft visited theme that marriage is a kind of subjugation also. That a man cannot be at peace with a woman until one or other is dominated and reconciled to their inner combatant.Ah, the soul! The soul was always flashing and darkening into new shapes, each one strange to the other. She had thought Ramón and she had looked into each other's souls. And now, he was this pale, distant man, with a curious gleam, like a messenger from the beyond, in his soul. And he was remote, remote from any woman. Whereas Cipriano had suddenly opened a new world to her, a world of twilight, with the dark, half-visible face of the god-demon Pan, who can never perish, but ever returns upon mankind from the shadows. The world of shadows and dark prostration, with the phallic wind rushing through the dark.
Here there is the added dimension of older gods than those of the Church. Quetzlcoatl becomes a central character in the narrative, and he is manifested through the character of Ramón, who is inevitable and overwhelming.
The novel's central character Kate is a white, middle-aged Irish woman who has spent much time in the United States, and her fiery and independent spirit is eventually overcome. She presents the opportunity for Lawrence to expound his political ideals. Indeed, this must be Lawrence's most political novel.[T]here are only two great diseases in the world to-day--Bolshevism and Americanism; and Americanism is the worse of the two, because Bolshevism only smashes your house or your business or your skull, but Americanism smashes your soul.'
I would not disagree with this however. And then:'There is no such thing as liberty. The greatest liberators are usually slaves of an idea. The freest people are slaves to convention and public opinion, and more still, slaves to the industrial machine. There is no such thing as liberty. You only change one sort of domination for another. All we can do is to choose our master.'
These are the same central concepts that build uncomfortably to an apotheosis of powerlessness. You might almost think of it as a fascistic kind of manifesto. That there is a strength and inevitability to some primal drives that cannot be resisted, most especially by the dilettantish 'civilised races', who are too cultured to contend with the unbreakable death stare of the old gods whose language is all blood and bone, which oppresses mere philosophy:Sometimes, in America, the shadow of that old pre-Flood world was so strong, that the day of historic humanity would melt out of Kate's consciousness, and she would begin to approximate to the old mode of consciousness, the old, dark will, the unconcern for death, the subtle, dark consciousness, non-cerebral, but vertebrate. When the mind and the power of man was in his blood and his backbone, and there was the strange, dark inter-communication between man and man and man and beast, from the powerful spine.
What results is a work which is undeniably brilliant, but very difficult to love or even at times, to agree with. Certainly there is something here which is made up of Lawrence's own bitterness, his rejection and isolation. He is decrying his own powerlessness through the lens of the old Aztec gods. It is a supremely Plutonic work, brooding, dark, uncomfortable.
Not to be taken lightly.
-
The best thing about having read this book is that I will no longer have it on my reading list. The Plumed Serpent is a mishmash of bad sociology, bad anthropology and bad theology all jumbled together in a noxious stew of racism, sexism and neo-paganism.
-
DH Lawrence hated people. I mean he really hated people. And for a man who traveled the world, and lived in countless of places, if a man can come out of all that and still hate people, well you can come to expect quite the cynical novel.
Before diving in, it’s best to understand The Plumed Serpent with a little background behind the Mexican Revolution
The Porfiriato.
Mexico’s seven-term president, and of Cinco De Mayo fame, Porfirio Diaz, became a war-hero after fending off the French during Emperor Maximilian’s reign at the Battle of Puebla. The Mexican George Washington (if Washington decided not follow the example of Cincinatus and instead sought to be Julius Caesar) wasn’t immediately granted power; but playing the long game, he would eventually seize it. He was elected president in 1877, and after winning again in 1884, he never left.
But like all ��great’ dictators, his reign ended in revolution and bloodshed. In 1910, Mexico started their revolution. In 1911, With some US support, Diaz was ousted, the leader of the revolution, Francisco Madero took over, and then the game of thrones began: presidents were murdered, presidents resigned, presidents were overthrown. The Mexicans were granted a more liberal constitution in 1917, and the chaos didn’t somewhat unwind until after the Rebellion of Agua Prieta and the death of elected Constiutionalitst president, Venustiano Carranza. The revolution didn’t officially end until the 1920’s.
The novel takes place in post-revolution Mexico, in transition to a more liberal state. This novel essentially deals with a few competing concepts: religious/ethnic identity, liberty, and a moral society. And what Lawrence believes, the necessity of one underlines the purpose of the others.
In the book, Mexican’s feel that true ethnic identity is Creole (Mixed Ingenious and European blood). The natives of Mexico are considered second-class, Zambo (half-black) and Indio (100% Indian). The death of the old gods materialized under the decree of the Catholic church who, having a huge political persuasion within the republic, were not only heralding monotheistic devotion, but western culture itself (think of the bull fights).
But still with such a large indigenous population being persecuted against, conflict is almost inevitable. In The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence predicts a pandora’s reckoning that revives Mexico's old gods, Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochti (through Ramon and Cipriano respectively) which brings a decaying Mexico back to the Aztecs. We experience this reckoning through the mostly ignorant, sententious Irish woman, Kate Leslie; witnessing her servitude to the paganistic cult and her further attempts to remove herself from it as well.
So it goes: They burn Jesus. She plays hero. They execute infidels. She has doubts about the whole thing. You know. All the entertaining parts of any violent, culturally tectonic shift that comes from years and years of power malady: human nature/ bloody conflicts.
“Power just power. Just foolish, wicked power.”
As the story progresses, the protagonist becomes disillusioned by the cult when seeing their revolution come to life: The violence, the consolidation of power. Ramon and Cipriano, different deity, same worship that fuels, yes, more mob rule. The sacrifice of the individual for ‘blood one-ness.” And as Lawrence was heavily anti-labour, anti-capitalist, semi-fascistic Brit, most of what curtails is the individual getting lost among, what the protagonist perceives, a ‘primitive’ society. Kate wants to be the individual, until mid way through the novel she marries Cipriano and then vacillates between the 'is she leaving or is she staying’ (make-up-ya-damn mind!) routine.
The story had a lot of potential, especially after its wonderful, and sadly quite funny, rebuke of tourism for the popular bull-fight. But it’s one thing to go after Western ignorance, and the decline of culture thanks to years of colonial conquest and pillaging; but going after the indigenous from a colonialist perspective seems harsh and overly punitive, when so many Western ideas transmogrified the nature Lawrence is so willing to abhor anyway—the animal abuse, for example.
Even if the concept of a proto-pagan dictator can be broken down to the core of its philosophy: destroy old-boss replace with new-boss. If democracy precipitates chaos and decay; maybe having a racist, loud-mouth protagonist navigating the pillars of rule, might not be the best path towards a moral authority. -
I took several months to read this book, working on it slowly and diligently, trying to enjoy and comprehend each page. In whole, it's really about the ambivalence of the protagonist, Kate, for Mexican culture and people. In parts, it was beautiful, even exciting at one juncture, but mostly slow and darkly atmospheric. I had a lot of trouble staying awake at times, but I'm glad I stuck with it, and I won't forget it anytime soon. I gave it 4 stars, but 3.5 is what I'd like to give it.
-
Initially I was disappointed with The Plumed Serpent. I had adored D.H.Lawrence when I was young, but that was half a century ago. I assumed that this had been an early novel, but I was wrong. It was written well after my favourite, The Rainbow. Although the descriptions were vintage Lawrence (one would undoubtedly empathise with Kate's disgust at the bullfight because it was depicted so vividly) it quickly got bogged down in description and verse about a revival of Aztec beliefs which is being orchestrated by a charismatic fellow she meets, one Don Ramon. There are lengthy descriptions of the cult of Quetzalcoatl before Don Ramon's motives are revealed and the book begins to make some sense. "Quetzal is the name of a bird that lives high up in the tropical mountains, and has very beautiful tail-feathers, precious to the Aztecs. Coatl is a serpent. Quetzalcoatl is the Plumed Serpent, so hideous in the fanged, feathered, writhing stone of the National Museum". At this point I would have heartily agreed with a later description from the aforementioned Kate that it was all "high-flown bunk". My curiosity about where Lawrence was going with this (and my 1001 points) helped me to persist and I am so pleased I did. Don Ramon believed (as did Lawrence) that every society needs its own gods. He wanted Mexicans to unite in an emotional, religious fervour to restor their pride. Lawrence was critical of Western hegemony. "In attempting to convert the dark man to the white man's way of life, the white man has fallen helplessly down the hole he wanted to fill up. Seeking to save another man's soul, the white man lost his own, and collapsed upon himself". Don Ramon wrote poetic tracts to be read or sung to the peons, who were unlikely to be able to read them for themselves. He, in a particularly vivid section, ceremoniously removed the images of the crucified Christ and the Virgin Mary from the local church and replaced them with ancient Aztec symbols. Nevertheless a lot of Christian imagery was employed in the process. Quite a number of stones were rolled away from tombs, for example. The cross was replaced as a symbol by the Eye of the Other One. There was much talk of the Morning Star of the male and the Evening Star of the female. Which brings me to the other theme, that of gender politics. Lawrence had wrestled with the role of the modern woman in other books. His protagonist here is an Irish divorcee and widow, who is trying to forget that her second husband sacrificed himself for Irish Independence, which is presumably why she is drawn to Don Ramon! Kate sees herself as independent, not subservient to any man, and, indeed, not in need of one. She spends a great deal of time, however, thinking about Don Ramon's contention that male or female assume the role of the ravished, or of the ravisher. For reasons that are not made clear she ends up with a ceremonial role in the revived cult and an actual marriage to Don Ramon's sidekick, the little, but powerful and competent General Cipriano . While all this is going on, and there is a violent home invasion thrown in, Lawrence writes with lyrical ease of the lakeside town where the action takes place. It is so beautifully written that the reader feels that they have been there, at that time. Whereas, actually, he was writing from Taos, New Mexico. Lawrence is actually examining his own ideas about colonialism "For the white man, let him bluster as he may, is hollow with misgivings about his own superiority". Remember that this book was published in 1926, well before such ideas became mainstream. He has Kate conclude that "The blood is one blood. It was a strange, overbearing insistence, a claim of blood-unison". So the conclusion is, despite "Western women keeping their souls for themselves, in a sort of purse, as is were""only the man of a great star, a great divinity, can bring the opposites together in a new unison".
-
Hardly a stranger to controversy, DH Lawrence really went to town on some of society’s more sensitive aspects with his largely unheralded later work, The Plumed Serpent. Mixing blasphemy, violence, sensuality and issues of race and gender with a sneering contempt for both developed and third world contemporary cultures, it’s an explosive work even for today’s readers. For the folks back in 1926, it must have seemed an utterly alien piece of literature, which probably helps explain why it was considered a critical failure at the time.
The story revolves around Irish widow Kate Leslie, who has relocated to Mexico following the death of her husband. Appalled by what she sees as the elemental barbarity of Mexican culture, she is drawn inexorably into the orbit of two powerfully charismatic men. Don Ramon is a prominent politician who has undergone some sort of epiphany and now sees himself as a kind of messiah for Mexico; he sets himself the task of expelling Christian worship from the land and replacing it with a return to the old pagan worship of Quetzalcouatl and the other Aztec gods. His right hand man is Cipriano, a General of purely indigenous descent; the controller of a devoted section of the Mexican Army, he is a powerful man. Quickly becoming enamoured of Kate, he influences her to move to the lake town of Sayula - the centre of Don Ramon’s new cult.
The Plumed Serpent is a work of such intense criticism of - well - just about everything, actually - that it is kind of the literary equivalent of being bashed about the head with a cricket bat. But there’s no doubt that, in amongst the diatribes against religion, Americans, English, Mexicans and women there are some passages of truly astounding insight and beauty. Much of the book is devoted to recounting Don Ramon’s sermons to the people, word for word; although often containing some beautiful poetry, the length of these can be quite exhausting. Conversely, there are some scenes of extraordinarily exciting action and violence. Lawrence seems to have had a close to peerless skill in describing movement and conflict with a languid economy of meaning that is supremely effective in conveying the scene. The scene where Don Ramon’s house is attacked by bandits is as desperate and graphically violent as anything from a modern thriller writer.
Although not considered one of his greatest novels, The Plumed Serpent is a profound and savage work. -
This novel appears to be an existential exploration for Lawrence. I almost got the sense he was exploring his belief, not just expounding it. But may be not. Told from the point of view of Kate Leslie, a middle-aged Irishwoman visiting Mexico, who becomes acquainted with two men trying to re-establish the Aztec religion in place of Catholicism, which they feel doesn't "suit" the Mexican people, it seems to ask and sometimes answer quite a few questions? What is soul? What is spirit? What is will? What is body? What is life? How are they related, connected, and yet different? Lawrence ties these questions not just to the lives and spirits (etc) of the individual characters, but to the societies of the people - Mexican, European and American (US). He touches on yin/yang concepts, ultimately appearing to conclude that neither women nor men are 'complete' unless they are united (in a romantic relationship). It does come off a bit misogynistic although I suspect not by design. (I haven't researched real-world Lawrence, so wouldn't know.)
Although I didn't really "enjoy" this overall, and felt very loooooong, there were a number of passages I marked as really well portrayed or expressed. [Examples too long to post...]
A big question I have is what impressions do Mexican readers have of Lawrence's portrayal of Mexico - does it ring true TO YOU when you read it? I wonder how much of it is reflective of what Mexico might really have felt like to a foreign visitor of the time versus how much of it is simply intended to serve Lawrence's design purpose and not truly mirror reality. -
The Plumed Serpent was intended to be a major novel. Lawrence called it ‘my most important novel so far’. This novel is an attempt to realise more completely the nature of religion. Kate Leslie, an Irish widow of forty goes to Mexico.
The novel opens with Kate and two American male companions of hers, going to see a bullfight. Kate finds the fight despicable and crude and leaves in abhorrence.
Afterward she meets two men of Spanish descent Ramon and Cipriano and in their company goes to the Lake of Sayula where, an attempt is being made to revitalize the pagan gods of Mexico. The chief god in their pantheon is Quetzalcoatl (the Plumed Serpent of the title).
In a scene enacted in the Plaza, the death of Jesus (and hence the rejection of Christianity) and the coming of Quetzalcoatl are announced.
Later Kate is married to Cipriano ¡n an ancient mystical ceremony and with him she finds complete sexual fulfilment, though she still hankers after her old independence to move around the world.
Thus The Plumed Serpent on the one hand expresses Lawrence’s displeasure with Christianity and glorifies the old primordial religion of Mexico, and on the other it suggests the obsession of the author with the great cosmic laws underlying the sex relationships to which all other aspects of life are linked.
He felt that if the complete social system can be made to depend upon an integral sex relationship, all the ills of the society can be removed.
