In the Bullring With Simon & Simone

André Masson: Bullfighting (1937)

 

 

I. 

 

In response to a recent post [1], the Irish poet and playwright Síomón Solomon asks:

 

"I wonder how you square your squeamishness and selective sentimentality when it comes to bursten bowels and the suffering of animals, with your professed admiration for Bataille's Histoire de l'Oeil - a work which powerfully illustrates the (Nietzschean) idea that, in saying Yes to life in all circumstances and under any conditions, one must ultimately give even the most terrible aspects of existence one's blessing?"

 

 

II. 

 

It's a fair question. And I'm grateful to Solomon for raising it - and also for reminding me of the following passage from Bataille's short novel:

 

"There were actually three things about bullfights that fascinated [Simone]: the first, when the bull comes hurtling out  of the bullpen like a big rat; the second, when its horns plunge all the way into the flank of a mare; the third, when that ludicrous, raw-boned mare gallops across the arena [...] dragging a huge, vile bundle of bowels between her thighs in the most dreadful wan colours [...] Simone's heart throbbed fastest when the exploding bladder dropped its mass of mare's urine on the sand in one quick plop." [2]

 

Sixteen-year-old Simone, then, is the literary antithesis of forty-year-old Kate Leslie, the protagonist of Lawence's Plumed Serpent, who is utterly ashamed and nauseated by what she witnesses at the bullring. Having expected a display of bravery and a gallant show, Kate is shocked by the human cowardice and beastliness - not to mention the sight of blood and smell of bursten bowels [3].

 

But Simone loves everything about the bullfight; the heat, the noise, the cruelty, and not least the possibility of seeing a toreador injured by a monstrously lunging bull. 

 

When her wealthy English patron, Sir Edmund, informs her that at one time it was customary to serve the roasted testicles of the slaughtered bulls to guests seated in the front row of the arena, she begs him to obtain for her the balls of the first beast killed - only she insists they be served raw on a white plate, so that she might lift her dress and sit on them.

 

Unfortunately, this last part proves tricky to accomplish unobserved in a crowded arena. And so Simone simply holds the dish containing the two peeled testicles on her lap, until the opportunity arises to bite into one of them and then slowly and surely insert the other into her cunt - a lewd act which coincides with a handsome young bullfighter having an eye gauged out by a bull "with the same force as a bundle of innards from a belly" [4].                  

 

 

III.

 

What, then, are we to make of this - and how, then, are we to answer Síomón Solomon's question?

 

Firstly, I concede that it takes an almost inhuman effort to affirm even a single moment or joy, when it's in the knowledge that by so doing we affirm also every pain, every sadness, every cruelty, and every obscenity. But that's precisely what we are challenged to do by authors, like Bataille, who subscribe to the idea that all things are tied together beneath the same dark sun. 

 

However, affirming the fact that all things are part of a general economy of the whole, does not, as far as I can see make one morally complicit with evil, nor does it oblige one to participate in wrongdoing. 

 

I can affirm, for example, the pride of the peacock and the lust of the goat, without being a preening narcissist or a licentious libertine; I can affirm the vital cruelty of the natural world, without wanting to watch or make animals suffer in the bullring; and I can even read works of transgressive literature without wanting to act out ... 

 

Notes

 

[1] See the post entitled 'I Don't Know as I Get What D. H. Lawrence is Driving at When He Writes of Bursten Bowels ...' (6 June 2023): click here.   

[2] Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschal, (Penguin Books, 1982), p. 47.

      For readers unfamiliar with this classic work of the porno-philosophical imagination (originally published in 1928), Simone is a sixteen-year-old erotomaniac with a perverse penchant for inserting soft globular objects - be they eyes, testicles, or boiled eggs - into her vagina or between her arse cheeks. Half-way through the novel, she and her lover - a distant cousin who is the tale's anonymous narrator - run away to Spain in order to escape a police investigation in their native France. Here, they are supported by a fabulously rich (and depraved) Englishman, Sir Edmund, who enthusiastically lays on obscene entertainments for the young couple.  

[3] See Chapter 1 of D. H. Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), 'Beginnings of a Bull-Fight'. 

[4] Bataille, Story of the Eye ... p. 54.

I Don't Know as I Get What D. H. Lawrence is Driving at When He Writes of Bursten Bowels ...

Picasso: Gored Horse (1917) 

Graphite pencil on canvas with ochre primer 

(80.2 x 103.3 cm)

Museu Picasso de Barcelona

 

 

I. 

 

As readers of D. H. Lawrence are very well aware, he loves to write about the mysterious nether region of the human body known as the loins - i.e., that zone of libidinal intensity that lies somewhere between the ribs and the pelvis (or above the legs, but below the waist).

 

In fact, the only thing that excites his imagination more are the bowels ... 

 

 

II. 

 

Unfortunately, a bit like Frank O'Hara, I'm not quite sure I always understand what Lawrence is getting at when he uses this term [1]. On the one hand, it seems to be more than simply an anatomical reference to the gastrointestinal tract; indeed, for Lawrence, the bowels seem to be the seat of human compassion from which the deepest desires also spring. 

 

But, on the other hand, Lawrence likes to base his philosophical understanding of the body in biology where possible. So when he talks about the bowels, he is also referring us to the digestive system and those sausage-like organs known as the intestines or entrails. 

 

And, rather like Kenneth Williams, who described his daily bowel movements obsessively in his diaries, Lawrence seems to be plagued by a fear of things not working properly in this region, as we can see in the novel Kangaroo (1923), for example, when the marsupial-like fascist Ben Cooley is shot several times in his "'bloomin' Kangaroo guts'" [2], as one of his followers says.

 

Richard Somers - the book's Lawrentian avatar - visits Cooley in the hospital and can barely disguise his horror and disgust at the thought of ruptured bowels:

 

"Somers found Kangaroo in bed, very yellow, and thin [...] with haunted, frightened eyes. The room had many flowers, and was perfumed with eau de cologne, but through the perfume came an unpleasant, discernible stench. [...]

      Somers could not detach his mind from the slight, yet pervading sickening smell.

      "'My sewers leak,' said Kangaroo bitterly, as if divining the other's thought." [3]

 

Bruce Steele's explanatory note on this is spot-on:

 

"Jack's angry reaction to his leader's having been shot in the stomach and not killed outright probably reflects the First World War soldier's fear of abdominal wounds. In a pre-biotic age, peritonitis was a common and deadly complication of such wounds. While a ruptured bowel could be stitched, contamination of the abdominal cavity was frequently fatal; it would account for  the 'unpleasant, discernible stench' and Kangaroo's diagnosis 'My sewers leak'. If the sniper had deliberately aimed at his stomach rather than his head - which would probably have killed him instantly - it would have been in the knowledge that the victim would almost certainly die a slow and painful death." [4]

 

Of course, whilst being shot in the stomach can lead to a slow and painful death for a man, being disemboweled by the horns of an angry bull can be an equally horrific (and, arguably, even more obscene) way for an elderly horse to die.

 

And so to Mexico City ...   

 

 

III.

 

There are several disturbing scenes in Lawrence's novel The Plumed Serpent (1926), including the opening one set at the plaza de toros [5] - and I'm not referring to the fact that someone in the crowd thought it funny to throw an orange at the bald spot on Owen's sunburnt head.

 

Rather, I'm referring to the following incident involving a blindfolded horse ...

 

"The picador pulled his feeble horse round slowly, to face the bull, and slowly he leaned forward and shoved his lance-point into the bull's shoulder. The bull, as if the horse were a great wasp that had stung him deep, suddenly lowered his head in a jerk of surprise and lifted his horns straight up into the horse's abdomen. And without more ado, over went horse and rider, like a tottering monument upset.

      The rider scrambled from under the horse and went running away with his lance. The old horse, in complete dazed amusement, struggled to rise, as if overcome with dumb incomprehension. And the bull, with a red place on his shoulder welling a trickle of dark blood, stood looking round in equally hopeless amazement.

      But the wound was hurting. He saw the queer sight of the horse half reared from the ground, trying to get to its feet. And he smelled blood and bowels.

      So, rather vaguely, as if not quite knowing what he ought to do, the bull once more lowered his head and pushed his sharp, florishing horns in the horse's belly, working them up and down inside there with a vague sort of satisfaction." [6] 

      

As the novel's protagonist Kate Leslie rightly recognises, this shocking spectacle reveals nothing so much as human cowardice and indecency. She turns her face away in disgust. And when she looks again, "it was to see the horse feebly and dazedly walking out of the ring, with a great ball of its own entrails hanging out of its abdomen and swinging reddish against its own legs as it automatically moved". [7] 

 

But the sordid show isn't over: another horse is brought into the bullring so that it may be publicly disemboweled for the amusement of the crowd:

 

"Kate knew what was coming. Before she could look away, the bull had charged on the limping horse from behind [...] the horse was up-ended absurdly, one of the bull's horns between his hind legs and deep in his inside. Down went the horse, collapsing in front, but his rear was still heaved up, with the bull's horn working vigorously up and down inside him, while he lay on his neck all twisted. And a huge heap of bowels coming out. And a nauseous stench." [8] 

 

 

IV. 

 

I've never been (and wouldn't go) to a bullfight, and so would find it difficult (and disturbing) to visually imagine this scene were it not for the fact that Picasso - a lifelong bullfighting enthusiast - produced the image at the top of this post, after attending a bullfight in Barcelona during his stay in the city in 1917.

 

As the anonymous author of a piece describing this work on the Picasso Museum's website rightly notes:    

 

"In contrast to what he had mostly done on previous occasions, here the artist leaves aside the colourful and festive representation of the spectacle of bullfighting to focus his attention [...] on the solitary agony of the disemboweled horse, which collapses until it falls on its knees in a fetal position or prayer posture that has been compared to that of a fossilised crustacean or bird. Picasso manages to transcribe the animal's stabbing pain by means of its outstretched neck and raised head, looking upwards with a fixed gaze, as if asking for mercy to put an end to its cruel agony, once and for all." [9]

 

The author concludes: 

 

"The drama and cruelty of the scene reaches its zenith with the horn that sprouts from the ground and stands threateningly, waiting for the horse to finish collapsing to then finish it off." [10] 

 

I suppose, to end on a slightly more positive note, it might be mentioned that bullfighting was banned in Catalonia several years ago and the the last bullfight in the region took place in September 2011. [11]

 

However, there are still eight countries in the world where this ancient festival of gore still takes place - Spain, France, Portugal, Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador - and every year around 180,000 bulls (and 200 horses) are slaughtered in the ring.

 

 

V. 

 

In sum, I might not get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at when he writes of bursten bowels, but I do know: 

 

(i) I wouldn't want to be shot in the stomach ...

 

(ii) I don't like cruelty to animals ...

 

 

Notes

 

[1] See Frank O'Hara, 'I don't know as I get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at', Selected Poems, ed. Mark Ford, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), p. 167. The poem can be read online at allpoetry.com: click here. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge Unversity Press, 1994), p. 317.

 

[3] Ibid., pp. 322-323.    

[4] Bruce Steele's explanatory note to 317:12 of D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo ... p. 406.

[5] In Lawrence's day, the main bullring in Mexico City was the Toreo de la Condesa. This ancient bullring was replaced in 1946 by the monumental Plaza de toros México, an arena that seats over 41,000 people.

[6] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, pp. 15-16.

[7] Ibid., p. 16. 

[8] Ibid. 

[9-10] See the text that accompanies Picasso's Gored Horse (1917) on the Museu Picasso de Barcelona website: click here. 

[11] The ban was officially annulled for being unconstitutional by Spain's highest court in October 2016. However, despite the overturning of the ban, no further bullfight has taken place in Catalonia. 

 

 

In Defence of Owen Rhys and the American Way of Life (The D. H. Lawrence Birthday Post 2021)

 

Portrait of Witter Bynner (1919) upon whom D. H. Lawrence 

based the character of Owen Rhys in The Plumed Serpent (1926)

 

 

I. 

 

Whilst there may be some aspects of the American way of life I feel uncomfortable with, I would, nevertheless, prefer to live in the United States than in the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan; or, indeed, in any country where political power is exercised by religious leaders who act in the name of a deity with whom supreme authority is said to rest.  

 

And that's because, when all is said and done, theocracy is just about the worst of all forms of government. And that remains the case even when the theocracy is neopagan in character, full of dark gods waiting in the outer darkness, as imagined by D. H. Lawrence in The Plumed Serpent (1926).

 

Hopefully, I have made my thoughts on this novel and some of its central characters clear in a number of earlier posts: click here, for example, or here. So, in order not to simply repeat old material, I'd like in this post to offer a few thoughts on one of the minor characters; Kate Leslie's American cousin, Owen Rhys ... [1]

 

 

II. 

 

Rhys is a 40-something homosexual [2] with a Chinese jade collection and a very definite bald spot; a poet, keen to experience all that life might have to offer, no matter how sordid or how upsetting he may find it. He is, writes Lawrence, possessed of an almost maniacal will-to-happiness and a determination to treat everything as a game. 

 

It's fairly obvious that the narrator of the novel does not approve of him. And whilst Kate is really fond of her cousin, how could she respect him, when he was so empty and "waiting for circumstance to fill him up" [3]? 

      

Ultimately, Owen tried her patience and she was relieved when he had to return to the United States [4] - or the great death-continent, as Kate likes to imagine it [5].

 

Be that as it may, Rhys and his young lover, Bud Villiers, are surely preferable to Ramón and Cipriano, the spiritual and military leaders of the revolutionary fascist movement that aims to reintroduce Aztec gods back into history via an awakening of racial mysteries and the establishment of a theocracy on national socialist lines [6].      

 

And whilst Rhys may display many of the characteristics that Lawrence associates with sensational white America - such as the insidious modern disease of tolerance and the fear of missing out - we might ask ourselves if these traits are really so bad when compared to the atrocities committed by armed militants using terror to impose their religious beliefs? 

 

Better the cult of the dollar, than the cult of Quetzalcoatl; better the World Trade Center, than any sacred site or holy place; and better Owen's desire to play with his own emptiness, than Ramón's portentous prognosticating ... [7]   

 

Notes

 

[1] The character of Owen Rhys was based on the poet and translator Witter Bynner (1881-1968), who associated with many of the leading literary figures of his day, including Lawrence, to whom he and his lover Spud Johnson were introduced by Mabel Dodge Luhan.   

      Bynner had moved permanently to Santa Fe in the summer of 1922. The following year, he and Johnson joined the Lawrences on a trip to Mexico. Whilst Lawrence fictionalised elements of this in The Plumed Serpent, Bynner published a memoir based on recollections of his time with Lawrence entitled Journey with Genius (1951). 

      For full details of the Lawrence-Bynner relationship, see the third volume of the Cambridge biography, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game, 1922-1930, by David Ellis, (Cambridge University Press, 1998). See also the essay by D. A. N. Jones, 'Whacks', in the London Review of Books, Vol. 4, No. 4, (4 March, 1982): click here to read online. 

 

[2] Although in The Plumed Serpent the question of Rhys's sexual orientation is left vague, in the first version of the novel - Quetzalcoatl - Lawrence tells us that he was a "confirmed bachelor [...] by conviction and practice", a common euphemism for a male homosexual. It is also revealed that Rhys has a pederastic penchant for young Mexican boys: 

      "He lay for hours on the sands cooking like a beefsteak and surrounded by a swarm of little boys [...] spanking their little posteriors and being spanked back by them, letting them climb over him and dive from his shoulders when he was in the water, letting one of them sit on his naked chest as he lay on the sand."

      Owen also took nude photographs of those boys who would let him, "in all imaginable poses".

      See D. H. Lawrence, Quetzalcoatl, ed. N. H. Reeve, (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 35 and 128. 

 

[3] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 28.

      In a passage cut from the published novel, Lawrence expands upon the above at length and in detail, leaving the reader in no doubt as to how Kate sees her cousin Owen (and the USA):

       "Owen, what was he doing? With his poetry, and his very secure income, and his socialism, what did he amount to? A parlour socialist, of which there are so many in America. Why? What did he want? 

      She felt it very vividly. He wanted to destroy the soul out of life, by preserving the shells of living human beings. He hated the old divinity of man, the old divine authority which is in the soul of every living man, and which the soul of every living man gratefully recognises. Every living woman too. [...] Her woman's soul was weary, aching, vacant. She wanted again to be given to the living god. 

      And Owen, she knew, hated her for this desire. He hated her because she felt a natural ridicule of his unheroic attitude. A parlour socialist! A playboy of the western world. Play-boying, and nothing else. What was there here for a woman? 

      What was more, his soft, heavy, play-boying hatred of the divine inspiration which carries with it a divine authority. He hated religion in any form, even the simple instinct of religion. He liked aestheticism because it was a toy to play with.

      The hollow, grinding gap of negation that was the middle of him! Yet in this way he was a good fellow, superficially kind and good-natured. But at the middle of him, the grinding void of negation, grinding against any sort of positivity.

      Grinding to destroy the old god-power in man, the old god-authority. Grinding, grinding to reduce the living, creative quick to dust. Then grinding on and on, with mechanical benevolent insistence, to keep all the shells of human beings alive. The great American benevolence! Preserve life, preserve all life, but only when the soul has been killed out of it [...] 

      The great, hideous American activity! Democracy!"

      Kate even resents Owen for sunbathing, collecting things on his travels to take back home, and for snapping endless pictures with his Kodak camera!

      See The Plumed Serpent, textual apparatus [78:13], pp. 498-99 and cf. with what Lawrence writes in chapter III of Quetzalcoatl, p. 46.

 

[4] The character of Owen Rhys departs from the pages of The Plumed Serpent at the opening of chapter V. He has a rather more significant role to play in the first version of the novel, although he also drops out of Quetzalcoatl almost completely at the half-way point.  

 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, pp. 77-78.

 

[6] The description of Ramón's plumed serpent movement as form of national socialism is provided by a German hotel manager speaking to Kate in chapter VI of The Plumed Serpent, see pp. 101-03. 

      It's interesting to note that although the above character appears in the earlier version of the novel, he doesn't use that phrase, describing the movement instead as a type of bolshevism masquerading as a religion. I suspect that's probably because Lawrence only heard of Hitler and the Nazis following the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923, i.e., several months after completing Quetzalcoatl, but a year before he began rewriting the book.

      It's interesting also that Kate refused to accept the hotel manager's judgement: "She had seen Ramón Carrasco, and Cipriano. And they were men. They wanted something beyond. She would believe in them. Anything, anything rather than this sterility of nothingness which was the world, and into which her life was drifting." [103] 

      And that, of course, is precisely the appeal and false promise of political fascism and/or religious fundamentalism. People would rather believe in anything and anyone - no matter how specious -  than face up to the challenge of nihilism: "She felt she could cry aloud, for the unknown gods to put the magic back into her life, and to save her from the dry-rot of the world's sterility." [103]           

 

[7] See D. H. Lawrence, Quetzalcoatl ... The phrase 'portentous prognosticating' is on p. 52. As for Owen Rhys having a vacuum at the middle of him, see the deleted MS passage from chapter III in Appendix I. Lawrence makes it clear that Rhys treasured his own emptiness and found in it his greatest strength, freedom, and joy. 

A Character Study from The Plumed Serpent: Cipriano (First Man of Huitzilopochtli)

General Joaquín Amaro (1889-1952)

Mexican revolutionary and military reformer

According to an explanatory note in the Cambridge edition of The Plumed Serpent, Lawrence probably based the character of General Viedma - or Don Cipriano - on several real-life figures from the time, including Emiliano Zapata and Joaquín Amaro.

Like the latter, for example, Cipriano was an officer in the Mexican army, of native Indian origin (Zapotec), who possessed a real talent not only for military strategy but also institutional reform. Unlike Amaro, however, Cipriano also had "a little black beard like an impériale" and was fluent in English (having been educated in London and Oxford), even if the language sounded "a little stiff on his soft tongue" [21].

Lawrence being Lawrence - that is to say, a racial fetishist with a particular penchant for dark-skinned, dark-eyed foreign men who still have something of the goat-footed god Pan about them - he's very keen to emphasise Cipriano's ethnicity and how, underlying his superficial assurance and good manners, lay something fierce and primitive; he was a man who seemed to be "perpetually suspecting an ambush" [22] and had a savage gleam in his black, inhuman eyes.     

Perhaps that's why Kate, the 40-year-old Irishwoman at the cente of this peculiar work, is both drawn to him and repulsed: Cipriano could appear to be awfully nice and kind, but he also had a "heavy, black Mexican fatality about him" [24] that made her want to get away from him. Like Michael Howard, Cipriano has something of the night about him. His eyes were not merely dark-coloured, they were as black as jewels "into which one could not look without a sensation of fear" [67].    

Kate observes him at the dinner table:

"His face was changeless and intensely serious, serious almost with a touch of childishness. But the curious blackness of his eyelashes lifted so strangely, with such intense unconscious maleness from his eyes, the movement of his hand was so odd, quick, light [...] and his dark-coloured lips were so helplessly savage [...] that her heart stood still. There was something undeveloped and intense in him, the intensity and the crudity of the semi-savage. She could well understand the potency of the snake upon the Aztec and Maya imagination. Something smooth, undeveloped, yet vital in this man suggested the heavy-ebbing blood of reptiles in his veins." [67]

And this is despite the fact his god-father was an English bishop who oversaw his education and welfare and wanted him to become a priest. Still, Kate is also alert to what she imagines to be the "dark, surging passion of tenderness" [71] that Cipriano is capable of. She puts this down to his being an Indian. However, as Lawrence suggests in his next novel that even English gamekeepers can feel such tenderness, perhaps it's rooted more in phallic masculinity than race. 

One day, Kate and Cipriano have tea together. Again, Lawrence can't resist the opportunity to write of the latter's eyelashes and the way that his eyebrows tilted "with a barbarian conceit, above his full, almost insolent black eyes" and it's clear with whom his erotic fascination lies. Indeed, poor Kate is dismissed as "one of the rather plump Irishwomen, with soft brown hair and hazel eyes" [81] - i.e., of no real sexual interest.   

She may have her own feminine charms and mystery, but, for Lawrence, Cipriano is the main attraction; "he had a good deal of magnetic power", undiminished by his years spent in England. Indeed, his education "lay like a film of white oil on the black lake of his barbarian consciousness." Despite his diminutive stature, Cipriano also has real presence and substantial being: "He made the air around him seem darker, but richer and fuller" [82].

For Kate this makes Cipriano curious, but it quickly has the potential to become suffocating. And malevolent - even satanisch.

Although, clearly, his real love is for Ramón (whom he finds both compelling and incomprehensible), Cipriano decides he wants to marry Kate. He looks at her with "a strange lingering desire in his black eyes" [187] and sees her as a fresh-faced flower, despite her age. He doesn't merely want Kate to become his wife, however, he wants her to become the incarnation of a goddess by his side - just as he is the incarnation of the Aztec deity Huitzilopochtli, armed with a serpent of fire.

The absurdity of this idea makes Kate laugh. Kate informs Cipriano that it is her intention never to remarry and that she doesn't much feel like a goddess in a Mexican pantheon. But still she can't help admiring his body: "How dark he was, and how primitively physical, beautiful and deep-breasted, with soft, full flesh!" [201]

For all that, it's Ramón who really tickles her fancy and touches her inside. Cipriano seems only to offer her submission and horror. But then, as he says, why not accept a bit of horror in life; horror is real and belongs to an economy of the whole. He feels a bit of horror for her too; her light-coloured eyes and white hands. Horror is what adds spice to life; it gives the "'sharp, wild flavour'" [236].

Kate is not entirely convinced by Cipriano's uncanny logic, however. In fact, she think's he's simply trying to exert his will and get one over on her: "Really, he seemed sinister to her, almost repellant [...] how could she marry Cipriano, and give her body to [...] death?" [236, 246]    

Ramón sometimes sees something of this deathliness in Cipriano too; he knows him to be a man who thrills at the thought of power and longs for a holy war fought with the entire world if need be. (The German hotel manager who describes their neopagan revolution as just another expression of national socialism isn't far wrong.) If he can appear comical, ultimately the demonical little figure of Don Cipriano is not to be laughed at. 

When next they meet, Kate again notices the physical presence of Cipriano:

"Cipriano  made her a little uneasy, sitting beside him. He made her physicaly aware of him, of his small but strong and assertive body, with its black currents and storms of desire. The range of him was very limited, really. The great part of his nature was just inert and heavy, unresponsive, limited as a snake or lizard is limited. But within his own heavy, dark range he had a curious power. Almost she could see the black fume of power which he emitted, the dark, heavy vibration of his blood, which cast a spell over her." [310] 

Once Kate has tuned into the ancient phallic Pan mystery, she can conceive of marrying Cipriano, with his small hands, slanting eyes, and the "tuft of black goat's beard hanging light from his chin" [311] ... Not to mention his huge erection that rises suddenly in the twilight when the power of his blood is up and to which Kate is obliged to submit with supreme passivity, as beneath an over-arching absolute.

This, for all its highfalutin religio-literary language, is Lawrence (as narrator) simply indulging his BBC fantasies. He uses the character of Kate as a kind of sexual go-between between himself and the figure of Cipriano. It's odd to say the least, but something he often does in his fiction.      

Eventually, Cipriano achieves his deification and becomes-Huitzilopochtli. Even his soldiers can see the change in him; as if he has grown wings with dark feathers, like an eagle. And how does he exercise his second strength? Again, strangely - but not surprisingly, knowing Lawrence - he makes all his men cook and clean and do their own laundry, grow vegetables and paint the barracks. 

Doing chores and jobs about the place was Lawrence's idea of fun - and Cipriano's method of instilling some discipline in his men. For that was what was needed; not machine discipline, of course, imposed by outside authority, but sacred inner discipline. He also encourages them to dance the old dances to the beat of the drum, so that they might gain power over the living forces of the earth. This they do semi-naked, smeared with oil and red earth-powder, their limbs glistening with sweat.  

 

Cipriano loved to dance and loved also to watch his men dancing by firelight. He also enjoyed making long marches across the wild Mexican country and camping out beneath the stars. If he and his soldiers captured any bandits, Cipriano would strip them and tie them up. Those he judged to be beyond redemption he would stab with a knife to the heart, saying "'I am the red Huitzilopochtli'" [366].

Work - Dance - March - Camp - Kill: this, then, was the life of a soldier under the command of General Viedma. His was an elite force who threw off the drab uniform of regular troops and "dressed in white with the scarlet sash and the scarlet ankle cords, and carrying the good, red and black sarape" [366] (when not naked and displaying their dark and ruddy bodies).   

If all this sounds a little insane - like something from Apocalypse Now - that's because it is. Things don't get any less disturbing when Cipriano as the Living Huitzilopochtli has his coming out ceremony. To the sound of drums and brightly-coloured fireworks, he emerges from the church in his black and scarlet sarape carrying a torch and with "three green parrot feathers erect on his brow" [372].

Meanwhile, the semi-naked Men of Huitzilopochtli dance around like demons. After a song or two, the ceremony climaxes with an execution of prisoners, two of whom have their necks broken by guards and three of whom are stripped and blindfolded before Cipriano personally stabs each of them in the chest - once, twice, and three times for luck! This is followed by acts of blood play within the church (no women allowed) that make, if I'm honest, pretty uncomfortable reading.

No doubt Kate is right and Ramón and Cipriano act in good faith and all sincerity - but that's the problem, isn't it? Fascists and religious fanatics always believe in the rightness of their own deeds and their eyes always sparkle with conviction. And Kate is surely mistaken to believe that it's okay if Cipriano kills people and commits numerous other atrocities because his "flame is young and clean" [394] and he is of the gods.    

Inevitably, the novel ends with a kind of war. This releases a certain thrilling energy into the air, but "there was a sense of violence and crudity in it all, a touch of horror" [420], which rather made Cipriano happy "in his curious Indian way" [421]. Strangely, denying his wife Kate clitoral orgasm - or "the white ecstasy of frictional satisfaction" [422] - in the name of the greater sex also makes him happy.   

In sum, then, what are we to think of Don Cipriano, the First Man of Huitzilopochtli and fascist religious fanatic who loves dancing and dressing up almost as much as he loves killing helpless prisoners with a knife?

I said at the beginning he's a kind of composite character made up of various figures, and these surely include fictional psychopaths like Colonel Kurtz, as I hinted earlier. Indeed, it's interesting that Lawrence uses the phrase heart of darkness at one point, as if remembering Conrad's magnificent short novel and anticipating Francis Ford Coppola's movie 55 years later.   

The following, said by Kurtz, could quite as easily have been said by Cipriano discussing his own followers, or, indeed, Heinrich Himmler referring to members of his beloved SS: "You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling ..."

It's a little depressing to think that, for a while at least, Lawrence was to insist The Plumed Serpent was his greatest achievement and that he meant every word of it ... 

See: D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L. D. Clark, (Cambridge University Press, 1987). All page numbers given in the text refer to this edition. 

Note: readers who liked this post might find an earlier one, on the queer love affair between Ramón and Cipriano that lies at the heart of Quetzalcoatl (the early version of The Plumed Serpent), also of interest: click here.