D.H. Lawrence's "Dark Page": narrative primitivism in 'Women in Love' and 'The Plumed Serpent.' - English author

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1997 by Brett Neilson

As in Woman in Love the primitive signifies a "final rest" (423) that promises to arrest the "endless traveling" of the narrative. Thus the religious rhetoric of Quetzalcoatl, which accompanies Kate's transformation into Malintzi, celebrates the possibility of an atemporal existence. "There is no Before and After" proclaims Ramon in a sermon he delivers at Jamiltepec, "there is only Now" (175). Placing the primitive in the enunciative present, he elevates this fiction into a principle of self-identity: "I always am. . . . In the dreamless Now, I Am" (175-76). Furthermore he refers to Quetzalcoatl as "lord of the two ways," an appellation that repeats and modifies the rhetorical scheme discovered in Women in Love. The narrative operations of The Plumed Serpent regulate its treatment of cultural hybridity in much the same way as the linear time scheme of Women in Love affects its handling of bisexuality. Thus, while the liaison of Kate and Cipriano promises a radical transfiguration of intercultural relationships - a "strange third thing that was both of them and neither of them" (389) - it is ultimately remastered by the novel's edicts against cultural mixing. Lawrence reverses the racial polarities of the Malinche story, but he can only accept the possibility of cultural hybridity under strict conditions of class hierarchy.

The Plumed Serpent contains several pronouncements against the mestizo progeny of la Malinche. The most extreme of these occurs at the dinner party held for Kate and her friends at Ramon's Mexico City villa. Here, Julio Toussaint, an elderly Mexican, advances the theory that his country's problems derive from the "people of mixed blood," and that unless returned to the "pure-blooded Indians," it will be overtaken by the United States. For Toussaint, the "half-breeds" are the only "conscious" people in Mexico, and their downfall results from the fact that they are "begotten in greed and selfish brutality" (66). The "mixed-blood Mexicans," he believes, are "divided against" themselves, being "neither one thing nor another" (64). While it is unacceptable to attribute the opinions of this minor character to the author, Lawrence elsewhere develops these edicts against miscegenation into a general statement about the impossibility of cultural hybridity - that is, the ambivalent and uneven melding of cultures under colonialism. In Mornings in Mexico, a collection of essays written at the same time as The Plumed Serpent, he writes the following about the relation between the European and the Amerindian:

The Indian way of consciousness is different and fatal to our own way of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united. They are not even to be reconciled.... [T] he same paradox exists between the consciousness of white men and Hindoos or Polynesians or Bantu. To pretend that all is one stream is to cause chaos and nullity. To pretend to express one stream in terms of another, so as to identify the two, is false and sentimental.... One man can belong to one great way of consciousness only. He may even change from one way to another. But he cannot go both ways at once. (55-56)