Now the bright page was turned, and the dark page lay before her. How could one write on a page so profoundly black? - The Plumed Serpent (51) According to Tzvetan Todorov, there is no such thing as narrative: [n] o is natural; a choice and construction will always preside over its appearance; is a discourse, not a series of events (55). This is narratology's most basic premise, but it has a special relevance for my topic in this paper - that is, how modernist attempts to represent the primitive in disable the critique of Western modernity that so often accompanies them. Focusing on two texts from D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love and The Plumed Serpent, I argue that they deploy a strategy that I call narrative primitivism. By this I mean that they imagine the primitive as a nonnarratable quality, which returns to destabilize their progressive time schemes. By exploring the complicity of these techniques with atemporal/ahistorical notions of the primitive, I contrast Lawrence's critique of the Enlightenment values of instrumentality and reason with recent theories of postcoloniality, defined loosely as the failure of decolonization.(1) In particular, I compare Lawrence's ideas about nationalism, race, and gender to the present-day theories of Benedict Anderson and Homi Bhabha, arguing that he cannot imagine a form of hybridity that articulates difference outside a dynastic class hierarchy. Ultimately, Lawrence's critique of modernity refashions the ethnocentric myth of cultural progression as a logic of restitution, leaving undisturbed the temporal model that makes it possible to understand the primitive as a fiction of lost origins. The primitive is a disputed category, and its use to describe traditional cultures such as those of precolonial Mexico is highly doubtful. Anthropologists have avoided its implications of temporal priority by preferring the word archaic, but Lawrence uses the term to describe much more than indigenous and non-Western cultures. In her Gone Primitive, Mariana Torgovnick has charted his use of the word, cataloging the various states and entities it signifies throughout his novels (159). Including workingclass men, phallic power, and natural harmony (attunement with the sun), her list is sufficiently heterogeneous to show that the Lawrentian primitive furnishes no consistent political or anthropological thematic. Yet she finds Lawrence's divergent attitudes toward the idea to display a fundamental shift in his work, from a feminine, degenerative primitive in Women in Love (a feature the book shares with Conrad's Heart of Darkness) to a masculine, regenerative version in The Plumed Serpent. This regendering of the primitive is undoubtedly a feature of Lawrence's ouevre, but, as the transformation itself suggests, such identifications are never internally stable. Building on Torgovnick's argument, I want to show that this negotiability of gender in the Lawrentian primitive unsettles the heterosexual logic by which identification and desire are mutually exclusive. For Lawrence, the primitive is a dense site of significations that allows the coexistence of hetero- and homosexual modes of desire. Thus, the novels that grapple with this theme frequently contain episodes that interrogate their own adherence to a logic empowered by heterosexual relations of displacement and rivalry. Women in Love is a case in point. Consider the discussion that follows the famous man-to-man tussle in the chapter entitled Gladiatorial. Hoping to evade the clutching bonds of Ursula and accede to an impersonal, nongenital state of union with Gerald, Birkin declares Life has all kinds of things. . . . There isn't only one road (276). The trope implies the possibility of an escape from the naturalized imperative of heterosexual commitment that Lawrence, in a contemporaneous essay, associates with an continuing in the same sort, endless traveling in one direction (Love 25). …