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“The Great Death-Continent”:
D. H. Lawrence on America
David Herbert Lawrence, 1885 - 1930
Editor’s Note: The following passage on America is from D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent (1926). The Plumed Serpent tells the story of Kate Leslie, an Irish widow of 40, who, to escape her unhappy life, decides to travel to Mexico. She is horrified at Mexico’s ugliness, degeneracy, and backwardness. Eventually she encounters Don Ramon and General Cipriano, whose goal is to rid Mexico of Christianity, restore the religion of the Aztecs, and institute a new social and political order, in which women are subordinate to men and all are subordinated to a divine-human leader. The Plumed Serpent explores the connections between Lawrence’s Nietzschean philosophy, which can be described as a “psycho-sexual vitalism,” and the themes of neo-paganism, male dominance, nationalism, and fascism. It should be noted that in spite of Lawrence’s evident horror of miscegenation, in the end of the novel, he has Kate marry General Cipriano, a pure-blooded Indian. Thus The Plumed Serpent can also be read as a meditation on the sicknesses of the European mind that lead to social and sexual dalliances with primitive non-whites. Lawrence believed that European civilization had made European man devitalized and decadent. This caused Europeans to be attracted to the psychological and sexual vitality of less civilized races and peoples. In the passage quoted below, Lawrence uses “America” to refer not just to the United States, but to the Americas in general. The whole of The Plumed Serpent can be found online here.
And sometimes [Kate] wondered whether America really was the great death-continent, the great No! to the European and Asiatic, and even African Yes! Was it really the great melting-pot, where men from the creative continents were smelted back again, not to a new creation, but down into the homogeneity of death? Was it the great continent of the undoing, and all its peoples the agents of the mystic destruction! Plucking, plucking at the created soul in a man, till at last it plucked out the growing germ, and left him a creature of mechanism and automatic reaction, with only one inspiration, the desire to pluck the quick out of every living spontaneous creature.
Was that the clue to America? she sometimes wondered. Was it the great death-continent, the continent that destroyed again what the other continents had built up? The continent whose spirit of place fought purely to pick the eyes out of the face of God? Was that America?
And all the people who went there, Europeans, Negroes, Japanese, Chinese, all the colours and the races, were they the spent people, in whom the God impulse had collapsed, so they crossed to the great continent of the negation, where the human will declares itself ‘free’, to pull down the soul of the world? Was it so? And did this account for the great drift to the New World, the drift of spent souls passing over to the side of Godless democracy, energetic negation? The negation which is the life-breath of materialism. And would the great negative pull of the Americans at last break the heart of the world?
from D. H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, chapter 4
The TOQ Classics Corner
The TOQ Classics Corner reprints classic articles of interest to racially aware white people.
It’s worth pointing out that D. H. Lawrence’s critique of America is an essential critique, where America’s underlying spirit is (and has always been) destructive. The active agent in what Evola might refer to as the Kali Yuga.
Evidently, Lawrence doesn’t need a theory about Jewish virulence in order to see the calamity that America poses for the White race, and indeed the World.
There’s also a positive statement of vision in Lawrence’s Plumed Serpent, one that speaks directly to the many charged discussions of religion, universality, and mutual influence that often arise in our circles:
‘I would like,’ he said, smiling, ‘to be one of the Initiates of the Earth. One of the Initiators. Every country its own Saviour, Cipriano: or every people its own Saviour. And the First Men of every people, forming a Natural Aristocracy of the World. One must have aristocrats, that we know. But natural ones, not artificial. And in some way the world must be organically united: the world of man. But in the concrete, not in the abstract. Leagues and Covenants and International Programmes. Ah! Cipriano! it’s like an international pestilence. The leaves of one great tree can’t hang on the boughs of another great tree. The races of the earth are like trees; in the end they neither mix nor mingle. They stand out of each other’s way, like trees. Or else they crowd on one another, and their roots grapple, and it is the fight to the death. — Only from the flowers there is commingling. And the flowers of every race are the natural aristocrats of that race. And the spirit of the world can fly from flower to flower, like a humming-bird, and slowly fertilize the great trees in their blossoms. Only the Natural Aristocrats can rise above their nation; and even then they do not rise beyond their race. Only the Natural Aristocrats of the World can be international, or cosmopolitan, or cosmic. It has always been so. The peoples are no more capable of it than the leaves of the mango-tree are capable of attaching themselves to the pine. — So if I want Mexicans to learn the name of Quetzalcoatl, it is because I want them to speak with the tongues of their own blood. I wish the Teutonic world would once more think in terms of Thor and Wotan, and the tree Igdrasil. And I wish the Druidic world would see, honestly, that in the mistletoe is their mystery, and that they themselves are the Tuatha De Danaan, alive, but submerged. And a new Hermes should come back to the Mediterranean, and a new Ashtaroth to Tunis; and Mithras again to Persia, and Brahma unbroken to India, and the oldest of dragons to China. Then I, Cipriano, I, First Man of Quetzalcoatl, with you, First Man of Huitzilopochtli, and perhaps your wife, First Woman of Itzpapalotl, could we not meet, with sure souls, the other great aristocrats of the world, the First Man of Wotan and the First Woman of Freya, First Lord of Hermes, and the Lady of Astarte, the Best-Born of Brahma, and the Son of the Greatest Dragon? I tell you, Cipriano, then the earth might rejoice, when the First Lords of the West met the First Lords of South and East, in the Valley of the Soul. Ah, the earth has Valleys of the Soul, that are not cities of commerce and industry. And the mystery is one mystery, but men must see it differently. The hibiscus and the thistle and the gentian all flower on the Tree of Life, but in the world they are far apart; and must be. And I am hibiscus and you are a yucca flower, and your Caterina is a wild daffodil, and my Carlota is a white pansy. Only four of us, yet we make a curious bunch. So it is. The men and women of the earth are not manufactured goods, to be interchangeable. But the Tree of Life is one tree, as we know when our souls open in the last blossoming. We can’t change ourselves, and we don’t want to. But when our souls open out in the final blossoming, then as blossoms we share one mystery with all blossoms, beyond the knowledge of any leaves and stems and roots: something transcendent.
Why all these problems coming from America