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

When Hermione and Gerald argue about this topic at Laura Crich's wedding, Birkin intervenes by declaring that "race is the essential element in nationality, in Europe at least" (28). It is difficult to transpose this statement into the non-European context of The Plumed Serpent, but if the sexual politics of the earlier novel are organized around the same rhetorical and narrative schemes as the later discussions of race, there are strong grounds for arguing that Lawrence's conceptions of nationalism rest on his ideas of the primitive. Such an association implies a different view of nationalism from that of Anderson, who confines racism to an archaic moment that antecedes the modern nation. For Anderson, "nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations ... outside history" (149). This argument replicates Lawrence's belief in the atemporality of race, and even associates racism with aristocratic "ideologies of class" (in the manner of Ramon), but it cannot account for the racial/ethnic identifications that temper the secular aspirations of many nations (the contemporary European examples cited by Michael Ignatieff in Blood and Belonging being among the most obvious). In this respect, Lawrence's conception of nationalism is more accurately described by Homi Bhabha, who finds the "archaism" of race to reactivate the "primal scene" of the modern nation - that is, "the problematic, historical transition between dynastic lineage societies and horizontal, homogeneous secular communities" (250).

By positing racism's "timelessness," Bhabha argues, Anderson exposes the

ambivalent historical temporality of modern national cultures - the aporetic coexistence, within the cultural history of the modern imagined community, of both the dynastic, hierarchical, prefigurative "medieval" traditions (the past), and the secular, synchronous cross-time of modernity (the present). (250)

I believe that Lawrence's celebration of traditional religious forms within the context of a modern national revolution generates a similar "ambivalent" temporality. The spiritual revival of The Plumed Serpent, while predicated on the progression of narrative form, requires the repetition of traditional dynastic hierarchies, which Bhabha simply registers as "the past." For Lawrence, this legitimates an aristocratic "commingling," or a "two way" travel in the realm of the primitive. Thus it is in that "strange third thing" between Kate and Cipriano, the hybridity of sexuality and race, that the novel imagines the possibility of a nationalist struggle that will not simply reinforce the transgressive dialectic of modernity. But this requires a movement of return that installs the nation within the atemporal locus of the "Now" (175). Just as Lawrence's rewriting of the Malinche story simply turns the tables on colonial inequalities (inverting rather than displacing the binary logic of racism), so this complicity of timelessness and repetition (noted by Bersani as constitutive of Lawrentian narrative) attests his inability to imagine a cultural hybridity that articulates difference outside an imposed or assumed hierarchy.