For D.H. Lawrence, the First World War ‘gave a catastrophic force to an analysis he was already making of European culture’
(Bell, 1992a: 101).19 The establishment’s endorsement of the carnage on the western front led him to ‘a crucial breach with his own contemporary culture’, convincing him that ‘civilised’
Europe had lost any sense of the value or purpose of human life (Bell, 1992a: 195). In the aftermath of the war, Lawrence argued, civilised man was so alienated that he could not see that the life he prized was a travesty of authentic experience, that though upright and breathing he was spiritually dead. He dealt with his experience of this period autobiographically in his Australian novel, Kangaroo (1950), in which his protagonist, Richard Somers, confesses that as a result of the war ‘the meaning had gone out of everything for him. He had lost his meaning.
England had lost its meaning for him’ (Lawrence, 1950: 286).
In The Plumed Serpent (1987/1926), another of his works ‘in which the central fi gures leave Britain’ in an effort to ‘digest the meaning of the war for European life’, Lawrence proposed that Britons might fi nd a remedy for the spiritual crisis engendered by the war by revisiting death, by rethinking their understanding of it and by looking at the example of Mexico for the benefi ts that this might bring (Bell, 1992a: 133).
Hence it is fi tting, if ironic, that the action of the novel opens at the bullring where, hoping for a noble spectacle the protagonist, Kate Leslie, is appalled by the slaughter she witnesses. She feels
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the whole performance owes more to the squalid brutality of the knackers yard than the courage of the gladiatorial arena: ‘There was no glamour, no charm’, the toreadors, ‘four grotesque and effeminate-looking fellows in tight, ornate clothes’ seemed ‘about as gallant as assistants in a butcher’s shop’:
She had still cherished some idea of a gallant show. And before she knew where she was, she was watching a bull whose shoulder trickled blood goring his horns up and down inside the belly of a prostrate and feebly plunging old horse. The shock almost overpowered her. She had come for a gallant show. This she had paid to see. Human cowardice and beastliness, a smell of blood, a nauseous whiff of bursten bowels! She turned her face away. (Lawrence, 1987: 14, 16)
Where Kate is disgusted by what she sees, one of her American companions, Owen, is thrilled: ‘this was life. He was seeing LIFE’
(Lawrence, 1987: 19). That this debased slaughter can be mistaken for meaningful experience demonstrates how much damage the war had done, how profoundly it had alienated modern man from his moral and spiritual purpose – a point driven home by Lawrence’s allusion to Ruskin. Lawrence’s quest for a world redeemed from brutality brought him, like Hudson, to Latin America. Just as the omnipresence of death on the pampas had renewed Hudson’s faith in the value of life, so the all-pervasiveness of death in Mexico did much to restore Lawrence’s hope for the future. His responsiveness to death and the redemption it presaged was not an isolated enthusiasm. It came at the moment when artists and intellectuals in Europe and America were showing a reinvigorated interest in ‘destruction as an act of creation’, but when the wider public seemed to have lost touch with its signifi cance as a regenerative force (Ecksteins, 1989: 126). This failure to recognise the redemptive possibilities of death seemed to Lawrence to refl ect Europe’s broader inability to appreciate the purpose of life. Yet this was not the case in Mexico where, as Kate Leslie notes, the Meso-American death cult that had dominated pre-Colombian culture had remained the ruling principle, the normative state against which all life was played out: ‘Kate could so well understand the Mexican who said to her: El Grito Mexicano
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es siempre el Grito del Odio. The Mexican shout is always a shout of hate…Death to this, Death to the other, it was all death! death!
death! as insistent as the Aztec sacrifi ces’ (Lawrence, 1987: 50).
Unlike Europeans, Mexicans had never lost sight of the oblivion that death brings to all and by embracing it they had been able to transcend it. Where ‘White men had had a soul, and lost it’ due to their spiritual pusillanimity, the Mexicans’ ‘pure acknowledg-ment of death, and their undaunted admission of nothingness kept them…erect and reckless’ (Lawrence, 1987: 78). Living ‘without hope, and without care’ they live authentically, and despite their inevitable fate no power and no creed has been able to subdue their spirit (Lawrence, 1987: 76). As Ramón Carrasco explains to Kate: ‘the men in Mexico are like trees, forests that the white men felled in their coming. But the roots of trees are deep and alive, and forever sending up new shoots’ (Lawrence, 1987: 80).
Death here is not an ending but the stimulant of new growth.
In The Plumed Serpent the indigenous renaissance that Don Ramón leads takes the form of a resurgent primitivism with its centrepiece a renewed passion for Aztec worship. In an effort to renew the broken link between Mexicans and their Gods, to return to the people ‘a religion that will connect them with the universe’, Don Ramón assumes the physical form of Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec God of priestly wisdom (Lawrence, 1987: 264).20 In Europe, Lawrence notes, Christianity has severed the link between men and their universe because ‘it encourages the self’s disintegration’, promoting not a life-giving devotion but ‘a sort of numbness and letting the soul sink uncontrolled’ (Beede Howe, 1977: 115–16).
This is not the case in Mexico where the purpose of the new religion is to restore man, morally and spiritually, through his contact with God. In order to effect this, Don Ramón explains, man needs a new means of identifi cation with Him, hence his assumption of the form of Quetzalcoatl:
God is always God. But man loses his connection with God. And then he can never recover it again, unless some new Saviour comes to give him his new connection…the people have lost God, and the Saviour cannot lead
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them to him any more. There must be a new Saviour with a new vision.
(Lawrence, 1987: 166–7)
Central to this vision is a renewed veneration for death and its regenerative power.
In Ramón’s prescription for the spiritual regeneration of Mexico, Lawrence identifi ed a cure for Europe’s ills – old Gods and a primitive system of beliefs bringing a new connectedness with the earth and a renewed spiritual life. Lawrence proposes that in the catastrophic destruction of the preceding decade Europe might discover not the negation of its values but the means to their recovery. As he refl ected in the Foreword to Women in Love (1920), written during the war:
We are now in a period of crisis. Every man who is acutely alive is acutely wrestling with his own soul. The people that can bring forth the new passion, the new idea, this people will endure. Those others, that fi x themselves in the old idea, will perish with the new life strangled unborn within them.
(Lawrence, 1987: 496)
The primitivist resurgence in Mexico lays bare a truth that materialism and shallow sophistication have obscured in Europe, that death constitutes not a state of dissolution, not a place of loss or fi nality, but an opportunity for new beginnings.21 In Mexico’s Aztec renaissance, Lawrence identifi es the existential and spiritual truths about death and life that Europe had long since forgotten and in doing so has sown the seeds of its collective cultural breakdown. Only by returning to ‘a Mexico within’, he argues, can Britain renew its authentic self (Bell, 1992a: 171).
With characteristic immodesty Lawrence offered himself as guide for this journey into darkness. Little wonder that few chose to follow him. In The Plumed Serpent he transforms Hudson’s sober reappraisal of the value of life into an ostentatious rejection of the moral cornerstones of western culture. Convinced that adherence to them has reduced their devotees to moral and spiritual paralysis, that LIFE as we know it in the west is not worth living, Lawrence recommends their wholesale renunciation and promotes in their place an outlandish veneration for nihilism.
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Hence his protagonists spend the novel fl outing the most sacred values of western society: Jesus is taken down from the cross, churches are desecrated, murder sanctifi ed, cultural regression promoted as a species of sophistication and female subjugation celebrated as the last word in emancipation.22 Mexico’s historical associations with human sacrifi ce and cultural genocide may have made it an ideal context within which the future of the west might be radically re-imagined, but Lawrence never gets that far.
What he offers in The Plumed Serpent is not a coherent plan for the rejuvenation of the west but a sensationalist rejection of its orthodoxies. Lawrence’s Latin America is less a plausible setting for social and spiritual critique than it is the alibi for a command performance in blasphemy and invective.