Myth and the making of modernity: the problem of grounding in early twentieth-century literature 9042005831, 9789042005839

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
I Antecedents: A New Mythology?
Romantic Myths of Myth: Myth as Autopoiesis
Zoas and Moods: Myth and Aspects of the Mind in Blake and Yeats
Myth in the Nineteenth Century: Tennyson’s Idylls and Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen
Myth, Art and Illusion in Nietzsche
II Myth, Science, Technology
A Different Sun: The Allegory of Thermodynamics in D. H. Lawrence
“Reactionary Modernism” and Self-Conscious Myth
The Existentialist Reinterpretation of Myth: Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Jonas
III Poeticizing the Modern: Myth as a Form of Life
The Domination of Memory: Dark Days of Modernism
“To Unscrew the Inscrutable”: Myth as Fiction and Belief in Ezra Pound’s Cantos
Myth as Culture: The Lesson of Anthropology in T. S. Eliot
IV A New Immediacy: Grounding or Overcoming the Subject?
“Like Water in Water”: Primitivism and Modernity
Macro-Myths and Micro-Myths: Modernist Poetry and the Problem of Artistic Creation
Freud’s Myths: Memory, Culture and the Subject
Echo’s Bones: Myth, Modernity and the Vocalic Uncanny
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Studies in comparative literature 16 Series Editors

c.c. Barfoot and Theo

D'haen

Myth and the Making of Modernity The Problem of Grounding in Early Twentieth-Century Literature Edited by Michael Bell and Peter Poellner

WI

Amsterdam - Atlanta, GA 1998

Cover design: Hendrik van Delft Cover illustration : Anonymous figure combined with Gustave Dore (fragment of Zachary's vision) ISBN : 90-420-0583-1 The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of 'ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence'.

© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - Atlanta, GA 1998 Printed in The Netherlands

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

VII

Introduction Michael Bell

I Antecedents: A New Mythology? Romantic Myths of Myth : Myth as Autopoiesis Bian ca Theisen

9

Zoas and Moods: Myth and Aspects of the Mind in Blake and Yeats Edward Larrissy

25

Myth in the Nineteenth Century : Tennyson's Idyll s and Wagner 's Ring des Nib elungen Maike Oerg el

35

Myth, Art and Illus ion in Nietzsche Peter Poellner

61

II Myth, Science, Technology A Different Sun: The Allegory of Thermodynamics in D. H. Lawrence Bruce Clarke

81

"Reactionary Modernism" and Self-Conscious Myth David E. Cooper

99

The Existentialist Reinterpretation of Myth: Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Jonas Robert Segal

115

III Poeticizing the Modern: Myth as a Form of Life The Domin ation of Memory : Dark Days of Modern ism Leon Burn ett

125

"To Unscrew the Inscrutable": Myth as Fiction and Belief in Ezra Pound 's Cantos Peter Nicholls

139

Myth as Culture: Th e Lesson of Anthropology in T. S. Eliot Mar c Man gan aro

153

IV A New Immediacy: Grounding or Overcoming the Subject'? "Like Water in Water": Primitivism and Mod ernity John McGovern

167

Macro-Myths and Micro -Myths: Modernist Poetry and the Probl em of Artistic Cr eation Rain er Emi g

181

Freud ' s Myth s: Memory, Cultu re and the Subj ect Gerald Siegmund

197

Echo 's Bones: Myth, Modernity and the Vocalic Uncanny Steven Connor

213

Note s on Contributors

237

Bibliography of Works Cited

241

Index

257

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Most of the essays in this volume have been chosen from papers written for a conference held at the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick in April 1995. They have been selected to form a series of thematic groupings and to encompass a range of disciplines bearing on the literary use of myth in the early twentieth century. The editors gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Academy and the Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature, and the assistance of Gerald Carlin , Harry Hattingh, Manish Popat and Simon Sparks.

INTRODUCTION MICHAEL BELL The turn to myth in a number of early twentieth-century writers is a topic that manages to be at once banal and misleading. For many readers, this aspect of modernism has faded into a mere historical curiosity; along with the outdated anthropology of Frazer and Levy-Bruhl to which it seems fatally wedded. I Furthermore, the broader intellectual and political history of the first half of the century has led to an increasing hostility to myth as such, as if it were intrinsically fascistic.' And where the millenial mood of postmodernity is still prepared to deal in myth it is usually in a playful and demystifying spirit. There are good reasons for this shift by which the word has fallen from its central and honorific status in the early decades of the century to being an object of either suspicion or tedium by the end of it; and not the least of the reasons for this was the banalizing critical use of myth, for several decades, as a quick-fix, recuperative profundity; a ready-made, culturally prestigious, nostalgia for the pre-modern. In this respect, the programmatic influence of Northrop Frye, whatever his personal distinction as a practising scholar, was largely mischievous.' Yet myth , as invoked by these early modem writers , was not merely a regressive literary device with unsavoury political overtones. It had a liberal and progressive implication which was just as intrinsic since its underlying significance was a sense of philosophical responsibility in living in a postreligious, and even in a post-metaphysical, world . Modernist myth-making does this not, most typically, by nostalgic retreat from modernity but by projecting a mode of being for the future which the past, even the merely putative past, could serve to define. Its fundamental purport was either to 1. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, l st ed., 2 vols, London , 1890. Lucien Levy-Bruhl How Natives Think, trans. L. A. Clare , New York and London, 1923. On this topic see Marc Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer. Eliot. Frye and Campbell, Newhaven and London, 1990. 2. The classic progressive critique of myth is Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London and New York,1986. 3. Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, 1957, sought to put literary study on a quasi-scientific basis by defining its primary modes of romance, tragedy, comedy and satire in terms of a mythic scheme ultimately derived from Frazer.

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create, or to signal emblematically, a desir ed mode of thought, feeling and being in the world . Undoubtedly there is a backward glance in the invoking of myth , and sometimes there is only that, but it is more co mmonly, and subtly. a matter of reculer pour mieux sauter. Modern myth is not an attempted recovery of an archaic form of life so much as a sophisticated, self-co nscious equivalent; for which the archaic is a necessary term only in so far as this provides its emblematic definition. Far from seeking a simple return to the 1950 's myth-kitty , then , or to an earlier rom antic valorizing of myth , the essays in this collection show how the true interest of early twentieth-century myth -making lies in the consciousness, affirmative as well as tragic , of living in a human world which, in so far as it must embody value , can have no ultimate grounding. Alth ough myth may initially appear to be the archaic counterterm to modernity, it is also the paradigm on which modernity has repeatedly reconstructed , or come to understand , its own life form s. Whereas primary, or archaic, myth, is lived as belief, or realit y, the self-conscious, modern use of myth focuses an awareness of living as conviction, which is the only way it can be lived , a world of values which cannot be grounded in anything beyond itself. The very term "myth" , by combining, in its modern usage , the rival meanings of a ground ing narrative and a falsehood , encapsulates this central problem of modernity: how to live, given what we know . Only at this level does myth represent an important continuity of concern between writers, such as Lawrence and Joyce, who are often thought to have little in common: the poet, originally a " maker", now represents the fundamental human activity as a maker of worlds. So too , in these introductory remarks, the term "rnythopoeia" , or mythmaking, rather than "myth", emphasizes the focus on a continuing and inescapable activity rather than the use of existing contents or stru ctures. The present volume, by rethinking myth on this more philosophical plane, provides both a new appreciation of the relevant literature and the bas is for a truly pertinent critique of it. By the same token , the essays do not present, individually or collectively, a monolithic view . They seek precisely to free the term myth from single-eyed conceptions and to retrace some of the many inflections of mythic self-consciousness in the period . The central problematic embodied in modernist mythopoeia is still with us, as for example in a recent collection entitled Beyond Representation (1996), edited by Richard Eldridge, but it is often debated in crucial ignorance of some of its earlier, and still classic , twentieth-

Introduction

3

century formulations. ' Those who take an interest in this question soon realize that German philosophical and aesthetic thought, from the early romantics to the present day, has continuously theorized the nature and meanings of myth; and that this long-running debate is overtly reflected in imaginative literature in German throughout the period . This long chapter of German intellectual history is excellently represented in the collection Mythos und Moderne (1980) edited by Karl-Heinz Bohrer.' The most significant aspect of that volume, however, in the present context, is that it is not translated into English since. for whatever reasons, the German philosophical debate about myth and the literature of anglophone modernism have managed to inhabit largely parallel and noncommunicating universes. Indeed, a partial purpose of the volume is to consider some anglophone modern literature in the light of this broader European history of thought, yet there is some intrinsic rationale for this general separation. In many respects the modernist use of myth is an unwitting fulfilment of the lena romantics ' desire, expressed by both Friedrich Schlegel and Schelling around 1800, to create a "new mythology", and yet its very different story has not been told, nor its meaning debated." This is partly because anglophone literature of the early part of this century, although obviously reflecting ideas about myth from various disciplinary quarters, most typically resisted overt philosophical self-consciousness, and in fact positively valued a more implicit understanding. Whereas the lena romantics, even while appealing to myth precisely for its escape from philosophical abstraction, formed the idea of a " new mythology" out of a process of abstract reflection, the modernist writers of Britain and America tended more commonly to express a mythopoeic response for which a too overt self-reflection would be damaging, would translate it into discursive terms . 4. Beyond Representation : Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination, ed. Richard Eldridge, Cambridge. 1996. 5. Mythos und Moderne, ed. Karl-Heinz Bohrer. FrankfurtlM., 1983. See also Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, London, 1985; Ernst Cassirer , The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, II: Mythic Thought, trans. Ralph Manheim, Newhaven and London, 1955; Colin ~alck, Myth. Truth and Literature, Cambridge. 1989; Manfred Frank, Der kommende Gott, FrankfurtlM., 1982 and Gott im Exil, FrankfurtlM., 1988; Karl Guthke, Die Mythos der Neuzeit, Berne and Munich, 1983; Kurt Hiibner, Die Wahrheit des Mythos, Munich, 1985; Leszek Kolakowski, The Presence of Myth, Chicago, 1989. 6. An introductory account of Schlegel and Schelling on myth, with translated extracts, and placed in a larger European historical context in relation to this theme, can be found in The Rise of Modern Mythology 1680-1860, eds B. Feldmann and R. D. Richardson, Bloomington: Ind., 1972.

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Michael Bell

Since the force of myth is that it stands in contradistinction to the "concept", its truest exp ression is characteristically embodied, or enacted, rather than overtly stated. And where there are overt references to myth, these strictly provide the sign under which the work is to be read rather than the true subject of the work . At its best, therefore, modern mythopoeia is not in itself the point of the work concerned, so much as the given condition through which the world of the given text is lived. By the same logic, for such writers, mythopoeia is not a voluntary, and therefore conscious, project, like the "new mythology" of the German romantics, so much as the emblematic recognition of an inescapable condition of human being in the world. Its phil osophical equivalents are Heidegger and Wittgenstein rather than Schelling and Schlegel, and the notorious difficulty of expression in Heidegger and Wittgenstein lies in their attempted unfolding of the obvious as something which is to be preserved in its obviousness even as it is analytically revealed. In a comparable way , the writer has to be aware of the mythopoeic dimension but that does not necessarily apply to the dramatic consciousness within the text. A certain "naivety" , in Schiller's positive sense, is preserved. The work of D. H. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats, for exampl e, preserves the intuitive unity of its world so apparently naturally that its sophisticated recognition of its own metaphysical statu s is constantly in danger of being overlooked for the sake of its thematic concerns. And, in a sense, this is a proper response for that is where the texts themselves direct our interest. But the implicit condition underlying the created world is also part of its meaning, and significantly governs what may sometimes seem, at first glance, to be merely extreme or naive expression. Such literature has indeed often proved the victim of its own imaginative success and subtlety which is why the present volume concentrates on this more subliminal level of mythopoeic awareness in modern texts while using the lens of German thought to highlight its implicit structures.' If modernist mythopoeia is a reworking, or a delayed fulfillment, of the "new mythology" sought by the lena romantics, a key difference is that , while Friedrich von Schelling saw myth as a mode of reconciliation of self and the Absolute as conceived within the idealist philosophy developed by J. ,G. Fichte out of Immanuel Kant, the modernists came after the collapse of nineteenth-century idealist philosophies generally, so that the inescapable self-grounding of every form of life is more starkly self-aware. German idealist philosophy had placed myth at the misty 7. On this aspect of modem literary mythopoeia, see Michael Bell, Literature , Modernism and Myth. Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, 1997,

Introduction

5

aspirational centre where the I and the Absolute meet , and where the cognitive, the moral and the aesthetic combine. But the gradual break-up of this body of thought provided, in one line of development, not just the dropping, but a peculiar inversion, of its terms. Whereas for Schelling, myth and poetry had been the means of knowing truths which escape discursive reason , the aesthetic, and aestheticized myth , now became the self-grounding, because ungroundable, basis of the human world . Friedrich Nietzsche is the. most crucial single figure behind this development and the extraordinary, late twentieth-century, interest in Nietzsche arises partly from an unwitting rediscovery of the problematic of modernist mythopoeia in which his influence had some of its first and most positive fruits. The crucial point here is that Nietzsche's invoking of the aesthetic is not aestheticist. For him, the autonomy of the aesthetic is not counter to life but encompasses life. It is an absolute concentration of, not a remove from , living values. In his notion of the aesthetic, as already in his early formula "only as an aesthetic phenomenon are human existence and the world eternally justified", the aesthetic encompasses

everything .' This crucial line of thought, however, is not the only intellectual context for modernist mythopoeia. It is simply the sharpest lens for recognitions which the authors got just as much from other, often more home-grown, sources which is why several contributors to the present volume consider the impact of myth, not only in a variety of authors, but in different intellectual disciplines such as science, anthropology, politics, religion and psychology. There is more at stake here, of course, than interdisciplinarity, for myth represents precisely the lost unity, real or imaginary, which preceded the modem division of realms. The consciousness of such a division is one definition of modernity. Joyce's Ulysses, with its series of episodic techniques invoking the different disciplinary viewpoints through which the intuitive unity of the whole is narrated, is the classic expression of modem mythopoeic form achieved or suggested within the very terms of diversity. Self-consciously constructed as a unity, it suggests a single form in which they are all contained. Whereas, at the level of analytic understanding, they are unreconcilable, at the level of life they co-exist and affect each other. In life, the unity does not so much precede as underlie the division which we intuit within the narrative whole. It will not translate into a discursive proposition but we feel it, almost tangibly, as a world. 8. The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Walter Kaufmann, London and New York, 1957,52.

6

Michael Bell

At the same time, and more subtly, the individual disciplines, the modern forms of cognition which have developed from the original unity , are themselves secretly or unwittingly mythopoeic. Not only religion , from Herder to Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Dogma" (1873), but science, as in Karl Pearson 's The Grammar of Science (1892), had begun to recognize their status as human constructions; as modes of world creation and therefore limited. For though each encompasses the whole of life, it is confined to its own plane of understanding. And in so far as these disciplinary realms are fiduciary or cognitive, and therefore provide effective modes of dealing with the world despite their conscious relativity, they too partake of the doubleness of modern myth. For this is not a matter of content, or structure, but of an internal relation to what is known or believed; the consciousness of living within a created form of life . The whole of a form of life cannot be brought to consciousnesss as such, yet the series of disciplinary viewpoints and discourses in Ulysses can collectively bring the fact of it to awareness. The following essays are grouped to represent the questions and viewpoints suggested so far although they do not directly repeat the broad definition of modern mythopoeia already outlined here since this can be explored in existing debate as indicated in the notes and bibliography to this introduction. They rather seek to use this general recognition of myth as a dynamic category of thought, its being a condition rather than a content, to investigate particular themes or authors. The first group of essays reinforces the historical purview already proposed by suggesting the continuities and transformations between romantic and modern. Bianca Theisen elucidates in Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis and E. T. A Hoffmann the intimations of a forward-looking, specifically modern, mythopoeia conceived within the philosophical assumptions and aspirations of their day. Edward Larrissy looks at two key authors of the British tradition, Blake and Yeats, to distinguish their closely related mythopoeic conceptions in relation to their respective historical moments. Yeats's pioneering appreciation of Blake makes such an epochal view of the two poets especially salient and highlights the inward, psychological tum of the modern. Maike Orgel compares two important nineteenth-century reworkings of medieval archetypes in poetry and in music and understands their commonality not in terms of influence but of a broader context of thought about myth and art. This leads to Peter Poellner's consideration of early Nietzsche, especially The Birth of Tragedy, as an anticipation, in ethos and metaphysic, of a strain of modernism which was also to define itself, albeit less discursively, in terms of aesthetic myth.

Introduction

7

The next group of essays considers how myth has been brought to bear on aspects of modern thought and experience which might be supposed most intransigent to mythopoeia, such as science. Bruce Clarke shows how thoroughly D. H. Lawrence had absorbed the scientific and positivist thought of the preceding century and understood it within his own vitalistic, mythopoeic cosmology and language. David Cooper considers the relation between the mythic and the reactionary in modem politics and social thought with special emphasis on Oswald Spengler, Ernst JUnger and Filippo Marinetti. Robert Segal then looks at two modem religious thinkers, Rudolf Bultrnann and Hans Jonas, to see theology reworking itself in terms of myth . A third group looks at ways in which myth, largely identified as the strongest form of the poetic imagination , has sought to perform something of the function traditionally attributed to religious belief as the expression of a form of life. Leon Burnett considers the capacity of the mythopoeic to face the greatest moral test of the imagination in this century: meditation on the victims of fascist politics. Marc Manganaro examines how T. S. Eliot, a writer who came increasingly to identify himself as religious, sought, by the use of myth, to create a partly aesthetic order within modernity. Peter Nicholls examines in Ezra Pound one of the most difficult and notorious cases of reactionary modernism. The Cantos were initially conceived in the apparently progressive moment of early modernism and continued to the end of a career on which they increasingly reflected as their subject matter. In showing how, without a moment of conscious rupture, the mythopoeia of the early Pound becomes the dogmatism of the later , Nicholls asks what light each sheds on the other. A final section deals directly with the questions of subjectivity and grounding; questions which are inevitably linked since a mythopoeic conception of the world implies a corresponding conception of the self. One important possibility of modem mythopoeia is primitivism which John McGovern considers in the striking case of D. H. Lawrence whose primitivist phase, culminating in The Plumed Serpent (1926), can be seen as an attempt to overcome the internal alienation of the modem selfconsciousness by a rhetorically violent, unsustainable short-cut. The very extremity and self-consciousness of Lawrence's speculative attempt, whatever its measure of success, gives it an exemplary and analytic value . Rainer Emig meanwhile approaches the question of grounding from the other extreme. It has already been remarked that an important strategy of modem mythopoeia lies in its subliminal character, its being an implicit condition rather than a content or meaning, and Emig looks at the smallest

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Michael Bell

units of poetic discourse, its "micromyths", to see how the mythopoeic world of the modernist poem , particularly as it stems from imagism, is constructed. The impact of Freud on the period makes him a well recognized colleague of mythopoeic writers, as Thomas Mann acknowledged in his lecture on "Freud and the Future" (1938).9 But as well as being both a source for, and a student of, modern myth-making, Freud's own thought partook of the mythopoeic in its twilight status as not quite a science while using much of the method, and seeking some of the authority, of science. Gerald Siegmund seeks to show, in a representative instance, how the mythopoeic element is manifest in Freud's mode of argument. He concludes with a discussion of Beckett's Not I in which the voice on stage expresses the disintegrated ego, a theme taken up by Steven Connor in the concluding essay. Whereas much discussion of the mythopoeic, as in Heidegger, has been focused on the visual, Connor opens up the phenomenology of the voice in modernism seeing its uncanny transpositions of the Orphic myth inherited from romanticism. His discussion also has an eye to the postmodern and provides an appropriate note on which to end since the questions raised in these discussions of modernist writers continue to concern us at the end of the century, and a principal purpose of this volume is to indicate that far from being a merely regressive motif the mythopoeic conception in modernism still has a contemporary pertinence.

9. In Essays of Three Decades , trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London, 1947,411-28.

ROMANTIC MYTHS OF MYTH: MYTH AS AUTOPOIESIS BIANCA THEISEN Johann Gottfried Herder believed that the poetic effect of mythology would be of "heuristic" value to the creation of a "completely new mythology".' In his "Letters on Recent German Literature" from 1767 (Briefe uber die Neuere deuts che Literatur) he argued against the enlightenment critique of myth and. its presupposition that mythic images were to be understood allegorically. If myth were allegorical, it would say something else than it says, trying to point to a truth which reason could represent in a less mediated way. The paradigmatic shift away from an allegorical to a symbolical interpretation of myth was instituted in the German context largely by Herder and his historicization of literature. The fact that Greek antiquity was no longer seen as a model of imitation only but rather as a historical moment in the development of thought and literature itself, gave rise to the beginnings of a comparative mythology in the late eighteenth century; the comparison of Greek mythology with the myths of other, contemporary peoples first allowed for an understanding of myth and its multifaceted variations as a particular mode of thought. In his later text of 1796 "Iduna or the Apple of Rejuvenation", Herder suggested a supplementation, or rather rejuvenation, of Greek through Old Norse mythology, on analogy with the myth of a rejuvenation of the gods through the apple of Iduna, the wife of the god of poetry (Herder, XVIII, 483-502). Just as Herder emphasized the "heuristic poetics " of mythology, Karl Philip Moritz conce ived of myth as a "language of fantasy" which avoided abstract conceptualization and focused on "poetic formation" (bildende Kraft) instead . Moritz also turned against an allegorical interpretation of myth and insisted that one should not look for what myth signified but understand what it says as that which it says. This shift to a symbolical interpretation of myth is radicalized in romanticism. For the romantics, myth does not say something else (allegory), it says what it says (symbol) and what cannot be said in any other way: it is "tautegorical". That myth thus explains itself, or refers to itself, as form lends itself to the romantics ' I. Johann Gottfried Herder, "Briefe tiber die Neuere deutsche Literatur", in Samtliche Werke, ed, B. Suphan, Berlin, 1877-1917,1,447,444. Hereafter, Herder. 2. Karl Philipp Moritz, Gotterlehre oder Mythologische Dichtungen der Alien, Bremen, 1966, 7.

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Bianca Theisen

interest in self-referential and self-reflexive processes. For the romantics, I shall argue , the function of a new mytho logy is not limited to a revitalization of poetic imagery or of a " language of fantasy", but aims at the logic of myth. "Mythology is only the hypomochlion of poesy", Friedrich Schlegel noted in an early fragment. ' As the pivotal point of poesy , mythology seems to represent the very juncture which allows for the differentiation of levels implied in the romantic notion of poesy , where representation always also represents itself in its representations, thus referring back to itself as form. Dissatisfied with the potential of Aristotelian logic, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis vitalized the circular and self-referential logic of myth to institute the " myth" of a new logic.'

The Myth of Logic and the Logic of Myth: Schlegel's Dialogue on Poesy Friedrich Schlegel programmatically formulated his notion of a new mythology in the "Speech on Mythology" embedded in his Dialogue on Poesy (Gespriich tiber die Poesie). Structured as a dialogue on the model of Plato 's Symposium, Schlegel's text contrasts, and at the same time unites, different perspectives on poesy, thus already in its structural set-up interlocking the individual with the communal, the part with the whole. Plato's mise-en-abyme of the narrated dialogue at the beginning of the Symposium (Appollodoros reports how an acquaintance has asked him for an account of the symposium, a story which Appollodorus, who did not participate himself, has heard from someone else who in tum learned about it from someone else) resurfaces in Schlegel's Dialogue as the mutual implication of the spoken word and the written text. Within the Dialogue , Schlegel has some of his figures read their written contributions which are then discussed by the whole group. Thus, Andrea first contributes a text on the "Epochs of Literature", in which he emphasizes the necessity of conceiving literature historically, tracing its genesis from Greek antiquity to the Middle Ages, as the era 3. Friedrich Schlegel, Literary Notebooks , ed. H. Eichner, Berlin, 1980, 195, No. 1934. Hereafter, Notebooks . 4. How impoverished logic alone is, and how little we can accomplish with it, Friedrich von Hardenberg argues, becomes clear in the assumption of the tertium non datur . Logic therefore would need to be supplemented by another faculty, which in itself, however, would be equally disappointing as logic alone. See Friedrich von Hardenberg, "Allgemeines BrouilIon", in Werke, ed. H. J. Mahl, Munich, 1978, II, 641, No. 702. Hereafter, Werke.

Romantic Myths of Myth

11

which for the romantics marked the beginning of their own modernity, and from a refutation of French Classicism with its erroneous imitation of the ancients, to the rise of a new contemporary literature. After hailing the "dawn" of this "new poesy", Ludoviko proceeds to his "Speech on Mythology" which he announces twice with a temporal marker of commencement.' First, "it is now time" (KA, II, 311) - time to further elaborate on the dawn of a new poesy with his text on mythology indicates the transitional point in the Dialogue from the discussion of the epochs of literature to Ludoviko's contribution on mythology; second, "it is high time" (KA, II, 311) - time to bring up the idea of a new mythology - refers to the timeliness of a new mythology itself, which is thus surprisingly introduced as a transitional point where the present hinges on the future while the very notion of mythology would have seemed to be indebted to the past." The "Speech on Mythology" , then, does what it says when it is embedded in the overall Dialogue both as a transition in itself and as thematizing the transitional nature of a new mythology. It is, in other words, a two-levelled representation of itself as itself, a representation of a new mythology as a new mythology. This selfimplication is further elucidated in the third contribution to the Dialogue, the "Letter on the Novel", in which Antonio advocates the ironic narrative mode of Sterne, Diderot and Jean Paul as a form of narrative representation that always also represents itself in its representations; the novel as the all-inclusive genre of other genres can thus be tautologically described as the "romantic book" (KA, II, 335) which comprises its own theory: a theory of the novel, Antonio suggests, would itself have to be a novel .' Finally, the fourth contribution on "Different Style in Goethe's Earlier and Later Works" discusses three phases in Goethe's oeuvre, thus referring back to the first contribution on the epochs of literature also historicized in a tripartite model, and sees Goethe as paramount for

5. Friedrich Schlegel, "Gesprach tiber die Poesie", in Kritische FriedrichSchlegel-Ausgabe, ed. E. Behler, Paderbom, 1963, II, 3 I I. Hereafter, KA. 6. Karl-Heinz . Bohrer, "Friedrich Schlegels Rede iiber die Mythologie", in Mythos und Moderne, ed. Karl-Heinz Bohrer, FrankfurtlM., 1983, 52-82, has interpreted this transitory moment as the aestheticized and subjective temporality of a "Jetzt-Zeit" with which Schlegel dissociates himself from his earlier models of a history of philosophy. . 7. See David E. Wellbery, "Rhetorik und Literatur. Anmerkungen zur poetologischen Begriffsbildung bei Friedrich Schlegel" , in Die Aktualitiit der Friihromantik, eds E. Behler and J. Horisch, Paderbom, 1987, 161-73, for an analysis of the operations of irony in Schlegel's particular construction of textuality.

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initiating the new poesy by creating a successful interrelation between antiquity and modernity. Such an interrelation between antiquity and modernity, of course, is exactly what is at stake in the project of a new mythology. In Schlegel, this interrelation should not be thought of as synthesis or as recurrence of the golden age on a higher level; rather , it poses the problem of a structural reconceptionalization of antiquity under the aegis of modernity. Ludoviko states in his "Speech" that modem literature is second to that of antiquity only in that it lacks a mythology. He does not suggest, as Herder had done , that modem literature therefore should draw on old Germanic myth as a possible "poetic heuristics" for a new mythology. The function of a new mythology is thus not limited to the revitalization of poetic imagery, but aims at structural implications. Ancient mythology provided a "centre" or rather, a "middle point" (KA, II, 312) for classical literature, and inasmuch as mythology and poesy were inseparable, all individual works were interconnected so as to form one work: "ancient poesy", Ludoviko emphasizes, could be seen as "one singular, indivisible, completed poem" (KA , II, 313). But while "it is time" for modem literature to generate something like ancient mythology, it has to do so in a different manner.' Where old mythologies, as an expression of the "youthful imagination" (KA, II, 312) of different peoples, were embedded in a sensuous intuition of the surrounding world, a new mythology would , on the contrary, have to be generated intellectually. Schlegel here alludes to two influential contemporary trends in the reconsideration of mythology: on the one hand, with a shift to a comparative and historic ized investigation of myth, as it had been initiated by Heyne and Herder, it is now seen as a necessary developmental stage of different peoples and a specific "non-conceptual" expression of their understanding of the world . On the other hand, Schlegel seems to propose the conceptual notion of a new mythology "in the service of ideas", a "mythology of reason" as it was also formulated in the so-called Oldest 9 Systematic Programme of German Idealism . But Schlegel goes beyond these two considerations of myth as either poetic expression or as conceptual, albeit aestheticized, expression of reason . In fact, Schlegel 8. Jochen Fried, Die Symbolik des Realen , Munich, 1985, 86, has interpreted this passage as a "pseudo-syllogism" in which Schlegel moved from the thesis "our poetry lacks a centre" to the statement "mythology offered such a centre for antiquity" to the conclusion: "modem poetry has no mythology" . 9. "Das alteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus", in Materialien zu Schellings philosophischen Anfiingen. eds M. Frank and G. Kurz, FrankfurtlM. , 1975, 112.

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seems to diverge from the either/or of the non-conceptual and the conceptual to a logic of both/and; when the new mythology, as Ludoviko adds. should be "the most contrived, the most artificial of all artworks because it is to encompass and include all other works" (KA, II, 312), it could be said to be both non-conceptual, as art work, and conceptual, as contrived or artificial art work , and as such to exceed the idea of an aestheticized mythology of reason in that it is meant to be all-inclusive. Moreover, the new mythology is characterized as an "artificially ordered disorder" ("ktinstlich geordnete Verwirrung", KA, II, 318) and an "intriguing symmetry of contradictions" ("reizende Symmetrie von Widersprtichen", KA, II, 318) ; like all poesy . it would be able to suspend the laws of reason and reintroduce the disorder of imagination and the chaos of nature for which the "bustle of the ancient gods " was the most appropriate symbol." What Schlegel seems to aim at with his new mythology, then. is in fact a new logic. The intimated logic of a both/and (both the conceptional and the non-conceptual , both the ordered and the disordered) poses the problem of a third which, however, exceeds the notion of a synthesis that would sublate these oppositional pairs on to a higher level ; rather, Schlegel insists on a contradictory simultaneity of such oppositions. Mythology as a "symmetry of contradictions" would then entail the inclusion of the excluded third and thus evade the bivalence of traditional logic. Schlegel here seems to point to a possible nonAristotelian logic which Jean-Pierre Vemant has also recently called for in order to better account for what he calls the "logic of ambivalence" in myth: a logic which would not be a binary one, a logic which would, in short, transcend the logic of logos.' In his Philosophische Lehrjahre, Schlegel notes repeatedly that the doctrine of a tertium non datur should be abandoned: "every syllogism," he suggests, "should begin with a paradox. The antinomies should have prompted Kant not to give up the infinite, but rather to abandon the law of the excluded third" (KA , XVUI, 410; see also XVIII. 409, No. 1070 and XVIII , 86 , No. 673). In the Dialogue on Poesy, the "dynamical paradoxes" (KA, II, 322) of physics can therefore be seen as the basis for a new mythology, which in its

10. "Denn das ist der Anfang a1ler Poesie , den Gang und die Gesetze der vernunftig denkenden Vemunft aufzuheben und uns wieder in die schone Verwirrung der Fantasie, in das ursprungliche Chaos der menschlichen Natur zu versetzen, fur das ich kein schoneres Symbol bis jetzt kenne, a1s das bunte Gewimmel der a1ten Getter." (KA, II , 319) II . Jean Pierre Vemant, Mythos und Gesellschaft im a/ten Griechenland, FrankfurtlM., 1987, 242.

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relationship to nature is thus again only "logically" equivalent to ancient mythology. Schlegel's new mythology is modelled on ancient mythology only in that it tries to extricate a specific logic implicit in myth; in itself a fairly modern endeavour that transcends both the allegorical and the symbolic interpretations of myth, as they had been offered in the eighteenth century and by Schlegel's contemporaries. When Schlegel stresses in addition to the antinomical structure of myth that the "method" of mythology consists in "interrelatedness and constant transformation" (KA, II, 318), his ideas seem to anticipate Levi-Strauss's assumption that myth offers a logical model for dealing with antinomies and that it operates on interchange and reversal." But Schlegel does not point only to the logic inherent in myth, he is apparently interested in instituting a new logic, which he cannot grasp except as mythology. I had suggested earlier that the Dialogue might take up the mise-en-abyme structure at the beginning of the Symposium with the relationship Schlegel establishes between oral and written discourse, mythos and logos. Greek thought , for instance in Plato, had established a functional opposition between spoken word and written discourse; while mythos or the spoken word had a persuasive and performative function, which exercised power over its recipients, logos or written discourse presented itself es meson, in the middle of the community, its message became a common cause in a political sense and its structure abandoned mere persuasive effect for a dialogical argument (Vernant, 192). While the overall Dialogue replicates the argumentative structure of logos, reflecting on its difference to mythos with the alternation between spoken dialogue and written contribution, one of these contributions, namely the "Speech on Mythology" quite literally reinscribes speech or mythos into logos : the "Speech" is at the same time a written text, which is both performative in its rhetoric and yet positions itself from the beginning in the middle of the community and as a communal cause. A mytho-logic on mythology, as it were, the "Speech" itself presents the simultaneity of contradictions it had addressed thematically. With its re-entry of the distinction between mythos and logos into logos, Schlegel's Dialogue seems to radicalize the mise-en-abyme of a narrated logos at the beginning of Plato 's Symposium; the mise-en-abyme is transformed into a problem of recursive self-implication, where the structure of the overall text, its relationship to antiquity, the distinction it draws between mythos and logos, recurs within one of its parts: the "Speech on Mythology". 12. Claude Levi-Strauss, Strukturale Anthropologie, FrankfurtlM., I 1977,253.

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This recursive relationship between part and whole had also been implied in the idea of mythology as an all-inclusive artwork , in tum included in all artworks. Hans Eichner has interpreted this relationship of individual works to the One Work as symbolical; in the "Speech on Mythology", Schlegel sees this relationship prefigured in Greek antiquity and its symbolics of nature and art; in his essay on Lessing , Schlegel asserts that the decisive characteristic of all higher art and form is its relationship to the whole and that therefore all works are in fact "One Work" (KA , II, 414) . Different individual works can only be One Work, Eichner concludes, if they can draw on a mutual symbolic language as mythology offered it for the ancients; the disintegration of modem literature could be overcome by creating a new mythology as a mutual symbolics adequate to the modem philosophy of nature. I ) Since the symbol, already etymologically, presents unity within separation (originally of host and guest) , it can in fact be seen as a response to the logical problem of grasping a distinction both as that which it distinguishes and as the unity or form of this distinction. In Schlegel's text, this logical paradox had been operative in the simultaneity of contradictions such as order and disorder, or logos and mythos . Symbols, one could argue with Niklas Luhmann, make invisible such paradoxes of the unity of a distinction by offering a token which allows for a continual reference to the unity of the distinct; due to this continual reference to an otherwise ineffable, and, at least within bivalent logic, inconceivable unity, the symbol is operative less on a logical than on a temporal level. According to Luhmann, the romantics are among the first to become aware of the short-circuiting of logical problems in the symbol , as well as of the actual contingency and conventionality of symbolic mystification." "Symbols", Novalis notes laconically, "are mystifictions" (Werke, II, 560, No. 160): their mystification, or invisibilization of paradoxes, in other words, is seen as a necessary, and yet contingent, fiction .

13. Hans Eichner, ''Einleitung'', in Friedrich Schlegel, Uber Goethes Meister. Gesprach iiber die Poesie, ed. H. Eichner, Paderbom, 1985, 74. 14. Niklas Luhmann, "System und Absicht der Erziehung", in Zwischen Absicht und Person: Fragen an die Piidagogik; eds N. Luhmann und K. E. Schorr, FrankfurtlM., 1992, 120.

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Novalis and Mythological History: Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen As Schlegel had already surmised in his Literary Notebooks, the combination of heterogeneous elements and of different mythologies, can only be realized in the novel (Notebooks, 163, No. 1565); the Dialogue had then presented the novel as the all-inclusive genre of other genres and tried to unfold the logical paradox of self-inclusion in the tautological description of the novel as a "romantic book" which even includes its own theory. With his tautology, Schlegel of course vitalizes the semantics of the adjective "romantic" and its derivative, the noun Roman , or novel: while "romantic" first referred to the vernacular, Romance language in opposition to Latin as the language of erudition, it was used since the fifteenth century to designate the literature of epic romances and, more generally, in the sense of the "fictionalized". Even though the adjective was still used in the eighteenth century in the semantic opposition romantic/true, Herder had historicized the term "romantic" as a period concept referring to medieval literature. When Schlegel states in his Dialogue that "the romantic can be found in the older moderns", in the Middle Ages from which both the concept and the word "romantic" derive, the romantic has in fact become a self-referential term with which the romantics reflect on their own movement as a modern movement. This self-reflection of romanticism on its own modernity of course arose out of a historicization of the ancient and the modern eras in the wake of the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, as Friedrich Schlegel, for instance , had taken it up in his early Study on Greek Poesy (Uber das Studium der griechischen Poesiei. The new historical focus on the qualitative differences of each era does not only allow the moderns to shift away from the obligatory imitation of the ancients , it also occasions the problem of self-description or self-implication at stake in the very concept of modernity: the very moment the modern identifies and establishes itself as modern, it is already past, so that it is in fact structurally impossible for modernity to grasp itself; trying to situate or define itself, the modern is already no longer itself, no longer "modern" .'s To avoid this problem, modernity would have to situate itself in an enduring, eternal present, as it were , a temporality which romanticism aims at with a futurization of the past, or to constantly transcend its temporal elusiveness, a strategy that romanticism realizes by eclipsing this elusiveness and at the same time pointing to this eclipse; a strategy that is at work in various forms of 15. Niklas Luhmann, "Das Modeme der modemen Gesellschaft", in Beobachtun gen der Moderne, Opladen, 1992, 11-50, argues that modem society tries to solve the problem of its self-description by identifying itself in temporal terms.

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romantic self-reflection, such as irony or a two-levelled representation which, folding back upon itself, always represents itself as representation within the represented. Where Schlegel had pointed to this problem of self-implication in logical terms, with his re-interpretation of mythology , Novalis addresses it in temporal terms with his notion of a " mythologized history". 16 With his novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Novalis wanted to exceed the genre of the historical novel with a romantic novel that would include other genres such as poetry and historiography and even transcend itself as genre in the fairy tale, thus presenting a mythologisierte Geschichte : a mythologized history as well as story . The novel traces the educational journey of the historical poet Heinrich von Ofterdingen, a participant of the Wartburger Sdngerstreit in 1206, but stages him in a poeticized world of the Middle Ages which serves as a ground for various figures of romantic self-reflection. The structural grid of the narrative revolves around oppositional pairs such as recollection/premonition, occidentJ orient , natural science/poetry, nature!history, played through in each chapter so as to be integrated in what could be called a temporalized logic of simultaneity. The first chapter, for instance, opposes the premonition of Heinrich's dream about the blue flower (a dream which at the very beginning of the narrative already encloses the development of the overall narrative with Heinrich 's gradual realization of his poetic inclinations and his love for Mathilde) to the recollection of his father who had had a similar dream in his youth but then suffocated his artistic talent in mere craftsmanship. Premonition and recollection, future and past, mirror each other in such a way that the narrative present can actually figure as a simultaneity of the non-simultaneous: or, in other words , function as the unity of the distinctions it draws. A similar temporal logic is set up with the Atlantis myth in chapter three, told to Heinrich by a group of merchants with whom he travels, and again an anticipation of his poetic development. The Atlantis myth unifies the oppositions of poetry, figured forth by the king of Atlantis and his daughter, and natural science, represented by a wise old man and his son; poetry and natural science meet in an exchange between daughter and son, which is consolidated in their loving unison. The unity of poetry and natural science is finally the theme of a song the princess's husband presents at the king's court in order to ask the king 's forgiveness for the secret marriage and to introduce their child . While the song conjures the 16. Mythology "in my sense of the term" , Novalis adds in the margins , "as poetic invention which symbolizes reality in a multifaceted way" (Werke, II, 380, No. 392).

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recurrence of the golden age, the time of its presentation is marked as an interregnum, when the princess's husband passes on the insignia of power bestowed on him to his child. The Atlantis myth thus formalizes a simultaneity of contradictions within a temporality that is modelled on the parameters of a particular history of philosophy. What Novalis emphasizes within the tripartite model of the history of philosophy is, however, not so much the recurrence of the golden age as a synthetic third stage in which dissociation and differentiation are finally overcome in a higher unity , but the very moment of transition, the interregnum as an intermittent phase which is, paradoxically, extended . Since the golden age is only ever on the verge of recurring (its actual recurrence would be unrepresentable or inconceivable), the interregnum or intermittent phase which announces it has to become constant, as it were . With such a constant transitionality or extended present, we suggested earlier, romanticism tries to grasp its own modernity and situate itself in the historical process. To do so, Novalis here resorts to a "mythologized history ": the Atlantis myth, in itself already a cipher for a golden age, is presented within the merchant's narrati ve of the myth as announcing the recurrence of a golden age. The myth of the golden age is reapplied to itself and thus temporalized in a history that "futurizes" the past in an intermittent, transitory moment. This temporalization of history in the interm ittent moment can in turn only be captured as a myth. Myth and history imply each other in the intermittent moment. In the structure of the overall novel, the narrative of Atlantis functions again as intermittent, announcing Heinrich as a future poet who will bring about the recurren ce of the golden age. If the overall structure of the novel is thus to some degree encrypted in the Atlantis myth , if the "Expectation", as the first part of the novel is entitled, recurs within one of its parts, the Atlantis myth in chapter three , we are again faced with a recursive self-implication, as in Schlegel's "Speech on Mythology", Novalis represents this problem of selfimplication even more clearly with a book within the book : in the cave of a hermit, Heinrich finds a Provencal book without title and without end, in which , although he cannot read the Romance language, he recognizes himself and his own story in the illustrations. The book even depicts what is as yet future for Heinrich : his relationship to the poet Klingsohr and his love for Klingsohr's daughter Mathilde. The book within the book thus encompasses the overall book which includes it. In his novel , Novalis employs this recursive relationship between part and whole with Heinrich's dream at the beginning of the novel, with the Atlantis myth , with the Provencal book , and, most importantly, with Klingsohr's fairy tale which marks the transition of the first to the second part of the novel.

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"The novel should gradually turn into fairy tale" (Werke , 1, 740), Navalis believed, since the fairy tale can present the utopian completion of history in the recurrence of a golden age that cannot be represented with the means of the historical novel or of linear narrative. Chapter five, in which Heinrich found the book about himself, had already argued for the poetic structure of history, setting itself off from the enlightenment differentiation between historiographer and poet; history, inasmuch as it is open and incomplete, can only be completed poetically, the unrepresentable end of history in the recurrence of a golden age can only be represented in the intermittent moment. Klingsohr's fairy tale thus already functions structurally as transitional moment between the novel's first part, "Expectation" and the second part, "Fulfilment", which Navalis never completed. The fairy tale combines elements from Germanic and Greek mythology to create an intricate network of allegorical references. Three realms, the astral world, the human world and the underworld are traversed and finally unified by the child Fable, allegorical of poesy; the final unison of the distinct is moreover sealed with the marital union of Eros and Freya, of Greek and Germanic mythology. The fairy tale mirrors the family structure of the overall novel, when Freya and her father Arctur in the astral world finally meet with Eros and his mother, just as Heinrich and his mother meet with Klingsohr and his daughter Mathilde. While the fairy tale can be read as a new mythology which joins Greek and Germanic mythology, it differs from other romantic approaches, when for Navalis the northern realm, the astral world of Arctur and Freya, initiates the movement which leads to the union. By instruction of Arctur, the old hero, Iron, throws his sword from the astral world into the earthly realm; it splinters, seems to descend in sparks , one of the splinters is found by Eros's father and then prompts Eros's journey to the astral world . The splinter has magnetic properties and turns into the figure of an oroborous. With the allusion to magnetism and galvanism, Novalis grounds his new mythology in the natural sciences of the time which in this context interest him as interpretative variations on the principle of unity and differentiation. For Hufeland, for instance, the relationship between iron and magnetism captured the principle of what he called a "differentiation of unity in opposition", a principle which for him formalized the poiesis of life. J7 Novalis here also employs the "dynamical paradoxes" which Friedrich Schlegel had seen prefigured in physics. The Dialogue, we had argued, introduced the new mythology as a logic which would be able to conceive the terms of a distinction as both distinct and unified. The 17. Quoted in the commentary by H. J. Balmes in Werke. III. 146.

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paradox of self-implication is visualized in Ofterdingen when the splinter, a part split off from a whole , the sword , turns into an oroborous, in itself a figure for a self- implicating whole, and then points in the direction of the final unity of the distinct, the marriage of Eros and Freya in the astral world . The circularity of the oroborous, the snake biting into his own tail, can come to symbol ize, as Heinz von Foerster has shown, the recursive process in which cognition cognizes its own cogn itions ." While for romanticism in general this symbol would thus capture the poietic process in which representation represents its own repres entations, Novalis in particular seems to employ this symbol to symbolize the very structure of the symbol, or, to be more precise, to visualize the very paradox that the symbol invisibilizes: the unity of the distinct which can grasp itself as distinction. What we had described as the logic of a new mythology and the myth of a new logic in Schlegel, thus resurfaces in Novalis's belief that the novel could realize what in his Logological Fragments he called the "laws of the symbolical construction of the transcendental world" (Werke, II, 325 , No. 48); modelled on combinatory analysis and calculus, Novalis's "symbolical construction" was meant to offer a combinatory principle that could link distinct and heterogeneous elem ents through a new logic of relationality, to which he also referred as "representational interchange" (Wechselrep riisentation) or simply as "romanticizing" tR omantisireni . which would tum cognition into poiesis. Novalis's sym bolical construc tion does not aim at what is symbolized, and would otherwise be inconceiva ble or ineffa ble, but at the process of symbolization in itself: to confuse the symbol with the symbolized, he stresses, accounts for the superstitions and erron eous beliefs of all times (Werke, II, 637, No. 685). With the circularity of the magnetic splinter Novalis offers a symbol which, as he claimed for the poetic image in general, is neither allegorical , nor symbolic of something, but instead presents a "sy mbol of itself,.19 Autopoietic Creation: E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixirs Where Novalis visualizes the paradox that the symbol invisibilizes in a symbol that refers to itself as symbol, other romantic authors take up the paradox of a unity of distinction to address the evasive moment of 18. Heinz von Foerster, "Gegenstande: Greifbare Symbole fiir (Eigen-) Verhalten", in Wissen und Gewissen, ed. S. 1. Schmidt, FrankfurtlM ., 1993, 108. 19. " Bild - nicht Allegorie - nicht Symbol eines Fremden - Symbol von sich selbst" (Werke , II, 352, No. 185).

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creation, thus of course reflecting on the form of their own creations. The recursive embeddings we had observed both in the structure of Novalis 's novel and in Schlegel 's notion of mythology as an all-inclusive artwork included in all artworks resurface for instance in E. T. A. Hoffmann's novel The Devil's Elixirs (Die Elixiere des Teufels): the autobiographical narrative of the monk Medardus includes the narrative of an old painter which mirrors the gothic offences of the overall narrative, tracing them back genealogically to the artistic sin of the first ancestor, the old painter himself, for whom his painting of a Christian saint he had imbued with the features of the pagan goddess Venus seductively came to life. This book within the book quite materially encloses the book in which it is enclosed: Medardus's manuscript is wrapped in yellowed paper which is covered with almost illegible scribbling. The editor of Medardus's manuscript deciphers the scribbling as old Italian and discovers in the yellowed paper the painter's book which he inserts into the narrative as the crucial "knot" and "focus" that joins the different threads or rays of Medardus's confessions. The book within the book here provides the rule of production from which the overall narrative is generated. As a rule of production, itself addressing the aporias of an unrepresentable act of creation or artistic representation, it is left out of Medardus 's narrative , as if it were unrepresentable itself. Moreover, since writing is the mode of production and in fact also an "atonement" of Medardus's narrative, the book within the book is not written , but miraculously writes itself in scribblings and sketches whenever the old painter reads in it. The overall narrative of course reduplicates this stenographic rule of production with the editor fiction ; the editor merely reads and inserts , thereby creating a narrative ,structure without, strictly speaking, having to create. When the painter's book breaks off with an elision which marks the coincidence of past, present and future in Medardus's continuation and modification of the genealogical curse , the painter's scribbled writing becomes illegible altogether, and we return to Medardus's manuscript which spells out exactly that elision in the recurrence of the painter's in Medardus's experiences. In an autopoietic reapplication of its rule of production to the process of its production, the narrative paradoxically escapes the "sin" of artistic representation while seductively representing it. What first appears to be but a cliched opposition between the saint and the pagan seductress, between Christian modernity and antiquity in Hoffmann 's novel, falls into an oscillation which creates a new myth of creation: that of a selfgenerating, autopoietic process in which modernity no longer imitates antiquity, but grasps itself by recursively reapplying the distinction between antiquity and modernity to that which it distinguishes. Through

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such a re-entry, modernity can grasp what would otherwise elide it as a kind of blind spot or unrepresentable condition of possibility: its own form or delimitation. Myth, Andre Jolles has argued in his description of myth as a minor form, is creation . Myth is a dialogical form modelled on the relation between question and answer: man asks the world to disclose itself and is given an answer, a resisting answer, however, in which the world's word meets him. Jolles's formulation "er bekommt Antwort, das heifst, er bekommt ihr Widerwort, ihr Wort tritt ihm entgegen", emphasizes a juncture of opposition and correspondence or of distinction and unity at the heart of myth; myth as a form arises whenever the world is created for 20 man out of this relationship between question and answer. The world discloses itself in such a way that the posed question solves itself in an answer , and that in and through this particular interplay of question and answer the surrounding world of concrete things creates itself. Jolles refers to the world of things here as "das Gegenstandliche", implying that the concrete also quite literally , as Novalis had also understood it, stands in opposition. Myth would then seem to capture the emergence of a distinction , in Jolles's terms that between man and his world , or, in more general terms, between a system and its environment. If in myth the question posed solves itself in an answer that first constructs or creates the world of things which discloses itself in myth , myth would moreover seem to formalize autopoiesis. This particular interplay between question and answer that Jolles sees as constitutive of myth could be read as a selfreferential loop in which the answer to a question reproduces the question which in turn produces its own answer. Autopoiesis thus includes its own rule of production which it recursively reapplies to itself to guarantee the self-constitution and self-stabilization of a system. If myth can indeed be seen as an interpretation of autopoietic systemic differentiation, it would offer an explanation of emergence on the basis of self-reference, either dismissing the notions of "cause" and "origin" completely or fictionalizing them. Myth , inasmuch as it structurally replicates the self-reference of emergence which it illustrates, seems to follow the logic of self-fulfilling prophecies which create or call forth what they say by virtue of saying it. Jolles implies something similar when he compares myth to oracle : both in myth and in oracle , the interplay between question and answer calls forth a future ; both myth and oracle tell a truth : wahrsagen , "to prophesy, to tell the truth", is for Jolles etymologically related to wahren, "to last" and to gewdhren, "to yield". In myth and oracle , he concludes, the world yields 20. Andre Jolles, Einfache Formen, Darmstadt, 1958,97.

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itself in that it tells the truth about itself: in that it lasts (Jolles, 98 ). In this temp oralized world of duration which yields itself in myth , past and futur e are not differentiated for Jo lles . Even though myth at first always seems to refer to past events , Levi-S trauss conceded in his analy sis of the temporal structure of myth , these past eve nts are onl y mythically relevant if they offer a structure of duration , a dur ation which then simultaneously encompasses past , present and future (Levi-Strauss, 229) . The simultaneity of the non-simultaneous in Novalis, the evasi ve intermittent moment which remembers the future to come as a recurrence of the past in a transitory present, the coincidence of past , present and future in a moment of elision in Hoffmann which spelled out the autopoiesis of the overall narrative, the coincidence of oppositions, the paradoxes and tautologies with which Schlegel tried to re-include the excluded third all seem to create temporal and logic al "myths" of myth, with which romanticism grasps itself as itself and situ ates its own modernity - mythi cally - within the historical process.

ZOAS AND MOODS: MYTH AND ASPECTS OF THE MIND IN BLAKE AND YEATS EDW ARD LARRISSY This article takes a fresh look at the oft-compared couple, Blake and Yeats, comparing and contrasting their use of myth to convey aspects of the mind, and relating the differences between them not only to changing conceptions of the mind, but also to their different political assumptions. It should, of course, go without saying that Blake can figure in a discussion of modernism and mythopoeia, and not just because of Yeats's clear indebtedness to him. One of the more dispiriting effects of the resurgence of historicism has been a tendency to revert in practice, though perhaps not in theory , to simple models of temporality which lend a spurious ease to talk of historical periods. But Blake is merely one of the more acute examples of a textual history which renders such talk inadequate. In point of his reception he is in many ways a poet of the modem period . Among his first serious readers was Swinburne, whose influence extends well ahead ; and he is important to the understanding of Joyce, Auden, Ted Hughes and Allen Ginsberg. Roger Fry seems to have regarded him as an exponent of "significant form". The first serious edition of his works was the great three-volume edition by Edwin Ellis and W. B. Yeats in 1893. Of course, this is not to deny that Blake exhibits many of the signs of "Romantic Ideology": the idea of the prophet-poet; the cultivation of the sublime; the value placed on "Imagination"; the drive to the unity of the Gesamtkunstwerk exhibited in his "composite art", which seeks to integrate text, design and decoration in a complex, contrapuntal mode. But it is not only his emergence in the late Victorian and modem periods that complicates Blake's presence in the list of romantic artists: there is also the perspective backwards: his inheritance of radical Protestant traditions that go back at least to the seventeenth century, and alongside which one may include an interest in the spiritual interpretation of alchemical symbolism. I This inheritance conditions not only his sense of the political 1. Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England, London, 1971, 271, 378; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 2nd ed., Harmondsworth, 1976, 287-305; Henry J. Cadbury, "Early Quakerism and Uncanonical Love", Harvard Theological Review, 40 (1947), 204-5.

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import of his myths but even, as we shall see, colours their iconography. And here we find a point of difference between him and other romantic mythographers or bricoleurs of myths such as Shelley or Nerval . For when Blake says, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Plate II), that "all deities reside in the human breast", he is not only referring to the idea that myths represent psych ic realities, but also declaring his indebtedness to a radical Protestant understanding of revelation and the inner light which allows him a few lines later to converse with Isaiah and Ezekiel (Plate 12). My initial point, then, was that Blake is peculiarly congenial to, and influential in, the modern period. My second point was that some of his sources show him to be the inheritor of a politically radical Protestant tradition. But it is not chiefly to rehearse Blake's peculiar provenance, nor simply for the sake of source-hunting, that I shall here say something about the places from which he drew associations for use in his mythology. For these sources help to give a sense of the role myth plays in his work, and help to sharpen a contrast with Yeats. Nor do these sources comprise only those that might be expected from a radical Protestant, for they also include Christian iconography of a kind that was common to Christian poets from other traditions, and the iconography of the classical gods as studied by a poet such as Keats.

II In a world that is "fallen", Blake seeks to find a mythological language for the psychic and sexual conflict he sees as inseparable from a system of political oppression and alienated religion. To do so he draws not just upon his reading of comparative mythology - for instance, in the work of Jacob Bryant - but also interweaves resonances drawn from those iconographies and discourses which might be claimed as psychological. I mean in particular the theory of humours, philosophical alchemy, and the tradition of personification of virtues, vices and passions in English poetry, especially that of the eighteenth century. The fact that Blake goes to such sources has occasionally been noted. But the significance of the fact has not been thoroughly studied. What it means is that Blake makes a far more decisive, because more motivated and identifiable, shift towards the human breast, and away from Olympus or the heavens, than do other mythopoeic poets of the period. Like these other poets he sees the mind as a crucial arena of political conflict: the "mind-forgd manacles" are forged in the mind. The use of this phrase in "London" represents a considerable equivocation in the earlier work about whether the real battle is only in the

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mind or also outside it. (Significantly the phrase replaces an earlier one referring to the Hanoverian soldiery: "german forg 'd manacles".) In the later work, in any case, the chains can only be removed by "mental fight " . Unlike with thes e othe r poets , however, the tradition of valuing revelation and of finding a symbolic language for spiritual process gives extraordinary ambition and incisiveness to Blak e's myth. Yet, unlike in Yeats' s poetry (as opp osed to his occult system), Blake's use of myth retains a fixed and iconic qual ity: only relatively fixed , of course, subject to variation and indeterminacy, but still recognizably of an age when poets are see king to return to the orig ins of the mythopoeic faculty by re-making mythol ogy in their poem s, thus providing som ething that could vie in its narrat ives and its structures with the pagan myths and the stories of the Old Testament. Th e best plac e to start, then , may not be with what I have called psychological icon ographies and discourses, but at the most obvious place, with the god s themselves. A figur e such as Urizen famously constitutes a parod y of images of God to be found in the Christian tradition , notably in Raph ael ' s designs for the Vatican Loggie, which Blake had studied care fully in engravings. But Blake 's figure is a composite. Thus the related figur e of Death in the Night Thoughts engravings clearly draws upon imag es of Jupiter to be found in such Renaissanc e manuals as Vincenzo Cartari's lmag ini delli Dei de g J'A ntichi (Venice, 1556) . It is possible to find designs in Blake which ostensibly illustrate a Biblical or Christian theme, but draw their iconography from Renaissance manuals displaying the gods.' In some of these manuals the gods can look quite unexpected. Jean Seznec, in The Survival of the Pagan Gods, for instance, looks at an engraving of Jupiter in the 1571 edition of Cartari, where the deity is shown in a white mantle covered with stars, holding a nine-stringed lyre and two globes. "Who," asks Seznec, "would recognize Jupiter with these accoutrements?".' Seznec remarks that "our mythographers sum up and continue a syncretistic tradition ; they turn for information above all to the last adherents of pagan ism - that is, to a period when all the cults were being merged and all the gods amalgamated" (Seznec, 238) . It may be worth remarking by the way, that a consideration of Renaissance manuals leads to the suggestion that the origins of comparative mythology and romantic myth -making should be traced back well before the Enlightenment. 2. See The House of Death. Colour Print. Tate Gallery. Illustration of Paradise Lost. XI. 491-92. 3. Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. B. Sessions , New York, 1953.237.

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In any case, Blake ' s sources agree with Jacob Bryant "and all antiquaries", as he puts it, that All Religions are One. The effect of syncretism within those sour ces is to break down the differences between similar deit ies within different cults , but also to blur the differences between similar gods with in the same tradition, for instance the difference betw een Saturn and Jupiter. The iconography of Saturn-Krenos is traditi onally confused with that of Chr onos, the latter influencing his depicti on of Time in the Night Thought s illustration s. Urizen is an amalgam of ico nographical hints taken from the dep iction of God the Father, of Jupiter, of Saturn and of Old Father Time. Of particular interest to Blake was the associ ation of Saturn with Melanchol y, which provides a background to the mournful aspect of Urizen . And this topic leads on to the more psychologically-oriented tradit ions upon which Blake was drawing.

J[J

Melancholy had an imp ortant place in spiritual or philosophi cal alchemy. Blake claims allegi ance to this trad ition , the trad ition of "Paracelsus and Behm en" (Jakob Boehme) at a couple of places in his writing (Th e Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Plate 22 , and Letter to Flaxman , [2 September 1800) . Without going into the biz arre and florid ramifications of that suject, 1 want to get straight to the point about my example of Urizen. At the stage where the alchemist's mixture is about to be purified over the fire it may be symbolized as an old man , often a king , who is sickening and is finally killed by the heat. This is the symbol held by philosophical alchemists to represent Melanchol y. But this old man aspect is actually only one element in the original mixture, which comprised Mercury and Sulphur. These were regarded as "contraries", analogous to water and fire ; and what Northrop Frye calls the "Ore-cycle" in Blake the opposition and alternation of Reason and Energy, or Urizen and Orcis partly modelled on this alchemical opposition. Blake amalgamates this opposition with the traditional psychology of humours. For the Ore-cycle also derives from the well-established notion of the manic -depressive cycle. Quite apart from the romantic interest in texts such as Burton 's Anatomy of Melancholy evidenced in Keats 's "Ode", for instance, this notion was receiving new confirmation at the end of the eighteenth century in empirical studies, of which Robert James offers a digest in his Medicinal Dictionary, where he refers to observations of patients:

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... melancholic patients. especially if their Disord er is inveterate, eas ily fall into Madne ss, which , when rem oved, the Melan choly again discovers itself, thou gh the Madn ess afterwards returns at certain periods.' He is insistent on the point that Mania and Melan choly are two face ts of the same disord er: There is an abso lute Necessit y for reducing Melancholy and Madne ss to one species of Disorder (ibid.). Th e ca use of this malady is "an excess ive Con gestion of the Blood in the Brain" (ibid.). Blake is probably thinking in term s of this kind of psychology when he says that one of the mythological figures or "Zoas" (mo re on that word in due course) repr esentative of passion "flew up from the Hum an Heart / Into the Brain " (MS, 10, British Library ). On the basis of this intern al disord er. Mort on Paley has suggested that we sho uld think of Blake' s Yala as influ enced by a sub tle form of "psychornachia" to be found in Spenser' s Faerie Queene: " It is of co urse, the mind (and body ) in wh ich the eve nts of the poe m take place, and the quests and battl es are episodes in the making of that mind . " But Blake draws not only on Spenser ' s allegorized virtu es, passion s and vices, but on the traditi on of personi fication in eighteenth-ce ntury poet s such as Gray , Young and Collins.' That Urizen (to stay with our main exampl e) mythologizes repressive facets of the mind is clear. and the source s, as we have seen, are appropriate one s. But there is anoth er con sideration, that of the historical allego ry : how much does it matt er that Urizen is also George III? Or that he draw s on contemp orary radical s' depiction of a mal ign alli ance between Priest and King , such as one may find in the works of Paine, or in Shelley' s "Ode to Libert y"? It clearly matters a gre at deal . But though Blake ' s mythology is used to repre sent political realities, the fact that it also represents psy chic ones, combined with the belief that "All deities reside in the . human breast". puts the origin of political corruption and conflict in the human mind , as the kind of equivocation we saw earlier, in the case of "London", also indicates. Blake' s mythology maintains the 4. Robert Jame s. A Medicinal Dictiona rv, London , 1743-5, n. " Mania" . 5. Monon D. Paley, Energy and the Imaginati on: A Study in the Developm ent of" Blake ',\' Thought , Oxford , 1970 , 95. 6. Jean H. Hagstrurn, "Blake and the Sister- Arts Tr adition", in Bla ke 's Visionary Forms Dramatic. eds David V. Erdm an and John E. Grant , Princeton. 1970 , 88.

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iconic quality natural to an age seeking a re-authentication of faith in terms of an original poetic faculty. But he is far more radical than any of his contemporaries in shifting the locus and origin of myth into the realm of mental process, and this fact can be gauged quite concretely in an examination of the iconographies and discourses to which he turns. The word "Zoa" , used to denote the faculties and personages of Blake's developed mythology, is expressive of this shift. It is a misunderstanding of the plural of the Greek ZOOfl , which translates the Bible' s "living creatures", as in Ezekiel. The reference pushes the origin of mental faculties far back into proximity with the Godhead, while the connotations of the word itself impart a sense of relation to living mental process. It is arguable that one fact verifying this conclusion is precisely Blake's prestige with a growing number of radical poets, painters and critics from the pre-Raphaelites onwards. That is to say. the serious study and emulation of Blake begins in that period of pre-modernism when the fluidity and tentativeness of states of mind is being increasingly emphasized. Yeats himself finds it easy to assimilate Blake's Zoas to his own tentative concept of "mood", itself a word that finds increasing currency in the discussion of mental states at the end of the nineteenth century.' The more iconic aspect of Blake's mythology is relegated. Indeed, what is striking about Yeats 's work, if one approaches it with the very plausible comparison with Blake in mind, is how very little it corresponds to that world of "titanic forms" to be found in Blake's prophetic books. Of course, Blake 's influence is not merely theoretical, a matter of commentaries in the Yeats-Ellis edition . A number of the structures to be found in A Vision have their correlates in Blake's thought. For instance. the interpenetrating and opposed gyres include Blake's "T he Mental Traveller" among their many sources. And Yeats's abiding interest in "antinomies" , which was nursed on Blake's "contraries" and SOflRS of Innocence and of Experience, finds its expression in poems expressing opposed states of mind - "T he Song of the Happy Shepherd" and " The Sad Shepherd" - or even in books that do the same thing: The Tower with its bitter, masculine assertiveness. as against the next volume, The WifldinR Stair. with its cultivation of sweetness and labyrinthine internality, seen by Yeats as feminine . This aspect of Yeats 's work has been studied by Hazard Adams in The Book o] Yeats ' .I' Poems .x

7. Cf. a quotation from Conrad in Michael Levenson, A Geneuology of Modernism , Cambridge, 1984. 2, and compare with this the use of the word "mood" by T. E. Hulme, quoted in Levenson, 44 . 8. Hazard Adams , The Book oj' Yeats's Poems. Tallahasee: Fa" 1990.

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Nevertheless, it could be claimed that Yeats chooses to emphasize those aspects of Blake' s mythol ogy which relate to states of mind. The most obv ious bare word to appear in Yeats's terminology as summing up something more tentative in his representation of mental sta tes is the word "mood". In the Blakean -sounding volume of essays , Ideas of Good and Evil, there is a brief paragraph, dating from 1895, called "The Moods" : It seems to me that these moods are the labourers and messengers of the Ruler of All, the gods of ancient day s still dwelling on their secret Olympus, the angels of more modem days ascending upon their shining ladder. "

Later in the passage he speaks of discovering "immortal moods in mortal desires ". It will be noted that where Blake thinks of mental states as identifiable with his Zoas , Yeats thinks of them as ancillary : as labourers or angels of the gods , connected with them by a ladder. This conception can be seen as paralleled in the later one of Anima Mund i, and must be includ ed in any general account of the connections between mental states , mythopoei a and politics in his work . In the poem from The Wind Among the Reeds that bears the same title as that little essay, there is none of the defin iteness of a panth eon , even of so dynamic and shifting a panth eon as one finds in Blake: Time drops in decay, Like a candle burnt out, And the mountains and woods Have their day , have their day . What one in the rout Of the fire-born moods Has fallen away? ("The Moods " ) In his A Genealogy of Modernism, Michael H. Levenson has fastened on the use of the word "mood" in early modernist texts, seeing in it an index of a typical tension between the desire to repres ent the immediacy of experience and to reveal its deeper structure at the same time, a tension he finds in the Preface to Conrad ' s The Nigger of the Nar cissus ( 1897) where 9. W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions. London, 1961, 195. Hereafter , EI.

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the author wants "above all to make you see" but at the same time to reveal "what is kept out of sight". In pursuit of this dual aim Conrad wants the artist to hold up a fragment of life "in the light of a sincere mood" (Levenson, 1-2). The parallel with Yeats 's conception of moods as messengers of the "secret" Olympus is clear. But both Yeats and Conrad are inheritors of a Victorian criticism which concentrated on developing an associationist theory of poetry and of the "moods of character" (the phrase is Arthur Hallam 's) to be found there. Yeats's early work is full of injunctions to capture the livingness of life and its eternal aspect at the same time. Thus in "To the Rose upon the Rood of Time" he seeks to find " In all poor foolish things that live a day / Eternal beauty wandering on her way". Typically he then balances this desire with concern lest , in going too near the Rose of Beauty, he forget to hear "common things that crave". Even after, perhaps especially after, Yeats increasingly adopts the strong voice from about 1907 onwards, the tentative and provisional is everywhere to be found . Stan Smith has republished an essay on "Yeats and the Structure of Forgetting" in his recent book on The Origins of Moderni sm, in which he fastens on lines such as these from "T he Tower", from which he develops an argument about the importance of forgetting and of a sense of unfinished narrative in Yeats: 10 Hanrahan rose in frenzy there And followed up those baying creatures towards o towards I have forgotten wh at - enough! ('The Tower", 196) These lines are inserted into an inventory of memories, and Yeats left them there, where they serve to impress upon us the fact that this inventory is, as it were, dashed off in a casually associative flow of remembrance. Cairns Craig in his Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry, stresses the part that association and memory play in Yeats 's conservative ideology, hallowing beloved remembrance, and insists that their role had been prepared even in the early poetry and in, for instance, Yeats 's formulations of symbolist doctrine." Not that anyone would maintain that associationism is in itself inimical to symbolism. Craig 10. Stan Smith, The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal, Hemel Hempstead , 1994, 177-78. II . Cairns Craig, Yeats, Eliot, Pound and the Politics of Poetry, London , 1982, 72-111.

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discusses a passage from "The Philosoph y of Shelley 's Poetry " (EI, 8990) in which Yeats describes how "ancient symbols" occur to us in fantasy and dreams, adducing a "vision that a friend of mine saw when gazing at a dark blue curtain". Yet this passage cannot be entir ely concerned with contingency, casual or otherwise, if it shows that our assoc iations end in ancient symbols from the Great Mind. For Yeats 's ladder is still there, and it still leads, by means of association , to the same place. Of course, whether remembering the value he himself invested in fictional characters such as Hanrah an, or the heroic acquaintances whos e portraits adorn the walls of "The Muni cipal Gall ery Revisited ", or lamenting the absence of Major Robert Gregory from the landscape he had loved , ridden over and painted ("In Memory of Major Robert Gregory"), this is a poetry where memory and loved association sanction a world where "all's accustomed, ceremonious" . But what Yeats gives us, it seems to me, is an even more profoundly conservative politic al position than Craig suggests: he offers us a world where not only do loved associations have to be accepted with the heart rather than dissected by "opinion" ; but also one where those associations, when prope rly construed, exhib it the faint (but to the Irish Ascendan cy occulti st, defin ite enough) outlines of a world of eternal forms - and, indeed , values, for Yeats is not neutral in the great antagonism between the objecti ve and the subjecti ve. Th ese eternal form s have some of the shape, and something of the cyclical and antithetical character of Blake's myth , but empty it of the capacity for final redemption not only by making its cyclical character inescapable, but by giving it the character of eternality. In "Sailing to Byzantium" it could even be said that the eternal appears as a static golden wall on the outer marg in of existence. Instead of being at one with the heart, then, as in Blake , myth is to a degree alienated from it. The heart remains the locus of the associative and organ ic, yearningly connected to the eternal, but also remote from it. This is sugg ested by "The Circus Animals ' Desertion" ," where ladders yet again figure the poet 's relationship to his myth-making, and the heart , instead of being a place of unified origin , is a scene of multiplicity and disjunction." To be precise, Yeats's "circus animals " are his works, and the calcul atedly demean ing phrase sugg ests a show from which the poet feels distance. The second section of the poem, in which the poet proceeds to "e numerate old themes ", obviously shows how the 12. W. B. Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition, ed. Richard Finneran. 2nd ed.• New York. 1989. 346-47 . 13. Michael Bell suggested the connection of this poem with the earlier image of the ladder. See also the discussion in Edward Larriss y, Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Difference, Hemel Hampstead. 1994, 193. .

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drea ms embodied in his works too k their origi n fro m the desires of the heart, but also how these desires were sub lima ted and misrecognized . In the third part he briefly honours the dreams with the phrase " masterful images", whic h demonstrates that he is assi milating them to the realm of archetypal image and myth in the Anima Mundi. And ind eed, he asse rts that they "Grew in pure mind". But they begi n in the hea rt, wh ich is not only described as a "foul rag and bone sho p" , but is pro vided with an inven tory of co ntents: "O ld kettles, old bo ttles, and a brok en can, / Old iro n, old bones, old rags, tha t ravin g slut / Wh o keeps the till". This is not a very prepossessing picture of the relationsh ip betwee n the eternal forms and the merely associative and orga nic. But these are the und erly ing term s, already famili ar fro m Yea ts's ear lier work, even thou gh he is here giving them a different emphas is. Blake, o n the other hand , would ass imilate both terms - the heart as well as the image - to his mytholo gy: what Yeats refe rs to as the heart, Blak e wo uld comprise at various times in the figures of Vala (someti mes equate d with Nature) and Luv ah (so metimes equated wit h Passion ). Th ere wou ld be no tend ency to separa te what co uld be repre sented in myth, on the one hand , from the natural and the passionate on the other . Th ese obse rvations give further depth to the description of Blake' s myth-m aking as possessing a more "iconic" quality than that of Yeats . It has often been said that Yeats atte mpts to recover a sense of the supernatural reference of symbols by using some of the too ls of a symbolist tec hniq ue which had been devised in a more or less sce ptical frame of mind. T he combination of arche type and associationism described here would seem to bear witness to the truth of that claim. Blake, on the oth er hand , altho ugh he feels the need to recove r the original force of myth , is still sufficiently co nfident that arch etypes imbue eve ry aspec t of experience.

MYTH IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: TENNYSON'S IDYLLS AND WAGNER'S RING DES NIBELUNGEN

MAIKE GERGEL In his study of Tennyson's Idylls of the King Clyde de L. Ryals suggested that a "cultural convergence" exists between Tennyson's work and Wagner's Ring des Nibelung en. For Ryals it was a convergence of theme : both Wotan and Arthur are motivated by the desire to found for man a satisfactory society and both find their desires frustrated by the nature of reality. I But as a point marginal to Ryals's main concern, it remained a passing remark. It was not entirely novel, either: already in the 1890s Henry van Dyke had observed that the Ring and the Idylls share a common theme and are in fact, together with Victor Hugo's "romances", "the most characteristic art-works of the nineteenth century" .' But, again, it was only an aside in a study of Tennyson's poetry. What lies behind these suggested links , these somewhat intuitive flashes of insight? In the course of a longer investigation I have become convinced that the Ring and the Idylls are the results of similar intellectual conditions and preoccupations, i.e. that they bear out newly developed notions of literature and history, both of which I consider as mythopoeic in nature.' These notions, which I would like to call the mythopoeic conception of literature and of history respectively, have their roots in the romantic revolution of ideas. It is in romantic thinking that the mythic receives its potency for the modern intellectual situation. So, in order to assess the possibility of any "cultural convergence", it will be necessary to investigate the intellectual situation that Wagner and Tennyson inherited. These new, modem, definitions were formed between, roughly, 1770 and 1830. It is widely accepted that towards the end of the eighteenth century a fundamental intellectual and metaphysical crisis occurred. The French Revolution, on the one hand the result of the Age of Reason's preoccupation with rationality, liberty, and individualism, and on the other hand equally inspired by a belief in the power of the organic collective of the nation (-state), marked a turning-point in intellectual and political 1. Clyde de L. Ryals, From the Great Deep: Essays on the "Idylls of the King" Athens: Ohio, 1967, 193-94. 2. Henry van Dyke, The Poetry of Tennyson, 3rd ed., New York, 1893, vii. 3. Maike Oergel, The Return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen : National Myth in Nineteenth-Century English and German Literature , Berlin and New York, 1998.

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history . Its outcome, the dictatorial terreur, revealed the doubt about the omnipotence of reason and the progressive perfectibility of the human being as ju stified and damaged irreparably the trust in these very cornerstones of Enlightenment thought. Previously the Enlightenment itself had done similarly irreparable damage to the metaphy sical supremacy of Christian theology. With both the cert ainties of Chri stianity and the Enlightenment questioned, a vacuum of metaphysical meaning occurred that rom antic thought endeavoured to fill by transforming both the Christian and the Enlightenment heritage into a new metaphysics. This was done by recourse to a notion of origin through a historical, the historicist, perspective. I have traced in greater detail elsewhere how this process turned "literature" into the medium through which the totality of human existence could be expressed, that is revealed, rather as the Scriptures used to reveal divine truth.' Important in this context is the fact that this transformation involved newly defined notions of myth. Applying the newly developed philological and historical methods, which owe much to the climate of rational enquiry, to the Bible, the founding schol ars of the "Higher Criticism" concluded during the last third of the eighte enth century that the Bible was mythic poetry . This meant that a philosophical content was presented in poetic images and narratives, som e of which may have their origin in historical occurrences. Abstract intellectual content appeared in figurati ve expressions so that it could be grasped by a mind yet incapable of abstract discourse.' Initially Eichhorn 's was an effort to salvage the Sacred Text from the more extreme ridicule of dogmatic Enlighteners, who derided the stories of the Scriptures as fictitious lies easily proven as such by the (new) natural sciences. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744 -180 3) took this appreci ation of the primitive mode one step furthe r: abandoning any vestig e of Enlightenment distaste, he prepared the veneration of what came to be cons idered "ori ginal poetry", of which the 4 . Maike Gergel, "Literature as the Modern Sacred Te xt: Th e Development of the Mythopoe ic Co ncept of Literature 1770-1830" , in Myth and its Legacy in European Literature, ed . Neil Thomas , Durham , 1996. 5. The Gottingen classicist J. G. Heyne paved the way with his enquiries into the nature of myth, which, in Enlightenment fashion, defined myth as a surpassed primitive stage of the human intellect. His pupil 1. G. Eichh orn applied Heyne 's findings to the Bible. Initially, in his early Urgeschi chte written in the 1770s, Eichhorn displays an almost Herderian veneration for the "primitive" mode , but in his later work retains Heyne' s critical distance. In England Bishop Lowth's Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, held 1741-50, published in Latin in 1753, had initiated the acceptance of the Bible as a poetic document. A useful survey of this development is given in Der Ursprung des Mythosb egriffs in der Bibelwissenschaft, eds Christian Hartlich and Walter Sachs, Tubingen, 1952.

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Scri ptures were a particularly fine example, as not only original, but as best. For Herder this origin al poetry, as it survived in the Old Testament, was the ultimate model of poetry, because it made the deepest impress ion on mind and soul. Die frappantesten Stellen in der Bibel dunk en mir von der hochsten und zugleich so einfachen Natur zu seyn, daB ich aus aller Welt nichts an ihre Stelle zu setzen wiinschte. Wenn ich da in den gelehrten Komm entaren oder Paraphrasen ... viel von Bildersprache reden hare , die man in unser gutes, reinverstandliches , d.i. metaphysisches Deutsch iibersetzen musse, so weif ich nicht wohin ich soil. Jene Spr ache versteht aile Welt, weil sie die Sprache des menschlichen Herzens ist, diese Sprache versteht niemand. The most striking passages in the Bible seem to me of the highest and simultaneously such simple nature that I would not wish to replace them with anything else. When I hear much said in erudite commentaries ... of the figurative langu age that ought to be translated into our good comprehensible German, i.e. metaph ysical [German], I don 't know where to turn . Th at language is understood by all the world , because it is the language of the human heart , this language no-on e understands." The figurative language directly addr esses the human understanding wi th its conc rete imagery that neverth eless conveys co mplex spiritual and intellectual meaning. Attacking the contemp orary , exclusive preference for abstract conceptualizing as irrelevant, Herd er asse rts that human spiritual understand ing operates in images: "The self-reve aling human soul sees pictures".' Thi s image-based, poetic langu age was, as contemporary research pointed out , the first language. "T he symbolic image [Denkbild] was so to speak the whole characteristic, historical, philosophical, and poetic language of the creation .... Sacred natural language, poeti c and genetic !" Its genetic productivity can draw together the whole of human perception. It has thus the power to convey a multiplicity of coherently interlocking meanings 6. Johann Gottfried Herder, Siimtliche Werke. ed. Bernhardt Suphan , Berlin, 18771913, IX, 167. Hereafter, Herder. (Note: all translations are my own). 7. "Die sich enthiillende Menschliche Seele sieht Bilder." Herder, VI, 27 J. 8. "Das Denkbild war gleichsam die ganze Charakteristische, Historische und Poetische Sprache der Schopfung .... Heilige Natursprache, poetisch und genetisch!" Herder, VI, 302.

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which create the symbo lic density in the text. Poetry , now as then, is, acco rding to Herder, the "q ueen of all ideas from all se nses"." Thu s, for Herder, poetry is capable of functionin g as the revelatory medium of the totality of human existence, of prese nting hum anit y in its abstrac ttheor etical and concrete-imagin ative modes of conceptualizi ng. In the crea tive co nceptualizing of the abs trac t, the spiritual, the metaphysical in term s of the image, the original mythic meth od was said to be at work in myth in general and in the Bible in particular. Thi s symbolic density that contained the abstract in the co ncrete was of particular interest to the rom antic thin kers, because it had the potent ial to express and contain the metaph ysical disjunction of the real and the ideal that resulted from the lack of a coherent me taph ysical framework, whi ch had occurred in the wake of the metaphysical crisis. Friedrich Schlegel ( 1772- 1829), one generation after Herder, dia gnoses the prob lem that arises from these modem intellectu al circumstances in his " Rede tiber die Mythologie" as the lack of a mythol ogy, which adverse ly affec ts the poet: Aus dem Innern heraus arbeiten das alles muB der moderne Dichter. und viele haben cs herrl ich ge tan, aber bis je tzt nur jeder alle in, jedes Werk wie eine neue Sch opfung von vom aus dem Nich ts .... Es fehlt ... unsrer [sic] Poesie an einem Mittelpunkt ... wir haben keine Mythologie. The modem poet has to crea te everything out of his innerm ost (so ul), and many have achieved this glorio usly, but until now each on his ow n, each new work like a new creation from the beginning out of nothin g .... Our poetry lack s a centre ... we have no mythol ogy. III A mythol ogy co uld function as the metaph ysical framework necessary to make it possible for philosophy to be co ncretely expressed in poetry. Schleg el clearly believed that a new mythology could be created. But, unlik e the orig inal model, it must be a mythology of the mind (Mythologie de s Geist esi realiz ed through the artifice of art, in order to be viable for the modem mind .

9. "Konigin aller Ideen aus allen Sinnen." Herder. IV, 166. 10. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed . Ernst Behler, Paderborn, 1958-87, II. 312. Hereafter. KSA.

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Auf dem ganz entgegengesetzten Wege wird sie [die neue Mythologie] zu uns kommen, wie die alte ehemalige, iiberall die erste Bluthe der jugcndlichen Fantasie, sich unmittelbar ans chlieBend und anbildend an das Nachste, Lebendigste der sinnlichen Welt. Die neue Mythologie muB im Gegenteil aus der tiefsten Tiefe des Gei stes herausgebildet werden: es muf das kunstlichste alle r Kunstwerke sein, denn es soli alle andern umfassen, ein neues Bette und Gefaf fur den alten ewigen Urquell der Poesie. It [the new mythology] will come to us on a path quite opposite to that of the old former one, which everywhere was the first flower of the youthful im agination, directly connecting itself to and shaping itself after what was mo st immediate, the liveliest thing of the world of the senses. On the contrary, the new mythology must be created out of the deepest depths of the mind ; it must be the most artificial of all art -works, because it is to encompass all others, a new bed and vessel for the ancient eternal spring of poetry (KSA ,

312) . The work of art, the piece of poetry, created deliberately by recourse to ancient structures will produce a new metaphysics. The mythopoeic becomes the only way to express human existence, to achieve a holistic view of the fragmented world. Friedrich Schelling (1775 -1854) remarks in his Philosophie der Kunst (1802): Jeder groBe Dichter [ist] berufen, von dieser noch im Werden begriffcnen (mythologischen) Welt, von dem ihm seine Zeit nur einen Teil offenbaren kann, - von dieser Welt, sage ich , diesen ihm offenbarten Theil zu einem Ganzen zu bilden und aus diesem Stoff derselben sich seine Mythologie zu schaffen. Every great poet [is] called upon to cre ate of this (mythological) world, which is still in the process of becoming and of which his time can only reveal a part to him, - is called upon, I say, to create this part that has been revealed to him into a whole and to form of this matter his own mythology for himself. II The mythic expression, in its figurative capacity to name, reveals meaning, a demand necessitated by the metaphysical crisis, without denying the 11. Schellings Werke, ed. Manfred Schroter, Munich , 1927, rep. 1965. III, 465.

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oppositeness, the binarin ess of existence , but providing a totality of meaning, a kind of semantic infinity. Schelling notes: "The character of true mythology is that of universality, of infinity" (Schelling, III, 433-34). Th rough this circumstance the recou rse to original structures reveals itself not as regressive, or nostalgic, but as intellectuall y progressive. The resurrected archetypal structures are employed to reflect, as well as to attempt to amend , the intellectual and spiritu al situation of modernity. The English romantic poets, without precisel y describing it as mythic , subscribe to a very similar concept of the function of poetry. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is an illuminating example." In his "Prospectus" to his Magnum Opus , of which The Prelude, The Excursion, and The Recluse were to be the parts, which is now prefaced to The Excursion , Wordsworth writes in 1814: ... Not Chaos ... can breed such fear and awe As fall upon us often when we look Into our Minds , the Mind of Man My haunt , and the main region of my song .... For the discernin g intellect of Man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these [Elysian Fields] A simple produce of the common day. - I, long before the blissful hour arrives, Would chant in lonely peace , the spousal verse Of this great consummation; - and, by words, Which speak of nothing more than what we are, Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep of death. 13 Wordsworth, like Schlegel, insists that an accommodation of the binariness of existence is possible. The joining of opposites is first induced by the power of poetry, which is created by the human mind. Poetry will reveal the true , complete reality of humanity, which is the "great consummation", the awakening of the spiritually dying to new life. Through the reference to paradise Wordsworth suggests that this union existed in the past, at the original beginning, thus its recapture in the future suggests some kind of re12. Wordsworth ' s closeness in thought to Schelling has been traced by E. D. Hirsch, in Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study in Romanticism, Newhaven, 1960. 13. Wordsworth: Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt, London , 1975,590.

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achievement of an original state. Poetry must clearly have a relation to the original state. Like Herder, Wordsworth also complains about the irrelevant and "separate" nature of contemporary poetry . In his "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth criticizes: Poets , who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation." Good poetry instead embodies a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (LB, 246) and, Wordsworth thought, could express the "essential passions of the heart" best in a "plainer and more emphatic language" (LB, 245). In the Lyrical Ballads, he sought to remedy the situation of contemporary poetry through the introduction of original features, through which to create a new kind of ballad. In 1830, that is in hindsight, Walter Scott (1771-1832) acknowledges that German and English (romantic) poets shared a sense of the mighty task poetry and poets were capable of performing: As far back as 1788 a new species of literature began to be introduced into this country . Germany ... was then for the first time heard of as the cradle of a new style of poetry and literature of a kind much more analogous to that of Britain than either the French, Spanish, or Italian schools ..... Those who were accustomed from their youth to admire Milton and Shakespeare became acquainted ... with the existence of a race of poets who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the flaming boundaries of the universe and investigate the realms of chaos and old night. 15 In the same essay Scott also praises the achievements of Wordsworth and Coleridge, mentioning the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner" in particular (Scott, 543) as evidence of a revitalization of contemporary literature that he connects with the modem adaptation of ancient literary structures and intentions. 14. William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge , Lyrical Ballads , eds R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones, 2nd ed., London and New York, 1991,245-46. Hereafter, LB. 15. Walter Scott, "Essay on Imitations of the Ancient Ballad", in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, ed. Thomas Henderson, London, 1931,547-48.

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The redefinition of the function of literature as mythic text with revelatory potential received its impetus equally from the re-assessment of the Biblical texts and ancient secular literature, such as ballads, epics, and romances. Both religious and secular sources displayed the original features of the figurative, image-based mode of expression. This two-pronged approach is already clearly visible in Herder, who developed his ideas from the study of the Scriptures and from what he came to call "folk-poetry" (Volkspoesie) alike. Thus ancient, original literature, whether of religious or secular origin , comes to be seen as based on mythic structures that provide access to a layer of meaning and an intensity of expressiveness that offered a way of ordering, or at least naming, the metaphysical chaos that the loss of the certainties of Christianity and the Enlightenment had caused. The mythopoeic concept of history springs from the same intellectual conditions as its twin in literature. With the teleological process of Christianity and the perfectible progress of the Enlightenment questioned, the destiny of humanity needed redefining. And history, from being a chronicle of political events , was turned into the secular structure of revelation. Through history's process humanity would arrive at its eventual destination. Like the literary concept, it avails itself of the mythopoeic structure of symbolic density to contain the real and the ideal in one. History becomes a narrative, in which concrete (real) events symbolize ideal (abstract) content, which, put together, reveals the human historical telos . Friedrich Schelling writes in his Methode des akademischen Studiums (1802): "True universal history should be written in the epic style, written in the spirit the seed of which lies in Herodotus." (Schelling, III, 333) Why? Schelling explains in by now familiar terms: Die wahre Historie beruht auf einer Synthese des Gegebenen und Wirklichen mit dem Idealen , aber nicht durch die Philosophie, da diese die Wirklichkeit vielmehr aufhebt und ganz ideal ist, die Historie aber ganz in jener und doch zugleich ideal seyn soll . Dieses ist nirgends anders als in der Kunst moglich, welche das Wirkliche ganz bestehen laBt, wie die Btihne reale Begebenheiten, aber in der Vollendung und Einheit darstellt, wodurch sie Ausdruck der hochsten Ideen werden .... Der absolute Standpunkt der Historie ist dernnach der der historischen Kunst. True historylhistoriography rests on a synthesis of the given and real with the ideal, achieved not through philosophy, since the latter cancels out reality and is wholly ideal, and since historylhistoriography should be completely real and at the same

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time ideal . This is only possible in art, which leaves the real in existence, like the stage, presenting real events , presents them in a perfection and unity , through which they become the expression of the highest ideas .... Accordingly, the absolute standpoint of historylhistoriography is that of historical art (Schelling, III, 33132).

These ideas had currency in Britain, too. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote in 1833: "In essence and significance it [history] has been called the true epic poem.''" Carlyle also shares Schelling's notion that only art can express history fully . He held that only the "historical artist" had an "eye for the whole " (Carlyle, XXVII, 90-91). Again, the meaningful fusion of the real and the ideal was assumed to have existed once and was hoped to come into existence again on a different level. This understanding originates in the theories of history that developed within German idealism . These are conceptions of world-history that interpret the historical process as moving from an ultimate origin through history proper towards an ultimate destination. These theories are thoroughly philosophical, proceeding a priori as they primarily consider the necessary progress of the intellect and consciousness, which manifests itself in the movement of history . 17 The ultimate origin is characterized as unfragmented as well as unreflected (unconscious) oneness, out of which the intellect emerged at the first stirrings of consciousness in order to begin its long journey through history. Upon the completion of the journey oneness will be regained, but this time on a fully reflected, conscious level ." It is not difficult to recognize the structure of Christian consummation translated into the secular sphere. 16. Carlyle, "On History Again" , in The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill, London , 1896-1901, XXVllI, 176. Hereafter, Carlyle . He may well be referring to Schelling as he had read the Methode . 17. Key representatives are J. G. Fichte, Schelling , and Friedrich Hegel. Key texts in this context are Schelling 's System des transzendentalen Idealismus (1800) , Fichte's Grundziige des gegenwdrtigen Zeitalters (1803-4), and Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte (1822-1831) . 18. Fichte writes : "Der gesamte Weg aber, den ... die Menschheit hienieden macht, ist nichts anderes als ein Zuruckgehen zu dem Punkte, auf welchem sie gleich anfangs stand, und sie beabsichtigt nichts, als die Ruckkehr zu seinem Ursprunge. Nur soli die Menschheit diesen Weg auf ihren eigenen FiiBen gehen ; mit eigener Kraft soli sie sich wieder zu dem machen , was sie ohne alles ihr Zutun gewesen.' ("The whole path, however , which ... humanity covers , is nothing but a returning to that spot on which it stood initially, and humanity intends nothing other than the return to its origin. Only humanity is to make this journey on their own feet, through their own strength they are

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Unlike Hegel, who thought origin and destination were too different to be thus closely related, both Fichte and Schell ing believed that the last vestige of the original oneness in history was to be found in myth and that myth and mythic structures were the key to re-achieving any semblance of unfragmented oneness. Schelling claims: Die Mythologie HiBt die Geschichte mit dem ersten Schritt aus der Herrschaft des Instinktes in das Gebiet der Freiheit, mit dem Verlust des goldenen Zeitalters, oder mit dem Stindenfall, d.h. mit der ersten AuBerung der Willkiir, beginnen. In den Ideen der Philosophen endet die Geschichte mit dem Vernunftreich, d.h. mit dem goldenen Zeitalter des Rechts, wenn aile Willktir von der Erde verschwunden ist, und der Mensch durch Freiheit an denselben Punkt zurtickgekehrt seyn wird , auf welchen ihn ursprtinglich die Natur gestellt hatte, und den er verlieB, als die Geschichte begann. Mythology lets history begin with the first step out of the domination of instinct into the realm of freedom, with the loss of the Golden Age , or with the Fall, i.e. with the first manifestation of the arbitrary will. In the ideas of the philosophers history ends with the realm of reason, i.e. with the golden age of rightful law, when all arbitrariness has disappeared from the earth , and [when] the human being will have returned , through freedom, to the selfsame point, at which nature had placed him originally, and which he left behind when history began (Schelling, II, 589). The structure of universal history following from this would be: myth, history, new myth . Although the terms "myth" and "mythic" are not mentioned, a similar attitude towards history can be detected in Britain. Thomas Carlyle is a case in point. It has already been observed that Carlyle acknowledges that a poetic dimension was required to grasp history fully , and that this dimension, which he calls epic, was an ancient structure. Carlyle also believes that only when viewed in its totality can history reveal its meaning, become revelatory. In 1830 he writes: [History] is a looking both before and after ; as indeed the coming time already waits " unseen , yet definitely shaped, predetermined

to make themselves again what they once were without any effort of their own .") See J. G. Fichte, Werke, VII: Grundzuge des gegenwdrtigen Zeitaiters , ed. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, Berlin, 1834-46; reprinted Berlin, 1971, 12.

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and inevitable; and only by the combi natio n of both is the meaning of eith er co mplete (Carlyl e, XXVII , 83). Carlyle also asserts that so me kind of temporal totality encompasse s histo ry : The Celt and the Copt, the Red man as well as the White, lives between two eternities, and warrin g aga inst obl ivion, he would fain unite himself in clear consc ious relati on , as in dim unconscious relation he is already united , with the whole Future and the whol e Past (ibid .). Alth ough , unlik e the German idealist s, Carlyle mak es little attempt to prec isely inves tigate these "eternities", he still sees them as the beginning and destination of the intell ect ' s drive tow ard s full consciousness from an uncon scious point o f ultimate belon gin g. Hegel, albeit without stressi ng the mythic origin of history , turns history into the self-reve latory narr ative of the world -spirit on its progress tow ards full y reflecte d co nsciousness . " World-history is the depiction of the div ine , the abso lute process of the mind [Geist] in its highe st form s, of the step-by-step proc ess, throu gh wh ich it achieves its truth , self-consciousness of itself.'!" By linking these steps to the contri but ion s of wh at he calls world-historic peoples, he turns historical events and nations into manifestation s of the ideal. of the Geist. Real occurrences symbolize ideal concepts. Here Hegel's effort conforms to Schelling's call for a form of "historical art" . Each world-historic nation possesses its specific essence, its Yolksgeist; which contains the innovati ve momentum necessary to move the ideal development on to the next stage. "T he realizations of these steps are the world-historical national essences, the definitions of their moral code, their constitution , their art , religion, and sc ience. To realize these stages is the unending dr ive of the world -spirit. '?" In England these ideas became not only available (Hegel's Philosophie der Geschichte was translated by J. Sibree in 1857), they also, from rnid19. "Die Weltgeschichte ist die Darstellung des gottlichen, des absoluten Prozesses des Geistes in seinen hochsten Gestalten, dieses Stufenganges wodurch er seine Wahrheit, das SelbstbewuBtsein tiber sich erlangt." See G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, XII: Philosophie der Geschichie, eds Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel, FrankfurtlM ., 1970-79,73 . 20. "Die Gestaltungen dieser Stufen sind die welthistorischen Volksgeister, die Bestimmtheit ihres sittlichen Lebens, ihrer Verfassung, ihrer Kunst, Religion und Wissenschaft. Diese Stufen zu verwirklichen, ist der unendliche Trieb des Weltgeistes ." Ibid.

46 century onwards, became accepted. Hegel 's notion that certain nation s contributed so decisively to the world-historical proc ess that they instigated, and thus symbolized, new eras is found , for example, in Edward Augustus Freeman 's Comparative Politics of 1873. Freeman was Regius Professor of History at Oxford." At this stage a brief summary: Original , "mythic", structures, which provide a symbolic density that combines the abstract and the concrete, as well as the real and the ideal in the figurative , were needed to address the fragmentation of metaphysical meaning, offering a new "totality". They could be applied to express ideas in poetic texts as well as in the presentation of history. Both literature and history were thought to originate in myth and to gravitate back towards myth on a higher plane. Schlegel's call for a mythology of the mind corresponds to Schelling's belief in the eventual and final arrival of the Yemunftreich as the regained yet redefined point of departure. This is what I define as the mythopoeic impetus. To what extent did Wagner and Tennyson subscribe to these ideas of literature and history? It has often been pointed out that Wagner adhered to a romantic concept of art." Wagner's notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk represents the ultimate result of the romantic, mythopoeic, idea of art as unifier of the antinomies of human existence through the imagination. It is closely related to, and derived from, Friedrich Schlegel's idea of "universal poetry" formulated in the programmatic Athendum fragment 116, which urges the re-unification of the genres and states the need for multiple self-reflection of the poetic content. " The intention of achieving a complete, all-inclusive 21. Edward Augustus Freeman. Comparative Politics: Six Lectures Read before the Royal Institution in January and February /R73, 2nd ed ., London and New York, 1896. Cf. particularly chapter 2. 22. See for example Paul Arthur Loos, Richard Wagner: Vollendung und Tragik der Deutschen Romantik ; Munich , 1952; and Manfred Frank , Der kommende Gott: Yorlesungen iiber die Neue Mythologie, 1982. Frank summarizes: "Der erste Satz seines [Wagner's] spaten Essays tiber Religion und Kunst [1880-1] ist ein gedrangtes Resume der friihromantischen Ideen zur Kunstreligion in einer bindungslos gewordenen Burgerwelt." (226) 23. This closeness was noted recently by John Daverio in his article "Wagner's Ring as ' Universal Poeuy"', in New Studies in WaRner's "Ring of the Nibelung ", ed. Herbert W. Richardson, New York, 1991,39-53. It had previously been pointed out in Laos , 480 . It was first noticed, however, by a contemporary of Wagner's, Ernest Lehmann, in his review of the first Bayreuth Festival , entitled "Richard Wagners Nibelungen: Werth und Bedeutung des Ganzen ", in Bayreuth in der deutschen Presse: Beitrdge zur Rezeptionsgeschichte Richard Wagners und seiner Festspiele 1(/872-76), ed. Susanna GroBmann-Vendrey , Regensburg, 1977, 128-33 (128).

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cognitive form recurs in Wagner's definitions of " language" and "music" put forward in his theoretical treatise Oper und Drama of 1851. Language represents and appeals to rational understanding, whereas music belongs to the realm of feeling. Both need to be united in order to accommodate the total reality, the communication of which is the redemptive and revelatory poetic intention. Die reale Wirklichkeit vermag nur der losende Verstand nach ihren Einzelheiten zu erkennen, und durch sein Organ , die moderne Verstandessprache mitzuteilen; die ideale ... Wirklichkeit vermag nur der dichtende Verstand als einen Zusammenhang zu verstehen , kann sie aber verstandlich nur durch ein Organ mitteilen, das dem verdichteten Gegenstande als ein verdichtendes auch darin entspricht, daB es ihn dem Gefuhle am verstandlichsten rnitteilt .... Ein Motiv verstarkt sich aber nur durch Aufgehen der in ihm enthaltenen verschiedenen Verstandesmornente in ein entscheidendes Geftihlsmoment, zu dessen tiberzeugender Mitteilung der Wortdichter nur durch das ursprtingliche Organ des inneren Seelengefuhls, die Tonsprache, gelangen kann . The dissolving understanding is capable only of recognizing reality in its separate elements and of communicating it through its organ, the modern language of the understanding; only the poetic understanding is capable of understanding ideal ... reality ... as a context, but can communicate it intelligibly only through an organ that corresponds to the poetically condensed (verdichtet) object as a poetically condensing tverdi chtend) one also in the respect that it communicates it [the object] clearly to the emotion .... A motif is intensified only by absorbing the different moments of the understanding into one decisive moment of emotion, the convincing communication of which the poet of words can only achieve through the original organ of the internal feeling of the soul , [which is] the language of music." Total reality includes the spiritual reality of humanity. transcending the real into the ideal , which can only be achieved through the productive interaction of language and music , the cerebral writer and the intuitive composer.

24. Richard Wagner. Oper und Drama: Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 2nd ed., Leipzig. 1887-8, IV, 99-100. Hereafter, OD.

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In true romanti c fashion, Wagner , like Herder, Schlegel, and Wordsworth, wanted to reform an inadequ ate art by re-introducing an original element to create a new entity. For Wagner this was the Tonsprache ("language of musical sounds") , defined as the "ursprungliche Organ des Seelengefuhls ", which predates and produced the rational Wortsprache ("verbal language"), as emotional predates rational understand ing, as the figuratively co ncrete precedes the rationally abstract. Both the original and the descendant need to be join ed to achieve an equilibrial whole that would be perfection as well as totality. This structure is strongly remin iscent of the Idealist progress of consciousness from original oneness through fragmentation to re-achieved oneness. With relation to the artist, Wagner depicts this progress in his description of the Wortdichter ("poet of word s") and the Tondi chter ("poet of music"), who both depart from one original point and travel separately around half the world , the form er over land, the latter through water , meet at the antipodal point in order to part again to trace each other' s steps, and finally re-converge back at the original point of departure never to part again . Now they poss ess a fully realized "spiritual" consciousness: "They have becom e one, for each knows and feels, what the other knows and feels. Th e poet has becom e a musician , the musician a poet: both are artistic human beings to perfection.':" The projected reachievement of true, total, revelatory art, of the very Kun stwerk der Zukunft, rests, as the Idealist achievement of total con sciousness, on the re-discovery of an original element and the union of this element with its currently predominant opposite, which has resulted from the historical process. Die Tonsprache ist Anfang und Ende der Wortsprache, wie das Gefuhl Anfang und Ende des Verstandes, der Mythos Anfang und Ende der Geschichte , Lyrik Anfang und Ende der Dichtkunst ist .... Der Gang dieser Entwicklung ist aber ein solcher, daB er nicht eine Riickkehr, sondem ein Fortschritt bis zum Gewinn der hochsten menschlichen Fahigkeit ist .... Wie im unbewuBten Geftihle alle Keime zur Entw icklung des Verstandes, in diesem aber die Nothigung zur Rechtfertigung des unbewul3ten Gefiihles liegt, und erst der aus dem Verstande dieses Gefiihl rechtfe rtigende Mensch der vernunftige Mensch ist; wie in dem durch die Geschichte, die auf gleiche Weise aus ihm entstand, gerechtfertigten Mythos erst das wirklich verstandliche Bild des Lebens gewonnen wird.

25. "Sie sind Eins, denn j eder weiB und fuhlt, was der andere weiB und fiihlt. Der Dichter ist Musiker geworden , der Musiker Dichter: jetzt sind sie Beide voUkommener ktinstlerischer Mensch ." (OD, IV, 159)

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Musical language is the beginning and end of verbal language, as feeling is the beginning and end of reason, as myth is the beginning and end of history , as poetry is the beginning and end of literature .... The process of this development is such that it is not a return, but a progress up to the highest human capability.. .. As in unconscious feeling there are all the seeds for the development of the understanding, in which, however, lies the drive for the justification of unconscious feeling, and only that human being that can justify this feeling out of the understanding is the rational human being; as only in myth that is justified by history. which developed out of myth in the same fashion, the truly comprehensible picture of life can be discerned (OD , IV, 91) . In language, Wagner names this structurally and functionally "mythic" element the "musical", extending, in his music dramas, Schlegel's "universal poetry" beyond verbal language. Tennyson, equally recognized as the heir to romanticism, also subscribed to a notion of a Gesamtkunstwerk:" The Idylls clearly join together different literary genres. Ryals noted, "Tennyson blended the dramatic, the narrative, and the lyric to produce a new kind of poetry" (Ryals, 54). The crux of the Gesamtkunstwerk was the containing of opposites and the attempt to make the ideal appear, or at least experienceable, within the real; to make the extra-historical experienceable in history. Tennyson clearly believed in the realit y of the ideal, the spiritual, as can be seen from statements like the following : There are mom ents ... when I feel and know the flesh to be the vision , and the spiritual to be the only real and true. Depend upon it, the Spiritual is the Real: it belongs to one more than the hand and

foot." To find the langu age adequate to express this binariness of existence was Tennyson 's endeavour. To express the extremes of human existence that transcend ordinary experience in ordinary language is bound to be 26. See, for example, M. W. MacCallum, Tennyson 's "Idylls of the King " and the Arthurian Story fr om the 16th Century, Glasgow. 1894, 292; or, more recently, Herbert F. Tucker . Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism, Cambridge: Ma.. 1988,28-29. 27. Note the conjunction of "feel and know" which was also held to be characteristic by Wagner of the "vollkornmener kiinstlerischer Mensch". Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son. London, 1897, II , 90. Hereafter. Memoir .

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unsatisfactory, inadequate, as Tennyson makes explicit in III Memo riam A. H. H. (1850): I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel ; For words, like Nature, half reveal , And half conceal the Soul within ." (Y, 868,11. 1-4) Dwight Culler suggests that Tennyson developed a language beyond the "ordinary" in his poetry , developed "the quasi-mystical word ... that did have the power to transport the soul 'at least to the verges of the world"." The "real" and the "ideal " face each other as opposites in need to be connected. In In Memoriam Tennyson presents this opposition as "knowledge" and "faith". Knowledge is incomplete unless it is joined to the "other" in the human make-up; both then make up the desired Whole. And faith preceded knowledge: Half-grown as yet, a child, and vain She [knowledge] cannot fight the fear of death . What is she, cut from love and faith, But some wild Pallas from the brain Of Demons? fiery-hot to burst All barriers in her onward race For power. Let her know her place; She is the second, not the first .... For she is earthly of the mind , But Wisdom heavenly of the soul. (CXIY, 966,11. 9-22) In the "Prologue" to III Memoriam Tennyson makes clear the relation between the origin and the destination as one in which the original state is eventually regained in a greater dimension: Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell;

28. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, London, 1969. Hereafte r, P. 29. A. Dwight Culler, The Poetry ofTennyson, Newhaven , 1977, 2.

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Th at mind and so ul, acco rdi ng well, May make one music [!] as before. But vaster ... (P rologu e. 86J, II. 25-29) Wr itten be twe en 1849 and 1850 , only months befor e Wagn er' s Oper und Drama . III Memoriam contains notions that are striking ly close to Wagner' s ideas: the mind, or Yerstand. limited in itself, and the so ul (Wagner' s Tonsprache was the " organ of the soul") , are joined togeth er in harm on y which creates the musi cal text and which existed originally and can be regained on a higher level. In this context it is interestin g to rem ember that musi c features crucially in the Idylls, preci sely at points wh en ordinary reality is transcended. Th e Idyll s contain several precise agreements with Friedrich Schlegel' s not ion of " univers al poetry", whi ch was also seen to inform Wagner's work. Unive rsal poetry , Schl egel demanded, should " increase reflections and multiply them in an endl ess series of mirrors" and thus bec om e "ca pable of the high est and allro und educa tion through organizing all parts in everything that is to be a whol e in its [poetry 's] products similarly"." It was throu gh this that sy mbo lic density co uld be created . Ryals obse rve d that the Idylls present a "multiplici ty of cyclical images " (Ryals, 56) and John Rosenb erg not ed that "characters within the larg er fiction of the Idylls often ge nerate less er fictions within it, like mirrors within mirr ors " , arguing that thus "the poem takes on the quality of a self-fulfilling prophecy and valida tes itself, like Scriptures": it "symbolizes itself '.' ) An equally striking parallel is the notion of the ex tra-temporality of art, reach ing beyond the verg es of ordinary time, which Schlegel pinpoints in the 10 Ist Athenaum fragment, maintaining that "what occurs in poetry, is always occurring, or never" (Schlegel, [I, 180). Tennyson refers to the building of Camelot, the poetic, non-ordinary zone in the Idyll s, by saying that it occurred 'T o music [!], therefore never built at all , / And therefore bu ilt for ever" ("Gareth and Lynette", 1491, II. 273-74).'2

30 . " Reflexionen potenzieren und wie in einer endlosen Reihe von Spiegeln vervielfachen" , "der hochsten und a1lseitigen Bildung fah ig ... indem sie jedern, was ein Gan zes in ihren Produkten sein soli, aile Teile ahnl ich organisiert", (Schlegel, II. 18283) . .3 1. John D . Rosenberg, The Fall of Camelot: A Study of Tennyson 's "Idylls of the King ", Cam bridge: Ma ., 1973, 143. 32. In this context I only wish to point out the similari ties of intellec tual situation and response. Direct co ntact with Schlegel' s Atheruium is doubtful; indi rect contact,

52 Tennyson. too. subsc ribed to so mething akin to the Idealist notion of total history, albeit on a more indivi dualist level than the German Idealists. For him. as for Carlyle. two infin ities enco mpass human existence: Birth is a mystery and death is a mystery. and in the midst lies the table land of life with its strugg les and performances. It is not the histo ry of one man or of one generation, but of a whole cycle of generations (Me moi r , 11 ,127 ). Tenn yson regard s birth and death as gates to the beyond outside time and space . This notion occurs in the Idylls in the recurrin g phr ase "from the great deep to the great deep", which refers to Arthu r." The idea of the development of con sciou sness towards a perfect state is expressed in the concluding stanzas of III M emoriam: No longer half-akin to brute, For all we thought and loved and did , And hoped , and suffered, is but seed Of what in them [the crowning race of the future] is flower and fruit ; Th at God , which ever lives and loves , One God, one law , one element, And one far-off divine event, To which the whol e cre ation moves. (CX X XI. 987-88, II. 133-44) The "one far-off divine event", with its stress on perfect oneness after a long histori cal development, is strongly reminiscent of the German Idealists' notion of the final consummation of history." however. is quite possible and should be sought in Tennyson' s connections to the Cambridge Apostles in his student days. 33. The "deep" as extra-temporal , extra-spatial reality features frequently in Tennyson 's poetry. See, for example, "Crossing the Bar": "the boundless deep"; "The Ancient Sage": "the boundless deep" ; or "De Profundis": "out of the deep". 34. Although Tennyson is unlikely to have read Fichte or Schelling (he did read Hegel' s Philosophie der Geschichte), he could have gleaned these ideas from Carlyle. The "divine event" also features in Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840), where the heroic action is "preparatory afar off to a new thing, which shall be true and authentical ly divine". Tennyson may equally well have picked up these ideas through the Cambridge Apostles. Julius Hare, a leading member of the group

Myth in the Nineteenth Centurv Evidentl y Wagner and Tennyson inhabit ed very similar intellectu al situations and reacted to them by subscribing to similar co ncepts of art and history. How are these concepts borne out in the Ring and the Idylls'? It is obv ious that both cycles circumsc ribetemporal totalities. Wagner' s Ring, as Arthur Drew s noted , translat es into art the Idealist concept of total history : the Ring begin s in the depths of the river Rhine with the Rhinemaidens playing a see mingly endless, innocent ga me with the ring that guarantees omnipotence, which corres ponds to the Ideali st notion of orig ina l oneness , the unfr agm ented, unconscious state." Wagner him self called this the WieKenlied der Welt.Jo Th e equil ibrium is dis turbed by Alberich' s intervention, his attempts to acq uire the ring, wh ich is the first deliberate, co nscious act of will, endi ng the original state. The action of the ensuing cycle mov es through the activities of the gods and hum ans designed to (re)gain the ring and , by impli cation, equil ibr ial oneness free from fear and do ubt. Wotan , chi ef of the gods , is driven by his fear of the end , of death , a rather und ivine em otion , but a typically human co ncern in a world of spiritual uncertainty ." Equ ally, at Gunther' s co urt, on the properly hum an level of action, the unease cau sed by uncertainty is combated by a strugg le for the ring that promi ses world-rule, w hich is a form of security. But all strife and endeavour only appear to result in destruction at the end, the Gotterdammerung, Th e interp retat ion of the end of the Rin g has rem ained a probl em , confused by the different endings that Wagner produ ced at di fferent times to fit his changing philosophical outlook, from socialist (Bakunistic) through optimistic-Feuerbachian to annihilationist (Schopenhauerian)." The Bakunistic option would appear to have been dropped, but which of the during Tennyson 's undergraduate days, was familiar with Schelling 's. Fichtes. the Schlegels ' , and Hegel's works . See Klaus Dockhorn, Der deutsche Historismus in England: Ein Beitra g zur Geistesgeschi chtr des N . Jahrhunderts, Gottingen . 1950,45 . 35. Arthur Drews, Der ldeengehalt von Richard WaKners dramatischen Dichtungen im Zusammenhange mit sri nem Leben und seiner Weltanschauun~, Leipzig, 1931. 193. 36. Cosima WaKners Tagebiicher, entry 17 July 1869; quoted by Dieter Borchmeyer, " Faust und Der Ring des Nib elungen: Der Mythos des 19. Jahrhunderts in zweifacher Gestalt" , in WeKe des Mythos in der Moderne, ed. D. Borchmeyer, Munich. 1987.133-58 (141) . 37. In a letter to Rockel, Wagner in fact characterized Wotan as "die Summe der Intelligenz der Gegenwart": Richard Wagner, Siimtliche Briefe, eds Gertrude Stobel and Johannes Forner (vols. VI-VIII ). Leipzig, 1979-91. VI, 69. Hereafter, SB. 38. The labels "Bakunistic", "Feuerbachian", and "Schopenhauerian" were suggested by Hans Mayer, in Richard WaKner: Mitwelt und Nachwelt, Stuttgart and ZUrich, 1978, 167.

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remaining two won out is still heing debated. The return of the ring to the Rhine . however. is an indi sputable fact. With the calming of the waters and the end of world-action as it had gone before. a seco nd equili brium is reached. Wagner had written to Liszt abo ut the Ring in 1853: " Mar k well my new poem - it contains the world' s beginning and end.' :" Tenn yson ' s temp oral totality is so mewhat differe nt in that it is res tricted to Arthur's period . But nevertheless, the birth of a new era. its growth. blossom . decline. and destruction are depicted . eve n if it is one in a chain of eras. a concept whi ch owes something to the Hegelian notio n of history, as the lines recurring in both the "Coming" and the "Passing of Arthur" make plain : "The old orde r changeth, yieldin g place to new" ("Coming of Arthur", 1483, I. 50 8. " Passi ng of Arthur", 1752. I. 408) . Although we are presented with a specifi c history within the larger co urse of history . the notion of lost and regained oneness is clearly present in the idea of the " dee p" from wh ich Arthur sugge stively co mes and to whi ch he returns. Significantly, the " Co ming" and " Passing", in which the " deep" occurs most prominently, frame the action of the " Idy lls of the Round T able". corr esponding to the "mysteries of birth and death" that frame the " tableland of life". The deep has characteristi cs of the unfragmented: it is "calm, whatsoe ver stor ms may shak e the world" ("Coming of Arthur" , 1477 , II. 29 1-92). Cont act with this un fragmented oneness does not necessaril y occ ur at the beginning and end, thou gh it does as well, but at certain sign ificant points during the acti on , at intersections of tim e and timelessness, where the real and the ideal co nverg e. As such the "deep" seems to lie alongsi de, beyond or beh ind the ordinary reality . Both works are in an extrao rdi nary man ner co ncerned with apocalyptic destru ction. Desp ite this, both wo rks are stories of attempted redemption. The world, and hum anity, are in need of rescu ing, an act to be performed by the heroic rede em er. Both redeem ers are clearly set up as such. Wot an realizes: Not tut ein Held, del', ledig go ttlichen Schutzes, sich Jose vom Gottergesetz , So nul' taugt er, zu wi rken die Tat, die, wie not sie den Gottern, dem Gott doch zu wirken , verwehrt." 19. "Beachte wohl meine neue Dichtung - sie enthalt der Welt Anfang und Untergang." Briefw echsel zwischen WaKner und Lisn, Leipzig, 1887, 1, 21. 40. " A hero is necessary / who, devoid of divine protection / unties himself from the law of the Gods. / Only thus is he fit to work the deed / that, as necessary as it is to

Mvth in the Nineteenth Centurv. .

55

This hero is, of course, Siegfried. In the ldvlls it is Arthur: he wishes to "have power on this dark land to lighten it. / And power on this dead earth to make it live" ('The Coming of Arthur". 1472, II. 92-93). But in both cases the redeemer must first reconcile within himself the opposites of human existence in order to be capable of bringing about the new paradise, which is in itself an attempt at joining together fragmentary oppositeness. Tennyson's Arthur, clearly identified as the spiritual essence of humanity, must join himself to Guinevere. the material side. " the fairest of all tlesh on earth" ("The Coming of Arthur", 1470. I. 3) , before he can set out to "lighten" the world. While this joining proves initially successful, it can be argued that Arthur's mission fails, because his union with Guinevere is not successful. He says: "Thou hast spoilt the purpose of my life" ("Guinevere", 1736. I. 450). In the Ring Siegfried only becomes the fully-fledged redeemer after his union with Brunnhilde, as Wagner informed his friend Rockel on 25/26 January 1854 (5B, VI, 68). Prior to it, he represents the natural. unreflected principle of existence, whereas Briinnhilde embodies spiritual wisdom derived from the sphere of the divine. From my brief remarks about the structures it is obvious that both authors aimed at romantic symbolic density. It has already been pointed out how the mythopoeic mode offered greatest scope for this. The aim was the achievement of a totality of meaning, the containing of opposites. which would facilitate the transcendence of the real into the ideal. J. P. Eggers remarks of the Idylls: Tennyson's view of the Arthurian Golden Age is interfused with the spirit of ironic contrast, with opposite views of the ideal .... A stately blank verse sweeps over a landscape peopled by a flippant queen, a cynical Tristam, a priggish king , a stupid Elaine, a childish grail quest; but turn the kaleidoscope and the king is exalted, the queen beautiful in her humanity, Elaine pure and tragic, Tristam a man oppressed by rigid vows, the grail quest a sublime error." Here the containing refers to the contents, for example Arthur's unmitigated idealism. Whereas he clearly has a vision and mission that have authorial support, the one-sidedness of this idealism is subtly questioned by the close

the Gods, / is denied to the God to work." Die Walkiire, II. I, ed. H. Zentner, Stuttgart. 1993(1951),33. 41. J. P. Eggers, King Arthur's Laureate: A Study of Tennyson 's " Idylls of the King "; New York, 1971,55.

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parallels to Galahad ' s purely spiritual quest, which , although in keeping with Galahads nature and ambitions, is dangerous for Arthur' s work . "Ah, Galahad , Galahad." said the King, "for such As thou art is the vision, not for these. Thy holy nun and thou have seen a sign - . A sign to maim this Ord er which I made " ("The Holy Grail" , 1670. II. 293-97 )42 Th e double-edged presentation of Arthur's idealism is a precise example of a Schlegelian self-reflection. The impossibility, as well as its desirability, of realising Arthur's vision , are both clearly expressed in the poem ; they make up the perhaps paradoxical combination of "the ideal manhood enclosed in real man" as Tennyson calls Arthur in the Idylls' epilogue "To the Queen" (1756. I. 38) . The absoluteness of the vision conditions its redemptive as well as tyrannical nature . Thi s paradox has led twentieth-century interpreters to see Arthur as "I'homme fatale" (Rosenberg, 10) of the poem or as being simultaneousl y the "hero and villain " (Ryals , 90 ). Arthur's duality , indicated by Tennyson not onl y in the epilogue, seems to engender ambi guity of meaning. But in a romanti cally mythopoeic work such as the Idylls this is not an invalidation of one meaning, but a mythopoeic condensation into a whole meaning. In the Ring I have picked out a similar example of such holistic duality : the theme of sexual love which goes right back to the probl em of how the cycle is to be interpreted. Is love erliisend ("redeeming"), or verh eerend ("harrow ing", "destructive")? Love as redeeming is the Feuerbachian interpr etation." If Siegfried and Brunnilde cannot save the world, which would be the Bakunistic solution, they can at least redeem themselves throu gh each other. This interpretation sees their union on the

42. The "phantom cup" of the grail, the apparition that inspires the knights to vow to embark on their quests and breaks up the order, is linked to Arthur who is called the "phantom king" in Leodogran' s dream in the "Coming" (1481, I. 429 and I. 435). The cup is "clothed in white samite" C'Grail", 1676, I. 513) as is the Lady of the Lake, Arthur' s spiritual mentor. Equally attached to both Arthur and the cup is the notion of "coming" and "going" C'Grail". 1663, l. 44 and, for example, "Passing", 1753, I. 445). On his quest Galahad repeats Arthur' s progress through the world and foreshadows his departure from it down to the wording (cf. "Grail" , 1675, 11.467-484 with "Pelleas and Ettarre", 1704,1. 597, "Coming", 1471-72,11. 58-59, and 1483,11. 514-18). 43. This view is strongly supported in Carl Dahlhaus, "Ober den Schluss der Gotterdammerung", in Richard Wagner: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Carl Dahlhaus, Regensburg, 1971,97-115. See also Borchmeyer.

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Walkiirel!t"elsell as an achievement and their final union on the funeral pyre as consummate. On the other hand, the interpretation of love as destructive considers their involvement with each other as engendering death and destruction from the outset holding that passion of this nature is intricately 44 Wagner offers support for both linked to violence and death. interpretations. Rejecting the redeeming option as tendentious Wagner writes to Rockel on 23 August 1856 : Doch entsinne ich mich, schlieBlich meine Absicht gewaltsarn

einrnal zur Geltung gebracht zu haben .,. in der tendenziosen Schlullphrase, welche Brunnhilde [am Ende der Ginterdammerungi an die Umstehenden richtet, und ... auf die einzig beseligende Liebe verweist, ohne (leiderl) eigentlich mit dieser Liebe selbst recht ins Reine zu kommen, die wir doch im Verlaufe des Mythos als recht grtindlich verheerend auftreten sahen. But I recollect that eventually I once made my intention clear forcefully ... in the tendentious final phrase that Brtinnhilde addresses to those around her [at the end of the Twilight of the Gods] and [which] refers to love as [the] only redeeming [thing], without (sadlyl) actually coming to grips with it For in the course of the myth we saw love appear in a fundamentally destructive manner (58 , VIII, 153). But on I December 1858 he confides in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck : Es handelt sich narnlich darurn, den von keinem Philosophen, auch von Schopenhauer nicht, erkannten Heilsweg zur vollkommenen Beruhigung des Willens durch die Liebe, und zwar nicht einer abstrakten Menschenliebe, sondern der wirklich, aus dem Grund der Geschlechtsliebe, d.h. der Neigung zwischen Mann und Frau, keimenden Liebe, nachzuweisen . This is about proving that a path towards salvation leading to the complete tranquillizing of the will exists, [a path] that has not been 44. This view is upheld by, for example, Eric Bentley in The Cult of Superman : A Study of the Idea of Heroism in Carlyle and Nietzsche with Notes on other HeroWorshipp ers in Modern Times, London , 1947, 158-59. Sabine Zurmiihl's more recent feminist interpretation is in a similarly negative vein: see "Brunnhilde - Tochter im Leben im Tode", in In den Triimmern der eigenen Welt: Richard Wa.l:ners "Ring des Nibelungen ", ed. Udo Bermbach, Hamburg and Berlin, 1989, 181-200.

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Muike Oergel recognized by any philo sopher. not eve n Sch op enh auer. It is through love. and not an abstract love of humanity. but the love. wh ich sprouts from the fo unda tion of sexual love. i.e. the inclination be twee n man and WOmUl1.~5

Th e mythic stru ctures are ideall y suited to co ntain such duality, or completeness, as Wagner him self points out, replying to Rockel who had qu estioned the very Undeu tlichke it (" Iack of clarity" ) in parts of the Ring : Ieh glaube, mich mit ziemlichem lnstinkt e vor einem allzu grofsen Deutlichkeitseifer gehiitet zu. haben , denn meinern Gefuhle ist es klar geworden, daB ein allzu offenes Aufdecken der Absicht das richtige Verstandnis durchaus start; es gilt im Drama. wie im Kunstwerk uberhaupt, nicht durch Darlegung des Absichtlichen. sondem dur ch Darstellung des Unwillkurlich en zu wirk en . I believe, I have with go od instinct avo ided an exaggera ted zeal for explicitness, for it has become clear to my feeling that too open a discovery of intention disturb s the right comprehension : drama, like the art-work in general, ex ists to effect. not the present ation of the intentional, but the presen tation of that outsi de the acts of the will (58 , IV, 68-69). This opaqueness of meaning Wagn er had initially admired in myth : "It is the incompara ble quality of myth that it is true at all times , and that its contents, even in the most compressed densit y. is for all time s inexhau stible"." Thi s not ion goes back to Sch ell ing ' s universali ty and infinity of myth . As a poet in the romantic tradition, Tennyson , when pressed to interpret and label clearly the pieces of his poetic creati on , reacted similarly. Asked whether the three que ens in the Idylls stoo d for Faith. Hope. and Charity, he replied: They mean that and they do not .... They are much more . I hate to be tied down to say , "This means that", because the thought within the image is much more than any one interpretation .... Poetry is like shot-silk with man y glancing colours (Me mo ir, II, 127). 45 . Quoted in Dahlhaus, III . 46. "Das Unvergleichliche des Mythos ist es, da~ er jederzeit wahr, und sein lnhalt, bei dichtester Gedrangth eit, fur aile Zeiten unerschopflich ist." (Wagner, Gesammelte Wake, IV. 64)

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It has become evident that the mythopoeic response to the modem intellectual situation informs both Wagne r's and Tennyson 's work . Both are clearly attempting the task that Schlegel and Schelling set the modem poet. Thi s is evidently a case of a "cultural convergence". Whether they have succeeded in creating new mythologies that redeem, rather than merely reflect and contain, the mode m intellectual situation is open to debate. But the fact that they have bee n read and re-read, interpreted and re-interpreted, indicates that they have prod uced something that still appears to concern us.

MYTH, ART AND ILLUSION IN NIETZSCHE PETER POELLNER It is a commonplace that the concept of creativity, often in conjunction with that of the aesthetic, assumes a particular significance in European culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to a considerable extent as a result of the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. In this essay I shall examine certain aspects of Nietzsche's thought on creation and "art" which seem to me of particular importance both in their own right and in terms of their wider cultural impact. The major part of the essay will be concerned with Nietzsche's early works, but in the final section an attempt will be made to trace the later development and transformation of some of the ideas we shall have identified in his pre1876 philosophy. Nietzsche's early writings occupy a curious place in the history of Nietzsche reception. We find, among the critical responses to them, statements like Karl Schlechta's who somewhat dismissively referred to them as uneigentlich and as effectively irrelevant to any understanding of the concerns of the later, the "authentic" , Nietzsche.' In extreme contrast to this, Paul de Man, expressing and partly inaugurating an entirely different style of Nietzsche-interpretation, offered an influential analysis of the text of Die Geburt der Tragodie which indicated no significant discontinuity at all between what de Man supposed to be the "fundamentally ironic" import of Nietzsche's first book and his later productions.' None of these admittedly extreme, but by no means uncharacteristic, responses seems to me to do justice to the specificity and the significance of Nietzsche's early thought. This significance is not captured adequately either by interpreting it as no more than a slightly modified Schopenhauerianism, or by reading it as an undeveloped but essentially continuous expression of his later philosophical activity. I shall offer some reflections on Nietzsche's early thinking up to and including Unzeitgemafie Betrachtungen as the expression of an ethos and an associated metaphysics which was to become definitive of an important strand of modernism in European culture. What characterized this strand of modernism was pre-eminently a certain conception of the "aesthetic" as 1. Karl Schlechta, "Nachwort'' to his edition of Friedrich Nietzsche's Werke, Munich, 1966, III, 1433-34. 2. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, Newhaven , 1979, 82-102 .

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- to use Nietzsche's words - "the truly metaphysical activity" of humanity. ' In this vision - which might, and often did, involve an assimilation of human life itself (lived in a certain way) to "art" - the latter concept was under stood as the self-consciously mythopoeic transfiguration of reality . It was to signify a rebellion , a protest against what the young Nietzsche revealingly called "the tyranny of the real"(HL 8, KGW III I, 307) . We find particularly clear expressions of this modernist ethos and its associated metaphysics in writers such as Stefan George and W. B. Yeats . Thomas Mann ' s wri ting s also bear witness to it although, as always with him, his commitment to it is ironically qualified. Even the existentialism of Albert Camus with its notion of a "metaphysical rebellion" may be regarded as a descendant of this ethos at least in respect of some of its central assumptions and concerns. I am going to suggest that the specific constellation of ideas that dominated Nietzsche's early thought manifested tensions which are different from , but at least as severe as, those associated with Schopenhauer's metaphysic o-ethical endeavour, and that these tensions rendered it inherently unstable. His development after Unzeitgemafie Betra chtungen can hence plausibly be interpreted, not simpl y as a change of perspective, a radically new departure from earlier commitments, but rather as an attempt to resolve fundamental conflicts within his early think ing which could neither be resolved nor peacefully accommodated without relinquishing some of the basic assumptions of that philosophy. The significance of this extends, I believe, beyond the concerns of Nietzsche-interpretation in the narrow sense. For if I am correct in identifying a close link between specifically early Nietzschean ideas and a central strand of high modernism, then the fate of early Nietzsche may illuminate for us one of the cau ses of the historical instability of that cultural phenomenon.

3. GT, "Selbstkritik", 5. The following abbreviations will be used for the writing s by Nietzsche referred to: KGW = Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, eds G. Colli and M. Montinari , Berlin, 1967ff. GT = Die Geburt der Tragodie. HL = Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie fi r das Leben. SE = Schopenhauer als Erzieher. WB = Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. MA = Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, FW = Die fro hliche Wissenschaft. Z = Also sprach Zarathustra . 1GB = Jenseits von Gut und Bose. EH = Ecce Homo . S = "Zu Schopenhauer". References to Nachlass fragments in KGW wilI be (in this order) to Abteilung, notebook, and note or fragment , e.g. KGW IV, 3, [75]. All translations from Nietzsche are my own .

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II It is impossible to approach Nietzsche's early work fruitfully without a consideration of the Schopenhau erian legacy. Schop enh auer' s continuing influence on him dur ing the years up to 1876 is generally recognized, but its more precise character is equally often left obscure. It is beyond doubt that Nietzsche no longer accepted the specificities of Schopenhauer's metaphysical claims by the time he wrote Die Geburt der Tragodie, notwithstand ing the Schop enhauerian idiom pervadin g that book . As early as 1868, he had written a detailed critique of Schop enhau er's chief metaphy sical doctrines.' By Nietzschean standards, this long fragment is a uniqu e piece , for it unfolds entirely within the traditional rhetoric of philosophical argumentation. Nietzsche here meticulously dissects what he takes to be Schopenhauer's basic metaphysical proposition which he paraphrases thus: "the groundless will, devo id of knowledge, reveal s itself, when brought under an apparatu s of representation, as [phenomenal] world " (S, 353 ). In Schop enhau er, he obse rves, "the thing-in-itself is given one of its possibl e forms. Th e attempt has failed" (S, 352). Among his reasons for this imperious assertion, two are especially significant in our context. First, Schopenh auer's identificat ion of the Ding an sich with a non-individuated, non-obj ectifiable "blind urge" - the metaphy sical Will is logically arbitrary: "what Schopenhauer puts in the place of the Kantian X, the Will, is created only by a poetical intuition. while the attempted logical demon stration can neither satisfy Schopenhauer nor us" (5, 354 ). Secondly, Nietzsche rejects the specific pred icates which Schopenhauer applies, if only by analog y, to the thing -in-itself - phrases such as "powerful impulse", "blind urge" , "keen desire", "determined striving". Th e connotation here is of an aimless affective energy, and it is to a large extent this connotation which was responsible for the popular appeal of Schopenhauer's philosophy. But, Nietzsche asks , is there anything significant or comprehensible that remains of the original meaning of these expressions, once they are applied no longer to embodied spatiotemporal individuals, but to a supposedly non-individuated, non-spatiotemporal order of reality? Schopenhauer's procedure is "to drape an altogether dark incomprehensible x with predicates taken from a world foreign to it, the phenomenal world, like colourful clothes. Afterwards, we are asked to regard the clothes, i.e. the predicates, as the thing-in-itself' (S,

4. "Zu Schopenhauer", in Werke. Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, eds H. J. Mette and K. Schlechta , Munich, 1933ff., III, 352-61.

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357 ).5 Nietzsche even questions whether Schopenhauer (and Kant , for that matter) are entitled to postulate a noum enal realm distinct, or different in character, from the world of appearances. To be sure, "th ere might be a thing-in-itself' and "this possible thing-in-its elf might be the Will", but "in no oth er sense than that in the sphere of the transcendent anything is possibl e that has ever been hatched in a philo sopher' s brain " (S, 354-55). III

If we turn to Die Gehurt der Tra godi e, written a couple of years after this fragment, we find that one of only two passages in which this text explicitly aligns itself with Schopenhauer's general metaphysical doctrines is in Section 18, where Schopenhauer and Kant are hailed, famously , as the victors over the optimism of theor etical culture: "great ... natures have, with incredible thoughtfulne ss, been able to use the tools of theory [Wissenschaft] itsel f to demon strate the limits and the merely conditional character of all knowledge" (GT 18, KGWIII I, 114). Inspired by Lange's Geschi chte des Mat erialismu s, Nietzsche here reads transcendental idealism as a form of metaphy sical scept icism ." And yet, as we know , Die Geb urt der Tragtidie itself includ es an elaborate metaphy sical narrative whose Schopenhauerian provenance is only too apparent. It is a narrative which reveals to the astonished reader what Nietzsche call s the "myth of tragedy ". His use of the notion of myth in Sections 17 and 23 is, I want to propose, crucial to any adequ ate understanding of the metaphysical story told in this text. Two senses expressed by the word "myth" are emphasized here : first, a myth is a story or an "image of the world " which connects the temporal flux of appearances to an underlying ontological ground and which presents that ground, and the relation between it and the empirical world , as not, or not fully , accessible to a rational expl anation. Secondly, and most importantly in our context, such a story or image relates transient human experiences in particular to a purposeful non-temporal order of reality understanding them , in a certain sense, sub specie aeterni. This function of myth is emphatically endorsed: 5. There is a closely related question, which Nietzsche however does not pose explicitly, as to whether Schopenhauer, given his claim that none of the laws of classical logic apply to reality as it is in itself, can even refer to such a presumed reality. See Peter Poellner , Nietzsche and Metaphysics, Oxford, 1995, 289-91, for a discussion of this. 6. See Friedrich Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, Iserlohn, 1866, e.g. 482, 499.

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for j ust as much is a peop le - or for that matter an individual worth, as it is able to impress upon its experiences the stamp of the eternal: for through this it is, as it were, de-secularized and shows its unconscious inner conviction of the relativity of time and of the true, that is, the metaphy sical sig nifica nce of life (GT 23, KGW 1I1 I, 144). But there is a third sens e of "myth" which is so metimes operative in the text - myth as an illusory or erroneous , i.e. false, story - as "Illusion" or "Wahn" . The importance of this becom es clear when we consider that Die Gehurt der Tragodie in fact co ntains two myth s. Th ere is the tragic myth Nietzsche ascribes, with self-conscious historical liberty, to the preSocratic Greeks : the world-view , or perhaps better , the mod e of experience embo died in Greek tragedy as a (supposed) social practice. The central beliefs appertaining to this myth , both in its Apollini an and its Dionysian aspects, Nietzs che refers to as "eine tiber die Din ge gebreitete Illusion " ("an illusion spread ov er things") (GT 18, KGW III I, III ). I shall return to this important point presently. But the book also contains a seco nd-order myth , Nietz sche's own mythi cal meta-n arrati ve, which allow s him, among oth er things, to assi gn such an exalted position wit hin cu ltural history to the tragi c myth of the Greeks. It is this meta-n arrative which underwrites his polemic against Alexandrinian or theoretical c ultu re and which legitimates and motivates the elevation of "art" - understood as the creation of myth ical Wahngebilde (structures of illusion) - over the Socratic, rational, pursuit of truth . The pivotal question to ask here is whether the third sen se of "myth" - myth as a false story - can be either withheld from, or applied to, Nietzsche's own met a-narrative without exploding the entire project of Die Geburt der Tragiidie, and indeed of the cultural polemics of Unzeitgemafse Betrachtungen. I have said that the mode of experience ascribed to the tragic Greeks is illusory in both its Apollinian and its Dionysian aspects. The dream world of Apollinian art, to be found in its pure form in Greek epic and sculpture, but deployed in a subservient role also in tragedy, is obviously a web of Wahnbilder. It presents the world of spatio-ternporally individuated appearances, including pre-eminently the human individual, in a transfigured form under the aspect of beauty. "W hat is beauty?" Nietzsche asks in one of his working notes , and answ ers :

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But whil e the dream image s of Apollinian art are manifestly transfiguring illusions , so - jf less obvio usly - are the raptured intoxications of Diony sian art, in wh ose servi ce Apollinian images are displ ayed in traged y. For wh at Nietzs ch e calls the Diony sian mystery doctrine of traged y - the beli ef that everything exi stin g is in some sense One, and that individuation is the orig in of evil and of sufferi ng (G T 10, KGW III I , 6869), as well as the Dionysian reveller ' s sense of bei ng united with the nonobjectified, non-individuated, gro und of things, a ground which is beli eved by him to be, prior to individuation , "immeasurable prim ord ial pleasure", ind estru ctible and eterna l (GT 17, KG W III I , 105) - all of these are declared, in Section 18, to be Illusion. For the early Nietzsche, in stark contrast to Schopenhauer, individuation is precisely not the origin of evil and of suffering. As he says explicitly in a note : that which suffers, struggles, tears itself apart is always only the one Will: it is the most extreme conflict as the primordial ground of being. Individuation is therefore the result of suffering, not its cause (KGWIII, 7, [117]). Here we have arrived at the Nietzschean meta-myth which embeds the exposition of the mystery doctrine of tragedy. And it is here that we would most expect a continued presence of Schopenhauerian ideas. But this expectation is, as I have indicated, only very partially fulfilled. Certainly, the basic dichotomy is Schopenhauerian in or igin - the empirical world in space and time as a mere phenomenon, an illusion, analogous to a dream, in which an essentially different, non-objective, non -sp atial , but affective ground of things in some mysterious way "objec tifies" itsel f, or brings itself into appearance. Yet, the details filling in this basi c schema diverge significantly from Schopenhauerian precedent. While Schopenhauer's

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Will is supposed to be a non-personal, unconscious and yet affective "blind urge", the "primordial One" of Die Geburt der Tragiidie is insistently characterized both as personal and as sentient - it is Urschmerz (primordial suffering), (GT 4, KGW III 1,35) and it is also described as the "world artist" and "the one truly existing subject" (GT 5, KGW III I, 43-44). In the preparatory notes Nietzsche time and again refers to it as the Urintellekt (e.g. KGW III, 5, [79]) . The relation between phenomena and their ground, which in Schopenhauer was both required and not permitted to be a causal one - with predictably problematic consequences for Schopenhauers system as a whole - this relation is here articulated in creationist terms; indirectly in the text, explicitly in the paraphrase added in 1886: "an amoral artist god who ... frees himself of the plight of fullness and overfullness, of the suffering from opposites crowded within him, by creating worlds" (GT, "Selbstkritik" , 5). As regards the aesthetics contained in the Nietzschean meta-myth, they manifestly have departed from a Schopenhauerian cognitivist or mimetic conception of art - art as the revelation of the essence of Will or representation - to an illusionist one: art is not the imitation of nature, but its supplement "put beside it to overcome it" (GT 24, KGW III 1, 147). Since the properly aesthetic state is by definition a state. in which the individual will is renounced, and the artist in particular is transformed in it into a medium for the creative activity of the "world artist" (the "truly existing subject"), art becomes the self-deception of the deity . While in Christianity God redeems man from sin by becoming himself man , in Die Geburt der Tragiidie. man redeems god by becoming the medium of god 's self-deception in the transfiguring illusion of art: but we may indeed assume that we ourselves are already images and artistic projections for the true creator [of that art world], and that we have our highest dignity in our significance as works of art (GT 5, KGW III I, 43. Also GT 3, KGW III I, 33-34). All of this "a rtist' s metaphysic" may be thought, as Nietzs che himself later called it, "arbitrary, futile , fantastic" (GT, " Selbstkritik", 5). There can be no doubt that he con sidered it arbitrary, logically arbitrary , even at the time of writing it. What he did not consider arbitrary or fant astic , and certainly not futile , was the general, one might say formal , schema this metaphysic satisfies or exemplifies. This is the schema of myth in the second sense I indicated earlier - a narrative relating transient human experiences to a purposeful, time-transcending order of reality . As Nietzsche realizes, there can be no viable and historically efficacious pure

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schema of myth - just as there is unlikely to be a viable and efficacious pure schema of religion, di vested of any specific mythological contents (GT 8, KGW III I, 1l3). But any concrete "filling in" of the schema, including Nietzsche's own , is rationally arbit rary - its effectiveness or lack of such is a functi on of its resonance within given cultural traditions and pre-dispositions. But there is of course a second aspect of the meta-myth of Die Geburt der Trag iidi e which is not considered "arbitrary" by Nietzsche - the Schopenhauerian vision of the natural , un-transfigured human condition, communicated through the mouth of Silenus to the "children of accident and of hard ship " (GT J, KGW III I, J 1). It is the suffering from the Schrecken und Entsetzlichkeiten des Daseins , and the fact that existence is indeed "terrible" and "horrific" is the unquestioned presupposition and the probl em which the entire rest of Nietzsche's Artisten-Metaphysik is designed to overcome. But wh at are these terrors? We would be naive to construe Nietzsche's talk of "suffering" throughout the early writings as the outpourings of a frustrated eudaimonism or hedonism. We are more likely to approximate to its import if we note the emphasis on the word "accident" (Zuf a ll) in the speech of Silenus. The terror of nontrans figured , natural existence, in the early Nietzsche, is essentially conn ected with its being "accidental" - which means : outside any purposive order of the kind exemplified by the myth of Die Geburt der Tra giidie. And yet, Nietzsche also says that through "impressing upon its experi ences the stamp of the eternal", a people (or an individual) expresses its inner conviction of "the true , that is, the metaphysical significance of life" (GT n , KGW III I, 144; my emphasis). Unless this dictum is interpreted as itself a mytheme in the third sense - an element of a false story - it seems to stand in irreconcilable tension to the Schopenhauerian wisdom of Silenus which Nietzsche, without any doubt, continues to accept. Yet, if it is understood as itself part of a mythical web of illusion, how can it continue to motivate the de-secularizing, transfigurative project of Die Geburt der Tragiidie't

IV The predicament which I have so far only pointed to is largely implicit in Nietzsche's first book, but it comes more clearly into view in its sequel, Unzeitgemiifte Betrachtungen, and in the notebook entries of the same period. What strikes, or should strike, the attentive reader of these writings is their pervasive use and endorsement, without irony or scare quotes, of

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the traditional vocabul ary of ethica l evaluation. We hear much about good and evil here, and much in praise of morality and virtue: Con sider any virtue you please, whether it be j ustice, magnanimity, co urage , wisdom, or hum an co mpassion everywhere man is virtu ous by prot esting agai nst the blind power of the facts , against the tyranny of the real, and by subjec ting hims elf to laws wh ich are not the laws of those historical fluctu ations (HL 8, KGW m I, 307 ). History , Nietzsche says in Vom Nut zen und Nacht eil der Historie, is the "compend ium of the immorality of the factu al world " (ibid., 306). Wherever we look in history, we find so much that is "false, crud e, inhumane, absurd and viol ent" (HL 7, KGW III I, 292 ) that the realization should force itself upon us that "the course of human affairs is determ ined by violenc e, deception and inju stice" (WB 4, KGW IV I , 24). "The history of nations is the history of the egois m of the masses and of the blind cravin g to exist" (KG W III, 29 , [73]) . In the notebo oks, he praises as the supreme and lasting virtu e of Schopenh auer' s philosophy its warn ing "above all not to play down and to obsc ure that indifferent , mercile ss, indeed evil original constitution of being" (KGW III, 34, [21]). As in Schopenhauer, one may be tempted to think that "evil" here refers to whateve r causes human suffering . This tempt ation has sometimes been yielded to by Nietz sch e's interpreters , but it should be resisted. Suffering, even in the early Nietzsche, is never per se bad - on the contrary in one note he expressly declares suffering to be the mean ing of existence (KGW m, 32, [67] ; cf. SE 4, KGW III 1, 368). The problem he sees himself as stru ggling with is precisely that neither the masses nor , for that matter , the Bildungsphilister suffer from what they ought to suffer from . It takes , as he indicates in Section 3 of Die Geburt der Trag odi e, a geniales Volk like the Greeks to suffer, as it were , in the right way and from the right things (GT 3, KGWIII 1,32; also GT 18,112). And the most important of these , as he reiterates tirelessly, are essentially two. The accidental character of existence, that is, the absence of a purposeful order of the kind illustrated by the meta -myth of Die Geburt der Tragiidie.' Secondly, the affective

7. His point is perhaps expressed most forcefully in the following note: "If someone were able to unite the total consciousness of humanity within himself, he would break down with a curse against existence. For humankind has no aims. Consequently , even if he were capable of it, a man could not find in the contemplation of the whole his solace and support, but rather his despair. If he sees in everything he

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structure of natural man, which he designates by a very characteristic, not at all untimely, nineteenth-century expression: egoism. All natural human desires are, as Schopenhauer had also maintained, essentially self-directed: the subject or its states invariably figure in a correct description of their ends. It emerges very clearly from the text that this fact by itself, irrespective of any suffering of others that may result from it, is for early Nietzsche co-constitutive of what he calls the "evil original constitution of being". His description of it imitates, not only the sentiments, but even the language, of Luther : In Christian idiom: the devil is the prince of this world and the master of success and of progress; he is in all historical powers the real power ... - although this may sound rather embarrassing to an era that is used to the idolization of success .... For it has practised itself particularly in giving new names to things .and even in renaming the devil ... humanity seems to be close to the discovery that egoism has been the lever of historical movements at all times; but at the same time one is by no means worried about this discovery, one rather decrees: egoism shall be our God. With this new faith one is about to erect, with the most patent deliberateness, the history of the future on egoism: only it is to be a prudent egoism, one which imposes a few limitations on itself in order to install itself permanently (HL 9, KGWIII 1, 317 ; cf. KGW III, 19, [93]) . Yet nature - the will-to-live - can be transcended , or, in Nietzsche's language, "redeemed from itself ', in the figure of the genius. For the genius, "suffering serve s to mortify his self-w ill and to prepare that complete upheaval and overturning of his nature , the effecting of which is the real point of life" (SE 4, KGW III I, 367) . Such formulations show very clearly that Nietzsche's conception of the self in Unzeitgemdfie Betrachtung en is sharply dualisti c. The natur al self, identified with the Schopenhauerian will-to-live and its "egoistic" desires, is contrasted with a "higher", "proper", or "true" self, to be found pre-eminently in the genius, but, it seems , present at least potentially in other humans also . But, unlike in Kant , it is not pure practical reason that is constitutive of the "higher self', but a form of eros.' In love, the individual "despises himself does the ultimate aimlessness of humankind, his activity assumes in his eyes the character of a waste" (KGW IV, 9, [I]). 8. The dualism is starkly apparent in passages like this: "All law-abiding and all law ... come from a balance of egoisms : mutual acknowledgement not to harm each

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[i.e. his "egoistic" passions] and longs to go beyond himself" (SE 4, KGW III 1, 365), and his life is experienced "almost no longer individually" (SE 5, 378-79). Indeed, here "we cease to understand the meaning of the word 'I' . There is something beyond our being which in these moments becomes a part of it" (ibid.). The ultimate object of this kind of eros is something that is apprehended as "higher" than the self (SE 6, 381) as "perfect and just" (HL 7, KGW III 1,292), or as the "ideal" (KGW III ,S , [80]). Love is a geniale Eigenschaft, a qu ality of the genius who, as Nietzsche says in a famous passage in Schopenhauer als Erzi eher, "experiences the meaning of his activity as a metaphysical one , explicable from the laws of another and higher life and affirmative in the most profound sense, although everything he does appears as a destroying and breaking the laws of this life" (SE 4, KGW III I, 368). The ultimate object of love thus seems not to be of this world, the world of nature, of spatio-ternporal existence. But it is not clear that it is really of another world either - the early Nietzsche is neither a Platonist nor a Lutheran. In Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie he explicitly identifies at least the objects of love , and possibly that state itself, as illusory: "only in love , only surrounded by the illusion of love , is man creative, namely in the unconditional belief in the perfect and just" (HL 7 , KGW III I, 292; my emphasis). In a notebook entry he is more concise: "T he ' ideal' [is] ... an erroneous representation [Wahnvorstellung]" (KGW III, 5, [25]) . The structural analogy of these ideas with the myth of Die Geburt der Tragodie is clear. There, all value resided in illusory states, most significantly, in the illusions of the Dionysian reveller, that is, in the auto -produced transfigured self-awareness of the artist-god, channelled through the medium of the artist-genius. Here , in the Betrachtungen, value, to the extent that it is realizable in humans. either lies in or is derivative from the erotic relation to an illusory "ideal" in which the selfwill of ordinary desire is "negated" (verneint). We might say that love, rather than discovering value, creates an illusory value as its object - eros is the artistic activity par excellence. According to some passages, it is a condition of its possibility that its artistic quality remain hidden from it - love cannot be self-consciously

other. i.e. from prudence .... Love and law are opposites: the point of culmination [of the former is) sacrificing oneself for the world .... The anticipation of possible experiences of displeasure determines the action of the law-abiding man .... Cluistian ethics is the opposite of this: it is based on an identification of oneself with the other .... Love is connected with a desire for union" (KGW III, 19, [93)).

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rnythop oeic." This is the sig nifica nce of Nietzsche ' s allu sions to Darwinian theories which, as he understands them , deny the possibl e occurre nce of non-self-directed , i.e . "unegoistic" , desire." " [T hese] doctrines" , he says , " I con sid er to be true , bu t deadly" (HL 9, KGW III I, ~ 15), for , to repe at, "only surrounded by the illusio n of love is man creative, namely in the unconditional beliefin the perfect and just" (HL 7 , 29 2; my emphasis). And yet, there is a curious ambi gu ity here. Nietzs che him self, the initiate to the " truth" of the do ctrines he opposes , retains the evaluative commitments allegedly made imp ossible by believing them. Eros, in the Nietzschean sense, is said to be imposs ible, and yet he co ntinues to declare that only through it could value be realized in human existence and nature be "redeem ed from itself'. It is this exigency which perhaps explains statements like these: "try to justify the meaning of your exi stence as it were a posteriori , through giving yourself an end , an aim , a ' for this ' , an exalted and noble ' for this ' ... I know of no better aim in life than to perish, animae magna e prodigus, in pursuit of the great and imp ossibl e" (HL 9, KGW III 1, 315 ). In the corresponding not es he says : "a [self] -denying morali ty magnificent, because wonderfully impossible" (KG W III, 19, [205]). Such a morality would in fact be "particularly pure if nothing in the nature of things corresponded to moral ity" (KG W III , 19, [ 185]) . If we take thes e rem ark s seriously, there is indeed no objective value - the "ideal" is illusory - yet human greatness lies in acting as if there were. It resides in the unending struggle with the recalcitrant " tyranny of the real" , in the heroic quest for intimations of the numinou s which can never be rewarded by success - except in mythopoeic self-deception. It is this ethos which, I maintained earl ier, was to become definitive of a major strand of modernism. In what follows I shall highlight some of its problematic aspects which, I suspect, contributed to the historical

9. "Love" in the early Nietzsche therefore seems to signify something different from the phenomenon which many authors have referred to by the traditional term "agape". The latter is supposed to designate a "creative", "spontaneous", or "unmotivated" act which can think of itself as bestowing value on its object rather than discovering it in the object. Cf. Anders Nygren, Agap e und Eros, Giitersloh, 1930, J, 185£. See also section V below. ' 10. C£. SE 5, KGW III I, 374: "For as long as someone desires life as happiness, he has not yet raised his sights above the horizon of an animal, he merely wants with greater awareness what the animal craves in a blind urge. But this is how it is with all of us, for the greater part of our lives: we commonly do not rise above animality, we ourselves are animals who seem to suffer pointlessly."

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instability of that important cultural phenomenon which left its impress on the life-world of the early twentieth century. For Schopenhauer, the problem was how the will-to-live could deny itself. He described such self-denial as a "paradox" - "impossible and yet real". Yet such talk could not quite escape the suspicion of being a euphemism for inconsistent metaphysical propositions. If the will-to-live can deny itself, then it is not adequately, or fully , described as will-to-Live. The early Nietzsche, as we have seen, in some passages appears to elude this particular problem. The will-to-live cannot deny itself, but it can create for itself the illusion of doing so. What we call "culture" is the site where such erotic illusions are produced . Is it possibl e to continue living in these WahnvorsteLLungen, once they are seen to lack a referent, once it is accepted that "nothing in the nature of things correspond[s)" to their apparent intentional directedness? In fact, there are two questions here, one concerning the nature of the erotic state itself, the other its object. Compare the analogous relation between people. We can ask of someone whether her apparent love of a person really is what she thinks it is, and we can ask whether the qualities of its object really are what she thinks they are. In the analogous Nietzschean case, both of these questions have to be answered negatively , according to at least some of his statements. But if we say that the erotic state itself is only seemingly distinct in char acter from the self-directed desires of the natural self contrasted with it, the elaborate dualism of Nietzsche's scheme evidently collapses, and with it the rationale for his talk of "nature's redemption from itself', "a complete upheaval and overturning of nature", and so forth . What also collapses, although this is less often noted, is the heroic pathos of Nietzsche's (and many modernists') rhetoric, since this pathos requires the rigid opposition of nature and the virtues of the heroic genius struggling against it in the name of something that radically transcends it, or would transcend it - if it existed. In any event , if we choose to say that the dualism itself is illusory ,- we have already left the parameters of Nietzsche's early philosophy and are well on the way to his later thought which , of cours e, denies any such dualism. II But what if we take Nietzsche's talk of " illusions" to refer only to the erotic object - that ideal "other order of being" the incantation of which we hear resonate throughout Unzeitgemafie Betrachtungen? That "other order of being" (KGW III, 29, [8]) is presented throughout the text as an ultimate intrinsic value , conceived in realist terms. It is to be thought of as II. cr. his numerous attacks on the belief in "unegoistic" emotions and desires in Menschliches, Alizumenschlich es, e.g. MA 1,57, 133, 137; MA 11,37,96.

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"other" than the subject - as ontologically independent of it - and as calling for the subject's allegiance. The transformed nature of the genius, reborn through its affective orientation towards the ideal lying "beyond" the self (KGW IV, 5 , [22]), receives its value from the (apparent) intrinsic value of its object. Strictly speaking, there is, in the Betrachtungen , nothing of intrinsic value other than that numinous object. But in that case , how can it continue to motivate the evaluative distinctions made by Nietzsche, and how can it motivate the "q uest" of the genius, once it is clear-headedly recognized as illusory - as an artistic creation of the subject? It seems that it is incapable of doing so, since the specific mode in which it affects the subject, as well as its exalted value, for Nietzsche, are conditional upon its being presented to the subject precisely as "other", as "beyond" the ordinary, natural self. To see this more clearly, let us recapitulate why art, conceived in a wide sense as the mythopoeic transfiguration of nature, attains such a preeminent status in the work of the early Nietzsche. The reason for this is that nature "unredeemed" by it is devoid of value. It is entzaubert, for it is the realm of ephemeral accident and the life of its denizens is governed exclusively by the will-to-live. What does have value, for the early Nietzsche, is a non-self-directed, affective, intentional relation to a numinous object he calls the "ideal" or "the perfect and just". It is because reality systematically frustrates that longing for the ideal that the "overcoming" of the "tyranny of the real" through myth-making becomes necessary. Yet, we are compelled to ask, how is Nietzsche in a position to recognize the value of that erotic relation to an object "beyond" the natural self? It is hard to see how he could recognize it as a value , except by being presented with it or an analogue to it. As many recent philosophers have reminded us, the concept of value is logically tied to that of affective responses by subjects ." A being incapable of the relevant specific responses - the relevant sentiments, if you wish - could not adequately grasp the concepts of the values which are the "objective" correlates of these responses. I) To be sure, such a being might understand that certain 12. For -some influential statements of this point in recent anglophone philosophy, see e.g. John McDowell, "Values and Secondary Qualities", in Morality and Objectivity, ed . Ted Honderich, London , 1985, and David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth, Oxford, 1987, esp . essays III and V. 13. The nature of this "obj ectivity" continues to be a matter of intense dispute. I am using the term here in a minimalist sense accord ing to which any intentional object of an intuitive (e.g. sensory) intentional state is the objective correlate of this state. In this limited sense of "objective", even David Hume is an objectivist about value when he, famously , speaks of "taste" as "gilding or staining all natural objects with ...

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actions described in non-evaluati ve (" natural") terms are commanded - i.e. it could understand the concept of obligation, in one etiolated sense of this expression - but this is not equivalent to understanding either these actions or their end s as valuabl e." However, in Nietzsche's case, it is evident that he regard s himself as recogn izing both the affe ctive state of mind exalted by him and its intent ional obj ects - the qualities which that state of mind is directed at - as values . Indeed , what are Nietzsch e' s paneg yrics to the qualities of the redeeming 'genius - abov e all, of Schopenhauer and Wagne r as he wishes to see them - oth er than the express ion of an affective relation analog ous to that of the gen ius himself to the num inosum absconditum , the absent "idea l"? But if that is so, then the qualities which confer such an exalted status upon the subjective state that apprehends them are indeed accessible to the mind, and this entails that there is - on Nietzs che's own crit eria, but contrary to his conclusions - value in the world . But in that case the exigence of an "overcoming of nature" or a "redemption of nature fro m itself' throu gh the creation of mythical Wahnh ilder which are known to be illusions has disapp eared. Either there is intra-wordly valu e, and thus no need for redemptive illusions in Nietzsche' s very spec ific sense; or there is not, in which cas e neither Nietz sch e nor anyone else could recognize it and mov ingl y pledge himself (or us) to heroic end eav our in its name . To put the matt er very pointedly: a necessary condition of the psych ological possibility of heeding Nietzsche's enjoinder to act "selfden yingly" as if there were intrinsic value beyond the self is the belief that such valu e exis ts. It seems therefore that , how ever Nietzsche 's emphasis on illusion in the early writing s is und erstood , it occasions tensions which can neither be unpr obl em atically excise d nor acco mmodated within the co nfi nes of his early philosophy. His abandonment of that philosophy is perhaps most fruitfully int erpreted as the con sequ ence of his realiz ation of this aporia.

colours borrowed from internal sentimen t" (Appendix I of the Enqu iry Concerning the Principl es of Morals. ed. P. Nidditch, Oxford, 1975). 14. To grasp something as an obligation or as (externally) commanded in the present sense is obviously not yet to consider it a Kantian duty. Rememb er that, for Kant. the object of duty (the moral law) is recognizable as a value through the emotion of respect (Ach tunK). Nevertheless, the early Nietzsche rejects even the Kantian idea that an awareness of duty could reveal value: "An action from duty is ethicall y worthless qua action from duty" (KG W III, 5, (80)) .

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v I should like to end with some observations on Nietzsche's evaluative commitments in his better known mature works and on their relation to some of the earlier ideas of his we have been exploring above . Nietzsche 's later thought on value is of course many-faceted and no pretence will be made here of shedding light on more than one or two of its salient aspects. For all the important shifts that followed in the train of his post-1876 abandonment of the earlier motivational dualism and of his eventual account of human desire as invariably falling under specifications of the "will to power" (see e.g. KGW VIII, I, (30», there are also, at least at first sight, some apparent continuities. These are perhaps most striking in Also sprach Zarathustra, particuarly in the concept of self-overcoming which occupies such a central position in that work and in the heroic pathos associated there with this concept. "Self-overcoming" in Zarathustra is closely linked to the notion of "overcoming the human": "what can be loved in man is that he is a transition and a going-under [Unter,r.:an,R] ." (Z, KGW VI I, II) Before we can usefully ask what is perhaps the most important question with respect to Nietzsche's later philosophy of value what is the actual content of "self-overcoming" ? - we need to understand some of the connections he draws between this concept and others, most significantly, with what he sometimes calls the virtue of bestowing (die schenkende Tugend) and in other passages the "great love" (e. g. Z, KGW VI I, 112; KGW VII, 26, [262». This grosse Liehe is characterized not as an affective response to apparent qualities in its object, but as a creative activity - herein lies the crucial difference between it and the earlier conception of eros: "All great love ... wants - to create what is loved!" (Z, KGW VI I, 112) The virtue of bestowing literally bestows value onto the world in its encounter with it rather than ever discovering it there. While this seems prima facie to have some affinity with the earlier idea of eros as "art", in fact the schenkende Tugend is not a form of eros at all, for it is essential to it that it be entirely active , sovereign, and creative. While, as we have seen, love in the Betrachtungen needed to think of itself as finding value in the world (and thus was condemned to engage in autoillusionism), the privileged condition in Zarathustra is arguably indeed superhuman, for what constitutes its value for Nietzsche is that it is entirely active and not in any respect dependent on its object. Grasping the difference involved here is crucial to any adequate understanding of the later Nietzsche's thought, so let me sharpen the point once more: For the early Nietzsche the artistic, poietic character of eros was not essential to the worth he accorded to this psychological condition; it was rather a

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condition; it was rather a contingent requirement given the way the world happened to be. In his later writings, the creative character of the "great love" is what makes it the summum bonum for Zarathustra-Nietzsche: "And whoever must be a creator in good things and evil ones, truly he must first be a destroyer and break values. Thus the greatest evil belongs with the highest good: but this is the good of creation. - " (2, KGW VI I , 145) To this evaluative re-orientation that enthron es creativity itself as the ultimate value there corresponds a change in tropes. Whereas in the Betrachtungen the dominant images were of heights seen from below the "ideal" is glimpsed high above one 's quotidian , natural self - and of receptivity , this pattern is reversed in Zarathustra : My impatient love overflows in torrents, downwards, .... There is surely a lake within me, a secluded, self-sufficient lake ; but the stream of my love draws it down with it to the sea (2, KGW VI I, 102)! Like the stream flowing downhill, the virtue of bestowing is indifferent to the particularities of the objects it encounters on its way - being pure activity it inundates them indiscriminately: "How I now love everyone with whom I can as much as speak! Even my enemies are part of my happiness." (2, KGW VI I, 103) The virtue of bestowing is thus closely related to the psychological state Nietzsche calls amor fati, although it is not identical with it: My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different .... Not merely bear what is necessary ... but love it (EH , KGW VI 3, 295 ). I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful .... some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer (FW 276, KGWV 2, 201) . Since amor fati makes no evaluative distinctions between particulars, the individual who has it must be sovereign vis-a-vis the intrinsic character of these particulars: it "makes things beautiful" indifferently. Amor fati necessarily involves the creative "virtue of bestowing" , although the converse is not true. But what is the relation between it and Nietzschean self-overcoming? This depends obviously on how the "self' is understood which is to be overcome. While Nietzsche's remarks on this crucial point

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are so mewhat elusive , they ne verth eless suggest that the self to be ove rco me includes the " higher" self ex tolled in the earlier writings. Sel fove rco ming means, partl y, tearing oneself free of the very obj ects whi ch elici ted the devot ion of the "true" self in the Betra chtungen . This seem s fairl y clea rly impli ed by formulations such as these: Has ever yet a man searched on the path of truth as I have don e hith erto - nam ely struggling against and contradicting everything that gav e comfort to my most intimate feeling (KGW VII , 27 , [81 ]) ? ... the man of knowledg e acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty in forcing his spirit to know against its inclination and often enough against the wish es of his heart - saying No where he wants to affirm, love, worsh ip - (lGB 229 , KGW VI 2, 173). "Whatever I create and how ever much [ love it - soon I must oppose it and my love: thus my will wants it." (Z, KGW VI, I , 144). Wh at emerges from remarks such as these, which are typical of one main strand of Nietzsche' s later tho ught, is a rejection of eros . To give a co nvincing ex planation of the moti ves for this development is one of the most importan t but also mos t difficult tasks of Nietzsche-interpretation. My own view , which I cannot defend in detail here , is that eros is opposed by the later Nietzsche on acco unt of the aspect of passivity which is essential to it. Now , the priv ileging of activity (self-sufficiency, autonomy) over passivity (receptivity, other-dependence) is of course one of the oldest and most per vasive motifs of philosophy, going back at least as far as Plato, and the evaluative hierarchy involved here has often been regarded as a self-evident one . In fact, however, it is very far from selfevident. It only commands any plausibility through the tacit inclusion of a ceteris paribus clause: activity is preferable to passivity, other things being equal. But what if it were impossible that other things should be equal - if, in other words, some goods essentially require an element of passivity for their realization? (Any genuine interaction with something outside oneself may be a case in point here - the ideal of pure activity or creativity is necessarily a solitary one.) But however one stands on this issu e, what is certainly problematic is Nietzsche's idiosyncratic radicalization of the ideal of activity in Zarathustra: for here any kind of "creativity" is elevated over any kind of passivity whatever. It is

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interesting to specu late what might have led Nietzsch e to this radi caliz ation ; some of his rem arks indicate that in the later period he was at least strongl y tempted to vie w any kind of self-consciou s receptivity (incl uding that con stituti ve of eros ) as im ply ing a self-reflex ive concern of the indivi d ual with his or her ow n self-preservation and well -being qua particul ar subject (a con cern that he cam e to call "v ulga r egoism" ; KGW VII. 26 . [262 ]). In any case, the ide al of the virtue of bestowing as expressed in amor [at! raises que stions of its own, and it is with these that I wish to conclude. It is clear that amorfuti cannot be in any ordinary sen se the content of a prescription. advice or enjoinder , for the attitude that it consi sts in is not subject to one 's will - one cannot make onself "love everything" and Nietzsche in the passages I have quoted does not suggest one can . This means that there is at least a ten sion between amor futi and the ideal of pur e activity . but let us ignore this difficulty here. A more pressing question is: what doe s it mean to "want ... nothing to be different .... Not mer ely bear what is necess ary ... but love it" ? The indi scriminate "c rea tive" affirmation implied by this is. I want to sugges t. imposs ible if its objects are to be particulars - eve nts. people. indi vidual things in space and time . One cannot, for ex ampl e. " love" a parti cul ar human life for its own sake and . at the same tim e and in the same way. the destruction of this life. Hence, for so meone who takes this attitude towards the life of a particular human bein g. it cannot be a matter of indifference wh at happens to this life. But amorfuti see ms to req uire s uc h indifference. for . acco rdi ng to Nietzsche ' s descript ion . it co nsis ts in " lov ing" whateve r happen s. In ge neral. and irresp ect ive of w hether one is a determinist . one cannot knowingl y take the sa me evaluative stan ce tow ard s two possible particul ars if the prop erti es on acco unt of whi ch one tak es this stanc e in each cas e are strictly co ntrad ictory: I ca nnot admire John simply becaus e he is j ust, and at the sa me time admire Peter simply because he is unjust. Th e claim that apparently contrad ictory evaluations of this kind are rati onally possible is likely to mean one of the following thin gs: either the eve nt (action , etc .) we normally think of as negative or bad (in our first example: the death of the loved person) is accepted because it is seen as causally necessary - but this interpretation of am or futi is explicitly ruled out by Nietz sche. Or els e the obj ect of the attitude in que stion is not the particular qua particular at all. Indeed, "amor fati " is certainly psychologicall y intelligible if it refers to a certain stan ce towards the totality of things, or towards particulars only qua constituents of such a totality. If it is und erstood in thi s sense it comes to resemble Spinoza's "love of God or Nature". Some read ers of Nietzsche may be quite content

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to accept this conclusion, but we should not forget that the price Spinoza was forced (and happy) to pay for this affirmation of the whole (the "infinite") was an affective indifference towards any particular thing considered in its own right."

15. An earlier version of parts of this essay was incorporated in an article published in German under the title "Der friihe Nietzsche und die Verklarung der Natur", Jahrbucn Nietzscheforschung, 3 (1996). We are grateful to the editors of the lahrbuch for permission to use this material .

A DIFFERENT SUN: THE ALLEGORY OF THERMODYNAMICS IN D. H. LAWRENCE BRUCE CLARKE

In his major doctrinal statement "The Crown", first drafted in 1915 and revised in 1925 for the collection Refl ections on the Death of a Porcupine , D. H. Lawrence describes contemporary hum anity as being "e nclosed within the womb of our era". ' The existential impasse of the modem era is a horrific constriction within a withered womb from which, for most persons, no vital delivery seems to be possible. As Lawrence elaborates this elemental figure of a spent womb, its sterile confines become a penitentiary, a cesspool , and a tomb . Lawrence uses all these images of hermetic enclosure to develop his diagnoses of a morbid modem humanity entrapped by its egoistic arrogance, its failures of cosmological vision. In Section V, "The Nuptials of Death and the Attendant Vulture" , Lawrence applies this motif of existential enclosure to a series of beliefsyst ems fostered by the sciences of his time. His cr itique concerns the way that these positivistic systems present their culturally-constructed axioms as "accomplished" finalities, "absolute" truths, in short, as irrevocable "laws" : So, if we are imprisoned within wall s of accomplished fact, experience, or knowledge, we are imprisoned indeed. The living sun is shut out finally . A false sun, like a lamp, shines. All absolutes are prison- walls. These "laws" which science has invented, like conservation of energy, indestructibility of matter, gravitation , the will-to-live, survival of the fittest: and even these absolute facts, like - the earth goes around the sun - or the doubtful atoms , electrons, or ether - they are all prison-walls, unless we realize that we don 't know what they mean ("Crown", 287) . The realization Lawrence urges , that with regard to scientific laws we "don' t know what they mean ", signifies his desire to deflate the

1. D. H. Lawrence, "The Crown", in Reflections on the Death ofa Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, New York, 1988.251-306 (255).

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epistemological pretensions of the mod ern intellect by opening it to further , intuitional meanings, to reinstate an awe before the ultimate mystery or unfathom ability of a sentient body with a "biological psyche".' However, a skepti cal reader of these and other Lawrencean pronouncements on science might respond that Lawrence, in any event, did not often understand the sciences that he rail ed against, and at other times sought to coll ab orate with. Th e stereotype of Lawrence as anti-scientific obscurantist is wellestablished .' Several years ago a biochemist colleague of mine, upon learning of my intere st in Lawrence, responded : " Oh, Lawrence - isn't he a Luddite'?" I imagine my friend got his impression not from the s pecialized critical literature but perh aps from some dimly remembered passages of Oliver Mellors's rant against the indu stri al system. In fact , the "science" that Lawrence was "against" was in fair degree a flawed form of knowledge that Lawrence had some reason to reject. But due to the paradigm shift between Lawrence's sci ence and our own , it is necessary at some point in the critical encounter to bracket his own statements. Lawrence 's usages of scientific terms like "mechanism", "evolution", and "relativity" need to be put on hold while the criti c negotiates a historical detour." At the end of the twentieth century we tend to forget that we dwell in the aftermath of a revolution in sci entific thinking that has largely displaced the late-classical, mechanistic physics in which Lawrence and his generation were schoo led, and which was being dismantled and superseded thr oughout his active career.' We need to retrieve the given

2. See David Ellis. "Lawrence and the Biological Psyche", in D. H. Lawrence : Centenary Essays, ed. Mara Kalnins , Bristol, 1986, 89- 109. 3. Critiques of this sort were directed at Lawrenc e ' s Fantasia of the Unconscious by I. A. Richards in his Science and Poetry of 1926. See also Aldous Huxley's reminiscences in his 1932 introduction to the first edition of Lawrence ' s collected letters . On this history and on Lawrenc e' s relations to science generally, see David Ellis, " Biological Psyche," and " Poetry and Science in the Psychology Books ", in D. H. Lawrence '.I" Non-Fiction : Art. Thought and Genre, eds David Ellis and Howard Mills, Cambridge, 1988,67-97. 4. For an example of such contextualization that reinforces the major points of my argument, see Michael Wutz, "The Thermodynamics of Gender: Lawrence, Science and Sexism ", Mosaic, xxvm12 (June 1995), 83- 108. 5. For illumin ating summaries of the rise of modern physics and treatments of Lawrence's relation to those developments, see N. Katherine Hayles, "The Ambivalent Approach: D. H. Lawrence and the New Physics ", Mosa ic, xlv/3 (September 1982), 89-108, and "Evasion: The Field of the Unconscious in D. H.

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cultura l co ntexts of mod ernist literary produ ction, to inv esti gate the specific purch ase of sc ientific terms as they developed within prior sc ientific discourses, to assess the attitudes of earlier sc ientists tow ards their own conceptual and terminological systems, and to recall the theoreti cal len gth s scientists often went to moralize their own formul ation s. Recon structing the discursive histori es of Vict ori an and Edw ardi an scientific terms and ideas, we ca n place a writer such as Law rence wit hin that enric hed context. Return ing Lawr enc e ' s text to cultura l histor y releases its ter ms fro m thei r ow n ideological enclosure. Th e ex tens ion of sc ientific ideas bey ond their immed iate domain inevitably adheres to a regim en of figurativ e proc esses with determin abl e structures . Bound up in a series of cultura l matri ces, the sciences must negotiate with the forms of the trop es that hold them tog eth er with oth er systems of discourse. T raditionall y co mmitted to es tablishing univ ersally valid bodi es of knowl edge, sciences conve y that knowledge by figures pressed to cos mic length s. Th e ex tensio n of metaphors into co mprehens ive cos mo logical sys tems prod uces "allegory".' Myth op oeia may seem to stand to allegory as pre sence stands to dis tance . The mythic wo rd ca rries a promi se of atern poral presenc e; allegory enters time by the detours of system atic figuration . But the mythi c eleme nts in Lawr ence ' s texts are allegorize d wh en Lawrence him self pla ces them into ironi c histori cal fra mes . Christopher Pollnitz formul ates a related irony of Lawr encean mythopoeia in relation to chapter 13 of Fantasia of the Uncon scious, in whi ch Lawrence created a co smogonic myth that wrested eve n the materi al univ erse back from the gr asp of scientific law . Pollnitz summed up wh at must be the consensus on this chapter when he ca lled it "no nse nse sincerely believed ". Lawrence 's level of belief in his own very diverse att empts at bricolage is more Lawr ence" , in N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century, Ithaca , 1984. 6. The work of Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man , Fredric Jameson and many others has retri eved the theory of alle gory from its post -romantic eclipse and broadly extended it to encompass both textu al and c ultural structures . For an overview of contemporary allegory theory, see my Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis , Alban y, 1995 . My co-ordination of alle gory with ideas of "cosmos" is indebted to Angus Fletche r, Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode, Ithac a, 1964 . See also Joel Fineman, "T he Structure of Allegorical Desire" , in J. Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition, Cambridge, 1991, 3-31 ; and Deborah L. Madsen, Rereading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre, New York , 1994. For an example of alle gory in relati on to a literary author writ ing cons ciously in the co ntext of nineteenth- and twentieth-centu ry phys ics, see Deborah L. Madsen, The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon, New York , 1991 .

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questionable, however, than his sincerity in believing that such mythopoeia had to be undertaken .' For Lawrence the mythopoetic act itself - making a literary text out of the written record of a prophetic reaction away from one view of the world in homage to another view - is the essential spiritual gesture: the text that rem ains is an allegory of cultural history . At the least, we might say that Lawrencean mythopoeia is at its most alleg orical when it responds to "sc ience" - in his day. psych oanalysis, anthropo logy, ph ilosophy, and mythography as well as physics and biology. His mythopoeses tend then to their most schema tic or diagrammatic form: the physiol ogy of the body becomes a complexly emblema tic, multileveled energy field. Plac ing Law rencean modernism in the wider context of Victorian and Edwardi an sci entific culture draws out a protracted contest of cultural allegories during which the discourse of sci ence usurped from Chri stian theology the role of auth oritative pretext and bec ame the primary battleground over whi ch mod ern attitudes tow ard religious questions were waged. In this contest of cosmologies, allegories of science emerged first of all within scientific discou rse . That is one rea son why science' s own series of systematic edifices hav e been , despite their variability, so formidably persu asive as cultural discourses. In the case of the parti cular nineteenth-centu ry scien ces that most significantly influenced the early twentieth century - evolutionary biology and energy physics - the scientists themselves were responsible for the initial rhetorical frameworks by which their ideas were grasped and popularized . Literary wr iters wer e often anticipated in decisive ways by the spec ulative productions of literate scientists such as Charles Darw in, John Tyndall , William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), James Clerk Maxwell, and T. H. Huxl ey, and a vast and vari ous cast of popularizers and apologists." The figurative productions of nineteenth-century scientists led inev itably to "scientism". the overvaluation of scientific ideas as well as their overhasty extension into disparate cultura l domains, where they then succumbed to the gen eral inertia or mindless tenacity of popular ideas." 7. Christopher Pollnitz, '''I Didn't Know His God' : The Epistemology of 'Pish' ", D. H. Lawrence Review, xrv/l -z (Spring-Summer 1982), 8. 8. See Gillian Beer, "Helmholtz, Tyndall, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Leaps of the Prepared Imagination", Comparat ive Criticism, XIV (1991), 117-45, and "Wave Theory and the Rise of Literary Modernism", in Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture, ed. George Levine, Madison, 1993, 193-213. 9. My use of the term "scientism" follows David Knight. It denotes a broad cultural investment in science as a foundational discourse and a readiness to extend

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The problems to which Lawrence was responding - constriction of vision , misplaced authority - did not always emerge from science per se. Ideally, or at any rate eventually, the skeptical method prevents the rigidification of provisional theories into unassailable dogmas. Lawrence's animus was often with scientistic sociologists such as Herbert Spencer, Lombroso. Kraft-Ebbing, or Max Nordau. In confrontation with both thermodynamics and its scientisms, Lawrence improvised a corpus of cosmological myths specifically to attack other ideological structures imposed by the unregulated dissemination or unwarranted acceptance of scientific allegories. In the passage from Lawrence's "The Crown" cited above, "the conservation of energy" alludes to the first law of thermodynamics, "indestructibility of matter" to chemistry, "gravitation" to Newton, the "will-to-live" to the philosophical writings of Schopenhauer, and "survival of the fittest" to the sociology of Herbert Spencer. Here I will focus particularly on the reference to thermodynamics. The provenance of thermodynamic ideas in the passage at hand is announced first of all by Lawrence's rhetorical glance at the SUIl . With the formulation of thermodynamic laws in the mid-nineteenth century, the sun became the object of a new order of mechanical questioning. Frank James writes that in the 1850s the scientific "realization that the sun was the ultimate source of all energy for man, while not an original sentiment, seems in the thought of the founders of thermodynamics to have taken on a special significance. As soon as it was realized by them that ... the sun was running down, it became important to them to discover the source of its energy". 10 In the period from "The Crown " to the Fantasia, as the nuclear rather than chemical nature of the sun's energy was being established, Lawrence would construct his own scientific romance or allegory of abiding solar energy from the vitalistic premise of a "living sun" that is only "shut out" by false knowledge. The sun is of course a symbol primevally marked scientific terms and ideas to heterogeneous areas: "This was the power of scientism, the idea that science is the guide to all reasoning and will provide the answers to all the questions which can reasonably be asked. Behind it lay the faith that the answers given in the sciences were independent of time and place; that they were truths, and that a scientific method led to certitude." See David Knight, The Age of Science: The Scientific World-View in the Nineteenth Century, Oxford. 1986. 5. 10. Frank A. J. L. James , "Thermodynamics and Sources of Solar Heat, 18461862", British Journal for the History of Science, xvt; (July 1982), 174. See also Stephen G. Brush, The Temperature of History: Phases of Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, New York, 1978.

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with mythic inscriptions. But historically considered, it becomes such a pivotal figure in Lawrence's myth-making precisely because Victorian physics had , so to speak, killed it off by constraining the sun to a mechanistic description . Animating the sun and inscribing it within his vision of a vitalistic cosmos, Lawr ence's mythopoesis here is a specific response to the dissemin ation of entropic scen arios in the later nineteenth century, and thus an allegory of thermodynamic s. As Gilli an Beer has documented , throughout the later Victorian age a "dying sun " was envisioned in resp onse to the therm odynamic alarmism of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in parti cul ar." In direct co mmunica tion with late Victorian science, in 1895 H. G. Wells memorably imagined a dying sun at the end of The Time Machine. Lawrence 's determin ation of a "living sun " is a counter-rnythopoetic refusal to subscribe to the "myth" of heat death elaborated by Well s and others on the basis of the second law of thermodyn amics. In its latecla ssical presentation, the second law states that while expended energy is always conserved, it is also irrec overable, because it is always eventually degraded into forms of heat in which it is unavailable for any further work . Within closed systems. therefore, entropy - here the measure of the molecular disorder cre ated when heat differentials are lost - always increases to a maximum. If the universe is a closed system, eventually all temperatures will settle down to a final equilibrium. This vision of universal heat death is perhaps the supreme expression of the Victorian allegory of thermodynamics , an apocalyptic prediction of cosmological consequences, breathtakingly extended from an unassuming physical postulate about the thermal motions of molecules - that unless external agency is applied, heat alw ays flows from warmer to cooler bodies. Peter Harman points out that "appeal to theol ogical arguments, not uncommon among British phy sicists, was a manifestation of the continued influence of the 'natural theology ' tradition "." William Thomson 's universal moral ization of mechanical dissipation was motivated by

II . See Gillian Beer, " T he Death of the Sun ': Victorian Solar Physics and Solar Myth", in The Sun is God: Painting. Literature and Mythology in the Nineteenth Century, ed. 1. B. Bullen, Oxford, 1989, 159-80. 12. P. M. Harm an, Energy, Force, and Matter: The Conceptual Development of Nineteenth-Century Physics, New York, 1982, 68-69. See also Greg Myers , " Nineteenth-Century Popularizations of Thermodynamics and the Rhetoric of Social Prophecy", in Energy and Entropy: Science and Culture in Victorian Britain, ed . Patrick Brantlinger, Bloomington: Ind., 1989, 307-38 .

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theological con siderations.D The moral allegorization of thermodynamic laws in British culture represents an attempt on the part of a number of leading physicists to constrain Victorian scientific discourse within a Christian hermeneutics. Opposition to secular materialism was clearly the case with the popularization of thermodynamics co-authored by Thomson 's close colleagues P. G. Tait and Balfour Stewart and published anonymously in 1875 as The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State, a work that confronts the heat death scenario with the "scientific" plausibility of certain doctrines of personal immortality. The authors state at the outset of the volume that "our object, in the present work, is to endeavour to show that the presumed incompatibility of Science and Religion does not exist"." Tait and Stewart profess themselves to be wary of allegory, seeing it merely as a rhetorical dodge by which to evade the letter of scripture. IS Nevertheless, on the basis of thermodynamics and other physical postulates, they proceed in the rest of the book to construct a grandiose allegorical cosmos. They conflate the material world or "seen universe" with a spiritual realm or " unseen universe," and they bind their two-tiered world together with the energies that radiate through the universal medium of the aether." The intermediary aether posited by late-classical physics is in fact the same "doubtful ... ether" that Lawrence remarked upon in 1915 as representing a scientific entity of dubious or at least unproven reality. Here Lawrence was accurate enough. At the moment of his writing, the aether theories of Victorian physics were only beginning to be definitively superseded as the cosmical transformations of Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity came gradually into currency. Tait and Stewart's late-classical effort to fit thermodynamic mechanisms within Christian revelation seems to have done little for the 13. See Crosbie Smith, "Natural Philosophy and Thermodynamics: William Thomson and 'The Dynamical Theory of Heat'", British Journal for the History of Science, IX (1976), 293-319; and Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin, eds Crosbie Smith and M. Norton Wise, New York, 1989. 14. The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State, eds Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait, New York, 1875, iii. Hereafter, UU. 15. "Not a few who revere the sacred writings, believe nevertheless that the descriptions of the unseen world contained therein are purely allegorical . They do not believe in the existence of evil spirits exercising an influence over the mind of man. Satan is regarded as a personification of evil ('c"w[3oAor;, the accuser , Devil's advocate) rather than possessing a real objective existence." (UU, 36) 16. P. M. Heimann, "The Unseen Universe: Physics and the Philosophy of Nature in Victorian Britain" , British Journal for the History of Science, XXI (1972), 73-79.

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prestige of institutional religion . Ironically , however, it gave considerable impetus to alternative spiritual systems. By ostensibly marshalling scientific credence for the divine dispens ation of immaterial energies, this work strongly abetted the mythopoetic fervor of the late-Victorian and early-modernist eras. The cultural wake of the allegory of thermodynamics cod ified in the Unseen Universe impelled a series of scientistic doctrines that lapped upon D. H. Lawrence' s shores, from the Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, to the monist energetics of Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Ostwald, to the hyperspace philosophies of the fourth dimension initiated by Charles Howard Hinton in the 1880s and later disseminated to Lawrence by the English translation of Ouspensky 's Tertium Organum. That the spiritual figures of the Unseen Universe conceivably had some direct impact on Lawrence is suggested by his entrenched habit of valorizing the invisible, of equating the "unseen" with the essential. 17 The question of direct influence aside , Lawrence shares with the authors of the Unseen Universe a comparable grounding in the discourse of the Protestant sublime. So it is not surpri sing that Lawrence would be the recipient of a rather amorphous and contradictory inheritance of highly-charged thermo dynamic scientisms. For instanc e, in the continuation of the same passage from "The Crown " in which Lawrence inveighs against the "absoluteness" of the first law of thermodynamics, he nonetheless adapts the second law, as if by engrained rhetorical reflex , to the corruptive process he calls "sensationalism": "to get a sensation," Lawrenc e expl ains, "you reduce down some part of your compl ex psyche , physical and psychic. You get a flash, like when you strike a match . But a match once struck can never be struck again . It is finished . - Sensationalism is an exhaustive process" (287). This scientized notion of psychophysical entropy - the irrecoverable waste of vital energ ies - is so pervas ive in his writings that it could be handily labeled as "D. H. Lawrence' s second law". The root of the rhetoric of corruption and dissolution that funds Lawrence 's characteristic idiom of modernist moralism - the main impetus behind his systematic absolution of both the body and the cosmos from the "mechanical" destiny of entropic annihilation - is the vitalistic revision of thermodynamic ideas . However, the foreshortened heat-death scenario of Thomson's and Tait's physics, against which Lawrence rebelled, was itself a quasitheological attack on Darwin's theory of evolution, about which Lawrence 17. For a provocative critique of Lawrence 's complex attitudes toward visuality, see Linda Ruth Williams, Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D. H. Lawrence, Detroit, 1993.

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also declares, " I do not believe in evolution, but in the strangeness and rainbow-change of ever-renewed creative civilizations"." In an 1862 paper, "On the Age of the Sun's Heat," William Thomson pursued an antiDarwinian agenda by arguing that the authority of physics granted to the sun's prior existence far less time than was posited by Darwin 's spacious chronologies of natural evolution. Thomson's best estimate of the age of the sun was somewhere between ten and one hundred million years . His conclusion was that, "As for the future , we may say , with equal certainty, that inhabitants of the earth cannot continue to enjoy the light and heat essential to their life, for many million years longer, unless sources now unknown to us are prepared in the great storehouse of creation". 19 That some form of Kelvin's solar claims was credited well into Lawrence's day is usefully attested to by later reminiscences. For one, in the preface of a 1931 reissue of the Time Machin e, H. G. Wells found his youthful tale to be quite dated. Recalling the intellectual climate of the tale's gestation in the early 1890s, Wells declared, "the geologists and astronomers of that time told us dreadful lies about the ' inevitable' freezing up of the world - and of life and mankind with it. The whole game of life would be over in a million years or less. They impressed this upon us with the full weight of their authority, while now Sir James Jeans in his smiling Universe Around Us waves us on to millions of millions of years"." And Jacquetta Hawkes. writing in 1962 about her upbringing in the decade of the Great War, recalled : when I was a child it was thought that as the sun was pouring out its treasure of heat, light and other forms of energy with such royal munificence it must gradually exhaust its resources and cool down. I remember feeling real grief as I pictured earth losing the warmth of its star and becoming more and more arctic until at last all life had withered away and it spun in darkening space. a grey and frozen planet. Now it seems that although the sun is promised a much longer life than was then allowed it, as it grows old it will destroy us not by cooling but by swelling until the earth is cremated." 18. D. H. Lawrence, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious, New York, 1976,55. 19. William Thomson , "On the Age of the Sun's Heat", Macmillan 's Magazine, 5 (March 1862), 393. See also Joe D. Burchfield, Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth, New York, 1975. 20. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, New York, 1931, ix-x, 21. Jacquetta Hawkes, Man and the Sun, London, 1963, 18.

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It is useful to recall that Lawrence came of age exactly during the-heyday of heat death when assessing his various commentaries on science in general and the sun in particular. For instance, 'The Crown" concludes: Our universe is not much more than a mannerism with us now . If we break through, we shall find that man is not man, as he seems to be, nor woman woman .... Men may be utterly different from the things they now seem. And then they will behold, to their astonishment, that the sun is absolutely different from the thing they now see, and that they call "sun" (305 -6). Lawrence's attitudes here follow directly from the basic ally sound impression - during the decade of the Great War - that the science in which he had previously been schooled was in profound crisi s. and that its established verities, along with so much else , were being swept away . With this in mind, we can look at some of Lawrence's most extreme doctrinal expressions, those advanced in the Fantasia of the Unconscious of 1921, wi th a greater appreciation for Lawrence' s points of departure, if not always for his points of arrival. A major part of the Lawrencean diagnosis in the Fantasia has to do precisely with the relatively diminished statu s of scienc e's cultural authority in the modernist era, at least for a significant number of disaffected artists and intellectuals. In a projected self-description that measures a cultu rally-specific period response, Lawrence refers the broad modern plunge into psychologistic, occultic, and Theosophic mythomania to the collapse of the scientific credulity of the previous, positivistic era. 'These myths now begin to hypnotize us again :' says Lawrence, "our own impulse towards our own scientific way of understanding being almost spent" (Fantasia 55) . Later in the book Lawrence accounted to some extent for the exhaustion of his own scientific credence: "1 have tried , and even brought myself to believe in a clue to the outer universe. And in the process I have swallowed such a lot of jargon that I would rather listen now to a Negro witch-doctor than to Scien ce ," (Fantasia , 182) Clearly, part of the "jargon" that Lawrence did choke on was the scenario of imminent icy extinction bound up with Kelvin' s prestige. However, the immediate effect of Lawrence's intellectual disillusionment was the rather petulant avowal that, "I do not believe one-fifth of what science can tell me about the sun" (Fantasia, 181). Confident that he had disabused himself of both a bankrupt Chapel religiosity and a spurious secular-mechanistic creed, and convinced of the cultural need to fill the universal vacuum left by the deaths of God and of

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Science, Lawrence pro ceed ed in the Fanta sia to rewrite the book of Genesis. In what he disarmingly defin ed as his "s udde n lurch into cos mo logy, or co sm ogony " , he composed a primal alleg ory. he made up a myth by which to reanimate the material world and to co nfer meaning upon the creatures whose life and being are bound up with it. But alongs ide this revi sion of co smogony , Lawrence also rev erted to ges tures inherent in the discursive productions of both romanti c and Victorian natural theolo gy. Th e qu asi-p arod ic cos mogo ny of Lawrence 's Fanta sia begins: In the beginning - there never was any beginning, but let it pas s. We ' ve go t to mak e a start so mehow . In the very beginning of all things , time and space and cosmos and being. in the beginning of all these was a little living creature. But I don ' t know even if it was littl e. In the beginning was a livin g crea ture, its plasm qu ivering and its life-pulse throbbing . Th is littl e creature died, as littl e cre atures alw ays do . But not befor e it had had young ones. When the daddy creature died, it fell to pieces. And that was the beginning of the cosmos ... Whi ch is my acco unt of the creation. And I mean by it, that Life is not and nev er was anything but living creatures. That' s what life is and will be, j ust living creatures, no matter how large you make the ca pital L. Out of living crea tures the material cos mos was made: out of the de ath of living creatures, when their little living bod ies fell dead and fell asunder into all sorts of matter and forces and energies, sun , moon, stars and worlds. So you got the universe. Where you got the living creature from, that first one, don't ask me. He was just there (Fantasia , 63-64). On the o ne hand , Lawrence 's co smogony here is part of a longstanding cultural reaction des cend ing from the eighteenth century, an effort to counter mechanistic theories with vitalistic arguments for the operation of a life force irreducible to material contingencies - arguments whose scientific plausibility was exhausted only with the revolution in molecular biology of the mid -twentieth century. And as directed toward vitalistic ide as, Lawrence' s formulation represents a further co rporealization, an implicit attack on the abstract vitalism of Platon ic idealists like Edward Carpenter, for whom the life force was a metaphysical power, the

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immaterial anima of the universe." But on the other hand, Lawrence 's insistence that "Life is not and never was anything but living creatures" is reminiscent of certain Victorian arguments against the theory of evolutio n. Darwin ' s critics had objected, even if new species evolved from previous ones, out of what did the very first species evolve? Pointing to the abiding myster y of the primal origin of Life - about whi ch Darwinian biology had little publicly to say - was a standard gambit of both my stic-vitalist and orthodox -C hristian anti -rnaterialism. We discover an argument similar to Lawrence 's purveyed in 1875 in the midst of the Christian phy sic s of the Unseen Universe. The imm ediate context of Tait and Stewart's discussion is the need to discriminate between "energy" - which concept they have been loading up with heavy theological freight - and "life". The concept of life was the more typical recipient of spiritual amplification , and it had frequently been smudged over into that of physical or mechanical energy. Tait and Stewart' s effort to desynonymize en ergy and life points out the very power of this particul ar equivocation within modern scientistic systems. not the least of which is the energetic vitalism of D. H. Lawrence . So they enounced another sc ienti fic "law" on a par with the laws of thermodynamics, the " law of Biogenesis" : Life proceeds from life, or to speak more accurately , ... a conditioned living thing proceeds only from a conditioned living thing .... The law of Biogenesis is justly reg arded by Professor Huxley and others as the great principle underlying all the phenomena of organised existence .... If we assume the truth of this principle it appears to lead us directl y to infer that life is not merely a species of energy, or a phenomenon of matter. For we have seen that the great characteristic of all energy is its transmutability - its Protean power of passing from one form to another .... Life, however, can only be produced from life , and this law would seem to be an indication that the solution of the

22. For Edward Carpenter on the life force. see "Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure". in Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure and other Essays. 12th edition , London, 1912, I-50 . I discuss this text as a precursor of modernist vitalism in chapter 1 of my Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender. Individualism. Science. Ann Arbor, 1995. On Lawrence and Carpenter, see Emile Delavenay , D. H. Lawrence and Edward Carpenter: A Study in Edwardian Transition. New York. 1971.

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mystery is not to be found by making life merely a species of energy (UU, 176-77).v By some form of cultural inheritance, then, Lawrence's cosmogony seems to have reiterated the "law of Biogenesis", a principle that had expressed an objective epistemological limit within Victorian science. even within the secular evolutionary biology of Darwin 's bulldog, T . H. Huxley. Perhaps Lawrence spoke more truly than he realized when he titled this work a fantasia of the "unconscious", for his leaps beyond the present ripping "the veil of the old vision across" (Fantasia, 57) - led also to unconscious reversions to the past. In this phase of the discourse. mythopoesis slid into atavism. The Fantasia is impelled primarily by reversal. As we have seen, since the mid-nineteenth century, the material cosmology of thermodynamics had posited energy - specifically, sunlight - as the origin of life: a dying sun would bring death to all living things . Lawrence's premier gesture in the Fantasia was to reverse that entire scenario: "Instead of life being drawn from the sun", Lawrence asserts, "it is the emanation from life itself, that is, from all the living plants and creatures which nourish the sun" (Fantasia, 57). This fantasmatic claim is then followed up at length by the elaborate physiological scientism Lawrence posited against psychoanalysis. As opposed to the philosophical formulation advanced in "The Crown" - where absolution is to be achieved by a balance of opposing forces - in Lawrence's new schemas of polarized autonomic nerve centers, the poles pull apart: the primacy of the spirit is reversed in favor of the dark awareness of the viscera. And Lawrence's revisionary scientisms were also part of the high-modernist reaction against modern liberal-democratic social and political reforms. In this instance, the reactionary cast of his current sexual and social politics is immediately coded by the reversal at the level of physics. Lawrence's lurch into cosmology is not without its visionary appeal as a deliberate provocation, especially when he avoids the uneven field of gender polarities to evoke the universal electro-vitalism that magnetizes the soul and the sun: 23. The Unseen Universe held the concepts of energy and life apart long enough to reinscribe them both in a personification allegory, as different Persons of the Christian Trinity: "The Third Person of the Trinity is regarded in this [Christian) system as working in the universe, and therefore in some sense as conditioned , and as distributing and developing this principle of life, which we are forced to regard as one of the things of the universe, in the same manner as the second person of the Trinity is regarded as developing that other phenomenon , the energy of the universe." (UU, 179)

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Bruce CLarke How it is contrived that the indi vidu al so ul in the livin g sways the very sun in its ce ntrality . I do not know. But it is so . It is the peculiar dyn ami c polarity of the living so ul in every wee d or bug or bea st , each on e se pa rately and individu all y pol arized with the great returning pol e of the sun. tha t ma int ains the sun alive . For I take it that the sun is the g rea t sy mpa thetic center of our inanima te universe .... Th e sun' s quick is pol arized in dynamic rel ation with the quick of life in all livin g things ... . Th e sun is not. in any se nse . a material body. It is an inv ariabl e inten se pole of cos mic energy . and wh at we see are the particles of o ur terrestri al decomposition flying thith er and returning .... (Fantasia . 18::\-84. 186 ).

How ever, Lawrence' s revisionary psychophysics. wh eth er applied to the body or to the cosmos, is ultimately stranded within the clo sed paradigm of a "circuit of polarity" that descends. by way of the late-Victorian vogue for elec tromagnetic fields, from the grid of German romantic physiology." His idiosyncratic attempts during this period to break o ut of the co ntemporary sc ient ific co sm os often placed him in the grip of an alto gether inferior scientif ic ideology. Lawrence' s reliance on pol arit y mod els and their " reversibility" was a speculat ive cul-de -s ac that produced a se ries of regressive se xual and soc ial position s. For instance. in the se rmon from Rawdon Lill y that concludes Aaron 's Rod, composed concurrently with the writing of the Fantasia, the rheto ric of polar reversal is inscribed directly on the demand for a revital ized mascul inism: ..... We must reverse the pol es . The wo man mu st now submit - but deeply, deeply , and richly! No subservi enc e. None of that. No sla very. A deep, unfathomable free s ubmission." " You' ll never get it." said Aaron." With regard to pronouncements such as Lilly 's, Lawrence 's novels provide a variable fund of dialogical irony, as in Aaron ' s perspicuous if downhearted retort. But in his later doctrinal writings, a monological rhetoric of gender polarity is Lawrence's great drawback as a scientistic commentator on modernity and its discontents. The Fantasia eventually 24. See Knight, A!{e of Science, 56-57; see also Guenter B. Risse, "Kant. Schelling , and the Early Search for Philosophical 'S cience ' of Medicine in Germany", Journal of the Histo ry of Medicin e and Alli ed Sciences, XXVII (1972). 145-58; and Karl E. Rothschuh , "The So-called ' Romantic' Interlude in Physiology", History of Physiology, trans. Guenter B. Risse, Huntington, 1973, 155-66. 25. D. H. Lawrence, Aaron 's Rod, New York, 1976. 346.

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elabor ates Lawr ence' s cos mo log ical polarity-rh etori c into a sexual puritani sm as distasteful as the mo ral purita nism he oth erwi se despi sed : The great thing is to keep the se xes pur e ... pur e maleness in a man. pure fema leness in a wo me n. Wom an is reall y polarized down wards . tow ards the ce nter of the ea rth .... And man is polarized upw ard s. towards the sun and the day ' s activity. Women and men are dyn ami call y different, in eve rything .... And though yo u rev erse the sex ual polarity, the tlow betw een the sex es. still the difference is the sa me iFuntasia . 215 ). Lawrence ' s reversion s from Vict ori an to ro mantic scienc e functioned precisely to foreclose the form s of open int ercourse he othe rwi se wanted to ce lebr ate. His attempt to get beyond Victori an thermodynamics by an electro- vital refurbishing of romantic physiology was to a large extent a do ctrinal failure. Yet the vesti ges of a preferable resp onse were alre ady in place in 'T he Crown", as when Lawrence affirmed that , "The spirit of destru cti on is di vin e. wh en it breaks the ego and opens the so ul to the wide heaven s" (C rown. 292 ). In this formul ation , Lawrenc e darkly anti cipated what would prov e to be the effec tive way bey ond the chimeras of Victori an thermodynam ics." Th e clu e has to do with a revalu ation of the ro le of entropy as it funct ion s within open sys te ms und er w hat is termed now ad ays "far -fro m-equilib rium" co nditio ns." And insofar as Lawrence ' s best insights and mo st success ful dramatizations have alwa ys concerned the need to break out of ide ological enclosures into living realms of free energies, they are underwritt en by contemporary ide as abo ut the c haotic eco logies of living syste ms in an open universe. 26. Katherine Hayles has underscored the exten t of the congruence between Lawrence ' s idiosyncratic "field theories" and the world of quantum theory postulated by the "new ," or post-Einsteinian, physics: "The struggle of modem scientists to conceptualize a holistic reality is nearly as torturous as Lawrence ' s own odyssey. As a result of this struggle, most physicists would agree (though for very different reasons) with many of Lawrence ' s deepest beliefs : that reality is a dynamic. ever-changing flux rather than the manifestation of rigid laws; that the observer, rather than being isolated in Cart esian objectivity. participates in that flux ; and that certain aspects of reality elude deterministic anal ysis. In the absence of much factual knowledge about the new science, Lawrence nevertheless anticipated the spirit of many of its principal results ." Kathe rine N. Hayles, " Ambivalent Approach : D. H. Lawren ce and the New Physics ", Mosaic. Xlvi:' (September 1982), 107. 27. See Order Out of Chaos: Man '.\ New Dialogue with Nature, eds lIya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengel's , London, 1985. and N. Katherine Hayles, Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. Ithaca, 1990.

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Bruce Clarke Lawrence states in "The Crown": If we have our fill of destruction, then we shall turn again to creation. We shall need to live again, and live hard, for once our great civilized form is broken, and we are at last born into the open sky, we shall have a whole new universe to grow up into, and to find relations with. The future will open its delicate, dawning aeons in front of us, unfathomable (Crown, 294 ).

In Lawrence's ultimate allegory of thermodynamics, the sign of that unfathomable dawn will be the rising of a different sun , to which a revitalized humanity will offer the post-scientific prayer , "We don 't know what you mean". In closing I will turn to Lady Chatterley's Lover for a brief example of the resolution of thermodynamic and other scientific themes in Lawrence's late writing. For most of the novel, Connie Chatterley's sympathies play back and forth between hope and despair over imagined forms of evolutionary and devolutionary possib ility. This thematic and emotional rhythm reaches its climax at the beginning of chapter 16, in the last great argument between Clifford and Connie, after she returns from her erotic streak through the rainstorm and flowery communion with Mellors, in anticipation of her departure for Venice . Clifford, we are told, had been reading "one of the latest scientific-religious books". " The auth or under discussion in this passage is Alfred North Whitehead, the author of widely popular works such as Science and the Modern World (1926 ) and the text from which Clifford cites, Relig ion in the Making (1926). Lawren ce extracts from Whitehead and give s to Clifford a disquisition on evolution that asserts a cosmic inverse ratio inimical to the passion al progress the novel up to this point has been detailing : "What do you think of this, by the way?" he said, reaching for his book . "You 'd have no need to cool your ardent body by running out in the rain , if only we had a few more aeons of evolution behind us. Ah, here it is! - 'The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other it is spir itually ascending'" (LCL, 264) .

28. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley 's Lover, New York, 1959, 264. Hereafter, LCL.

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Interpolating Whitehead 's remark , Lawrence offers a late reprise of the modernist scientism that entangles evolution together with thermodynamics. and that uses the dark promise of physical entropy to enforce a spiritual or transcendental solution to hum anity 's cosmic dilemma. Once again Lawrence rejects the Victorian moralization of solar thermodynamics when Connie retorts to Clifford. "Physically wasting? .... Do you think the sun is smaller than he used to be? He's not , to me" (LCL , 264). Connie's simple statement sums up Lawrence's career in relation to the mechanistic physics his generation inherited from late-Victorian science. In intuitive defiance of what was in fact a faulty formulation of imminent entropic collapse. Lawrence and his characters continue to affirm the inexhaustibility of the "creative mystery". Connie throws her alternative, late-Lawrencean cosmos back at Clifford and his intellectual mentors: "But now the body is corning really to life, it is really rising from the tomb . And it will be a lovely, lovely life in the lovely cosmos, the life of the human body." (LCL , 266) The manifest elimination of gender polarity from this formulation realigns it with the androgynous or Carpenterian register of progressive vitalist mythopoeia. The ontological polarism of Lady Chatterley 's Lover is reasserted , however, in the clash of its two gods , Clifford 's white mental-ideal or philosophico-scientistic deity of transcendental evolutionism with Connie 's dark daemon : "Believe me, whatever God there is is slowly eliminating the guts and alimentary system from the human being, to evolve a higher, more spiritual being." "Why should I believe you , Clifford, when I feel that whatever God there is has at last wakened up in my guts , as you call them, and is rippling so happily there, like dawn?" (LCL, 266). When Clifford regresses into a perverse man -child, the novel concludes with the contrast between his sterility and the ineffable vital principle rippling in Connie's bowels. Mellors's final credo combines evolutionary vitalism and revisionary thermodynamics in the figure of a different sun an organic flame that "ripples" waves of sexual energy through the universal aether, yet burns from a source that lies beyond the material world. "I believe", Mellors declares, "in a higher mystery, that doesn't let even the crocus be blown out .... We fucked a flame into being. Even the flowers are fucked into being between the sun and the earth. But it's a delicate thing , and takes patience and the long pause" (LCL , 343). "T he long pause" is the alternative apocalypse of Lawrence' s allegory of

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thermodynamics, not the dismal finality of heat death but the peaceful stillness of a post-human cosmos in which a living sun cohabits the cosmos with a living earth freely evolving eon by eon in the aftermath of the "bad time coming ... death and destruction. for these industrial masses" (LCL, 342).

"REACTIONARY MODERNISM" AND S ELF-CONSCIOUS MYTH DA VID E. COO PER

"We did not," wrote St Peter , "fo llow cleve rly devised myths when we made known to you the power and co ming of our Lord Jesus Chris t, but we were eye-witnesses of his majesty" (II Peter, I : 16). The implication is clear: if it were myth s that the Apostles were broadcas ting, no credence co uld be given them . The OED agrees with Peter: refere nce to a story as myth , it tells us, implies that it is false. Th is raises a problem concerning the devisin g of myth s - mythopoeia. How ca n anyo ne openly promulgate a myth , for to do so, it seems, is to offe r for acce ptance so mething which , by calling it a myth , one admits is false? Myth s, surely , dare not speak their name. As Roland Barthes put it, the mythologist's relation to what he recog nizes as myth must be one of "sarcasm" . I Of co urse, write rs may use "myth" in sca re-quotes, as it we re, to refer to a story that is genera lly held to be false. but themse lves want ing to leave open the question of its truth value. But, eve n then , it seems odd to describe one 's own view as myth , for "myth " has several connotations, beyo nd that of falsity , which make it a pejorative term . Th e Greek or Hindu myth s may be amusi ng and char ming, but they are also - so we assume - accounts which have no scientific basis , are typically anthropomorphic in conception, and so on. These are not features, surely, which people - modern people, at any rate - could want the views that they promulgate to be accused of having. Open, self-confessed mythopoeia, then , so unds to be an incoherent enterprise. To proffer one 's view as a myth is, at worst, to invite people to accept what is implied to be false , and at best - onl y somewhat less paradoxically - to be accusing one 's own view of various epistemic sins. Despite this, there have been many self-confessed twentieth-century mythmongers . The problem posed by this mythmongering is, doubtless, part of a much wider one with which we are now famil iar. Over the last century and a half, there has been no shortage of thinkers who , while announcing the "relativistic" or "perspectival" c haracter of all claims to truth , are not shy to advance their own claims. The question inevitably arises , therefore , of the status of their own claims. How , for instance, are

I. Roland Barthes, Mytholog ies, trans. Annette Lavers, London , 1973, 157. Hereafter, Barthes.

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we to take Nietzsche's doctrine of the will to power given his insistence that any such doctrines can only represent "perspectives"? This wider problem is a very large and heady one , and perhaps there is mileage in approaching it by focusing on the narrower one of selfconscious mythmaking. Perhaps there is mileage, too, in examining and reflecting on a particular example of recent mythmaking, rather than in beginning with the quite general, "abstract" question of how selfconscious mythopoeia might be an intelligible exercise. In this essay, therefore, I focus upon a particular group of thinkers - mainly, but not exclusively, Germans in the first third of the twentieth century - who were certainly in the business of mythmaking. They belong to a larger group of thinkers neatly labelled "reactionary modernists" by the historian Jeffrey Herf, who has called attention to their importance as a distinctive tendency within right-wing fascist or National Socialist thought. I have nothing startingly novel to say about these thinkers: my aim , rather, is to organize and articulate their positions as instances of modem mythopoeia. Nor, having done so, is it my ambition to apply the lessons learned from such an examination in "solving" the problem of reconciling the making of truth-claims with "relativism" or "perspectivisrn". My ambition in the present paper is the more modest one of attempting to understand how, at least in the view of the thinkers who will concern us, the "paradox" of self-conscious mythmaking might be dissolved. It is not, I believe, a view to be lightly dismissed: hence it is one which deserves, so to speak, to be put on the table for any full-scale debate on the wider problem. "Statistically" , Barthes tells us, "myth is on the right" (Barthes, 148), and it is of course a cliche that, as one German historian says of his country, "logos capitulated before ... myth" , notably that of "race, blood [and] nation".' Attention has focussed, however, upon the predilection for myth of the most conservative, anti-modern writers on the German right, nostalgic for a past they wished to retrieve. Thinkers like Lagarde and Langbehn with their "romantic sky ... populated by mythic figures ... and ancient deities";' or members of the poet Stefan George's effete circle, such as Ernst Kantorowicz who believed in the legends of the thirteenthcentury Hohenzollem Emperor Friedrich II as "deep truths" and in the mysterious "return" of the Emperor as the saviour of a "suffering Germany";' or indeed, Stefan George himself, who also subscribed to the myth of the "sleeping leader" who will be "once more lord ... lead[ing] his 2. Hermann Glaser, Spiesser-ldeologie: Von der Zerstorung des deutschen Geistes im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Freiburg, 1964,83. 3. Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, Hannondsworth, 1977, 143. 4. Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, London, 1968, 51.

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band of liegemen to ... [the] founding of the New Reich" (quoted in Fest, 153); or the Nazi ideologue Rosenberg, author of The Myth of the 20th Century, with its proclamation of "the myth of blood , the belief in defending the divine nature of man through blood" (Glaser, 143). How this motley crew of poets , romantic historians, and muddled autodidacts would try to respond to the problem I raised - of the coherence of self-confessed mythmaking - I do not know. But they are not my concern, which is, rather , with thinkers of a different hue, the "reactionary modernists". These included the political theorist Carl Schmitt, the economist Werner Sombart, and for a spell , arguably, the philosopher Martin Heidegger. But it is upon the two best-selling serious German authors of the I920s , Oswald Spengler and Ernst Ji.inger, that I focus, but with occasional references, too, to the Italian Futurist and fascist, F. T. Marinetti . For in these three cases, we find a self-confessed mythopoeia lacking, or less overt , in their colleagues. II

It was, perhaps, Thomas Mann who first appreciated the distinctive and important role played by "reactionary modernism" in the aetiology of fascism. The "really dangerous aspect of National Socialism", he wrote, was its "highly technological romanticism".' For, as Herf explains, the most salient feature of this tendency was the "embrace of modem technology by German thinkers who rejected Enlightenment reason" . They "succeeded in incorporating technology", he continues, "into the symbolism and language of Kultur - community, blood , will, self, form, productivity, and finally race - by taking it out of the realm of Zivilisation" (Herf, I, 16). Among them , there was nothing of Stefan George 's horror at a "satanic" technological "ant-world", nor another conservative's sense that "mechanization and industrialization" was "the most terrible catastrophe to have befallen mankind"." They were, nevertheless, "reactionaries". At any rate, they were nationalists implacably opposed to liberalism and democracy. The day when parliamentary democracy collapses, proclaimed JUnger, will be our "greatest day of festivity" (Glaser, 99) . Belief in progress, utilitarian 5. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge, 1984,2. 6. H. S. Chamberlaine, quoted in Michael E. Zimmermann, Heidegger 's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, and Art, Bloomington: Ind., 1990.9-10.

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ethics, and more ge nerally Enli ght enment confidence in rationality are rejected . Th e Futurist, de mands Marin etti , must "break apart the old shack les of logic" and " hate the intelligence".' War is not only ine vitable , gi ven that human beings exist in a natural state of struggle, but to be welcomed. For JUnger , it pro vides the theatre in which real men , brought togeth er in masculi ne cameraderie , may best exe rcise the traditional virtues, so alien to the bour geoisie, of hardness , brav ery , and self-sacrifice. In these respects , how ever, the "reac tionary mod ernists" were no different from oth er currents of right-wing thought. Their main distinguishing mark , as noted , was their enthusiasm for technology and ind ustrializa tion. It is this, above all, whi ch makes them an interesting phenomenon, for we have been conditioned by generations of thinkers on various points of the lefti st spectrum - from Lukacs to Dahrendorf - to associate that enthusia sm with progressive modernist thought. Even skilled commentators have tend ed , at least until very recently , to lump fascist intellectuals together as peopl e resp onding to a deep "fear of modernity" (Gay, 96) or "overwhelming anxiety" in the face of indu strialization (Fes t, 139). Such generalizations are immediately punctured when we enco unter Spengler' s heroi zing of those modern "Faustian men ", the engineers; or JUnger's co nviction that " the age of ... machines represen ts the gigan tic for ge of an approaching empire [for] wh ich ... every decline ... [has been ] a preparation";' or Marinetti's dithyrambs to "the vibrant nightl y fervour of arsenals and shipyards ... deep-chested locomoti ves ... [and] sleek flight of plan es" (Marinetti, 42 ). Th e modernist tone of such pronouncements contrasts vividly with that of oth er, conservati ve fascists of the We imar years: for example, with the attitude of the influential Ludwig Klages, for whom modern technology, " the rape of nature by humanity", demonstrates that " man ... has torn himself apart along with the planet which gave him birth " ." There is a further respect in which some, at least, of the "reactionary modernists " were modernists. JUnger, Marinetti and others were important figures in the literary avant-garde, both calling for and, in their own writings, exhibiting new forms of literary expression. JUnger, for example, practised a "magical realism", icily detached descriptions of horrors that transform them into a peculiar form of beauty for the reader; while Marinetti both advocated and used a bizarre range of syntactic and

A.

7. F. T. Marinetti , Selected Writings, ed. R. Flint, London, 1972,88-89. 8. Ernst Junger, Der Arbeiter (1932), in Essays II, Stuttgart, 1964, 85. Hereafter,

9. Herbert Schnadelbach, Philosophy in Germany 1831-1933, Cambridge, 1984, 150.

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figurative devices. This compounds, perhaps, the puzzle over their overall ideological positions, for we tend to assume an intimate connection between the artistic avant-gardism of the time and pred ilections for individualism, freedom, even anarchism. Even the connection between modernism and technological enthusiasm is not one which has simply been foisted on us by unperceptive left-wing commentators . Prima fa cie, there is indeed something puzzling about vitriolic critics of Enlightenment embr acing that flagship product of Enlightenment reason and scienc e technology . If there are general puzzles about the coherence of "reactionary modernism", these become more acute in the case of those thinkers belonging to the movement who unabashedly wrote in the language of myth. I must forego exploring the question of how writers attuned to "progressive" trends in literature could want to see their own works placed in such an ancient category as that of myth . I focu s instead on the question of how some "reactionary modernists", notably Spengler and Junger, could reconcile their vision of themselves as mythmakers with their "unmitigated enthusiasm for ... steam , chemistry and electricity" (Herf, 69). That Spengler and Junger saw themselves as persuading their readers of views which they regarded as myths , there is no doubt. In The Decline of the West, Spengler refers to his own "morphology of world-history" as a "life-symbol" or "universal symbolism", possessing "significance", but not "eternal truth".'? Symbols, he tells us, should be regarded as myths: not to do so is itself a symptom of decline. "Mythopoetic power", he insists, is the "ability ... to fill the world with shapes ... symbols" (Decline, I, 399) : precisely what Spengler himself is doing in his "morphology of worldhistory". Junger, likewise, describes his "stance [as] a symbolic one" : he is not reporting on how things objectively are, but "comprehend[s] every act" in the modern world as " a symbol of a unified and unchangeable being" (quoted in Zimmermann, 50). To understand and cope with the age of machine-guns and factories is "a matter of one deciphering [a] secret , [a] now as at all times mythical law and using it as a weapon" (A, 145).

10. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality, 2 vols, New York, 1939, I, 4 Iff.

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III It will help if I briefly sketch the respective and related "myths" which Spengler and Junger advance . The central theme of The Decl ine of the West (1917 , revised 1922) was world-history as "the marvellous waxing and waning of organic [or morphological] forms" according to an inexorable "logic of time" (Decline , I, 22). These "forms" are whole "cultures", all aspects of which - from painting to science, from mathematics to religion - are organically related "expression-forms" of the wholes which give them their "stamp" (Decline, I, 6, 21). A culture declines when it becomes a "civilization" : when its forms become ossified and lose significance, when it looks outward instead of inwards for its resources , and so on. The latest culture to have waxed is the "Faustian" one which began in mediaeval Germany, but which is now, both in Europe and America, waning. Spengler was interpreted by some as holding technology and industrialization responsible for the decline. But that was not at all his point: technology is indeed "devilish", but then Faust made a pact with the devil. The Faustian vision of "energy, the will-to-power in Nature" (Decline, I, 387) is nowhere better manifested than in technology and industrialization. Decline will be due to their atrophy , a point made clearer twelve years later in Man and Techni cs. There the characterization of Faustian culture as "the victory of ... technical thought", as the attempt to "enslave and harness [Nature 's] very forces" in a "grim, pitiless noquarter battle of the will-to-power" is reaffirmed." Unfortunately, technology breeds the elements that will destroy it and with it Faustian culture. The will-to -power, it seems, "began to make its decisive mistakes " at the end of the nineteenth century. Democracy and the money-economy, for example, and the initiation of "coloured peoples" into a technology which they will use against the Faustians. Worst of all, perhaps, the Faustians themselves tum against technology: the masses, uncomprehending, begin to care only about material well-being and resent processes they cannot understand, so that eventually even the "born leaders ", unappreciated, take to "flight from the machine" (MT, 97). Despite differences between the two writers , notably over the question of the impending doom of technological culture, Junger's "myth" is, in large part, a continuation and radicalization of Spengler's. For him, too, in his main theoretical work, Der Arbeiter (1932) , history has "the destiny of forms [Gestalten] for its content" (A, 42) . Where a Gestalt 11. Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, London, 1932,77,84,18. Hereafter,MT.

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obtains, everything and everyone bears its "stamp" under "the compulsion of iron lawlikeness" (A, 159). Corresponding to a Gestalt is the "type" (Typus) of human being who is thus "stamped". The Gestalt of our age is that of the "worker", and the worker, no longer "a person or individual", is its type . Bya worker, JUnger does not mean the man in a cloth -cap , but the person - be he a factory worker, soldier, or engineer - who bears the "stamp". His favourite example, indeed, is that of the anonymous soldier, a mere cog in a "totally mobilized" war dominated by machinery. It is in and through technology that the "stamp" is received, for technology is the "mobilization of the world through the Gestalt of the worker", the concrete expression of a "metaphysical" will-to-power which "mobilizes matter" (A, 164, 126). Machinery is at once "the symbol of our time" and the "image of a power", the "new and unlimited influx of elemental powers" which have once more "taken possession" (A, 42, 64). Here, in the age of the machine is the "approaching empire" for which earlier declining cultures have been a mere preparation and which, unlike Spengler's Faustian era, is with us to stay.

IV Neither Spengler nor JUnger gives prolonged and explicit attention to the problems I raised in Section I concerning self-confessed myth-making: hence their response to them is an interpretative task. Those problems, recall , were the following . Myths, as we usually understand the term , are false: hence it seems self-defeating to promulgate a view as a myth. Second, myths typically have further features - an anthropomorphic character, for instance - which are generally deemed objectionable and which, therefore, seem to preclude anyone from wanting their own position to be classified as myth . Our main protagonists' strategy with these problems is as follows : first, they try to-return the charge of paradox by holding that , in a sense , all theories, not just their own, are myths; second, they deny that the alleged objectionable features of myth are objectionable. I approach the first stage of their strategy indirectly. In a much discussed youthful essay, the philosopher who , by their own admission, most influenced Spengler and JUnger - Friedrich Nietzsche - wrote that all so-called truths are really metaphors, and hence , strictly speaking, falsehoods . No statements report how the world objectively is, for they presuppose structures, classifications and meanings that we have not found in the world, but have imposed upon it. Within all these metaphors, of

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co urse, important dist inctions must be drawn: notably, between those "live" ones which we all recognize as metaph ors and which therefore retain vibr ancy , and those "de ad" , clic hed ones which Nietzsch e compares to coins that have lost their faces, "illusions which we have forgotten are illusions"." Crucial, too, is a distinction between those metaphors or "truths" we ought to, or cannot but , acce pt because they contribute to the increase of our power, and those we should reject because they do not. Nietzsche ' s views were expl oited , in the follow ing century, by Ernst Cassirer and others in their discussions of myth and science. Myth is not distingu ished from scie nce as the true from the false, Cassirer writes, since "a ll schemata [are] arbitrary schem es" , none of which "express ... the nature of things" ." Myth s and scientific theories alike are "symbols ... each of which prod uces and posits a world of its own". The y are "o rgans of reality", co nstructed to achieve various purposes, like control over nature (LM, 8). Just as, for Nietzsche . statements do not report objective experience, so, for Cassir er, myth is not "superadded " to experience, since the latter is already "steeped in the imagery of myth" (LM, II ). One way in which myth does differ from science, says Cassirer, is in its holistic character. To the mythic al consc iousness , items are not "separately given" , as to the analytic scie ntific mind, but "have to be ... derived from the whole" (LM, 13). All the elements of Cassirer's Nietzschean treatm ent of myth , albeit in cruder and more inflated form s than he would subscribe to, are, I believe, implicit in Spengler's and Hinger's positions, and often rise to the surface. To begin with, there is their insistence that all theories are essentially mythic or symbolic in status. "T here are no eternal truths" , proclaims Spengler, only "life-symbols". Scien ce is a "sum of symbols": even mathematics is an "early and deep myth " (Decline, I, 41 , 427 ). JUnger concurs: thinkers are merely "the organ through which [a] language is spoken", so that their products are merel y expressive symbols - at one time "spiritual" ones, and later, as now , "technical" one s (A, 170). Second, myths are not symbolic simply because they do not , impo ssibly, report the objective world. In addition , they confer meanings and hence render the world itself symbolic. JUnger's "type" recognizes everything about him as a symbol: even he himself is a "parable" (A, 161, 50). The difference between the mythopoet and others. explains Spengler, is that the former knows he is in the business of symbolizing, and decline sets in when 12. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense", in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche' s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, ed. D. Breazeale, Atlantic Highlands, 1990, 85. 13. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, New York, 1953,7. Hereafter, LM.

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people forget that this is what they are doing. Science is, so to speak, ossified mythology, comparable to Nietzsche's faceless coins. (Cassirer, it should be noted , would demur: the philosophically alert scientist - the one who has read his Kant - will not mistake his theories for objective reportage). Third, we must distinguish between those vibrant myths which properly serve the will-to-power and the stale ones which no longer do. Truth, if we are to retain the concept at all , can only be construed, says Junger, as the "expression of the will-to-power" (A, 76) . Faustian science, for Spengler, was distinguished by its "masterful questioning of nature" (Decline, I, 382), its conscious purpose of harnessing and enslaving nature. If the West is to decline, it will be in no small part because that purpose is forgotten and replaced by ideals of "objective truth" and "pure thought". Finally, if there is a genuine difference between myths and other theories, it is because of the holistic character of the former. What the person who grasps a Gestalt recognizes, says Hinger, is that "a whole ... encompasses more than the sum of its part", and is subject, not to a law of cause and effect relating the parts, but to a "law of stamp", marking each part as an ingredient in the whole (A, 38) . Likewise, for Spengler, Faustian man does not perceive the world as a collection of independent things, unlike "Classical" man . God , not gods , and magnetism (a cosmic force), not magnets (individual things), are the currency of Faustian thought. There is, then, no paradox for our protagonists in deeming their own positions to be myths - no more, at any rate, than for anyone else , for truth in the classical sense of correspondence with how things are is a chimera. Rather there is an honest recognition that their own visions do what every theory does: impose holistic order and meaning on the world in service to the human will-to-power's urge to control and dominate nature. Since this has been the purpose of what we conventionally recognize as myths, the name of " myth" is not something to blush at, but to welcome.

v There were, however, other charges made against myth besides that of falsity, ones which, if conceded, would preclude a thinker from regarding his own products as myths. How might Spengler and JUnger deal with these? We would not, of course, expect them to be embarrassed by the charge that their positions, like myths generally, are supported by little in the way of evidence and reason-giving. JUnger, as one commentator indicates, did not see himself as constructing an argued philosophical "system", for "whoever has a vision of what 'The Worker' is about does

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not require to have it demonstrated; and whoever lacks such a vision (for example, the bourgeois) will never understand it anyway"." He and Sp engler, like most "reactionary modernists", would have endorsed Marinetti 's call to break apart "the old shackles of logic and the plumb lines" of " bo urgeo is" thought, so that " intuition" might be reawakened (Marinetti, 88-89). But other charges remain, three of which I shall discuss: those of anthropomorphism, of treating what are historical human products as if they belonged in the destined order of nature and, relatedly , of justifying the status quo. Each of these are features which, though hardly definitive of myth, can reasonably be regarded as typical. Anthropomorphism is, of course, prevalent among ancient myths. The world is populated with gods and other beings modelled on people, and the processes of nature are typically explained by reference to the machinations of such creatures. Spengler and J linger are by no means unsympathetic to such modes of explanation. For the latter, for example, the nordic sagas rightly register a "wonder" at a " mighty magic" operating in the world, and at "elemental dangers" unfathomable by ordinary science and reason (A, 53 , 56). But their main response to the charge is that anthropomorphism, in some shape, is unavoidable. It is an illusion, says Spengler, to think "we can ever set up 'The Truth' in the place of 'anthropomorphic' conceptions, for no other conceptions .,. exist at all" (Decline, I, 381). The concepts of modern physics, for instance, are heirs to the "mythological concepts of our Germanic ancestors" (Decline , 1, 47), since "force", "energy" and the like are intelligible only on the basis of the will which Faustian men are aware of at work in themselves . The very notion of a Gestalt - the proper explanatory schema - is derived from those paradigms of wholes which are something more than the sum of their parts - the human face and organism. The second charge against myth is one which several notable twentieth-century writers have in mind when criticizing various conceptions and ideologies as myths. As Barthes puts it, "myth operates the inversion of anti-physis into pseudo-physis": it turns "reality inside out ... empt[ying] it of history and ... fill[ing] it with nature" (Barthes, 142). One of Adorno 's reasons for labelling Enlightenment thought "mythical" was its tendency to construe the historical as natural: a point he applies to Spengler, who is accused of inventing a "second nature" by presenting human products as if they were the result of extrahuman forces. IS Our

14. J. P. Stern, Ernst Junger: A Writer of Our Time, Cambridge, 1953,46. 15. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics , London, 1973, 35lff.

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protagonists ' way with this charge is not to rebut it, but to disarm it by welcoming it. World-history, says Spengler, is indeed an aimless process over which human beings, whether individually or collectively, have no real control, subject as they are to an "organic logic" of time that produces the "waxing and waning" of cultural forms (Decline, 1,22,26). We are all, he declaims in Heideggerean tones, "in the silent service of Being" (Decline, II, 507). Junger, meanwhile, never tires of telling us about the "inner lawfulness" of the world to which we are subject, of the "raging process" in which we are "inscribed"." A ruling Gestalt is indeed something that has "destiny" and is "in the deepest sense independent of ... circumstances" over which individuals or collectives have control (A, 40, 89). The human being is not the "goal" of our present technology, but the "means" employed by the Gestalt of the worker: he or she is subject to the "new order as the will to total mobilization" (A, 50). History , then , no less than nature, is "physis" if this means that its processes, like those of the latter, are in the final analysis "destined" to roll on irrespective of people 's best-laid plans. An important reason for Adorno's and Barthes ' complaint against myth for rendering the historical natural is that, by doing so, it serves to justify the status quo . We reach the third of the charges I mentioned. The "mythic process", Adorno and Horkheimer complain, "tends to legitimate factuality ": 11 a point echoed by Barthes , when he accuses myths of providing a "natural justification" for what are in reality "historical intention]s]" (Barthes, 142). It is a familiar, if bland, observation about ancient myths that they do typically serve to reconcile people to their condition, construing it as the requirement of fate, the will of the gods, the demand of cosmic justice, or whatever. But it may seem a strange charge to level against Spengler and Junger, both of them enthusiasts for processes of technological modernization which will surely transform the conditions of human existence that have hitherto obtained. Indeed , Spengler refers to a "quite new phase of human existence" (Declin e, I, 34) and Junger to a "new life" (TM, 138). Neither thinks it either desirable or possible to keep things static, let alone to turn back the clock in the manner of reactionary conservatives. Nevertheless, it is the intention of the two writers to vindicate the fundamental human condition as it stands, if only by dismissing religious, Enlightenment and other dreams of transforming or transcending that 16. Ernst Jiinger, "Total Mobilization " (1930) , in The Heidegger Controversy : A Critical Reader, ed. R. Wolin, Cambridge, 1993, 134, 128. Hereafter, TM. 17. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheirner, Dialectic of Enlightenment, London, 1979,27.

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condition. Ernst Nolte famously defined fascism as "resistance to transcendence", to attempts to "correct nature" in the name of transforming ideals. The pursuit of such ideals not only fails ultimatel y. but "threatens to destroy the familiar and the beloved". " For Hitler , the world's woes are due to "attempts to transgress the laws of nature" for the sake of illusory ideals, like universal justice (quoted in Nolte, 529) . Nolte's definition has, to be sure, been challenged, most recently by Roger Griffin: but what Griffin has in mind by a fascistic urge to transcendence, a desire for "self-transcendence" through, say, "identification with [a] supra-personal entity" like the Volk, is perfectly compatible with what Nolte had in mind when speaking of "resistance to transcendence", namely resistance to endeavours to transcend the confines of "nature" and of one's "culture". 19 Nolte's characterization applies to our "reactionary modernists" as well. Not all of them would subscribe to Marinetti 's bleak statement that as "the life of insects demonstrates .,. everything", including human life, "comes down to reproduction at any cost and to purposeless destruction" (Marinetti, ISO): but they share the view that our lot can only be to conform to the reigning Gestalt that fate or nature has dispensed. Nothing , says Spengler, allows us to become "dissociated from the conditions imposed by blood and history" (Decline, I, xiii), and when we try to we produce "civilization" and so go into decline , ripe for replacement by a new "culture". Or, as Hinger put it in one of his novels, "when the pattern fades to which our innermost life must conform" , we "sway and lose our balance" and enter upon "periods of decline "." The worker can only "express" the Gestalt in which he is "inscribed", not attempt to reform or replace it. It is true, of course , that at a certain level human life alters radically , and that succeeding cultures may be incommensurable with one another. But, at another level, it is all just more of the same - different expressions of a will-to-power that human beings in essence are. "Man is a beast of prey", declares Spengler, and life is a "no-quarter battle of the will-to-power", and when people endeavour, pathet ically, to deny this, to live in a "completely anti-natural" way, the writing is on the wall. Their culture is in decline and will soon "lie in fragments, forgotten " (MT, 19, 16, 76, 103). There is, then, a status quo, that of the fundamental human condition, which our writers wish to vindicate: but then, from their

18. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism: Action Francaise, Italian Fascism. National Socialism , New York, 1969. 529, 538. 19. Roger Griffin , The Nature of Fascism, London , 1991, 188. 20. Ernst Junger , On the Marble Cliffs. Harmond sworth, 1970, 33.

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perspective, those like Adorno and Barthes who complain of this, are merely in the grip of other and less realistic, less life-enhancing myths.

VI Although most of my discussion has focused on certain "reactionary modernists", they have been serving as a "test case", an illustration of a general problem, that of how modern thinkers can engage in open, selfconfessed mythopoeia. Indeed , they thereby serve as a "test case" , as noted in Section I, for the still wider problems raised by "relativism" and "perspectivism" . What are the lessons for addressing the problem of mythopoeia which can be learned from my illustration? I suggest that anyone intelligibly engaged in open mythopoeia must make at least the same broad moves as Spengler and Junger. If the name "myth" is to be at all appropriate to one's position , and if it is not to be paradoxical or otherwise bizarre to want that label attached to it, then something like the following must be advanc ed. First, the mythical perspective is no worse off than any other. Indeed, these other perspectives are themselves myths in the sense that they too fail to depict reality as it objectively is. Second , within the class of myths in this wide sense, distinctions need to be made: some , including one 's own, are to be preferred, since they are, for example, "life-enhancing" or effective devices in the pursuit of power. Third, one's own position is "holistic", and hence cleaves closer to our fundamental experience than the artificial abstractions of "analytical" science and reason . Fourth, reason and logic are not to be privileged over other epistemic strategies, such as the cultivation of intuition. Fifth, one's position must, like typical myths, render as "natural" or "destined" what many people would regard as the intended and controlled products of human historical purposes. Finally, and relatedly , the human condition so subject to "nature" or "destiny" is not one that we can or should try to "transcend". Whether or not a position possessing these features can be intelligibly advanced, I do not here judge. But such a position is not obviously absurd, or if it is, then it is absurd in a sense that would be welcomed by those who advance it. If so, open , self-confessed mythopoeia may not be the suicidal enterprise it at first seemed. Do the six broad moves just catalogued which our "reactionary modernists" make in order to draw the sting of accusations of paradox have wider application? Are they, that is, of a kind which "relativists" or "perspectivists" at large must also make if their advancing positions of

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their own is not to be incoherent? I suggest that moves closely akin to the first four listed certainly need to be made by all such thinkers. They must, that is, show that their positi ons are no worse off than any other; that by some such criterion as "life-enhancement", these positions are preferable to rival ones; that they remain closer to our basic experience of the world than rival one s, especially the "esoteric" constructions of the scien ces; and that the elev ation of certain perspectives to the statu s of objective truth is due to an invidious preferen ce for certain epistemic methods. The two remainin g moves, however, seem on the surface only to be required by people anxious to have their own positions regarded as myths in some serious sense of that term. Why else should it be important to show that one's position deflates the role of intention and control in history and that it preaches "resistance to transcendence"? Nevertheless , several philosophers who have not used the vocabul ary of myth, but who have - whatev er their intentions - spawned "relativist" or "perspectivist" viewpoints, have made moves of this kind, and it seems to me unsurpri sing that they should have done. Thus the Heideggerean tone of Spengler's pronoun cements is no accident: for it is important to Heidegger's critique of scientific reason , and of its claims to issue in a privileged account of reality , to show that it belongs to a destined "history of Being". For to show that science developed as the result of certain much earlier, unrefle cting turns in human beings ' vision of the world is to puncture the image of science as the product of people's belated recognition and controlled appl ication of rational criteria of knowledge." Again, it should occasion no surprise that many "relativists" seek inspiration from the works of someone whose "resistance to transcendence" is total - Ludwig Wittgenstein. There can, for him, be no appeal to justificatory crit eria that transcend our actual , basic practices, themselves rooted in our "natural history". The language in which we think "is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there - like our life"." Such resistan ce to a transcendence which, if feasible , would hold out the promise of achieving a standpoint from which all but one "perspective" could be ruled out is, surely, a natural strategy for any "perspectivist" to adopt. Arguably, then, even those moves of our "reactionary modernists" specifically designed to warrant their boast of promulgating myths are of a kind which others must also make if they are

21. See, for example, Martin Heidegger , The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York, 1977. 22. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Uber Gewissheit: On Certainty, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford, 1969, §559.

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to reconcile a "perspectivist" outlook with advancing positions of their own.

THE EXISTENTIALIST REINTERPRETATION OF MYTH: RUDOLF BULTMANN AND HANS JONAS ROBERT A. SEGAL Whether myth has a future arguably depends on its capacity to meet the challenge posed by modern science, which does so well what myth has long been assumed to do : explain the origin and operation of the physical world. Where myth attributes events in the world to the decisions of gods, science ascribes them to impersonal, nonteleological processes. To accept the scientific explanation of the world seems to render the mythic one either superfluous or outright false - superfluous because superseded by the scientific account, false because incompatible with the scientific one. Scienc e does not challenge the origin of myth. How and why myth arises does not matter. Science challenges what many have considered to be the function of myth by usurping that function . The most facile response to the gauntlet thrown down by science has been cavalierly to ignore science. An only slightly less facile response has been to pronounce science itself mythic. A more credible response has accepted science as the reigning explanation of the world and has then either "surrendered" or "regrouped". "Surrendering" means simply replacing myth with science. Myth is here conceded to be an outdated and incorrect explanation of the world . " Regrouping" means altering either the function or the content of myth in order to make myth compatible with science. The exemplar of the "surrendering" response to science is the Victorian anthropologist Edward Tylor. According to Tylor, myth arises and functions solely to explain events in the physical world . Like science, myth serves neither to endorse nor to condemn the world but only to account for it. Myth does not moralize, sanction, or emote. It explains. To serve as an explanation, it must be read literally. As common as the strategy of surrendering myth to science has been, even more popular has been the strategy of regrouping, Conceding to science only the explanatory function and the literal content of myth, this strategy seeks alternative functions and contents beyond the ken of science . Regrouping has taken several forms . One form has been to credit myth with nonexplanatory functions, in which case myth runs askew to science and can therefore coexist with it. An influential representative of this response is the historian of religions Mircea Eliade. A second form of

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response has been to interpret the content of myth symbolically, in which case myth is not even referring to the physical world and so can likewise coexist with science. Two exemplars of this response are Rudolf Bultrnann, the New Testament scholar and theologian, and Hans Jonas, the philosopher and scholar of Gnosticism. Their views are examined in this paper. The boldest form of response has been to alter both the function and the subject of myth, so that on neither count doe s myth compete with science. The chief representatives of this two-pronged rejoinder to science are C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell.

Rudolf Bultmann For both Bultrnann and Jonas, myth does not explain the world - a function left to science. Instead, myth expresses the relationship of human beings to the world. As Bultmann puts it: The real purpose of myth is not to present an objective picture of the world as it is, but to express man 's understanding of himself in the world in which he lives. Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically, but anthropologically, or better still, existentially. I Bultmann acknowledges that , read literally, myth is about the world itself. But unlike Tylor, who reads myth literally, Bultmann, together with Jonas, reads it symbolically. In Bultmann's famous , if excruciatingly confusing, phrase, one must "demythologize" myth, which means not eliminating, or "demythicizing", the mythology but instead extricating the true , existential meaning of that mythology. Taken literally, myth for Bultmann is exactly as it is for Tylor: a pre-scientific explanation of the world, an explanation rendered not merely superfluous but plainly false by science. Were myth to harbour no other meaning, Bultmann no less than Tylor would spurn it altogether as primitive. When "demythologized", however, myth ceases to be an explanation at all and becomes an expression - an expression not of the nature of the world but of the nature of the human experience of the world. Myth ceases to be merely primitive and becomes universal. It ceases to be false and becomes true.

1. Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology", in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans-Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald H. Fuller, London, 1953, 10.

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Read literally. the New Testament in particul ar describ es a cosmic battle between good and evil anthropomorphic gods and angels for control of the physic al world. These beings intervene not only in the operation of nature, as for Tylor, but also in the lives of human beings . The beneficent beings direct hum ans to do good; the malevolent ones comp el them to do evil. Tak en literall y, the New Testament describes a pre-scientific outlook: The world is viewed as a three-storyed structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celesti al beings - the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scen e of natural , everyday events, of the trivial round and common task. It is the scene of the sup ernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his daemons on the other. These supernatural forces intervene in the course of nature and in all that men think and will and do . Miracle s are by no means rare. Man is not in control of his own life. Evil spirits may take possession of him. Satan may inspire him with evil thoughts. Alternatively, God may inspire his thou ght and guide his purposes. He may grant him heavenl y visio ns. He may allow him to hear his word of succo ur or dem and. He may give him the supernatural power of his Spirit (Bultmann, I ). Demythologized, the New Testament still refers in part to the physical world , but now to a world ruled by a single , non anthropomorphic, transcendent God. Because God does not act directly in the world and because no evil powers exist, human beings are free rather than controlled like pupp ets: Mythology expresses a certain under standing of human existence. It believes that the world and human life have their ground and their limits in a power which is beyond all that we can calculate or control. Mythology speaks about this power inadequately and insufficiently because it speaks about it as if it were a worldly [i.e., physical] power. It [rightly] speaks of gods who repre sent the power beyond the visible, comprehensible world . [But] it speaks of gods as if they were men and of their actions as human actions .... Again , the conception of Satan as ruler over the world expresses a deep insight, namely , the insight that evil is not only to the found here and there in the world, but that all particular evils make up one single power which in the last analysis grows

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from the very actions of men, which form an atmosphere, a spiritual tradition, which overwhelms every man. The consequences and effects of our sins become a power dominating us, and we cannot free ourselves from them.' Demythologized, God still exists, but Satan does not. Sin becomes one 's own doing, and Satan symbolizes only one's own evil inclinations. Damnation refers not to a future place but to a present state of mind, which exists as long as one rejects God. Similarly, salvation refers to one's state of mind once one accepts God. Hell symbolizes despair over the absence of God; heaven, joy in his presence. The eschatology refers not to the coming end of the physical world but to the personal acceptance or rejection of God in one's daily life. Because a literal interpretation of the New Testament reduces human beings to the pawns of cosmic forces, a literal reading focuses on those forces themselves, which means on the world itself. Because a symbolic interpretation pronounces humanity free, it concentrates on the actions humans choose in response to the world. Taken literally, myth, as a supernatural explanation of the physical world, is incompatible with science and is therefore unacceptable to moderns: Man's knowledge and mastery of the world have advanced to such an extent through science and technology that it is no longer possible for anyone seriously to hold the New Testament view of the world - in fact, there is no one who does. What meaning, for instance, can we attach to such phrases in the creed as "descended into hell" or "ascended into heaven"? We no longe r believe in the three-storyed universe which the creeds take for granted. No one who is old enough to think for himself supposes that God lives in a local heaven . There is no longer any heaven in the traditional sense of the word. The same applies to hell in the sense of a mythical underworld beneath our feet. Now that the forces and the laws of nature have been discovered, we can no longer believe in spirits , whether good or evil (Bultmann, 4). Once demythologized, however, myth is compatible with science because it now refers both to the transcendent, nonphysical world and, even more, to humans' experience of the physical one. 2. Rudolf Bultmann , Jesus Christ and Mythology, New York, 1958, 19,21.

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Like Eliade, Bultmann urges modems to accept myth. But where Eliade neglects to show how modems can accept myth, Bultmann translates myth into existentialist terms in order to make it acceptable. At the same time he justifies his translation not on the pragmatic grounds that otherwise modems could not accept it but on the grounds that its true meaning is existential : If the truth of the New Testament proclamation is to be preserved, the only way is to demythologize it. But our motive in so doing must not be to make the New Testament relevant to the modem world at all costs. The question is simply whether the New Testament message consists exclusively of mythology, or whether it [itself] actually demands the elimination of myth [at the literal level] if it is to be understood as it is meant to be (Bultmann, 10). To say that myth is acceptable to scientifically minded modems is not, however, to say why myth should be accepted. In providing a modern subject for myth, Bultmann provides no modern junction. What myth does for modems, Bultmann never says . Perhaps for him the answer is selfevident: myth, and myth alone, serves to reveal the human condition. Bultmann may never go so far as to deem myth untranslatable into nonmythic terms, the way theorists such as Paul Ricoeur and Philip Wheelwright do, but the message translated may for him be contained only in myth . In encouraging modems to accept the mess age of myth, Bultmann would thereby be encouraging them to accept myth itself. But even when demythologized, myth is acceptable to moderns only if the existence of God is. For as a religious existentialist rather than, like Jonas, a secular one , Bultmann takes myth to be preserving the reality of God, simply of a nonphysical God. Bultmann saves myth from science only insofar as modems can accept even a sophisticated conception, not to mention a specifically Christian conception, of God. Where Eliade saves myth from science by appealing to the existence of distinctively modern myths - myths without gods in them - Bultmann retains an ancient myth with its God. Furthermore, at least Eliade tries to demonstrate that modems, however avowedly atheistic, actually espouse myth . Bultmann merely leaves myth as something worthy of espousal. He does say that the message of myth need not be conscious: " It goes without saying that this existential self-understanding need not be conscious." (Bultmann, 203) But he nowhere establishes that this message is commonly espoused.

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Hans Jonas In proposing a demythologization of the New Testament, Bultmann declares his debt to Hans Jonas, who had already (1934) offered a demythologization of Gnosticism: "A good example of such treatment [i.e., demythologization] is to be found in Hans Jonas's book on Gnosticism. Our task is to produce an existentialist interpretation of ... the New Testament along similar lines." (Bultmann, 16) Jonas argues that ancient Gnosticism touts the same fundamental view of the human condition as modern existentialism. Both philosophies stress the radical alienation of human beings from the world. Taking the roots of existentialism all the way back to the seventeenth century, Jonas describes Pascal 's depiction of the human situation: "Cast into the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened." "Which know me not" : more than the overawing infinity of cosmic spaces and times, more than the quantitative disproportion, the insignificance of man as a magnitude in this vastness, it is the "silence", that is, the indifference of this universe to human aspirations ... which constitutes the utter loneliness of man in the sum of things. As a part of this sum , as an instance of nature, man is only a reed, liable to be crushed at any moment by the forces of an immense and blind universe in which his existence is but a particular blind accident , no less blind than would be the accident of his destruction. As a thinking reed , however, he is no part of the sum, not belonging to it, but radically different, incommensurable: for the res extensa does not think, so Descartes had taught, and nature is nothing but res extensa - body , matter, external magnitude. If nature crushes the reed, it does so unthinkingly, whereas the reed - man - even while crushed, is aware of being crushed.' While Pascal , unlike Sartre and Camus, is a religious existentialist, his God "is essentially an unknown God, an agnostos theos , and is not discernible in the evidence of his creation" (Jonas, 324). The result is human estrangement from God as well as from the world . For Jonas, ancient Gnosticism presents an outlook as forlorn as that of modem existentialism. For here, too, lies an uncompromising divide between human beings and the world: 3. Hans Jonas , The Gnostic Religion, 2nd ed., Boston, 1963, 322.

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And, like Pascal , he [the Gnostic] is frightened. His solitary otherness, discovering itself in this forlornness , erupts in the feeling of dread . Dread ... is the self's reaction to the discovery of its situation, actually itself an element in that discovery: it marks the awakening of the inner self from the slumber or intoxication of the world. Becoming aware of itself, the self also discovers that it is not really its own , but is rather the involuntary executor of cosmic designs. Knowledge, gnos is, may liberate man from this servitude; but since the cosmos is contrary to life and to spirit, the saving knowl edge cannot aim at integration into the cosmic whole .... For the Gnostics, on the contrary, man 's alienation from the world is to be deepened and brought to a head, for the extrication of the inner self which only thus can gain itself (Jonas, 329) . The Gnostic and existentialist world views are far from identical, as Jonas certainly grants . In Gnosticism one is presently separated from one's true, divine self, which itself is separated from both the true god and the true world. One finds oneself trapped in an alien , material self which is part of an alien world under the control of an alien god. In secular existentialism the true self from which one is separated is the absence of any fixed nature or essence. One is severed from the true self exactly insofar as one deems one 's nature determined by heredity or environment rather than freely created and recreated. There beckons no higher world beyond the present world . And there looms no god of any kind, lower or higher. In Gnosticism one's false self is not just the body but worldly values. In existentialism one's false self is the role with which one identifies oneself - for example, that of professor, student, lawyer, parent, child , sibling. One has no essence because no god created humanity. In Gnosticism one 's true self is consubstantial with the true world : the divine spark is part of the immaterial world . The alien world is the material world ruled by the Demiurge, the nemesis of the true god. In existentialism the sole world that exists is antithetical to oneself: human consciousness stands over against inert, dead matter, which is amoral rather than demonic. The world is meaningless. It has no essence, or purpose, precisely because no god created it. In Gnosticism one's true self is consubstantial with the true god : the spark is a split-off piece of the godhead, which strives for reunification. In the ideal state one is reunited with the godhead and loses all individual identity. In existentialism belief in any god is false hope and , like the identification of oneself with a single

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role , is an attempt to avoid resp onsibility for one 's life . It is what Sartre calls "b ad faith " . In Gnosticism the state of alienation is temporary. To heed the revelation of the true nature of things from the saviour is automatically to begin the process of overcoming that state - a process that culminates in the severance of the spark from the body at death. In existentialism the state of alienation from the world is permanent. It is the human condition. Alienation from one' s true self is overcome the moment one recognizes that one has chosen to forge one 's present identity. No saviour from outside is required for that recognition. No world or god has deceived one. To evade responsibility for one's actions, one has deceived oneself. Despite these not incon siderable divergences between ancient Gnosticism and modem existentialism, Jonas demonstrates the even keener similarities. Like Bultmann, Jonas translates ancient myth into contemporary parlance. While Jonas him self is as captivated by the way ancient Gnosticism sheds light on modernity as by the way modernity sheds light on ancient Gn osticism, it is the light that modern existentialism sheds on ancient Gnosticism which gives myth a future. For Jonas, as for Bultmann, myth , rightly deciphered, refers not to the world but to the experience of the world. Gnostic myths no longer describe the godhead, the emanations, the creator god, or the mate rial world. They now describe the state of alienation from the material world. Gnostic myths no longer expla in the origin of the material world from or through the immaterial world. They now describe the way human beings comport themsel ves toward the mate rial world . Gnostic myths cease to offer any escape from the material world and instead condemn one to life in that world. More accurately, Jonas, like Bultmann, ignores those aspects of ancient myths which are cosmogonic or esch atological and concentrates on those aspects that are existential. The fact of human alienation from the world, not the source of it or the solution ·to it, is the demythologized subject of myth. The residue is mere mythology - to be discarded, just like all mythology for Tylor. Yet no more than Bultmann does Jonas offer any alternative function of myth for moderns. At most, myth functions to express or describe the human condition. But Jonas, unlike Bultmann, never makes myth the exclusive bearer of its message. If twentieth-century philosophy provides the key to unlocking the meaning of myth, what part does myth itself play once its own meaning has been unlocked? Just as Bultmann fails to make the New Testament palatable to atheistic modems, so Jonas fails to make Gnostic myths necessary for them .

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Jung C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell offer the fullest reprieve to the death sentence that Tylor pronounces on myth. For they transform both the function and the subject of myth . Like Eliade, they make the function of myth more, indeed other, than explanatory. Like Bultmann and Jonas, they make the subject of myth other than the physical world. Jung is entranced by ancient Gnosticism because he sees in it an uncanny parallel to the present.' Where for Jonas the key similarity is the experience of alienation from the world , for Jung the key similarity is the experience of alienation from oneself That alienation is projected onto the world, so that one feels severed from the world, but one is really severed from oneself. The world is the manifestation, not the source, of alienation. lung, like Jonas, gives myth a reprieve by translating its content into a contemporary idiom. But Jung offers a far more detailed glossary and grammar than Jonas. He makes sense psychologically of the state of Gnostics not merely upon receipt of the revelation but also both before and after. Jung renders into psychological terminology the narrative structure of Gnostic myths from the pre-fallen state of the world through the fallen one to the restored one . Where Jonas transforms only the content of myth, Jung also transforms the function. Jung would say that Gnostic mythology served not just to reveal the unconscious but actually to put Gnostics in touch with it. Jung thus accords Gnostic mythology, and mythology generally, a role as well as a viewpoint that is acceptable to moderns. Still, Jung does not go as far as Joseph Campbell, who proclaims myth indispensable.' As valuable for Jung as myth is, religion, art, dream, and the "active imagination" can serve as well - even if he sometimes loosely uses the term "myth" to apply to all of them. For Jung, the functions that myth serves are themselves indispensable, but myth is not itself indispensable to serving them . Jung ventures beyond Jonas in granting myth a future not only by providing a function as well as a subject that is acceptable to moderns but also, like Eliade, by uncovering modern as well as ancient myths. lung does not claim to find modern Gnostic myths, but he does claim to find modern myths of other varieties. Because he psychologizes the meaning of all myths, he circumvents Eliade's dilemma that myths acceptable to moderns lack the element necessary for their efficacy: gods. For lung, 4. See The Gnostic Jung, ed. Robert A. Segal, Princeton and London, 1992. S. On Campbell, see Robert A. Segal, Joseph Campbell: An Introduction , revised ed., New York, 1990 .

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gods are merely the symbols that ancient myths used to represent archetypes. Modem myths , using other symbols, are equally efficacious. Far more than Bultmann, Jonas , or Eliade does Jung, together with Campbell, envision a boundless future for myth.

THE DOMINATION OF MEMORY: DARKDAYS OF MODERNISM LEON BURNETT

In memory ofall holocausts Roland Barthes includes an entertaining little essay on "Wine and Milk" in his Mythologies. Of wine, he says that it "is a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment .... It exalts all climates, of whatever kind : in cold weather, it is associated with all the myths of becoming warm , and at the height of summer, with all the images of shade, with all things cool and sparkling". It is, for the French at least, "part of the reason of state". Milk , in contrast, which as a "totemdrink" Barthes associates with "the Dutch cow", is characterised as "antiwine": milk is cosmetic, it joins, covers, restores. Moreover, its purity, associated with the innocence of the child, is a token of strength, of a strength which is not revulsive, not congestive, but calm , white, lucid, the equal of reality . I The opening sentence of the entry under "milk" in Funk and Wagnalls' Standard Dictionary of Folklore , Mythology and Legend (vol. II, 725) declares "Milk is the only substance on the face of the earth whose primary purpose is nourishment".' What we might want to add in qualification is that although milk nourishes us physically, physical nourishment may sometimes deaden us spiritually. In Chekhov's story, "The Black Monk" (1894), for example, the central character, Kovrin is dosed with milk and potassium bromide to stop him seeing the hallucination of the black monk, a being who defies time and space: "How fortunate Buddha, Muhammad or Shakespeare were in not being treated by kind-hearted relatives for ecstasy and inspiration!" Kovrin said. " If Muhammad had taken potassium bromide for his nerves, had worked only two hours a day and I. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, London, 1972, 60. 2. The entry was written by Julius L. Rothman.

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In Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken (1899), when the Nun. the "black crow", who is nurse and attendant to the mad Irene, dressed all in white, brings her charge "milk and bread" on a tray , the bruti sh hunte r. appropriately nam ed Ulfhejm, "laughs scornfully" and remarks : Look at that! Call that food for human consumption ? Watered milk, and soft, mushy bread! Now you ought to see my fellows eat! ... Great red meat-bones - they swallow ' em whol e - cough ,em up, and then gulp' em down aga in. Does your heart good to watch 'ern.' There is another kind of milk , however, of which the Milk Marque know s nothing. I have in mind the liquid which "was a god-given drink before the coming of wine" ,' and which in the texts of antiquity is clo sely allied to wine in a manner rather different from the contrastive relationship that Barthes proposes." This milk is poured out for the dead in the epic s of Homer. Circe instructs Odysseus (Odyssey, Book X) to "dig a pit - like this - about a cubit each way , and pour a drink-offering around it to all the dead, of milk-in-honey first and then sweet wine and lastly water. Over it all sprinkle white pearl-barley". A libation such as this is as far beyond the reach of humanity as the milky way that sparkles in the night sky in testimony of galactic otherness. In Euripides' Bacchae, when the herdsman reports to Pentheus what he has seen on Mount Cithaeron, he tells of frenzied young mothers "who 3. Anton Chekhov, The Duel and Other Stories, trans. Ronald Wilks. Harmondsworth , 1984, 216. 4. Henrik Ibsen. When We Dead Awaken, trans. Michael Meyer, London, 1960, 30-32. 5. Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 3rd ed., New York, 1960,595. 6. One author, writing at the tum of the century, who preserved the more archaic association of milk with natural vitality is Hugo von Hofmannsthal (in "A Letter", 1902): " .. . when 1 drank the warm frothing milk that a straw-haired peasant had milked into a wooden bucket from the udder of a beautiful, gentle-eyed cow, then that to me was no different from when, sitting on the windowseat of my studio, I drew sweet and foaming intellectual nourishment from a folio volume. The one was like the other; neither conceded anything to the other, either in terms of a celestial, dreamlike nature or of physical vigour .. ." (Quoted from Michael Hofmann 's translation: The Lord Chandos Letter, London, 1995, 8.)

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had left their infants behind" and who suckled "the untamed whelps of wolves ". Their swollen breasts , howe ver, were not the only source of milk on the mountain : One took her thyrsus and struck it against a rock , and there sprang from it a dewy stream of water. Another struck her fennel wand upon the ground, and the god sent up a fountain of wine for her. Those that had a desire for the white drink scraped the earth with the tips of their fingers, and had rich store of milk. From the wands of ivy there dripped sweet streams of honey.' . Along with all the differences in the imagery of milk that could be pointed out between the nervous afflictions of the fin de steele. in an age of decadence, and the unnerving rituals of antiquity, in an age of heroism, there is one similarity to be noted . That is the sharp contrast between white, wholesome milk and the darkness of alien and supernatural forces . It is this chequered interplay that I want to investigate in my paper. I shall construct a counter-example to the Barthean "myth" of milk as "calm, white , lucid, the equal of reality" in order to explore the function of mythopoeia as an aspect of man's aesthetic confrontation with the "great threat of evil" during the dark days of modernism.' Not merely of modernism, for I would situate what I have to say within the perspective of the modern , thereby extending the scope of my study back into the early decades of the nineteenth century, which witnessed the revival of a mythological interest. This interest, as we know, was eclipsed for a time by the upsurge of a materialist ethic, by what Virgil Nemoianu has called the "taming" of romanticism in an age of Biedermeier, more attracted by the gross than the engrossing." The change that ushered in modernism came with the fin de siecle, when, it could be argued, the apparent naturalism of writers like Ibsen and Chekhov had the effect of transmitting a prolonged, and prolonging, electric shock to the body poetic that was to galvanize the mythically oriented artist into renewed activity. The first spasms of the neo-Galvanic may have appeared grotesque (or, as we more 7. Euripides, The Bacchae, quoted from the translation in Classical Mythology , 2nd ed., eds Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardson, New York, 199. 8. The phrase "a great threat of evil" is taken from Albert Einstein's 1946 essay, 2 "E = mc " , in which he concludes: "Averting that threat has become the most urgent problem of our time". (Quoted from The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, ed. Timothy Ferris, Boston, 1991, 59.) 9. See Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier, Cambridge: Ma., 1984.

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co mmonly say, decadent), but as the poet became master of his body - and of his memory - again, as he co nquered his nerves and came to his senses, a new movem ent arose with an interest in myth . In the first ch apter of Myth and Reality, Mircea Eliade attempts a definit ion of myth: Myth ... is always an account of a "creation"; it relates how some thing was produced, began to be. Myth tells only that which really happ ened , which manifested itself completely." He go es on to mak e the distinction betw een myths as "true stories" that "report facts that really took place" and fables as "false stories" that "have no foundation " : Both categories of narrat ives present "histories" , that is, relate a series of events that took place in a distant and fabulous past .... Nev erthel ess , the nativ es have felt that the two kind s of "stories" are basically different. For everything that the myths relate concerns them directly , whil e the tales and fables refer to events that ... have not altered the human condition as such (El iade, lOII ). "[Mja n as he is today" , Eliade obs erves, "is the direct result of those mythical events, he is constituted by those events" that happened in illo tempore (Eliade, 11). Myth , then, is a matter of primary importance, while tales and fables are not , for myth teaches the primordial stories that have con stituted archaic man existentially (ibid., 12). Eliade's account of the relation of "archaic man" to his m yth finds an echo in the romantic period. Keats , commenting on the composition of his epic poem about Hyperion, to his friend J. H. Reynolds (in a letter, dated 21 September 1819) 11 writes: It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from Hyperion and put a mark X to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one II to the true voice of feeling. Upon my soul 'twas imagination I cannot make the distinction.

10. Mircea Eliade , Myth and Reality, trans. Willard R. Trask , New York, 1975,

8. 11. The letter is reprinted in Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings, London , 1970, 291-93 .

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What the poet refers to is the "distinction" between the composition of a truly "rnythopoetic" Hyperion and what, in his opinion, would be no more than a meretricious accomplishment that might leave itself open to the accusation of being no more than a "pretty piece of paganism" or , equally damning, a "Miltonic" imitation. In this letter, Keats expresses a critical uncertainty about his own verse: "Every now & then there is a Miltonic intonation - But 1 cannot make the division properly." Engaged in his "work on myth ", the English romantic poet sought to untangle a cluster of issues that had formed themselves into a complex and critical question: what constitutes "the true voice of feeling" ? His formulation may stand as a model for the mod em poet 's engagement with mythological material to set beside the anthopological enquiry of Eliade. A poet such as Keats may be said to be "in touch with" the myth that he recounts, even though he no longer ritually re-enacts it. His is a commemoration of what Eliade calls the "strong time" of the mythical event, when something new , strong, and significant is manifested, rather than a tame reiteration of it (Eliade, 19). Myth stands, or withstands, the test of time. Its significance survives, or it ceases to retain the status of myth outside the museum or the scholarly treatise. This is a truism that applies equally to the cre ations of the "modem" myth-makers as to the "ancestral voices" , whose origins are lost in "the deeps of the mind" , and which come down to us as variants of an anonymous folk-construct. If Keats 's dilemma is symptomatic of the modern poet's situation, then the fourth stanza from Yeats 's "The Circus Animals' Desertion" may be said to point to the essence of myth for the modernist poet. It is a line from this stanza that has supplied me with the wording for my title : And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea ; Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory, Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of. The paramount accomplishment of myth comes when it manages "To engross the present and dominate memory", when, in its narrative mode, it presents "Character isolated by a deed", and when, pictorially and poetically, it employs the kind of symbolic image that Yeats called an "emblem" ("And not those things that they were emblems of'). When

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Yeats uses the phrase "To engross the present", I take it that he is deliberately exploiting the ambivalence of the word "engross" as meaning both "enchant" and "enlarge". For Yeats, as for Keats, the work of myth is not only a "heart-mystery" with the power to enchant, but it is also a force to magnify the moment . The essential difference between the "false" fairytale and the "true" myth is summed up in this second connotation of the word "engross". The fairy-tale has the charm to suspend time, but by insisting upon its "once-ness" it diminishes its present-ness, its presence, for the recipient. The fairy-tale is a world of the Other, a spatio-ternporal retreat from reality into "nothingness". Myth , in contrast, invests its narrative with a perpetual significance. The "now " of myth is the "now" of now, and as Pip says somewhere in Great Expectations, "once was not now" . The formulation, for example, that characterizes Arthur as "the once and future king" catches the transformation of legend into myth in flagrante delicto! Shelley, to return to the romantic view, expresses the sense of abiding experience in the last canto of "The Revolt of Islam", when he comments upon the culminating event in his lengthy narrative: And to long ages shall this hour be known ; And slowly shall its memory , ever burning, Fill this dark night of things with an eternal morning . (XII , 259-61) If Shelley could think of " Fill[ing] this dark night of things with an eternal morning" , the type of modernist poet in whom I am interested would be more inclined to contemplate a reversal of the romantic image , "an eternal morning " filled with the "dark night of things". " Indeed , the "great threat of evil" (to which Einstein referred ), like Yeats's "rough beast" about to be "loosed upon the world", is sufficiently omnipresent to warrant our speaking also of the dark days of modernism. The pictorial "emblem" that I want to submit to the litmus test of "true feeling" as against "false beauty" is the image of "black milk" that opens Paul Celan 's "Todesfuge", and which subsequently recurs three more times in the poem with an accelerated intensity: 12. See, for example , my "Heirs of Eternity : An Essay on the Poetry of Keats and Mandel'shtam", Modern Language Review, 76 (1981) , 396-419, for a contrast in the uses of Greek mythology in the periods of romanticism and modernism . I discuss the common mythopoetic ground of four modernist poets in "Between River and Rock: Landmarks in European Modernism ", in The Turn of the Century: Modernism and Modernity in Literature and the Arts, ed. Christian Berg et aI., Berlin, 1995, 199-208.

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Schwarze Milch der Frtihe wir trinken sie abends wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie . nachts wir trinken und trinken Celan ' s poem may be taken . as one of the great mythopoetic achievements of the twentieth-century mind, and it is usually cited in any introduction to the poet's work." Composed in 1944-45. but not published in German until 1952. "Todesfuge" has been described as forming the benchmark for poetry "after Auschwitz" (Felstiner, 26). Michael Hamburger, in The Truth of Poetry, in remarking that "Celan shares [with Mallarrne] a strong aversion to the merely phenomenal and accidental, as opposed to the essential and archetypal", goes on to make a comment about the poet's "black milk" : Celan began by rendering extreme experience - that of a poet born into a Jewish German-speaking community in Rournania, fed on the "black milk" of terror under the German and Russian occupations and surviving that terror to become a resident of France. 14 In this account, biographical information is supplied at the expense of a simplification of the poetic image. Black milk is equivalent to the abstraction, "terror". To interpret it in this way is to reduce an emblem to the "false beauty" of symbolist abstraction, in short, to a cliche," whereas, in the poem, the central image manages so utterly to "engross the present and dominate memory" that there is no doubt but that the poet speaks with "the true voice of feeling". Here terror, to reverse Rilke"s celebrated formulation at the start of the Duino Elegies , is nothing but the beginning of beauty, which we are still just able to endure. 13. Text and translation (by Hamburger) may be found in Paul Celan, Selected Poems, trans. M. Hamburger. Harmondsworth, 1990, 60-63. Felstiner breaks new ground with his translation . See John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet. Survivor, Jew. Newhaven, 1995,31-41 for his version and commentary. 14. Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s, London, 1982.294-95 . 15. Felstiner, who comments on the "array of historical and cultural signals some overt and direct, some recondite or glancing" in "Todesfuge", is not entirely free from the temptation to propose a reductive reading of the poem's image of "black milk": "is it crematorium smoke?", he asks tentatively (38).

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Like all mythic utterances, Celan' s poem demands the engagement of its reader on (at least) two levels: the linear " unfolding" of the plot and the concentric "layering" of the imagery. In "Todesfuge", the concentrated immediacy of the imagery and rhythm offset the difficulty of grasping the poem's narrative "meaning". Lyric poetry of the twentieth century, when it most aspires to the condition of myth, manifests a marked tendency towards such paratactic structures as we find in Celan' s poem, when lyrical concentricity may be said to enact the characteristic recurrence, the eternal return, of archaic myth. Mythopoetic resonance of word and image contains, but also extends, the "poetic". To put it another way, Celan's image of black milk may be regarded merely as part of an exposition of the poetic unit, a lyric poem published in the collection Mohn und Gedachtnis (1952), but it may also be viewed as part of a mythic constellation which it was modernism 's project to construct." A prominent feature of myth is that it will name, rather than (as science does) define. Celan's poem has four proper nouns: two personal names and, corresponding to them, reference to two nations. Margarete (and Deutschland) and Sulamith (and Jud en). If it is legitimate to speak of a lyric "plot" in "Todesfuge", then we may observe that the two women, or rather their names, are brought most closely together in the rhythmically marked parallelism of the last two lines of the poem: dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith What sort of conjunction is this ? This poem, in foregoing any of the normal marks of punctuation is, in more than one sense, non-periodic. On the one hand, the clo sing cadence of Celan ' s " Death Fugue" recalls the image with which it began: S.ulamith - Schwarze Milch. On the other hand, the last syllable of the poem (Sulamith) shades aurally into the very concept of "myth" (German, Mythe, Myth os ) itsel f. "T odesfuge" may lack a final full stop , but it constructs its own point of reference within the 16. The oxymoronic conjunction Schwarz e Milch does not orig inate with Celan . Rose Auslander had used it in 1939, and "it could have some remoter orig in" (Felstiner, 34). Indeed , Frank and Schultze maintain that "the image of dark milk belongs to the poetic norm of Germ an Expressionism in one of its peripheral, regional and ethnic variants" ; see Armin Paul Frank and Brigitte Schultze, "Normen in historisch-deskriptiven Ubersetzungsstudien", in Die Literarische Ubersetzung, ed. Harald Kittel , Berlin , 1988, 96-121 (102) . They also point out the mythic implications of a stark black-white complementarity 001-2). I am indebted to Jan-Mirko Maczewski for bringing this article to my notice.

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linguistic and the cultural context in which it was engendered. One obvious clue is in the pairing of Margarete and Sulamith." Visitors to the exhibition of "The Romantic Spirit in German Art 1790-1990" at the Hayward Gallery. London, in 1994, would have been able to admire the chalk and charcoal cartoon by Friedrich Overbeck of Sulamith and Maria (1811-1812 ), conceived as part of a project with his friend and fellow-artist, Franz Pforr , who was also at the same time working on an allegorical representation, to depict Friendship through the representation of two female figures. Later, in 1828, Overbeck's cartoon was developed into a painting entitled ltalia and Germania . In the evolution of Overbeck's work on his Sulamith, it is possible to point to at least three kinds of friendship . The personal friendship between the two painters (another notable work at the exhibition was the Double Portrait of Overbeck and Cornelius, 1812, a celebrated example of the romantic friendship portrait); the allegorical , but still individualized, friendship of Sulamith and Maria ; and the grand design of friendship between nations in ltalia and Germania . Turning from Overbeck's Sulamith to Celans, it is hardly necessary to labour a point about the conjunction of Margarete and Sulamith by expanding upon the concept of "mythic irony" . If a reversal of the romantic depiction of friendship has taken place in Celan 's poem, thereby conveying the sense of a deviation from the natural that is reinforced by the very idea of black milk, then this is a reversal that may also be seen as a revision or even as a re-appropriation. Overbeck identifies Sulamith with Germania: Celan reclaims her for the Juden . Reclaims , because behind the modern representations stands the female figure of the "Shulamite" from the Song of Solomon , which Biblical exegesis identifies with the "Shunammite" of Kings, as the original. It is possible even to trace the central image of black milk in "Todesfuge" to a conflation of the reference to the "black, but comely" bride of the Song of Solomon (Chapter I, verse 5), and the several references to milk that follow (e.g. "honey and milk are under thy tongue " IV, II ; and "I have drunk my wine with my milk" V, 1), but the identification of such a subtext would need to be accompanied by an acknowledgement that Celan has effected an "ironic" revision in the biblical symbolism of, first , the

17. As Felstiner. 36-39, and earlier commentators have noted, the name "Margarete" points to Goethe's Faust. It is a curious coincidence of literary history that Mikhail Bulgakov (d. 1940) had, a few years earlier , brought together another Margarita and another Master in his indirect denunciation of another tyranny. The epigraph for Master and Margarita is taken from Faust.

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bride, who represents the king's fertile land, IS and, second, the formulaic "milk and honey ", signifying abundance and wealth. It is certain that there is nothing either in the Song of Solomon or in the Overbeck-Pforr project that invites the mythemic fusion that creates such an anti-nutrient as "black milk". Celan makes "black milk" his primary, and ironic , emblem of Death. Ironic because, whereas (white) milk is primarily associated with suckling and infancy, Celan presents an image associated with the brutal end of a life rather than with its tender origins. In Celan's verse, the myth of death dominates memory . I have chosen to read "Todesfuge" as embodying the modernist disposition towards the making of " myth" , but the question as to what qualities a Modernist text to be regarded as "mythopoetic" remains to be answered. Why is one poem more constitutive of "myth" than another? To a certain degree, each reader must answer that question for himself, for myth, it is said , re-affirms the truth of the formula, de te fabula . As a general rule, it could be said that if one merely loses oneself in the narrative, instead of finding oneself, then the story has the force of fable but not of myth. If an emblem unlocks no doors to a primordial reality , then it lacks the power of the "nocturnal word" that enunciates "a primary metaphysics"." Since , as readers, we are in possession of the knowledge as to where (and with whom) any particular modern myth originated, the text to achieve the status of myth must, in a sense, be released from the possession of the individual. The mytho-poet must "empty himself' of his creation in an act of kenosis. As Yeats said of his poetic "coat / Covered with embroideries / Out of old mythologies", let the "fools" take it: "For there 's more enterprise / In walking naked" ("A Coat")." The opening image of Celan 's "black milk" constitutes an important "key" to the recognition of the poem's "mythic" significance. It makes us, figuratively speaking, prick up our ears. According to Cassirer, mythical thinking concentrates the energy of the ego on a single point "instead of extensive distribution, intensive compression"." This domination of memory might, in an analogy with Schiller's Spieltrieb, be called a "drive to myth". Indeed, I would go further and say that the myth-drive is the most intense expression of the play-drive. To test this claim, I should like 18. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, London, 1983, 155. 19. Marcel Detienne, The Creation of Mythology, trans. Margaret Cook, Chicago, 1986, 120-21. 20. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems, London, 1965, 142. 21. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans., Suzanne K. Langer, New York, 1946,33.

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to substitute the word "myth" for " play" in the seventh paragraph of Schiller's fifteenth Aesthetic Letter, to show how well it fits the context. I am adapting Willoughby and Wilkinson 's English translation: But how can we speak of mere myth, when we know that it is precisely myth and myth alone, which of all man 's states and conditions is the one which makes him whole and unfolds both sides of his nature at once? What you , according to your idea of the matter, call limitation, I, according to mine - which I have justified by proof - call expansion." The engrossment of mind referred to in Yeats 's line from "T he Circus Animals' Desertion" that I have understood as involving a focus upon the heart-mystery as well as an enlargement of being is thus equivalent both to Schiller's "expansion" , in its sense of wholeness and unfolding, and to Cassirer's "intensive compression", that concentrates the energy of the ego upon a single point. The emblematic "black milk" is the catalyst that allows the mytheme of Death-in-life, or Life-in-death, so conspicuous in all cultures, and which runs like a leitmotiv through the "dark days" of modernist poetry, to unfold in Celan's brooding Jeremiad. If it is possible to reduce the topic of the poem to such a formulation as " Death-in-life" , then the category of myth , as defined by Eliad e, into which it falls would be that of myths of origin : Every origin myth narrates and justifies a "new situation" - new in the sense that it did not exist from the beginning of the World. Origin myths continue and complete the cosmogonic myth; they tell how the world was changed, made richer or poorer (Eliade, 21). In discussing different manifestations of the return to the origin, Eliade argues that , at the beginning of the twentieth century, when psychoanalysis "developed techniques capable of showing us the 'beginnings' of our personal history" (Eliade, 77), the possibility of "going back" to the Time of the origin, previously available to the community, through a collective ritual, was now opened up to the individual through such therapeutic means as the interpretation of dreams, 22. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, eds and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Oxford, 1967, 105.

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in which "the individual ' s return to the origin is conceived as an opportunity for renewing and regenerating the existence of him who undertakes it" (Eliade, 79). Two of Freud' s ideas, as Eliade remarks, have a bearing on the mythic interest in recovering the past: "(1) the bliss of the 'origin' and 'beginnings' of the human being, and (2) the idea that through memory, or by a 'going back' , one can relive certain traumatic incidents of early childhood" (Eliade, 78). Freud "discovered the decisive role of the 'primordial and paradisal time' of earliest childhood". This "primordial and paradisal" time before time becomes, for each individual, a "living time" that is, as Eliade points out, the time of bliss before weaning. It is, in other words, the time of the mother's milk. I shall now turn away from the twentieth-century emblem of "black milk" to look at an earlier instantiation of the same image. It is to be found in the Kalevala, a work that, as Eino Friberg has written , presents "a view of the past to be taken as a view of the future?" - a description which would be equally apt for "Todesfuge", The Kalevala is an example of the kind of "second-order mythology" (K, 14), which flourished in the nineteenth century as European nations came to grips with their cultural origins. The compilation of Elias Lonnrot (1802-1884) has its counterparts in the work of the Brothers Grimm in Germany, and Aleksandr Afanasiev in Russia, to cite but two obvious examples, but as regards the focus on a group of culture-heroes Lonnrot is perhaps closer to Charlotte Guest in her recuperation of the Mabinogion . In the case of the Mabinogion; these heroes are related to the Arthur-complex; in the Kalevala they centre on the nucleus of three male-archetypes: Lemminkainen, the pursuer of women, llmarinen, the magical smith, and Vainarnoinen, the wise bard. According to Friberg, the Kalevala "revolves around a core meditation on the nature of exchange and mediation" (K, 20) . Like all mythic narratives, it concerns itself with origins. Runo nine is about the Healing of Vainamoinen, who has wounded himself in the leg with his axe while building a boat. The flow of blood is unstaunchable. ("Seven boatfuls and eight vats / Of blood are on the floor already" before the ninth runo begins.i') The only cure available to Vainamoinen is for him to dominate the metal that wounded him. As Friberg comments: 'The most powerful magic is in the knowledge of the origin word. To know the birth and breeding of a thing or person, to reveal it, recite it, and name it is to 23. The Kalevala: Epic of the Finnish People, trans. Eino Friberg. Ed. and Introduction by George C. Schoolfield, Helsinki, 1988. Hereafter, K. 24. All translations from the Kalevala are by Eino Friberg.

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have power over it" (K, 73). Eliade, in commenting on the same episode, remarks that "the origin of remedies is closely connected with the history of the origin of the World " (Eliade, 17). The greater part of this runo of nearly 600 lines is taken up with Vainamoinen's incantation about the origin of iron. It is the opening of this long speech that I shall discuss . It concerns the genealogy of iron, the youngest of three brothers, coming after water and fire. For iron to be born , a mother must be created. Or, rather , a triad of mothers, who come into being parthenogenetically from Ukko, the lord of creation: Ukko, lord of heaven above , Rubbed his palms, then pressed them down Both together on his left knee . This gave birth to three young maidens, All of them creation's daughters, Mothers to the are of iron ... These three maidens are characterized by what can best be described as "exuberance". "With their full breasts overbrimming / As their nipples ached for milking", Vainamoinen tells his audience, they "Sprayed their milk upon the earth". This, of course, is in contrast to the blood that the old sage-and-singer is pouring forth , Friberg has remarked upon the structural relationship of dyads and triads in the Kaleva/a , noting that there are "many cases where a dyad subserves a triadic relationship" (K , 20). Here the opposition between "blood", draining away in token of death , and "milk ", flowing copiously in token of life, must be seen as subservient to the triad of the maidens, differentiated primarily by the "colour" of their milk. Thus the first one milked out black milk, She the oldest of the maidens; And the second spilled out white milk, She the second of the maidens; And the third one sprayed down red milk, She the youngest of the maidens. If red is the colour of the fire to which man applies the mineral in order to shape it for his own ends as well as the colour of the blood that flows in consequence, then black is both the colour of the earth from which the mineral is extracted and a signifier of the original, undifferentiated chthonic matrix. One is made aware also of a movement from the darkness

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of the underworld to the flaming brightness of the sun. It is in this respect that the account presents a triadic structure rather than a dyadic opposition, for it explains, as far as myths do explain, man ' s place in the cosmic pattern. Standing between two extremes, man is the measure of being , closest to the steel , tempered but not self-destructive, which is nurtured by the "white" milk of the mother. The image of "black milk" (mustan ma ion ) in the Kalevala has a different function from that of the same image in "Todesfuge". In the Finnish epic, it stands not in opposition to "white milk" but as one in a set of three option s, since cosmogonic myths tend towards the triadic , with man and his utensil s at the centre, whereas, in Celan's poem, the device of dyadic pairing, most noticeably in the last two lines, is foregrounded in consistency with the concept of "alteration" that one encounters in later "myths of origin", which (as Eliade notes) narrate and justify a "new situation". Although in Celan's poem the "white milk" of normal existence has drained away, and is not even mentioned, its place has been taken by "golden hair" . "Golden hair" may be considered to allude ironically to the fact that, traditionally, the golden mean is a measure of man's concord with his world , but it is also an image that allows Celan to introduce the "Jewish" motif of black-and-gold. Myth dominates through the power of its incantatory disloc ation of everyday reality, of the space-time conti nuum that we normally measure by the clock. Celan 's "Schwarze Milch der Friihe" , his "black milk" of a Shelleyan "eternal morning" makes time go haywire: "wi r trinken sie abends I wir trinken sie mittags und morgen s wir trinken sie nachts I wir trinken und trinken". Anamnesis, here, is "disorienting" in the full sense of the word. I began with a quotation in which Barthes argued that wine , in contrast to milk, could be regarded as "a part of society because it provides a basis not only for a morality but also for an environment". I hope that in the course of the present investigation I have at least gone some way to redres s the balance by making a case that for one poet excluded from the convivial joys of society it was possible to return to an earlier symbolic order to discover an alternative basis for a morality and also for an environment in what Barthes, the prototypical, French, postmodern theorist , considered to be nothing more than "anti-wine".

"TO UNSCREW THE INSCRUTABLE": MYTH AS FICTION AND BELIEF IN EZRA POUND'S CANTOS PETER NICHOLLS The quotation in my title - "To unscrew the inscrutable" - is from Pound's Canto XCVIII, part of the sequence called Thrones which he wrote during his thirteen -year incarceration in St. Elizabeth's hospital in Washington DC. I It is the idea of some essenti al inscrutability attaching to myth which I want to look at here. Is the myth-making of Pound's epic poem a matter of literary fiction , or is it meant to command our belief in some way? And, to pursue that question further, is there then some dangerous oscillation in The Cantos between "belief' , on the one hand, and "faith", on the other? The idea of unscrewing the inscrutable seems to have come from one of Pound's fellow inmates in the asylum, a cert ain Warren G. Peabody. It is an amusing word-play which "rhymes" with one of Pound's own aphorisms in a later Canto: "And who try to use the mind for the senses / drive screws with a hammer" (CIV/741 ). In the strange world of St. Elizabeth's it is not infrequent that a chance utterance should connect with the deeper currents of Pound 's reading. History , at this point in The Cantos, has taken on decidedly conspiratorial qualities, and in these lines we find that Old Peabody 's aphorism seems obliquely to echo some words of the Greek historian Procopius who apparently also observed that "the nature of the god" must resist scrutiny.' Looking at just this passage for a moment, I think we can observe a rather characteristic tension in Pound's thinking. On the one hand , he seems to endorse these claims for the inscrutability of the divine, while , on the other, he stres ses the need for a clear language of ethical prescription (the source used here is Frederick Baller 's translation of the neoConfucian Sacred Edict of K 'ang Hsi, a text subsequently revised several times with a. view to greater simplicity and directness. Pound then I. The Cantos of Ezra Pound, New York, 1977, 688. The relevant lines read:

"T o unscrew (qnxnv 'tau veou) / Procopius and old Peabody) the inscrutable ' / Antoninus and Leo got down the percentage ." Further references to The Cantos will be given in the text. 2. For Pound' s reading of Procopius at this time (presumably The History of Justinian rather than The Secret History). see A Catalogue of the Poetry Notebooks of Ezra Pound, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, Newhaven, 1980,85 .

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co nnects these later attempts at revision with Dante' s endorsement of the vernacular as the langu age of poetry: "in volgar' / eloquio taking the sense down to the people" .(XCYIIl/688). Of course, one way of unscrew ing the inscrutable is to give it tangible representation; Pound uses the Edict to stress the danger of redu cing the divine form to a material object with co mmercial value (" Does god need a clay mod el? gilded?"). But there is another threat to the spiritual here: furth er down the page we read: " hua(4) t'ou(2), these tongue words". In Pound ' s source, Baller translates: "All this talk about fasts , gettin g up proc essions ... is a plan for swindling you".' and Pound ' s point seems to be that we should not waste time in idle speculation about the gods when serious thought needs to be given to more clearly secul ar matters (lik e the fiscal laws to which Antoninus and Leo attended, for example). But while this brisk dismissal of enquiry into spiritual experience accords with Pound's increasingly dciwnhome exposi tion of Confucian ethic s, it is surely an odd conclusion to draw so late in a poem which has had so much to say about the god s and about the hum anizing potential of mod em myth-making. After Pound' s dogged investigation of visionary idioms and terminol ogies - .most not able, perhaps, in his sustained interest in scholastic thinking - the split which opens up here between inscrutability, on the one hand , and the very pragmatic "grits in the mortar" (XCYIIIJ689), on the other , raises some large-scale ques tion s about Pound ian mythopoeia. In one sense , those questions tum on the relation of myth to writing. If myth is tied to ideas of some return to origin, to a founding moment from which subsequent history flow s, and if myth in restoring what is lost articulates a fantasy of immanence and identity, then in an obvious way , writing, with its temporal movement and its withdrawal of Being into "the singularity of the word'" offers something very different. There is, I think , a tension here betw een myth and writing which runs deep in Pound's work. Let me go back, briefly, to some of his early comments about myth and its origins. In an essay published in 1918, for example, Pound suggests that myth came into being as a way of narrating an otherwise inexplicable experience: "The first myths arose," he says, "when a man walked sheer into 'nonsense ' , that is to say, when some very vivid and 3. See David M. Gordon, "Pound's Use of the Sacred Edict in Canto 98", Paideuma, [vII (Spring 1975), 134-35 (my emphases). 4. Cf. Herman Rapaport, Heidegger and Derrida: Reflections on Time and Language, Lincoln: Nb. and London, 1989, 149: "The pas as retrait ... would be the opening of a relation even as what opens it withdraws into the singularity of a word, pas."

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undeniable adventure befell him, and he told someone else who called him a liar.:" Myth, Pound concludes, is synonymous with "a work of art", being what he calls "an impersonal or objective story woven out of [a man's] own emotion , as the nearest equation that he was capable of putting into words ." Through the invention of myth an actual experience is translated into fiction , into an aesthetic form which ensures that the "putting into words" does not entail a reduction of the visionary to the order of mere "meaning". Modernity is the story of just such a reduction , beginning, says Pound , "when some unpleasing Semite or Parsee or Syrian began to use myths for social propaganda, when the myth was degraded into an allegory or a fable, and that was the beginning of the end." Pound's thought on these matters has certain obviously nineteenthcentury features, not least his conviction that the persistent appeal of the old mythologies testifies to what he called "a sort of permanent basis in humanity" ." The phrase recalls , for example, Walter Pater 's similar talk of a "broad foundation, in mere human nature" which he characterized as "a universal pagan sentiment".' It was this "sentiment", a quasi-Platonic form of reminiscence, which promised to restore humanity to an experience of immanent totality , and to bring freedom from the constraints of a utilitarian rationalism. Pater stressed that the "pagan sentiment ... has lingered far onward into the Christian world" , but, like Pound after him, he was keenly aware of the price paid for the institutionalizing of religion: "Always, the fixed element is the religious observance", notes Pater, "the fluid, unmixed element is the myth, the religious conception". It is this last, "the aesthetic element" which , he says, "expands with the freedom and mobility of the intellect" (Pater, 201). Pound was trying to establish a similarly "fluid" type of religious or visionary sensibility, and his early speculations about "energy" and "vibrations" conflated a "scientific" vocabulary with notions drawn from theosophy to produce a syncretistic (and avowedly "modern" ) form of mythopoeic awareness. Myth was "fluid" so long as it remained, if not exactly pre-ethical, then indeterminate with respect to dogma and belief. This is how Pound put it in the early essay "Psychology and Troubadours": Christianity and all other forms of ecstatic religion ... are not in inception dogma or propaganda of something called the one truth 5. "Arnold Dolmetsch " (1918), in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound , ed. T. S. Eliot, London, 1968,431 . 6. The Spirit of Romance, New York, 1968. 92. 7. Walter Pater, The Renaissance . London, 1910,201. Hereafter, Pater.

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Peter Nicholls or the universal truth ; they seem little conce rned with ethics; their gene ral obj ect appears to be to stimulate so me sort of co nfidence in the life-force.'

In reaching back to the earliest mom ent of Christianity , Pound mak es myth opoeia the ground for a certain psychi c "fluidity" : ecstatic religion connotes a radi cal displacement from the moral self of institutionalized Christianity, literally a "s tanding outside oneself'. It is a displ acem ent which also , of course, has a temporal dimension, and arg uably the most distin ctive featur e of Pound 's early volumes is the co nnection they make betwe en myth and anachronism. Initi ally , this operates primarily at the level of theme, associating the poet's own sen se of a literal (and, of cou rse, chosen ) "exile" from the land of his birth with a more generalized , Paterian mood of "ho mesickness" for an earlier age. Poems like "In Durance" dramatize this feeling of alienation by evoking in Yeatsi an style those "far halls of mem ory"? in wh ich the ec hoes of a more habitable past seem still to reson ate. To review Pound ' s early volumes with this theme in mind is to be struck by the way in wh ich images of transcendental estrangement are coupled with those of narci ssism. In "Plotinus", for example: But I was lonely as a lonely child. I cried amid the void and heard no cry, And then for utter loneliness, made I New thoughts as crescent images of me. And with them was my essence reconciled While fear went forth from mine eternity." One reason for Pound's frequent recourse to stylistic pastiche in the early poems is perhaps that it offered a way of moving beyond this selfreflecting poetics, by making the writer seem merely the passive vehicle and conduit for images deriving from "the great dead days " C'Piere Vidal Old"). Such poems couple the imagery of a sensuous Platonism with the formal device of reminiscence, but they deri ve their consolatory power 8. The Spirit of Romance, 95. (Pound 's emph ases). 9. Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Michael John King, London , 1977, 115. The phrase recalls Yeats 's early preference for both remoteness and abstraction, as in his talk of "images that remind us of vast passions , the vagueness of past times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance" (Essays and Introductions, New York, 1961,243). 10. "Plotinus", ibid., 36.

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from a capacity to efface the poetic self which is otherwise felt to be trapped in the closed moment of modernity: "How our modernity, / Nervewracked and broken, turns / Against time 's way and all the way of things, / Crying with weak and egoistic cries! " ("Und Drang"), This view of the self is expressed almost programmatically in the early poem "Histrion" where Pound conjures with the Emersonian idea that "the souls of all men great / At times pass through us, / And we are melted into them, and are not / Save reflexions of their souls". Here the aesthetic of the arrested moment allows the past to return, but it does so at the expense of the poetic sensibility which is invaded or possessed by it. The present tense of the poem is eclipsed by the fantasy of a return to origin : " So cease we from all being for the time, / And these, the Masters of the Soul, live on." At this stage, then , the ecstatic experiences encoded in myth produce a kind of passivity or lack of agency. For Pound, the crucial move away from this epistemology came with the invention of Imagism. The campaign for Imagism was , in one respect, an attempt to achieve a more concentrated sense of a collision of time-schemes, though in its first format the image was still tied to a late romantic convention of writing about special moments. Within early modernism, Pater's "moment" had become the "impression" of Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. What is particularly important about the distinction between "image" and "impression" is that the "impression" is typically unmixed. Its intensity results from its capacity to make one moment govern an emotional state. As Ford put it in his key essay "On Impressionism", " to import into the record of observations of one moment the observations of a moment altogether different is not Impressionism. For Impressionism is a thing altogether momentary". I I It was, however, precisely this interaction of different moments which interested Pound, and his use of juxtaposition suggested a way of making a formal hiatus or pause - a gap between two parts of the poem - a space in which the reader might construe relationship. This conception of the image also contained in germ Pound's evolving notion of translation as a kind of model for the writing process itself - translation, that is, as a form of re-inscription which allows past and present languages to exist in tension with each other. Such " Making It New" thus offered release from that world of the early poems in which desire was inextricably coloured by II . Critical Writings of Ford Madox Ford, ed. Frank MacShane, Lincoln : Nb., 1964,40. Ford goes on to say that impressionism allows for "superimposed emotions", but it is clear from the thrust of his argument that he is concerned primarily with "the record of the impression of a moment", "the impression, not the corrected chronicle" (41) .

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nostalgia and loss, and where the poem was always the unhappy copy of some lost original. Now the appearance of the present tense of writing made the process of myth-making a much more active one - no longer just the attempted reconstitution of lost originals, but the rewriting of them. In his book The Inoperative Community, the French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy speaks of writing as an "interruption" of myth : "once myth is interrupted, writing recounts our history to us again. "12 The terms of this opposition bear on what I have described in Pound's early work and also point forward to the later entanglement of myth with politics in The Cantos. Nancy suggests that myth expresses a desire for communion "fusion in a shared, immanent Being" (Nancy, xxxiii), the community that becomes "a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader)" (Nancy, xxxix); by way of contrast, Nancy proposes an idea of community based on "being in common" in which there is no single social identity, but rather an experience of "singularity" through which Being is understood as both divided and shared (Nancy, xxviii), what Nancy calls a "strange being-theone-with-the-other to which we are exposed" (xxxix). It is literature which "puts into play nothing other than being in common", says Nancy (Nancy, 65) . One might say that the fantasy of immanence and fusion which underlies the use of myth in many of Pound's early poems is "interrupted" by his move toward forms of "convoluted" temporality. I think this also explains the importance to Pound of his discovery of the Japanese Noh theatre. For a peculiarity of Noh (or at least of the form which most intrigued Pound), is that it is constructed from a double time-scheme, its main action taking place at once in the present of the play's performance and in the past of stylized recollection (usually in the form of a dream which occupies the second half of the play). Such plays thus contain two different chronologies, even though the characters are the same. More is involved than a simple juxtaposition of past and present, for the reversal of chronology produces a sort of compound tense in which the past may seem open to change or revision." This trope of a return breaks open any dream of absolute presence at the same time as it provides a powerful figure for the devices of textual imitation - of pastiche, allusion, citation, translation - which would come to distinguish Anglo-American modernism. Pound's idea of "Making it 12. Jean Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Minneapolis and Oxford, 1991, 69. 13. For a detailed discussion of Pound's work on the Noh plays, see my "An Experiment with Time: Ezra Pound and the Example of the Japanese Noh", Modern Language Review, xcII (January 1995), 1-13.

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New" thus points not simply to an idea of cultural renovation, but to a far more complex process whereby two different times are grafted together, each somehow "supplementing" the other. The Cantos was to become a palimpsest in which, ideally, one text might overlay another without effacing or negating it. In the early sections of the poem, the tension between different times and spaces allows a praxis of creation and discovery which sustains the intellectual openness and methodological self-consciousness underlying Pound 's earliest plans for the work. In contrast to his first excursions into myth, these Cantos employ allusion and translation in a decidedly projective way . There are still plenty of PreRaphaelite traces in the writing, notably in the exotic maidens and lavish tableau settings, but Pound now attempts to make myth a condition of writing rather than simply an external ground of reference. Myth still functions as an avowed fiction, and its privileged landscapes and rhythms offer Pound a means of suspending closure, of keeping the poem moving, directed into an uncertain future. In that sense, the erotic, affective component of myth is crucial, since it allows the poem to express a desire for order and coherence without settling into premature certainty and simple moral judgement. The emphasis throughout these early sections is on the multiplicity of voices ("ply over ply" , as Pound describes his elaborate layering of elements), and in this way authorial presence is dissolved into many incarnations. The method is a radical one , for it is not simply that lyric coherence of "mood" is broken, but that our most fundamental expectations of poetry have to be revised as we are called upon to test and evaluate the extremely varied materials Pound weaves together. Yet Pound's direct engagement with the pressing political and economic questions of his day could not long postpone the emergence of a polemical axis to the poem. Once the diagnostic tendency had been fully established it was only a matter of time before "history" would mutate into a more programmatic narrative of right or wrong choices. Increasingly the poem would concern itself with definitions of just authority, even as the writing began to close down questions about its own judgemental legitimacy. Where the early Cantos had invited the reader's scepticism, now the poem began to demand a certain faith ; and as Pound began to discover in Mussolini a stronger, more authoritative self-image, so the poem acquired an intransigent, often hectoring tone."

14. For an account of these developments, see my Ezra Pound: Politics. Economics and Writing, London, 1984.

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The Cantos now moved in their middle phase toward the more continuous and extended "Enlightenment" narratives of China and America , a move partially prepared for by some of the lavish mythic celebrations of the mid-Cantos. Myth began to operate here less as a fiction than as an absolute ground of value. Canto XLVII provides a memorable example. Here Pound gathers together the Odyssean quest motif of his own poem, and embeds the hero 's search for sexual knowledge in the knowledge of natural process which ensures its recurrence (Hesiod's injunction to "Begin thy plowing ..."). The Canto provides a rich expression of Pound's traditionalism, its ascending rhythms embodying the desire for knowledge which is, for him, at once the expression of focused will and the energy which drives a truly epic narrative. Highly characteristic of The Cantos is this emphasis on narrative as the vehicle of the heroic will and on the grounding of language in nature - hence the ritual act of penetrating woman and mountain. Yet the heroic narrative has its own problems, and, as Charles Bernstein has observed, it frequently "translates into a will to dominate language rather than let it be (heard) .... In short, the ' humanist' claims of the heroic help evade the responsibility for creating a prosody not based on received idealizations of speech and the willful man"." There are several lines of implication here, but the idea of the "willful man" has a particular relevance to the structure of The Cantos as epic narrative. Wyndham Lewis spotted the problem early on. Pound, he observed, cannot finally accept the deadness and essential otherness of the past; he is always , as Lewis put it, trying to "get into the skin of somebody else". Pound , he says, is "in love with the past" , always wanting to inhabit it, to find himself at home everywhere through repeated acts of imaginative colonization." This tendency toward a narcissistic construction of the past would ultimately reopen those romantic fantasies of origin and presence which Pound 's earlier work had sought to evade . In one sense his experiment had come full circle: where the -real discovery had been that writing might productively "interrupt" myth, now history was being pressured to tum into myth as Pound invested more and more heavily in a unitary model of social process - "communion", to use Nancy's word, a society fantasized as one in its "shared, immanent Being". In the late Cantos, Pound would turn increasingly to primitive agrarian societies in

15. Charles Bernstein, Content's Dream: Essays 1975·1984, Los Angeles, 1986, 329. 16. Wyndham Lewis. Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards. Santa Rosa, 1993.68.

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order to discover this principle of mythic totality and identity - 'T he whole tribe is from one man's body" (XCIX/708). From one point of view , though, this conflation of the social and mythic had a particular irony , since it occurred at just that point in Pound 's career when he was insisting loudly on the priority of secular values. In Guide to Kulchur (1938), for example, he actually rejects Homeric myth as "irresponsible" : Plato's Republic notwithstanding, the greek philosophers did not feel communal responsibilities .... The sense of coordination, of the individual in a milieu is not in them .... Rome was the responsible ruler. The concentration or emphasis on eternity is not social . The sense of responsibility, the need for coordination of individuals in Kung's teaching differ s radically both from early Christian absoluti sm and from the maritime adventure morals of Odysseus or the loose talk of argumentative greeks." That word "coordination" is darkly resonant, allowing us to glimpse the combination of coercion with a myth of social coherence which would now colour much of Pound 's thinking. As we move into the early 1940s, we find an increasingly embattled tone in the writing, and in the Italian journalism he produced during these years mythic elements familiar from earlier parts of The Cantos are disconcertingly refigured as unquestionable truths . One theme is constant: history can be understood only in terms of a perpetual struggle between the pure "European" values of Catholicism, and the rootless, " anti-statal", monopolistic values of Hebraism and Protestantism. The latter, he claims, "lost almost all its holiness, all, that is, which derives from reverence for the divine , inherent in the grain. It became Hebraic, ceasing to be European " . 18 The idea of a "grain-rite" figure s prominently in these pieces , as Pound argues that "the agricultural morality remains. The grain is and remains sacred". Judaism subverts the "European" belief in "the spirit ... of enlightening fertility", its alien "poison" destroying the old mythological rites and putting in their place the "pre-ethical" and "preagricultural" "blood-rites" of the Old Testament. The "truth" of myth is now self-evident, since the ethical is grounded in a sacramental

17. Ezra Pound , Guide to Kulchur, London, 1966, 38. (1 September 1940) , 1. (My translation) .

18. "Sui serio", Meridiana di Roma, v/35

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agrarianism ("Olive oil is sacred," writes Pound , " It is worthy of a rite"); " and since myth is now a repository of "faith", any interruption of it by writing is to be feared and resisted, since this would be to expose the fantasy of social cohesiveness to the dispersive force of singularity and difference. By 1942, Pound was telling his readers: faith is weakened by debates , [which are] more or less rabbinical and if not rabbinical at least anti-totalitarian .... Faith is totalitarian. The mystery is totalitarian. The sacred symbols are totalitarian .... That fatal inclination to want to understand logically and syllogistically what is incomprehensible is Hebrew and Protestant ." Passages like these provide an interesting gloss on the next main sequence, The Pisan Cantos , written after the collapse of Mussolini's regime , when Pound was held at the Detention Camp awaiting extradition to America. Here the political and mythological fold together in a mourning of lost origins and opportuniti es." And while, on the face of it, the allusiveness of Pound's text and its dazzling stylistic manoeuvres seem to return to the "writerly" investments of the earlier sections, the poem is drawn increasingly toward a language removed from social transactions. I am thinking, of course, of Pound 's attraction to Chinese ideograms here and throughout the remaining Cantos, for these characters are invoked outside of any governing syntax so as to imply a kind of absoluteness of meaning. Single words start to function almost as religious symbols here , and writing (to adapt Nancy 's argument) is frozen into the self-identity of myth . Yet this is not quite the whole story about Pound 's poem, and in thinking of it as perhaps the modernist work par excellence , we sometimes forget that its final sequence, Drafts and Fragments, appeared much later , in 1970. Another type of anachronism, perhaps, for here we find passages of writing which somehow deviate from, or exceed, the protocols which had structured the earlier sections - passages, in short, where Pound's "willful" narrative is occasionally suspended, yielding a momentary glimpse of a different kind of temporality. These are occasions in which 19. "Idee fondamentali" , Meridiana di Roma, vnl19 (10 May 1942), I. (My translation). 20. "Nella pelle di pantera", Meridiana di Roma, VIIJ44 (I November I942), 2. (My translation). 21. For a detailed discussion, see my Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing, 161-81.

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the writing seems to dissolve the embedded connections between language, authority and myth, occasions when narrative seems to lose its external ground and to move from ideology toward a more specifically linguistic encounter. The opening of Canto CX, the first of the new sequence, provides the best example of this sort of moment: Thy quiet house ' The crozier's curve runs in the wall , The harl , feather-white, as a dolphin on sea-brink I am all for Verkehr without tyranny - wake exultant in caracole Hast' ou seen boat's wave on sea-wall, how crests it? What panache? paw-flap, wave-tap, that is gaiety, Toba Sojo, toward limpidity, that is exultance, here the crest runs on wall che paion ' si al vent' 2Har-2Ia-lllti 3k ,o of the wind sway ... The setting - Torcello, in the Venetian lagoon, and , specifically. the Basilica there - summons a now familiar imagery of water and stone which revives echoes of the very earliest Cantos. But there is an interesting tension in the lines - a tension between the usual posture of authority ("1 am all for Verkehr without tyranny", CXJ777) and a sort of handing over to langu age which is quite different from Pound's more usual concern with the "welding of word and thing"." The dense allusiveness of the text interweaves different moments from a remote past, but this intense cultural regard is complemented by a non-referential wordplay which dramatizes language as event, as an autonomous temporal structure. We may observe a new kind of reflexivity in the writing here

22. Ezra Pound, Selected Letters 1907-1941 , ed. D. D. Paige, London , 1971, 158.

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which works against the sort of finality and closure which is epitomized in the ideograms of the Pisan sequence." The lines open with a complex sense of immemorial time. The Madonna's "house", the Basilica, is "quiet", but carries the mark, or "curve", of the Bishop's staff. This image is then connected with the Middle English word "harl" , meaning fibers, filaments, the crest of a bird, perhaps - an association Pound then develops in "featherwhite". This in turn is like foam on a wave, leading us sinuously to the dolphin, a classical symbol of immortality, here glimpsed on "sea brink". Or on "w ave exultant": like the reference in an earlier Canto ("Circa 1941 ") to the black cat with its tail "exalted" (800), Pound's phrase exploits etymology to catch the sense of both literal elevation and joy. Then we have "caracole", an unusual word with a range of meanings: "shell" , "winding stair", but the most relevant is its technical meaning as a term from dressage, "a horseman's ceremonial half-turn to the left or right" (OED) . This is, one might think, a strange intrusion into the seascape of the Lagoon, but after another allusion to "crest", in tum recalling the feathers of the "harl", Pound pursues it further, giving us "panache", another word with rich etymological associations: literally, the plume of a helmet, but also, metaphorically, style and arrogance. With "paw flap " and "wave tap" familiar rhythmic figures are echoed from the earliest Cantos, further connecting the water's movement with metamorphosis and the motion of animals. The salute to Toba Sojo, a Buddhist painter whose "limpidity" of style Pound admires, both gives the network of allusions a specific cultural signature and adds to the mood of humour and gaiety. (Toba Sojo, Fenollosa tells us, met the decadent atmosphere of his time with satire: "The work", he says, "was dashed off in almost pure line, but with a racy vigour and sweep of motion that make it live.'?") It is hard to define precisely what is going on in Pound's lines, though it's clear that this complex figure of movement, of water, rider, wind and dolphin, far exceeds the range of the simple image. I think that this has something to do with a momentary shift in Pound's way of dealing with history. For what happens is a kind of displacement away from the 23. Scott Hamilton, Ezra Pound and the Symbolist Inheritance, Princeton, 1992, also remarks a late "reversal of Pound's earlier poetics of assertion and ... his new willingness to entertain previously threatening and unexplored states of mind" (184). Hamilton argues that what I have called the "reflexivity" of some of the late Cantos reconnects Pound to the Symbolist (Mallarrnean) tradition. 24. Ernest Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, New York, 1963, 175. See Massimo Bacigalupo, The Formed Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound, New York, 1980,464, for an alternative source.

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resources of a knowable past toward an idea of language as a discontinuous temporal medium. Hence Pound's way of emphasizing the functions of inscription here - the trace left in the wall by the boat 's "wake", a word which may remind us too that the "quiet" of the Basilica is also the quietness of absence and of death . And aptly so, since the things about which we read in these lines aren 't actually there in any simple sense. There is an instability or evanescence which parallels the complex mood of the passage as it conjoins "gaiety" with death . So the partially quoted Italian phrase, "Che paion ' si al vent [esser leggieri)" - "who seem so [light] upon the wind" - alludes to Dante 's Paolo and Francesca whose illicit desires have doomed them to the Inferno, while the phrase which follows refers to the ceremonies that the Na Khi people of Western China used to expiate the spirits of suicides. Without these so-called "Wind sway" rites, the spirits were believed to become dangerous wind-demons." Taken together, then , the two allusions connect gaiety and desire with death , but do so in a curiously non-judgmental way , submerging narrative implications in the movements of the "wind sway". Yet what is most striking about the lines is that they strive to capture not some epiphanic release from time, but a far more complex sense of speaking simultaneously from within and beyond time ; of speaking, as it were , from the horizon of mortality - something which is obliquely thematized, as it had been in The Pisan Cantos, by the allusion to suicide, but which is more richly figured in a sense of the passing away of language, of its yielding up of any willed anchorage in some notion of nature or the mythic "real". (In more Heideggerian terms , perhaps, we might speak of a certain "withdrawal" in place of reference)." So too the "willful" man recedes here , not because of guilt or remorse, but because the self is forced to acknowledge its own discontinuity, its immersion in a time it can never fully call its own . Such an acknowledgement distracts the poem from its complementary thematics of authority and humility, with the figures of natural process allowing - unusually - a postponement of Poundian moralism. Here, in this short but extraordinarily rich passage from Canto CX we may read 25. Dante, Inferno, v, 75; for the various works by Joseph Rock drawn on here by Pound, see Carroll F. Terrell , A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993, 713. 26. Cf. Emmanuel Levinas , Sur Maurice Blanchot: "What would be needed would be an indication that would reveal the withdrawal of the indicated , instead of a reference that rejoins it. Such is a trace, in its emphasis and desolation. " Quoted in Timothy Clark, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida 's Notion and Practice of Literature, Cambridge, 1992, 100.

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many of the tensions in Pound 's work as a whole and none more problematic than that between myth and writing. Such moments are rare, partly, I think, because they represent a certain danger for Pound, suggesting a play of language without any sustaining ethical ground. By displacing myth into writing , however, moments such as this threaten not only to "unscrew the inscrutable", but also to free us from that need for "faith" upon which, increasingly, The Cantos had come to depend.

MYTH AS CULTURE: THE LESSON OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN T. S. ELIOT MARC MANGANARO Myth, mythopoeia, myth-making, is cultural. Obvious though this statement might be, it cannot be over-stressed because it does not seem fully to have sunk in, at least in the history of much myth criticism of this century. In a very basic sense myth is culture. Webster's Third defines "myth" as "a usually traditional story ... that serves to unfold part of the world-view of a people". And mythos Webster's defines as "a pattern of beliefs expressing often symbolically the character or prevalent attitudes in a group or culture". Myths in this respect are part of, while also in important ways indices of, cultures ; ways of reading them. Myth expresses the culture within which it works. As Claude Levi-Strauss puts it , myths are "things to think with".' That is one take, anyway. Myths often invoke , and even purport to be, the sacred . Whether they are or not, their success often lies in their being thought to be so. A fundamental, if neglected, role of the criticism of myth is to interpret the cultural work that myths do, both in our time and in the often vast and transcultural history of the myth 's social travellings. Mid-century AngloAmerican myth criticism - such as that by Philip Wheelwright, Richard Chase, Joseph Campbell, and even Northrop Frye - sputtered out because it too often tried to attach itself to the rhetorical aim of its subject: it tried to assume the sacred which it gleaned through the mythic text: heroes with a thousand faces , burning fountains.'

a

1. Levi-Strauss's famous phrase, in the original French "bonnes penser", can be found in his Le Totemisme aujourd'hui, Paris, 1962. English translation Totemism , Boston, 1964. See Edmund Leach's Levi-Strauss, London, 1973, on the meaning (34) and the contestable translation into English (note 7, 121) of the phrase. 2. See, as leading examples of this criticism, Joseph Campbell 's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton, 1949; R. Chase's Quest for Myth, Baton Rouge, 1949, Philip Wheelwright's The Burning Fountain, Bloomington: Ind., 1968, and Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, 1957. A rich and timely assessment of midcentury myth criticism is John Vickery's edited collection, Myth and Literature: Contemporary Theory and Practice, Lincoln: Nb., 1966, especially Philip Rahv's essay "The Myth and the Powerhouse", which is an insightful early critique of myth criticism's limitations, especially regarding the school's attitude toward historical change.

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Much of the problem of such criticism was the soc ial science it depended upon. Modelled on comparative evolution ary anthropology that of James Frazer, especially - it usually argued the primacy of the universal s of world culture, esse ntialisms that soo n enough began floating above the earth. Both Campbell and Frye, in fact , actively argued against the cultura l particul arism at work in anthropologists such as Bron islaw Malinowski who put culture reso lutely into the plural - cultures - and discouraged the free-wh eeling hunt for universals. The cultural relativism animating the study of particular cultures also got in the way of schematized theories on the evolution of primitive myth into ritual and eventually liter ature; theories which were partl y imported from James Frazer and the Cambri dge Hellenists.' 1 oversimplify here for the sak e of brevity, and it sho uld be said that mid-century myth criticism consciously worked agai nst the then-dominant New Criticism whi ch, in its emphasis upon the interpretation of particular, enclose d, self-sufficient texts itself strikingl y corresponded to the anthropologica l focus upon discrete cultures . But myth criticism thereby lost the opp ortunity of linking myth to culture, as then understood, at least anthropologica lly. It work ed agai nst clarifying the value and meaning of a myth as a "story" that, to quote Webster' s again , "serves to unfold part of the world view of a people " . Anglo-American myth c riticis m in this period was not alone in this disregard . Stru ctural anthropology, as formul ated by Levi -Str auss, and ultim ately structuralist literary theory, while arguing for myths as texts through which to read how humans think, opted for a universalist definition of thinking. Myths became unimportant as local , social things to think with, but rather came to be regarded, in their linguistic incarnations, as keys to the master mythology of the pan-human mind. I am not simply claiming that mid-century theorists on myth failed because they neglected to adopt a functionali st anthropological paradigm, which, after all, like any other paradigm, is historically situated and ideologically driven. More to the point is the observation that myth criticism and Levi -Straussian structuralism chose not to conceive of myth 3. On the shifts in method and discursive style from the evolutionary to the cultural/functional anthropological approaches , see especially George Stocking 's "The Ethnographer's Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski", in Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, ed. G. Stocking, Madison, 1983,70-120; and James Clifford ' s "On Ethnographic Authority" in his The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge: Ma., 1988, 21-54. On Campbell and Frye as writers on myth who draw from evolutionar y assumption s and discursive practices, see my own Myth, Rhetoric. and the Voice of Authority, Newhaven, 1992, 18-67, 151-85.

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and mythi cizing in modern anthropological terms - that is, concerning, speaking about, relatively discrete groups of people we have , since the mid-nineteenth century, called cultures. Although myth critics did not articulate the definitions of culture their approaches to myth produced, they were nonetheless doing culture work. That is not to say quite simply, that they were acting ideologically, but to call attention to the complex history of contestations over the meaning and value of culture that they were assuming, or implicitly arguing against. Any theorizing on myth or mythic texts in this century stakes out a position , often quite complex, on the meaning, cogency, and value of culture; itself a highly flu id and powerful term. This is not the same thing, therefore, as saying, blandly, that myth, or culture as myth, is culturally constructed. It is to put the approach to myth in a cultural register and in the light of (though not dictated by) the history of the discussion of what "culture" mean s. In other words, it reads the history of mythopoeia and myth criticism in this century as one strand of what in present-day America is called the Culture Wars. Myth criticism tended to extract myths from cultural contexts and to canonize liter ary works for their success in articulating pan-human values and aspirations. One can discern in this a roughly Arnoldian view of culture, an aspect of "the best that has been thought and said in the world "," as opposed to the mor e anthropological notion of myth as expressing, in a less hierarchical, elitist manner, part of the world view of a people.' Of course the division I am tracing doubles the development of the concept of culture as it moves from Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (869) to E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), from Arnold 's notion of 4. Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman, Newhaven, 1994,5. First published in 1869. Doubtless I do simplify greatly when referring to Arnold's conception of culture as "elitist" . George Stocking, in Race. Culture. and Evolution , Chicago, 1982 [1968], 89 and Christopher Herbert, in Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago, 1991, 54-55, make the case that Arnold's definition of culture, in its complexity and its "stress upon internal, ideational factors", prepared the ground for the modem anthropological notion of culture more than did Tylor even. 5. Of course much rich work has been done in this century on local/regional myths and mythologies . Franz Boas in the early pan of the century was profoundly influential in training anthropologists in "area" studies of myth, particularly in the area of North American Indian studies. His insistence upon the intensive study of paJticular cultures, along with his methodological bent toward the study of the diffusion or spread of cultural-mythological material, worked significantly against evolutionary approaches that aimed for broad cross-cultural generalization. For a useful collection of his writings, see Race, Language. and Culture, New York, 1940.

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elite cultural production emanating from inspired individuals to that of culture, "i n its wide ethnographic sense", as a "complex whole" . Those latter words , which open Tylor's Primitive CuLture, virtual ly founded the modem activity we call cultural anthropolog y. Th e fundamental distinction of these two positions on culture, thou gh the intermixings of them are most significant, canno t be denied, and indeed some of this ce ntury's most astute social and literary critics - Raymond Willi ams among them" - have work ed away at both the assiduousness and the elasticity of these two poles of the concept of culture : the elite and anthropological. And yet since the scholars of myth preceded Arnold by several generations (one could say several centuries, depending upon one 's definit ion of the "study" of myth ), is it not more appropriate to chronicle the influ ence of the study of myth upon the emergence of the culture conce pt? If it is obj ected that I am attempting to reverse influence here , to j umble chronology, my answer is that as a forc e in mod ernity "culture" matt ers more than "myth" . It is a greater master narr ative for modernity , and postrnodernity; it functions more powerfully in our age as a thing to think wi th. Hence, whereas myth critics such as Campbell and LeviStr auss have resolutely worked against culturalist definitions and applica tions of myth , the variegated meanings of myth in common parlance owe much to the modem culturalist legacy: myth as folk production, on one hand, or as part of Cultural heritage, with a capital C. As wi th contendin g defi niti ons of culture, "myth" ought not to be limited to folk prod uction, that which anonymously reflects part of a people' s world view, for it also refers to what has become that people's elite "heritage" . Th e possibl e obliqueness of "heri tage" can be quite striking :.note , for example, the current arguments in the U.S. over the need to keep Homer, Arnold , and Eliot on college reading lists on account of their place in Ameri can "culture heritage". Penned or anonymously wrought, elite or common, telling folk titbit or pantheonic literary monument, or even outright lie, the inclusiveness of "myth" is probably what gives the concept its power; a power, I claim, that in large part derives from the strategies the term has inherited from the "culture" quarrel Arnold started one-hundred and twenty-five years ago .

6. Williams's brilliant archaeology of the term "culture" is best found in his Keywords, New York, 1976, 76-82, and in Culture and Society. /780-/950, New York, 1983 [1958], see especially xvii-xix. Hereafter, Williams.

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Culture as Myth: The Waste Land T. S. Eliot had a big investment in the Culture Wars of his times . Those

times, I should add , stretched out to some sixty years during which he played a major role as architect of literary modernism. modern literary criticism, modern academic professionalism, and - a case I will make here - of "myth" as modern method . I begin near the end, 1948. with the publication of Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. By then Eliot was established as literary artist, critic, and editor, and was already beginning to make himself a name as a social critic (he had published his first fulllength sociological treatise, The Idea of a Christian Society, in 1939). In Notes Eliot, like Arnold before him and Clifford Geertz after him, calls attention to culture as a much debated and powerfully deployable concept. Like Geertz, who twenty-five years later complained that the term has come to mean "everything" - hence , "it is necessary to choose'? - Eliot straightforwardly admits that his ambition is to "rescue this word" from abuse. "I have observed with growing anxiety the career of this word culture", Eliot confesses, and then proceeds to try to whittle the word 's meaning down to more precise proportions.' The epigraph to Eliot 's volume, incidentally, is the OED definition not of "culture" but of "definition": as "the setting of bounds; limitation" (Not es , 79) . It would be easy enough to personalize Eliot 's motive as a perverse rage for order, but in fact this resolve to bind culture has a significant correspondence to then-contemporary institutional practices within the field of anthropology. Eliot 's impulse to delimit culture, to give culture "definition" , owes an immediate debt to modern (post-evolutionary) anthropology's efforts to articulate a "culture" - and usually this means a "primit ive" culture - as an autonomous social group having its own functionally distinct set of rules." Eliot's attempt to give definition, as it happens, hardly succeeded in keeping "culture" within bounds; in fact , it produced a complex, if elitist, understanding of the term that kept debate 7. See C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures. New York. 1973. 5. 8. Notes Toward the Definition of Culture. in Christianity and Culture. New York. 1988, 89. First published in 1948. 9. Richard Handler's "Ruth Benedict and the Modernist Sensibility". in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text. ed. Marc Manganaro. Princeton. 1990. 163-64, insightfully makes the case for a comparison between the classic functionalism of Benedict's work and the prevailing traits of Eliot's social criticism. According to Handler, Benedict's emphasis upon "cultural integration and the determination of individuals by culture" is significantly consonant with Eliot's Catholicism, his filiations to "tradition," and his arguments for "cultural constraint".

158 around the term rolling. Raymond Williams noted that regardl ess of you r politi cs, you had to concede that Eliot, "in his discussion on culture ... has carri ed the argument to an important new stage". If you do not take on Eliot' s formidabl e pondering upon the term , Will iams remark ed, you might as well "retire from the field" (Wi lliams, 243) . Eliot in fact opens his first chapter with the division of "c ulture" into three aspects - the individu al, the gro up or class, and the whole society (Notes, 93) - and then notes that "the difference between the three appli cations of the term can best be apprehended" by asking what meaning "the con scious aim to achieve culture" has for eac h (No tes , 94) . He distingui shes these uses of the term fro m "the general, or anthropological sense of the word culture, as used for instance by E. B. Tylor" , and then proceeds to demonstrate what he term s the "thinness" of Arnold ' s use of the term: Arnold cleave s to the culture-as-individual mod el, which, he notes , rather simplistically ass umes that culture is pretty much con sciousl y aimed at. Arnold ' s argument, Eliot shrewdly notes, lacks a certain "social back ground " (Notes, 94). What Eliot challenges his readers to do is to keep at least three notions of culture in their heads at the same time. Cruciall y, he notes, no one individual can possess all the aspects of culture at the same time: it is only society itself as culture organis m that can do that (No tes, 95). And culture does function as organism: "c ulture is som ething that must grow " , Eliot notes in roughly Arnoldian antitechnological rhetoric; "you cannot build a tree, you can only plant it, and care for it, and wait for it to mature in its due time" (Notes , 196). He also quite resolutely state s that you cannot bring cultures back from the dead : "what is wanted is not to restore a van ished, or revive a vani shing culture und er modern conditions which make it impossible, but to grow a contemporary culture from the old roots ." (Notes , 127 ) The overt culture work wrought here within the trop e of the arborescent cannot but make me trip backwards twenty -five years to 1922, to a less overt but as significant culturalist argument cast in mythi c arborescent form: "The Burial of the Dead", part I of Eliot' s The Waste Land. Here culture bodies forth as plant/corpse dead , or dying, perhaps waiting to be reborn, in its Winter, fed "A little life with dried tubers"." That is the suspense of the poem, when it comes down to it: waiting to see what will come of the old roots . Will the culture, as embodied in the corpse/tree/Fisher King, flourish again from the roots ?

10. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays. 1909-1950, New York, 1971,37, line 7. Further references to the poem will be made within the text by line number.

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Good critical work - such as that by John Vickery - has been performed upon the complex links of mythic vegetation gods as interpreted by Frazer and the metaphors of roots , waste land, corpses, and kings that appear to structure the poem . II But that criticism, in its formalistic study of the influence of mythic materials upon the literary masterpiece, has tended to reify myth as the primary category of analysis: we are, in effect, habituated into tracing the evolving stages of myth from its primitive-folk or grand-classical forms to its individualized, ironized modernist literary sculptings. But again , I will note the need to look at the culture work being done here, in the form of arguments, or assumptions, concerning the origin, configuration, transmission, or disintegration of social processes we have come to call or recognize as "culture" . For one, critics who work to mine the mythic underground of the metaphors of king, folk , and land have in effect replic ated a culturalist assumption about the isomorphism of a people and the land. Why should it be assumed that a "culture" is something rooted in a soil? Eliot himself, in Notes, played a big part in fortifying that assumption. The organic tropes for culture do a lot of that work and, importantly , the second of his "three important conditions for culture" is "the necessity that a culture should be analyzable, geographically, into local cultures" (Notes , 87). But recent anthropological theory has challenged the unreflective acceptance of the belief that cultures are characterized by, defined by, bounded within, a stretch of territory . Arjun Appadurai, for one, has observed that such characterizing of tribal peoples by anthropologists has the effect of incarcerating those peoples, demeaningly limiting them to a compass of earth from which they have, in a sense , autochthonously sprung. And Liisa Malkki has pointed to the persistence of botanical tropes, both in popular culture and anthropological theory , that channel our thinking of cultural configuration in terms of the bind of particular cultures to particular plots of land." Certainly a good part of the power of the opening of Eliot 's poem proceeds from the deftness through which he works the trope of land as culture. This trope, profitably borrowed in part from Frazer's renditions of mythic-primitive alliances of earth and tribe, assumes, as anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson note, that "solidarity and identity" do indeed depend upon, work through, a social life in which "contiguity and face to face contact [upon a bounded stretch II . See Vickery's The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough , Princeton, 1973. 12. Arjun Appadurai, "Putting Hierarchy in Its Place", in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, ed. George Marcus, Durham, 1992, 37; Liisa Malkki, "National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees ", Cultural Anthropology, 7 (February 1992), 24.

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of earth] are paramount"." The intimate association of wasted land and wasted people in the poem is figured (as in Eliot's later poem "The Hollow Men") through a landscape that intimately blends nature and culture: a land of "stony rubbish" (I. 20) , where April nonetheless is " ... breeding / lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire" (11. 13). In this respect the poem operates through metonymy in Roman Jakobson 's sense of the term. One could say that the land is identified with , substitutes for, the culture which rests upon it, the people who are bound to it, who are, in turn, dependent upon the king who lives among them and synecdochically represents them." The trope works precisely because of the assumption of the contiguousness of the cultural unit as it resides upon a piece of earth. The identification I am pointing to seems so commonsensical, so elemental, so intuitive, but it is nonetheless a construction. I do not mean that in the demeaning, and now tiring, sense of "this or that is a cultural construction" but - and here I borrow from anthropologist Michael Taussig - in the magical sense of construction, in the spirit of admiring the persistence and power of the invention of figurality. Once we identify something as constructed, Taussig notes , "what do we do with this old insight? If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable? How come culture appears so natural"?" Eliot is a wizard at making culture appear natural. Thunder ends up asking all the important questions. Eliot's age-old, mythic identification of land and people is a form of magic, after all, and Frazerian magic specifically, one of the two forms of sympathetic magic that Frazer is famous for articulating. I am referring here to what Frazer called the law of contact, the supposed "primitive" belief that a "sympathy" resides between things that are, or were once, in contact, in contagion, in proximity: peoples and their lands, for instance." Frazer's shaman, 13. "Beyond 'Culture' : Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference", Cultural Anthropology, 7 (February 1992), 9. 14. For Roman Jakobsen 's classic formulation of metonymy (as distinguished from metaphor), see his "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances", in Fundamentals of Language, The Hague, 1956, 105. 15. M. Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, New York, 1993, xvi, 16. Frazer's influential formulation of the "Principles of Magic" as they are divided between the "homeopathic" and "contagious" varieties, can be found in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 4th edition, New York 1963 [1922]. Marty Roth, "Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Reading Lesson", in Modernist Anthropology, 74, also points to the correspondence between Frazer's two forms of

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reproducing, transmuting, in modern mythic form, contact magic, making people long for lost connections. Before 1 appear to float off into mythological outer space, I should emphasize that while Eliot is replaying an age-old magical-metonymic strategy institutionalized by Frazer , dean of evolutionary anthropology, this identification of a wasted people bound to a wasted land is also concomitant with the then-emerging anthropological principle that discrete peoples are bound to discrete places, and that these peoples constitute cultures with their own distinct patterns, their own legitimate ways of knowing. Eliot was no Ruth Benedict but it is helpful to see that he was , even in 1922, participating in the intellectual conversation that invented culture as separate patterned whole. Eliot's contribution to that discussion, in The Waste Land in particular, would only make more possible, feasible, arguable, his later culture work. One might say, in a perhaps counterintuitive mode , that in The Waste Land Eliot was laying the ground for the culturalist scaffolding of the later work. The poem is, after all, an early version of Eliot 's argument, in Notes toward the Definition of Culture, that cultures , rooted as they are, must grow, or die, an argument that is replayed, in poetic form , in Four Quartets, in his invocation of "the life of significant soil" (The Dry Salvages). The premise of society as living whole, in other words , was there in the blasted landscape that culminated Eliot's early career. In that regard Frank Lentricchia is right on the mark when he notes (in intentionalist language) that the Eliot behind The Waste Land "may write in fragments but he doesn 't want to live that way. He wants to live in a culture organically whole.?" But now another turn in the argument is necessary, one that just might lead us to a more easily recognized waste land. Although the assumed isomorphism of people to land is fundamental to the poem, grounding it as it were, the poem is premised upon cultural breakdown, upon the supposition that modernity is a mess. And in order to capture that sorry state, a new poetic form is necessary, in which antique myths and modern effluvia are juxtaposed at the flurrying heartrate of the poem's elusive swallow: the Sibyl at Cumae, the Grail myth, primitive vegetation ceremonies a la Frazer, Ecclesiastic voices, allusions to Christ, all shot through with the contemporary reminiscences of rootless decadent aristocracy , Wagner opera, a kind of card shark and, later , bar gossip , a homosexual pass, and a bit of ragtime called the "Shakespeherian rag" (1. magic and Jakobsen's metaphor and metonymy, but then goes on to maintain that Frazer in fact works essentially metaphorically . 17. "My Kinsman, T. S. Eliot", Raritan: A Quarterly Review, 11 (Spring 1992), 19.

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128). It is the celebrated mythical method, which Eliot, in his oft-quoted 1923 review of Joyce' s Ulysses , claims will take the place of narrative method. "In manipul ating a continuous parallel between con temporaneity and antiquity", Joyce, Eliot asserts, has come upon "a way of controll ing, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemp orary history." It is, Eliot concludes , "a step toward making the modem world possible for art" .18 Of course Eliot' s tribute to Joyce operates as trailer, as advertising brochure, for The Waste Land , publish ed one year befor e. Th e thrust of Eliot' s elucidation of the mythical method , as it relates to both Ulysses and The Waste Land , is in the arrangement of mythical artifacts up against contemporary cultural materials. It needs to be noted that Eliot's review is staged as a reaction to Richard Aldington ' s claim that Joyc e's novel is "an invitation to chao s" (Sl', 176). Eliot responds by arguing for the classicism of Joyce 's method, its control of cultural material, past and present, through the juxtaposition of myth and contemporary reality . The emphasis, as in Eliot' s orientation in Notes Toward the Definition oj Culture, is upon setting the bounds of - "o rdering" and "giving a shape and a significance to" - culture. The arch itecture of the poem in this sense is anything but found ed on meton ymy: indeed, the supposition of a fragmented world - an argument dependent upon the belief in originary metonymy now broken - now makes necessary, according to Eliot 's essay on Joyce , a radical metaphoricization that stacks ancie nt Tereus up against the young man carbuncular, the goddess Diana up against Mrs Porter, the First Punic up against the First World War. This is Frazer 's second type of magic , that of similarity, that works precisely through the invocation of like producing like - metaphor, in other word s, not the metonymy of Frazer' s first magic , the law of contact. I do mean my referen cing of Frazer's magic to ground Eliot in the cultural work of his day . I am not arguing influence here, simply the confluence of Frazer's organizing of primitive mentality with Eliot's use of mythic materials for culturalist ends. Eliot's poem is an argument about culture, after all. In a rhetoric that proceeds right out of evolutionary anthropology's argument that the savage is disappearing from our view and thus urgently and immediately requires study , Eliot posits Western collapse that, as it happens, "makes the world possible for art", for what we call high modernist art anyway . It worked so well that for decades critics, in heated controversy over whether or how the land/people was 18. "Ulysses, Order, and Myth", in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kerrnode, New York, 1988 [1923], 177-78. Hereafter , SP.

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healed , neglected to question the death of culture that Eliot had so brilliantly figured . As varied and important as their approaches to the poem have been, critics from Cleanth Brooks to Joseph Frank to William Spanos pretty much either assume that the cultural incoherence pieced together in the poem actually happened to civilization or elide history altogether by focusing on the brilliant novelties of the aesthetic scaffolding. 19 I am not suggesting that Eliot got it wrong - that, say, he overestimated the effects of the Great War upon the European psyche. I mean rather to register Eliot's success in managing to make people believe that they were falling off the edge 'of the world ; indeed, I am giving Eliot credit for crafting an emergent structure of feeling , rather than merely reflecting an already dominant mood. The poet , after all, makes myths, which in Eliotic terms means he shapes them actively , suppressively, orderingly, out of cultural material, rather than simply expressing or mouthing them . I am attempting, therefore, to suggest another way of thinking about Eliot 's suturing of antique mythic forms to contemporary "reality" bits . The point here is that myth is "made" through the arrangement of mythic and other material into a pattern of dead or dying cultural fragments. When Eliot's ventriloqual persona utters, near the poem 's end, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" (I. 431), the pressure of Eliot's figuration is at high torque, as the metaphorically wrought (old poems , new songs, old rapes, new rapes) get quashed against each other in the ultimate (odd) metonymy ("shored against"). It is a contorted brand of writing culture, in which an organized pattern of social unity is metonymically appealed to - Western culture as originary rooted tribe - through the vehicle of the mythical method that posits metaphoric fragmentation. But it is more complicated than that, for the metaphors themselves are deftly channelled, selected for their odd fits 19. See Cleanth Brooks, "The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth", in his Modern Poetry and the Tradition, Chapel Hill, 1965 [1939], 136-72; Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form in Modem Literature", in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature, ed. J. Frank, Bloomington: Ind., 1963 [1945], 3-60; and William V. Spanos, "Repetition in The Waste Land: A Phenomenological De-struction ", Boundary, lIn (Spring 1979), 225-85. Spanos (226) takes issue specifically with Brooks' s and Frank's influential formalist readings of The Waste Land as a masterwork of modernist literature that operates spatially, like the plastic arts, and thus attempts to escape from history and time. Spanos responds by arguing that the poem can, and ought to, be read as "phenomenological process" (242). On the subject of The Waste Land as a construction of apocalypse, including a discussion of recent critics who have addressed Eliot's (dis)figuration of history, see my own Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice ofAuthority, Newhaven, 1992,78-79,200.

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- there is a sense, after all, to the non-sense of placing the character Stetson in both the Punic and the Great War . We feel a congruence - Eliot puts it there - in the relation of the Sibyl to Madame Sosostris, and Christ to the hanged gods . I am hardly the first to comment that Eliot's poem, in reworking mythic materials, creates a new kind of mythopoeia. Nor is it particularly novel to note that Eliot's juxtaposition of ancient myth to the imagery of modern life changes both our view of modem life and our take on the myths appealed to. Through this new arrangement, a third term is possible, a modem mythopoesis that, as Eliot notes in "Tradition in the Individual Talent", enters the order of existing art precisely by changing what is already in that order." But it is important to put Eliot's own famous statement on tradition in a wider and more contemporary cultural register, specifically, in this instance, by showing how the poem helped shape what was understood variously as "culture". For one, the addition of The Waste Land to the canon meant a reconfiguration, a significant expansion, of what could count as myth-making, as aesthetic, as Culture with a capital C. Poems, great poems, could now contain footnotes, could point fingers at readers in foreign tongues, could have sex changes in them. In this respect Eliot helped open a door that he himself was often too ready to close: this is the man who, as late as the 1950s, insisted that drama be written in verse." And one could argue that the poem, in its allusive immensity, provides an ultimately comprehensive definition of and argument for cultural diversity. According to this line of reasoning, the success of the poem in packing together, however erratically and apocalyptically, Greek myth, contemporary pop music, modem French verse, Elizabethan history, tarot cards, the Bible, obscene folk song, and the Grail Quest, amounts to a tour-de-force exposition of Western culture, from the elite to the "folk" to the utterly primitive-anthropological; and in including the Upanishads at the end, Eliot was making the final leap to World Culture itself (as emblematized by the West, of course). A generation later, in Notes, Eliot, already having unpacked the complex levels of individual, class, national, and European culture, would tenuously put forward the possibility of World Culture, a concept that, for him, got more interesting and difficult to hold in the mind as it got less overtly unitary (Notes , 136). And yet, ultimately, the strongest cultural work Eliot's poem does probably goes in precisely the opposite direction: that is, the waste land as 20. "Tradition and the Individual Talent", in Selected Essays, New York, 1950, 5. The essay was first published in 1919. 21. See Eliot's "Poetry and Drama", in SP, 132-47. The essay was first published in 1951.

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splintered postmodern landscape, as a strongly resonant nightmarememory of how culture from then on will be imagined. Granted my argument that the metonymic isomorphism of culture to land grounds the poem and in effect makes the nightmare possible," and granted the critiques, proceeding particularly, it seems, from champions of Joyce, that Eliot 's "fitting" of antiquity to contemporaneity is too tidy and controlling" - still the secure identities of people with places in the poem get profoundly confounded. This is what's happening, after all, when (with the aid of the infam ous "Notes" to the poem) delirious antarctic explorers find themselves eerily bumping up against Christ, when the ancient "Murmur of maternal lamentation" puts the "hooded hordes " of modem Eastern Europe in your face (11. 368-69), when Thunder asks what sound like really important questions, and you have no idea how you got to India. In The Waste Land, "local" ground, "significant soil", suddenly , nightmarishly, gapes open , sounding corridors of multiple brutal mythologies. Modern anthropological notions of pristine, bounded cultures did not help Eliot put that together. You can thank Frazer, with his odd mixings of modem Estonians and worshippers of the Egyptian SunGod Ra, for that , for, unwittingly, playing a part in what is perhaps even Eliot 's unwitting pulverization of the secure cultural geography of modernity. The mythical method ends up haunting us. Cultural centres cannot hold, home ain't what it used to be, all kinds of boundary lines get palimpsestically crossed, recrossed: London Bridge collapses in nuclear simulacrum, the corpses of Syrian fertility gods somehow get into our flower-beds, and countesses, once secure in their mountain fastnesses, now act out a nomadology of the postmodern, and "read, much of the night, and go south in the winter" (1. 18). It is James Clifford's postcultural culture of travelling rather than dwelling, of routeing rather than rooting, where the locus of habitation is no longer the village hamlet

22. That "culture-grounding" might be said to function as one of the "normative", battening-down features of modernism that, according to Fredric Jameson, separate the classic, orthodox modernist from the truly free-floating postmodernist. Jameson has published several versions of his argument on postmodernism, the most comprehensive treatment being probably Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London, 1991. 23. See, as an example, Perry Meisel's The Myth of the Modern, Newhaven, 1987, 127-42, passim .

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but, rather, the hotel circuit." Such cultural configurations, Clifford asserts, do not have to be seen as post-lapsarian or apocalyptic, as "pure products" of culture gone "crazy", which is how Eliot's contemporary William Carlos Williams phrased it;2S but for Eliot, as for Williams, and indeed for Arnold, arguing culture often means tracing that hybridic plunge. And that is what sticks with us, that fear of falling. At the poem 's end , bits of culture, as in much good mythopoesis, are thrown together with an air of artlessness. It comes off as sacred, this spot-welding of elite and folk-anthropological - ritual fishing, nursery rhymes, Isaiah, Dante, Algernon Swinburne - and, to finish it off, that series of elemental repetitions with the white space of utter holiness effectively in-b etween: Datta. Dayadhvam. Damy ata. Shantih shantih shantih (II. 433-34) Metonymized fragments , ruined towers predicated upon a theory of collapse, indicating where the poet wants the myths to take us back to, to a specific argument about what must be grown again from old roots, to a contention that, thanks to the poem itself in part, our imaginings can never again return.

24. See James Clifford, "Travelling Cultures", in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al., New York, 1992,96-112. 25. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, Cambridge : Ma., 1988, 1-7.

"LIKE WATER IN WATER": PRIMITIVISM AND MODERNITY JOHN McGOVERN

Primitivists propose that primitive man was or is superior to modern man . The primitive mode of being, they claim, shows a unity of consciousness and inclination that escapes the fragmented modern self. Immersed in Nature , the primitive acts with spontaneous purpose. Modern man attempts self-direction but to the primitivist mind that mode of being is unhappy. Torn from Nature, and acting under the auspices of merely human purposes, man becomes an onlooker, viewing with remorse a lost world of exuberance, innocence and gr ace, or , when the primitivist imagination grows darker, one who longs for nothing other than to be, as the animals, "in the world like water in water". I For the painful separation has cracked open human nature too . The line divid ing man from Nature runs also through modern man himself, setting consciousness at odds with inclination and making of it an unhappy self-consciousness. That selfconsciousness has occasioned a state of feelin g which has fascinated thinkers sinc e the late eighteenth century, "alienation" . Sentimental self-indulgence has often borrowed primitive dress . Putting on the manners of simple folk , touring ruins, findin g one' s self in desolate places and occasionally owning up to undomesticated excitements may give some respite from ennui.' But the sincere primitivist will see in this sentimental version no more than the effects of lassitude induced by a life, often one of unmerited ease, conducted in the absence of obl igation and faith. As D. H. Lawrence, the most profoundly primitivist of the English modernists, wrote: "We can't get the sun in us by lying naked like pigs on a beach." Primitivism should be more exacting. The sincere primitivist recognizes that the problem of self-consciousness cannot be solved self-consciously and the recognition is an agony. "I can' t cluster at the drum anymore," Lawrence lamented." In his earliest works, such as 1. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. R. Hurley, New York, 1992, 19. 2. Sentimental primitivism has had other uses. Ever since its first vogue in the mid-eighteenth century it has fuelled nationalism . See Gerald Newman, The Rise of Englisli Nationalism , London, 1987. 3. D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, Harmondsworth, 1995, 78. 4. D. H. Lawrence , "Indians and an Englishman", in Selected Essays, Harmondsworth, 1950, 189-98, (198). Hereafter, SE.

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The White Peacock, Lawrence had himself inclined toward s sentimentalism but his primitivist vision of things deepened and his latest writings are motivated by the knowledge that self-consciousness itself is the problem with which he had to struggle. "There is no going back", he insisted, "always onward , still further " (5E, 197). Self-aware primitivists have understood that overcoming alienation requires working through the problem of self-consciousness and that it is impossible to evade the dilemma merely. Th eir agon y, however, flows from the fact that, unlike the pigs on the beach, such self-awareness seems to carry with it its own impossibility, Within the tradition of .romanticism the reconciliation of consciousness and inclination has been conceived of as the achievement of a higher unity than that enjoyed by the primitive. This is the point at which primitivism separates from the romantic tradition from which it emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. For prim itivists like D. H. Lawrence do not believe that, if unity is re-established, it will be superior to that wholeness which characterized the mode of being of archaic peoples and which remains present in the life of surviving primitives. In contrast, romanticism qualified the superiority of the primitive in two ways. First , the primitive is superior not to the modem per se: he is favourably contrasted with a particular aspect of modernity, the separation of man from Nature and his division from himself. This double separation is expressed in Descartes ' identification of human being with the selfconscious subject and Kant's opposition between the moral law and the passions. Romanticism springs from the des ire that wholeness should be restored to man, That wholeness will be superior to the unity of being enjoyed by the primitive, however, for it will involve the unification of more complex, diverse experience and, rather than turning its back on selfconsciousness, will transcend without abolishing it. The style of thought is now associated with Hegel , though Friedrich Schiller used it before him .' The superiority of the primitive as understood within romanticism, then, is relative to the utterly self-divided and hollow consciousness of the Cartesian or Kantian subject. And, secondly, on this familiar account, the unity of being enjoyed by the primitive was or is produced by submission to external force, Nature. Having an undivided consciousness, the primitive is unaware of the fact that the fluid continuity which he experiences between consciousness and inclination, self and world , is engineered by the action of Nature upon 5. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, eds and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Oxford, 1967,304-5, Hereafter, AE .

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him. The recognition of Nature as external force introduced by modem natural science is valuable, therefore, on this romantic view. For it permits man to liberate himself from submission to Nature, an emancipation which discloses spiritual as well as practical gains. The higher reconciliation of man's divided being anticipated by the romantics will involve human activity . Modem man will take upon himself the responsibility of granting to his being unity previously conferred upon it automatically, thereby overcoming the Nature within himself. However, this romantic conception of the primitive is ambivalent, containing in combination two elements which are apparently incompatible. The term "primitive" can refer both to the primal and to the prior or, in other words , to the "first" in an ontological and a historical sense. On one hand there is a belief in the primordial or original unity of human being which has been corrupted. A mode of consciousness is available to and ought to be embodied in human being which is primary and in it the modem dualism of self and world is overcome and fluid continuity re-established. This doctrine would imply no reference whatsoever, on the other hand, to the primitive in a historical sense were it not for the fact that the dualism to be transcended is historically specified as "modem". There is no necessity to postulate the historical existence of early ancestors whose mode of consciousness prefigures the unity of being expressed by the ontological doctrine. Christian orthodoxy teaches that man once enjoyed that blissful state, fell from it and shall have it again in a more sublime form. But neither the Fall of Man nor his return to God are historical events . Mircea Eliade has shown that the myth of the Fall is universal amongst primitive and archaic peoples and that always, as with Christiani ty, there is a profound concern to distinguish between "this" world and "the other" world, time and eternity, being and history." To the degree that romantics have conceived of divided being as a historical state, modernity, brought about by an event or events in the past, to be worked through in the present and overcome at some time in the future, they have attempted to combine together what Judaism and Christianity, ancient philosophy and primitive myth, have always seen as ontologically distinct, being and time. After the romantics the tendency to see the ontological doctrine of primal unity embedded in a historical or, rather , pseudo-historical, context grew more and more powerful during the nineteenth century. What motivates that tendency is a desire that there should be a reconciliation of 6. Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries , trans. P. Mairet, London and Glasgow, 1968, 43-71. Hereafter, Dreams.

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self and world on the plane of empirical existence. Traditional Christianity effects a reconciliation , but not in this world . A fall into division and death has taken place and empirical existence bears the mark of a disorder that cannot be redeemed at the empirical level but will ultimately be set right in another world. The Fall was not a mundane, historical event but occurred out side of history and, indeed, history is its consequence. Nor will the disfiguration of existence be repaired in tim e but at the end of time. In contrast, within the tradition of romanticism the Fall is seen as a historical event, so that fragm entation may be considered to be a consequence of, for example, modern industry and commerce. Early pre-civilized man came to occupy the position of Adam in the Old Testament. The more perfectly unified man to come is the romantic version of the Saviour, always known as the "new Adam" in Christian tradition. And the overcoming of fragmentation will also take place in physical time , whether within the life of the gifted individual , the elect group or , as in the Marxist variant, mankind as a whole. This belief in the reconciliation of self and world on the plane of empirical existence within time presents a predicament, however, which has become increasingly pressing since romanticism. The very recognition that division between self and world is what is given to us as a fact about empirical reality, even though that is to be overcome, indicates this. For we are to overcome what we are , our nature, and the solution to this predicament, the postulating of a "higher" nature or "higher" self which is both the present source and the future destination of self-overcoming, is not so much a solution as a restatement of the dilemma. It is clear that post-romantic accounts of the state of being consequent upon overcoming divided empirical existence tend to be unintelligible, empty or fatally inconsistent. Once romanticism had taken the first step towards historicizing the ontological doctrine of primal unity, that historicizing tendency was pressed towards ultimately irrational conclusions. Nietzsche 's attempt to describe the state of being of the " Overman" is a notorious case in point. Either the Overman turns out to be a representation of real persons whom Nietzsche happened to admire, such as Napoleon Bonaparte, in which case he was not describing a type of human too different from that with which present humanity is quite familiar. Or the doctrine lapses into obscurity, becoming no more than a gesture, the only substance of which is its passionate injunction that selfovercoming should happen in practice, where precisely what that would mean is unclarified. Similarly, Marx 's description of the communist state at the end of history is either empty of content or, to the extent that that it is meaningful, refers to elements of precisely that historical existence that

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is supposed to be completely transcended in the state described. This is not to say that such attempts to express primal being in a temporal idiom are unsuccessful. Though theoretically valueless, practical expressions of the desire to press eternity into history have been successful in deforming empirical existence throughout this century. Since the romantics prepared the way, the progressively deeper setting of the ontological doctrine of primal unity within historical time has affected the concept of the primitive. It has either encouraged the view that historically existing primiti ve or archaic peoples are or were living embodiments of primal human nature or it has fostered speculation about the re-entry of primal man , whose mode of being is believed to have been prefigured in archaic cultures or is embodied in surviving primitive societies, into historical time in the futur e. And these two constructions tend to be connected, as in the case of D. H. Lawrence. Belief in the existence of primitives embodying primordial hum an nature either in the past or contemporaneously as "survivals" lends speculative support to the hope that uncorrupted human being will exist again and flourish in the future . For it is a recognition of the present, modernity, as a scene of unbearable corruption which must be overcome in the future that motiv ates belief in the existence of a golden arch aic past which has in some places survived into the present at the primitive edges of civilization. That belief is certainly not warranted on empirical grounds. Anthropological evidence shows that the primitives described by Lawrence in Mornings in Mexico and other travel writings did not exist. Using fieldwork methods amongst such peoples, since the beginning of this century anthropologists have dismissed as a nineteenth century fiction the view of the primitive as an unindividuated, spontaneous creature enjoying an unbroken relation with the cosmos. As one contemporary anthropologist has put it: "typical of our romantic conception of the primitive is the idea that there is no individual interest, that individuality as we know it is solely a modem form, that in the natural condition humankind tends to be collective."? Nor is there evidence that such primitives ever existed in the past: "the orthodox modem view is that there

7. Daniel Miller, "Primitive Art and the Necessity of Primitivism to Art", in The Myth of Primitivism, ed. Susan Hiller, London, 1991,50-71 (65).

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never was such a thing as 'primitive society ". " The same must be said of the notion of a radically different type of "primitive" consciousness." In an important recent study of Lawrence's primitivism Michael Bell has suggested that, as a result of such anthropological evidence, "we are perhaps in a better position to distinguish what is sui gen eris in Lawrence's vision " and that Lawrence's "essential source was a meditation on the life of feeling in and around himself' rather than "scientifically questionable" constructions of " ' primitive' sensibility "." However, Bell's suggestion raises a further difficulty. For " the life of feeling in and around himself' which was indeed, as Bell observes, the source of Lawrence's primitivist belief is presumably to be counted as the empirical support for that belief. As Bell has commented, in addition to expressing his primitivist vision "in personal terms as in his poetry", Lawrence "could perceive the evidence of some comparable experience in others as in his 'travel' writing or his study of the Ancient Etruscans" (LB, 131) . Unless the primitivist vision is to be seen as having no satisfactory empirical foundation, it must be supported either by the demonstrable historical existence of peoples in whom it is embodied or it must be reasonable to claim that it represents a permanently available presence as a potential within the common human psyche. Lawrence himself believed that his primitivism received empirical support from both sources. But there is no evidence that ancient Etruscan or any other society has represented an embodiment in history of primal human unity. And anthropologists and historians of religion have found that, far from it being the case that Lawrence's primitivism represents a permanently available mode of consciousness, neither primitive nor archaic peoples subscribe to such belief. Nor has that primitivism's capacity to persuade those whom Lawrence hoped to reach been entirely satisfactory. Michael Bell , noting the difficulty which Lawrence encountered in communicating his primitivist vision , has argued that "the problem lies not in the vision itself but in making it available to an inappropriate, or unprepared, sensibility" (LB, 131). But, as Bell accepts, it might be that 8. Adam Kuper, The Invention of Primitive Society, London, 1988, 7. See also Ernest Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book, London, 1988, 23-28. 9. "The primitive form of the ' primitive thought' formulation - that is, that while we, the civilized, sort matters out logically ... they, the savage, wander about in a hodgepodge of concrete images, mystical participations , and immediate passions ... has, of course, been progressively undermined as more about how the other half thinks has become known ...." (Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge, London, 1993, 148-49). 10. Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge, 1992,61. Hereafter, LB. Cf. also his Primitivism , London, 1972.

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the reason why even sympathetic and well-informed readers remain finally "unprepared" to accept Lawrence's primitivist vision is not a consequence of some deficiency of "sensibility" on their part but because it is fatally incoherent. Only an examination of that vision can resolve this issue. I would argue that the empirical basis for primitivism like Lawrence's lies nowhere other than in a peculiarly modern experience of acute alienation. Were that experience to be adequately communicable and , in virtue of its intrinsic appeal, persuasive, then it would be possible to claim that the vision represents desires rooted in the common human psyche. But, I shall argue, it is not possible adequately to express that vision in persuasive language because it is fundamentally incoherent. It is not anthropological or historical fact but a certain spiritual pressure that leads a primitivist, like Lawrence, to view historically existing primitive people as incarnations of pristine human nature." This is arguably the result of an overflow of revulsion at modernity. The discontent experienced by Schiller seems balanced when compared with the fury of Marx or the rage of Lawrence. The greater the hatred for modernity, a passion which reached its peak after romanticism, the more likely it will be that the reappearance of primal man will be thought to be prepared for by an apocalypse, as Marx , Nietzsche and Lawrence all anticipated. For modern men, such as Lawrence, who recognize modern civilization as a scene of utter corruption," will be inclined to transfer the virtues they cannot discover there to some "other", the primitive, and they will be comforted only by the prospect of his return (Apocalypse, 78, 149). If really existing men once enjoyed unity of being, then it should be within the realm of human possibility that man shall enjoy it again . To the degree that modernity is experienced as no more than a source of pain, there will be a more profound longing that there should have been primal men in history so that the possibility of their re-appearance within physical time cannot be dismissed by the sceptical intelligence as totally fantastic. In Marx the evidence for his millenialist belief did not depend upon the empirical, though unwarranted, claim that pristine human nature had been embodied in pre-historical society but was supposed, rather, to be 11. See D. H. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico/Etruscan Places, Harmondsworth, 1960, chapters 5, 6 and 7. Hereafter, MM. Not all "tribes" were "cosmic" in Lawrence's opinion. however, and he viewed Africans as inferior. See Apocalypse, 182. 12. Lawrence's conviction that with modem civilization "the long slow death of the human being set in" (Apocalypse , 79) had become settled by around 1914. On Lawrence's "imagery of corruption" see Frank Kermode, Lawrence, London and Glasgow, 1973,52-53 .

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discernible within modern ity itself, where certain developm ents permitted speculation about the future direction History must inevitably take. Thou gh it is not genuin ely primitivist, even in Marxi sm, howeve r, the notion of "primitive co mmunism" confers upon historical primitives honorary "higher" statu s. But the true promise of prim al hum an nature in Marxian thou ght lies with the proletariat, the "people", or, at least, its revoluti onary vanguard. Features which primitivists like Lawrence ascribe to people s such as Mexican Indi ans or the ancient Etruscan s (MM, 56-57 , 61- 63, 68; Apocalypse, 131 , 19 J), belong to the proletariat in Marx ' s vision . The proletariat move beyond "bourgeo is" morality , j ust as the actions of Lawrence's primitives are free from ethical co nstraint, "beyond good and evil". Where Lawren ce frankly describ ed the primitive as enjoy ing a " mindless" unity of consciou sness and incli nation, Marx similarly rega rded the "class con scious " prolet arian in whom "false consciousness" had been overco me as one whose activity exhibits a unity of "theory" and "praxis". The Marxist equivalent to Lawrence 's notion of "c osmic consciousness", acco rding to which prim itives are, he claimed, "i n naked contact with the cosmo s" (Apocalypse, 131), is the identity postul ated between the class conscious revoluti onary praxis of the proletariat and the inexorabl e movement of History. And ju st as "there is no individual isolated experience" (MM, 56-57 ) amongst Lawrence 's primitive and archaic peoples, so individualism is said to have been already virtually abolished in practice amongst the proletariat as a result of the de velopment of the relations of production and its destin y is to remo ve forever the "bourgeois" individual from History. Generally, the symbol "History" is the Marxian equivalent to Lawrence's "cosmos". And this accounts for a very important difference between the two visions of primal human unity . In Marx the proletariat represents the promise of that wholeness of being. Man has never experienced it in History but will achieve it only in the communist future after the end of History. Primitivism is premissed on the assumption that historical societies have experienced its presence. Like Marxism, sophisticated primitivism is provoked by and responds to modernity. Comparing Lawrence's primitivism with Marxism, however, shows what is its essential element, that is, the belief that primal humanity has been or is incarnated in the mode of being of historically

I,

13. Amongst the minority of professional anthropologists still inclined to portray primitives as superior beings Marxists stand out. See the description of "the original affluent society" in Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, London, 1972. Others claim that primitive societies are free from oppression. (See Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. R. Hurley, Oxford, 1977.)

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existing peoples. This is what distingui shes it from other distinctively modern apoca lyptic visions, such as the Marxian. "Culture and civ ilization are test ed by vital con sciou sness", Lawrence asserted. " Are we more vit ally co nscio us than an Egyptian 3000 years B.C. was?" he asked. His answer was that " men are far more fool s tod ay" (Apocalypse, 90, 92) . Meditating upon rur al life during his stay in Mex ico he remarked : O ur corn doesn 't fail us : we ha ve no se ven years famine and . apparently need never hav e. But the other thing fails us, the .. strange inward sun of life .... And we die of ennui (MM , 77) . For Marx , on the other hand , the bourgeoisie "has accomplished wonders far surpass ing Egypti an pyramids, Roman aqu aducts and Gothic cathedrals" and "rescued a considerabl e part of the popul ation from the idiocy of rur al life " ," Lawrence, how ever, believed that primordi al hum anity was emb odied in the empirical existence of archaic peoples in the past and survived into the pre sent at the ma rgins of civiliz ation amongst contemporaneous primitives such as the Hopi Indians whose existence is taken as evidence of its presence univ ersally in the rem ote past. From this, the foundation of primitivist bel ief, its other features flow. The wa y in whi ch the primitivist views history is affected. For if prim al unity is to be present generally , then , having on ce exi sted and still existing at the margins, it will have returned. Primitiv ism seems, then , to impose a cyclical shape upon history. The romantic view of history, as expressed by Schiller, for instance, "saw it as resembling a sp iral , from a primitive undifferentiated unity , to a conflictual di vision between reas on and sen sibility, human and human, to a third and high er recon cili ation, in wh ich the gains of the second period , reason and freedom, were fully retained"." History has a spiral rather than cycl ical pattern onl y on the assumption that there are "gains" associated with " the second period". Primitivists, viewing modern instrumental reason as an enemy and freedom with suspicion, characteristically see no such gains. In Apo calypse, Lawrence made expl icit his anti-rationalism : "Mind is not a Rule r, mind is only an instrument .... Real consciousness is touch. Thought is getting out of tou ch ...." That "real consciousness" was present in " ancient sense-consciousness" and was "arrived at direct , by instinct and 14. " Manifesto of the Commun ist Party", in Selected Works, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, London , 1968, 31-63 (38-39) . 1S. Charles Taylor. Sources of the Self, Camb ridge , 1992, 386 .

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intuition, as we say, not by reason". Reason, having deformed religious experience in Protestant Christianity , has "substituted the non-vital universe of forces and mechan istic order ... and the long slow death of the human being set in" (Apocalypse, 199, 91, 79) . Amongst primitives "the mind is there merely as a servant" and "bows down before the creative mystery" (MM, 63). It is not surprising that Lawrence also had misgivings about modern social, political and economic freedoms . "Europe", he wrote in 1921, "will never be able to continue and remain firm unless it unites also round one great chosen figure, some hero ." " It all depends upon the will of the people", he conceded, then added "but the will of the people must concentrate in one figure , who is supreme over the will of the people.':" Lawrenc e's judgement that neither Fascism nor Bolshevism were movements capable of producing such a leader was shrewd but it should not be taken to suggest that he was therefore fundamentally welldisposed to the ideals of the French Revolu tion as had been the romantics such as Schiller." The primitivist belief that really existing peoples have embodied primal humanity represents a departure from romanticism. It is true that Schiller distinguished between the primitive or "sav age" (Wild er) and the "barbarian" (Barbar) in line with the eighteenth century notion of the noble savage. In his view, the "savage" was superior to the "barbarian" but the reason for this evaluation was not that the "savage" represents a full embodiment of primal humanity: But man can be at odds with himself in two ways: either as savage , when feeling predominates over principle; or as barbarian, when principle destroys feeling. The savage despises Civilization, and acknowledges Nature as his sovereign Mistress. The barbarian derides and dishonours Nature , but, more contemptible than the savage, as often as not continues to be the slave of his slave. The man of Culture makes a friend of Nature, and honours her freedom whilst curbing only her caprice (AE, 21) . Thus "savagery" and "barbarism" are both moments within the movement of human history. The "savage" lives within what Schiller referred to as a Notstaat or Naturstaat, that is, a political society which has evolved as the product of force or "Nature" as "sovereign mistress" in contrast with the 16. D. H. Lawrence, Movements in European History, Oxford, 1981, 306. 17. Obviously a distrust of reason and an antipathy towards freedom are connected and Lawrence made that connexion quite explicit in various "educational" tracts. See Kermode, 84-87.

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Yemunftstaat in which men live under the rule of reason. The "barbarian" is he who, unlike the primitive, knows reason but, through repressing rather than tutoring the feelings, fails to achieve a Vernunftstaat and contrives instead to ensure that those repressed feelings will return in their primitive state. Schiller did not identify the mode of being of the "savage" with man in "the state of nature". The "savage" possessed real historical existen ce whereas the state of nature in his account did not. Schiller distinguished between two states of nature , Hobbes's bellum omnium contra omnes, and the one to which he referred, a state in which man lived for and by himself. Neither were supposed to be historically real and Schiller viewed his state of nature as a rational construct, a hypothesis necessary for political speculation. Thus when he claimed that man was compelled to leave the state of nature and enter the State as we know it iNotstaai or Naturstaat) he did not intend to make a historical claim about actions of our early ancestors (AE, 225-26). Rather, as M. H. Abrams has observed, Schiller had secularized the religious doctrine of the Fall of Man, transforming it into "universal history" , according to which the first men were creatures of pure instinct whose inclinations were immediately and without remainder translated into action. Though "happy" in their prerational way, it was necessary for these Adams, in Schiller's view, to convert their purely instinctual behaviour, analogous to that of "reasonless animals", into "acts of freedom and morality". Original sin, on this naturalistic interpretation, represented in mythical terms man's "fall from his instinct" and "the beginning of his moral existence". Schiller wrote: Man was destined to learn to seek out, by means of his own reason, the condition of innocence which he now lost, and as a free, reasonable spirit, to return to that place whence he had started out as a plant and creature of instinct: from a paradise of ignorance and bondage he was to work up, even if it should be after thousands of years , to a paradise of knowledge and freedom; one in which he would obey the moral law in his heart just as constantly as he in the beginning had obeyed instinct, and as plants and animals still obey it." .

18. Cited in M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, New York, 1973, 206-7. Ihough not so confident that the "fall" had been fortunate, Lawrence took a similar view (see Apocalypse, 181-82).

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Thus, within romanticism the primitive or "s avage" was not seen as the embodime nt of prim al humanity. Man was to become whole and it was only through reason and self-co nsciousness that properly human wholeness , as distinct from the pre-human unity of being enjoyed by "creatures" who were "as plants and animals" , would be gained. The original wholeness to' which man must "return" in a spiral movement, bringing with him the gain s of intermediate stag es , was enj oyed, not by really exis ting primitives , but by hypothetical "creatures of instinct". Though a cyclical con ception of history would be appropriate to the "c os mic consciousness" which the primitivist regards as the primary mode of human being, as well as ensuring its return , in fact Lawrence's view of history was not truly cyclical. And the reason why that was so is because his vision of "cosmic consciousness" was not truly "cosmic", or not at least in the sense in which primitive and archaic systems of belief are term ed "cosmic" . Lawrence attributed the absence of cosmic con sc iousness amongst moderns to belief in tran scendent reality: With the coming of Socrates and "the spirit" , the cosmos died. For two thousand years man has been living in a dead or dying cosmos, hoping for a heav en here afte r. And all the religions have been religions of the dead bod y and the postponed reward ... (Apocalypse , 96 ). Mircea Eliade, by contras t, has argued that "Plato could be regarded as the outstanding philosopher of ' primitive mentality', that is, the thinker who succeeded in giving philosophic currency and validity to the modes of life and behaviour of archaic humanity" . 19 And the reason why this is so , Eliade shows, is that the essential feature of the ''' primitive' ontological conception" in which man "feels himself indissolubly connected with the Cosmos" is that no intrinsic value whatsoever is attached either to physical nature or human action. Value or "reality" is acquired, rather, because an action or object participates in precisely the transcendent reality which Lawrence, the primiti vist , regarded as the antithesis of primitive consciousness. The effect of being "indissolubly connected with the Cosmos" is, in Eliade's words, " the abolition of time ... of profane time, of duration, of ' history :" (MER, xiii , 35). Lawrence, in contrast, saw the effect of "cosmic consciousness" in a quite different light. For him wholeness would be experienced in the here and now . "We ought to dance

19. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or. Cosmos and History , Princeton, 1971, 34. Hereafter, MER .

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with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos", he wrote, for "the magnificent here and now of life in the flesh is ours , and ours alone , and ours only for a time" (Apocalypse , 149). This suggests that Lawrence was mistaken if he anticipated a cyclical return to the '''primitive' ontological conception" as we know it from the work of historians of religion like Eliade . In fact, Lawrence's cosmic consciousness contained distinctively modern "gains". In primitivism history is ascribed a spiral structure after all. As a sincere primitivist, Lawrence pleaded that "we have to get back the cosmos" but knew that "it can't be done by a trick" but will require "a sort of worship" (Apocalypse, 78) . And what that "worship" in tum required was imagination . Lawrence emphasized the importance of imagination repeatedly in Apocalypse. Whereas in "astronomical space " there is a "sense of imprisonment" in which "the heart melts and dies", one experiences a "sense of release, of marvellous release" in "the astrological heavens ". For there "the whole imagination is released". The imagination is more important than scientific knowledge, Lawrence claimed, because "what we care about is the release of the imagination" . For the imagination once "released" produces a more intense and satisfying "experience" (Apocalypse, 46-47). However, as Eliade again has shown, in primitive and archaic cultures myth "is thought to express the absolute truth" (Dreams , 23) . Lawrence took the highly subjective and very modem view that the value of mythical or "cosmic" consciousness lies in the intensity of a particular type of experience, "release", which it affords the individual. Such a view is of course nothing if not self-conscious. John Searle has recently described that self-consciousness as occurring when "we shift our attention from the object of the conscious experience to the experience itself"." The '''primitive' ontological conception" is premissed on the absolute objectivity of reality, whereas Lawrence's notion of cosmic consciousness transfers value instead, in what is arguably a very modem way, to subjective "experience". Lawrence's "release" may be compared with the experience of ecstasy present in the religious life of primitive peoples. But such ecstatic experience -is suffered by representative individuals, shamans most notably, whose ecstatic communion with the Cosmos occurs only under special ritual circumstances, for very brief periods of time and as a service to the community to which they belong. As if to demonstrate a recognition of the social danger that might follow if such experience is considered the property of an individual, typically the shaman is kept at the margins of 20. John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind, Cambridge: Ma., 1994, 143.

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society." In effect, a primitivist such as Lawrence takes the experience of the ritual specialist, removes it from its social context, detaches it from the belief in transcendent reality and regards it as characteristic of "primitive consciousness". For Lawrence, like the romantics, history had a spiral , not a cyclical, pattern in which the "gain" of modern subjectivity was not lost. But whereas Schiller had no doubt that the self-consciousness brought into being by modernity , provided it did not negate the emotional life , was a highly valuable human achievement, Lawrence tended to view selfconsciousness as a blight. He seems not to have been aware that his "cosmic consciousness" did not represent a return to an archaic mode of being but, motivated by the experience of modernity, contained peculiarly modern elements.

21. "They are separated from the rest of the community by the intensity of their own religious experience" (Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. W. R. Trask, Princeton, 1972, 8).

MACRO-MYTHS AND MICRO-MYTHS: MODERNIST POETRY AND THE PROBLEM OF ARTISTIC PRODUCTION RAINER EMIG When we talk about myths, we tend to think of the large narrative structures out of which histories, truths and beliefs are created . However , when we shift our attention to modernism and its dominant characteristics, we only find in one of its major aspects a form analogous to myth. This central aspect of modernism is expansion, the tendency to become a universal ist reality of its own. The second dominant characteristic of modernism, its reductive move, does not seem to go together with the narrative model of myth. Nonetheless, modernism's reductionism is at least as important as its striving for totality . Perhaps it is even more important, since reduction usually precedes modernism's expansion into holistic totalities . Reduction appears in the many attempts at purging the material of modernist texts from impurities and excess , but also from basic features such as personality. What I wish to do in this essay is throw some inquiring glances at the modernist aesthetic of reduction . By doing this I hope to prove that even in scarcity and purification the mythical is present, as a "micro-myth", so to speak. In showing its underlying impact, I also want to suggest that this hidden presence is in many ways more dangerous than that of the large and obvious narrative "macro-myths".

Mythmaking as a Defensive Strategy The origins of modernism's simultaneous tendencies of reduction and expansion and therefore the locus of micro- as well as macro-myths must be sought in modernism's uneasy awareness of its paradoxical position . The aesthetics of modernism derive from the insight into the impossibility of artistic creation. At the same time modernism is propelled by the invincible urge to utter, to produce, to make statements in the shape of artefacts. Modernism's awareness of these mechanisms produces its selfdestructive tendencies. Its products , however, must at the same time, as art, strive for duration, permanence, significance and value. The origin of modernism's compulsion to create unceasingly is therefore inextricably linked with the awareness of its temporality and the potentially limited value of its creation. This entanglement is already outlined by Friedrich

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Nietzsche. In "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense", he neatly pinpoints the dilemma: Everything that sets man off from the animal depends upon this capacity to dilute the concrete metaphors into a schema; for in the realm of such schemata, something is possible that might never have succeeded under the intuited first impressions: to build up a pyramidal order according to castes and classes, a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, boundary determinations, which now stands opposite the other, concrete world of primary impressions, as the more solid , more universal, more familiar, more human, and therefore as the regulatory and imperative world .' Here we find the motivation for myth as well as the drive to create art. This artificial creation is from the start hopelessly tainted by the awareness that it is inferior to the so-called "concrete world " that it opposes. Nietzsche is consequently very sarcastic about human creativity in its entirety: In some remote corner of the universe that is poured out in countless flickering solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the most arrogant and the most untruthful moment in "world history" - yet indeed only a moment. After nature had taken a few breaths, the star froze over and the clever animals had to die . Someone could invent such a fable and still not have illustr ated adequately how pitiful , how shadowy and fleeting, how purposeless and arbitrary the human intellect appears within nature. There were eternities when it did not exist; and someday when it no longer is there, not much will have changed (RL, 246). In a related statement in the same essay, Nietzsche clearly pinpoints the limitation of all human creation: it is only ever concerned with human existence. Yet even in order to cope with something as insignificant as human existence, human beings have recourse to models that virtually encompass the entire world :

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, eds and trans. S. L. Gilman, C. Blair and D. J. Parent, New York and Oxford, 1989, 250. Hereafter, RL.

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For that intellect has no further mission leading beyond human life. It is utterly human , and only its owner and producer takes it with such pathos as if the whole world hinged upon it (RL , 246). This pathos is the pathos of myth . Paul de Man is the theorist who outlines most clearly the contradictory drives within the modernist work of art: The appeal of modernity haunts all literature. It is revealed in numberless images and emblems that appear at all periods - in the obsession with a tabula rasa , with new beginnings - that finds recurrent expression in all forms of writing. No true account of literature can bypass this persistent temptation of literature to fulfill itself in a single moment.' "Tabula rasa" and "fulfilment in a single moment" - these are the signs of a self-destructive aesthetic. "Numberless images and emblems" and "recurrent expression" embody the opposite tendency, that towards institutionalizing or, as Adorno would say , reifying itself despite its awareness of its intern al paradoxes and lack of foundation .'

Imagism's Hidden Mythopoeia I will now provide some illustrations for my hitherto rather general and abstract statements. I will do this by taking a look at some of the early works of a poet who not only emerged as the most important artistic innovator of modem poetry , as a link between Victorianism and modernism, but also as a major theorist of the modernist movement. I am talking, of course, about Ezra Pound. Already in his early poems proofs of the claims that I have just made can be found . After discussing these, I will move on to Imagism and Vorticism and show that, despite the extremist reduction attempted by these short-lived artistic tendencies, the mythical pervades them too. Pound's poems achieve their own little tabula rasa by vehemently denying the existence of an outside of the texts. They are a neat illustration 2. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed., Minneapolis, 1983, 152. 3. "The ground of modernism is both the absence of a ground and the explicit normative rejection by modernism of a ground, even if there were one." See Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, in The International Library of Phenomenology and Moral Sciences, trans. C. Lenhardt, London, 1984,34. Hereafter, AT.

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of Adorno's idea of the work reifying itself by mov ing beyond "thinglikeness" (AT, 389). They achieve this by the removal of any external reality surrounding it. Pound's poems insist that the ir crea tive tactics are the only reality - and this turns them into the ir own micro-myths. They subvert the dichotomy of reality and art and call the artificial production of poetry real and reality empty. Pound 's early poem " Apparuit" indicates in its very title that it discusses an apparition , the tran sformation of a vision into reality:" Golden rose the house, in the portal I saw thee, a marvel, carven in subtle stuff, a portent. Life died down in the lamp and flickered , caught at the wonder. Crimson, frosty with dew , the roses bend where thou afar, moving in the glamorous sun, drinkst in life of earth, of the air, the tissue golden about thee.' Life dies down under the impact of the apparition, because it is obviously inferior to the artistic effect. Reality is replaced by the vision which now supplies all aspects commonly associated with reality: colour, temperature, moisture, etc. The apparition "drinks in" reality and turns it into a text. "Silet", another early poem by Pound, appears to be more sceptical about the superiority of art over reality . Still it cannot help but contradict its own argument - the actual event is more significant than its artistic depiction - exactly when it makes its point: When I behold how black, immortal ink Drips from my deathless pen-ah, well-away! Why should we stop at all for what I think ? There is enough in what I chance to say. It is enough that we once came together; What is the use of setting it to rhyme? When it is autumn do we get spring weather, Or gather may of harsh northwindish time? 4. The title alludes to Dante' s Vita Nuova where the line "Apparuit iam beatitudo vestra" describes the effect of Beatrice's apparition. See Peter Brooker, A Student 's Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, London and Boston, 1979,77-78. 5. Ezra Pound, Collected Shorter Poems, London, 1968, 68. Hereafter, CSP.

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It is enough that we once came together; What if the wind have turned against the rain? It is enough that we once came together; Time has seen this, and will not tum again ; And who are we, who know that last intent , To plague to-morrow with a testament! The poem seemingly supports the Platonic idea (elaborated in the tenth book of The Republic) that there is a hierarchy of value with the Idea at its top, particular objects (as the copies of Ideas) in an inferior position, and artistic imitations of objects (as pictures of pictures) at the bottom. Yet in spite of the poem 's repeated claim, "It is enough that we once came together", the existence of the poem creates a problem. Its own hierarchy is the actual event, thinking about it, saying it, and eventually "setting it to rhyme". A complete reversal of Plato's order has happened. The poem pretends to shun becoming a testament to the events, because the permanence of the artistic text would violate the transience of event, thought, and verbal utterance. Yet what it achieves as a work is the exact opposite. As "Apparuit" and "Siler" demonstrate, the institutionalization of the text as superior to any external reality is a characteristic attempt of moderni sm. It is a paradoxical one, since it tries to create an all-powerful textual ity out of a material , language, that is shaped by cultural discourses and neither independent of reality nor capable of forming a reality of its own. Modernism's complementary tendencies of reduction and expansion are defens ive responses to the loss of faith in mimesis. Language can no longer be trusted to relate to any given real ity. At the same time language is not detached from tradition, from a past that brings with it echoes and ghosts , a surplus and an alien discourse that removes the material of literature from the power of its creators. In a short poem called "Coda", Pound addresses the dilemma:

o my songs ,

Why do you look so eagerly and curiously into people's faces, Will you find your lost dead among them?

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How does this paradox of pretended autonomy and addiction to tradition affect the creation of the texts? How can they be original (and therefore valuable) when there is this disturbing awareness that the tools of the craft are only ever borrowed, that they inevitably ting e their products with the traces of history? Imagism is an attempt to exorcize exactly these traces of tradition. As an art form that institutionalized itself simultaneously with its rules, Imagism attempts to produ ce itself out of itself as a creation sui generi s. Imagism's radical reduction attempts a "direct treatment of the thing" by eliminating ornamental aspects, such as unnecessary adjectives and meaningless rhythmic conventions. Most importantly, it rejects explicit and identifiable speakers as well as narratives." These strategies try to tame the troublesome paradigmatic aspect of poetic language as well as syntagmatic excess. The terms employed in Imagist poems are meant to be neither metaphors nor symbols. The underlying motivation of Imagism's poetics of austerity is its attempt to force language to be referential. Imagism cannot accept the basic arbitrariness of language. Pound states this programmatically in Gaudi er-Brzeska: A Memoir (1914): "Nomina sunt consequentia rerum" (words are the consequences of things).' One of the most radical modernist techniques freely gives away its regressive wish to participate in a decidedly pre-modem concept of language, that of mimesis. Several of Pound's poems come very close to the Imagist ideal. One of them is "L' Art, 1910": Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, Crushed strawberries! Come let us feast our eyes. The poem contains neither a coherent narrative nor merely ornamental words. It rests on a series of oppositions: between colours (green, eggwhite, and , implicitly, the red of strawberries), wholeness and destruction ("smeared" and "crushed" versus an "egg-white" cloth, which conjures up the frailty and perfection of an egg), and the edible and the poisonous (egg and strawberries as opposed to arsenic). The poem concludes with its 6. The Imagist "rules" given by F. S. Flint in Poetry of March 1913 are: " I. Direct treatment of the 'thing ' whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase not in sequence of a metronome." They are reprinted in Imagist Poetry, ed. P. Jones, Harmondsworth, 1972, 18. 7. Quoted from the 1960 reprint, 92, in Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, London, 1972, 146.

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central opposition, that between eating and seeing (in "feast our eyes"). It demonstrates precisely the generation of Images as Pound saw it. He describes his views on the nature of the Image in the essay "As for Imagism" (19[5) : The image can be of two sorts. It can arise within the mind. It is then "subjective". External causes play upon the mind, perhaps; if so, they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an [mage unlike themselves. Secondly, the [mage can be objective. Emotion seizing upon some external scene or action carries it intact into the mind; and the vortex purges it of all save the essential and dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original." The quotation contains the crucial impasse of the concept. It cannot distinguish between subjective and objective, between external reality and internal sensation. The "thing" in Imagist poetry is not an actual object, but a state of perception (EP, 53). This creates a massive problem concerning the origin of and authority behind its creation. Is it the objective reality of a stained cloth that produces the impression, the Image of " L' Art, 1910"? Or does the observer create objective reality by classifying the green as arsenic, the cloth as egg-white, and the entire scene as a feast for the eyes? Wolfgang Iser sees this dilemma in positive terms as a proof that the Imagist reduction is neither a complete return to mimesis nor idealistic subjectivis m. The Image, he claims, is neither located in the described object(s) nor in the perception of the writer and reader." It oscillates between them, and it is this oscillation that produces the "apparition" described in "Apparuit" and in the master-poem of Imagism, "In a Station of the Metro": The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Pound himself realized this evasive in-between status of the Image:

8. The essay appeared in The New AKe, xvIll3 (1915) . Quoted in Franz Link, Ezra Pound . Munich and Zurich, 1984, 53. Hereafter, EP. 9. Wolfgang Iser, Immanente Aesthetik, iisthetische Reflexion: Lyrik als Puradigma der Moderne , Poetik und Hermeneutik , II, Munich, 1966, 369. Hereafter,

u.

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This liberating aspect of the Image is exactly its connection with myth . The aim of the Imagist reduction techniques is precisely freedom from historic constraints and empiricist restrictions. When in Imagist poems perspective becomes part of reality , and indeed its ordering scheme, then the Imagist Image suggests convincingly that reality emerges neither from a given reality nor from an (equally limited) subject, but is constituted by a plurality of perspectives. Singular and monolithic definitions are presented as illusory. In a paradoxical way the illusory apparition becomes the "true" reality. The Image eventually institutionalizes imagination in an unconstrained relation with objects as reality. This imagination eventually reshapes experience and creates a new model of perception (lA, 371-72). But despite its rejection of complete subjective control, the Imagist perception still contains strong echoes of tradition. It calls up the romantic idea of the sublime and in conjunction with it the myth of the genius: "Will you find your lost dead among them?"!

Micromyths: Liberation or Trap? Rather than exploring the hidden traditionalism of the anti-traditionalist aesthetics of modernist poetry, I would like to continue to look at the structural consequences of modernist reduction. There, the freedom from the conventions of perception - which entails a liberation from traditional coherent and linear concepts of history and personality - functions as a deautomatization of the reading process. However, both Pound's pragmatic term "purify" (which he borrows from Mallarrne) and Iser's critical claim that this de-automatization is not a defamiliarization point towards an inherent contradiction within the technique which also influences its relation to history and myth : the de-automatization of a process does not 10. Ezra Pound , The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot , London , 1954,4. 11. Compare Maud EHmann's foreword to my Modernism in Poetry: Motivations, Structures and Limits, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature, London and New York, 1995.

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abandon the process but in fact highlights it (lA , 374-5). The reduction of language with the aim of doing justice to the complexity of phenomena still has to deal with two given entities: the mechan isms of language and the presence of objects. Pound's formula "make it new " gives away this impasse in its grammatical object "it". "It" refers exactly to the oscillating phenomenon created by the interaction of language and perception, the apparition of Imagist poetry. Yet the remaking of a traditional object creates nothing new ; it only ever reproduces an already existing object in a modified shape. Wolfgang Iser explains the reason for this impasse of Imagism: its approach remains analogous. Its Images still strive for mimetic equivalents, for instance by using the image of the "bough" for platform and "petals" for faces in "In a Station of the Metro" . The Image does not really alter the role of the creative poetic subject as an arranger of converging images. It merely hides the traditional subject at work in its professed impersonality. It does not break free from the constraints of history either. It merely replaces historic limitations with a superhistoricism that pretends to be unrestricted by linear and coherent history. Despite its anti-narrative attitude which rejects "macro-myths" such as "reality" , "history" and "subjectivity", Imagism nonetheless becomes mythical again . In its reductive and seemingly momentary apparitions, inside its own notion of expansion in a timeless and impersonal sphere, it produces micro-myths. The position desired by the paradoxical impersonal identity of Imagism is that of Nietzsche's Uberm ensch, the superman. The key to this superior perspective is sought in the perfect work of art. Here Pound is in perfect agreement with William Butler Yeats. But while Yeats attempts to find perfection in the most elaborate artefact (the golden bird of the "Byzantium" poems, for instance), perfection for Pound is located in the immediacy of artistic creation. The stress on the instantaneousness of Imagist images attempts to re-create an archetypal form of artistic production - that of inspiration. The romantic concepts of the sublime and the genius are again not far away . Roland Barthes calls this superhistorical tendency of modernist poems the desire of language to become substance rather that remaining a mere attribute. 12 Yet the fulfilment of modernism's wish is clearly prevented by the very instability of language itself. Even attempts to overcome tradition and conventional history by a direct treatment of "the

12. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and C. Smith, London, 1967, 48-49.

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thing" bring back the mythical in the shape of the supposedly authentic unmediated experience. Experience then assumes the role of the original, of the object-language that the poetic text transforms into a nuclear myth. A genuinely new poetic must consequently be concerned with the basic mechanisms of language. Pound's abandoning of Imagism in favour of the more radical Vorticism shows his recognition of the impasse. Vorticism stresses the metaphoric drive beh ind poeti c creat ion in a way that again recalls Nietzsche: That drive to form metaphors, that fundamental desire of man , which cannot be discounted for one moment, because that would amount to ignoring man himself, is in truth not overcome and indeed hardly restrained by the fact that out of its diminished products, the concepts, a regular and rigid new world is built up for him as a prison fortress. It seeks a new province for its activities and a different riverbed and gen erally finds it in myth and in art. It constantly confuses the categories and cells of concepts by presenting new transferences, metaphors and metonyms; constantly showing the desire to shape the existing world of the wideawake person to be vari egatedly irregular and disinterestedly incoherent, exciting and eternally new , as is the world of dreams (RL, 254 ). Vorticism indeed attempts the impossible. It strives to institutionalize the very force described by Nietzsche as the simultaneously constructive and destructive drive to create metaphors. In Adorno's terminology , it attempts the reconciliation of the irreconcilable, a reification of the will. Strictly applied , Vorticism must consequently remain a theory without application and without products. For where is the possible plac e of texts - which must try to achieve some form of duration - in a concept of perpetual flux ? They would mer ely be the residue on the walls of the vortex - and therefore deficient and in fact waste from their very conception. Once more, modernism is caught between the contradictory impulses towards instantaneous fulfilment and the establishment of permanence described by Paul de Man . This problem highlights drastically the most crucial impasse of modernism: if it really wants to be free from the past, from tradition, from the predetermination of its material, it must remain without value. For value can only ever be determined against pre-existing measures, tradition in short. All-powerful modernist works that include and encompass everything must shift themselves into a nihil istic limbo.

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The complementary assault on language to Vorticism's emphasis on flux is Pound 's ideogrammatic method. With it, he attempts to eliminate the inevitable lack of precision of the connection of signifier and signified by insisting on the proper expression. The Chinese character cheng ming , which Pound introduces in Canto Ll , represents this strategy. It means "correct name(s) " or, more literally , "correct rank". In his idiosyncratic etymology of the term Pound claims that the character unites those of "governor" and "waning moon over the mouth"." With this etymology he wishes to prove that the character has a clear ideographic link with its signified. Yet this is questionable, and not only because the history of the Chinese language is rather different from what Pound and his source Fenollosa believe . The term "correct name(s)/rank", this much is obvious, refers to abstractions that possess no unambiguous ideographic equivalents.

Modernism's Myths: A Double Failure Modernism's paradoxical double failure is its attempt to become autonomous from mimesis and at the same time remain faithful to it. One can therefore describe modernism's aesthetics as not so much antirealistic, but hyperrealistic in Baudrillard's sense of the simulacrum attempting to be more real than reality . 14 When modernism fails to achieve its paradoxical goal, this failure is eventually transformed into a rejection of the mimetic altogether. One of the most obvious consequences of this rejection is the shift of value to the aspect of construction. This suddenly all-powerful construction again finds its expression in reduction as well as expansion, in Imagism and Vorticism, but also in the "world formula" of The Cantos. What has really happened, however, is merely a costume change of modernism's mythopoetic will to power. Once more it attempts to secure its power by exclusion. In Adorno's words, it "manifests intolerance of all externality and wants to transform itself into a reality sui generis" (AT, 85). Even on the level of the smallest constituent of the modernist poem, that of the sign, the problematic connection between signifier and signified is replaced by a further reduction. As its consequence the signifier alone remains and seemingly guarantees an absolute control of signification.

13. Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, Milwood, 1974,38. 14. Jean Baudrillard , Fatal Strategies, ed. J. Fleming, trans. P. Beitehman and W. G. 1. Niesluchowski , London, 1990, 11.

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Reduction , however, and this is perhaps the very core of its micromyth, is not possible without a holistic expansionist model of thought inside which the reduction happens and makes sense . Out of the crucial instability of modernism at the basis of its very material evolves its desire for wholeness, control, and totality . Here, Jacques Lacan's pronouncement concerning the desire of the subject applies also to the modernist work : "the signification is realized only on the basis of a grasp of things in their totality.':" The greatest endeavour of modernism therefore merely reflects its attempt to control its very basis. Yet the control it simulates is only that of the signifier. Lacan states: "The signifier alone guarantees the theoretical coherence of the whole as a whole." (E, 126) The adjective "theoretical" is crucial here. Adding signifier to signifier only ever creates a layer of text Modernist poetry , caught between the shortcomings of its own material and the desire for what it continually fails to attain , namely true being , perpetuates itself endlessly as a self-destructive work. The concept of the quest with its promise of possible fulfilment, the projection therefore of an external plan inside which the frustrating manoeuvres of modernism will eventually be justified, is another hint at the inextricable link between modernism's microscopic endeavours and myth. Adorno characterizes this paradoxical desire once more in terms of the work of art The enigma of works of art is the fact of their having been broken off. If transcendence were really present in them, they would be mysteries rather than riddles . They are not. They are riddles precisely because they are fragments disclaiming to be wholes, even though wholes is what they really want to be (AT, 184). This desire for wholeness and the claim for universality are inherent in all facets of modernism, not only in modernist poetry , literature, art, and philosophy, but also in the sciences. One only has to look towards the "world formulas" of physics or chaos theory. It is arguable that even the claim that literature has no distinct boundaries, that it is concerned with and capable of making statements about everything, is a variant of this universalism. It is precisely this tendency which eventually permits the highly specialized discourse of poetry to produce a "poem including history " in The Cantos .

15. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, London, 1977. 126. Hereafter. E.

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An alternative expression of the universalist and totalitarian tendencies of modernist poetry, complementary to the endless significatory quest of The Cantos, is the "calming" of the material, the reification of its mechanisms in symbolic shape. Eliot's Four Quartets are an example of this pretended reconciliation of internal impasses. The recourse to the symbolic creates a oneness. a whole, that - according to de Man's description of modernism as struggle - should no longer be possible. It is, but - as Adorno points out (AT, 425) and Baudrillard repeats in his theory of the simulacrum - only in the form of an illusion. Myth easily enters an aesthetic of total control through the backdoor, an aesthetic which on the surface presents itself as purged from traditional myths . The pretended reconciliation of irreconcilable tensions between subject and object, work and world is, as Adorno demonstrates in his Aesthetic Theory, a regressive turn within modernism. Modernism, Adorno claims, results from an insistence on dissonance; it stresses the constructive aspect of art and sets up construction against the traditionally mimetic task of art. When this dissonance at the centre of modernism is overcome, a truly modernist artistic expression becomes impossible (AT , 160-62). One of the central proofs of the desire of modernist poems for an impossible wholeness despite their inevitable structural fragmentation is their attempt to present themselves as works. The work seemingly leaves its appearance character behind and overcomes its internal paradoxes. It presents itself as a synthetic wholeness, an artificial consciousness or indeed a reality of its own . In this assumed "reality" of the modernist poem, the modernist micro-myth becomes a macro-myth again. Escapes from Myth? As long as modernism takes recourse to the wholeness (and through this wholeness to the authority) of works, it cannot escape the fangs of myth . All that is possible for it is a precarious balance through which it can attempt to fulfil itself without falling victim to myth, and especially to the most dangerous myth of all: that of its own all-powerful autonomy. In order to achieve this balance, it must ' indeed pursue the tendency of modernity (highlighted in Nietzsche) of transforming reality into an aesthetic construct - rather than refraining from aesthetics altogether. Yet it must at the same time resist the complete aestheticization of reality. It must give up its dream of omnipotence inside a simulated reality of construction. For this would entail the transformation of aesthetics into

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what the German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch calls "anaesthetics". Anaesthetics is the equivalent of Adorno's dubious "more" , the nimbus of truth and authenticity achieved by the products of experiences which are conditioned and conditional, the creation of universal "truths" out of limited insights. " The key to modernism's delicate balancing act as well as the crossroads from which the ways lead either to a blind revelling in myth or a delicate handling of myth is self-reflection. Modernist utterances must of necessity constitute themselves; they cannot resist the attempt at an impossible unity either. As Adorno reminds us, this is the legacy of myth at the very core of Enlightenment rationality. Both myth and rationality are propelled by the same desire, that of mastering nature. Yet modernism 's internal dialectic - and that makes it more flexible than rationality - also contains an oppositional drive: that towards dissolution. It can therefore accept heterogeneity, however uneasily (AT, 266-67). It is this contradictory impulse that allows modernist poems to highlight both their constructive potential and the tension created by its interplay with a remaining attachment to the mimetic. Th e pretended wh oleness achieved by the reific ation of modernist utterances as truth, history and works of art is therefore as questionable as the unrestrained flow of signification, the excess of endless utterances, such as those of The Cantos. Reduction as well as complete expansion are variants of myth, micro-myths and macro-myths respectively. They form a false alternative, because when followed in the direction of a pretended autonomy, authority and indeed omnipotence, they deny the structural origin of modernism in tension. The concept of tension is above the suspicion of being formalistic. Tension highlights dissonant experience and antinomial relations in the artistic object, thus stressing precisely the substantive moment of "form" . It is through its inner tensions that the art work defines itself as a field of force , even when it has already come to rest , i.e. when it is objectified. A work of art is as much a sum total of relations of tensions as it is an attempt to dissolve them (AT, 407). False unification in a mythical wholeness as well as equally mythical unrestricted dissolution abandon the dialectic tension of modernism because they do not abandon the work. In order to be true to itself (i.e. to 16. Wolfgang Welsch, Asth etisches Denken, Stuttgart, 1990,25. Hereafter, AD .

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its ongin in a paradox), modernism must continue and radicalize the interplay of tensions - at the expense of even the work and the subject. If postmodernism is to be regarded as the fulfilment of modernism and not as the abandoning of modernism, I? then "postrnodern" poems must undermine themselves. They must deny authority both to themselves and to their readers . At the same time they must display an awareness that even this act of self-questioning cannot fully escape the mechanisms of myth . For mythopoeia lurks even in the self-reflection that is called for. Roland Barthes demonstrates that reflection is the very end of myth." Yet the origin of reflection, the "self' of "self-reflection", is itself already tainted by the mythical. The modernist work in its "truest" form must be an expression of this paradox. It is therefore both modern, in that modernism results from tension , and doubly modern, in that it acknowledges the contradictions and mythical impasses even within the foundational tensions of modernism. The most important result of this double paradox is formulated by Adorno as the justice towards heterogeneity (AT, 266-67; see also AD, 130). This farewell to totalizations - and the related careful handling of myth - has not been achieved by the so-called "classical" modernisms of a Yeats, Eliot. or Pound. The reason lies exactly in the simplistic belief that established mythical thinking can be overcome by structural devices, either in the direction of new myths or demystification. What happens, in fact, and this is what this essay has tried to demonstrate, is that obvious mythical attachment, that to tradition and its macro-myths, is replaced by seemingly myth-free technique. This freedom from myth, however, is only achieved through a dangerous blindness towards the micro-myths inherent in the strategies (of reduction , impersonality, etc.) themselves. What a postmodernism that is true to its modernist roots requires is a mythical thinking that simultaneously questions and even deconstructs myth, that dissolves "rnonornyths" into coexisting and competing "polyrnyths", as the philosopher Odo Marquard demands." The insight into the potentials of language must under no circumstances be used to create world-formulas, such as the one described by Walter Benjamin : The conviction that the spiritual essence of a thing consists in its language - this view understood as a hypothesis is the great abyss 17. Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, 2nd edition , Weinheim, 1988, 319-20 . 18. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, London, 1973. 19. ado Marquard , Farewell to Matters of Principle: Philosophical Studies, trans. R. M. Wallace , New York and Oxford. 1989.

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Yet equally dangerous (because equally totalizing) is the opposite of such a world-formula. It occurs when relativism is declared to be the norm, as in many watered-down views of postmodernism as "anything goes". Assertions and exclusions are inevitable and necessary; reductions and attempts at purification are not wrong in themselves. What is required once more is an awareness of the dubious premises of these strategies and the contradictions and aporias they create. Ludwig Wittgenstein' s warning concerning scepticism neatly summarizes the impasses of modernist poetry in its relation to the macro-myths of traditional knowledge and the micro-myths of its own assumed power. Wittgenstein wittily unmasks the unpleasant alternative of a naive mythical thinking and an equally naive belief in the power of criticism to overcome myth once and for all. Wittgensteiri 's dictum is: "A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt.'?'

20. Walter Benjamin. Angelus Novus, Frankfurt/M .. 1988. 10. (my translation). 21. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Uber Gewifiheit: On Certainty. eds G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. trans . D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford. 1969. 5ge.

FREUD'S MYTHS: MEMORY, CULTURE AND THE SUBJECT GERALD SIEGMUND

It has become a truism in recent years that Freud employs myth for the sake of knowledge and insight. The one particular myth that functions as the key to all the subject's problems and traumas is, of course. the myth of Oedipus. It helps to reveal the hidden truth about the analytic subject, it enlightens its past through an individual retelling of the one story. It functions as the key to the interpretation of dreams and the construction of a chain of events representing the subject's history.' In fact , the story of the psychoanalytic subject can only be told if Oedipus remains firmly in place, if it gives the history of the subject an origin from which all other events inevitably follow. On the other hand, and this is what I would like to show in this essay. myth, and the myth of Oedipus in particular, is the very undoing of the system it pretends to stabilize. I would like to draw your attention to the role of myth as the producer of texts and knowledge in a framework that is primarily a theatrical one. Myth is not only employed for the sake of knowledge and insight; it helps to bring Enlightenment itself into being. This role is not even abandoned in the process of demystification. Every insight requires myth, and to end all myth, you need another myth, which for literary modernity. as I would like to point out, is the myth of language and theatre.

Oedipus Undone: Myth and the Psychoanalytic Subject For Freud, the beginning of civilization lies in the Oedipus complex. The archaic laws of totemism and the taboo of incest which promise to put a ban on violence in the company of man both have their origin in the conflict of the primal horde in which an overpowering father kept all the women for himself. "One day " - but Freud might as well have said "once upon a time": .. . the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde.

1. M. Rutschky, "Freud und die Mythen". in Mythos und Moderne : Begriff und BUd einer Rekonstruktion, ed. Karl-Heinz Bohrer, FrankfurtlM .• 1983.217-41.

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Gerald Siegmund United , they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually .... Cannibal savages as they were , it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as welI as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished 'their identification with him, and each one of them acquired a portion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps mankind 's earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed , which was the beginning of so many things - of social organization, of moral restrictions and of religion .'

Thus, the totem meal is at once the memory of and the atonement for the deed . The emotional ambivalence towards the father, who was loved and hated at the same time , resulted in a feeling of guilt which constitutes the laws of social organization. To prevent the repetition of the deed, a totem animal acting as a substitute for the father was declared sacred, and any attempt to harm it was punished. Freud considered this to be the origin of religion. But now that the father was gone, the sons fought among themselves over the women . To prevent them from killing each other, the taboo of incest was created, and the women remained untouched. An immediate satisfaction of the sexual drive to possess the women was again made impossible. "They thus created out of their filial sense of guilt the two fundamental taboos of totemism, which for that very reason inevitably correspond to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex." (IT,

205)

The primary Oedipus of mankind, which Freud here considers to be an event, "inevitably corresponds" to the secondary Oedipus each and every individual has to live through to become an integral part of the social order. The German text, here, is much stronger: the two Oedipusses, it says, "muBten tibereinstimmen" ,' they "must correspond". Otherwise what? Could it be that Freud 's elaborate hierarchy of sexual development which culminates in the genital organization of sexuality, that is to say in the subordination of the pleasure principle under the reproductive function, would then crumble? And what about his second topography, the neat distinction of the human psyche into id, ego and super-ego, which 2. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Pelican Freud Library, trans . James Strachey, Harmondsworth, 1973, XIII, 43-224 (203). Hereafter, IT. 3. Sigmund Freud, Totem und Tabu, in Studienausgabe, IX: Kulturtheoretische Schriften, FrankfurtlM., 1974, 287-444 (427).

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likewise revolves around a successful resolution of the oedipal conflict? Without an Oedipus, there is no guilt, without guilt there is no super-ego. It seems that the stability of Freud's entire system of thinking stands and falls with Oedipus. It is perhaps telling and even more telling in a Freudian sense that Freud does not dare ask what would happen otherwise. The quoted passage gives the impression that Freud forces two events together to bolster up each other, to lend support to each other. In a lengthy footnote, Freud cite s the anthropologist Atkinson - or should I say he hides behind Atkinson 's theory ? Atkinson supposedly arrived at the same murderous conclusion concerning the primal horde. He even observed the killing of the father "in herds of wild oxen and horses". What the example from wildlife suggests is of course: who could possibly argue with the laws of nature? As if this were not enough, Freud then performs another somersault to undermine the very proof he has just delivered in favour of his argument. He apologizes for his "lack of precision" : "It would be as foolish to aim at exactitude in such questions as it would be unfair to insist upon certainty" (IT, 204 ). The murder story of the primary father is a logical nightmare. Freud treats the primary Oedipus as if it were a singular event with a beginning, a middle, and an end. He therefore must posit a father who never was a son himself, a fatherless father for whom neither guilt nor the taboo of incest could possibly have been an issue. With regard to such a "pure" father, where should all the conflicts derive from that transform him into a dreaded law after the killing? The mythological story of origin cannot help but presuppose the element of guilt that in the story is supposed to be the result of the killing. What else should have kept the brother horde from killing the father straight away, once their sexual urges have become strong enough? Freud 's own explanation, however tentatively put, does not sound convincing: "Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength" (IT, 204) . They must have wanted to employ their strength in the direction of the killing, and that wish can hardly be accounted for by the means with which it could be fulfilled. What is more important, however, is that Freud does not need the murder to explain the origins of the sexual taboo in the first place . As Rene Girard has pointed out in a different context, the law of exogamy already existed before the father was killed , since none of the brothers had

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access to their sisters.' The father must already have been a father before the killing turned him into one, otherwise the emotional ambivalence of the brothers towards him could not be accounted for. Where does the block come from that prevents their love from turning into hate straight away? The murder must already have taken place before it actually happened. On top of all that, the killing was completely superfluous: the brother horde killed to satisfy their sexual drive , but the result of the killing was the suppression of the very drive they had killed for. What was supposed to liberate, frustrates even more. Why then, one cannot help asking, does Freud tenaciously stick to the apparently scientific explanation of the primal horde and the killing of the father, when it is clearly, even to 'Freud himself, nothing but a myth that cannot be logically justified? Why tell the story of the killed father, if it causes so many problems that could be avoided simply by not telling it? I would argue that Freud's use of myth here follows a different logic which I will call the "aesthetic memory". The concept of aesthetic memory allows us to gain insight into the functioning of myth in general. In order to enlarge upon this, I am inevitably drawn to Freud again in a sort of repetition compulsion which is at the core of Freud 's use of myth. The primary Oedipus revolving around the actual killing of the father "must correspond" to the individual Oedipus leading to the interiorization of the law of the father and the super-ego. Thus, this second Oedipus inevitably faces the same logical difficulties as the first one. Or does he not? There is one crucial difference between the first and the second , namely that the first precedes the second. The second can therefore already rely on a culturally inherited feeling of guilt, which accounts for the emotional ambivalence during the Oedipus of our individual childhoods. Freud needs the killing of the primary father to end all killings. Only because we have an inherited memory of the killing , a memory that forms the core of our unconscious , can the second killin g be prevented. The super-ego merely repeats what is always already there in our unconscious. It becomes the memory of the id, and what is more, it also becomes the memory of our ego . If the ego comes into being through a succession of object cathexes, of which the first is, as Freud claims, the introjection of one's parents, then the super-ego immortalizes exactly this first narcissistic cathexis. The super-ego is the memory of the ego organ ization . But far from stabilizing the ego , as Freud believes , it is part of its narcissistic dissociation. The connection between the repression of drives and

4. Rene Girard , Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory, Baltimore and London, 1977, 193-222.

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aggression forces the ego to incorporate new objects which keep its structure open while at the same time striving for closure. The ego here follows the same structural ambivalence as myth . And the myth of the subject as ego can only be, as we shall see later , a theatrical one . The super-ego repeats the violence it is supposed to control as the arbiter of the civilization process. We may therefore ask with Leo Bersani, "how can an oppositional or dualistic structure survive this unexpected sameness of different terms and this spiralling or swirling back of a proposition to its point of departure"?' What we have here is a complex system of mirrors mirroring each other. In fact , the mirror and the mirrored come into being simultaneously. The one ceases to be a prerequisite of the other but only exists at the moment when the two come together. The secondary always becomes the primary and vice vers a, but the primary gets lost in the process of mirroring. There is no primary. It is only an effect, unseen and unheard of, within the structure of the secondary to guarantee its closedness and unity . Where, then , does this leave Freud's myth of origin ? Freud needs the myth of a primary Oedipus to get his narrative going, to describe what otherwise could not be described , and to transform the circular mechanism of repetition into a linear story. He needs it to establish a relation of cause and effect, where there is only ambivalence of simultaneous love and hatred : " After they had got rid of him, had satisfied their hatred and had put into effect their wish to identify themselves with him, the affection which had all this time been pushed under was bound to make itself felt" (IT, 204) . First there was hatred, and then the affection is allowed to come through, but never both at the same time. Freud needs the primary scene to stabilize his psychoanalytic system which cannot run on ambivalence but requires a hierarchy of terms and developmental steps towards a social norm in order to establish the social . But what happens if the myth of origin is not as self-sufficiently stable as Freud wants us to believe? What happens when, as we have seen, the first needs a second that makes it a first only after the event? I do not think it is too far-fetched to suggest that the hesitant way in which Freud sketches the myth of the primary horde indicates that he realized what he was letting himself in for. Myth then is a secondary construct or an image hiding the primary one, which it tries to establish while at the same time signalling that it is hiding it. Myth is the memory of that which cannot be

5. Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art, New York, 1986, 21.

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remembered, since the original always gets lost in the course of the narrative. Freud could not have arrived at his psychoanalytic system without the myth which is also its undoing. Freud 's use of myth, therefore, also opens up the question of how knowledge (or any theoretical or scientific discourse) functions. The linear and hierarchic model is only achieved by circular repetition, time only by the atemporal, knowledge only by blindness, Enlightenment by myth . If all myth partakes in Enlightenment then all Enlightenment is necessarily tinged with myth. It is this dialectic that Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno describe in their Dialectic of Enlightenment: "Just as the myths already realize enlightenment, so enlightenment with every step becomes more deeply engulfed in mythology. It receives all its matter from myths in order to destroy them; and even as a judge it comes under the mythic curse."? The history of the psychoanalytic subject acts as proof of this. Freud discovered the Oedipus complex while undergoing selfanalysis. In his letter to Wilhelm FlieB of 15 October 1897 , Freud writes: "I have found, in my own case too, falling in love with the mother and jealousy of the father, and I now regard it as a universal event of early childhood . . . ."7 "Moi, c'est comme Oedipe", Jean Starobinski writes in his interpretation of this primary scene for the psychoanalytic subject. Cette proposition se renverse instantanement et se formule comme une verite historique universalisee: Oedipe, c' etait done nous. La comprehension de soi, dans l' auto-analyse, n' est possible que comme reconnaissance du mythe, et Ie mythe, ainsi interiorise, sera desormais lu comme la dramaturgie d'une pulsion. ' The subject gains knowledge about itself by interiorizing the Oedipus myth: "Moi, c'est comme Oedipe" - It is with me as with Oedipus.

6. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheirner, Dialectic of Enlightenment. trans. John Cumming , London and New York, 1979, 11-12. 7. Sigmund Freud. Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. ed. and trans. James Strachey, London, 1966, 1,265. 8. Jean Starobinski, L' Oeil Vivant 1/: La Relation Critique. Paris. 1970, 315. "This claim is suddenly reversed and becomes a general historical truth: all of us were Oedipus . The understanding of the self is only possible in the self-analysis as the recognition of the myth; and the myth, interiorized in this way, is then understood as the dramaturgy of the drive ."

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Recognizing ones elf means recognizing the myth. If the subj ect of consciousness comes into being by introj ecting myth , this recognition implies (after all, we have heard about the logical pitfall s of the Freudian myth) the cognition of its openness , its contingency and amb iguity . Recognition of the "I" is therefore nothing but the acceptance of "Not I". Myth co vers up the gap of origin . It puts a lid on the heterogeneity that originates with , but is hidden under , the narrative singularity of the primal scene. At the same time , and this is the dialectic twist in Freud 's under standing of psychoanalysis, the very same myth that covers up the non-hierarchical organization of elements in clear-cut, manageable and, for that matter , curabl e oppositions leaves access to the snakepit of difference by offering itself to endless interpretations. Whatever drama tis personae you choose to focus on, they will tell a different story of the same myth , will bring to light other elements hitherto neglected and will open up the single story to a plurality of meaning. The story of psychoanalysis and its subject is a network of different intertwined stories, an intertextual device or a rhizomatic structure. Perhaps this makes more concrete what I have called "aesthetic memory" at the beginning of this essay . Myth does not remember given facts which are recalled to mind . It remembers the new , unforeseen and hitherto unknown in the form of a text. I would now like to draw attention to a poetic text by the East German playwright Heiner Muller. He uses the myth of Oedipus to comment on the very structure of myth in a specific historic situation. He connects repetition compulsion, expressed in the failure of revolutions, with linear progress.

" Odlpus Kommentar"I"Oedipus Commentary": The Eye Mirroring Itself Heiner Muller wrote his commentary on Oedipus in 1966 as an introduction to his own version of Holderlin's translation of Odipus Rex which was premiered at the Deutsche Theater in East Berlin in 1967. 9 This short poetic text has been read as an allegory of communism with Stalin as Oedipus who freed mankind from capitalist oppression by solving its riddle with humane communism. "And man was the answer", as Heiner Muller writes, but the saviour of mankind brought destruction upon his people in the form of political violence and starvation. Mtiller's text

9. Heiner Muller, "Odipus Kommentar", in Mauser, Berlin, 1978, 43-44 (my translation). Hereafter, OK.

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therefore represents a self-questioning of socialism which fully acknowledges its violent history and tries to turn it into a chance for a new beginning. to I would like to give this story a slightly different twist by emphazising the inevitable interaction of blindness and insight, to borrow Paul de Man's famous phrase , and the need for myth as the narrative that binds the two together. In Muller's text Oedipus's advance to knowledge, which in his case is always self-recognition, is described as follows: On his own track overtaken by his own step : he And his foundation is his summit: he has overtaken time Taken into the circle , I and no ending, himself. In the sockets of his eyes he buries the world. Was there a tree (OK,44)? Oedipus has overtaken time as a linear succession of generations. He is simultaneously son, husband , father and brother and has thus transformed genealogy into a mythic circle. Oedipus has become completely selfsufficient and self-absorbed. He has connected himself with himself by avoiding any form of exterior reality , by avoiding the Other. At the very moment when Oedipus gains access to this superior because pure form of knowledge, he loses contact with the outside world. He blinds himself at the supreme moment of total insight. Complete knowledge turns into its opposite and actually denies the ideals of Enlightenment and history. The fact that he is both the problem and its solution, the beginning which has always already been its own ending, leads to no action. Knowledge becomes sterile by trying to avoid the practice of the Other which is a social one. Muller's poetic text articulates the same dialectic of blindness and insight that forms the basis of Freud's use of myth: the linear narrative model of time must necessarily take recourse to the mythical model of repetition. It does , however, give the mythical circle a tragic undertone. By starting the story with Laios, Oedipus's father, the text puts the origin of violence back in time. Not only Oedipus but already his father were subject to the same fate. There is no single story with a clear-cut beginning and a definite ending. The beginning is lost in time and yet yearns to be told as a narrative. The story of Oedipus is preceded by that of his father 10. Hans-Thies Lehmann, "Odipus Tyrann", in Heiner Maller, ed. Genia Schulz, Stuttgart, 1980, 87-92. The text may, of course, also be read as an oedipal story featuring Heiner Miiller, the son, and Bertolt Brecht, the father figure whom Miiller has succeeded by turning the screw on his Marxist dialectics.

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who was involved in a homosexual rape and was therefore also expelled from his city . History is nothing but an endless repetition of the same cruelty. It consists of various layers of tragic events that do not add up to a continuous historic development. The new alway s turns into the old again . On this level, the text seems to suggest that progress is always based on repetition compulsion, that historic linearity rests on the ahistorical circle. But what kind of progress can this be? The steps Laios and Oedipus undertake to avoid catastrophe actually bring about the catastrophe they are trying to avoid . The road mankind takes to save itself is its downfall. As Muller's text declares, Laios "thus spread the foot, which trod on him, by prudence" (OK, 43). Laios wants to stifle "the new" , wishes to prevent historic progress (there is a pun on the German "Fortschritt" , "progress" , and "Fufsschritt", "the step of a foot" , which links progress with Oedipus and his swollen foot) . The text suggests that rivalry is necessary to gain insight. Rivalry actually forms the basis of the subject's identity . "Nobody has my gait" (OK , 43), says Oedipus, thus acknowledging, via the stigma, the rivalry between father and son. There always is a wound that functions as a mnemonic sign which chains the subject to its forgotten history . And yet the text does not end on this single note. It actually incorporates the dialectic of blindness and insight, myth and Enlightenment, human failure and revolution into its own structure. Oedipus, as we have seen, comes into being by blinding himself, that is by avoiding external images . But the text presents Oedipus as exactly such an image , as a memory of something still to be learned from all the violence, even though the text does not specify what exactly that "something" could be. "Seht sein Beispiel " - "look at his example" - turns Oedipus into an emblematic figure, "who departs from bloody starting holes in the freedom of mankind". So there is a kind of departure from the bloody eye sockets which at the same time already contains its own failures and impossibilities: "between the teeth of man / on too little feet, with hands not grasping enough space" (OK, 44). The text ends on an aporia that brings the dialectic of myth and Enlightenment to a standstill. It freezes the dialectic in the single mnemonic image of the bloody Oedipus who remains forever entangled in his own violent history. Nonetheless, he departs into a future, as Sophocles's play Oedipus on Colonnus tells us, a future that turns him into the patron saint of Theseus's Athens. In plays like Mauser or Der Horatier, Heiner Muller often uses the "dialectic at a stillpoint", as Walter Benjamin defines the image , thereby confronting the socialism of the former GDR with its own blind spots: namely the

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violence of the revolution towards its own children ." Myth, as his text suggests, enables us to see the blindness and to benefit from it. It can do so, however, only if we are attentive to its textual implications, only if we see it as a web of interwoven textual strands that open up the single mythical narrative and turn it into a process of interpretation. 12

The Myth of Theatrical Representation And yet, to bring the dialectic round once again, is not myth the very structure that masquerades the process in favour of the event ? At least this is what my reading of Freud's myth of origin suggested. I use the word "masquerade" on purpose, because it describes the mechanism at work when the mythical process becomes a theatrical one. Something is pretending to be something else. For the psychoanalytic subject, fate is disguised in the shape of the primary Oedipus, which Freud in turn derived from a play by Sophocles, which represents the subject for the purpose of self-recognition by means of introjection. For Freud, the origin of civilisation as told in Totem and Taboo is closely linked with the origin of theatre. For the first totem meal was also the first festival in which the mourning over the killing and the death of the totem animal was transformed into festive joy. "Here we have easy access to an understanding of the nature of festivals in general. A festival is a permitted, or rather obligatory, excess, a solemn breach of a prohibition" (IT, 201). The feast remembers the dreadful deed by mourning the loss of the father. It acts out the catastrophe symbolically in order to prevent its actual repetition. As a consequence it binds the newborn subjects in an early social contract. In early Greek tragedy , Freud interprets the single suffering hero as the substitute for the father who takes on the guilt of his sons (the chorus) "in order to relieve the chorus from theirs" (IT, 218) . The sons are transferring their guilt to the father who is now held responsible for "presumptuousness and rebelliousness against a great authority" (IT, 219), a crime the sons originally committed in their rebellion against the father. Leaving aside the correctness of Freud 's interpretation of Greek tragedy, Greek theatre was indeed part of a five day festival, the City Dyonisia in March of every year. The festival was both concerned with 11. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk. in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Prankfurt/M, 1991, vnt/l , 577ff. 12. Cf. Mythos und Moderne: Begriff und BUd einer Rekonstruktion . ed. KarlHeinz Bohrer , FrankfwtlM., 1983, passim.

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remembering the dead - as an endless list of names and genealogies in Aischylos's Prometheus testifies - and with redressing the social balance in a newly formed democracy based on continuous warfare with the cities surrounding Athens and the exclusion of large parts of its population from wealth and power. The Dyonisia renewed the social contract by celebrating over the graves of the dead. " The mythopoeic fables unfolded in the tragedies can therefore be read as master narratives of society, as the memory of its actions, problems and morals. Society mirrors itself in the public sphere of theatre. The actors on stage represent the audience which in tum participates in the theatrical action by means of illusion and identification with the characters on the one hand and analytic distance from their actions on the other. If, however, the textual implications of Freud's mythical story are taken seriously, another element comes into play. If myth is indispensable for the birth of the subject, it is also at the same time its own undoing. Far from closing the subject through the story of Oedipus, as Freud would have it, Oedipus opens up the question of the subject, whose answer is always deferred to some other untold and yet present part of the story. The subject thus becomes a body marked with signs of other stories that escape its conscious presence, in the same way as the meaning of the swollen foot escaped Oedipus until it was no longer of use to him ." I would argue that it is the body of the actor that opens up representation on stage onto that which cannot be represented. 15 The actor 's presence in a particular piece always carries echoes of all the other parts he or she has ever played. It also echoes his or her personal history with all its personal predilections, mannerisms and wounds. They function as the memory of his or her story that are always there, but which the present cannot tell. Representation on stage therefore contains elements that do not signify but present the collapse of signification in favour of an auratic effect. These wounds and scars account for the emotional aspect of theatrical communication. Theatre then does not represent an image of man in action . It presents the process of a coming into being of man whose very first sense of himself at his inception in Greek tragedy was that of

13. Compare, for instance, Christian Meier, "Zur Funktion der Feste in Athen im 5. Jahrhundert vor Christus", in Das Fest, eds Walter Haug and Rainer Warning, Munich, 1989,569-91 . 14. Shoshana Felman, "Beyond Oedipus: The Specimen Story of Psychoanalysis", MLN Comparative Literature, 98 (1983),1021-53. 15. Siegmund, Gerald, "Theatre as Memory", Theaterschrijt, VIlI/3 (1994), 21434.

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pain and powerlessness." One of his first names was Aias, the twice cheated Greek warrior, whose very name is an onomatopoetic cry of pain. The sufferi ng of the heroes does not make sense. It is unintelligible. Nonetheless, this very breakdown of semantics communicates on an unconscious level. If myth translates the unrepresentable or even the unspeakable into the representable by bring ing heterogeneous elements originating at the same time into a linear narrative, then myth is the very heart of theatre . The mirror and the mirrored only exist when they meet. Translated into theatrical terms this can be read as: theatre only exists when actors and audienc e come together. It is this . union that marks the moral aspect of theatre beyond the telling of a moral fable. Contents or the jabula docet are completely irrelevant to the social function of theatre . Theatre does not represent society . It presents society and its subjects by the very act of coming together. What Freud' s text then suggests is that the subject is in its formative process a theatrical rather than a dramatic one. It dissociates itself to constitute itself rather than coming together in the closed narrative of Oedipus . And yet Freud needs this narrati ve to speak of the very process it covers up. The theatre of the subject already begins within the subjec t-to-be and not only in the sphere of social interaction and roleplaying that constitute the world of drama. The subject becomes a theatrical text of inauthentic relations with others trying to come together by the dynamics of performance. Thi s partly explains the abundance of theatrical metaphors in deconstru ctionist texts, as discussed in a paper by Mana Minich Brewer : "Theatricality is thus a priviledged means by which interpretation , explicitly or not, design ates and frames its own practice as performance.?" Jacques Derrida 's key idea, which haunts every single one of his readings, discovers the secondary at the heart of the primary. He holds, therefore, that there can be no origin but only traces that come together momentarily and spark something off that is beyond the control of an intentional act. One might say that he has uncovered the very structure of theatre, a theatre that goes beyond the supposed closure of the subject through Oedipus, a theatre behind the looking glass , of haunted spaces, ghosts and spectres, a theatre that does not present a dramat ic image of man, but echoes his Others: his passion s and losses. Behind the dramatic desire for wholeness lurks the theatrical memor y of "I" being actually and painfully "Not I". 16. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Theater und Mythos: Die Konstitution des Subjekts im Diskurs der antiken Tragodie, Stuttgart, 1991. 17. Mari a Minich Brewer, "Performing Theory", Theatre Journal, 37 (1985), 1330.

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Such a theatre is, of course, not free from eventually becoming mythical itself. Reification raises its monstrous head , fixing the very terms performance is supposed to keep open. This brings me to the final section of my paper which deals with Samuel Beckett's play programmatically entitled Not I.

The Mouth-Body-Language Machine: Samuel Beckett's Not I Unlike the modem French dramatists Jean Anouilh or Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett does not tell a mythical story in order to transpose the myth of Antigone or Orestes into a modem day context. He deals with the myth of theatre itself: the myth of the black box, where everything is possible, the mystery of hearing, speaking and listening, the mouth, the voice and the body with all its erotic connotations. Not I is the blueprint of the theatrical situation as such. IS The play analyzes its constitutive parts, but by doing so it also enlarges them to mythical proportions. Not I is the coming into being of a memory and the memory of a coming into being of a subject caught between repetition compulsion (myth) and a linear model of time (history). Beckett's play does not represent a story, but a paradoxical situation that cannot be represented. As the curtain rises, we see a black box . Faintly lit and raised above ground by the ghostly touch of a magician in opposed comers of the stage an isolated mouth, a face and a sexless figure are floating. The relationship between the figure called "Auditor" and the mouth is established solely by the former's gesture of "helpless compassion", a shrugging of the shoulders that is directed diagonally through empty space towards the mouth. The gesture is repeated four times throughout the play, thus giving it a neat five-act structure reminiscent of classical plays. The relationship between mouth and body is characterized by a rupture that becomes visible in Beckett's theatrical space. It is a relationship of simultaneous indifference and helplessness. As the curtain rises over this ghostly scene, the words" ' ... out ... into this world ... this world ... tiny little thing '" (NI, 376) become audible. They characterize the situation as one of birth or giving birth. Together with the rising curtain this turns the world into which the "tiny little thing" is expelled into the world of theatre. Ever since Aristotle, compassion has been the typical reaction expected from theatre audiences. This turns the " Auditor" of Beckett's play into the

18. Samuel Beckett, Not I, in The Complete Dramatic Works, London and Boston, 1990,374-83. Hereafter, NI .

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substitute of the spectator on stage. The theatrical triangle of audience, Mouth and Auditor, which is established by the gaze and by listening, is repeated and doubled on stage by the relation between Auditor, Mouth, and an invisible third party, whose voice is only audible to Mouth. This third party interrupts Mouth's speech, corrects it and reminds it of parts still to be spoken. ''' ...what?. girl? .. yes ... tiny little girl ... into this' " (N!, 376) the voice interjects, while it also offers help when Mouth has forgotten its text: "... what? .. not that? .. nothing to do with that? .. nothing she could tell? ... all right ... nothing she could tell ... try something else " (N!, 382). Mouth therefore does not articulate its own subjective emotions, nor is its speech an articulated stream of consciousness. Mouth speaks as an actor on stage. Its speech is learned by heart, remembered, and quoted. Speech permits Mouth only an indirect relation with itself, even though the text calls "...the whole being ... hanging on its words" (N!, 379). Before the curtain rises, the babbling of a voice can already be heard. After the curtain has dropped again, the babbling continues. It is language that drifts in and out of the subject-to-be. Yet by constituting the subject, it simultaneously turns it into an echo of the Other. If the subject finds its own voice by listening to other voices, it must inevitably also be Not I, the ghost of somebody or something else that eludes him or her. What Beckett's play does is to characterize the constitution of the subject as a theatrical act. Theatre does not mirror alread y established characters in a soci al context. It articulates a form of subjectivity that can never become identical with itself. In order to articulate that which in the pos itioning logic of language cannot be represented , theatre has to take recourse to myth; the myth of the voice, the mouth , the body and of language itself. As a the atrical piece, the play has to present something. In the very positioning of mouth, body and voice as constitutive elements of theatre and its subject lies their mythical reification. This makes the process of theatre structurally similar to the reification of Oedipus as the master narr ative of psychoanalysis. By the very act of analytic reduction and the subsequent display of theatre's constitutive parts, Beckett cannot help but enlarge them to mythical proportions. Not I, the title of the play , is only present in the text through absence. "She" refuses to speak the text that the voice requires, namely to stop referring to herself in the third person and to actually say "I". But "She" is adamant, because the order of langu age which she would join by using "I" , can, as the text repeatedly shows, not be her own. And yet, in her stubborn refusal, ''' ... what? ... who? ... no! ... she! ' " (N!, 377 , 379 , 381 , 382), there is already a consciousness at work that enables her to say "no"

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in the first place . What the text presents is a consciousness that refuses to become a consciousness. Like a ghost "She" remains trapped in the paradoxical state between I and Not I, world and not-world, whose status is that of theatre . "She" is like the mouth itself that becomes its own opposite, the anus , an outlet for verbal diarrhoea, an uncontroll able stream of words that "She" does not even recognize as her own : "... ' words were coming ... a voice she did not recognize'" (N!, 379) . Language in the text blots itself out. It makes itself impossible exactly while presenting itself. Through the textual strategies of repetition , specification and negation every utterance is at once surpassed, corrected and taken back, as demonstrated in the very first words of the text: "out ... into". "Imagine!" is a frequent request of the text, but how can one imagine something that is systematically made impossible: " ... 'imagine! ... feeling coming back! .. starting at the top ... then working down ... the whole machine ... but no . spared that' " (N!, 380) 7 All language aspires to the mythical ground of silence, yet silence is impossible to achieve by the very language that is supposed to make it audible. Language opens up the closedness of silence but must perforce become mythical itself because nothing can surpass it. Myth can only be overcome by myth, a process which turns myth into a mnemonic text which strives for the new to be heard and seen within its very blindness. As Adorno points out in his Aesthetic Theory : "Will fastens the new firmly to the immutable. This expl ains the link between Modernism and Myth.''" This wish that cannot become deed, the modernist wish to say something that has never been said before, to invent a world sui generis at the spur of the moment, a world , however, that as a work of art must necessarily last , binds all modem demystifiers to myth . Only artists (one might call them postmodern) who use myth as an aesthetic memory of the new, who reflect upon the theatrical structure of the subject itself and make their very utterances impossible while uttering them, are immune to dangerously compulsive and organicist notions of myth .

19. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory , in The International Library of Phenomenology and Moral Sciences, trans. C. Lenhardt, London, 1984,33.

ECHO'S BONES: MYTH, MODERNITY AND THE VOCALIC UNCANNY STEVEN CONNOR Invocations: Orpheus andEcho I examine in this essay the conjuncture of two preoccupations in literary and artistic modernism: the fascination with mythology, and the investment in the phenomenology of voice, sound and hearing, This involves looking at the ways in which the willed revival of mythomorphic ways of being and knowing seemed to solicit an attention to the voice and the ear, which pulls against the conspicuous and well-documented demands of modernism for light, clarity and vision, This conjuncture is manifested in an emphasis both upon vocal and auditory experience in modernist accounts of mythopoeic language and in the attention to mythological instances of vocal power (Orpheus), seduction (the Sirens), conj uration (Ulysses and the voices of the dead in Book XI of the Odyssey), transformation (Philomela, Echo), ecstasy and assault (Pan, Dionysus), and possession and prophecy (the Delphic oracle, the Cumaen Sibyl) . Such myths concerning the voice, and the vocal power of myth are given dimension by the modem experience of technologies of the voice. Myths of the voice are utopian restorations of the power of the voice that has seemingly been diminished by such technologies, which yet double some of the disturbingly mythic effects of dissociation and death in life made possible by such technologies. Ezra Pound's first Canto summarizes the invocatory drive of modernism with regard to myth. The Canto is a translation of the passage from Book XI of the Odyssey in which Odysseus and his men fill a ditch with blood to give voices to the dead with whom they wish to consult. This invocation is the first of many such summonings of voices in The Cantos. Whether in the form of literal invocation, as often in the work of Yeats, or metaphorical invocation, in the work which solicits identification with particular myths or a more general mythical condition, modernist works often evidence this act of "invoicing" other voices. We should note the doubled structure of Pound's invocation; Pound invokes the condition of myth by incorporating Odysseus's own act of mythical invocation. We first hear the "heavy speech" of Elpenor, Odysseus's companion whose body has been left unburied in the house of Circe , and then the more

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assured utterance "strong with the blood ", of Tiresi as, here adopted as the guiding voice of Pound ' s poem at around the same time as Pound was helping to isolate his role in Eliot's The Waste Land , who foretells the eventual homecoming of Odysseus/Pound and his poem.' The voices in Book XI of the Odyssey are enabled to speak, given bod y, as it were, by blood , in som ething of the way that the unqu iet spirits of Diarmuid and Dervorgilla are roused into vocal life by the similarly sacrific ial blood of the Easter Uprising in Yeats 's The Dreaming of the Bones (1919 ). But we will see that the recovered vocality that is so powerful a part of the modernist recovery of myth is often an uncannily disembodied vocality, a vocality which speaks of and out of the condition of physical violence or rending, and which therefore holds the body apart from its voice rather than uniting them. Other English modernists shared in this invocatory relation to myth , the desire to invoke a mythic condition itself conceived as a kind of vocality. This desire is obviously governed by the oral/graphic contrast which had become conventionalized by the early twentieth century ; myth had now come to be seen as the characteristic product of oral rather than written cultures, its forms determined by the fluid permanence and the performativity of oral transmission rather than by the fixed historicity of the written record associated with cultures of writing. To look to myth , and to aspire to mythopoeic identity with it, was therefore in a general sense to wish to move from the cold and abstract visuality of print to the warm intimacy of the heard voice . In this, modernism also draws upon the Orphic traditions of romantic thought, as received from poetic mythologists like Shelley and Col eridge and medi ated through nineteenthcentury critical mythographers such as Ruskin , Pater and Arnold. According to this view, myth is a product of the archit ectonics of voice projected in the myth of Orpheus, whose singing both subdued and animated the natural world, as well as in other musicovocalic culture heroes, such as Amphion, the king of Thebes who could move stones and build cities with the power of his music , and Arion , whose singing summoned a dolphin to his aid when he was about to be put to death by pirates. Myth serves for the romantic imagination as an actualization of the unfallen unity of word and nature , of a langu age spontaneously filled with natural presence, and a nature transfused and animated by the power of voice. Myth invokes the natural world by giving it the voice with which it speaks itself; myth is nature articulate.' The Orphic ideal was strongly 1. Ezra Pound, The Cantos, London, 1968,8-9. 2. A. D. Moody relates The Waste Land to the Orphic ideal he finds in Coleridge' s Ancient Mariner, an ideal whose purpose is "to animate nature, to bring

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attractive for modernist writers. Among the fragments out of which The Waste Land was formed, for exam ple, was a poem origin ally entitled "Song for Orpherian", the title evoking an instrument described by Valerie Eliot as deriving from a compounding of the two musical culture heroes, Orpheus and Arion .' No more powerful articulation of this impulse to articulate the spontaneous speech of the world, to sing it into reciprocal speech, and to affirm the identity of being and song (Gesang ist Dasein) can be imagined than Rilke 's Sonn ets to Orpheu s, which were being written at precisely the moment when Eliot and Pound were working simultaneou sly on The Waste Land and the early Cantos:' However, modernism does not merely inherit romanticism 's Orphic hypostasis of the voice . In this, as in so many other respects , the modernist desire for origin and presence is vexed and pestered by the suspicion of belatedness and absence. The power invested in the idea of the voice twists in modernism into what I wish to call a sense of the "vocalic uncanny ". Romantic Orphism idealizes voice as a benign ventriloquism in which the voice is at once self and other, potentiality and embodiment, nature and culture. By contrast, the vocalic uncanny focuses upon the moments of separation , spacing, and distance within the excursive exercise of the voice ; thus upon thwarted or imperfect utterance, the conflict of embodiment and meaning, upon impediment, impotence and the failure of address. Most of all, perhaps, it focuses on the voice itself: where romantic Orphism subtilizes the voice into song or sonorous power, the vocalic uncanny fixes upon the elements and apparatus of the voice , insisting on its materiality, rather than its power to transform or transfigure the material , or itself to be transformed. Such myths of voice also demonstrate the principle of epistemological echoing I have already observed in Pound, in which myths are used, not just as embodiments of an ideal condition of mind, but also as allegorizations of a modern relation to myth . Indeed , modernists found within certain myths the instan cing of the failure of mythic vocality. In the appropriation of such moments, myth is made to speak the deficiency of alive the souls of things": "T o Fill All the Desert With Inviolable Voice"', in The Waste Land in Different Voices, ed. A. D. Moody, London, 1974,50. 3. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot, London, 1971,99, 130. 4. For an argument that Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus are in fact to be seen as an imitation rather than a mere invocation of Orphic song, and thus acquire "the right to pronounce with mythological authority on the character of existence" , see Anthony Thorlby, "Rilke' s Orpheus: A Myth Revived", History of European Ideas, 4 (1983), 61-72, esp. 64.

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its speech. The most important of such inst ances of the vocalic uncanny is, in fact, the ending of the Orph eus myth itself; having failed to retrieve Eurydice from the Underw orld , Orpheus retreats from human society into sylv an lamentation, and is at last torn asunder by maenads, resentful, depending on which version one follows. either at the melancholy of Orpheus ' s song , or at his turning his attention away from the delights of the female to the contemplation of male beauty. The ghastly coda to his story has Orpheus's head float ing down the river Hebru s, still singing. In its tearing apart of what Ihab Hassan has described as "the Orphic pact between word and flesh ", this final phase of the Orpheus myth, the sparagmos, or rend ing , is a denial of the very plenitude embodied in its earlier phases.' The myth sings of the failure of its voice; insofar as Orpheus is a kind of metamyth, the very voicing of the supreme mythi c value of voicedness, it mythifi es the failure of myth . The highlighting of the dark dual ities of the Orp heus myth in the modern period has not escaped critical attention. As long ago as 1971 , in his study of the use of the Orpheus myth in the work of Novali s, Nerval, Mallarme and Rilke , Walter Strauss observed that: Orpheus is not only poetry; he has become, in modern times. the agony of poetry .... He is the figure , the myth , entru sted with the burden of poetry and myth . His metamorphosis is the change in poetic climate itself, placed against an ever-darkening sky in which poetry recedes more and more toward secret and unexplained spaces, spaces that are obscure and must be illuminated by constellations of the mind ever threatened by disaster and extinction." It is in the seizing of this counter-sense of the "agony of poetry " in the Orphic myth that Ihab Hassan sees the beginnings of the postmodern within the modern. The voice that is associated with the plenitude of the body, with the fullness of vocal embodiment itself, is associated now with dismemberment, muteness and mutilation. And yet, for both Strauss and Hassan, the outcome of this fixation upon the dismembered Orphic voice is a filling out of the authority of the voice, which now becomes the warrant of an art sustaining itself beyond or against history and culture. For Strauss, "Orpheus becomes the mythical figure who affirms death5. Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Towards a Postmodern Literature, 2nd ed., Madison, 1982, 7. 6. Walter Strauss, Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature, Cambridge: Ma., 1971, 17.

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within-life, being-within-becoming. Mallarme and Rilke bring the modern poetic paradox of language as silence and silence as language to a point of incandescence".' I want to focus , by contrast, on the arresting of the voice , that catch in the thro at that seems to threaten or impede the sublimation into myth of dissociated sonority . Such an arrest can be discerned, for instance within the text which I have already used to characterize the impulse to mythical invocation. At the end of Pound 's first Canto, the invocation of the ghosts suddenly encounters historical interference, in the form of some printed words from the title-page of a sixteenth-century Latin transl ation of Book XI of the Odyssey, words which break into the reciprocating circuit of invocations, rupturing myth with history : Lie quiet Divus. I me an that is Andreas Divus , In officina Wecheli, 1538, out of Homer. Andreas Divus published in 1538 the Latin translation of Book XI of the Odyssey that is Pound 's starting point for his own Anglo-Saxonised version. The words which Pound first tries to repel C'Lie quiet Divus") and then incorporates into his own poem, are from the title page of the translation , which, in a copy of the book which Pound acquired around 1908, was bound together with a translation by Georgius Dartona Cretensis of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, a detail which determines the sudden, puzzling switch of focus at the end of Canto I to praise of Aphrodite: " Venerandam,lln the Cretan 's phrase, with the golden crown, Aphrodite . " I have already pointed to the way s in wh ich Pound's Canto is bound up with - or, let us say , following the hint given to us in its final lines, which move us from the time-suspending sonority of the recovered mythic voice to the historicity of print, bound in with - the evocations of the mythic in Eliot's The Waste Land. Most notably, of course, they have in common the figure of Tiresias, whom Eliot's notes identify as "the most important personage in the poem", since "what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem"." Eliot's emphasis on the fact of seeing seems to 7. Ibid. Jeremy Lane, in a wide-ranging survey of modern reworkings of the Orpheus myth in modernism. also suggests that, for modernism. "the Orphic story and figure present a condition of paradox. of inexplicability, of discontinuity and fragmentation. of allusiveness. even of silence and a kind of nullity"; "Orpheus : Myths for the Moderns". History of European Ideas. 8 (1987), 3. 8. Ibid.; Ezra Pound, Literary Essays, London, 1954.259. 9. The Complete Poems and Plays ofT. S. Eliot. London. 1969.78. Hereafter, CPo

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draw attention away from Tire sias's even more authoritative saying. In the same note, Eliot quot es at surprising length Ovid' s account of the origins of Tiresias's bisexual insight, but breaks off the quotation just before the beginning of the story that Ovid offers as proof of Tiresias 's prophetic powers, namely the story of Narcissus and Echo . The story twins visual with vocal impotence, the fate of Narcissus, condemned to gaze hopelessly upo n himself, being doubled in the fate of Echo, who is denied a voice of her own, and able only to reflect the words of Narcissus . In the end , she withers away in her desolation at not being able to win his love: She became wrinkled and wasted ; all the freshness of her beauty withered into the air. Only her voice and her bones were left, till finally her voice alone remained; for her bones, they say, were turned to stone. Since then she hides in the woods, and though never seen on the mount ains , is heard there by all: for her voice is the only part of her that still lives. 10 Ovid' s mythical narrative thus itself mirrors the punishment inflicted by Juno within it - the doubler of others' word s herself suffers a fate that seems little more than an echoing of the fate of Narcissus . Though it avoid s alluding to it, Eliot 's invocation of the figure of Tire sias silently enfolds the story of impotent utterance which Ovid offers as the certifica tion of his prophetic authority. What is the significance of the fact that Eliot refers us to Ovid 's rather than Sophocles's Tiresias, the Tiresias associated with Narcissus and Echo rather than with Oedipus? The Oedipus story is based upon a series of conflicts, between the law of the father and the love of the mother, duty and desire, the past and the present, confli cts which serve as a narrative engine driving the story towards tragic resolution. As the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu has suggested, it is partly the very theatricality of the Oedipus myth, its dynamic staging of these conflicts, which produces its movement towards consciousness, catharsis and cure. The myth of Narcissus, by contrast, is founded not upon theatricality, but fantasy, not upon the painful working through of conflicts, but upon the static agony of iteration. Where Oedipus reflects upon and comes to understand the truth of the prophecy delivered at his birth , Narcissus neither recalls nor ever comes to understand Tiresias's warning to his parents that he will live a long life prov ided that he never comes to know himself. This lack of significant relation to the 10. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans . Mary M. Innes, Hannondsworth, 1955, 91. Hereafter, M .

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other is merely matched rather than developed and interpreted in Echo's vocal iterations.II The contrast between the Oedipus and the NarcissuslEcho myths is thus a contrast between the possibility of maturation . through knowledge and the pathological refusal of such maturation. In cultural terms , it would encode the contrast between a culture capable of growth through time into self-knowledge and a culture suspended timelessly outside or before history. It is, we might say, a contrast between modernity and myth. "

Violations: Philomela Taken as a whole, Eliot 's Waste Land perhaps recapitulates the structure of the Narcissus/Echo narrative, in that it frames a series of narratives in which , as Tom Docherty has suggested, voices - and especially female voices - are impeded, violated, silenced, ignored or distorted ." However, where the prophetic voice of Ovid's Tiresias has its authority enhanced by the story of Narci ssus and Echo, the Tiresias who provides Eliot's frame is drawn into the condition of Ovid 's Echo. Like Echo, Tiresias is condemned, not merely to "foresuffer all", but to re-echo the vocal fragments that sound around him: As often as the unhappy boy sighed "Alas," she took up his sigh and repeated "Alas! " When he beat his hands against his shoulders she too gave back the same sound of mourning. His last words as he gazed into the familiar waters were : "Woe is me for the boy I loved in vain!" and the spot reechoed the same words (M, 94). Perhaps the most important of the thwarted mythical utterances in The Waste Land is the story of Philomela which is imaged upon the walls in II. Didier Anzieu, "Le theatre d'Echo dans les recits de Beckett", Revu e d' Esthetique, (1990), 139-40; special issue on Samuel Beckett. Hereafter, Anzieu. 12. Gayatri Spivak both widens and particularizes this analysis in her "Echo" , New Literary History , 24 (1993), 17-43. Here, she refuses the idea that the NarcissuslEcho myth illustrates the simple outside or mythical prehistory of the modem, suggesting instead that the figure of Echo dramatizes the complex position of the subaltern colonized woman, whose failure to be heard speaking on her own behalf is an effect of a powerful fantasy of muting exercised through her, not her own ontological deficiency . 13. Thomas Docherty, After Theory : PostmodernismlPostmarxism, London, 1990, ISO-57 .

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"A Game of Chess ". In Book VI of Ovid 's Metamorphos es, Philomela is raped by Tereus, the husband of her sister, and then has her tongue cut out to ensure her silenc e. She manages to depict the crime in a tapestry , and, with Procne , her sister, exacts revenge on Tereus by killing his son Itys, whose dismembered body they feed to his father . When the nature of his feast is revealed to him , Tereus pursues his wife and sister, but they are turned into birds - traditionally nightingales, though Ovid himself is not explicit about this - while he himself is turned into a hoopoe. Eliot elides most of this narrativ e, focusing instead upon a contemporary picture on the walls of the wom an in "A Game of Chess" of the final moment of the myth, the "change of Philomel" into a nightingale, and her continuing denunciation of her crim e with "inviolable voice" as she is pursued. That voice sounds throughout The Waste Land, as a kind of pure vocality, in the "j ug jug" and "twit twit twit" that we hear in "The Fire Sermon", and is reduplicated perhaps in the bitter lyric ism of the Rhine-maidens' "la la" and the inarticulate boom of the Thunder's "DA " . Docherty reads this twittering or babbling incoherence as the traces of "the oppressed womanly voice" [eft in a poem which can itself scarcely acknowledge the scandal of muting it perpetrates (Docherty, 153). The Waste Land com es at the end of a poetic tradition in which the figures of Orph eus and Philomela are both paired and contrasted. Allen Grossman argues that the Orph eus myth owes its centrality in our culture to the fact that "it reproduces the invariant or paradigmatic logic of the poet as civilizational agent , a maker of the social order of the human community", even as it encodes a reflection on "the inevitable subjection of the maker who intends and brings to pass the structure of a human world ... which is founded in and reproduced through the (Orphic) structure of the song"." The Philomela myth is a female counter-story which parallels the Orpheus myth , but refuses , or falls short of its civilizing imperative. The Philomela myth "founds poetry not only at the point of pain , but pain resulting from the overwhelming of the will (the power that maintains human form) of the person by the inhuman desire that the human form arouses but cannot regulate" (Grossman, 240). In psychoanalytic terms, the Philomela myth may therefore stand in the same relation to the Orpheus myth as the myth of Narcissus and Echo does to the Oedipus myth. In the context of "A Game of Chess", however, there is an interesting ambiguity about the "inviolability" of Philomela's voice . Is it inviolable 14. Allen Grossman, "Orpheus/Philomela: Subjection and Mastery in the Founding Stories of Poetic Production and in the Logic of Our Practice ", Triquarterly, 77 (1989-90 ), 231.

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because it survives the double crime of rape and violent silencing? Or is the violation of the voice its very condition for continuing to speak? (traditionally, the nightingale is thought to sing as the expression of a wounding and requires to be wounded anew to be reminded of its songinducing pain). That violation and inviolability are closely associated with each other is suggested by the strange image in "What the Thunder Said" of the woman who fiddles "whisper music" on the strings of her outstretched hair, making of her body a violin in the "violet light". Violation here means both the privation of the voice, and its restoration both violencing, and violing . Most readers of the Philomela passage find it unequivocally positive, when compared with the bored and passionless sterility of its context. Even Thomas Docherty, who, as we have seen , associates Philomela's utterance with various kinds of thwarted stammering and babbling, rather than the full achievement of sonorous and prophetic address, finds in Philomela's voice an ideal feminine discord to set against the totalizing harmonies of the rest of the poem . But such an apotheosis of the incoherent voice of the violated woman has to labour too hard , I think, against the current of misogyny pressing through this text and others . This seems to be surprisingly borne out by a small detail of punctuation when the Philomela episode is recalled in "The Fire Sermon", a detail which seems designed to remind us (or, given the obscurity of the allusion, privately to remind Eliot) that Philomela and Procne are the perpetrators as well as the victims of a violation. In "A Game of Chess", the picture on the wall is said to be of "the change of Philomel, by the barbarous king/So rudely forced" (CP, 64) . I have always vaguely assumed that the phrase "so rudely forced " derives from some seventeenth- or eighteenth-century retelling of the story of Philomela. However, I have been unable to find the phrase , or anything very close to it, in any translations from Ovid, or reworkings of this story. However, the fragments of the Philomela narrative which recur in "The Fire Sermon", give the phrase in a slightly different form: Jugjugjugjugjug So rudely forc'd. Tereu With the form "fore' d" rather than "forced", the phrase does have a specific literary predecessor. It appears in a long historical chronicle-poem by Edward Ward of 1715 entitled The History of the Grand Rebellion: Containing the Transactions of the Reign of King Charles I To The Happy

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Restoration. The poem tells of the treachery of Tichburn, the Lord Mayor of London and Parliament, in confining, and, of course, subsequently killing the king. There is a petition , which ... that base Fanatick Sot, Tichbum, then May 'r, most humbly did present, In form to the Rebellious Parliament, Involving the Whole City in the Guilt Of Royal Blood, so barbarously spilt. At the same time, the Rebels rudely forc 'd The King from Newport to the Castle of Hurst." Here, the apostrophe of "fore' d" allows the deed perpetrated upon the body of Philomela by Ovid's "barbarous king" to be condensed with the killing of the king - "the Guilt / Of Royal Blood , so barbarously spilt" - of which Philomela seems symbolically guilty , in feeding the dismembered body of the king 's son to the king , and glee fully displaying his severed head to his father. In the light of this remind er of the female violation practised by the myth, it becomes possible to read Eliot 's syntax in "A Game of Chess", albeit with a little forcing of one 's own , somewhat differently: "The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king / So rudely forced" certainly has as its primary meaning, "the transformation of Philomel, who [or which] was so rudely forced by the barbarous king" ; but it now appears that it may also have allowed for the royalist Eliot the private meaning "the transformation of Philomel, alongside that of the barbarous king, who was [himself] so rudely forced". The violation and the guilt are hereby shared, and the poem becomes slightly less plausible as a celebration of the inviolable, violated voice of the female . The inviolable voice of Philomela is both the product and expression of a violation. Where is Philomela in Eliot's account? She is seen in a picture which represents her "change", meaning her transformation into a nightingale, in a Miltonic "sylvan scene"; but no sooner do we hear of this change, than it appears to change its own scene, from the wood to the desert: "yet there the nightingale / Filled all the desert with inviolable voice" (CP, 64). Changing the scene of Ovid 's story allows Eliot to make audible what it 15. Edward Ward, ''The Most Remarkable Transactions of the Twenty-Fourth Year of the Reign of King Charles the First, Anno Dom. 1648", in The History of the Grand Rebellion: Containing the Transactions of the Reign of King Charles I To The Happy Restoration ..., London, 1715,444.

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does not, namely the voice of Philomela: in Ovid 's version , the nightingale is not mentioned and neither of the sisters sings . The association between Philomel and the nighting ale is established by Ovid only by the detail of the bloodied breast of the bird into which Philomela is transformed, a detail that occurs twice, and with different connotations. First of all, Philomel is said, after her ravishm ent, to be "like a dove, its feathers matted with its own blood" (M, 162) ("utque columba suo rnadefactis sanguine plumis"); after her transformation, she and Procne have actually bloodied plumage, though now the bloodstains are the "traces of the murder" ("caedis ... notae"). " The nightingale voice of Philomela, established by the synecdoche of the bloodied breast , thus includes both the voice of her unviolated purity, the Orphic voice with which she proposes to "fill the forests ... and win sympathy from the very rocks that witnessed my degradation" (M, 162) and the vengeful , violent voice that she longs for, as she thrusts the severed head of Itys at the horrified Tereus, in order that she might "express her glee in fitting words". The myth of Philomela is represented in The Waste Land by a picture which is perhaps the counterpart of the eloquent tapestry which Philomela weaves to reveal her sufferings; but, in Eliot's version, the picture is only one of a number of "withered stumps of time", (other pictorial representations of myth, perhaps) which are "told" (enumerated and narrated) upon the walls. As pictures, they are silent, and thus "hush " and "enclose" the room rather than unloosing it into speech. These withered stumps of thwarted speech recall the violence of Philomela's tom tongue in Ovid's account: ... even as she poured out her scorn, still calling upon her father, and struggling to speak, he grasped her tongue with a pair of forceps, and cut it out with her cruel sword. The remaining stump still quivered in her throat, while the tongue itself lay pulsing and murmuring incoherently to the dark earth. It writhed convulsively, like a snake's tail when it has been newly cut off and dying , tried to reach its mistress ' feet (M , 162-63). The inviolable voice of Orphic speech gives the mythic promise that the voicing of desolation will be its remission, and that by assimilating its accents to the authoritative speech of sibyl , prophet and inspired victim, 16. Ovid, Metamorphosis , Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge: Ma., and London, 1077, Book VI, 324, 334-35: 11.529,669-70.

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the broken, stammering, desiccated vocalities of modernity will achieve the mythified con dition of the reciprocal ventriloquy of word and nature, imag ed in The Waste Land's singing grass , and "voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells". and attain to the new civilization heralded in the grumbling voice of the thunder. In Eliot ' s later work , the theology of the Christian Word will displace much of the anxiety that is activated by the dism emb ered (scattered. dissembled. disremembered ) voices and vocalities of myth, as prayer and atoning contemplation take the place of the Orphic ideal. Eliot is drawn to the dismembered voices of myth . because hearing and transmitting their speech promises the wholeness of the restored body. as in the scattered bones who are enjoined in Ash Wednesda y to "Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only / The wind will listen ", and whose chirping "burden of the grasshopper" is turned into a hymn to the Virgin who is herself the image of dismemberment redeemed, "torn and most whole ... terminate torment .... Speech without word and / Word . of no speech" (CP , 91-92). But this redemption of the voice seems unavailable in the early work. The Philomela episode of The Waste Land appears to offer the mythical voice as a transforming plenitude; but in Eliot' s reworking the mythical voice is revealed to be imperfect, untransfiguring , guilty. Th e invocation of the myth of the inviolate voice doe s a kind of violence to it, or refuses its own desire for a mythical sublimation of violence into inviolable beauty . The myth is no ideal compensation for modern ity; rather it becomes a mythical mirroring of the broken, amythical voice and condition of modernity . Maud Ellmann suggests a revision of Helen Gardner's suggestion that The Waste Land is "an exercise in ventriloquism", with Eliot as the ventriloquist and the legendary dead his dummies; rather , she says, it is Eliot who is the oracul ar receptacle or echo chamber for the voices of the dead ." But Eliot's ventriloquial invocation is shadowed by the sense of what I have been calling the "vocalic uncanny", in which the voice remains caught between the antinomies it is meant to transfuse; body and will ; the past and the present; the dead and the living; myth and the profane present. The mythic voices whose transfiguring power Eliot means to appropriate turn out to be the embodiment - but held always agonizingly between desire and embodiment, like the hungry ghosts swarming around the trench of blood in Pound 's first Canto - of the violation of the voice , the voice as violation itself. Indeed, the very act of restoring the muted , mutilated voices of the past is repeatedly seen as an 17. Maud EHmann, The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Brighton , 1987, 112, n. 32.

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uncann y repetition of the mutil ation that brings them into being in the first place. In Eliot's earlier work . and in The Waste Land in particular, the mythic voice, as it is variously ripped from its beginn ings and reassembled in new contex ts, always signifies wholeness and dism emberment at once. Th e "in explicable mystery of sound", as Eliot calls it in a poem of 1948 celebrating the power of Walter de la Mare's ghostly verse (CP, 205 ), of the reverberating Orphi c or proph etic voice, is alw ays close to what the final word of the little sketch "Cape Ann" dismi sses as "palaver" (CP, 142) - the gha stly, wagging stump of Philomel a's tongue .

Listen to the Gramophone Affirming It is usual to set the auth enticity of Philomela's song in The Waste Land again st the emptiness of the mechanized voice , as it is repr esented in the gramophone wh ich appears at the end of the seduction of the typist witn essed by Tiresias - "She smoo ths her hair with automatic hand , I And puts a record on the gram ophone" (CP, 69), and perhaps also heard in the jolting syncopation of "O 0 0 0 that Shakespeherian Rag" (CP, 65); the empty, inhuman repetitions of the gramophone which seem to collapse Phil omela into Echo . What I have had to say about the vocalic uncann y, however , may suggest a more co mplex relation between the "authentic" voice of myth and the degraded voices of automated mass culture. The form ation of high modern ism coi ncides with a period which saw a temporary domin ance of vocal-acoustic technologies, such as the telephone, the phonograph, the microphone, the loudspeaker and the radio, in which sound and in particular the human voice was distanced, augmented, amplified, con served and multiplied. Such technologies could be seen both as the liberation of the voice, or literalization of romantic views about its power, and the diminishment of the voice into the condition of commodity. Because of this ambiguity, it also became possible for the mythical power attributed to the disembodied or divine voice to be transferred to and expressed by the apparatus for dissociating and disseminating the voice . Eliot 's The Family Reunion, for example, suggests the coalescence of the prophetic voice of myth and the uncanny capacities of the technologized acoustic in the present. At the end of Part II Scene I, the Chorus evokes the lingering presence of guilt and threat of retribution in terms of the preserv ation of voices: In an old house there is always listening, and more is heard than is spoken.

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Steven Connor And what is spoken remains in the room , waiting for the future to hear it. And whatever happens began in the past, and presses hard on the future . The agony in the curtained bedroom, whether of birth or of dying, Gathers in to itself all the voices of the past, and projects them into the future. (CP , 328-29)

The lingering of these voices is quasi-technological : "All twined and tangled together, all are recorded" (CP , 329 ). The persistence of myth here the myth of vengeance and expiation - cannot itself be expiated, for "we know nothing of exorcism / And whether in Argos or in England / There are certain inflexible laws". It persists, not against, but alongside the routinely distanced voices of the modern media: There is nothing at all to be done about it, There is nothing to do about anyth ing, And now it is nearly time for the news We must listen to the weather report And the international catastrophes. (CP , 329)

Here, we might recall that Eliot's working title for the "A Game at Chess" section of The Waste Land was " In the Cage", a title which, if it had been preserved, would itself have suggested a striking coalescence of the prophetic and the technological voice. It refers us to the voice of the sibyl enclosed in a bottle who is described by Trimalchio in Petronius 's Satyricon , a description transferred to the epigraph of The Waste Land as a whole when Eliot substituted it for the words of the dy ing Kurtz." It also refers us to the heroine of Henry James 's "In the Cage", the telegraph operator who becomes entangled in an adulterous affair conducted via the messages which pass through her office. For the power of talking machines to imitate and substitute for the vocal apparatus is not wholly to be distinguished from the heightened dissociation of the voice of prophecy, possession or inspiration. Both are "ecstatic", in that they put the voice at a distance from itself. Whether in the bottle, or in the cage, 18. For a discussion of the implications and effects of this substitution, see R. A. Sullivan, "The Sibyl and the Voice: Eliot's Epigraphs to The Waste Land", Yeats-Eliot Review, 71 and 72 (1982), 19-27.

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whether through the convulsive prophecy enacted in the scene describing the possession of the sibyl by the god Apollo in Book VI of the Aeneid." in the technological reduction of the femal e to the condition of a switchboard, the female body and female voice are racked and traversed by voices not their own . The telegraph is perhaps still in evidence, though, in "A Game of Chess" , in the image of language translated into visible or electrostatic form; the lady's violin-like combing of her hair produces, not "whisper music" , but mere electrical discharge, in the hair that "Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still" (CP , 65) . This mixing of the mythic with the technological voice is to be found elsewhere in literary and artistic mod ernism. Charles Grivel has suggested that the phonograph in particular was subject to "a frantic , delirious literization" almost from the moment of its appeara nce in the l870s. His analysis of the representation of the phonograph and later the gramophone, in the work of Villiers de L' Isle Adam, Alfred Jarry, Andre Breton and Michel Leiris, concludes that the instrument is associated with fantasies both of self-enlargement and self-violation . The phonograph gives to the voice the power of self-extension: " It answers me with me : I hear myself (and even see myself) as identical and different. Dream accomplished. There without being there. Person without person. Horror and rapture.'?" But it also signifies the capture of the voice by the machine and even the subtle penetration of the living voice by the deathly apparatus of reproduction. The phonograph allows the dead to speak beyond their death, but does so through a dead spe ech , or speaking out of the midst of death itself: I see before me a machine that speaks me . I am buried in its entrails (or it is in me): I am the equal of this imitating device. When it speaks to me, it also represents to me, outside of me and without me, the absence of subject ; it repeats me without my being there (Grivel, 52). This association between myth, death and the phonographic voice is conspicuous in the work not only of Eliot but of other modernist writers, especially Joyce, Woolf and Beckett. The "Hades" episode of Ulysses, for 19. The Aeneid, Book VI, II. 41-51, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, Hannondsworth, 1990,161. 20. Charles Grivel, "The Phonograph's Homed Mouth" , trans. Stephen Sartarelli, in Wireless Imagination: Sound. Radio. and the Avant-Garde . eds Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead , Cambridge: Ma., 1992, 51.

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example , offers a gram ophonic equivalent to the Odyssean summoning of the shades in Book XI of the Odyssey, in Bloom's ruminations about how one could preserve the memory of the voice of the dead : Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatg randfather. Kraahr aark! Helloh ellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladas eegain hellohellohello amawf krpthsth ." Here, the gramophone acts merely as a vocal archive, or a "mnemotechnic". When it reappears in the "Circe" episode, it seems to have become an amplifier and generator of dead voices. The blaring and squawking of a gramophone in the street outside the brothel where Bloom and Stephen have ended up evokes a series of grating , mechan ized, materialized voices, of the otherworldly and the dead. These include the chorus of three whores who protest against the sound of the needle grating against the disc, with a sound that re-echoes it - "Ahhkkk!"; the voice of Elijah , with its "choking breath coughs ... harsh as a comcrake's"; the vision of the Celtic sea-god Mananaun Maclir, with his strange, jarring speech - "Aum l Hek ! Wal! Ak! Lub! Mor! Ma!"; and the apparition of Bloom 's Hungarian-Jewish grandfather Virag, with his convulsive locutions compounded of the noise of the gramophone and the impeded speech of locomotor ataxy - " Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!".22 As is routin ely acknowledged nowadays, Joyce's later works are full of dissociated and displa ced voices of all kinds, though, unlike Eliot, Joyce appears disinclined to judge the dissociated voice in terms of distinctions between the mythical and the modem. Thus the crammed plethora of voices in Finne gans Wake is simultaneously and indistinguishably mythic and technological, so that the remythification of language into "direct expression" which Beckett, perhaps at Joyce's own prompting, celebrates

21. James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler, Harmondsworth, 1986, 93; 6:962-66. (I follow convention in giving also the chapter and line number.) 22. Ibid., 414, 416, 425 (15.2214, 15.2183-84, 15.2268, 15.2603). I offer an extended analysis of the ventriloquial powers of the gramophone in Ulysses in '''Jigajiga ... Yummyyum ... Pfuiiiiiii! ... BbbbblIlIlblblblblobschb!': Circe's Ventriloquy", in Reading Joyce 's " Circe", European Joyce Studies 3, ed. Andrew Gibson, Amsterdam, 1994,93-142.

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in his study of the Wake, "Dante ... Bruno ... Vico .., Joyce" ," is also a technologization of langu age, in which the radio and the telephone cross and cooperate with the seance and the oracular summoning of the mythic past. Similar instances of the vocali c uncanny are also to be found in the work of Virginia Woolf. Woolf was herself very susceptible to the powers of the ear and the voice , as instanced particularly in the quasi-mythical accents of birdsong; during one of her bouts of madness, she heard the birds talking to her in Greek, as does Septimus Smith in Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf makes a vocal/auditory epiphany the climax of her own ironic selfportrait as Miss Irma la Trobe in Between the Acts. Throughout the book , the historical pageant mounted by Miss La Trobe has been both controlled and disrupted by the threatening. dictatorial "chuff chuff' of the gramophone hidden in the bushes, which becomes a prosthetic version of that auditory unity of the pageant imagined by Mrs Swithin as a "harmony - if not to us, to a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head" ." The pageant comes to an equivocal end when the performers appear carrying a variety of mirrors, which are intended to send back to the audience their own reflections. This is followed by the sudden blaring out from a bush of an unidentified voice - which may be that of the author herself, Miss Irma la Trobe: "a voice asserted itself. Whose voice it was no one knew . It came from the bushes - a megaphontic, anonymous, loudspeaking affirmation ." (BA , 135) The voice is enigmatic, impersonal and unnerving. Like an oracle or divine revelation, it cuts into the fabric of present-day time . confronting the audience with their mortal imperfections, yet charging them grandiosely with the responsibility of rebuilding the wall of civilization : "how's this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civili zation, to be built by (here the mirrors flicked and flashed) orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves." Miss la Trobe's unidentified voice from the bushes disturbingly , comically recalls the voice of the Lord God from the burning bush in Exodus 3, which commands Moses to transmit to his people the divine promise to deliver them from captivity in Egypt and into the Promised Land. There are of course some very obvious differences between the two voices. Quite apart from the definiteness of the promise offered to Moses , as compared with the fragility of the vision of civilization offered by Miss la Trobe, there is the question of the authority of the revelatory voices in each case. Unlike the archly evasive 23. Samuel Beckett, "Dante ... Bruno ... Vico ... Joyce", in Disj ecta: Miscellaneous Writin~s and a Dramatic Fragment , ed. Ruby Cohn, London, 1983, 2527. 24. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts, London , 1978, 127. Hereafter , BA.

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voice of Between the Acts, the voice of the Lord God is categorical in its announcement of its ident ity: "And God said to Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you ." (Exodus, 3: 14) Th e power of the Lord ' s voice com es from its absolute self-identity ; whil e the whole point of Miss la Trobe ' s shape-shifting entertainment, with its enigmatic conclusion, seems to be to disc redit the phall ogocentric coalitions of voice and being that allow the claim "I am that I am". But there is also an important similarity between the divine revel ation of Exodus and the secular non-revelation of Miss la Trobe. For, having heard the word of God, Moses, who is by his own confession "slow of speech, and of a slow tongue" (Exodus, 4:10) realizes that he will need to find some way of reproducin g it. Even if his peopl e are imp ressed by the conj uring tricks with staffs and serpents that God has taught him, they will still need to have the divine message conveyed to them, and for this, it appears, Moses wil1 have to resort to paraphrase, performance, even imposture. Impatiently, the Lord promises him that the eloquent Aaron wil1 act as his spokesman (which is to say, God 's spokesman's spokesman). There is allegedly nothing to be feared from this chain of surrogacy, since the voice of the Lord will secure it agai nst al1 noise and interference: "thou shalt speak to him, and put words in his mouth : and I will be with thy mouth , and with his mouth , and will teach you what ye shall do." (Exodus, 4 :15) Yet the words of the Lord God also seem to let in the very possibilities of aberration and misprision which they rule out: "And he shall be thy spokesman unto the peopl e: and he shal1 be, even he shal1 be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God." (Exodus, 4:16) So both the voice of the Lord God from the burning bush and that of Miss la Trobe (if it is her) speaking through her megaphone in the bushes in Poyntz Hall end up resorting to substitution. Like God speaking to Moses, and arranging for Moses's onward transmi ssion of His word, the "megaphontic voice" yields place to another voice at the moment of its climax, urging its audience to "listen to the gramophone affirming" (BA, 137). As the voice travels awkwardly from megaphone to gramophone, there occurs one of the many hiccups, or unintended intervals, which establish a paradoxical principle of continuity in the syncopated, epochic action of Between the Acts : A hitch occurred here. The records had been mixed . Fox trot, sweet lavender, Home Sweet Home, Rule Britannia - sweating profusely, Jimmy, who had charge of the music , threw them aside

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and fitted the right one - was it Bach , Handel , Mozart, or nobody famous, but merely a traditional tune? Anyhow, thank heaven, it was somebody speaking after the anonymous bray of the infern al megaphone (BA , 137). The "voice" of the music, like Amphion ' s lyre , partly fulfils the architectonic dream of rebuilding the wall of civ ilization alluded to by the megaphone voice , for it draws the audience together into temporary coincidence and comprehension: "all comprehending, all enlisted. The whole population of the mind 's immeasurable profundity came flocking .... Was that voice ourselves'?" (BA, 137) (Perhaps Woolf also intends us, in this work produced in the uneasy interlude before the outbreak of war, to recall that Amphion' s musical rebuilding of the walls of Thebes was an act of military fortific ation .) The voice of the music then itself gives way to the "intolerable constriction, cont raction and reduction to simplified absurdity" (BA , 138) represented by the Rev. G. W. Streatfield 's attempt to summarize and interpret the ente rtainment, as it is itself further mediated by the anonymous reporter whom we overhear preparing to write the story up for the local paper. Between the Acts invokes the divine Word in order to reject it. The blaring, mechanical enlargement of the voice represented by the megaphone suggests that the contemporary equivalent of divine revelation is the voice of the dictator, as it is expressed in and artificially sustained by technological means. Against the temptations of megaphonia, Woolf offers the more indefinite, but less violent polyphonia represented by the music, whose power seems rather to be guaranteed than undermined by the fact that it is not in fact what it is said to be, "somebody speaking after the anonymous bray of the infernal megaphone", but only the metaphorical sensation of voicing giv en by the music . Yet this voicing is also gramop.honic , which is to say technologically constructed, substitutive, after the fact. When the vicar hesitates at the end of his speech, uncertain, in the obstinate refusal of Miss la Trobe to appear, to whom he should ascribe authorship of the entertainment, it is the gramophone which once again supplies the place of a source: It was an awkward moment. How to make an end? .... Whom could they make responsible? Whom could they thank for their entertainment? Was there no one? .... Then there was a scuffle behind the bush ; a preliminary premonitory scratching. A needle scraped a disc ; chuff, chuff, chuff; then having found the rut, there

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was a roll and a flutter which portended God ... (they all rose to their feet) Save the King (BA, 141). The little tease which allows us for a moment to see (or hear) the gramophone as the vehicle of God, rather than "God Save The King" comically tolerates the equivalence between logos and techne that it sends up. Woolf is willing to embrace the gramophone, as she is willing to embrace the interrupted, contingent, historical world in general, as capable of evoking wholeness and pattern without freezing history into myth." For Eliot, the entanglement of the revelatory , inspired, or divine voice in violence and historicity suggests that there may be a principle of violence at work from the beginning within the inviolate voice of myth - that dismemberment may be the essence of the myths to which he looks for reintegration. Eliot's simultaneous recoil from and embrace of this violence only reduplicates its effects. By contrast, Woolf's invocation of the divine or absolute utterance only to entangle it in reproduction suggests an ironic assent to the death-into-historicity which afflicts the divine voice seemingly from the beginning. The mythical plenitude of the voice that can announce "I am that I am" is always in fact in passage, "between the acts" of voice; the act of mythical (revelatory, divine, inspirational) speech and the reconstitution of that speech in history. The gramophone, as myth dying into mechanism and modernity, is the agency which subjects the transfiguring voice, the voice as the very figure of transfiguration, to the force of historical transfiguring. The vocalic uncanny of the gramophone is therefore not only the death of the myth of voice , but the survival of the uncanny movement of the voice from myth to history that is itself thematized and enacted in myth. The work of Beckett, who supplies me with my title, consolidates the modernist dismemberment of the mythical voice, or rediscovery of the mythical dismembering of the voice . Throughout Beckett's work , and especially in his drama, the voice is violently dissevered from the body and person, most notably in the talking heads of Play, immobilized in their urns, and the isolated, logorrhoeic mouth of Not I. Katherine Kelly has argued for seeing Not I in particular as a version of the Orpheus myth 25. I am therefore in disagreement with Georgia Johnston , who argues that Woolf's work is governed by a recoil from the dead, mechanical, commodified voice of the gramophone into a more active, living and "human" voice. See "After the Invention of the Gramophone : Hearing the Woman in Stein's Autobiography and Woolf 's Three Guineas", in Virginia Woolf Miscellanies: Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, eds Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow-Turk , New York, )993, 88-96.

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which discounts all but the third phase of sparagmos, so that the Orphic association between power and song yields to an emphasis on failure: "Beckett's Orphic mouthpiece in the underworld demonstrates by her compulsive inchoate babble the heroism of the artist who must fail in his or her expressive vocation. '?" Like Ihab Hassan, Kelly thus celebrates the movement of transcendence, or remythification in the midst of the failure and incapacity dramatized in Not I. But such a simple logic of inversion is mistaken and wish-fulfilling. As elsewhere in the modernist invocation of myth, the myth of vocal mutilation is made to speak by the mutilation of the myth, by a separation of the moment of separation or scattering from the integrated and integrating body of the myth in its entirety. The movement between the mutilation 'of the myth, and the remythification of mutilation cannot easily be resolved into one or other side of that movement. If Orpheus is present without being named in Not I, then the name of Echo , at the centre of that other myth of vocal deprivation and dismemberment with which I have been preoccupied in this essay, is also made audible on a couple of occasions in Beckett's work . It is first used in the title of the last story in Beckett's 1935 collection of short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks , which deals with the posthumous return of the stories' hero, Belacqua Shuah, to the scenes of his dilapidated life, and looks forward to the condition of bodiless voice examined in The Unnamable, Krapp's Last Tape, Not I, and Company. In recapitulating elements from the rest of the book, the story is a kind of echo-chamber, and the rendering of a life reduced to the condition of echo. Beckett was persuaded to delete the story , and it has never subsequently appeared in print." But, in an echo of this echo, the title was transferred to the short sequence of poems Beckett published under the title Echo 's Bones and Other Precipitates, and to the cryptic poem of dissolution that end s it: asylum under my tread all this day their muffled revels as the flesh falls breaking without fear or favour wind the gantelope of sense and nonsense run taken by the maggots for what they are" 26. Katherin e Kelly, "The Orphic Myth in Nor I", in The Beckett Studies Reader, ed. S. E. Gontarski, Gainesville, 1993, 127. 27. A typescript of the story is held in the Darunouth College Library, USA. It is summarized by Rubin Rabinovitz, The Developm ent of Samuel Beckett 's Fiction, Urbana and Chicago , 1984, 55-63. 28. Samuel Beckett, Collected Poems in English and French, London, 1977, 28.

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The lines which evoke the vanishing residue of the body, its flesh falling into the asylum of the earth underfoot. the "muffled revels" of its corporeal life decomposing into air and rot, also enact the ineffaceable supplement of their evocation, in the dissolving voice which, like that of Echo , speaks of yet also survives its own dissolution . If this voice is mythical , it is only residually or minimally so, since the names of the myths have evaporated as surely as every other kind of particularity and definiteness of reference in Beckett's writing. But the myth of Echo does perhaps continue to function as a name for the anti-orphic vocalizations of the self in Beckett's later work , and particularly those works in which the voicing self becomes entangled in various kinds of acoustic or auditory mechanism." Krapp's Last Tape literalizes this process . Here, the old man who attempts to capture and control time and change by technological means, hoarding the tapes which bear the evidence of the former selves he once was, finds that this very process surrenders him to decomposition. The more he attempts to recapture his past life, to echo back his own voice to himself through playing back his old tapes, the less he coincides with those voices. The tape recorder allows for no Proustian integration of his many selves; at best, it is the mechanism which preserves intact the evidence of his dismembering, faithfully giving back to him the loss of his own self. At the end of the play , Krapp sits silently, listening to the booming, vibrant, but long-dead voice of the man he once was, which now seems more real and substantial than his own diminished voice and person . The voice testifies to the strange power of technologies of the voice to habituate us to our own absence, to enable us to live our own familiar deaths. Beckett's work does not consent to the comic apotheosis of the technological which is to be found in the work of Joyce and Woolf; but his work is equally governed by the modernist fascination with the vocalic uncanny. The supersession of modernism, in which the work of Beckett appears to play an important part, has sometimes been characterized in terms of the dimming of the prestige of the voice, and its replacement by disseminating graphisms and technetalk of an kinds, all of which is often presented as a turning away from mythical aspiration, if not as downright anti mythical. Such a dimming appears to have brought with it the diminishment of a number of values which have been historically solidary with the idea of the voice: presence; life; redemption; truth; and the human subject. Part of my purpose has been to show that modernism had already encountered and 29. For discussions of the myth of Echo in Beckett 's work, see Anzieu, and Mary A. Doll, Beckett and Myth: An Archetypal Approach, Syracuse, 1988, 29-40 .

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negotiated a transformation of the status of the voice, in which the voice is not merely devalued, but comes to include in itself all of its defining negativities. What happens to the idea of the voice, happens to myth as well. Modernism reaches for myth in order to have it tell the story of its own failure or death-in to-modernity. It is not through the relay of myth alone that the transformation in the meaning of voice is brought about, but myths of the voice, as well as mythical anticipations of the dismembering of the mythic voice, have played an important part in this cultural process. If the Orphic voice sounds and sustains the ideal of a phonomorphic civilization, it also anticipates in its sparagmos a modem civilization that is defined as wholly inimical both to myth and the voice . Such a phonicidal civilization may be illuminated and perhaps subtly transformed by being read in terms of the vocalic uncanny of that myth, in its rendering of the rending of the voice, and of the triumph of death over, and in, vocality. Through the "other voice" of myth , modernism starts to hear the other of voice in vocality itself.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Michael Bell is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick. His books include Primitivism, 1972; The Sentiment of Reality: Truth of Feeling in the European Novel , 1983; F. R. Leavis, 1988; Gahriel Garcia Marque z, 1994; and Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Respons ibility in the Twentieth Century, 1997. Leon Burnett teaches in the Department of Literature , University of Essex , where he specializes in Italian and Russian as well as English and is an editor of Comparative Literature . Bruce Clarke is Professor of English at Texas Tech. University. His books include Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis , 1995; and Dora Marsd en and Early Modernism : Gender, Individualism, Science, J995 . He is completing a study of allegory and scien ce in the modem period . Steven Connor is Professor of English at Birkbeck College, University of London. Widely published on modern literature and thought, his books include: Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text, 1988; Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories, 1989; Theory and Cultural Value, J992 ; and Ventriloquies: A Cultural History of the Dissociated Voice, 1998, which incorporates material from the present essay . David Cooper teaches in the Department of Philosophy, University of Durham. His numerous books include Auth enticity and Learnin g: Nietzsche 's Educati onal Philosoph y, 1983; A Companion to Aesthetics, ed. 1992; Existent ialism : A Reconstruction, 1986; Philosophy and the Nature of Languag e, J973 . Rainer Emig is Lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Cardiff, and a member of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory. He publishes on modernism, especially in poetry (see his Modernism in Poetry , J995), and critical and cultural theory. He has recently completed monographs on W. H. Auden: Toward s a Postmodernist Poetics and The Metaphors of War in the Twentieth Century.

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Edward Larrissy is Professor of English at the University of Keele . He has written widely on the relations of romanticism and modernism. Books include William Blake, 1985; Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry: The Language ofGender and Objects, 1990; and Yeats the Poet: The Measures of Differen ce, 1994. Marc Manganaro teaches at SUNY, Rutgers . His books include Myth. Rhetoric and the Voice ofAuthority: A Critique of Fraz er, Eliot, Frye and Camp ell. 1992; and Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text , ed. 1990. John McGovern is a Senior Lecturer at the University of East London, where he teaches social anthropology and political philosophy. Peter Nicholls is Professor of English and Ameri can Studies, University of Sussex. His books include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing : A Study of the Camas, 1984; and Modernisms: A Literary Guide , 1995. Maike Oergel teaches in the Department of German, University of Nottingham. She is author of The Return of King Arthur and the Nihelung en: National Myth in Nineteenth-Century English and German Literature, 1998. Peter Poellner teaches in the Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick. He is author of Nietzsche and Metaphysics, 1995. and is currently working on a book on philosophy and modernism. Robert Segal is Reader in Theory of Religion at the University of Lancaster. He is author of The Poimandres as Myth, 1986; Joseph Camphell, 1987; Religion and the Social Scien ces, 1989; and has edited In Quest of the Hero , 1990; The Gnostic Jung; 1992; The Allure of Gnosti cism. 1995; Jung on Mythology. 1998; and The Myth and Ritual Theory, 1998. Gerald Siegmund studied English and French Literature, as well as Theatre, at the University of Frankfurt am Main, where he also completed his PhD thesis on "Theatre as Memory". He is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ttibingen, and a free-lan ce theatre and dance critic in Frankfurt.

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Bianca Theisen teaches in the Department of German at Johns Hopkins University. She has published a book on the formalization of reading in Heinrich von Kleist, Bogens chluss: Kleists Formalisierung des Lesens, 1996; and essays on Nietzsche, romanticism and Thomas Bernhard.

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NAME INDEX Abrams , M. H., 177 Adams, Hazard, 30 Adorno, Theodor W., I, 108, 109, 183, 190-94 , 202, 211 Aischylos, 207 Anzieu, Didier, 219, 234 Appadurai, Arjun , 159 Arnold , Matthew,S , 155-56,158 Auslander, Rose , 132 Bacigalupo, Ernest, 150 Barthes, Roland, 99, 100, 108-9, 125, 189,195 Bataille, Georges, 167 Baudrillard, Jean , 191, 193 Beckett, Samuel, 209-11 , 228-29, 23235 Beer, Gillian, 84, 86 Bell. Michael , 4, 33, 172-73 Benjamin, Walter, 195-96,206 Bentley , Eric, 57 Bernstein, Charles, 146 Bersani , Leo, 20 I Blake , William, 25-34 Blumenberg, Hans, 3 Boas, Franz, 155 Bohrer, Karl-Heinz, 3, I I, 197,206 Borchmeyer, Dieter, 53 Brewer, Maria Minich, 208 Brooker, Peter, 184 Brooks, Cleanth, 163 Brush , Stephen G., 85 Bultmann, Rudolf, 115-24 Burchfield, Joe D., 89 Burnett, Leon, 130 Cadbury, Henry J., 25 Campbell, Joseph, 123-24 , 153-54 Camus, Albert, 62 Carlyle, Thomas, 43-45, 52 Cartari, Vincenzo, 27 Carpenter, Edward, 92

Cassirer, Ernst , 3, 106-7, 134 Celan, Paul, 130-38 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 10I Chase, Richard, 153 Chekhov, Anton , 125-27 Clark , Timothy, 151 Clastres, Pierre, 174 Clifford, James, 154, 165, 166 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 41 Confucius, 139-40 Conrad, Joseph, 31-32 Craig, Cairns, 32-33 Culler, A. Dwight, 50 Dahlhaus, Carl, 56 Dante Alighieri, 140,.151, 184 Daverio, John, 46 Dela venay, Emile , 92 Derrida, Jacques, 208 Detienne, Marcel , 134 Docherty, Thom as, 219-21 Dockhorn, Klaus, 53 Doll , Mary A., 234 Drews, Arthur, 53 Dyke , Henry van, 35 Eggers, J. P., 55 Eichhorn, J. G., 36 Eichner, Hans, 15 Einstein, Albert, 127 Eldridge, Richard, 2 Eliade, Mircea, 115, 119, 123-24, 12829,135-37 ,169,178-80 Eliot, T. S., 153-66, 193,217-27, 232 Ellis, David , 82 Ellmann, Maud, 188,224 Euripides, 126-27 Falck, Colin, 3 Felman, Shoshana, 207 Felstiner, John, 131-33 Fenollosa, Ernest, 150

258 Fe rgu son . James, 159 Fest. Joach im c, 100 , 102 Fichte, J. G. , 4, 43-44 Fin em an, Jo el, 83 Fletcher, Angus, 83 Flint, F. S., 186 Foerste r, Heinz von , 20 Ford. Madox Ford, 143 Frank , Joseph, 163 Frank , Manfred. 3, 46 Frazer, James, 1, 154, 159-6 2 Freem an , Edward Augu stu s, 46 Freud, Sigm und , 197-211 Friberg , Eino , 136-37 Fried, Jochen, 12 Fry e, Northrop, I, 28, 134, 153-54 Gay. Peter, 100, 102 Ge ertz, Cliffo rd, 157 , 172 George, Stefan, 62 , 100-1 Girard, Ren e, 199-200 Glaser, Hermann, 100-1 Goeth e. Johann Wolfgang, II Gordon, David M ., 140 Griffin , Roger, 110 Grivel, Charles, 227 Grossman, Allen, 220 Hagstrom, Jean H., 29 Hamburger, Michael, 131 Hamilton, Scott, 150 Handler, Richard, 157 Hardenberg, Friedrich von , (Novalis), 10, 16-20 Harman, Peter M., 86 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 126 Hassan. Ihab. 216 Hawkes, Jacquetta, 89 Hayles, N. Katherine, 82-83, 95 Hegel , G . W. F., 45-46, 168 Heidegger, Martin, 4, WI , 112, 151 Heimann, P. M., 87 Herbert, Christopher, 155 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 6, 36- 38 Herf, Jeffrey, 101 , 103 Heyne, J. G ., 36

Index Hill , Chris topher, 25 Hoffmann, E. T . A.. 20-23 Hofmann sth al, Hugo von . 126 Horkheimer , Max, I, 202 Hum e, David , 74 Ibsen, Hen rik , 126-27 lser, Wolfgang, 187-89 Jakobson, Rom an, 160 Jam es, Frank A. J. L., 85 James , Robert, 29 Jam eson , Fredric , 165 Johnston, Georgi a, 232 Jolles, Andre, 22-23 Jonas, Han s, 115-24 Joyce, James, 5, 162,227-29 JUnger, Ernst, 101 - 13 Jung, C. G ., 123-24 Kant, Immanuel, 4, 64, 75, 168 Keats, John, 128-29 Kelly, Katherine, 232 -33 Kenner, Hugh, 186, 191 Kermode, Frank, 173, 176 Klages, Lud wig, 102 Knight, Da vid, 85 , 94 Kolakowski, Les zek , 3 Kuper, Adam , 172 Lacan, Jacques, 192 Lane, Jerem y, 2 17 Lange, Friedrich Albert, 64 Lawrence, D. H., 4,81 -98 , 167-80 Lehmann, Ernest, 46 Lehmann, Han s-Thies, 204 , 208 Lentriccia, Frank, 161 Levenson, Mich ael , 30- 31 Levinas, Emmanuel, 151 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, I Levi-Strauss, Claude, 14, 153-54 Lewis, W yndham, 146 Link, F., 187 Loos, Paul Arthur, 46 Luhmann, Niklas, 15-16

Index MacCallum, M. W ., 49 Madsen, Deborah L. , 83 Malkki, Liisa, 159 Man, Paul de, 61, 183, 190 Manganaro, Marc , 1. 154, 163 Mann, Thomas, 8, 62, 101 Marinetti . F. T ., 101-2, 108, 110 Marquard, Odo, 195 Marx , Karl, 170, 173-75 Mayer, Hans , 53 McDowell, John, 74 Meier. Christian, 207 Meisel, Perry , 165 Miller, Daniel, 171 Moody, A. D., 214 Moritz, Karl Philipp, 9 Miiller, Heiner, 203-6 Nancy , Jean -Luc, 144 Nemoianu, Virgil, 127 Newman, Gerald, 167 Nicholls, Peter, 144, 145, 148 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5. 61-80, 1056. 111- 13, 170, 180-83, 190 Nolte. Ernst, 110 Nov alis, s et' Hardenberg, Friedrich von Nygren, Anders, 72 Oergel, Maike, 35, 36 Overbeck, Friedrich, 133 Ovid,218-25 Paley , Morton D., 29 Pascal, Blaise, 120-21 Pater, Walter, 141 Pearson, Karl , 5 Plato . 10, 14, 147, 178, 185 Poe liner, Peter, 64 Pollnitz, Christopher, 84 Pound, Ezra, 139-52 , 183-94, 21317 Prigogine, Ilya, 95 Rabinovitz, Rubin, 233 Rahv, Philip, 153

259 Rapaport, Hermann. 140 Richards, I. A.. 82 Rilke , Rainer Maria, 215 Risse, Guenter, 94 Rosenberg, John D.. 51, 56 Roth . Mart y, 160 Rothschuh, Karl E. , 94 Rutschky , M., 197 Ryals, Clyde de L., 35.49.51.56 Sahlins, Marsh all. 174 Schelling, Friedrich von, 3, 12. 3944 Schlec hta, Karl , 61 Schlegel, Friedrich, 3, 10-16 , 38-3 9, 46 ,51 Schiller. Friedrich, 4, 134-35 , 16869, 174-80 Schnade lbac h, Herbert, 102 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 61-75 Scott, Walter, 41 Searle, John, 179 Seznec, Jean, 27 Siegmund, Gerald, 207 Smith, Crosbie, 87 Smith, Stan , 32 Sophocles. 205-6 Spanos, William V., 163 Spengler, Oswald, 101-13 Spivak, Gayatri, 219 Starobinski, Jean . 202 Stengers, Isabelle, 95 Stem, J. P., 108 Stewart, Balfour, 87-88, 92-93 Strauss, Walter, 216 Tait, P. G.. 87-88, 92-93 Taussig, Michael. 160 Taylor, Charles, 175 Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 35-59 Tennyson, Hallam, 49 Terrell, Carroll F., 151 Thomas, Keith, 25 Thomson, William, 86, 89 Thorlby, Anthony, 215 Tucker, Herbert F., 49

260 Tylor, Edward, 115-16, 155-56 Vernant, Jean Pierre, 13 Vickery, John, 159 Wagner, Richard, 35-59 Ward, Edward, 221-22 Wellbery, David E., II Welsch, Wolfgang, 194-95 Wells, H. G., 86, 89 Wiggins, David, 74

Index Williams, Linda Ruth , 88 Williams, Raymond, 156. 158 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4. 112, 196 Woolf. Virginia. 229-32 Wordsworth. William 40-41 Yeats, W, B. 4.25-34, 129-30. U4, 214 Zurmuhl. Sabine. 57