Abstract
In Chapter 5, transport in Lawrence’s Mexican novel, The Plumed Serpent, becomes the focus for encounter with difference and the examination of postcolonial tensions between invasive technological materialism and primitive cultural revival. Kate’s personal search for new life is interpreted through an engagement with the cultural other as a form of journey or series of iconic journeys towards self-discovery. Her moments of transit privilege and problematize this search as they challenge her conceptions of modernity and identity and signal, for Lawrence, transport’s significance for transcending the known world and achieving difference through intercultural and interracial encounter. Transport’s literal as well as mystic properties are interrelated as these worlds—the ancient and the modern—collide in revolution.
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Notes
- 1.
The actual Mexican Revolution lasted from 1910 until 1920 although revolutionary outbreaks continued well into the 1920s, coinciding with times when Lawrence was living in Mexico.
- 2.
Particularly relevant to this chapter is Neil Roberts’ claim in D.H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference (London: Macmillan, 2004) that the novel is ‘the culmination of Lawrence’s preoccupation with cultural difference, the furthest point of an imaginative journey that was driven by increasing hatred of the mechanised, automatised existence that he felt was pervasive in England’, p. 2. Also significant is Eunyoung Oh’s examination of The Plumed Serpent as a ‘“postcolonial” novel in which Lawrence envisions a co-existence of two different worlds’, p. 19. See Oh, D. H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing: Colonialism in his Travel Writings and ‘Leadership’ Novels (London and New York: Routledge, 2007).
- 3.
Howard Booth, ‘“Give Me Differences”: Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and Race’, D.H. Lawrence Review 27.2–3 (1998): 171–196, p. 171.
- 4.
James Buzzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), pp. 34, 320.
- 5.
Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), p. 168.
- 6.
Charles Burack argues that ‘Lawrence is a notable pioneer in suggesting that a creative fusion of races, cultures, and religions may hold real promise for the revitalization and evolution of humanity’ and Neil Roberts also supports Lawrence’s shift from a colonial attitude when he suggests that Lawrence’s ‘engagement with the otherness of indigenous American culture had found its culminating expression in The Plumed Serpent’, Burack, D.H. Lawrence’s Language of Sacred Experience: The Transfiguration of the Reader (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), p. 127; Roberts, D.H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference, p. 75.
- 7.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972 (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 1.
- 8.
Mexico City’s tramway system represented modernity and progress in the early 1900s but was most active in the 1920s when Lawrence was in Mexico writing his novel. Mexican trams also became associated with revolutionary violence and death. Trams, for example, were used as funeral cars to transport the dead. Ninety per cent of the city’s deceased were transported to cemeteries on the trams of the CFDF (Compañia de Ferrocarriles del Distrito Federal). ‘There were eventually ninety funeral vehicles of every size and style for every budget’; see Allen Morrison ‘The Tramways of Mexico City’ (http://www.tramz.com). Tramways also became the focus of revolutionary statements of power and change such as in 1911 during the Mexican Revolution, for example, when the long-standing President Porfirio Diaz was ousted from power and his opponents climbed into and on top of moving trams to wave flags in celebration. See Allen Morrison for a photograph illustrating this moment. The tramway workers went on strike and the new Carranza government seized control of the city’s tramcars between 1911 and 1915 (‘The Tramways’). Tramways also became the focus of industrial strike action during Lawrence’s residence in March 1925. The strikers called for the managing director of the Mexican Light and Power Company, George Conway—a friend of Lawrence—to be expelled from Mexico (See note 1 to Lawrence’s letters in v. 219, and note 2 in v. 228–229).
- 9.
Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings (New York. Grove Press, 1985), pp. 225, 68.
- 10.
H.M. Daleski, The Forked Flame: Study of D.H. Lawrence (London: Faber, 1965), p. 218; Graham Hough, The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H. Lawrence (New York: Capricorn, 1956), p. 124.
- 11.
Trains were central fighting grounds of the Mexican Revolution: ‘During the Revolution the railroads were to dominate much of the strategic planning, and were to prove a vital part of the logistics of all the armies. A great deal of the fighting took place along various railroads or in close proximity to them. Whole armies and their dependents would be moved by rail, with the horses in freight wagons and the soldiers and their families riding on top. Often a train full of troops would advance along a railroad line with cavalry providing flank guards.’ See P. Jowett and A. de Quesada, The Mexican Revolution 1910–1920 (Oxford: Osprey, 2006), pp. 19–20.
- 12.
Peter Maiken’s portrayal in Night Trains: The Pullman System in the Golden Years of American Rail Travel (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins, 1989) of the ‘Pullman system at its pinnacle’ in the USA of the 1920s differs greatly from the Pullman ‘other’ exhibited by Lawrence’s Mexican train in which such comparisons of difference are implied: ‘To the distant observer of a night train, a string of cheerfully lighted passenger cars moving across a dark landscape gave only a glimmer of the wondrous world that lay within: fashionably dressed urban travellers sipping cocktails and wines, or dining tables set with starchy linen and gleaming crystal and silver, while other people reposed in private sleeping compartments paneled with exotic tropical woods’, p. 8.
- 13.
Oh, D.H. Lawrence’s Border Crossing, p. 15.
- 14.
Homi Bhabba, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 3.
- 15.
Henry Ford, Today and Tomorrow (London: Heinemann, 1926), pp. 109, 167.
- 16.
Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, pp. 158, 166, 175.
- 17.
Virginia Hyde, ‘Introduction’, in D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, ed. L.D. Clark, pp. xv–xxxv (London: Penguin, 1995), p. xxxi.
- 18.
Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 26.
- 19.
Wayne Templeton, ‘“Indians and an Englishman”: Lawrence in the American Southwest’, D. H. Lawrence Review 25:1–3 (1993): pp. 14–34, p. 16; Jeff Wallace, D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (London: Palgrave, 2005), p. 219.
- 20.
Wallace, D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman, p. 213.
- 21.
Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, (1954) in David Farrel Krell, ed., Basic Writings: Martin Heidegger, pp. 311–341 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 333, 318.
- 22.
Heidegger, ‘The Question’, pp. 318, 330, 333.
- 23.
Anne Fernihough’s interesting argument that ‘Lawrence’s strategy is to use the same signifiers to express constantly shifting signifieds, so that meaning is always unstable and on the move’, has a bearing here if transport might be considered as one of the signifiers whose presence in Lawrence’s novels signals or embodies complexity and mobility of meaning. See Fernihough, D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 115.
- 24.
Ford, Today and Tomorrow, pp. 7, 164.
- 25.
‘In 1909 road-transport fatalities stood at 1,070 and injuries at 26,091. By the 1920s the average number of annual road fatalities had risen by over 400 per cent to 4,121, whilst the average number of injured stood at 87,255, an increase of equal magnitude’. See Sean O’Connell, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring 1896–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 115–116.
- 26.
Kurt Moser, ‘The Dark Side of Automobilism, 1900–1930: Violence, War and the Motor Car’, Journal of Transport History 24.2 (2003): 238–258, p. 239.
- 27.
Moser suggests that ‘the image of motor transport in the 1920s was linked with agitation and collective aggression. During these years, elements of collectivity were added to the aggressive image of speed. A typical sight in the troubled Germany of 1918–1923 was a troop of soldiers, revolutionaries or Freikorps, crowded into the back of a speeding truck, flags waving above…This type of agitation, where motor vehicles enhanced new forms of political mobilization, foreshadowed their use in the 1930s’, ‘The Dark Side’, p. 246.
- 28.
Moser, ‘The Dark Side’, p. 246.
- 29.
‘The Mexican Army had formed a Military Motor Service in 1907 to counter the threat of Yaqui Indian attacks from their desert strongholds. ‘There are photographs showing at least two Italian-made Isotta-Fraschini armored cars in service with the Federal Army: these had a water-cooled machine gun mounted on top, with crew protection in the form of an armored shield…An improvised armoured car was used by Pancho Villa’s army in 1914, built on a truck chassis with metal wheels adapted to travel along the railroad lines’ and ‘the Revolutionaries also made use of ordinary automobiles to transport ammunition and other war supplies.’ See Jowett and de Quesada, The Mexican Revolution, pp. 18–19.
- 30.
Sean O’Connell in The Car in British Society comments on the relationship between motor cars and gender ideology in the Britain and USA of the1920s. O’Connell discusses how ‘pre-existing ideologies ensured that the car was identified as a masculine technology.’ Despite the widespread increase in women driving motor vehicles during the First World War, O’Connell identifies a return to more traditional assumptions about gender in post-war 1920s car usage in which the ‘control of the car was often seen as best left to a male who was deemed qualified to control this powerful, liberating and potentially dangerous new technology through possession of traditional masculine traits’, pp. 70, 63.
- 31.
Peter Thorold, The Motoring Age: The Automobile and Britain 1896–1939 (London: Profile, 2004), p. 133.
- 32.
Edith Maud Hull, The Sheik, 1919, ed. Kate Saunders (London: Virago, 1996).
- 33.
Margaret Storch, ‘“But Not the America of the Whites”: Lawrence’s Pursuit of the True Primitive’, D.H. Lawrence Review 25:1–3 (1993–1994): 48–62, p. 58. Mark Spilka, for example, is suspicious of Lawrence’s aim to ‘force a woman to accept the cosmic inevitability of resurgent maleness’, Kate Millett sees the novel as evidence of Lawrence ‘inventing a religion, even a liturgy, of male supremacy’ and Marianna Torgovnick argues that ‘like the primitive itself, the female character is made to serve the author’s didactic purposes’. See Spilka, Renewing the Normative D.H. Lawrence: A Personal Progress (Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1992), p. 225; Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971), p. 283; Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, p. 167.
- 34.
Opinions are divided on Lawrence’s association with fascist ideas in this novel. Daleski argues that Lawrence ‘takes the leadership theme to what he himself ultimately recognizes is a repugnant conclusion’ and claims that there is ‘sufficient justification in The Plumed Serpent for linking the author with Nazism’ as the Quetzalcoatl movement’s ‘ethos is all too clear’. See Daleski, The Forked Flame, pp. 229–230. Judith Ruderman argues that the novel ‘provides a textbook case for the study of charismatic leadership’ while Jeffrey Meyers claims that, though a critic of democracy, Lawrence ‘did not support Fascism’. See Ruderman, D.H. Lawrence and the Devouring Mother: The Search for a Patriarchal Ideal of Leadership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984), p. 151; Meyers, Lawrence and the Experience of Italy (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Press, 1982), p. 135. Eliseo Vivas in D.H. Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960) sees the ‘synthetic savagery’ of Queztalcoatl as a ‘failure of intelligence’ and a ‘failure of taste’ yet does not see Lawrence as a ‘consistent proto-fascist’ elsewhere than in this novel, pp. 70, 103. Frank Kermode argues that ‘the end of the tale is naked doctrine, racial mastery’ and Mark Spilka sees the novel as ‘a kind of proto-fascist comic opera’, but Anne Fernihough attacks attempts to present Lawrence as a proto-Nazi when she states that a look at his overall output as a writer ‘places the neat link between organicism and idealism under violent strain’ and argues that Auschwitz ‘would … have utterly horrified Lawrence.’ See Kermode, Lawrence (London: Fontana, 1973), p. 111; Spilka, Renewing the Normative, p. 229; Fernihough, D.H. Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, p. 7.
- 35.
The motor car frequently divides the female protagonist from her true self in Lawrence’s fiction and promises sexual excitement at the expense of female autonomy. This is evident first in Lettie Beardsall’s choice of car-driving Leslie Tempest over George Saxton in The White Peacock, then in the young Ursula Brangwen’s car journey with Anton Skrebensky, which separates her from the natural world, in The Rainbow. It is also evident in Alvina Houghton’s loss of self and subsequent flawed engagement to the possessive car-driving Dr Mitchell in The Lost Girl (1920).
- 36.
Virginia Hyde, ‘Kate and the Goddess: Subtexts in The Plumed Serpent’, D.H. Lawrence Review 26.1–3 (1995–1996): 249–274, p. 266.
- 37.
Daleski, The Forked Flame, p. 246.
- 38.
See Frieda Lawrence, Not I But The Wind (London: Harper Collins, 1983), pp. 131–132 for a description of Lawrence’s illness in Oaxaca and Frieda’s reaction to the doctor’s diagnosis of his tuberculosis.
- 39.
Richard Aldington, D.H. Lawrence: Portrait of a Genius, But… (London: Heinemann, 1950), pp. 257, 285.
- 40.
Hyde, ‘Introduction’, p. xv.
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Humphries, A.F. (2017). ‘To Turn One’s Back on the Cog-Wheel World’: Transport, Otherness and Revolution in The Plumed Serpent . In: D. H. Lawrence, Transport and Cultural Transition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50811-5_5
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