But neither would Lawrence have bee»n surprised by the events at the bullfight because, before he went, he had read Terry’s Guide to Mexico, 6 which contains a fulsome description of bullfighting and these gruesome details of how horses are killed in the bullring: 6 My thanks to Jonathan Long for drawing my attention to the fact that, before seeing his first bullf (.)ģWhen Lawrence revisited his feelings about the bullfight in his novel, Michael Bell describes the passage as “an eruption of passionate disgust” and observes that “all readers, whether approvingly or not, feel Lawrence’s intensity of revulsion spilling over the frame of the fiction.” 4 Bell also notes that whilst “In The Plumed Serpent Lawrence seeks to analyse more directly than before the question of killing and violence he himself could not easily kill any living creature.” 5 Therefore, Lawrence’s response to the bullfight may not surprise us.Lawrence: Language and Being, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 94.

2 However, it is in Lawrence’s depiction of bull-fighting in The Plumed Serpent (1926) that we perhaps most clearly see his representation of the two faces of Dionysian “madness.” In January 1916, during his stay in Porthcothan in Cornwall, Lawrence read Hesiod’s The Homeric Hymns and Homerica and was particularly impressed by a story which links Dionysus with wine and pirates. Yet looking at Lawrence’s fascination with Dionysus suggests that he saw the division not between these two gods, but within Dionysus. 1 This opposition between Apollo, also seen as the god of the Sun, of light and reason, and Dionysus, who is associated with the dark, wine, excess, drunkenness and unreason – or madness – is commonplace. Kirk reminds us how Nietzsche saw the ancient Greek gods, Apollo and Dionysus, as “symbols of opposing aspects – classical and romantic, controlled and ecstatic – of the Greeks’ spirit”. Evelyn-White (London: William Heinemann, 191 (.)ġG.S. 2 Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans.

Dionysus by Walter F. Otto