The Plumed Serpent Can Be Regarded As a Summation of Lawrence's

IX THE VÖLKISCH IDEOLOGIES OF THE PLUMED SERPENT The Plumed Serpent can be regarded as a summation of Lawrence’s concerns since the First World War. Like The Lost Girl it envisages a Mignons Land as an alternative to modern, capitalist society. Like Gilbert Noon, the heroine Kate Leslie struggles to overcome her cynicism in this society, quoting Goethe’s Mephistopheles, “ich bin der Geist der stets verneint!” (PS, 214). The ending of The Plumed Serpent recapitulates that of Aaron’s Rod, where Lilly advises Aaron that “your soul will tell you” (AR, 299) whom to submit to. Ramón Carrasco, the leader of the Quetzalcoatl cult, reassures Kate to “listen to your own best desire” (PS, 444) in her choice of whether to stay in Mexico; meanwhile he uses his power to compel her to him. Finally, The Plumed Serpent attempts to create an alternative to the political struggles in Europe between right and left, with the principle of Somers’ “dark god” in Kangaroo which demands submission, and offers liberation. The Plumed Serpent is probably Lawrence’s most politically controversial novel. Its symbolic language of the blood gives substance to Bertrand Russell’s accusation that Lawrence’s “mystical philosophy of ‘blood’ … led straight to Auschwitz”. 1 The great majority of Lawrence’s defenders, from Leavis onwards, have stopped short at The Plumed Serpent. In a recent summing up of where the controversy stands, David Ellis has acknowledged the novel’s similarities to the völkisch literature that contributed to the fascist movement in Germany; he describes Diego Rivera’s impression of a similar cult in Berlin with the German President Paul von Hindenburg as Wotan and Marshall Ludendorff as Thor. Yet Ellis resists identifying The Plumed Serpent with Nazism, despite the authoritarianism of its principal male characters.2 Having followed Lawrence’s direct relationship with Germany in his writing career, we are in a position to judge The Plumed Serpent directly in terms of contemporary German politics, including Hitler 1 Russell, The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, II, 22. 2 See Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 218, 656. 270 D. H. Lawrence and Germany and the philosopher of Nazism Alfred Rosenberg. However, we can also turn away from the example of Nazism and continue our comparison with contemporary German Jews, including Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who share the völkisch discourse of The Plumed Serpent, particularly in its language of blood. The debate on the politics of The Plumed Serpent can be approached at the level of style. The question it poses is whether Lawrence’s religious, mythological vision of Mexico forms a totality that compels the action of his characters, or whether the characters disrupt his mythology while they enact it. In his defence of the novel L. D. Clark admits that “The Plumed Serpent is a flagrant piece of propaganda”. 3 John B. Humma observes that in the relationship between Kate and the Aztec cult “the outcomes seem, indeed, predisposed”. For Humma, Kate’s marriage to Cipriano Viedma is unconvincing because the imagery compels her behaviour, instead of there being a mutual relation between the two characters.4 Ellis voices a similar criticism about the ceremonies and hymns weakening the drama of the novel.5 Michael Bell argues that the “ontological vision” of Lawrence’s symbolic language in the novel fails to transform the physical reality of characters like Kate, because Lawrence is “trying to graft it on to a resistant sensibility”. Lawrence’s myth is “too much an authorial idea”, or an ideal, like those of liberalism and rationalisation to which it is opposed. The failure of Lawrence’s language, Bell observes, gives rise to “a doctrinal extremism”6 which, in its political form, approaches the totalitarian ideas of contemporary right-wing movements. In Lawrence’s first version of the novel, now referred to as Quetzalcoatl, the balance between Realist and mythological discourses is more even, leaving its characters with an apparently greater freedom to realize their individuality. Between composing Quetzalcoatl during the summer of 1923 and The Plumed Serpent from late 1924 to early 1925 in Mexico, Lawrence returned to 3 L. D. Clark, Dark Night of the Body (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 4. 4 Humma, Metaphor and Meaning in Lawrence’s Later Novels, 66, 74. 5 See Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 219. 6 Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being, 172, 174. .

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