The Plumed Serpent

A novel by D.H. Lawrence

With each line read from this novel, I became more and more convinced that the patterns in human thought are repeated throughout the ages, no matter how different they may seem from each other. The fatalism of the early twentieth century, discovered by me in the novel, seemed so similar to that present in the minds of some people in the early twenty-first century. The ideas gathered in the novel under the pretext of colloquial statements made by the book's characters seemed new and current to me, even if they represented fragments of human consciousness that had expired temporarily. It is as if the old obstacles of the human mind remained valid even today in spite of the progress made in the meantime. It was as if the core or essence of some existential dilemmas remained intact even if the rest was demagogically tarnished and diluted in more or less weighty opinions. A seemingly insignificant core that has relapsed and reborn the old problem in all its primary splendor.

"The Plumed Serpent" is the title of a 1926 novel by British author David Herbert Richards Lawrence (D.H. Lawrence). The work was written after a trip to Mexico in 1923. The work itself is a literary fresco intended to illustrate the life of Mexicans in the early twentieth century. The narrative of the work is among the socio-political events that marked Mexico at that time such as the influence of the Catholic Church in society, the development of interwar socialism, the preponderant modernization of Mexico with foreign investment, regressive agrarian traditions, high crime, revolutions and social instability by ideological reasons, peons poverty, precarious and difficult industrialization of the country, cultural antagonism between Europeans and native Indians and others.

The key character of the novel is an Irish woman over 40 years old named Kate Leslie. She lived the first part of her life in Europe (England, Ireland and others). She had two husbands: the first was Desmond Burns and the second - James Joachim Leslie. The first husband did not love him but had two children with him: a 21-year-old boy and a 19-year-old girl. After divorcing her first husband, her children remained in the care of their father, Desmond Burns. She had no children with her second husband, but she loved him very much. His name was James Joachim Leslie and he was one of the Irish leaders who fought for Ireland's independence until his death. D.H. Lawrence describes Kate Leslie in one of the excerpts from the book as follows: "Kate was a beautiful woman of a certain depth. In a week she would be forty years old. Accustomed to all kinds of society, she followed people as you flip through the pages of a novel, with some disinterested amusement. She didn't feel integrated into any society: she was too Irish, too wise."

This protagonist of the work will travel through Mexico (Mexico City, Tlacolula, Sayula, Jamiltepec and others), will know Mexican faces, will make friends or acquaintances, will explore more or less the cultural and social "panorama" of Mexico. In these European tourist adventures she will learn about the current life of the Mexican Indians, about their ancient Aztec civilization, about the villages of Mexican peons but also about the political government of Mexico, about the country's large landowners, about the relationship between Catholicism and Mexican Indians and the relationship between Spaniards and the old locals of the country, about the intellectuals as well as the young generation of the country in question. At first, Kate Leslie will be accompanied by two Americans: her cousin Owen and Villiers, and then travel through Mexico on her own. The plot that makes Kate take this step was a newspaper article in a Spanish-language publication. The title of that article was, "The Gods of Antiquity Return to Mexico."

After Kate read this novel, a great dose of curiosity and courage filled her soul so she decides to go to the place where that article mentioned that the supreme gods of the Aztecs will return to the village of Sayula, Jalisco which is near the lake with the same name means Sayula. In the article, Kate was amazed to find that a messenger of the Aztec gods came out of that lake as an empty, handsome, radiant man. On the shore of the lake he met the wives of the peons who washed their clothes. The messenger approached the clothes lying in the sun on the pebble of the beach and took a pair of pants to cover his nakedness, which aroused the protest of the women in front of this impertinence that happened right under their noses. Seeing that the women were still scolding him, this messenger or maybe even a flawless god returned to speak to the woman from whom he took those pants: "Why are you shouting? Calm down! Your pants will be returned to you. Our gods are ready for returning to you. Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc, your old gods, are going to return. Rest assured that the gods will not find you weeping and wailing. I have risen from the lake to tell you that the gods are returning to Mexico, that they are ready to return to their old hearth."

It should be noted that the author chose the title of this novel to be the name of one of the gods mentioned in the passage above, namely Quetzalcoatl but the editor of the first edition of the book (from 1926) insisted on the title "The Plumed Serpent". Only in 1995 was an early version of the novel called "Quetzalcoatl" published by Black Swan Books. The targeted edition is considered different enough from "The Plumed Serpent" version that it could be treated as another work. The meaning of the title "Quetzalcoatl", coveted by the author for this novel, is found in the pages of the book in the form of an inner dialogue carried by Kate: "Quetzal is the name of a bird that lives at high altitudes in the mists of the tropical mountains, and whose tail has a beautiful plumage, precious for the Aztecs, Coatl is a snake, so Quetzalcoatl means the plumed serpent, so hideous in the cornered, feathered, contorted statue at the National Museum. But, as she vaguely remembered, Quetzalcoatl had been a kind of god with a beautiful face and a beard; the wind was his breath, and his eyes saw without being seen, like the stars during the day. Eyes that lurk behind the wind, like the stars beyond the blue of the day sky. And Quetzalcoatl had to leave Mexico to plunge back into the deep bath of life. He had been burdened for years. And he had gone to the east, perhaps he had sunk into the sea, or perhaps he had floated to the heavens, like a meteor, from the top of the Orizaba volcano: like the trail left by a meteor. Quetzalcoatl! Who knows what he meant to the dead Aztecs or to the ancient Indians who had known him before the Aztecs raised their deity to the pedestal of horror and revenge?"

In Sayula, Kate found a place to rent and from there she got to know the surroundings. There she also met two Mexican friends she had known since she had come to Mexico: the Spaniard Don Ramon Carrasco and the Indian general Viedma, also called Don Cipriano. Last one, Kate met him at the beginning of her stay in Mexico, at the exit of the tribune of an arena that hosted corrida performances. Don Cipriano offered to help Kate return to her residence, the Hotel San Remo, and offered her his general cloak once it began to rain. After this unexpected meeting, Kate met again this two gentlemen and had the opportunity to get to know them better. Don Ramon Carrasco was a respected intellectual in Mexico (historian and archaeologist), a wealthy man but also an important public figure for the national consciousness of Mexico. He had relations and a say until the government of Mexico. Don Cipriano was a highly respected general and well known for his military career and protector of social stability in the country. Together with his good friend Ramon Carrasco, they embodied two populist voices that had ambitions to free Mexicans of any rank and social class from any kind of oppression, be it from within or without.

Thus, in her childish desire to solve the mystery of the "gods returning to Mexico," Kate had grown closer to Ramon Carrasco and Cipriano. All three became reliable friends and began to offer support. But the relationship between them is much more complex than it seems at first glance. As the "mystery of Quetzalcoatl" became clearer and clearer to Kate - politically and ideologically - she began to develop an open or undeclared passion for Ramon Carrasco, who was a married man with two mature children. In one of the lines of the book we find such a portrayal of the character: "Don Ramon Carrasco was a tall, imposing, handsome man, who gave an impression of massiveness. He was middle-aged and had a large, black mustache and arrogant eyes, under very straight eyebrows." In the novel we find nothing said directly about Kate's passion for Ramon Carrasco which I would suggest was reciprocal but the description of Ramon's sensuality in his ritual ecstasy when he worshiped Quetzalcoatl through the eyes of Kate makes me believe that she had an emotional feeling stronger than friendship with this "prophet" of the said god. To General Don Cipriano, Kate revealed an emotional ambiguity. She usually ignored him and tried to develop a very laconic relationship with him, which always displayed her Indian calm and detachment from what was happening around her. But we cannot say that Don Cipriano was not an ambitious man, including ambitions for marriage. He was a cultured person who was educated in London with the acquisition of English in addition to the native Spanish language and has been concerned since then in the prosperity of Mexico which made him abandon these ambitions of marriage but now after a brilliant career as a soldier was optimistic that the time had come for them as well. Although Kate never gave him a visible interest, he began to be interested in her as their friendship progressed. One day, he suddenly proposed to Kate to marry him during a colloquial discussion, not having such a subject. Kate did not accept his proposal but did not reject it either. She passed over this subject as calmly as in any other discussion with Don Cipriano, whom he considered a handsome man, rather small in stature and who did not know if he had anything to offer her.

Meanwhile, Kate has discovered that the "return of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl" is actually a demagoguery show politically directed by Don Ramon Carrasco and his ally Don Cipriano. The opponent of this national renaissance movement was none other than the Catholic Church which through its religious revolution nurtured Mexico of its Aztec values ​​and thus cultivated with or without malice a lack of identity patriotism among a good portion of Mexicans who were Indians as the novel relates: "But, Kate asked, how are you doing with the twelve million poor people - most of them Indians that Montes is talking about? Whatever you do, you can't provide them with a normal standard of living. And they don't even understand the words capitalism and socialism. They are the real Mexico, and no one even looks at them, except to turn them into a casus belli. From a human point of view, they don't even exist for you."

There was the question of the return of Mexico to an ancient religion, which had expired historically but could be used to obtain a nationalism with ideological or political overtones. The people of this country were like any other nation in the whirlwind of times, epochs and the latest political doctrines that took over the world and many of them did not even have time to adhere to a political vision facing social hardships and the luxury of go to school.

Don Ramon Carrasco gradually developed this myth of Quetzalcoatl using the written press as a means of informing the general public, so articles about "the legends of Quetzalcoatl" gradually appeared in the country's newspapers, even in the capital, which foreshadowed in an allegorical sense an archetypal future of Mexico born from the ashes of Aztec culture and religion - the ancient natives of this country. With the consolidation of this new cult, its founder began to negotiate and approach the Catholic dioceses to receive and accept the new faith which also involved the transformation of Catholic chapels or cathedrals into temples to be worshiped in a pantheon of the gods Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli. The novel mentions that during the revolutions in the country the purpose of the Catholic places of worship was changed but in buildings with a secular role. Obviously, in this social context, there were clashes, not only peaceful, between the followers of the two religions.

The intention of Don Ramon Carrasco and Don Cipriano was to foster an animistic belief that would have offered Mexicans a spiritual and transcendental revelation through magical thinking based on their cultural memory and idolizing the return to a prehuman origin, the forces of the universe that express so much consciousness as well as mysticism. However, the problem was much more delicate because the era in which this new socio-cultural order was attempted in Mexico, capitalizing on the anthropological approach of the original supernatural or genesis, was too thoroughly reformed by science to collectively and publicly support a religious vision more or less personal.

While this confrontation of religious cults continues in the novel, Kate finally decides to take the step she always doubted and marries Don Cipriano. First their marriage was made "in the name of Quetzalcoatl" but later the civil marriage was made official. The relationship between the two remained even after the rather ambiguous and bizarre marriage act. The author does not describe a too romantic idyll between the two, although he often notices Kate's fascination with Don Cipriano's anatomical beauty and his unparalleled spirit of Indian masculinity. General Cipriano behaves thoughtfully and at the same time distant from his wife Kate. Their marriage is like a communion without obligations. Don Cipriano loves Kate in his cold, Indian way and doesn't ask her for anything, not even to stay with him. Other scenes in the novel suggest a kind of bisexual inclination common to both Don Cipriano and Don Ramon Carrasco.

The end of the novel is outlined in the light of Kate's inner struggle. She did not know what to choose: to stay here in Mexico or to go to Europe, to her children, to her family. She decides to return to Europe. Kate confesses this to Don Cipriano but also to Don Ramon Carrasco. The two tell her to make this decision with her own heart, to choose what she believes. I don't know if the author gives us enough clues, but I think this situation can be likened to a literary parable in which the author shows the reader the situation in which every human spirit is once faced with a fundamental choice in his life: to live alive and without inhibitions or to live cautiously and sociably from the instinct of self-defense. In fact, this pending decision was pointed out throughout the novel. Mexico was a place of contrasts for Kate. Tough and genuinely seductive at the same time. It provokes repulsion but also a thrilling interest. Here she felt her pride dead or superfluous, her very soul seemed dead but sometimes she had the impression that she is more alive than ever here, in this place of pain, fear or the human spirit put to the test of fate.

Caught in the web of great doubt, Kate decides to meet her husband, Don Cipriano, who was currently visiting the hacienda of Don Ramon Carrasco in Jamiltepec. In her inner monologue, she had such conversations: "Why should I leave? Kate continues to talk to herself. Why to see the buses swimming through the mud in Piccadilly on Christmas Eve and the crowds of pedestrians crowding the wet sidewalks, next to big stores like huge caves of light? I'd better stay here, where my soul is less gloomy. I'll have to apologize to Ramon for everything I've said to him. I won't criticize him anymore. After all, here's another kind of vastness, with the sound of drums and the shout of Quetzalcoatl." Kate arrives at Don Ramon Carrasco's house and meets the two in the middle of a ritual dedicated to Quetzalcoatl and during that meeting she will reproach the two for not wanting her here, in this place, but with tears in her eyes she will add to Don Cipriano the following:

- You don't want me to leave, do you? she pleads.

A slow, almost mad smile spread across his face, and his body twitched in a slight convulsion. Then his Indian voice was heard, soft as if his whole mouth had softened, speaking in Spanish, but with the "r" sound lost.

- Yo! Yo! his eyebrows rose in a strange surprise, and a slight spasm shook his body again.

- I love you so much! I love you so much! A lot! A lot!

It sounded so sweet, so soft, like it came from his soft, wet, warm blood that Kate felt a shiver run through her.

- You won't let me go! she told him.