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Henry Thomas De la Beche: Awful Changes:
Man Found Only in a Fossil State - Reappearance of Ichthyosaur (1830) [1]
I.
Is it possible that the spirit of an ancient people who have been supplanted in their own lands by another race - as the Native Americans were supplanted by white Europeans, for example - will one day reassert itself and take posthumous revenge upon the latter?
That certainly seems to be the haunting idea advanced by D. H. Lawrence in his non-fictional writings on - and produced in - Old and New Mexico during the 1920s and essentially forms the plot of his novel The Plumed Serpent (1926). There is, he warns, a rattle-snake still coiled at the heart of America which will one day lift its head again and sink its sharp fangs into the flabby behind of the pale-faced world.
In a late essay, Lawrence is explicit in prophesying the collapse of the latter and the rebirth of aboriginal America: "The sky-scraper will scatter on the winds like thistledown, and the genuine America [...] will start on its course again." [2]
II.
Interestingly, Lawrence also likes to imagine worlds being successively created and destroyed, allowing new species to emerge from out of chaos and supersede older species; for mammals, for example, to supersede birds.
But although he senses a malevolent spirit "rippling out of all the vanished, spiteful aeons" [3], he doesn't suggest that monstrous skinny-necked lizards will one day have their revenge upon those warm-blooded life-forms that came after them and return to rule the earth once more.
For Lawrence, as for Birkin, the timeless creative mystery always brings forth newness - it doesn't give a second chance to those species that have been superseded or fallen into extinction due to an inability to change and develop.
So, whilst the Aztecs and other native American peoples might one day have the last laugh over the white settlers - the spirit of their ancestors finding a new embodiment and expression - it seems that the ichthyosaur, for example, will not be staging a dramatic comeback in a posthuman future ...
Unless, that is, those who subscribe to the notion of the resilient Cretaceous are on to something and "the temporary life of our species is part of the ichthyosaur's evolutionary plot to return after our species has reproduced, through climate warming, the conditions of the Cretaceous Period with warm seas, torpid swamps, and tropical trees" [4].
Notes
[1] This well-known caricature by English geologist Henry De la Beche, lampooning the idea that the ichthyosaur might return, was first published in 1830. It depicts 'Professor Ichthyosaurus' lecturing in front of other Mesozoic marine reptiles. The caption that accompanied the picture read: "'You will at once perceive [...] that the skull before us belonged to one of the lower order of animals; the teeth are very insignificant, the power of the jaws trifling and altogether it seems wonderful how the creature could have procured food.'"
[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'New Mexico', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 181.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Corasmin and the Parrots', in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, p. 13.
[4] Terry Gifford, 'Reading D. H. Lawrence in the Anthropocene', in The D. H. Lawrence Society Newsletter, ed. Naveed Rehan, (Feb 2023), p. 40.
To read a related post to this one on Rupert Birkin and the Ichthyosaur, please click here.
