Report of the Fifty-Second Meeting of the London D. H. Lawrence Group

Adam Parkes

‘Cut-Throat Lawrence’

 

August 28th 2026, 18.30-20.00 UK time

 

ATTENDERS

29 people attended, including, outside of England, Julianne Newmark in New Mexico; Judith Armstrong in North Carolina; Philip Chester in Deep River, Ontario; Lucas in Quebec; Shanee Stepakoff in Connecticut; Lee Jenkins in Cork; Shirley Bricout in Brittany; Robert Bullock in Juan-les-Pains, Antibes; and Patrick Armstrong in Paris.

INTRODUCTION

Adam writes: ‘Resuming conversations at last year’s international Lawrence conference in Mexico City, this talk considers scenes of violence with powerful, even alarming, aesthetic and psychological effects that overwhelm – or freeze – interpretative or hermeneutic impulses.  The central exhibit will be The Plumed Serpent.’

 

READING

Two chapters from The Plumed Serpent: Chapter XIX, ‘The Attack on Jamiltepec’, and Chapter XXIII, ‘Huitzilopochtli’s Night’, as well as Birkin’s conversation with Gerald in Chapter 2 of Women in Love.

BIOGRAPHY

Adam Parkes did his B.A. in English at Gonville & Caius, Cambridge and then took off for a PhD in America, assuming he would return to England but (to his perennial surprise) not doing so.  Since 1993, he has taught in the English department at the University of Georgia in Athens, near Atlanta in the US.  His publications include three books with Oxford UP, most recently Modernism and the Aristocracy: Monsters of English Privilege (the subtitle is the real title).  He is a former president of the D.H. Lawrence Society of North America and co-organized the international Lawrence conference held last year in Mexico City.  He is the current chair of CCILC (the Co-ordinating Committee of International Lawrence Conferences).

PRESENTATION

Adam started by acknowledging that The Plumed Serpent is one of Lawerence’s least popular works. However, since the international D. H. Lawrence conference in Mexico City in August 2025, at which the novel was much discussed, thoughts of it would not let him go. He was particularly held by its dialectical veerings between empathy and antipathy, narrative and lyric, incompleteness and reconciliation. Its acts of violence constituted an irreconcilable element par excellence, resisting not only historical contextualisation but many of the other interpretative manoeuvres which Adam would normally bring to literature. The Plumed Serpent, in other words, forced him to ‘relax his narratological principles’. He had, however, been assisted in his efforts at interpretation by Slavoj Žižek’s 2008 book Violence – six sideways reflections.

Adam then considered Lawrence’s emotional violence towards his friends (for example Bertrand Russell, Katherine Mansfield and Ottoline Morrell), and the discussion between Birkin and Gerald in Women in Love in which Birkin asserts that any murderer requires a ‘murderee’ (someone willing to be murdered). In this conversation, Adam argued, Birkin stabs at Gerald – enacting satire in the violent, Horatian sense of the term. Likewise, readers of Lawrence must enter a fray. Overall, the ‘endemic cruelties’ of Lawrence’s writing are ‘inseparable from his cultivation of kindness’.

Yet Adam considered two scenes of violence in The Plumed Serpent hard to categorise in terms of satire. Their violence was so extreme that they raised the questions of whether discussion of them could generate useful controversy, or whether they simply constituted causes for desperation – and whether our apparent resistance to them might (following Birkin) express also a desire to be caught by them. The reader’s response inevitably relates to that of the focalising characters. In the ‘Attack on Jamiltepec’, the narrative stays close to Kate’s perspective, which oscillates between attraction and repulsion to the sight of Ramón killing his would-be assassins (in contrast to her response to the novel’s bullfight, which she finds purely aversive). Yet the reader is not tied to Kate’s responses; they may resist her resistance.

In the novel’s later execution scene, the narrative’s perspective is initially with Kate (the twitching bodies may exist in Kate’s continuity of consciousness with those of Jamiltepec), but her largely-resistant consciousness is left behind when the poetic liturgy takes over the narrative, and when – as a woman – she is refused entry to the church where the liturgy continues. The chapter ends with a hymn to Malintzi, giving Kate a role which she had explicitly refused. Within the novel’s liturgical mode, the executions of the guiltiest prisoners resemble what Žižek classified as ‘divine violence’ (this is not legal, ethical, aesthetic or religious, but deals with absolute guilt and total annihilation within the realm of love). The next chapter opens with Kate’s revulsion from the executions, yet she does not (in the final version of the novel) then break from the movement and from Mexico. Were she a reader of The Plumed Serpent, Adam argued, she would read it to the end – and all readers who finish the novel (rather than walking out on it as Kate does from the bullfight) resemble her in this respect. In doing so they manifest an ability to move beyond liberal individualism sufficiently to negotiate the novel’s intermittent commitment to spiritual impersonality, which is the same as that advocated by Birkin in Women in Love. This non-humanity is not inhumanity in the common sense, although Lawrence sometimes uses the term ‘inhuman’ to mean the same.

Concluding, Adam said he found much to admire in The Plumed Serpent. It refuses to sentimentalise Mexico or Mexicans; it is not faux-anti-colonial or fetishistic; and that which is good in it is inseparable from that which is bad. Its violence, which freezes normal hermeneutic impulses, achieves a new understanding, both of impersonality and of violence itself.

DISCUSSION

John Pateman responded by adducing a mode of criticism which Adam had said that he found the novel’s violence to freeze: historicism. The Jamiltepec scene’s depictions of throat-stabbing, for example, may have been inspired by the method that was taught to World War One soldiers for use in night raids, and for which they were issued with specialised weapons. The scene was, therefore, realistic. More broadly, the novel showed the reality of revolutions, which are inevitably violent. Marxist-Leninists prefer to use the term ‘force’ than violence, and consider it to be legitimately applicable for political ends (in this case, a decolonising end). Judith Ruderman responded with the suggestion that the murder of Banford in ‘The Fox’ constituted a revolution on the domestic front, with the end of restoring a ‘natural’ (heterosexual) order.

Judith also wondered what relation the Jamiltepec scene had to the scene of the bullfight. Adam thought that it moved Kate’s perspective along from her earlier, purely aversive, response, whilst Michael Bell thought that the progress represented concerned the scenes’ audiences more generally. Whereas at the bullfight, the Mexican public are presented as voyeurs of violence (reflecting Lawrence’s perception of the psychic state of the civil war-ravaged country), in the execution scene the public – as spiritually elevated by the cult – are not voyeurs, but congregants in a religious service.

Catherine Brown (I) suggested that the distinctiveness of the violence depicted in the Jamiltepec scene – and the interpretative responses demanded by it – lay at least party in its cinematic aspect, which reflected Lawrence’s responses to early Westerns. She also argued that Lawrence had made circumstances as easy as possible for himself, insofar as he aimed to present the violence inflicted by Ramón and his men as justified. When Ramón’s hacienda is attacked, he acts in self-defence. Thereafter the surviving would-be murderers and accomplices are executed in line with what was presumably contemporary law. Despite this, readers are generally far more troubled by the (physically humane) execution scene than by the sadistic atrocities perpetrated by bandits in the novel, or by the vaguely-indicated mass killing perpetrated by Cipriano in his capacity as a Mexican general (‘Perhaps a hundred … Maybe two hundred’ ‘rebels’ are killed by him whilst on patrol). The reason for this reaction may not only be the approval which the liturgical aspect of the narrative enjoins for the execution, but the very fact that the execution has a religious aspect (which in the case of the criminals presented as less guilty extends even to reverence and gentleness). It is that combination of violence and the divine which readers find troubling – although Jane Costin thought that it related to the fact that the cult was rhetorically demonstrating absolute power.

Jim Phelps pointed out the particular – indeed intensified – relevance of the novel’s violence to today’s world. He praised Lawrence for having the courage to describe the world’s horrors as they exist. For this reason, readings of the novel should be liberated from both its geographic, and its historical, contexts.