Plumed Serpent (English Library) download epub

After a not terribly lively slog, this morning I finished D.H. Lawrence’s novel “The Plumed Serpent.” I had been interested to read it because I love “Women in Love” and identify with some of its themes: the “Blutbrüderschaft” between Birkin and Gerald, the pansexual nature-worship Birkin feels frolicking in the forest and meadow near Hermione’s manor house; Lawrence’s quest to wrest contemporaneous masculinity away from the slack status quo of industrialist England toward a more primeval ideal. And I was fascinated with Lawrence’s experience in the Americas; I even went to his and Frieda’s ranch near Taos and saw the memorial whose mortar reputedly encases his ashes.

But in my reading, “The Plumed Serpent” has a lot of the bombast of “Women in Love” but not much of the campy charm and spark. First and foremost, there’s an attitude toward Mexico and Mexican people that is tough to read with postmodern eyes. At best, Lawrence could be said to be writing as a person of his time: a white, privileged, famous Anglo-Saxon in an age still dominated by an elitist, colonialist ethos. At worst, his diatribes against Mexico are ill-informed, brazenly essentializing, and outright racist. There is some vile stuff in there.

Individually, characterizations are ill-defined. Kate, the female lead, is never really filled in. Although the story is largely told through her perspective, we never get the sense we know her, or that there’s much to know. She’s prone to dei ex machina and ephipanies that arise spontaneously from her sudden apprehension of Lawrencian ideas. Her lack of definition manifests as incertitude, culminating in the vacillation about whether to stay in Mexico that ends the novel. From her physical and temperamental description, we infer she is a stand-in for Lawrence’s wife, Frieda, and everything that drove Lawrence batty about the newfangled liberated woman fighting for a toehold against patriarchy. Kate is willful, committed to individualism, devoid of overt sentimentality toward men, and quite content spending time by herself. Although she’s intrigued by Don Ramon and Don Cipriano’s revival of pre-Columbian mysticism, she isn’t willing to sublimate herself to it or them. Her carping at the end of the book is a shrill echo of Ursula’s carping at the end of “Women in Love.” For Lawrence, men who don’t sublimate themselves to his particular conception of anti-dualistic, prelapsarian enlightment are slaves; and women who don’t are shrews.

As in “Women in Love,” the two male leads are drawn with more nuance than the women, and in fact the rapport between Ramon and Cipriano is every bit the bro-mance, and less frustratedly so, than that of Birkin and Gerald. And while Kate gets to sit around passively vacillating (and being jealous of Ramon’s second wife, Teresa), Ramon and Cipriano, properly macho, handle the forward motion of the plot: namely, overthrowing Mexican Catholicism and supplanting it with a revisionist worship of the ancient Mesoamerican god Quetzalcoatl. This conceit allows Lawrence to indulge his sometimes hackneyed, sometimes transcendent gifts for the poetry of the primordial sublime. He subscribes to a brand of Hobbes-and-Rousseau-derived “noble savage” romanticism, mixed in with a much darker, more Dionysian strain of Freudean eros-cum-thanatos bugaboo. This can be quite entertaining and occasionally beautiful, as in this passage from Chapter 26:

“She had a strange feeling in Mexico of the old, prehistoric humanity, the dark-eyed humanity of the days, perhaps, before the glacial period. When the world was colder and the seas emptier, and all the land-formation was different. When the waters of the world were piled in stupendous glaciers on the high places, and high, high upon the poles. When great plains stretched away to the oceans, like Atlantis and the lost continents of Polynesia, so that seas were only great lakes, and the soft, dark-eyed people of the world could walk around the globe.”

When he’s on, Lawrence can summon hypnotic, haunting incantations, often in awkward counterpoint to stilted socio-political haranguing. I think he deserves credit, along with many among his contemporaries, for helping push the ethos of his time away from the drawing-room puffery of entrenched sex-phobic mores and into a search for something more elemental. I also remain drawn to the dialecticism within his thought, which runs in deep veins through “The Plumed Serpent.” The book is an étude on this theme, with Lawrence positing and re-positing an ideal at the center of (presumedly) polar opposites: Old World and New, man and woman, “the morning star or the evening star, hanging perfect between night and the sun.” This idea of reconciling antipodes—of the synthesis midway between thesis and antithesis—has resonated with me for a long time. For better or worse, it is part of the architecture of my mind.

But of course, all of this dialectical mumbo jumbo has a lot to do with Lawrence’s philosophical and psycho-sexual idiosyncrasies and not a heck of a lot to do with Mexico. Someone looking for a rigorous analysis of Mesoamerican culture and religious beliefs will not find it here. As an ideologue, Lawrence is oriented not toward research or reportage but axe-grinding and air-castle building. Idealogues are happiest as shaman-poets and provocateurs, certainly not as historians or journalists. For them, cultural commentary is deductive and dilettante. For Lawrence, novels like “The Plumed Serpent” and “Kangaroo” are tarted-up travel writing-cum-polemic: a public intellectual’s platform for system-making, spiced up here and there with chipotle, saffron, or coriander from the local bazaar.

I’m glad I read this book, and I’m glad I’m done with it. Next up is “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey.

--Richard Speer, Portland, OR, U.S.A.

The critics focus on Lawrence's lifelong sexual themes and his colonial-era views on race, but the best part of this book, and the reason it's still important, is that it contains Lawrence's prescription for modern metaphysical ills -- a return to religion, not Christianity but a sort of new paganism which draws at its core on ideas from gnosticism and eastern mysticism. Lawrence thinks that Quetzalcoatl would embody this new paganism in Mexico, but he has Ramon suggest to Kate that, if she returns to Ireland, she should encourage the Irish to similarly reinvent the Celtic gods on the gnostic model. Ramon thinks every culture should revert to its old gods -- which he thinks are all expressions of the same, universal God -- because different "races," or to use more modern, politically correct terminology, different cultures understand the idea of "god" through their own unique experience, history and ways of thinking. Regardless of any other shortcomings, this is a fascinating, thoughtful approach, artfully presented.
I liked Lawrence's Quetzalcoatl hymns quite a bit, and thought they added immensely to the above-identified theme. They reminded me a great deal of some the Nag Hammadi manuscripts -- gnostic Christian teachings discovered in Egypt in the 1940s, and famously described by Elaine Pagels in The Gnostic Gospels. What's most amazing is the depth and scope of Lawrence's gnostic philosophy without having had access to those ancient Egyptian texts, which were not discovered until after the writer's death.
Those viewing this book through a purely feminist lens will dislike it; those who espouse identity politics will find themselves conflicted. But for anyone interested in a great writer's "practical" solution to the great spiritual dilemmas of the modern era, or who simply enjoys reading 400 pages of top-shelf prose, "The Plumed Serpent" is worth the time investment.

Kate, an Irish woman visiting Mexico, is in a continuous state of war with herself: whether to maintain her independence from men in the modern, European society to which she was familiar or to submerge her very soul to Cipriano, a Native American general bent upon revolution in Mexico. Cipriano would call it "uniting" their souls. Kate, having a gentle, womanly spirit, views Mexicans as "dark men" steeped in violence, revolution and death. She is sickened by this attitude--as she was by the bull fight presented early in the book--having lost a husband who was dedicated to fighting for Ireland's freedom from Britain. In fact, _The Plumed Serpent_ concerns the battle of women against men and the ambivalent feelings (including sexual) of one for the other. Kate is equally attracted to and repelled by the Mexican culture. Dona Carlota, the wife of Ramon who is a close friend of Cipriano, like Kate is an opponent of Ramon's revolutionary fervor. Both Ramon and Cipriano yearn to replace "the Gringo" Jesus Christ's hold on the Church with the Aztec God Quetzalcoatl. There is a harrowing and incendiary scene in the book concerning just this issue.
The book contains a number of references to sexuality, both male (Cipriano and Ramon are often shown at least partially naked) and female (Kate's expression of her sexuality as an indication of her independence, whereas Cripriano often sees her as a vessel for his manhood). I only wish that Lawrence had not dwelt so much in the novel on hymns written by Ramon as a paeon to Quetzalcoatl. This often bogged the book down in pseudo-Aztec myth-making and took away from what was otherwise a well-written and meaningful book.