Report of the Forty-Seventh Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group
Catherine Brown
September 26th 2025, by Zoom, 18.30-20.00 UK time
ATTENDERS
About 20 people attended including, from outside the UK, Emma Julieta Barreiro in Mexico City, Feroza Jussawalla in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Philip Chester in Deep River, Ontario, Lucas Campoli in Quebec, Philip Bufithis in the USA, Shirley Bricout in Vannes, Brittany, John Worthen in Germany, Vic Gattrell in Aichtal near Stuttgart, and Jim Phelps in Capetown.
INTRODUCTION
Between 1923 and 1925 D. H. Lawrence made two extended visits to revolutionary Mexico, and wrote a novel which speculates on how a neo-Aztec revivalist movement might function, in that context, to the benefit of Mexicans. The Plumed Serpent (1926) is possibly Lawrence’s most disliked and controversial work. FR Leavis called it ‘the least complex of all Lawrence’s novels’. In this talk (which demurs from this analysis) I place the novel in its contemporary artistic context, and explore some of its complexities, by considering its relations with two films: Pathé’s 1907/13 La vie et la passion de Jésus-Christ, and Sergei Eisenstein and Grigory Alexandrov’s 1930-31/1979 ¡Que viva México!, a project which has numerous parallels of approach and circumstance with Lawrence’s own. The comparison establishes the cinematic nature of Lawrence’s novel, and the similarities – as well as the profound and telling differences – between Lawrence’s and Eisenstein’s mediations of gender, religion and politics in response to a country which was making its own, highly idiosyncratic, response to modernity.
I first gave this lecture as the Mark Spilka Lecture at the International D. H. Lawrence Conference 2025 ‘Lawrence in México: Travel, Translation and Transcultural Representation’ at the Universidad Autónoma de México (UNAM), August 11th-15th 2025. An article based on this lecture is currently under consideration, hence the brevity of the summary below.
READING/WATCHING
La vie et la passion de Jésus Christ (45 minutes)
¡Que viva Mexico! (1 hr 24, which includes Grigory Alexandrov explaining how the film came to be completed only in 1979). Content warning: the film contains footage of a bullfight, which you should feel free to skip, as I have skipped it (minutes 36.42 to 41.52) (a similar warning applies to the first chapter of The Plumed Serpent
PRESENTATION
Soon after arriving in Mexico City for the first time in 1923, D. H. Lawrence attended an Easter Saturday screening of the silent French film La vie et la passion de Jésus-Christ (The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ,), and shortly thereafter started writing a novel about the country. Seven years later the Soviet superstar director Sergei Eisenstein arrived in Mexico City in order to make a film about the country. The lecture considered what light is shed on Lawrence’s novel with these two films, in relation to narrative technique, gender, religion and politics.
DISCUSSION
Emma Julieta Barreiro (one of the organisers of the 2015 conference ‘Lawrence in México’) noted the revival in modern Mexico of indigenismo, and of interest in and respect for indigenous Mexican cultures, which render Lawrence’s novel prophetic even of the present day. This revival was apparent in the festival of indigenous cultures that occupied the Zócalo (central square of Mexico City) during the 2025 conference, and in the trend to provide captions in Mexican museums in native languages as well as Spanish and English. Characterising the movement as left-leaning, she noted that the poorest Mexicans are often strongly Catholic but are nonetheless also interested in their indigenous heritage and medicine. Two aspects of the movement concerned her: the attitude towards death that is palpable in its religious dimension, and the cultural and ethnic politics of the mantra: ‘We are Mexicans now’.
John Pateman said that the festival on the Zócalo last August had reminded him of the Occupy movement, and that The Plumed Serpent itself is a deeply revolutionary novel. He characterised it and its first draft, Quetzalcoatl as social realist, and agreed with me that The Plumed Serpent was Leninist in its leadership politics. However, he was puzzled as to why Lawrence had been so surveilled during his time in Mexico.
I answered that the Mexico of the 1920s had felt itself isolated in international politics – distrusted as revolutionary by more reactionary powers and as reactionary by the Soviet Union for not having carried its revolution further. At the time of Eisenstein’s visit of 1930-31 Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and it was later (in 1937) to give Trotsky asylum. A further reason for the revolutionary government exercising close supervision of artistic foreigners was vigilance against the continuation of a trend of foreigners’ depictions of (especially indigenous) Mexicans as comically backward; they wished to ensure dignified representations of the people.
Michael Bell emphasised the difference of medium between the novel and film (Lawrence was writing for people who had never seen the Mexican pyramids), and between naturalism and the demands of silent film (the actors of La vie de Jésus were demonstrating their roles in an iconic rather than a mimetic way). In this La vie is connected to the rituals of The Plumed Serpent, in which there is no question of naturalism.
Terry Gifford stressed the extent to which The Plumed Serpent critiques, as well as enacts and depicts, leadership – and to which it honours the ecological dimensions of indigenous practices. Kate’s Irishness is another dimension of the novel’s decolonising politics. However, Lawrence shows how the movement becomes a cult (in the negative sense of that term) when violence, patriarchy and ritual become ends in themselves – all tendencies in Mexican culture as Lawrence understood it, and about which he manifested his anxiety through Kate.
Bob Hayward confessed that he had never managed to finish The Plumed Serpent, having been discouraged by F. R. Leavis’s judgment of it as ‘a bad book and a regrettable performance’; ‘the least complex of all Lawrence’s novels … the only one that I find difficult to read through’, although he adds ‘Not that there aren’t good things in it, striking and characteristic manifestations of the author’s genius’ (D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, Peregrine Books, 1964, pp. 30, 69). He continues: ‘the book gives the effect of his not being fully engaged. The evoking of the pagan renaissance strikes one as willed and mechanical; at any rate, it is monotonous and boring. The descriptions of rituals and costumes and dances and ceremonies fill immense areas of print; and there are pages upon pages of chants and hymns that one feels Lawrence must have written very easily, and so … the reader tends to skip them. It is by a kind of incantation, a hypnotic effect figured in the endless pulsing of drums playing so large a part in Don Ramon’s campaign, that Lawrence tries to generate conviction, and he produces boredom and a good deal of distaste’ (pp. 70-71). His final comment is that ‘in its sustained earnest intentness The Plumed Serpent as a whole rings false’ (p. 72).
Catherine noted that Eisenstein too claimed that he had not been able to finish the novel, despite it concerning what he thought of as his Mexico – indeed, perhaps because of this. Bob said that he was now inspired, nonetheless, to give the novel another try. Nicholas Royle said the same, but observed concerning the lecture thatL ‘It’s always so intriguing to witness the ways in which ocularcentrism imposes itself, however surreptitiously, in these circumstances’. He also said that he would like to hear more about the narrative’s veerings. I hope to develop this in further work on the novel.
