Re-Embroidering the Robe : Faith, Myth and Literary Creation since 1850 [1 ed.] 9781443814942, 9781847186089

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Re-Embroidering the Robe

Re-Embroidering the Robe: Faith, Myth and Literary Creation since 1850

Edited by

Suzanne Bray, Adrienne E. Gavin and Peter Merchant

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Re-Embroidering the Robe: Faith, Myth and Literary Creation since 1850, Edited by Suzanne Bray, Adrienne E. Gavin and Peter Merchant This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Suzanne Bray, Adrienne E. Gavin and Peter Merchant and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-608-4, ISBN (13): 9781847186089

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ...................................................................................................... viii Suzanne Bray Part I: Myth and Faith in Fictions of Childhood and Adolescence Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Adrienne E. Gavin The Wizard of Oz: Myth for an Age of Progress ......................................... 6 J. Jackson Barlow Nordic Mythology in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia ................. 17 Daniel Warzecha Creating National Mythology and its Reflections in Contemporary Children’s Literature ................................................................................. 32 Mari Niitra The Clew of Her Story: Female Myth-Making in Margaret Mahy’s The Tricksters ............................................................................................ 48 Adrienne E. Gavin Of Maidens and Dragons: Sara Maitland’s Three Times Table................. 63 Deborah Sarbin Part II: Myth and the Christian Author Introduction ............................................................................................... 73 Suzanne Bray J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Eucatastrophe,” or Fantasy as a Modern Recovery of Faith ...................................................................................................... 77 Joanny Moulin

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Mediaeval Myth and Modern Narrative: Dante’s Myth of Heaven and Hell and Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell.................................... 87 Robert-Louis Abrahamson Jesting in Earnest: Levity and Faith in George MacDonald’s The Light Princess................................................................................... 103 Daniel Gabelman Myth, Fact and “Literary Belief”: Imagination and Post-Empiricism in C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien ......................................................... 115 Rod Rosenquist Temptations for the Times in the Mythical Rewritings of British Christian Authors 1933 to 1945............................................................... 127 Suzanne Bray Incarnation as Meta-Narrative in Flannery O’Connor’s Short Stories .... 144 Isabelle Boof-Vermesse Part III: Mythology Revisited Introduction ............................................................................................. 157 Peter Merchant The Goddess and the Underworld in Modernism: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Feux .................................................................................... 162 Evans Lansing Smith Making It New: Changing Form and Function in Modern Myth ............ 177 Bradford Haas “In the Goddess’s Name”: Symbolist and Modernist Revisions of the Aphrodite Myth ............................................................................. 193 Nora Clark The Cult of Dionysus in the Work of W. B. Yeats .................................. 210 Elizabeth Muller “Breathed on by the rural Pan”: The Atmosphere of Arcadia in Giono’s Regain.................................................................................... 228 Peter Merchant

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God’s Death and Subsequent Resurrection from Faust to Apocalypto.... 243 Jacques Coulardeau Unity Among the Stars: Faith and Reason in Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives .................................................................... 256 David Waterman Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 270 Index........................................................................................................ 275

PREFACE SUZANNE BRAY

Religious faith, myths and legends have always been present in literature. However, their role has changed over time. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, with the diminishing role of religion in European society, writers with some kind of belief system, whether religious or political, have tended to use myth in two different ways. They have either retold the old, familiar myths of the past so that they carry a new message to the author’s own generation or created their own, new myths as modern vehicles of traditional truths. Many writers have combined the two techniques. This volume’s title, Re-Embroidering the Robe, was chosen both on account of its religious and mythological connotations—from Christ’s seamless garment to the Swan Maiden’s magic robe, Zeus’s gift to Chthonie or even Cinderella’s ball gown—and because it evokes the act of transforming artistry by which the enduring tale becomes new and relevant to each succeeding generation. Although writers, being merely human, cannot create ex nihilo, each author studied in this work has, in one way or another, fashioned a myth for their own time using, to some extent at least, already existing literary events and images. In order to make the most of the current interest in faith and myth, an international conference on “Faith, Myth and Literary Creation since 1850” was organised at Lille Catholic University in the north of France in May 2007. Thirty-seven scholars from North America, the United Kingdom and continental Europe were selected by an academic panel to share their research in this field in front of a fascinated audience. Although the conference took place in France, over half of the participants chose to speak in English. The majority of these were invited to contribute an article to this volume and one, Daniel Warzecha, has translated his study of Nordic mythology in The Chronicles of Narnia from the French. The articles naturally fall into three categories. The first group explores the notions of faith, or lack of faith, and myth in fictions of childhood and adolescence. The works studied are drawn from England, Scotland, New Zealand, the USA and Estonia. The authors considered range from a

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traditional Christian, via a liberal theologian and a freethinker, to others for whom national or female, rather than individual or spiritual, reembroidering of myth is the primary consideration. The second group of articles examines the work of the explicitly Christian author’s relationship with myth, both as a mythopoeic creator and as a teller of traditional tales from a new slant. A surprising unity can be seen between the Non-Conformist MacDonald, Catholic Tolkien and O’Connor and the Anglican Lewis, Williams, Sayers and Eliot, as each writer provides in their work a form of incarnation of their own spiritual message to their contemporaries. Classical, Norse, Hebrew and Celtic mythology as well as national legend and biblical or other religious imagery all provide the rich raw material for the literature studied. The approaches to this material vary from that of post-modern theory to the more traditional literary and critical approach, from the historian’s contextualisation of religious and political ideas to the teacher’s personal dilemma of how to make the text live for his students. On the surface the factors unifying the studies in the third group may seem more tenuous. French, German, British, Greek, Irish and American authors are joined together in a panoply of mythological wealth. Nevertheless, each contributor analyses how certain well-known mythical tales or concepts have found new expression in the literature of the last one hundred and fifty years. To borrow from Jacques Coulardeau’s title, from Faust to Apocalypto, God and the gods may sometimes be dead, but in literature they have shown a remarkable tendency to rise again at the slightest opportunity. The authors of these papers, many of them leading academics in their respective fields, have had the opportunity to feast at a banquet of literary delights. You too are invited to the symposium.

PART I: MYTH AND FAITH IN FICTIONS OF CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENCE INTRODUCTION ADRIENNE E. GAVIN

“Robert Frost said that poetry is what gets lost in translation: we could say that a myth is a story that is not lost, or harmed, or diminished as it sheds the skin of one language and assumes that of another.”1 That these are the words of a children’s author, Philip Pullman, is fitting, for it is perhaps in the literature of childhood that myths most often assume new forms. “When compared with general literature,” as John Stephens and Robyn McCallum observe, “the literature produced for children contains a much larger proportion of retold stories.”2 Similarly, Maria Nikolajeva suggests, all children’s fiction is “essentially ‘mythic,’” in that, like myth, it is often “a symbolic depiction of a maturation process (initiation, rite of passage) rather than a strictly mimetic reflection of a concrete ‘reality.’”3 The five essays in this section discuss novels of childhood and adolescence which re-embroider myth into fashions—or “skins”—more wearable in the modern world. Creating and reflecting national identity, conveying religious and moral messages, or re-visioning gender, class, and home, the novels examined all express a purpose beyond the purely narrative in their reinvention of mythical models. Spanning the twentieth century and the globe—with texts drawn from the United States, Estonia, Britain, and New Zealand—the fictions analysed here all contain mythinfluenced fantasy worlds or supernatural infusions into the realist, and centre on the passage of child or adolescent characters through magical experiences or places into a new sense of identity. J. Jackson Barlow’s essay examines The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), a distinctively American fairy tale written by L. Frank Baum in 1

Pullman, “A Word or Two About Myths,” n. p. Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture, 3. 3 Nikolajeva, From Mythic to Linear, 1. 2

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rejection of dark and moralistic old European models. Arguing that the novel does, nevertheless, contain a moral message, Barlow poses the question: “what is the moral of Baum’s tale, and how do political structures and practices in Oz help us to understand it?” The message which his essay finds Baum’s “wonder tale” to have for its readers is that ordinary people have extraordinary power and must learn to rely on their own judgements and be sceptical about conventional wisdom and the claims of others. On her journey to the Emerald City Dorothy discovers that the land of Oz is “uncivilized” and flawed in its government. By killing the wicked witches and unmasking the fraudulent myth-making of the Wizard, Dorothy begins to “civilize” Oz by moving it towards government by consent and democracy. Learning self-reliance and to question received wisdom, she begins to realize the limits of rulers such as the Wizard to fulfil her own needs and dreams. As Barlow shows, Baum’s story urges the idea that anything is possible for those who try. In the second essay in this section Daniel Warzecha traces the influence of Nordic mythology on C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56). Returning a clear yes to his question whether the seven tales of Narnia can be read as “more than mere children’s stories,” Warzecha shows that Norse mythology resonates with other inspirational sources in the stories to point towards “Christian eschatology in accordance with the Lewisian principles of transposition and inter-dependence of all things.” After discussing the appeal of the mythological Great North to Lewis in life, the essay examines the way in which The Chronicles borrow magical atmosphere, sylvan landscapes, spatio-temporal themes, supernatural creatures, journey patterns, and mythic devices from Nordic myth. Lewis interweaves his own artistic, psychological, and spiritual dimensions with old Scandinavian myths to create new dynamic tales, Warzecha shows, and the use of mythic figures magnifies the moral vision of Lewis’s work, making the battle between good and evil spiritual, timeless, and cosmic. Examining metamorphosis and odyssey, fauna and the sea, and destiny and sacrifice in poetic Eddas and Nordic sagas as echoed in Lewis’s works, the essay argues that Lewis wove through the Chronicles a “personally revised Christian eschatology” which reflected his belief that “all myths are essentially ‘copies’—lesser and yet glorious—of the central universal archetype, namely the redemptive incarnation of Christ.” Focusing on Estonian literature, Mari Niitra’s essay discusses the role of mythology in sculpting a nation’s identity. A small country with a history of being ruled over by more powerful nations, Estonia in the nineteenth century began recording and constructing myths with the purpose of creating a foundation for a “civilized nation.” Niitra outlines

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the role of Estonian intellectuals Friedrich Robert Faehlmann and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald in creating canonical literary myths, and giving Estonia its own national epic Kalevipoeg (Kalev’s Son). Drawing on a range of sources including classical mythology, German folklore, oral tales, and romantic literature, these nineteenth-century myth-makers created a national literature based on Estonia’s pre-Christian “golden age of ancient freedom.” As Niitra shows through her analysis of Reet Made’s 2005 children’s novel Salaroheline hiis (Secret Green Grove), these nineteenth-century myths still serve as ideological models for contemporary Estonian literature. The story of modern children who meet fairy creatures in the countryside and learn about old wisdom, national identity, and folkloric traditions, Made’s novel reveals the fairy world as “more sacred” than that of humans. It also reveals, the essay argues, a deeply rooted and enduring consciousness of the nineteenth-century mythic conception of the Estonian nation. In retellings of myths for children, such as Made’s novel or Lewis’s Chronicles, there is often “a high probability that replication of old content and mode of representation may result in the further replication of, for example, old masculinist and antifeminist metanarratives.”4 Yet, as critics Stephens and McCallum show, “[a]t the same time retold stories have the potential to disclose how old stories suppress the invisible, the untold and the unspoken.”5 The novels of female adolescence discussed in the final two essays in this section overtly acknowledge the untold female stories of old myths and re-stitch gender roles for a modern world. Ostensibly realist texts which introduce magical or supernatural elements, Margaret Mahy’s The Tricksters (1986) and Sara Maitland’s Three Times Table (1990) both depict the passage to womanhood as involving recognition of the faultiness of old myths as models for female protagonists. Discussing New Zealand author Margaret Mahy’s young adult novel The Tricksters, Adrienne E. Gavin argues that Mahy’s fluid, metamorphic drawing on old myths creates new female myth. In this coming-of-age story the protagonist Harry (Ariadne), a secret writer and keeper of family secrets, learns through conquering three supernatural trickster brothers that the old patriarchal forms of myth and romance that she echoes in her writing are a faulty and dangerous model for young women to follow. Suggesting that several myths serve as prominent but altered intertexts in the novel, the essay examines the ways in which Harry can most clearly be read as a reinterpreted Ariadne whose role also encompasses that of the 4 5

Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture, 22. Ibid.

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traditional Theseus. Not simplistically inverting old myths, but fluidly adapting, alluding to, and recasting them, The Tricksters weaves a modern, humanist myth of female maturation. Mahy emphasizes the power and marvellousness of human life and love in her myth-making, Gavin argues, and the novel reveals that the modern Ariadne must both create and follow the silken clew of her own story into the labyrinth of literary creation. Deborah Sarbin analyses Sara Maitland’s Three Times Table, a novel which re-energizes the myth surrounding St. Margaret of Antioch, a dragon conqueror who had a cult following in England in the Middle Ages but whose story was subsequently suppressed and deemed only legendary. Sarbin focuses on the youngest of the novel’s daughter-mothergrandmother trio of protagonists: fifteen-year-old Maggie Petherington whose entry into adulthood is marked by the giving up of her personal dragon, Fenna. Like Mahy’s Harry, Maggie realizes that she needs to create a new story of her own. Fenna has initially been useful, protective, and liberating for Maggie but as Sarbin argues, the dragon also becomes, like sin, dangerous and isolating for Maggie, cutting her off from the risks of real life. Considering the loss of St. Margaret’s legend, particularly in England, and discussing the ways in which this novel reinvents it, Sarbin shows that Maitland creates a story of spiritual strength which “addresses both a feminine coming-of-age and an examination of the complex nature of sin.” As Karen Armstrong writes, the “imagination is the faculty that produces religion and mythology.”6 It is also the faculty which inspires literature. The essays in this section range their discussions across the fields of mythology, religious belief, and literature, highlighting the ways in which, through their re-embroidering of myth, authors create new myths of place, of time past and present, and of identity national and personal. Authors such as Lewis and Maitland intertwine the religious with the mythical, others like Mahy reveal myth in more humanist terms, and yet others such as Baum and Made create myths of national identity. Discernible within all these myths re-told for modern times, however, lie the old myths undiminished, still beating and breathing in metamorphosed new skins.

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Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, 2.

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Works Cited Armstrong, Karen. A Short History of Myth. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005. Nikolajeva, Maria. From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Pullman, Philip. “A Word or Two About Myths.” [Essay pamphlet introducing Canongate’s The Myths series. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005]. Stephens, John and Robyn McCallum. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature. New York and London: Garland, 1998.

THE WIZARD OF OZ: MYTH FOR AN AGE OF PROGRESS1 J. JACKSON BARLOW

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) was America’s top-selling children’s book for the last Christmas season of the nineteenth century. Looking ahead to the new century, author L. Frank Baum offered his story as the prototype of a new form of children’s literature. In these “wonder tales,” the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with all the horrible and blood-curdling incidents devised by their authors to point a fearsome moral to each tale. Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.2

Generations of critics, however, have found something more than simply entertainment in The Wizard; they have found a moral, if not a “fearsome” one. Baum does not avoid making moral judgments, even as he entertains. Wickedness is defined as clearly and suppressed as effectively in Oz as it is in old fashioned fairy tales. But what is the moral of Baum’s tale, and how do political structures and practices in Oz help us to understand it? Much recent discussion about the politics of Oz has been framed by Henry Littlefield’s 1964 claim that the book is a “Parable on Populism.” He argues that the tale is an extended satire on the politics of the 1890s, with the Scarecrow representing Midwestern farmers, the Tin Woodman standing for the industrial workers of the East, and the Cowardly Lion being a caricature of William Jennings Bryan. Dorothy’s silver shoes and 1

Juniata College students Amber Laird ’08 and Emily Hauser ’09 helped with the research for this paper. The final revisions were made during the time I was the Garwood Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University. I thank them for their support. 2 Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, 4.

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the Yellow Brick Road in his view represent contemporary competing proposals over whether to monetize silver.3 Baum’s intention, according to Littlefield, is to support “Democratic Populism,” in particular the policy of “free silver.”4 This interpretation and its “monetary allegory” variant have been embraced by a number of other scholars and have proven to be especially popular among economists.5 More recent scholarship, however, has questioned the Littlefield thesis.6 The time has come for a fresh look at Oz and its politics. How do the adventures of Dorothy and her companions fulfil Baum’s intention of creating a “wonder tale” for modern children? The tale begins in Kansas, the heart of the heartland, where American values are the most solid. Yet Uncle Henry and Aunt Em are scarcely living the American Dream. They appear instead to be living in a story with a “fearsome moral,” for as the story begins they are powerless against the forces of nature. Nature is unkind in Kansas; everything is grey and cheerless, except for Dorothy. She and Toto are the only exceptions to the general dreariness. Baum is unsparing in his portrait of the human costs of life in Kansas: When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled, now…. Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.7

The land has remade Uncle Henry and Aunt Em in its own image. Dorothy, however, is young and yet to accept defeat. As Littlefield suggests, Dorothy is an American Everyman, or every child, characterized by a robust common sense and a powerful optimism.8 She has not yet lost hope or her sense of humour, and she has a generous way of accepting things on their own terms. By contrast with Kansas Oz is a beautiful place—a visual paradise. But for all its beauty, Dorothy quickly discovers that Oz is flawed. The main 3

Littlefield, “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism,” 376-77. Ibid., 373. 5 The economic uses of the story are covered in Dighe, The Historian’s Wizard of Oz. 6 See Hansen, “The Fable of the Allegory,” passim and Rogers, L. Frank Baum Creator of Oz, 265-66. 7 Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, 18, 20. 8 Littlefield, “The Wizard of Oz,” 375. 4

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problems are governmental. When Dorothy arrives, Oz is governed by witches—the good witches of the North and South and the wicked witches of the East and West—and by the Wizard. This condition has not changed for many years—just how many no one can quite tell.9 Although the people are prosperous, Oz is thus far “uncivilized,” as the Witch of the North explains to Dorothy soon after she arrives: “‘In the civilized countries I believe there are no witches left; nor wizards….But, you see, the Land of Oz has never been civilized, for we are cut off from all the rest of the world. Therefore we still have witches and wizards amongst us.’”10 By killing the Wicked Witch of the East, Dorothy has begun the process of civilizing Oz, and although the process is not complete when she leaves, the trend is clear. In every case where a change of government occurs in the book, government by force or fraud is replaced with government chosen by consent. Civilization means that no one, however powerful, is justified in ruling others without their consent. This means replacing those who have, or claim to have, more than human knowledge and power with those who have only everyday knowledge and abilities. Government by consent means government by ordinary people. Why has change been so slow to come to Oz? Dorothy kills both witches—one hit with a house and the other “liquidated”—and she makes it look easy. We must assume that any one else, at any time, could have done so with equal ease, yet in spite of the oppression they have suffered, citizens in the various lands of Oz have apparently never risen in rebellion.11 Although in some respects people in Oz seem public-spirited, they are also complacent. To them the power of witches and wizards is simply a fact of life, and is not worth challenging. Part of this, no doubt, is simple prudence: those who lack magic abilities dare not test others’ claims of power, lest they turn out to be true. But part is also the people’s habit of passive acceptance. It is easier to avoid trouble than to take action, especially if one enjoys a comfortable living. Of course, the Witches really do have magical powers, even if the limits of those powers have never been tested. The Wizard is different. He 9

Baum’s narrative is not free of problems, and this is one of them. It is difficult to see how the Wizard, coming as he did by balloon from Nebraska, could have built the Emerald City and ruled it for so long that everyone had forgotten what he looked like, especially since people in Oz seem to have longer than usual life spans. 10 Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, 45. 11 The Wicked Witch of the East “‘has held all the Munchkins in bondage for many years, making them slave for her night and day’” (Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, 38, 40).

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has convinced the inhabitants of the Emerald City to treat his very name with reverence, but he has done so by a series of lies. Although he claims to rule in the best interests of the citizens, they never appear to have questioned whether that is true, or inquired about what their interests might be. They are satisfied with his rule both because it seems benign and because they assume that his authority is based on powers or knowledge that set him apart. Dorothy and her companions expose the Wizard for a fraud. They discover that like successful charlatans in all ages he has a knack for finding the weak places in people’s self-estimates and exploiting them. The people’s fear of his anger, and the Witches’ fear of his power, are sustained by judicious but sparing demonstrations, and above all by clouding himself in mystery. The Wizard’s power is nothing more than the power of opinion. He has been able to manipulate and intimidate the people so that his power remains unchallenged. But there is no wizard, only the apparatus of wizard-making. Behind the illusion is simply a “common man” who managed to exploit the people’s superstitious beliefs. Baum depicts the Wizard’s myth-making in a way that undermines the political authority of myth. This is an appropriate lesson in a tale for modern children. The Wizard is more of a threat to popular government than is the real power of the witches, because he makes the people agents of their own deception. Unmasking the Wizard’s fraud reinforces for modern children a fundamental principle of democratic citizenship, the responsibility to scrutinize the activities of those in positions of power. Those who try to hide from the public may not turn out to be as wise, as powerful, or as benevolent as they would like us to believe. Democratic politics assume that the people can learn to see through the tricks of humbugs and rule in their own behalf. Democracy also assumes that there is no greater power than that of the people themselves. Dorothy and the Wizard, as Americans, share an unmistakably American recognition of the worth and dignity of individuals. But the Wizard’s recognition is merely formal; his power hinges on people being aware of their individual weakness and unable to assert their collective strength. As James Madison and later Alexis de Tocqueville observed, in an individualist age individuals feel little confidence in their own judgments when they diverge from public opinion. This insight allows the Wizard to succeed in deceiving the people of Emerald City.12 Dorothy, on the other hand, represents individualism’s more assertive or Emersonian side, the 12 Hamilton et al., The Federalist Papers, no. 49, 311-12; de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 243-49.

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side that stands up to public opinion and challenges figures of authority. In bringing this form of individualism to Oz, Dorothy will not only expose the Wizard’s fraud, but will set the inhabitants on a path to government by consent. Oz is a place of superstition, credulity, and tyrannical government when Dorothy arrives. As the witch says, it is not a civilized place because there are still witches and wizards among them. Dorothy’s arrival begins the process by which Oz will become civilized, and although this is scarcely her intention, Baum makes it appear the inevitable result of her presence. The qualities of her character alone are sufficient to bring about a transformation of the political system, resulting in improved government. But the Wizard’s government of Emerald City raises the question whether any state can be free from the manipulative arts of politicians, especially if the people are able and willing to deceive themselves. The causes of tyrannical government in Oz may thus be related to certain limitations of democratic citizenship. What are the appropriate character traits for “civilized” citizenship? The discovery of these character traits is explored in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz through the central action of the book: Dorothy’s journey to the Emerald City to consult the Wizard and her quest to carry out the task he demands of her. Completing the Wizard’s assignment requires that Dorothy learn self-reliance, and this involves two steps. First, she must become sceptical, both of conventional wisdom and of others’ selfevaluations. She must learn to test claims of knowledge and power (or lack thereof) against her own knowledge and experience, rather than taking things on faith. By shaping Dorothy’s story in this way, Baum not only reveals a profound scepticism about claims to political authority, but also teaches an amused and ironic detachment from both socially accepted conventions and from others’ self-assessments. This detachment provides the foundation for the second step in Dorothy’s learning self-reliance: the discovery of her own powers. Nothing is quite what it seems in Oz, as even its youngest readers quickly learn. Perhaps most obvious is the fact that each of the main characters proves to be an ironic inversion of his or her reputation and/or self-image. The brainless Scarecrow is logical and thoughtful. The heartless Tin Woodman is sentimental and tender. The Cowardly Lion is brave. The mighty but shadowy Wizard is a mere con man, and the powerful Wicked Witches are easily defeated by quite ordinary means. Some characters believe themselves to be less than they are, and others appear to be more than they are. It turns out that most people are willing either to accept or to exploit conventional attitudes, especially those that

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concern their own capacities. Dorothy must learn that the characters who underestimate their powers, especially her companions, have hidden strengths, and that the characters that are reputed to be powerful, especially the Wizard, have hidden weaknesses. She must first learn to question her own preconceptions. The first challenge to Dorothy’s received opinions comes in her initial meeting with the Witch of the North. When the Witch reveals her identity, Dorothy responds with the “stereotyped” fairy tale knowledge: “‘But I thought all witches were wicked.’”13 Dorothy’s conventional attitude toward witches is excusable because Kansas is civilized, and the witches there died out long ago.14 Dorothy must learn to replace her opinions about witches, and many other things, with knowledge derived from actual encounters with them. Dorothy’s scepticism about received wisdom grows as her experience grows. The first of her companions, the Scarecrow, has an advantage over Dorothy, in that he is not in need of unlearning accepted opinions. Having been created only the “‘day before yesterday,’” the Scarecrow’s mind is literally a blank slate.15 The Scarecrow has reason, but lacks experience, and so at first he falls into every pothole along the road. His lack of experience makes it difficult for him to understand Dorothy’s desire to return to Kansas, when she tries to explain it to him: ‘I cannot understand why you should wish to leave this beautiful country and go back to the dry, gray place you call Kansas.’ ‘That is because you have no brains,’ answered the girl. ‘No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no place like home.’ The Scarecrow sighed. ‘Of course I cannot understand it,’ he said. ‘If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all. It is fortunate for Kansas that you have brains.’16

The Scarecrow’s logic is inescapable, and certainly is not lost on readers. It does not seem to be lost on Dorothy, either, who responds by changing the subject. She cannot let go of her desire for home, however illogical. 13

Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, 40. Ibid., 45. 15 Ibid., 76. 16 Ibid., 75-76. Most commentators have noted Baum’s play here on the adage, “be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.” 14

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But the Scarecrow’s logic generates just the sort of naïve questions Dorothy must learn to ask. In contrast to Dorothy’s conventional views of witches or her attachment to her home, everyone’s faith in the Wizard’s power seems well justified and hardly open to sceptical inquiry. It is grounded in real accomplishments: he designed the Emerald City and has kept the Wicked Witches at bay for a long time. Faith is a natural progression from things seen (the city) to their unseen causes (the Wizard). The evidence for the Wizard’s goodness seems obvious as well, for the people are prosperous. The Wizard initially appears as a God-like figure in keeping with our traditional images of divinity.17 He is infinitely good but also deeply mysterious. He is a shape-shifter, appearing in different guises to Dorothy and each of her companions. The Wizard’s ability to change shapes reinforces our ideas about his power, but more importantly emphasizes our inability to know him in any meaningful way.18 At best we can know an aspect of divinity, but we cannot grasp the whole of it: ‘What is he [the Wizard] like?’ asked the girl. ‘That is hard to tell,’ said the man [a farmer in the country outside Emerald City], thoughtfully. ‘You see, Oz is a great Wizard, and can take on any form he wishes. So that some say he looks like a bird; and some say he looks like an elephant; and some say he looks like a cat. To others he appears as a beautiful fairy, or a brownie, or in any other form that pleases him. But who the real Oz is, when he is in his own form, no living person can tell.’19

The claims about the Wizard’s power, which are grounded in fact, are supported by images that conform to our conventional expectations about divine things. That they will prove to be mere images is one of the discoveries that Dorothy must make. At their first encounter the Wizard demands that Dorothy and her companions prove themselves worthy of the rewards they ask from him by killing the Wicked Witch of the West. The Wizard’s favours are not bestowed as an act of grace, but must be earned: “‘In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets.’”20 Dorothy’s response to the Wizard’s demand is a deep sense of disappointment, but it also indicates her growing independence of mind: “‘even if I wanted to, how could I kill 17

Nathanson, Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz as a Secular Myth of America, 179. 18 Hudlin, “The Mythology of Oz: An Interpretation,” 455-56. 19 Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, 165. 20 Ibid., 188; cf. Brotman, “A Late Wanderer in Oz,” 160.

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the Wicked Witch? If you, who are Great and Terrible, cannot kill her yourself, how do you expect me to do it?’”21 Dorothy raises no objection to the Wizard’s insistence that she do something in return for his favour. It is not unreasonable for him to demand a quid pro quo, and indeed it might be unreasonable for Dorothy to ask for an unrequited favour. But she can and does object to what he requires of her. Her question is a sensible one, after all. If the Wizard is powerful enough to send her back to Kansas, why can he not kill the Witch himself? Dorothy’s doubts will be amply confirmed by the end of her journey. Dorothy must sharpen her critical faculties before she can embark on her journey home. What she discovers is that there are no mysteries.22 Upon her return to the Emerald City to claim her reward, the Wizard is abruptly revealed to be simply “‘making believe.’”23 He is a humbug, if a very skilful one. What seems inexplicable or unknowable at first sight turns out to have a perfectly simple explanation that can be discovered by rational inquiry. The first step toward self-reliance is to understand things and people on their own terms, and not as containing or representing unseen forces that are working in or through them. Oz and its inhabitants are there for the purpose of being discovered by Dorothy, who must become sceptical of others as she is learning to trust her own judgment. The first step toward self-reliance is doubt about the ability of other forces, whether witches, wizards, or gods, to solve one’s problems. Dorothy learns to take others’ claims of power with a healthy dose of scepticism, because she can observe that no one is invincible. One cannot depend on being rescued by others or on escaping to another place—these are not just illusions, but irresponsible ones, for they make one passive in the face of problems that require action. As observed earlier, in a democracy it is essential that the people take action to solve problems, rather than accept things passively. But this also means they must discover and use their own powers. Having become sceptical about others’ powers, Dorothy and her companions must become confident in their own capacities to solve problems. Dorothy and the others must learn what the Wizard already knows and practices: how to make the best use of one’s talents and opportunities, however modest they might be. The key to his success is the Wizard’s understanding of others’ need for reassurance and their capacity for self-deception: 21

Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, 189. Sale, “L. Frank Baum, and Oz,” 581. 23 Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, 261. 22

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J. Jackson Barlow Oz, left to himself, smiled to think of his success in giving the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman and the Lion exactly what they thought they wanted. ‘How can I help being a humbug,’ he said, ‘when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can’t be done? It was easy to make the Scarecrow and the Lion and the Woodman happy, because they imagined I could do anything.’24

People in Oz, and perhaps people in Kansas as well, prefer their own imaginings or a comfortable and familiar falsehood to an uncomfortable truth, and the Wizard’s power is grounded in this observation. Baum makes clear to his readers that this human tendency is in tension with the needs of democratic government, which is undermined by the belief that those in power can “do anything.” The Wizard takes this insight one step further. He has not only given the people an illusion; he has reinforced it by staying out of the public eye. The less that is known, we may surmise, the better—let the public fill in the blanks with their own speculations. We must therefore add to his list of talents that he knows when to remain silent. The overt and explicit lesson Dorothy and her companions receive, or should receive, from their journey is that they have within themselves the resources to solve their problems. Again and again in the story they demonstrate their own capacities and strengths, yet the characters still doubt (as the readers do not) that they have the virtues they have displayed. The great irony is that they doubt themselves, but they do not doubt the Wizard, even after he has admitted he is a fraud. Dorothy’s companions never stop believing that their virtues are grants from outside, and not generated from within. They have made the mistake of imagining themselves without qualities they in fact possess, and must rely on an authority figure, however tarnished, to provide them with an equally imaginary reassurance. None of Dorothy’s companions really learns the lesson that Dorothy herself learns, or that the reader learns from them. The Wizard’s “gifts” to the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion are silly—not just symbols, but cheap and tacky ones. He cannot, in fact, give them anything, and everyone knows it but the characters themselves.25 As the readers learn, Dorothy also has the powers she seeks from the Wizard, since the silver shoes have the power to transport her home. But in contrast to the situation of her companions, the Wizard does not know Dorothy’s powers, and cannot “grant” them by making a symbolic gift. No 24

Ibid., 283. Cf Hearn’s comments and the sources he cites in Baum, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, 271, n. 17. 25

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one else has the power to send her back to Kansas. Dorothy’s discovery completes the lesson that modern children must learn: regardless of how difficult it may seem to achieve one’s goals, one’s own abilities are up to the task. Anything is possible for those who try. The Wizard can show the Scarecrow, the Woodman, and the Lion that they have the qualities they seek, only because they have already displayed them. They had achieved their goals, and needed only the testimonials. Dorothy, too, must find her powers in herself, but her discovery is more complicated. Her resourcefulness and pluck along her journey lead to discovering the power of the silver shoes. Metaphorically and literally, her powers have been right under her feet all along, but she did not know how to use them. The moral of Dorothy’s story is the extraordinary power of the ordinary person. This is the message that Baum’s “wonder tale” brings to the children of the twentieth century. Its Emersonian celebration of the extraordinariness of the ordinary is what has kept The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a central part of American mythology. Every person has inherent talents or abilities that he or she needs only to recognize; and every person also needs to learn to be sceptical of conventional wisdom and of others’ claims about their own powers. These are the grounds of self-reliance, and a critical support for the principle of government by the consent of the governed. Citizenship in a “civilized” country requires that citizens recognize that their own common sense is all that is needed to solve political problems. Politics is not a mysterious art for which they need to rely on the opinions of “experts.” In an age of rapid progress, the most important thing citizens can do is think for themselves. If the message of the older fairy tales was “trust authority,” Baum’s message to modern children is “trust yourself.”

Works Cited Attebery, Brian. “Oz.” In The Wizard of Oz. Schocken Critical Heritage Series, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn. New York: Schocken Books, 1983. 278-304. Baum, L. Frank. The Annotated Wizard of Oz, Centennial Edition, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn. New York: Norton, 2000. (First edition, Chicago: Hill and Co., 1900). Brotman, Jordan. “A Late Wanderer in Oz.” In Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature, edited by Sheila Egoff, G. T. Stubbs, and L. F. Ashley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. 156-69.

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Cook, Timothy E. “Another Perspective on Political Authority in Children’s Literature: The Fallible Leader in L. Frank Baum and Dr. Seuss.” Western Political Quarterly 36 (June 1983): 326-36. Dighe, Ranjit S., ed. The Historian’s Wizard of Oz: Reading L. Frank Baum’s Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by William H. Gilman. New York: Signet, 2003. Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers, edited by Clinton Rossiter, with introduction by Charles R. Kesler. New York: Signet, 1999. Hansen, Bradley A. “The Fable of the Allegory: The Wizard of Oz in Economics.” Journal of Economic Education 33 (Summer 2002): 25464. Hearn, Michael Patrick, ed. The Wizard of Oz. Schocken Critical Heritage Series. New York: Schocken Books, 1983. Hudlin, Edward W. “The Mythology of Oz: An Interpretation.” Papers on Language and Literature 25 (Fall 1989): 443-62. Littlefield, Henry M. “The Wizard of Oz: Parable on Populism.” In The American Culture: Approaches to the Study of the United States, edited by Hennig Cohen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. 370-82. Nathanson, Paul. Over the Rainbow: The Wizard of Oz As a Secular Myth of America. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991. Nye, Russel B. “An Appreciation.” In The Wizard of Oz. Schocken Critical Heritage Series, edited by Michael Patrick Hearn. New York: Schocken Books, 1983. 162-75. Rogers, Katharine M. L. Frank Baum Creator of Oz. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Sackett, S. J. “The Utopia of Oz.” The Georgia Review 14 (Fall 1960): 275-91. Sale, Roger. “L. Frank Baum, and Oz.” The Hudson Review 25 (Winter 1972-73): 571-92. Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. 2 vols. 1835, 1840. Translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. West, Mark L. “The Dorothys of Oz: A Heroine’s Unmaking.” Stories and Society: Children’s Literature in its Social Context, edited by Dennis Butts. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. 125-31.

NORDIC MYTHOLOGY IN C. S. LEWIS’S THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA DANIEL WARZECHA

Nordic mythology has a special place in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56). This is due to Lewis’s long-standing passion for myth in general which is shown in his many and diverse works which are impregnated with mythopoeia. Indeed, Lewis’s reason and imagination seemed to have been influenced by a mythological state of mind. Reasons for this are to be found in the writer’s intimate personal development as well as in his intellectual training. Recalling some major (auto)biographical landmarks might therefore be useful in better understanding the centrality of myth in Lewis’s career. Nordic mythology certainly played a major role in the writing of The Chronicles of Narnia, but it was only one element among many others. Yet Nordic mythology cannot just be reduced to a literary epiphenomenon made up of disparate elements. On the contrary, it contributed significantly to the depiction of an underlying “larger pattern”1 which underpins the architectonics of the seven tales. This specific mythology resonates with other powerful sources of inspiration to be found throughout Lewis’s stories. All however point in the same direction, namely to Christian eschatology in accordance with the Lewisian principles of transposition and inter-dependence of all things. This essay therefore asks whether The Chronicles are not more than mere children’s stories. Why does myth occupy such a prominent place for Lewis? Simply because, in his own view, “it is the myth that gives life.”2 At an early age, through pictures and stories, Lewis discovered the Great North which elicited in him a deep poetic and spiritual feeling. In his teens he shared this interest for the North with Arthur Greeves, a neighbour living near Belfast who became his lifelong friend. Then, when Lewis was at Malvern School, he discovered Richard Wagner’s music. Arthur Rackham’s picture 1 2

Lewis, Miracles, 110. “Myth Became Fact,” God in the Dock, 65.

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Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods3 created in him an aesthetic and spiritual rapture (which he called “joy”4). This feeling was as strong as his delight when he first saw the toy garden that his brother Warren had made for him. It was as powerful as his enchantment when he was a child and he read Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin (1903). This “northernness” Lewis was so fond of was not so much a geographical location but rather a very strong aesthetic feeling for an imaginary place. In Surprised by Joy (1955), his spiritual autobiography, Lewis wrote of how thrilled he was when he first read Wagner’s Siegfried in 1911. I had never heard of Wagner nor of Siegfried. I thought the Twilight of the Gods meant the twilight in which the gods lived. How did I know, at once and beyond question, that this was not Celtic, or silvan or terrestrial twilight? But so it was. Pure “northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity5

In the mid 1920s Lewis attended the Coalbiters, a club created and chaired by J. R. R. Tolkien. The club was designed to initiate Oxford dons to Icelandic myths and sagas. Lewis took part in it and enjoyed learning Old Norse and reading Eddas in Icelandic. Tolkien happened to have been a lover of the North since he was a boy. Like Lewis, he admired William Morris and since his adolescence, he had written poetry and plays influenced by old Nordic civilisation. The two men met on a regular basis in the 1930s and during World War Two at the Inklings, an informal literary circle created and animated by Lewis. The participants (Oxford dons, friends, and writers) read out their manuscripts, some of which would become bestsellers. The issue of myth was a very decisive one in the process of Lewis’s (re)conversion to Anglican Christianity in the early 1930s. At that time Lewis was a brilliant Oxford teacher. His conversion was gradual. He first became a literary convert very much in tune with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers such as Edmund Spenser, John Milton, or John Bunyan. On 19 September 1931, he had a fruitful conversation about myths with his friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. The conversation caused him deep inner turmoil. According to Tolkien, pagan myths had a divine origin and God spoke through them

3

Arthur Rackham illustrated Richard Wagner’s Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods in 1911. 4 A word extracted from Wordsworth’s poem “Surprised by Joy.” 5 Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 55.

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even if it was in a distorted way through mythopoeia.6 He argued that the Christian “myth,” although true, functioned in the same way as the Pagan ones. Lewis, who was keen on myths, was challenged by the argument. This attraction for the Great North, which was more mythic and literary than geographic, was closely interwoven with Lewis’s conception of religion. At an Oxford Socratic Club conference, he admitted: “If Christianity is only a mythology, then I find that the mythology I believe is not the mythology I like best. I like Greek mythology much better: Irish better still: Norse best of all.”7 The Chronicles of Narnia illustrates those preferences by making Nordic images central to the novels’ poetic and spiritual re-enchantment of the world. Lewis’s stories are immersed in the same magic atmosphere as that of the Eddas. “The religious world of the ancient Scandinavian was strongly impregnated with magic,”8 but how did Lewis manage to include this mythic and magic substratum in his tales? Lewis freely borrowed spatiotemporal mythic themes (like the winter, the spring, the forest, or the sea), mythic figures (such as dwarfs, giants, elves, or witches), mythical devices (like odysseys or metamorphoses) into which he incorporated aesthetic, and moral, psychological, and/or spiritual dimensions. For Lewis did not forget the intrinsic dynamism of his own tales. Very often the mythological borrowings were used as narrative artefacts. Lewis liked allegorizing and mythologizing time and space and by doing so he intended to make them denser. For instance, the opening scene of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) reflects Nordic mythical time.9 At the very beginning of the tale, Narnia is plunged in endless winter—“Always winter and never Christmas” (23)—because the land is under the evil spell of the White Witch. This spell, synonymous with a curse, has provoked barrenness. Probably the aspect most indicative of this sterility is the Witch’s power to make statues of all the living creatures. This winter is reminiscent of “fimbulvetr” (or “formidable winter”) which characterised the first event of the Nordic eschatology described in the 6

Carpenter, The Inklings, 42-45. Also see Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock, Essays on Theology and Ethics, 63-67. 7 Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?” 119. 8 Guelpa, Dieux et mythes nordiques, 109. All quotations from Guelpa translated by Warzecha. 9 In references the titles of the seven novels will be referred to with the following abbreviations: The Magician’s Nephew (MN), The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (LWW), The Horse and His Boy (HB), Prince Caspian (PC), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (VDT), The Silver Chair (SC), and The Last Battle (LB).

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Poetic Edda.10 As opposed to this endless winter, spring announces renewal and fecundity which is evocative of “Idhavöllr” or “the ever young plain,” the place where the gods return: Modhi and Magni, Thor’s sons, as well as Hödr and Balder (“the good god”). Interestingly, the melting of the snow in Narnia coincides with the return of Aslan, the “good god”—“‘Aslan is on the move,’” say Mr and Mrs Beaver euphorically (LWW, 65). Apart from in The Horse and His Boy (1954), the sylvan landscapes of the tales are drawn from the forests of Northern Europe as mythologized by ancient Scandinavians. The squabbles and the wars between Ase gods and Vane gods evolved in the snow-covered landscapes of the Nordic lands. Far from reflecting the widespread stereotypes of warriors, the mythology of Vikings was above all the mythology of magicians and poets. Patrick Guelpa indicates that it is a mythology which mirrors “a purely agrarian society.”11 The ancient Scandinavians had a consubstantial relationship with trees. “The centre of the mythological architecture is the Yggdrasill ash tree, The World Tree, whose roots extend beyond the inhabited world.”12 According to old Scandinavian belief “men are created by gods from tree trunks (i.e. terrestrial elements); as well as the primitive giants these gods are the guardians of original knowledge that lies in the Mimir spring at the foot of the big Yggdrasill ash tree.”13 In the precarious world under the threat of giants and the forces of chaos, “the tree is bitten at both its ends.”14 Lewis did not go as far as Tolkien in his symbolical and mythical representation of trees, but, like Narnia’s other living beings, trees are integral to the Chronicles’ cataclysms and promised restoration. Thus, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Tumnus the faun and Mr and Mrs Beaver warn the children against the spy trees’ submission to the Enemy. As the thaw progresses, however, the forest becomes the natural “friend” of the children as they walk towards the Stone Table and the natural “enemy” of the Witch who tries to catch them up. In The Magician’s Nephew (1955), nature and trees participate in the chastisement 10 “[The winter] will last for three years without stopping. There will be heavy snow falls, heavy frost and the wind will be icy. The sun will no longer shine” (Guelpa, Dieux, 95). These scenes remind the reader of the episodes in the LWW when the children are heading for the Beavers’ house or when they are fleeing the Witch’s wrath. 11 Guelpa, Dieux, 109. He mentions “1) the biological rites that mark the great stages of life 2) the practical or directly utilitarian rites” (ibid., 110). 12 Ibid., 22-23. 13 Ibid., 106. 14 Ibid., 106.

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of Uncle Andrew. In Prince Caspian (1951) the Narnian rebels take to the bush in the friendly forest. In the same tale, the trees and the wood nymphs (dryads and hamadryads) communicate with Lucy in a very subtle way allowing her to go on and meet Aslan in a forest.15 The sea is omnipresent in old Nordic civilisation as is shown by the numerous collective ship-like tombs. These show that the Vikings were sailors, but they also encapsulate the idea of the voyage into the great Beyond. It is striking that the Norse god Balder’s body was laid down in a boat.16 In Eddic cosmology, the sea is mythologized. “Among the Scalds, giant Ymir’s blood is a kenning, i.e. a Scandinavian poetic form, to name the sea.”17 In the Nordic pantheon, the giant Aegir personifies the Ocean. Finally, in Nordic eschatology, after the ultimate catastrophe, paradise occurs and a new beautiful and once more green earth emerges from the sea.18 In The Chronicles, the sea is not “physically” present in all the tales, but it is present “just beneath the surface” because Aslan originates from his Father, “the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea” (LWW, chapter 13). The sea is a geographical and spiritual Elsewhere. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the sea is geographically peripheral and appears at the very end of the book. Yet it is strategically central because the castle of Cair Paravel is situated on the strait of Beruna overlooking the ocean. In Prince Caspian, the four Pevensie children are drawn back into Narnia and are “landed” on an island, which used to be the strait of Beruna on which the ruins of Cair Paravel stand. In The Silver Chair (1953), the Sea is hinted at in chapter three, in which old King Caspian puts to sea in order to look for his lost son. But it is in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) that the sea becomes central. At the same time, it stands for a geographic, poetic, and spiritual topos. The sea is the medium that allows travel and the device that brings fluidity to the story. Symbolically it is very ambiguous. The chaotic turbulence that springs up from the sea is redolent of the spiritual and psychological darkness (sea monsters, storms, the Sea of Nightmares). At the same time, the sea is also laden with the promise of seeing Aslan’s country beyond the sea: in other words, paradise. Only the brave Reepicheep will be allowed to go there. The children will stay on the threshold of this Divine Elsewhere. Mythic figures magnify Lewis’s moral vision. So the battle between good and evil becomes timeless, spiritual, and cosmic. Aslan (“lion” in Turkish) holds a special place and is difficult to define. Is he a 15

PC, 103-04. Guelpa, Dieux, 49. 17 Ibid., 22. 18 Ibid., 96. 16

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“cosmocreator,” “a mythic animal,” a god or a demiurge, a “Christ-like figure”? Interpretations vary. He certainly embodies good. “He is the Alpha and Omega of the tales.”19 He is the centripetal figure around whom all the plots converge.20 The archetypal witch Jadis (MN) with her hypostases the Queen of Narnia (LWW), the old Hag (PC), or “the Lady of the Green Kirtle” (SC) echo the she-trolls, i.e. the ugly giantesses that people the forest. The White Witch acts as a foil to Aslan. The children first turn up in a forest where a queen reigns. According to Nordic legend, the she-troll gives life to many gigantic wolf-like sons. The White Witch commands several wolves including the ferocious and cruel Maugrim. He echoes the wolf Fenrir or the wolf Hati (also called “the heinous”) of Norse mythology. Nordic myths contain fauna living near the world of men. Narnia is also filled with beasts of all sorts. Some speak, others are dumb. Some play determining roles like the horses Bree and Hwin (HB), the mouse Reepicheep (VDT), or the winged horse Fledge (MN). Other animals are just part of the background like the animals that surround Aslan after he has created Narnia (LWW). From Nordic myths Lewis extracted for use in The Chronicles the crowd of supernatural creatures like dwarfs, elves, witches, giants, sylvan nymphs, and satyrs closely associated with major gods like Odin or Thor. For instance, Nordic dwarfs come from the blood and bones of giants, and like giants they are tellurian beings, but they “live inside the earth and in stones.”21 In Snorri’s Edda, although elves are difficult to define, they are akin to Ase-gods and are associated with dwarfs. In Prince Caspian, Trumpkin can be read as corresponding to a Nordic “bright elf.” He is inclined to good because he is faithful to the crownless prince whereas the black-bearded, dark-haired dwarf Nikabrik shares many points in common with Nordic “dark elves” who are “darker than pitch and correspond to demons and live under the earth.”22 Nikabrik is inclined to evil. He is suspicious and keeps discouraging the party as they get inside the tumulus. He ends up invoking the ghost of the White Witch and dies as he joins the

19

Sys, “Le Lion de Juda.” All quotations from Sys translated by Warzecha. “At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions at that time. Apart from that, I don’t know where the Lion came from or why He came, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him” (Lewis, “It All Began with a Picture,” Of Other Worlds, Essays and Stories, 42). 21 “Four dwarfs uphold the canopy of heaven. Their names correspond to the points of the compass: Austri, Vestri, Nordhri, and Sudhri” (Guelpa, Dieux, 22). 22 Ibid., 25. 20

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Hag and the Wer-Wolf who fight against Caspian, Edmund, the badger Trufflehunter, and Cornelius (PC, chapter 12). The giants also belong to one side or the other. In Nordic mythology giants, from whom the gods come, are “chthonian beings living in the mountains and the rocks.”23 By definition, they are “ugly, noisy and stupid. They have names that conjure up these qualities.”24 At the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the kind Rumblebuffin smashes down the gate of Cair Paravel, which has been disenchanted by Aslan. This nice giant enables the statues, which Aslan has resuscitated by his breath, to get out (chapter 18). In The Silver Chair Scrubb, Jill, and Puddleglum, as they walk in the wild and mountainous land of the North, come across lazy but quarrelsome giants who start stoning them. The children should have remembered the hostile giants as they were received at the court of the Queen of the House of Harfang. In her castle, the hospitable giants, in fact ogres, were preparing the Autumn Feast during which the children and Puddleglum were supposed to be served as delicacies to the royal couple (chapter 8). For aesthetic reasons, Lewis gives free rein to his imagination by inventing intermediate creatures like the wise Cornelius who is half-man and half-dwarf or the lovable Puddleglum, the “marshwiggle” who is unclassifiable: neither an animal nor a man but much more humane and generous than some humans. As narrative devices, metamorphosis and odyssey are interrelated. Metamorphoses give density to a journey: technically, they accelerate the rhythm of the journey and symbolically they disclose a concealed meaning or a moral or spiritual dimension. The odyssey, the voyage, or the journey is an integral part of mythic stories. It infuses vitality and dynamism into them. Probably one of the most beautiful and moving odysseys in Nordic mythology, because of its tragic dimension, is the Riding of Hermodhr. As Odin’s messenger, Hermodhr has been mandated to snatch Balder out of hell which is guarded by the goddess Hel. His riding fails because he has been confronted with the power of destiny. Indeed Balder’s death had been prophesied a long time ago. The journey pattern in The Chronicles, especially in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is shrouded with the same seriousness and sense of emergency found in the Riding of Hermodhr. The children have been entrusted with nothing less than the destiny of Narnia. The journey is par excellence the recurring narrative principle that energises the story by spurring the characters on. In all the tales the children are either brought unknowingly (MN), attracted (LWW), transported 23 24

Ibid., 105. Ibid., 20.

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(VDT), called (PC, LB), or even helped (SC) into Narnia, so as to be given special missions—namely, save Narnia, help Caspian (PC), Rilian (SC), or Tirian (LB), or take part in battles (LWW, PC). These missions imply travels and voyages which provide spiritual initiations for each child—for instance, by overcoming fear, becoming brave, redeeming oneself and so on. Metamorphoses fulfil a narrative purpose too. Let us take the examples of Fledge in The Magician’s Nephew and Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Before being named by Aslan, Fledge is a mere horse that pulls Frank’s cab. Later, as Narnia needs redeeming because it has been contaminated by evil, Digory is sent by Aslan to fetch an apple of life (without eating any) from the top of a mountain garden.25 So as to help Digory, Aslan makes the horse a talking beast and transforms him into a winged horse. Fledge is remotely reminiscent of Sleipnir, Odin’s eightlegged charger. In Lewis’s story the aim of the transformation is obvious: to make the plot progress and propel the action forward. In the case of Eustace Scrubb, the aim of metamorphosis is different. Eustace is the epitome of the selfish unpleasant little boy. On board the Dawn Treader with Lucy, Edmund, and the King’s crew, Eustace behaves selfishly. As the ship casts anchor near an island, he comes across treasure in a cave which he intends to keep for himself. He puts a bracelet on his arm and falls asleep. As he wakes up, he is changed into a dragon. His double transformation achieves two aims. It gives him a moral lesson and it enables the story to move on. Eustace is initially discouraged at being a dragon but then he is recognised by the others, and in his dragon state becomes useful by enabling the ship to be repaired by transporting tree-trunks. His becoming a human again is made possible through his being plunged into water (a hint at the rite of baptism) and through Aslan’s help (he tears the dragon scales off the boy’s skin). The technique of metamorphosis is to be found in all myths without exception. It is also found abundantly in fairy tales. First Odin himself as “the god of magic” very often changed forms. As his body was lying as if it was asleep or dead, he had become a bird or a beast, fish or snake and in the twinkling of an eye he would go to remote lands for his business or to fight against men.”26 Odin is “the elusive god.”27 Aslan, Narnia’s god, cannot be caught either in the proper sense of the term (“‘[He] is not like a tame Lion’” says Mrs Beaver28), but also in the figurative sense of the word. He undergoes a 25

Ibid., 133. Ibid., 37. 27 Ibid., 37. 28 Lewis, LWW, 166. 26

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metamorphosis (HB) and is even transfigured into a lamb (VDT, 187-8) because he is a numinous or Christ-like figure whose name is hidden.29 Some of Odin’s characteristics have been re-used by Lewis here and there in Narnia. A parallel between Odin and the White Witch could be drawn. Odin is not the god of war. His weapons are above all intellectual, and through them he causes others to fight.30 The White Witch is very manipulative too and forces others to fight for her, or at least to collaborate. The wolves, the dwarfs, or the Faun Tumnus are good examples (LWW, chapters 2, 4, and 6). “The warriors devoted to Odin distinguish themselves by their fury.”31 As warriors they are like “wild beasts” that howl, bite savagely, and are invulnerable. They are called “wolf skins” and are gifted with shamanic strength; they are impassive to “pain, fire and weapons.”32 They are invincible. The Wer-Wolf (a man transformed into a wolf) was a widespread belief in Europe in about the year 1000. According to Guelpa “this belief in the Wer-Wolf seems to correspond to the metamorphoses into animals coming from Odinic cults: the wild warriors, the Wild Hunt. The belief in the Wer-Wolf probably dates back to metamorphic cults.”33 In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Maugrim, the Witch’s wolf-like secret agent evokes this old tradition of the Wer-Wolf. Killed by Peter, his hypostasis comes back in the tumulus cave (PC, chapter 12). Evil (in its various forms) is what threatens the world of the ancient Scandinavian, and the world of Narnia. In Nordic mythology Loki, as “the instigator of Balder’s assassination,” epitomises “the Nordic devil” and he commits his crime by disguising himself as a woman. He flees to the mountains to escape the gods’ wrath. “In day time he is changed into a fish.”34 Loki is the principle of evil and the metamorphoses he initiates or the ones that come from him or from his sons represent manifestations of evil: cruelty, natural disasters, and chaos. Evil is embodied by different “characters” throughout the Narnian tales (Queen Jadis in MN, The Witch in LWW, Miraz or the old Hag in PC, the Lady of the Green Kirtle in SC, Tash in LB). The same functioning principle of evil as in Nordic 29

As the children are worried about not meeting him again in their world, Aslan reassures them by telling them: “‘But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me a little here, you may know me better there’” (VDT, 188). 30 “[S]cience, slyness, artefact, magic” are his characteristics (Guelpa, Dieux, 35). 31 Ibid., 35. 32 Idem. 33 Ibid., 36. 34 Ibid., 63.

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mythology reigns over Narnia into which an extraneous evil has been introduced. Queen Jadis has stolen and eaten the Apple of Life (MN, 14353) and has contaminated Aslan’s newly created world. Thenceforth, evil will assault Narnia in succeeding waves. Each time it is countered by different protagonists, but eventually it succeeds in destroying Narnia. Nonetheless, as in St. John’s apocalypse, “new heavens and a new earth” replace the old fallen world.35 The old Narnia gives life to a new Narnia. Beyond the mere thematic correspondences or functional similarities extracted from Nordic mythology, Lewis’s tales point to a larger pattern. Lewis drew his inspiration from Nordic organisational principles which he included in his stories. An underlying teleology rules over Narnia. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the over-arching tale, it is reinforced by the initial prophetic element, which triggers off the redemption of Narnia.36 This underlying finality in the nature of things could be interpreted through three leitmotivs: destiny, order versus disorder, and eschatology. What characterises Eddas and Nordic sagas is the crucial role played by destiny. Nothing and nobody, not even the gods (Odin above all) can escape destiny. Guelpa notes that destiny has many synonyms in Old Norse like lög meaning rules fixed beforehand or orlög for original laws. Lewis, who had some knowledge of Old Norse, has the White Witch say that Edmund the traitor must be killed in accordance with that law established since “the dawn of time” by the “Emperor-beyond-the-sea.” That law was written by his sceptre on the Stone Table. Nobody can elude it, not even all-mighty Aslan (LWW, chapter 13). Only a “deeper magic” dating back from “before the dawn of time” can cancel the first one and spare the culprit (LWW, 148). Another idea related to destiny is sacrifice. Animal and human sacrifices were part of Nordic rites. For the ancient Scandinavian who lived in a completely sacred world, sacrifices and other rites were meaningful responses to destiny. The White Witch’s demand for Edmund’s blood and his replacement by Aslan could have this signification too, and might therefore be seen as simply a response to destiny. The Christian interpretation, which is not necessarily the most obvious to readers, could be superimposed on the Norse concept of destiny without really contradicting it. Aslan’s sacrifice allows several interpretations. First, it could be read as reminiscent of the sacrifices in all 35

Revelation 21: 1. Mr Beaver sings that old nursery rhyme inscribed in Narnia’s collective subconscious: “‘When Adam’s flesh and Adam’s bone / Sits at Cair Paravel in throne, / The evil time will be over and done’” (LWW, 76). 36

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myths, including Nordic mythology. There has been an offence (or fault) which requires atonement either directly (the culprit Edmund is killed) or by “an interposed sacrifice” through Aslan. This could be called the substitutive or vicariant dimension of sacrifice. Second, it might be deciphered as having a Christian meaning, with Aslan representing Christ. Third, the sacrifice could be seen as simply a means for the plot to go on. The old Nordic world order, which makes peace, prosperity, and abundance possible, cannot be separated from the king who is a sacred figure. If the king fails to ensure peace and order he is sacrificed.37 But this order is precarious and “constantly threatened by creatures coming from the original chaos.”38 One finds the same vision of the world in the Lewisian tales. In the matrix story, the world created by Aslan (MN) has been disrupted by the introduction of foreign chaos (symbolised by Queen Jadis). To restore order, Aslan is sacrificed, and the four Pevensie children become kings and queens of Narnia, thus warranting the return of law, order, and peace. The other tales relate other chaotic disruptions and misadventures but each time law and order triumph: the lawful kings Caspian (PC) and his son Rilian (SC) are restored. Nordic mythology contains eschatology described in Snorri Sturluson’s Poetic Edda as “ragnarökr” (meaning “the twilight of powers” or “the twilight of gods”).39 This end of the world, also called “the destiny of powers” or “the accomplishment of the destiny of powers”40 can be divided into five major events, according to Guelpa: 1) the fimbulvetr or “formidable winter” will arrive and last for three years without intermediary summer; 2) the sky will get dark and the sky and the earth will be shaken; 3) the wolf Fenrir will fly into a rage; 4) The serpent Midhgardhr (the Nordic version of the Bible’s Leviathan) will make the earth surge out of the sea; and 5) There will be a battle of the end of times and a cosmic fire. “However this cataclysm is followed by paradise and death is followed by resurrection: the earth will appear suddenly out of the sea and it will be beautiful and green, the fields will be fruitful without having been sown.”41

37

Guelpa, Dieux, 105. Ibid., 105. 39 Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241): Medieval Icelandic writer. He was the main mythographer and historiographer. He announced the end of the world in his Gylfaginning (50-52). It was also predicted in Völuspà, the cosmogonic and eschatological poem, part of the Poetic Edda (44-46). 40 Guelpa, Dieux, 96. 41 Ibid., 96. 38

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This eschatology was revisited in a very personal way by Lewis in his “Always winter never Christmas” (LWW), the Sea Serpent (VDT, chap. 8), and all the battles announcing the last one. He integrated a personally revised Christian eschatology interwoven in the plots. Basically, there are similarities in both eschatologies because the Nordic one was in itself Christianised. We must bear in mind that the two medieval Norse mythographers Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) and Saxo Grammaticus (1150-1220) were Christians. In the tales of Narnia both eschatologies are interlocked, for in Lewis’s thought, all myths are intrinsically linked to one another. “Everything is indebted to everything else, sacrificed to everything else, dependent on everything else.”42 In accordance with the Lewisian principles of incarnation and transposition all myths are essentially “copies”—lesser and yet glorious—of the central universal archetype, namely the redemptive incarnation of Christ. “We catch sight of a new key principle—the power of the Higher, just in so far as it is truly Higher, to come down, the power of the greater to include the less.”43 So Nordic mythology for Lewis is one of the “transpositions of the Divine theme into a minor key.”44 Eventually all myths echo each other in symphonic polyphonies and converge in the “Great Dance” or the “Great Game”45 in which humankind, now reconciled with its Source, as well as all redeemed and glorified creation participate. Occurrences of celebrations and feasts can be found at the end of most stories: the coronation of Frank and Helen (MN, 160-1), the coronation of the four Pevensie children (LWW, 165), the grand feast (HB, 173), the dance involving Bacchus, Silenus, and the Maenads (PC, 179-80). However, the “Great Game” at the end of The Last Battle (1956) is of a different kind. The old Narnia has been recapitulated and transfigured in a deeper dimension, “further up and further in” (165), with all the Narnian heroes assembled again. The whole world, encapsulated in a garden “with its own rivers and woods and sea and mountains” (169), is now glorified by the very presence of Aslan. He is like the lover in the Song of Songs compared to “a young stag on the rugged hills” “leaping across the mountains, bounding over the hills” in order to meet his beloved.46 It is as if the new Narnia were enthralled by the sight of her Master, Lover, and Creator appearing again for good.

42

Lewis, Miracles, 124. Ibid., 116. 44 Ibid., 118. 45 Lewis, Perelandra, 340. 46 Song of Songs 2: 8, 17. 43

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The light ahead was growing stronger. Lucy saw that a great series of many coloured cliffs led up in front of them like a giant’s staircase. And then she forgot everything else, because Aslan himself was coming, leaping down from cliff to cliff like a living cataract of power and beauty. (171)

As we can see, The Chronicles are not only children’s stories. Following the major wardrobe metaphor—both a familiar piece of furniture and a magic object—the Narnian stories are filled with, and disclose, treasures hidden in the collective psyche. Nordic legends, in the same way as Warren’s “toy garden,” function as the vehicle of a mighty and transient “something else” which is, “a sensation of desire; but a desire for what?”47 The storyteller’s art consists in harmoniously putting together all these cultural and literary elements. Nevertheless, one does not necessarily need to know all about the sources of inspiration to enjoy the stories. For Lewis, who had been fascinated all his life by children’s stories, writing his own was an old dream and a pleasure. One must bear in mind that “we murder to dissect”48 and that the Narnian Chronicles are above all stories to be enjoyed for themselves. But what about their apologetic dimension? It cannot be erased altogether although Lewis always denied having written a sort of “picture catechism.” The tales, published in the early 1950s, were the work of a Christian apologist wellknown worldwide, famous for Mere Christianity (1952) and The Screwtape Letters (1959) and accustomed to demonstratio evangelica. Yet in 1948, his public debate with philosopher and believer Elizabeth Anscombe about the validity of naturalism had a devastating effect on Lewis as Christian apologist. “His argument for the existence of God had been demolished.”49 From that time, he stopped writing apologetic works as such and resolutely turned to fiction and books for edification. It is worth noting that The Chronicles, which are still bestsellers, were written by a childless, middle-aged bachelor.50 All in all it is through imagination, prepared since childhood and then “baptised,” and thanks to mythopoeia that Lewis returned to Christian faith. Therefore, it is not surprising that he chose this very mode of expression he excelled in. To intellectual and 47

Lewis, Surprised By Joy, 11. William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” line 28. 49 Wilson, C. S. Lewis, 213. 50 According to various web sites from 85 to 100 million copies of The Chronicles in forty-one languages have been sold so far. See the official web site “Into The Wardrobe: A C. S. Lewis web site” 27 March 2008. 48

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aggressive demonstratio evangelica, he preferred a more indirect but efficient preparatio evangelica.

Works Cited Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their Friends. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979. Dillmann François-Xavier, L’Edda. Récits de mythologie nordique par Snorri Sturluson. Paris: Gallimard, 1991 (French Translation). Guelpa, Patrick. Dieux et Mythes Nordiques. Lille: Septentrion Presses Universitaires, 1998. Lewis, C. S. The Horse and His Boy. 1954. London: Harper Collins, 1980. —. “Is Theology Poetry?” [The Socratic Digest, 1944] in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1976. 116-40. —. “It All Began with a Picture.” [Radio Times, Junior Radio Times, vol. CXLVIII, 15 July 1960] in Of Other Worlds, Essays and Stories. San Diego, New York, London: A Harvest Book, 2002. 42. —. The Last Battle. 1956. London: Harper Collins, 1980. —. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. 1950. London: Harper Collins, 1980. —. The Magician’s Nephew. 1955. London: Harper Collins, 1980. —. Miracles. London: HarperCollins, 1947. —. “Myth Became Fact.” [World Dominion, XXII, Sept.–Oct. 1944] in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2000, 63-7. —. Perelandra. 1938. The Cosmic Trilogy. London: Pan Books, 1989. —. Prince Caspian. 1951. London: Harper Collins, 1980. —. The Silver Chair. 1953. London: Harper Collins, 1980. —. Surprised by Joy, the Shape of My Early Life. 1955. London: Fount, Harper Collins, 1998. —. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. 1952. London: Harper Collins, 1980. Sys, Jacques. “Le Lion de Juda: Figures christiques dans The Chronicles of Narnia de C. S. Lewis” Graphè Website. 28 November 2007. . Wilson A. N. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Collins, 1990. Wordsworth, William. “The Tables Turned” In The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. London: Macmillan, 1888.

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Wordsworth’s poems can be read online from Bartleby.com. 28 November 2007.

CREATING NATIONAL MYTHOLOGY AND ITS REFLECTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE1 MARI NIITRA

This essay deals with national mythology and its role in forming a nation’s identity. Estonian myths were constructed with the clear purpose of creating a foundation for a “civilized nation,” and as this discussion outlines, in the nineteenth century Estonian intellectuals Friedrich Robert Faehlmann and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald created canonical literary myths which still serve as ideological models for contemporary literature. By analysing Reet Made’s 2005 children’s novel Salaroheline hiis (Secret Green Grove), this essay shows how the nineteenth-century romantic conception of the nation is deeply rooted in shared consciousness. Estonia is a small country in Eastern Europe surrounded by more powerful neighbours. Therefore the history of Estonia consists mainly of the reign of various oppressors (Germans, Russians, Swedes, Poles etc.). Through the centuries, the population of Estonia has consisted of two ethnic groups: Estonian peasants and a largely German nobility. It is important to note that, in the case of Estonia, the borders between ethnic groups and social classes coincided. The nineteenth century was the period when a so-called “cultural awakening” started among many European nations. In Central and Eastern Europe the ideology of nationhood developed under the influence of the ideas of the French Revolution, German classical philosophy, and romanticism. The ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau formed the philosophical background for the emerging conceptions of nationhood.2 In creating a national identity, some nations turned to their more or less glorious past or, where they did not 1

Completion of this article was funded by ETF grant project no 6484 Nimetamine ja anonüümsus kultuuris. 2 Laar, Äratajad, 65.

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have one, constructed it from more arbitrary components. Memories of a nation’s heroic past are of fundamental importance to national ideology. Accordingly, every nation creates its own view of the past in a way which best corresponds to its interests.3 Historian Ea Jansen writes that although the concept of nation is a rather new phenomenon, the national ideology of any nation always attributes great importance to the images of the nation’s past: the older the better.4 The legitimacy of the nation rests upon its past. National ideology is never a mere reconstruction of a historical past; it is, rather, a conscious process of reworking or perhaps even an artificial construction. Its purpose is to emphasize the vigours and virtues of a nation. If a nation does not have a glorious history (at least in documentary form), it has to construct its heroic figures and events. For the nationalities which did not have a statehood of their own (e.g. Estonians, Finns, Slovaks, and Slovenes), the main means of doing this was to turn to their ethnic traditions and myths. In a word, mythology or some reconstruction of mythological elements could be substituted for history. We can even say that the historicity of heroes and golden ages is actually of secondary importance. According to Anthony D. Smith, what matters about heroes and myths, “is their ability to evoke a lost splendour and virtue and to act as stimuli and models for a national self-renewal today.”5 The initiative for national awakening in Estonia first came at the beginning of the nineteenth century from a group of local German Estophiles, who noticed the unique folklore of Estonian peasants and found it worth preserving and studying. They were also the first to advocate the possible renaissance of the Estonians as a nation.6 It is important to note that during that period all university education and in fact all written culture was conducted in German without exception, so the Estonians who managed to advance economically and acquire a university education inevitably became Germanized. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when social and economic emancipation arose among Estonian peasants and literacy became a norm, it seemed doubtful whether Estonians could manage to survive as a separate ethnos and develop their own literary culture. It seemed more likely that they would merge with the Germans, whose language and

3

Jansen, “Muinaseesti Panteon,” 802. Jansen, “Muinaseesti Panteon,” 802. 5 Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 200. 6 Jansen, “Muinaseesti Panteon,” 802; Jansen, “Rahvuseks saamise raske tee,” 1174-77. 4

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culture officially dominated in the Baltic area.7 The first intellectuals of Estonian origin had a mixed background of oral peasant culture and official German-language based education. The most outstanding among them were two authors: Friedrich Robert Faehlmann (1798-1850) and Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803-82). Both came from the families of the officials working for local German landlords, were freed from serfdom, and had access to education in Tartu University.8 They both made efforts to create Estonian literary culture. Both men understood the importance of preserving Estonian folkloric heritage, and, by using folkloric material, tried to create canonical masterpieces, which would prove the peasant culture’s right to stand among other European nations as an equal member. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries scientific interest in folklore was widespread across Europe, and this certainly gave encouraging impulses to Estonian intellectuals.9 Both German Estophiles and intellectuals of Estonian origin believed in the glorious past of the Estonian people and tried to investigate and reconstruct it in the spirit of romanticism. Their aim was to prove to the educated world that Estonians had the right to exist as a separate nation and that their culture belonged in human cultural heritage.10 Finding evidence of the glory of the Estonian past had a crucial impact on ways of describing this past in the literary texts of the period. Faehlmann, for example, contrasted the more recent gloomy centuries of serfdom with the ancient liberty of Estonians, which he praised romantically.11 He described the period before the crusaders’ invasion in the thirteenth century as the golden age of ancient freedom, depicting it as a strongly mythologized ideal.12 Because there were extremely few historical documents about pre-Christian Estonia, it was possible to reconstruct the period at one’s discretion, preferably idealistically. Faehlmann attempted to reconstruct Estonian national mythology. He wrote a collection of tales called Müütilised muistendid (Mythical Tales, published originally in German during 1840-52; three of them were also published in Finnish in 1847) which proceeded from a belief that ancient Estonians must have had a highly developed spiritual life and

7

Jansen, Vaateid eesti rahvusluse sünniaegadesse, 377. Jansen, “Rahvuseks saamise,” 1162-63. 9 Annist, F. R. Kreutzwaldi muinasjuttude algupära ja kunstiline laad, 31. 10 Jansen, “Rahvuseks saamise raske tee,” 1175. 11 Laar, Äratajad, 122. 12 Krull, Loomise mõnu ja kiri, 4. 8

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consequently a developed religion which must be reconstructible.13 In his tales, Faehlmann created something that resembles a Greek pantheon in which the demiurge Vanaisa (Grandfather) has created the universe, including divine heroes and human beings. According to these mythical tales, the centre of the universe is Toomemägi, a mountain in the Estonian city of Tartu, where a sacred grove was situated. The demiurge lives on the mountain along with smaller divinities and semi-divine heroes. Faehlmann tried to concretize mythology by using very specific toponyms and descriptions.14 Faehlmann writes: For the proof of this splendour and magnificence we have left only the ancient tales and songs of uneducated people. But we still should not abandon these evidence[s], because where history does not reach with its written letters, there the tale and song would be justified.15

Largely due to Faehlmann’s influence, the Estonian pre-Christian period became mythologized in the nineteenth century, being described by many authors as an era of enormous wealth, democracy, and justice. Estonian national consciousness in the nineteenth century valued the idea of homeland, the mother tongue, ancient folk traditions, the historical past (especially the ancient “golden age” and fight for freedom) and inspired romantic literature. It had an enormous impact on the humanities as well, for example encouraging the science of history and folklore studies.16 Romantic ideas about the nation, which spread throughout the nineteenth century, gave an unequivocally negative assessment of the Christianisation of Estonians and described the period from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century as a 700-year long “night of slavery.” Because works of fiction preceded professional history by a few decades, even historians used many rhetorical tropes taken from the period’s belletristic writing in their texts (the ancient era of democracy and justice, the night of slavery for example), which then became regarded as historical truths.17 One widespread precondition of becoming a Kulturnazion, was showing that Estonians must necessarily have had something comparable to Western culture in the past. Kreutzwald writes: 13

Jansen, “Muinaseesti Panteon,” 808. Annus et al., Eesti kirjanduslugu, 61. 15 Faehlmann, Müütilised muistendid, 17. All translations in the essay are by Mari Niitra. 16 Jansen, Vaateid, 382. 17 Kala, “Eesti XIII-XVI sajandini,” 57. 14

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Mari Niitra Yet we can admit an inevitable truth that people with such an artistically designed language, such a deeply sensitive poetry, sufficiently proved by the traces reaching to our days, must at one time have had a monumental and logically structured religion. The one who has been oppressed for centuries is not able to give us a proper idea about the intellectual capabilities of his ancestors.18

One aim of the early Estonian intellectuals was to give the nation its own national epic, which they compiled from oral tales. Composition of this epic, Kalevipoeg (Kalev’s Son), was initiated by Faehlmann in 1839 and the work was completed by his friend and adherent Kreutzwald during 1857-61. Its literary influences included the Finnish national epic Kalevala, classical Greek epics, and the works of Virgil, Christfried Ganander and others.19 Kalevipoeg covers a wide range of topics in Estonian history: the formation of the Estonian nation, the praise of hard work, the fight against feudalism and a promise for future freedom, and the return of a “golden age.”20 Kreutzwald compiled another important text in the history of Estonian literature: the collection of Estonian fairy tales Eesti rahva ennemuistsed jutud, which was published in 1866. It is significant that the full title of this work is: Ancient Tales of the Estonian People. Gathered from People and Written Down by Fr. R. Kreutzwald. As we can see, he stresses his role as a mediator for uneducated people rather than as the independent author of a literary text. Kreutzwald, probably deliberately, did not take into account the scientific tradition of his time which demanded more or less precise recordings of folklore texts. Kreutzwald instead seems to have considered himself a member of the Estonian people to such an extent that he would have the right to add improvements to folklore recordings as a “spokesman” of the people.21 The purpose of the national epic and the fairy-tale collection was ambitious. As Kreutzwald writes in a letter to a colleague in 1860: “If some of these ancient tales will be published and Kalevipoeg will be printed as a popular edition, then we can already say something about the beginning of Estonian literature.”22 Kreutzwald’s ambition was to establish Estonian national literature and, as intended, the epic and his often republished fairy tales became the cornerstone of Estonian literature 18

Quoted in Masing, Eesti usund, 6. Annus et al., Eesti kirjanduslugu, 68. 20 Ibid., 68-69. 21 Annist, F. R. Kreutzwaldi muinasjuttude, 90. 22 Quoted in Annist, F. R. Kreutzwaldi muinasjuttude, 354. 19

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and have continued to inspire many artists and writers. The impact of Kalevipoeg and Kreutzwald’s fairy tales on the emerging Estonian national culture was enormous. The epic instantly became a symbol of ancient glory. “Kalevipoeg should have a place in every Estonian’s home along with the Holy Bible,” wrote C. R. Jakobson, another intellectual and author of many school textbooks in 1867.23 Some literary motifs in these texts were initially perceived as a true heroic history of the country,24 and they played a crucial role in bringing national identity into local peasants’ awareness. The relationship between Estonian folklore and some of the period’s literary examples is interesting. Faehlmann and Kreutzwald both wanted to demonstrate the splendour of Estonian culture, but they did it mainly via literary models taken from classical mythology and Western European literature. So, for example, Faehlmann created a pantheon of Estonian gods and claimed that Estonians had a monotheistic religion in order to show that the peasants, though poor, had a very sophisticated spiritual culture. Moreover, Faehlmann published his mythical tales in German as he was interested in changing the expectations of German readers, who saw Estonians as mere barbaric savages during that period. Kreutzwald proceeded from the literary traditions of his own period in creating his fairy tales. One clear influence was the fairy-tale collections of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, who also reworked traditional material and presented it as authentic, while trying to show the rich heritage of German peasants.25 In his fairy tales, Kreutzwald expanded short oral tales, elaborated the style artistically, and added some motifs from European romantic literature and Western folklore collections. The process of forming national identity thus took place via the cultural models of nations perceived to be more powerful than Estonia, which still had an orality-based culture. Such a wide use of literary examples was related to the attempts to create Estonian literary culture. It did not matter how rich and unique the peasants’ oral heritage actually was, because being a nation inevitably presupposes the existence of a written culture. It is no wonder that these texts are the products of somehow contradictory endeavours: a wish to preserve folklore and an ambition to establish a national literature which would correspond to Western European traditions and literary standards. In order to show that Estonian people, although poor peasants, were able to produce folklore texts of high artistic value, these authors reworked 23

Quoted in Jansen, “Eestlaste rahvuslik ärkamisaeg,” 96. Valk, “‘Kalevipoeg’ kui ajaloonägemus ja ajalookäsitlus,” 43. 25 Dundes, Kes on rahvas? Valik esseid folkloristikast, 92-93. 24

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folkloric material and borrowed and mixed various themes, motifs and characters from different sources including classical mythology, German folklore, and romantic literature. At the same time, some genuine folkloric materials were set aside as worthless. The already vanishing oral culture of Estonia in the nineteenth century was widely perceived to be non-culture while everything defined as culture came from Western Europe. In a broader theoretical context this process can be described by Juri Lotman’s model of culture. According to Lotman, every culture structures itself in opposition to something other or different. The most common way of structuring culture as one’s “own” is to contrast it with some “other” which is perceived to be a non-cultural, alien, and barbaric sphere.26 In the case of nineteenth-century Estonia, the situation is in some senses reversed. Because of the so-called national inferiority complex, the peculiarities of Estonian peasant culture were seen as signs of barbarianism and a lack of development, whereas all the distinctive features of a “culture” were taken directly from Western Europe. Here the conflict between classical western education and oral peasant culture manifests itself clearly. The first Estonian intellectuals felt the need to prove to the local German elite their nation’s right to be through analogies to German culture. This fact determined the nature of the literary works of the nineteenth century, which can be characterized as a mixture of authentic folkloric motifs “improved” stylistically by Western Europe’s literary tradition. Of course, Faehlmann and Kreutzwald were not mere epigones in any sense, but they used the influences of foreign literary sources with the clear purpose of increasing the artistic value of the peasants’ tales. This process is certainly not unique for Estonia; similar tendencies are observable in small nations all over Europe as part of a general nationforming process in the nineteenth century.27 Becoming a nation always requires a symbolic framework which is formed by intellectuals, mostly via canonical works which describe a mythology of the past. As Smith writes, it is intellectuals, especially educators, who “propose the category of the nation in the first place and endow it with symbolic significance. It is their imagination and understanding that gives the nation its contours and much of its emotional content.”28 In Estonia, paradoxically, the intellectuals stressed national pride using elements taken from the culture of the hated German oppressors. 26

See examples in Lotman, Kultuurisemiootika, 256-257; Ivanov et al., Kultuurisemiootika teesid, 62. 27 Dundes, Kes on rahvas?, 90; Kruks, “LƗþplƝsis ja Kalevipoeg,” 142-43. 28 Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 91-92.

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As already mentioned, Kreutzwald’s works have been regularly republished and constitute an important part of the canon of Estonian literature. These texts have been highly influential and have constantly played a great part in shaping Estonian national identity. Moreover, soon after their appearance, the tales began more widely to circulate in oral tradition.29 Although scholars had questioned the folkloric authenticity of these works soon after they were published, they are still masterpieces in popular imagination which reflect the genuine heritage of Estonian folklore and mythology. School textbooks at various times have also presented these works as examples of Estonian folklore, although in forms artistically reworked by Kreutzwald and Faehlmann. Although these works were mostly the authors’ original literary creation, they were interpreted as genuine folklore due to ideological demands. These literary works also had a remarkable role in different political situations in the twentieth century. During the short period in which Estonia was an independent state (1918-40), these works served the purpose of supporting national ideology. World War II was followed by Soviet occupation, a period when Estonians needed some alternative identity to their official identity as “Soviet people.” These texts were an important means for preserving the identity of Estonian nationhood and culture. With the collapse of the Soviet Regime in 1991, a new necessity for defining Estonian national identity arose. These texts from the nineteenth century were actualized once again in this process. Faehlmann and Kreutzwald were, therefore, not only the founders of Estonian literature as such, but they also created a model which enabled Estonians to give meaning to their identity in very different political conditions and in difficult historical situations. Consequently, these works have become perceived in the popular consciousness as genuine folkloric material. A remarkable example which supports this claim is Reet Made’s 2005 fantasy novel for children Salaroheline hiis (Secret Green Grove). A story about contemporary children who have moved to the country where they meet fairyland creatures and learn about old wisdom, the novel uses many motifs which can be traced back to Faehlmann and Kreutzwald’s works. The nineteenth-century texts serve as models and intertexts for creating the mythological fantasy-world in the novel. Themes and characters are presented as historically authentic in relation to the Estonian national past. It also seems that these elements form the sacral dimension of the text. There are two different worlds present in the novel: the everyday human world and the sphere of fairies, nature spirits, and ghosts. The latter 29

Järv, “Kas nimi rikub muinasjutu?” 95.

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world reveals itself only in the countryside, while the modern lifestyle is presented as urban. Moving from the city to the country simultaneously depicts moving closer to a nation’s past and becoming connected with its heritage, turning back to its “roots.” In some senses, acquaintance with the fairy world is presented as learning something about one’s national identity and folkloric traditions. The fact of moving to the country is in itself significantly connected with national identity and history: Now they have their own country house!...Their own farmstead! As it has traditionally been in Estonia: several buildings, a big yard, a garden with apple trees and berry bushes. Also a grove and a juniper meadow, which soon would be full of flowers, as father told them.30

The grove, or the sacred forest, is central to the text’s spatial universe, and it turns out to be an ancient place of worship. There is indeed proof that Estonians have since ancient times worshipped sacred trees and forests, but in the nineteenth century, the groves became a manifest symbol of Estonian ancient freedom and power.31 This national dimension is continually present in the pages of the novel. The family’s country house is situated near the grove, and all the movements from the primary world into the secondary fantasy world take place in the grove. As it turns out in the novel, this particular grove is the most sacred area in the whole of Estonia, because this is the residence of the Mother of the Forest. Here trees, especially oaks, transmit the power of the nature god to humans. The world of fairies is depicted as being more sacred than that of humans. They are supernatural beings who can either be benevolent or malicious. At the top of the fairy world hierarchy is the euphemistically named Suur (the Great), a kind of a demiurge, the master of fairies and (probably) the creator of the whole world. The demiurge usually does not reveal himself in visible form, but his presence is manifested through thunder and lightning. He is probably a sky god, but can also inhabit the oak-trees. It is important to note that there are some connections here with a thunder-god who, according to some medieval chronicles, the preChristian Estonians worshipped.32 The demiurge reveals himself only once in human form, being then described as a tall elderly man with long wavy hair. His description is probably influenced by the figure of the main god, the so-called Grandfather in Faehlmann’s mythological stories. 30

Made, Salaroheline hiis, 33. All translations from the novel are by Mari Niitra. Remmel, Hiie ase, 8. 32 Valk, “Inimene ja teispoolsus,” 494. 31

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Made has even constructed a ritual of gaining spiritual power through leaning on a tree trunk: Reio left the pram under the oak-tree, leaning it next to the tree-trunk. He retreated a bit and bowed deeply until his hands touched the ground. In this manner, hunched up, touching the spires and withered flowers, he started to circle around the oak. Little by little, the circles decreased. The boy approached the tree-trunk until his greenish-yellowish hair touched the tree’s rough bark. Now he slowly stood up, his hands sliding on the bark. Gently and carefully fingering the rough surface, Reio put his arms around the trunk. The tree-giant was in the boy’s hugging grasp. ‘The Great!’ whispered Reio. ‘Great, great, great...’ the forest seemed to whisper along. ‘I am here, the Great! Come, listen to me and speak to me!’33

This magical or primeval power supplies people with energy and enables humans to see fairies who are otherwise invisible. The forest fairies hold a very important place in the novel. Their leader is Murueit (the Mother of the Forest), whose numerous daughters inhabit nature. Their original background can be found in ancient beliefs about personified nature-spirits, but the novel depicts their world in a very romantic way. The fairies are described as extremely beautiful young women who float around silently, seed the flowers, and take care of nature. The main function of the fairies in Estonian folk beliefs is indeed to protect some aspects of the natural world (trees, animals, fish etc.) and their attitude to people depends mainly on people’s personal intentions.34 The description of the Mother of the Forest is again directly derived from the works of Kreutzwald, especially from the tale “Kuuvalgel vihtlejad neitsid” (“Maidens Whisking in the Moonlight”35). Kreutzwald’s tale was in turn influenced by German romantic writers such as Ludwig Tieck.36 As one character says, ‘Fairies are everywhere: in the forest and in the swamp, in the thicket and in the clearings. If you think you are living in Tammiku only with your 33

Made, Salaroheline hiis, 124. Valk, “Inimene ja teispoolsus,” 496. 35 Whisking is a specific term referring to a procedure undertaken while washing in a sauna. In a sauna (where it is very hot) people beat themselves gently with dried birch branches before washing. In ancient times whisking was also connected with some beliefs and rituals. In Estonia sauna and whisking are very common. 36 Annist, F. R. Kreutzwaldi muinasjuttude, 109. 34

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Mari Niitra brother, sisters, mother, father and grandmother, you are seriously mistaken. Farm fairies also live there. As soon as the house and other buildings are ready, the fairies appear. Some operate inside the house, some outside. Everyone has his or her own life and own doings.’37

In this novel, the fairies also perform the very important function of taking care of the ancient graves. This fact draws a direct connection between the folkloric fairy-world and the Estonian people’s historical past. Thus the two main aspects of national identity, myths and history of the country, are united. The feast of Saint John’s day, the most important event in the fairyworld is depicted as a mixture of a royal gala and a traditional Estonian song festival, the roots of which also go back to the nineteenth century. The celebration of Saint John’s day, the summer solstice, is an extremely old custom. It is in fact still the most popular feast in contemporary Estonia, and is a time when people gather around ritual fires and follow ancient traditions. The tradition of song festivals as a very powerful symbol of national solidarity and unity was initiated during the period of the rise of national consciousness. Choir-singing became very popular and choirs were founded in almost every school in the country in the nineteenth century.38 The first choir-singing festival was organized in 1869 in Tartu, where participants gathered from all over Estonia. In Made’s novel all fairies, animals, and insects assemble at the feast to celebrate the beginning of the summer season. Nobody is allowed to hurt other beings that night, but humans who come to the feast without permission are punished. The ceremony is described as having both extreme festivity and solemnity. Many of its motifs are related to the ceremonies of the song festival, for example lighting the festive fire and performing special dances. The author herself introduces a clear parallel: “Sounds coming from the lake shore drew attention. It seemed as if someone was blowing trumpets. Big trumpets made of birch bark. Marit recalled that similar trumpet-sounds opened the national dance festival last year.”39 It is a consciously used parallel for the reader, because all Estonians are familiar with the traditional folkloric song and dance festivals and many schoolchildren have taken part in these, as has Marit, the protagonist of the novel. The appearance of the Mother of the Forest is depicted as the entrance 37

Made, Salaroheline, 219. Jansen, “Eestlaste rahvuslik ärkamisaeg,” 98. 39 Ibid., 220. 38

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of a monarch: Suddenly everything fell silent. It was a deathly silence. An elderly lady came down the hillside....The lady carried a huge bouquet of flowers, braided garlands spreading to every direction. The garlands were carried by girls....Having reached the lake, the Mother of the Forest lifted the bouquet above her head. The girls repeated her movement with their garlands. A melodic sound of the little bells came from the choir of her daughters. The sound of the bells increased, increased, increased.40

The Great also honours the feast with his presence. When he arrives, animals fall to their knees and the fairies all bow in order to express deep respect. Saint John’s day as the shortest and lightest night is connected again with a myth created by Faehlmann: the story of Dusk and Dawn. Personified as a maiden and a young man, Dusk and Dawn happen to meet during the shortest night of the summer and fall in love. A fairy boy, Reio, retells the story to Marit, explaining that in a moment Dawn will kiss his lover Dusk and a new day will be born from the same place where the last one ended.41 A boy of half-human half-fairy origin, born from a romance between a forest fairy and a human artist, Reio is a mediator between the two worlds. Reio’s function is to introduce the urbanized children to old wisdom and the laws of nature. For example he teaches Marit how to measure time using sunlight, how to recognize animal traces and useful herbs. The opposition of contemporary urban world and ancient, traditional life manifests itself again through the two protagonists. Marit, the human girl, represents the modern lifestyle, while Reio, the semi-human boy, symbolizes the power of oral traditional culture which is closely connected with fairyland. The main adventure in the novel involves a hidden treasure which lies in the ancient graves. Again, the fantastic elements are related to a real historical past. Initially, an older gentleman, the grandmother’s friend, finds a sacrificial stone. He explains the importance of the stone to the children: “‘It is a memorial of ancient times. It has been an important and a sacred place for the people of past times.’”42 The children learn from the local sorcerer that there are also some ancient graves and a hidden treasure buried near the sacrificial stone. Stories of hidden treasure are extremely 40

Ibid., 222-23. Ibid., 230. 42 Ibid., 169. 41

Mari Niitra

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widespread in Estonian folklore, and it is widely believed that treasure is guarded by spirits. Kreutzwald also used this motif in some of his tales. In Made’s text, these guardians are depicted as the most evil underground spirits, who are not tolerated by other fairies. In order to dig out the treasure, the children must wait for the full moon, when underground spirits leave the graves and assemble to perform some gloomy rite. The author has constructed a ritual of gaining lunar energy on the crossroads for the underground ghosts. Finally the underground spirits ceased to emerge from the ground. The long-handed ones gathered exactly at the crossroads and started to bubble like a huge boiling pot. Having bubbled a bit, the underground spirits formed a row, put their arms on one another’s shoulders and formed a circle. The circle started to whirl slowly at first, then gradually speeding up.43

The children succeed in finding the treasure which consists mainly of ancient coins. As digging the ancient grave is a crime according to the laws of fairyland as well as human laws, it is followed by a fairy-trial of the half-fairy Reio. The motif of the fairy-trial can be found also in a tale from Kreutzwald’s collection: “Kaksteistkümmend Tütart” (“Twelve Daughters”). The boy is forgiven, because Marit defends him in front of the fairy court. Finally he asks for permission to become fully human and his wish is granted by the Great. The trouble with the treasure-pot in the human world is resolved more peacefully. The children turn to their parents who suggest donating the treasure to the museum. It turns out that the grave where the treasure lied belongs to an ancient chief. Reio’s fairy mother makes a solemn statement in the court about the graves. The reader learns that the houses of ancient ancestors were situated just there: Why they chose this stony and infertile soil for living, we cannot ask them anymore. But ancient people founded their villages right here. Here they lived, worked, hunted for food and clothes and cultivated the soil. Here, under these piles of limestone, they fell to their deathly sleep.44

As we can see, the children actually collaborate in discovering some historical monuments of ancient Estonia. The fairy-world and humans are reconciled, and the half-human boy starts to learn to read and write. The 43 44

Ibid., 286-87. Ibid., 305-06.

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human girl, in turn, has gained important knowledge about nature, history, and the spiritual world. In conclusion, we might ask why romantic or (pseudo)folkloric material is used so widely in this children’s novel. One possible explanation is that such a romantic manner of representation fits well with the canon of adventure stories for children. The fairy tales of Kreutzwald offer plenty of motifs which can be successfully used for creating an interesting children’s story. Some polarities, such as the opposition of good and evil powers, have been sharpened in the contemporary novel. Another possible reason why the nineteenth-century literary works have had such a great impact on this novel is the fact that one of the novel’s central themes is identity. In this case, it is the children’s personal identity as formed by national identity. Getting acquainted with national identity means understanding concepts of a nation’s historical or mythical past. These concepts are presented as genuine folkloric material, and nineteenth-century canonical works already serve as models ready for use. The text constantly alludes to various aspects of Estonian national identity, for example by using the parallels between the national song festival and the fairy feast. The author’s intention of introducing young readers to folkloric tradition is of no less importance. As we can see, most of the motifs in the novel are somehow related to genuine folk beliefs and oral traditions. They are, however, inevitably represented through the filter of nineteenthcentury canonical works. Critics have also stressed the way in which the book cleverly mixes contemporary life in with its explanations to children about ancient Estonian beliefs and customs.45 Both the treasure which dates from pre-Christian free society and the fairies who represent preChristian beliefs connect the theme of identity to ancient Estonian history, a period which has been idealized as a mythical golden age from the nineteenth century onwards. Faehlmann and Kreutzwald’s mission of giving Estonians their own literature and sense of national pride, has probably been a successful enterprise. From time to time, their works have been actualized as important cultural texts to lean on. Even if their literary creations seem to be somewhat outdated, their impact is still present in some spheres of contemporary literature. While literature for adults uses these canonical works in a more postmodern way (by deconstructing or parodying them), literature for children pays them more respect and uses their elements as models to be followed. 45

Kumberg, “Suvekodu ümbruse varjatud, ent põnev elu,” 25.

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Works Cited Annist, August. F .R. Kreutzwaldi muinasjuttude algupära ja kunstiline laad. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1966. Annus, Epp, Luule Epner, Ants Järv, Sirje Olesk, Ele Süvalep, and Mart Velsker. Eesti kirjanduslugu. Tallinn: Koolibri, 2001. Dundes, Alan. Kes on rahvas? Valik esseid folkloristikast. Tallinn: Varrak, 2002. Faehlmann, Friedrich Robert. Müütilised muistendid. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1979. Ivanov, V., J. Lotman, A. Pjatigorski, V. Toporov, and B. Uspenskij. Kultuurisemiootika teesid. Tartu: Tartu University Press, 1998. Jansen, Ea. Vaateid eesti rahvusluse sünniaegadesse. Tartu: Ilmamaa, 2004. —. “Rahvuseks saamise raske tee.” Akadeemia 6 (2000): 1155-88. —. “Eestlaste rahvuslik ärkamisaeg.” In: Eesti identiteet ja iseseisvus, edited by A. Bertricau. Tallinn: Avita, 2001: 88-108. —. “Muinaseesti Panteon: Faehlmanni müütide roll eestlaste rahvusteadvuses.” Keel ja Kirjandus 12 (1998): 801-11. Järv, Risto. “Kas nimi rikub muinasjutu.” In: Pärimus ja tõlgendus. Artikleid folkloristika ja etnoloogia teooria, meetodite ning uurimispraktika alalt, edited by Tiiu Jaago. Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2003: 94-103. Kala, Tiina. “Eesti XIII-XVI sajandini.” In: Eesti identiteet ja iseseisvus, edited by A. Bertricau. Tallinn: Avita, 2001: 56-71. Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold. Eesti rahva ennemuistsed jutud. Rahva suust korjanud ja üles kirjutanud Fr. R. Kreutzwald. 1866. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1978. Kruks, Sergei. “LƗþplƝsis ja Kalevipoeg.” Vikerkaar 7-8 (2005): 140-61. Krull, Hasso. Loomise mõnu ja kiri. Tallinn: Sihtasutus Kultuurileht, 2006. Kumberg, Krista. “Suvekodu ümbruse varjatud, ent põnev elu.” Postimees, 17.09.2005: 25. Laar, Mart. Äratajad: rahvuslik ärkamisaeg Eestis ja selle kandjad. Tallinn: Grenader, 2006. Lotman, Juri. Kultuurisemiootika. Tallinn: Olion, 1990. Made, Reet. Salaroheline hiis. Tallinn: Koolibri, 2005. Masing, Uku. Eesti usund. Tartu: Ilmamaa, 1995. Remmel, Mari-Ann. Hiie ase. Hiis eesti rahvapärimuses. Tartu: Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum, 1998. Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.

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—. Nationalism and Modernism. A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism. London: Routledge, 1998. Valk, Heiki. “Kalevipoeg” kui ajaloonägemus ja ajalookäsitlus. Õpetatud Eesti Seltsi Aastaraamat 2003. Tartu: Õpetatud Eesti Selts, 2005: 4170. Valk, Ülo. “Inimene ja teispoolsus eesti rahvausundis.” In: Eesti rahvakultuur, edited by Ants Viires and Elle Vunder. Tallinn: Eesti Entsüklopeediakirjastus, 1998: 485-512.

THE CLEW OF HER STORY: FEMALE MYTH-MAKING IN MARGARET MAHY’S THE TRICKSTERS ADRIENNE E. GAVIN

It [my life] is an ordinary life, but like many ordinary lives it is astonishing and mysterious to the person actually living it.1 —Margaret Mahy

Historians of myth frequently note the modern era’s secularization of a formerly sacral function of myth. “Many terms have been coined for this process,” William C. Johnson Jr. summarizes, “such as [Mircea] Eliade’s ‘de-sacralization’ and ‘de-mythicization,’ [Carl] Jung’s ‘withdrawal of projections,’ Owen Barfield’s ‘internalization,’ or C. S. Lewis’s more inclusive phrase, ‘the psychological history of the West.’”2 This humanizing of myth has particular relevance to the writing of literature for children and adolescents. As John Stephens and Robyn McCallum suggest: children’s literature has been, and remains, a crucial repository of humanist ideology. While the humanist tradition pervades, and indeed grounds, children’s literature in general, it manifests itself most apparently in those kinds of text which are, in some sense, a reversion of a known story.3

In other words, humanism is most evidenced in those stories which re-tell or draw upon myth. Using the term “myth” broadly to include myths, fairy tales, and folk tales, this essay discusses the ways in which humanized forms of myth are used, and created, in the children’s literature of New Zealand author, Margaret Mahy. By focusing on the work which best illustrates this, her 1986 young adult novel The Tricksters, the essay argues that Mahy’s 1

Mahy, “Voices of the Creators,” 433. Johnson, “On the Literary Use of Myth,” 25. 3 Stephens and McCallum, Retelling Stories, Framing Culture, 15. 2

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fiction, through its absorbent, adaptive, and metamorphic use of old mythology, contributes to the creation, in particular, of new female myths. Mahy’s modulations of myth in The Tricksters, as in her other texts, avoid overt re-telling or simplistic inversions of myths. Instead, she draws on multifarious mythical and folk-tale sources to create a new whole. Her text becomes a contented Frankenstein’s monster made out of parts of atrophying myths which, while still resonant, use Mahy’s galvanic current of story to twitch them into true vitality for our days. Her allusive, adaptive myth-making does not draw direct attention to the absences or outmoded visions of traditional tales; instead, it calmly proceeds with the gap-filling and reinvention that is needed. Mahy describes story as a “marvellous code”: a code in our lives, something we automatically recognise when we encounter it in the outside world, something personal, but possibly primeval too, something which gives form to our political responses, to our art, our religious feelings, sometimes to our science…Broken to bits, it starts to reassemble itself, like the Iron Man described by Ted Hughes.4

Ted Hughes himself, when asked whether he thought “myth [is] something that we can invent,” replied: “I think in fact you only invent the myths you need. I don’t think it’s possible to invent a story that your whole being doesn’t need in this way of a myth.”5 Mahy’s work recognizes this “need” for new myths, in particular myths that speak of and to women. Mahy is well-known in children’s literature circles, but in the context of the current volume it may be useful briefly to describe her work. The prolific author of well over 100 texts for children, Mahy began her writing career in 1961 with stories and poems for the New Zealand School Journal. From 1969 she expanded into humorous, linguistically gymnastic picture books and by the mid 1970s was also producing junior fiction. In the 1980s she began adding award-winning young adult novels to her repertoire. In 2006 she was recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Award—popularly known as the “little Nobel”—given to a living writer “whose complete works have made a lasting contribution to children’s literature.”6 Most academic writing on her work has thus far focused on three of Mahy’s novels: The Haunting (1982), The Changeover (1984), and the 4

Mahy, “A Dissolving Ghost,” 29. Hughes, “Myth and Education,” 68. 6 “Hans Christian Andersen Award,” online. 5

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subject of this essay The Tricksters (1986). These works infuse the magical and fantastic into a realist paradigm through what has been termed Mahy’s use of “supernatural realism,” a form particularly suited to those writing of female experience or seeking to create female myth.7 Mahy describes her novels as “‘disguised fairy tales,’”8 yet however much magic occurs within them, they centrally insist on the real, on the human and on the wonderfulness of being, or, in her coming-of-age novels, of becoming one’s new adult self. Mahy’s fiction—both realist and supernatural realist—seeks to, as she states, “convey something of…a resonance of wonder,”9 a wonder that can be found in “‘any commonplace object’”10 because the “universe is implicit in ordinary things.”11 The place of the sacred in Mahy’s modern myths is taken by the strength of human love, particularly the love within families—however fractured, in crisis or unusual they may be—and by an implicit secular faith in the integrally human powers of the imagination and in the marvellousness of life, especially to the person living it. A writer who is highly conscious of myth—“I certainly feel myth working, often at a pre-conscious level, in my own everyday life”12— Mahy’s expressed view is that myth “is not just a series of folktales but an attempt to take the listener or the reader into the very mysteriousness of creation and existence.”13 Her comments on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) illustrate her awareness of the need for new myths. Reading Tolkien’s trilogy soon after it was originally published, Mahy recalls that she was “‘completely absorbed’” by it although also chagrined that it seemed to have: use[d] up every idea I had ever had, or at least it brought me to understand that the ideas were not mine, had never been mine, and were not altogether Mr Tolkien’s either, but existed in the network, never exhausted, always capable of revealing themselves in new ways.14

Mahy’s understanding of what she terms “the network,” essentially mythology or story in its most universal sense, developed as her writing career progressed and as her 1995 views of The Lord of the Rings suggest: 7

Gavin, “Apparition and Apprehension,” 131. Mahy, quoted in Duder, Margaret Mahy, 197. 9 Mahy, interview by Sarti in Spiritcarvers, 130. 10 Mahy, quoted in Duder, Margaret Mahy, 139. 11 Mahy, interview by Sarti in Spiritcarvers, 131. 12 Ibid., 133. 13 Idem. 14 Mahy, “Joining the Network,” 158. 8

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‘reading it now I feel weariness at this great, creaking vehicle of a tale, with its polarised characters, its lack of irony, wit and humour. The invention of the entire imaginary world, complete with a history extending before and beyond the tale, is not the wonder I once thought it was, but a relatively commonplace act of imagination. As such fantasies have proliferated’—and Tolkien, she thinks, ‘has a lot to answer for’—‘the predictability of the genre has proliferated too.’15

Mahy’s work seeks the unpredictability that is necessary to make myths live in a contemporary world and eschews the patriarchal ethos not only of classical myth, but also of more recent myth-makers such as Tolkien. In their reflection of what fellow New Zealand children’s writer Tessa Duder terms “the subtle, sophisticated and highly individual Mahy ‘feminism,’”16 Mahy’s novels are well recognized for their portrayal of strong female characters and for their infusion and transformation of myth, fairy tale, and folk tale motifs. As Maria Nikolajeva states: very few genuine female myths exist in written—male, civilized, ‘symbolic’ (Lacan)—form, due to many reasons. Connected with essential life mysteries such as menstruation and birth…female myths are more secret and sacred than male myths. They have mostly existed in oral form, as esoteric rituals. In Western civilization, they have been suppressed and muted by the dominant male structure.17

Because of the paucity of female models in “pure” myth, writers depicting female coming of age often use folk-tale and fairy-tale patterns, as critics including Brian Attebery and Roberta Seelinger Trites have highlighted. “The text of The Tricksters,” observes Trites: exemplifies the intertextual use of mythology and folklore in feminist children’s novels. It uses intertextual references to underscore its theme, 15

Mahy, quoted in Duder, Margaret Mahy, 80. Duder, Margaret Mahy, 56. “‘I didn’t then and in many ways still don’t have very strong politically feminist intentions’” Mahy claimed in reference to the 1982 publication of The Haunting. “‘However, being a female I suppose that means a certain set of experiences at my command, and there are times when I quite like making a strong female character’” (Mahy, quoted in Duder, Margaret Mahy, 172). Growing up “in a family without very fixed sex roles” as one of four sisters (and a brother), raising two daughters as a solo parent, and for several years caring for an Aunt with Alzheimer’s Disease, Mahy has, she writes, “always lived in a woman’s world” (Mahy, interview by Kedgley, in Our Own Country, 135, 146). 17 Nikolajeva, From Mythic to Linear, 147. 16

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Adrienne E. Gavin but more important, when the original text oppresses females, the feminist author transforms the story, redeeming it from sexism and claiming it for feminism.18

“Mahy’s feminist perspective allows her to fracture the patriarchal narrative mode,” writes Elliott Gose, “and substitute one in which the power and creativity of the female become important….Together, feminism and fantasy help both the female and the male characters to self exploration and integration.”19 Rightly described as Mahy’s “most complex novel” and “probably [her] most audacious,”20 The Tricksters is the coming-of-age story of seventeen-year-old Harry—real name Ariadne—Hamilton who with her parents, four siblings, and assorted guests is spending the New Zealand summer Christmas season at the family’s holiday beach house, Carnival’s Hide. Partially through the power of her own secret romance writing, three ghostly brothers—the Tricksters of the title—come to Carnival’s Hide. There they serve as sequential challenges for Harry to overcome and stimulate darkly carnivalesque disruption within the family. Their arrival leads to the revelation of secrets: the secret that Harry is a closet writer and the secret which Harry has known, that Tibby, the two-year-old daughter of her sister Christobel’s best friend is also their father’s child. Young adult fiction is an apposite genre in which to reinvent myths because, like adolescent novels, classical myths and traditional tales focus upon challenges, quests, and rites of passage that are often read as reflecting the transition from childhood to adulthood. In Mahy’s view young adults “‘are looking very anxiously for something that’s going to make them marvellous.”21 At the opening of The Tricksters Harry feels anything but marvellous. The middle of five children: She was sick of feeling closed in by people above and people below, of being good old Harry, not wonderful Ariadne…She was sick of being gratefully but carelessly praised for docility when she wanted to have a turn at being the difficult, brilliant one instead, and she longed to be overwhelmed by something so whirling and powerful she could never be expected to resist it.22

18

Trites, Waking Sleeping Beauty, 45. Gose, “Fairy Tale and Myth in Mahy’s The Changeover and The Tricksters,” 1011. 20 Duder, Margaret Mahy, 118, 193. 21 Mahy, quoted in Duder, Margaret Mahy, 179. 22 Mahy, The Tricksters, 22. 19

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Her desire for a ‘“book [that] would make something happen in the outside world by the power of its stories,”’ is fulfilled magically by her own writing of a “story of mysterious and threatening love.”23 She learns, however, that the old forms of myth she echoes in this secret story present an unreliable and dangerous vision. At the novel’s opening Harry feels as if “her true life was lived in the moments when the tip of her pen met the white paper.”24 At the same time, however, she feels as if she is almost being directed “to tell someone else’s story”: “‘Here I am!’ something was saying, ‘Write me down. Let me live.’”25 These directions come from the “possible ghost” of Carnival’s Hide who is struggling to return and, implicitly, from the restraints and lies of old mythical models. Belen, the “romantic villain” of her novel, and Prince Valery, its romantic hero, are predatory, mocking men who take and possess women at will. Belen, “part-man, part-bird,” has become Harry’s imagined “secret lover” making her feel “thrilled” and “ashamed” of “the things she invented for him to do.”26 Harry comes to realize, however, that her following of standard patriarchal romance patterns is treacherous and misguided. “What am I describing?” she begins to think “uneasily” about the “beautiful lovers of her story, eternally ravishing one another among flowers and jewels.”27 In part because of the family’s belief in the “possible ghost” of the dead Teddy Carnival, thought to have drowned aged twenty around ninety years before; in part because of Harry’s secret writing; and in part because of the power of her imagination, Harry serves as a conduit for the three fantastic trickster brothers to enter her world by “struggl[ing] through holding on to the silken clew of her own story.”28 A fragmented manifestation of the dead Teddy Carnival, these triplet brothers have “crawled out of a wrong gap in the world.”29 They perform magic tricks and personal manipulations as they inveigle themselves into 23

Ibid., 63-64, 13. Mahy has said that her first picture book A Lion in the Meadow (1969) and The Tricksters “are ‘basically about the same thing—which is, someone whose imaginative extremity actually produces an alteration in reality’” (Mahy, “Margaret Mahy Interviewed by Murray Edmond,” in A Dissolving Ghost, 94). 24 Mahy, The Tricksters, 14. 25 Ibid., 15. 26 Mahy, The Tricksters, 14. Appropriately for the Christmas period in which Harry is writing, the name Belen echoes the Spanish word for a nativity scene and for Bethlehem, but is also the name of one of Tolkien’s characters thus implicitly symbolizing an inappropriately patriarchal mythical model. 27 Mahy, The Tricksters, 52. 28 Ibid., 53. 29 Idem.

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the family’s seasonal celebrations. Seeing Ovid’s Metamorphoses, John Hadfield’s The Book of Love, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt on the Hamilton’s bookshelf, the brothers claim to be Ovid, Hadfield, and Felix Carnival, descendents of the builder of Carnival’s Hide.30 That the fairhaired dominant brother is named Ovid signals his metamorphic capacities and the novel’s wider interest in the transformative potential of magicians, of ghosts, and of those maturing from childhood to adulthood. Like the tricksters of folklore the Carnival brothers enter this environment as strangers, play tricks upon and games with its inhabitants, display cocky knowingness and mockery, and stir up disruption and crisis that in the end benefits the family by bringing secrets out into the open. In depicting the brothers, Mahy utilizes the carnivalesque possibilities of both their name Carne-vale—“‘goodbye to flesh”’31—and the MidsummerChristmas-New Year season. She also draws upon other male figures of myth and old tales. Harry thinks of them as “mermen come up into the land of grass and air to lure” family members “out beyond their depths.”32 They claim to be “‘wandering along on one of those fantastic quests, hoping to save the world from the powers of darkness, boredom and so on,’” and state that they “‘travel in threes like fairy-tale princes.’”33 Representing, as they themselves proclaim, rationality (Ovid), love (Felix), and instinct (Hadfield), the triplets struggle amongst themselves for dominance and integration. As Patricia Meyer Spacks observes, “Writers who concentrate on the adolescent heroine…confront tangled psychic issues.”34 Harry’s complex apprehension of the brothers as fantastic beings while others see them as real, can be read on one level as reflecting her inner anxieties as an emergent sexual woman and as a writer of anachronistic myths. Mahy acknowledges that the Carnival brothers can be interpreted as “‘imaginative projections or metaphors, or psychological devices. They work for me by producing mysterious moments which though fictional still manage to enlighten mysterious moments in real life.’”35 The Tricksters are “ambivalent,” suggests Elliott Gose, “representing the dark side of the protagonist.”36

30

Ibid., 126. Ibid., 66. 32 Ibid., 65. 33 Ibid., 63, 68. 34 Spacks, The Female Imagination, 113. 35 Mahy, quoted in Duder, Margaret Mahy, 197. 36 Gose, “Fairy Tale and Myth in Mahy’s The Changeover and The Tricksters,” 8. 31

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In more concrete terms they are perilous to Harry as men, as ghosts, and as products of misplaced myth. They threaten her physical integrity, her emotional equanimity, and her faith in her own writing. Frighteningly, they mirror the male characters of her fiction: “everything about [the] fairheaded” Ovid, who looks like Prince Valery, “suggest[s] menace to Harry,”37 and “the dark brothers…ma[ke] [her] skin creep with fear” because they resemble her “enemy-lover” Belen.38 In dealing with their threats, her passage to womanhood reflects in female form the traditionally male heroic labours of myth as she conquers each of the brothers in turn. She conquers Hadfield physically when he assaults her on the beach one night pretending to be Felix. Fighting him off, she leaves him with a “notable black eye.”39 Realizing after this attempted violation that it would not be “exciting to have choice taken away from her” and that such actions are “‘nothing to do with love,’”40 she crosses out the description in her book of Belen sexually overpowering her heroine Jessica. This effacement makes her feel free yet also strangely sad: “There was a poem she had once read about Leda assailed by the god Zeus in the form of a swan. Leda had been ‘caught up and mastered by the brute blood of the air.’”41 She fears that in destroying her story, she “might be saying goodbye to her chance to be Leda all over again.”42 In echoing representations of women raped such as people classical myth (often literally as in Leda’s case through resulting progeny), her story has not expressed the truth of such experience for female victims. Realizing that hers is “a faulty story” and frightened by the power of her words, she hides her book in the roof.43 37

Mahy, The Tricksters, 54. Ibid., 64, 95. 39 Ibid., 103. The black eye is inflicted with the infant Tibby’s toy which Harry has come down to the beach to fetch. In a reversal of the classical Ariadne who encourages Theseus to slay her half brother the monstrous Minotaur (see Graves, The Greek Myths, 1: 314-15), Mahy’s Ariadne is here symbolically saved by her half sister Tibby. Through Harry’s later revelation of the family secret of Tibby’s paternity, she ensures that Tibby is accepted openly as one of the family and, unlike the Ariadne of old myth, Harry does not abandon her family. Family love and individual growth, not romantic abandonment, is emphasized at the end of Mahy’s novel. 40 Mahy, The Tricksters, 106, 104. 41 Ibid., 106-07. Although not identified in the novel, the poem is W. B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” from The Tower (1928). The poem raises the question whether Leda “put on his knowledge with his power” during her violation by Zeus, a point significant in terms of Harry’s own discovery of truth through her attack. 42 Mahy, The Tricksters, 107. 43 Ibid., 106. 38

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Harry has learned that she does not have to submit to possession by men. She has also learned that writing old myths does not present truths for women and that, dare she write again, a new form must be found. Harry conquers Felix through the power of love which leads to her new sense of herself as a woman who is “certain she [is] beautiful…like an enchantress.”44 As Alison Waller suggests, Mahy uses many mythic tropes in depicting Harry’s relationship with Felix: “[Harry’s] writing and her magic conjure up Felix to fall in love with; in a way Harry is a seductress, a siren, or a spell-weaver alluring and binding a man to her as the enchantresses seduce Odysseus.”45 After Harry and Felix make love following the Christmas Eve beach party Harry feels “as if she ha[s] spent a perilous hour in fairyland making love to a ghost who needs love, returning pregnant with phantoms.”46 “‘Have I made love with a ghost?’” she asks Felix. “‘It’s what writers do, isn’t it…Make love with ghosts,’” he tells her.47 Harry feels that a “profound secret had begun to yield to her.”48 This is the secret of mutual love and of how new myths of romance should be written: out of the power of one’s own imagination. Ovid is the most difficult trickster to conquer because he goes for a “weak place in her life,” by tempting Harry with ideas of gaining power over her attention-seeking glamorous elder sister Christobel.49 Ovid also tries to prevent Harry’s relationship with Felix as it threatens his own dominance amongst the brothers. Harry lets Ovid neither interfere in her romance with Felix nor use her to destroy her family. “‘We’re not yours to destroy,’” she tells him.50 After standing up to Ovid she feels “an excitement she had never felt before. It was to do with becoming powerful for the first time in her life.”51 Harry’s ultimate “slaying” of the Minotaur triplets happens on Christmas Eve when “It was no longer enough to be Ariadne alone up in her room.”52 She wants to reveal her true, marvellous self to all who see her. Coming in with Felix after the consummation of their love, she walks into a trap Ovid and Hadfield have laid. They claim to have found an old book by an unknown hand, which Christobel, not knowing it is Harry’s 44

Ibid., 172. Waller, “‘Solid All the Way Through,’” 35. 46 Mahy, The Tricksters, 222. 47 Ibid., 220. 48 Ibid., 221. 49 Ibid., 175. 50 Ibid., 177. 51 Ibid., 178. 52 Ibid., 188. 45

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story, reads aloud mockingly to the household. It is “‘a remarkably dreadful book, written by someone who’s…secretly longing to be raped by a winged stallion,” Christobel crows to Harry.53 Furious, mortified, and “burn[ing] before” her family “like a witch at the stake,” Harry announces that the book is hers.54 Becoming “both Pandora and the box of troubles” she in her fury also reveals to a devastated Christobel that their father, back in the “‘wife-swapping days’” three Christmases before, has fathered young Tibby.55 During the family crisis caused by this revelation the Trickster brothers disappear, reintegrating into a whole Teddy Carnival ghost whose positive emotional side has become dominant through Felix’s love for Harry. Later that night Harry briefly sees this more contented ghost. He disappears as she burns her book on the beach bonfire “until [her words] became part of the sand and the sea and the air.”56 She is left with “the dust of a dishonoured book, a ring of grass [which Felix has given her] and a memory of love that even within a second or two became faltering and inexact, indistinguishable from legend.”57 The ghosts of Carnival’s Hide, of Harry’s anxieties over womanhood and of “faulty” myths have been laid to rest. Several myths serve as prominent but altered intertexts in the novel. Harry is a reworking of Pandora, Leda, and, it has been suggested by Alison Waller, Medea.58 Most obviously Harry’s real name, Ariadne, points to the classical myth of Theseus and Ariadne in which Ariadne, daughter of King Minos of Crete, falls in love with Theseus and gives him a clew (ball) of thread so that he can find his way through the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur. His task achieved, they flee to Naxos where Theseus deserts Ariadne and her laments attract the attention of Bacchus/Dionysus who marries her. Like several of the mythical women whose names Mahy 53

Ibid., 227. Ibid., 228. 55 Ibid., 229, 19. 56 Ibid., 244. Like Harry—and like Hero, the protagonist of Mahy’s The Other Side of Silence (1995)—Mahy has burned her own work: “It is…true that I have burned books—though usually because I felt they were so faulty they needed to be put out of the agony that existence on paper and print imposed on them and returned to that earlier state” (Mahy, “Endings and Beginnings,” 25). 57 Mahy, The Tricksters, 244. 58 “Harry can be partly identified with Medea the sorceress. Medea is best known for killing her children in revenge for Jason’s fickle love; on a less dramatic scale, Harry too turns against her family” by revealing her father’s secret. “Harry’s potential for enchanting is as dangerous as Medea’s sorcery” (Waller, “‘Solid All the Way Through,’” 28). 54

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includes directly in her work—solo mother Dido in The Catalogue of the Universe (1985) is another—Ariadne has typically been seen as a women cruelly abandoned by her lover, but Mahy pictures this differently. Harry does indeed have a lover who leaves her but this causes her no tears or sense of loss, no desire for vengeance, nor has she abandoned her family or homeland for him. Instead, her relationship with Felix has brought both of them the empowerment and recognition they needed within their families. As anything more than love “indistinguishable from legend,” Harry forgets Felix very quickly. Soon after their disappearance she thinks: “Ovid, Hadfield and Felix already seemed like the names of fabulous beasts.”59 Harry, however, is not only the Ariadne of old myth but also can be read as Theseus: it is she who has slain the fabulous Minotaur brothers. She “refuses the passive role of helper,” as Gose points out. “Instead, she takes on the active role of the hero and confronts her version of the savage minataur [sic].”60 Like Theseus, states Janine McVeagh, she “travel[s] to the heart of mystery, [faces] the danger there, and…return[s] to the world.”61 Her slaying has returned the beast to death but it is to a content, willing death in a reintegrated, emotionally secure state. Her sword has not been the violent patriarchal blade of old but the power of human love: her romantic magical love for Felix and her fiercely loyal love for her family that will not allow temporary jealousies or betrayals to fracture it. As a conflicted adolescent who longs for life to be as simple as it was in childhood and as “sexless as a tennis racquet,”62 but who also longs for complex passionate love, Harry like Theseus has entered the labyrinth. “Most of [my characters] are looking for some thread of identity,” Mahy states, “rather like Theseus in the Minotaur’s maze.”63 Harry emerges with a new identity as a woman which leaves her feeling wonderful. She has no need for a Bacchus to hear her laments and marry her. Instead, on New Year’s Day, she decides to marry the sea. At the opening of the novel, during her first midsummer swim, Harry had put a shell ring on her finger proclaiming “‘There! I’ve married the sea. I’m Mrs Oceanus…Everything comes out of me’” and has felt the

59

Mahy, The Tricksters, 241. Gose, “Fairy Tale and Myth in Mahy’s The Changeover and The Tricksters,” 10. 61 McVeagh, “Myth and Folktale in Margaret Mahy’s Young Adult Novels,” 17. I am very grateful to Talespinner editor Dr Doreen Darnell for enabling access to this article. 62 Mahy, The Tricksters, 88. 63 Mahy, interview by Sarti in Spiritcarvers, 138. 60

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sensuous appeal of the sea.64 She is in her element until she loses her ring during a frightening experience involving the materialization of Teddy Carnival. “Somehow she had crumpled things up by wishing to be the sea’s wife,” she has thought.65 Her fear that she might have “‘gone mad from imagining things’” and the loss of her ring indicate that she is not yet ready for that sort of mythic marriage.66 Shortsighted and sometimes not wearing her glasses, she also cannot yet see clearly the truths of life and myth: “‘I’ve got used to seeing things a little bit blurred’” she admits.67 At the end of the novel, on New Year’s Day, Harry finds a shell ring on the sand which looks exactly like the one she had lost. Putting it on, she repeats the declaration about marrying the sea that she has used at the beginning of the novel. As she does so, “something indescribable happen[s]…The world shift[s] mysteriously.”68 It is an epiphanic, almost pantheistic moment in which she now sees with startling clarity: “She saw everything…every blade of grass, every grain of sand, every wave on the beach.”69 Feeling elemental, filled with light and fire, and unified with the natural world, she notices the high tide mark which “marked its furthest reaches with a line of seaweed and shells that went on and on around the world.”70 “[S]he had been on one side,” she thinks, “the sea on the other. Now she felt there was no longer the same separation between them.”71 Alone, naked, and powerful she enters the sensuous sea, symbolically a female realm connected with sirens, mermaids, and the fluid cyclical tides of womanhood. Especially in her engagement with the sea, Harry’s progress reflects the circular pattern of female initiation discussed by Nikolajeva. While male initiation patterns are “linear and aimed at a goal,” female initiation is, Nikolajeva writes: connected with circularity. The female body follows the lunar cycle, which is closely associated with the idea of death and rebirth…The cardinal function of the female body is reproduction. The female myths, describing female initiation, are aimed at repetition, rebirth, the eternal life cycle.72

64

Mahy, The Tricksters, 24. Ibid., 26. 66 Ibid., 28. 67 Ibid., 83. 68 Ibid., 263. 69 Idem. 70 Idem. 71 Idem. 72 Nikolajeva, From Mythic to Linear, 147. 65

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Earlier Harry had created her half-bird demon-lover Belen and has thought of the story of Leda and the swan, but these were faulty myths for her. Now, having conquered her demons and seen the world clearly, Harry experiences as she swims a magical moment that brings her what she has wanted all along: “something so whirling and powerful she could never be expected to resist it.”73 “In the end she was indeed possessed by the brute blood of the air so powerfully but so delicately it was like no possession she had ever imagined.”74 She feels mysteriously “filled with fire,” and although things quickly become ordinary again, the memory of that numinous moment stays: “She felt remarkable.”75 She has achieved a feeling of marvellousness in her life and the world. “Harry holding a pen and Ariadne with her ring make an androgynous whole” suggests Gose, but there is no need for androgyny here; Harry has instead found pure womanhood.76 Her union with the sea mirrors the green-world archetype identified by Annis Pratt in novels of female development, in which the “young female hero [is a] free spirit at one with the green world.”77 At the very end of the novel Harry begins to write again, in the blank book Christobel gives her which signals new familial understanding. Although she begins her new story in classical form with “‘Once upon a time…,’”78 Harry has learned that relying on traditional myths is dangerous for young women. We are therefore sure that, like her own creator Mahy, she is about to write new myths that speak female truths to her and her readers.79 As Mahy’s female protagonists, like Harry, mature towards womanhood they acquire faith in the marvellousness of life, of family, and of the imagination. They come to understand that the spiritual universe, like the literary imagination, is internally perceived rather than externally 73

Mahy, The Tricksters, 22. Ibid., 263. 75 Ibid., 263, 263. 76 Gose, “Fairy Tale and Myth in Mahy’s The Changeover and The Tricksters,” 10. 77 Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction, 19. 78 Mahy, The Tricksters, 266. 79 This she may do in part through what Annis Pratt terms: ‘unventing…[the] rediscovery of a lost skill through intuition, a bringing of latent knowledge out of oneself in contrast to ‘invention’ from scratch. Following this model, I would term the writing and reading of women’s fiction a form of ‘unvention,’ the tapping of a repository of knowledge lost from Western culture but still available to the author and recognizable to the reader as deriving from a world with which she, at some level of her imagination, is already familiar’ (Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction, 178). 74

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made manifest. Not simplistically inverting old myths, but fluidly adapting, alluding to, and recasting them, The Tricksters weaves a modern, humanist myth of female maturation. The novel emphasizes the wonder and power of human life and love and insists that the modern Ariadne must both create and follow the silken clew of her own story into the labyrinth of literary creation.

Works Cited Attebery, Brian. “Women’s Coming of Age in Fantasy.” In Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature, third edition, edited by Sheila Egoff, et al. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1996. 288-300. Duder, Tessa. Margaret Mahy: A Writer’s Life. Auckland: HarperCollins, 2005. Gavin, Adrienne E. “Apparition and Apprehension: Supernatural Mystery and Emergent Womanhood in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Novels by Margaret Mahy.” In Mystery in Children’s Literature, edited by Adrienne E. Gavin and Christopher Routledge. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. 131-48. Gose, Elliott. “Fairy Tale and Myth in Mahy’s The Changeover and The Tricksters.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1991): 6-11. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths. 1955. 2 vols. London: Folio Society, 1996. “Hans Christian Andersen Award.” International Board on Books for Young People Website 31 May 2006. Hughes, Ted. “Myth and Education.” Children’s Literature in Education 1 (1970): 55-70. Johnson, William C. Jr. “On the Literary Use of Myth.” In The Power of Myth in Literature and Film, edited by Victor Carrabino. Tallahassee: University Presses of Florida, 1980. 24-34. Kedgley, Sue. “Margaret Mahy.” Our Own Country: Leading New Zealand Women Writers Talk About Their Writing and Their Lives. Auckland: Penguin, 1989. 133-55. Mahy, Margaret. “A Dissolving Ghost: Possible Operations of Truth in Children’s Books and the Lives of Children.” A Dissolving Ghost: Essays and More. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2000. 27-47. —. “Endings and Beginnings.” A Dissolving Ghost: Essays and More. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2000. 11-26. —. “Joining the Network.” Signal 54 (1987): 151-60.

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—. “Margaret Mahy Interviewed by Murray Edmond.” [1987] A Dissolving Ghost: Essays and More. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2000. 92-113. —. The Tricksters. 1986. London: Puffin, 1995. —. “Voices of the Creators: Margaret Mahy.” In Children’s Books and Their Creators, edited by Anita Silvey. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 433. McVeagh, Janine. “Myth and Folktale in Margaret Mahy’s Young Adult Novels.” Talespinner 8 (1999): 17-22. Nikolajeva, Maria. From Mythic to Linear: Time in Children’s Literature. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2000. Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. New York: Harvester, 1982. Sarti, Antonella. “Margaret Mahy.” Spiritcarvers: Interviews with Eighteen Writers from New Zealand. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998. 12652. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women’s Writing. 1972. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976. Stephens, John and Robyn McCallum. Retelling Stories, Framing Culture: Traditional Story and Metanarratives in Children’s Literature. New York and London: Garland, 1998. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Waking Sleeping Beauty: Feminist Voices in Children’s Novels. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Waller, Alison. “‘Solid All the Way Through’: Margaret Mahy’s Ordinary Witches.” In Marvellous Codes: The Fiction of Margaret Mahy, edited by Elizabeth Hale and Sarah Fiona Winters. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2005. 21-43.

OF MAIDENS AND DRAGONS: SARA MAITLAND’S THREE TIMES TABLE DEBORAH SARBIN

St. Margaret of Antioch—the dragon conqueror—had a thriving cult in England in the Middle Ages. Over 250 churches were dedicated to her: fifty-eight in Norfolk alone.1 Her Life in several versions was a popular text from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries, and she was venerated as protectress of those pregnant and in labour. Invoked as one of the “Fourteen Holy Helpers,” she also famously appeared to St. Joan of Arc. Times change; the dragon-slaying St. George became patron saint of England and, in the twentieth century, the Vatican’s 1969 reformed Universal Canon “demoted” this holy St. Margaret, deeming her existence legendary only. The suppressed medieval legend of St. Margaret of Antioch finds new life, however, at the hands of a contemporary feminist and theologian. In Sara Maitland’s novel Three Times Table (1990), the author gives us a modern-day Margaret: Maggie Petherington, who must conquer her own dragon, literally as well as figuratively. This novel can be described as a ‘braided text’ since it entwines three concurrent narratives of a grandmother, daughter, and granddaughter. One third of the novel is granddaughter Maggie’s coming-of-age tale, and this adolescent’s awakening to adulthood reinvents the legend of St. Margaret, earlier told in The Golden Legend (1260-75), as well as in numerous free-standing narratives of the saint’s life. Unlike most contemporary treatments of dragons and their interactions with humans in fiction, this novel does not belong to the fantasy genre. It is instead a realist novel that employs magical realism, as it examines three generations of women uneasily sharing a household. While the St. George tradition has the valiant knight coming to the rescue of the terrorized maiden, the story of St. Margaret emphasizes the terrorized maiden’s own act of faith that is sufficient to conquer the dragon’s threat. The old legend 1

Barker, “Near the Rising Seas,” 62.

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serves well in its retelling as a celebration of a young woman’s facing her fears and coming into her own power. The legend of St. Margaret of Antioch presents her as a young woman (fifteen years old in John Lydgate’s account) who has converted to Christianity. As a Christian, she refuses to wed a pagan, despite her many suitors, none of whom is more adamant than Olibrious. Spurned by her, he imprisons the maiden Margaret and brutally tortures her, to no avail. As a prisoner, she prays that she might confront the very Demon responsible for her cruel treatment, and, to cite Bokenham’s legend, “a huge dragon, glittering like glass, suddenly appeared from a corner of the prison with horrible aspect.”2 Accounts then indicate that the dragon swallows her, and either by making the sign of the cross or by brandishing a cross on her person, Margaret causes the dragon to “burst in two,”3 freeing her. Satan then appears, in vanquished form, to be chastised by the saint. After suffering more trials, steadfastly refusing to give up her virginity, Margaret is finally beheaded. Before her martyrdom, in a final prayer, she offers to intercede for women in childbirth, and, as some accounts have it, for anyone who wrote, read, or heard her legend. In iconography, she is often depicted being devoured by a dragon, emerging from a dragon, or as in the artwork hanging in Maggie’s room and frequently referenced in Maitland’s novel, “leading a dragon into a city on a golden chain.”4 Maitland’s revisiting of St. Margaret’s legend offers unique perspectives on the story, which are informed by twentieth-century feminism, and the author’s own work as a self-proclaimed “amateur theologian” (“in the literal sense of the word, an amateur—a lover” writes Maitland).5 Maggie’s story is situated in the household community of her grandmother’s and mother’s personal and professional lives; her actions resonate and ultimately bless these two women. The three women live in grandmother Rachel’s house, significantly occupying separate floors, “stacked up like layers of sediment, geological formations each laid down in different eras.”6 The novel documents a twenty-four-hour crisis point for each of the women: Rachel, at seventy-four, confronts the undoing of her life’s work as a paleontologist. Accepting the changing tide of theory in her field, she has to renounce the dinosaur model upon which her career has been based. Phoebe, thirty-seven, long at odds with her professionally successful mother over her decision to leave a promising career in 2

Delany, trans. A Legend of Holy Women, 15. Ibid. 4 Maitland, Three Times Table, 8. 5 Maitland, A Big Enough God, 7. 6 Maitland, Three Times Table, 55. 3

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mathematics, finds herself having to face a diagnosis of breast cancer. On a more spiritual level, we learn that “she had come over the years to realize, very inarticulately, that somehow, in abandoning math and virtue, in abandoning that early and resilient commitment she had abandoned also the capacity to form commitment.”7 Maggie, at fifteen, must give up the things of childhood, notably her personal dragon, Fenna, so that she can become an adult. Yes, her personal dragon. From the perspective of grandmother Rachel, “Fenna was [in the past] Maggie’s imaginary dragon” [emphasis added], who “had appeared when Maggie was about five years old….Fenna was the dark force of the imagination as well as its golden dancing; Fenna was chaos as well as order.”8 From Maggie’s perspective, “Fenna is Maggie’s dragon.…Fenna accompanied Maggie into consciousness” [emphasis added].9 Maitland writes that Maggie, “[u]sing the solid material of history and science...had recreated, restored, raised up Fenna in her imagination and he had never gone away. For ten years he had been her constant companion.”10 Caught in the generational chasm that lies between her mother and grandmother, Maggie “could not remember a time when there was not the constant tug of tension”11 between the two women. Besides offering companionship and respite from adult arguments, her dragon teaches her to fly through the London night skies, testifying to the power of the child’s imagination and the fierce psychological need to flee from the conflicted family: immediately she lifted off, dodging the low branches on that pretty treelined street, and seeking a flight path in the darkening air. Her purposeful course took her over South End Green at a reasonable height....Years of practice had given her a graceful style, although Fenna still teased her gently about the ugliness of flight without wings.12

Fenna is a kind of defence, a welcome escape from family tension, yet is also an isolating choice: “by keeping him secret [Maggie] had given him too much power.”13 One manifestation of this power is Maggie’s delayed menarche, which still fetters her to childhood at age fifteen. Only with the 7

Ibid., 34. Ibid., 109. 9 Ibid., 159. 10 Ibid., 163. 11 Ibid., 171. 12 Ibid., 40. 13 Ibid., 175. 8

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determined banishment of the dragon does Maggie finally experience menstruation.14 Maggie realizes that she must give up Fenna, banish him from her life, since “What was appropriate and necessary at eight, was inappropriate and dangerous at fifteen. She was stuck.”15 Having been told the legend of St. Margaret by Fenna, albeit in an unorthodox way that saves the dragon, she decides upon a nondestructive manner of breaking Fenna’s power. In Maitland’s version, filtered through the modern dragon, St. Margaret is not only swallowed, but is borne through the air in the dragon’s flight. As she gives herself over to death (lacking any weapon), she hears Psalm 139 (“If I fly with the wings of dawn...Even there your hand will guide me”), and realizes that “not everything that was huge and fierce and wild and mysterious was necessarily evil….Her God had made the dark at the same moment as the light. He had made the shadow, the wildness and the passion.”16 As she realizes this, the dragon recognizes Margaret’s joy and insight, and opens his mouth for her to exit. They part ways, each acknowledging that they had wished to kill the other but could not bring themselves to do so. This version, unlike the medieval lives, presents a Romantic view of the mutual need for opposites as well as a feminist refusal of simple binary opposites. Maggie herself, in gratitude to her dragon for its friendship and gift of flight, cannot be its slayer, and so overtly rejects the “Georgian” sort of story where “you polish your armour till it gleams, you sharpen your lance and you mount your white charger, you raise your white banner.”17 Maitland has argued, in her study, A Big Enough God, that these stories about lonely heroes, usually male, who travel out into the big bad world and ‘defeat’ the forces of darkness and receive upperclass virgins as their natural reward...are self-rewarding tales which give a certain bogus glamour to wholesale destruction of whatever the hero’s culture sees as uncivilized.18

She pointedly includes dragons in a subsequent list of “uncivilized” beings. Echoing the author’s theological speculation, in this novel Maggie realizes that “she needed to make a brand new story, her own story.”19 For 14

Ibid., 195-96. Ibid., 178. 16 Ibid., 167. 17 Ibid., 169. 18 Maitland, A Big Enough God, 169. 19 Maitland, Three Times Table, 170. 15

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this, she looked to the assistance of another woman, an experienced dragon vanquisher: St. Margaret of Antioch, pictured on her bedroom wall, whose “holy obstinacy, her sulky refusal to bend her stubborn head to emperors, fathers, lovers, or dragons had proved strong enough to conquer even the need to kill.”20 The saint, “feeling neglected for decades,” thanks to “ignorant prelates who—full of their scientific and rationalist approach to the institutions of sanctity—insisted she never existed,”21 happily aids her modern kindred spirit. She creates a web of golden silk thread to guide Maggie as the girl thinks her way free of the dragon’s influence, riding Fenna for the last time in the night sky. Maggie is thrown from the dragon and falls back into her room, hurtling through the glass skylight all the while invoking her mother and girlfriends, as well as “St. Margaret and St. Joan and all the women who have fought the burning and conquered the dragon.”22 Or, as her mother and grandmother believe, the skylight of her room collapsed of its own accord while Maggie lay in bed. The two older women rush to her aid and for the first time in the course of the novel the three women gather together: “like a Medieval St. Anne with Virgin and Child. For a silent moment the three of them sat there....they were all together as one flesh with three faces.”23 The result of her act of will, Maggie’s renunciation of the dragon strengthens the bonds and understanding among the three women, stabilizing their community, and reinforcing Rachel’s and Phoebe’s own resolve to make things right in their lives. Beyond this personal and familial level, the novel also uses the dragon to explore the nature of sin. Ruth Feingold comments that the novel “is the only one of Maitland’s…to have no explicit Christian references,”24 yet the saint’s legend is clearly emphasized in Maggie’s narrative. Feingold does concede that the novel “can be read as having an explicitly Christian theme: that of renunciation.”25 Maggie, like any sinner, needs to renounce that which has overpowered her and created obstacles in her life: her need for Fenna. Whereas St. Margaret’s legendary dealings with a dragon neatly present the creature as representing evil embodied, Maitland’s version shows Fenna as initially useful, protective, and liberating. But these conditions become dangerous, separating Maggie from others (and herself), as sin will do: a seduction away from the fullness of being. The 20

Ibid. Ibid. 22 Ibid., 184. 23 Ibid., 190. 24 Feingold, “Sara Maitland,” 223. 25 Ibid. 21

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danger becomes clear, in terms of social isolation and temptation to pure self-indulgence: When she had been a tiny child, and Fenna had still been a small, manageable and undemanding dragon she had often spoken of him, to her mother who had grinned, to her grandmother who had smiled, and to her schoolteachers and friends, who had laughed indulgently. But as she grew, people smiled less often and Fenna himself began to insist on secrecy and darkness.26

Maggie ultimately recognizes the “greed” of Fenna and the need for renunciation in order to gain her adulthood. Yet the dragon is not dismissed as merely negative; this flight of fancy and creativity and imagination (the world of childhood after all) is willed to her grandmother, a recovering rationalist in need of imaginative flight. Maitland has averred that her novel is about “finding balances.”27 The power of the dragon is vanquished, yet its usefulness and potential for beauty are retained. In a similar way, that which becomes sinful is often at first useful, or beautiful, or intended for good; it is misuse and imbalance which makes it sin. Maitland, in another of her spiritually focused texts, explains that Dame Julian of Norwich’s notion of sin as “behovely” “—useful, even valuable, rather than damning—is a view that is very popular among women and other...modern theologians.”28 It is useful to consider further the loss of St. Margaret’s legend, especially in England, and the meaning of Maitland’s reinvention of it. In the later middle ages, the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, legends of the two dragon-slayers coexisted, complementary male and female versions. In St. George’s legend, the female remained, but only as (pagan) victim. In St. Margaret’s legend, she herself had the power of the cross to vanquish the dragon. Her legends clearly indicate that the dragon appears in answer to her prayers that she might confront the devil. St. George happens upon the dragon in his travels, and it is figured only as a monster, not explicitly as a manifestation of Satan. In Lydgate’s legend of Margaret, she exhorts Satan, in the aftermath of destroying the dragon, to “remember how I, a pure maiden, vanquished you to my greater glory, through feminine power” [emphasis added].29 Clearly, her life reflected spiritual power and strength of character. Her popularity as a patron and intercessor, as well as 26

Maitland, Three Times Table, 175. Ibid. 28 Maitland, A Map of the New Country, 209, note 10. 29 Lydgate, “Saints Margaret and Petronilla,” 93. 27

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her appearance to St. Joan of Arc attest to the appeal of her life story and its spiritual message. So why was this woman’s story lost and diminished? St. George had the benefit of masculine institutions: the military and the emerging British nation. His story was, however, shrouded in so much obscurity that The Catholic Encyclopedia’s 1909 entry on him was: martyr, patron of England, suffered at or near Lydda, also known as Diospolis, in Palestine, probably before the time of Constantine….the above statement sums up all that can safely be affirmed about St. George.30

Yet he had long been associated with the Crusades and with the national goals of England. Edmund Spenser’s nationally propagandistic The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) solidified the figure of the masculine saint in the post-Reformation order. Beyond local cults with a largely female following, St. Margaret of Antioch did not have the same impact. Once the Reformation took hold, her legend, including her intercession for those in childbirth and—more widely—for any who read or heard her story, could easily be dismissed as superstition. Indeed, “as early as the tenth century,” Sherry Reames writes, “there was concern about the authenticity of the most spectacular elements in the Margaret legend, her victories over the dragon and the demon.”31 In the late thirteenth century the author of The Golden Legend in his telling of Margaret’s story opined that “‘What is said, however, about the dragon devouring her and then breaking open, is considered apocryphal and frivolous.’”32 More striking, “the claims for Margaret’s power as an intercessor also became a matter of concern for some reform-minded clergy.”33 Too strong a female was perhaps too threatening; in England, especially, no legendary woman could overshadow the power of the reigning queen. The Vatican echoed this devaluation of St. Margaret in 1969, with her removal from the canon and the pronouncement of her existence as only legendary and apocryphal. This fact makes Maitland’s resurrection of the legend all the more poignant. Karen A. Winstead, in her Introduction to a collection of medieval English martyr legends, asserts that

30

Thurston, “St. George.” Reames, “Introduction,” 2. 32 Quoted in Coffman, “Maggie the Dragon Slayer?” 25. 33 Reames, 2. 31

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Maitland revitalizes this spiritual significance of legend in her depiction of a young woman whose choice to reject the imbalance of sin and isolation opens her family to authentic love and relationships. By re-imagining a contemporary version of St. Margaret, Maitland allows for a deeply feminine spirituality. She addresses both a feminine coming-of-age and an examination of the complex nature of sin. Led by the youngest of them, all three women must renounce something dear to them that they have grown dangerously, paralyzingly, attached to—a figure of sin. Following the night of the dragon and Maggie’s (fortunate) fall into young adulthood and full family membership, mother Phoebe determines to take all steps to thwart her growing cancer by finally visiting a doctor, and grandmother Rachel publicly renounces the theory that made and sustained her career. Maggie herself begins to menstruate the next day, entering womanhood. A late scene in which Maggie sets off with a friend of her own age indicates that she is now open to the risks of human relationship rather than a life of solipsism. A reader might lament that the apparent rejection of the magical and imaginative is the cost of entry to adulthood, yet Maitland allows Fenna to live, as a reversed legacy from Maggie to her grandmother. The imaginative spark and companionship that the dragon represents (or embodies) will be the reward of age and not only the purview of the child. The final lines witness this transference of Fenna to Rachel. Having just walked out of her museum office and concluding that “it was high time to retire,”35 the grandmother suddenly noticed, for the first time, that a medium-sized dragon was sitting in the upper branches of a particularly fine plane tree and munching a green leaf….The dragon looked directly at her. Its ancient and mischievous eyes were almost tender….She had never seen a dragon before, and now she nearly exploded with joy.36

One strength of this novel is that Maitland manages to mix the textures of legend—with its mythical beasts, cyclic view of time, and heroic choices—with a thorough going twentieth-century realism. In reclaiming

34

Winstead, Chaste Passions, 2. Maitland, Three Times Table, 215. 36 Ibid. 35

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St. Margaret of Antioch’s story for modern times, the author recovers a story of spiritual strength that can again sustain generations.

Works Cited Barker, Paul. “Near the Rising Seas, I Find Relics of a Dynastic Fury.” New Statesman 127: 4403 (18 Sept. 1998): 62. Coffman, Elesha. “Maggie, The Dragon Slayer?” Christian History 20.4 (Nov. 2001): 25. Academic Search Premier. EBSCOhost. Clarion U. Lib., Clarion, PA. 3 June 2006. Delany, Sheila, trans. A Legend of Holy Women: A Translation of Obern Bokenham’s Legends of Holy Women. Notre Dame, IN: U of Notre Dame P: 1992. De Voragine, Jacobus. The Golden Legend or Lives of the Saints as Englished by William Caxton, edited by F. S. Ellis. London: J. M. Dent and Co., 1900. Feingold, Ruth P. “Sara Maitland.” Dictionary of Literary Biography: British and Irish Novelists Since 1960. Volume 271. Detroit: Gale, 2003, 217-29. Lydgate, John. “Saints Margaret and Petronilla.” 1415-26. In Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends, edited and translated by Karen A. Winstead. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. 87-93. Maitland, Sara. A Big Enough God: A Feminist’s Search for a Joyful Theology. New York: Riverhead, 1995. —. A Map of the New Country: Women and Christianity. London: Routledge, 1983. —. Three Times Table: A Novel. New York: Holt, 1990. Reames, Sherry L., ed. “Introduction.” Margaret of Antioch. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003. The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages. 3 June 2006. . Thurston, Herbert. “St. George.” 1909. The Catholic Encyclopedia (online). 28 March 2008. . Winstead, Karen A., ed. and trans. Chaste Passions: Medieval English Virgin Martyr Legends. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.

PART II: MYTH AND THE CHRISTIAN AUTHOR INTRODUCTION SUZANNE BRAY

In February 1940 C. S. Lewis wrote to his brother Warnie: On Monday C.W.1 lectured nominally on Comus but really on Chastity. Simply as criticism it was superb—because here was a man who really started from the same point of view as Milton and really cared with every fibre of his being…I have at last, if only for once, seen a university doing what it was founded to do: teaching Wisdom.2

Lewis’s admiration came from his surprise at seeing, most unexpectedly in the academic context of the time, a piece of serious and well-researched literary criticism which could be actively applied to the lives of those who heard it. Williams’ analysis threw light both on Milton’s poem and on that poem’s theme. All of the scholars in this section have explored how committed Christian authors between 1860 and 1960 used myth to bring a message to their own times; some, like Williams on Comus, have gone further and attempted to make that message speak to the lives of today’s readers. One of Charles Williams’ novels, The Place of the Lion, explicitly criticises an academic who perceives the famous, ancient texts she studies as a means to her own professional advancement, rather than a source of wisdom to live by. Explicitly rejecting this temptation, Robert-Louis Abrahamson follows Williams’ own approach in his study of how the midtwentieth century author transforms Dante’s medieval images of heaven and hell, giving them a modern incarnation in his spiritual thriller Descent into Hell. Abrahamson warns us that he does not intend to “rest in mere observation of literary methods”, but to “proceed to the next step of asking 1

Charles Williams. C. S. Lewis. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis Vol. II edited by Walter Hooper. London: Harper Collins, 2004, 345-46.

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how these two versions of the same universal truths engage us as readers”. What follows leads the reader on a journey into the destructive power of lust and the horrors of damnation in both Dante and Williams, which both illuminates the text and applies it to our personal experience. As in all the texts in this section, incarnation is a key word. Abrahamson shows how, for example, Aquinas’ definition of lust as “seeking venereal pleasure not in accordance with right reason” becomes incarnate in Dante’s and Williams’ writings. However, in The Divine Comedy this taking flesh is perceived from the outside in a mythic and universal form with which anyone can identify, while in Descent into Hell, the reader is invited to enter the mind of one particular lustful man and there to observe the horrors of damnation from the inside. Isabelle Boof-Vermesse’s study of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction continues the themes of incarnation and the implication of the reader in the literary text, showing how “O’Connor’s stories actualize, revitalize and participate in the ‘grand Christian narrative’”, and how “the word is made flesh in the narrative gesture, turning meaning into experience”. Using the works of French thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Luc Marion as a starting point, Boof-Vermesse indicates possible ways of understanding O’Connor’s writings in our postmodern era. In the same way as Abrahamson sees Aquinas’s definition of lust underlying the passages he studies, Boof-Vermesse perceives Aquinas’s concept of analogy as the only possible approach to the divine as essential to O’Connor’s work. The fictional narrative, inspired by faith and following the biblical example of illustrating eternal truth in human story, thus becomes, for the reader, a source of grace here and now. Lyotard and the postmodern world also provide the context for Rod Rosenquist’s study of Tolkien and Lewis, which replaces them in their intellectual context as academics fighting against their overly rational Enlightenment heritage. Their constant endeavour to enhance the role of the mythical and the imaginary in the perception of truth allows us to identify them as precursors of many post-structuralist positions. While agreeing that the two Oxford colleagues deal in timeless truths, Rosenquist underlines their insistence on the limits of Reason and their understanding of myth as the bridge between objective and subjective knowledge. Lewis’s famous declaration that in Christ “myth became fact” returns us both to Aquinas’s necessary analogy and to the role of incarnation in making possible human knowledge of divine reality. Joanny Moulin also examines Tolkien’s perception of the relationship between myth, truth and faith in his article, which looks in particular detail

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at the message of the essay “On Fairy Stories”. While Tolkien’s fiction was never overtly religious, he claimed that it was profoundly Christian, as “the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism”. Moulin shows that, like his friend Charles Williams, Tolkien was concerned by the effect of the literary text on the reader, claiming that good fantasy fiction contains a eucatastrophe, a happy ending which “can give to the child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears”. This eucatastrophe is good news, or evangelium, producing in the reader, by analogy, the same emotion of joy and hope in the literary realm as the birth of Christ or the Resurrection in the real world. It is therefore “a literary means of cultivating belief”, enabling readers to escape from the depressing situation they see around them and to enter the world of faith. Joy, fairy stories and happy endings also concern Daniel Gabelman in his study of levity and faith in George MacDonald’s “The Light Princess”. Gabelman shows how, like Tolkien, MacDonald was convinced of the therapeutic properties of fairy tales and illustrated this by his insertion of “The Light Princess” into his realistic novel Adela Cathcart. As it is a story within a story, MacDonald can show the effect of his tale on its audience and, in particular, on the sick child Adela, for whom it is prescribed as a form of medicine. In the tale, the only completely wise character is the prince, who rejoices in wit and humour and is prepared to sacrifice his life out of love for the princess. He is therefore, as Gabelman points out, “a type of Christ, the greatest fool—who was also called ‘out of his mind’ and ‘demon-possessed’ by philosophers”. He thus provides, by analogy once again, an image or incarnation of the life-giving word. At first sight, Suzanne Bray’s article, which analyses works by Lewis, Williams, T.S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers, may seem different from the others in that it places the writings studied in a specific political context, that of the period from 1934 to 1945 with its totalitarian regimes and World War. However, once again we can see how the texts analysed provide various incarnations of the temptations which, according to their creators, were particularly relevant to the British people at that time. Showing, by analogy, the disastrous results of giving in to these temptations, the four writers hoped to provoke a reaction in their contemporaries which would strengthen national resistance to the totalitarian ideologies which had taken hold of several European countries and were undermining the continent’s Christian cultural foundations. Although all the writers studied in this section made no secret of their Christian convictions, their literary works are neither sermons nor

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allegories. In some respects they resemble extended parables in that their characters and situations give flesh to the spiritual principles their authors believed in. Firmly rooted in the Judeo-Christian and Classical traditions, these works are nourished by the Scriptures, by Greek, Roman, Norse and Celtic mythology and by numerous Christian thinkers including Aquinas and Dante. The articles which follow examine how these Christian writers used existing myths and also created their own mythical narrations. They also show how these re-incarnations (or in some cases what Isabelle BoofVermesse calls recruci-fictions), spoke to the readers of their time and may still speak today, as channels of divine grace or as catalysts to action, faith or even conversion.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN’S “EUCATASTROPHE”, OR FANTASY AS A MODERN RECOVERY OF FAITH JOANNY MOULIN

The recent film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings has confirmed the strong interest aroused in the contemporary world by J. R. R. Tolkien’s literary use of myth. It has scarcely been remarked that the central issue to the work of this author is faith—this is what I would propose to examine and demonstrate in this contribution. In a letter to Father R. Murray, S.J., Tolkien once said that “The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” but he went on to say that “the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism”. For The Lord of the Rings is not a religious allegory. It rather means to achieve what its author has called a “eucatastrophe”: “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argue is the highest function of fairy stories to produce).” He had said, in his essay “On FairyStories,” that this peculiar characteristic of Fantasy literature is also a “recovery (which included return and renewal of health)”, a “regaining of a clear view.” Looking back in several ways to S.T. Coleridge, he explained that this is an extension of the “willing suspension of disbelief,” of which the great Christian romantic said that it “constitutes poetic faith”. In the story, this is reflected thematically, as this leap of faith leads to a protracted ordeal, ending paradoxically in successful failure. For the hero of the quest, Frodo, finally “apostatizes,” as Tolkien puts it, but at the same time he is saved in extremis by his “mystical belief in the ultimate value-in-itself of pity” and forgiveness.

1. Myth (or Mythopoeia) vs. Allegory In a seminal essay “On Fairy-Stories”, originally published in 1947 in the commemorative volume Essays Presented to Charles Williams, Tolkien gave a definition of the genre Fantasy that amounts to marrying, as it were, the very vivacious tradition of utopia in English literature with

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the more ancient one of fairy tales. Fantasy appears on the whole as a variant on Science Fiction that is situated in the past instead of the future. But the reference to Fairy Story gives this new genre another dimension by linking it to the Romantic interest in the folk-tale, the German Märchen. In this respect, Tolkien acknowledges a debt to Coleridge and his concept of Fancy, although for him this is “a reduced and depreciatory form of the older word Fantasy”.1 Tolkien, in fact, challenges Coleridge’s well-known distinction between Imagination and Fancy, by asserting that Fantasy is the higher mode of literary creation, or as he would say “Sub-Creation”, thus implicitly adopting for Fantasy the definition of the Primary Imagination as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”2. But Tolkien eschews the modernist intrepretation of Coleridge’s Imagination as a creation ex nihilo precisely by foregrounding Fairy-Story as the principle of an organic growth, as it were out of the soil of immemorial tradition. This is best summed up in his image of the “Tree of Tales”3, which looks back to Carlyle’s notion of the “world-tree” as a literary reading of the myth of Yggdrasil. This is best understood with reference to Tolkien’s declaration that The Lord of the Rings was “an essay in ‘linguistic aesthetics’” and that “The invention of languages is the foundation”4. For indeed he was a philologist, who developed such an intimate knowledge of ancient Germanic tongues that his creativity first expressed itself by the invention of imaginary languages, out of which his fiction literally grew. The ‘stories’ were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows.

This is an extended and constructive practice of what John Austin called the performative function of language, and Tolkien’s creative writing is a protracted speech act. Hence his theory of literature as SubCreation, because it is truly a re-enactment on the minor mode of the Creation of the world by the divine Word. The writer creates a “Secondary World” just as God created this “Primary World”5. On one level, this amounts to saying that Tolkien’s writing is non mimetic: it does not represent the created world in any way, but rather it imitates the creation of the world considered as an as yet unfinished process. At another level, it also means that Tolkien’s literature is non-allegorical, in the sense that it 1

1983: 138 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria I, 202. 3 Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 144. 4 Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 219-20. 5 Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 132. 2

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does not illustrate, translate or preach any religious doctrine, or at least it does not do so directly. He has repeatedly explained that he disliked allegory and that his work was not allegorical, but that instead he had a passion for myth. From his point of view, myth and fairytale are more or less the same thing. Myth and fair-story must, as all art,” he would say, “reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‘real’ world6.

And for this reason he has taken care to keep out of the Lord of the Rings any direct allusions to cults and religions, preferring instead to write in such a way that “the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism”7. And it is remarkable that his fictional world is “not a Christian world”8. Regarding this, the influence of Beowulf on The Lord of the Rings is all important, not only structurally as can be gathered from Tolkien’s essay “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics”, like the Beowulf poet, he is a Christian author writing a pre-Christian age legend. One central question in the Old-English saga is whether the pagan ancestors of the English could be saved in spite of their having lived in times historically deprived of revealed Christianity, or if they already possessed virtues that qualified them for redemption. The latter thesis is defended by G.K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man. This is also an essential issue in Tolkien’s work, with the additional consideration that he was highly conscious of living in a age of de-Christianisation, as he could witness in his own time the result of a long process that had lasted since the eighteenth century and perhaps even since the Reformation. As Humphrey Carpenter has shown in The Inklings, this was very much a preoccupation of Tolkien and his friends, chief among them C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, in the Oxford University of the mid-twentieth century, where “the vast majority of undergraduates and dons maintained towards Christianity an attitude of incurious tolerance”9. The lasting importance of the Tolkien-mania, induced both by his novels and their recent film adaptations, would seem to indicate that the Christian myth, even more perhaps that the Christian religion in its doctrinal and institutional forms, still finds a large echo in the wider public. 6

Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 144. Ibid., 172. 8 Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 220. 9 Carpenter, The Inklings, 225. 7

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2. Escape Tolkien’s literary work is a continuation and a variant of what Romanticism stands for in Western civilisation, in so far as the romantic movement is a reaction against the secularisation of the western world under the influence of materialist rationalism. T.E. Hulme once famously defined Romanticism as “spilt religion”, meaning that it was a take-over by literature of the spiritual aspirations of mankind after Enlightenment philosophy had broken the containing vessel of established modes of worship. Talking of what he called the “Eden ‘myth’”, for example, Tolkien said that most modern Christians have been rather bustled and hustled now for some generations by the selfstyled scientists, and they’ve sort of tucked Genesis into a lumber-room of their mind as not very fashionable furniture10.

Let alone what has been said above about the Genesis issue of creation, in Tolkien’s world the Eden myth is recuperated by the constant migration of the Elves to the Grey Havens of the west where they embark for another world very much like Paradise. One main difference between what he called his “mythology” and the Christian is that he proposes an eschatological vision of Eden because In this Myth the rebellion of created free-will precedes creation of the World (Eä); and Eä has in it, subcreatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken11.

But Middle Earth is certainly not an allegory of Eden, for it is a fallen world, and the Fall is utterly irreversible. “I am a Christian,” he said, “and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’12”. The world is doomed, and all that can be done is to wage to the bitter end a losing battle against “the evil spirit”, which “in modern but not universal terms” he equates with “‘scientific’ materialism”13, which on the whole the tyranny of Sauron and Mordor stands for. 10

Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 109. Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 286. 12 Ibid., 255. 13 Ibid., 110. 11

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This accounts for Tolkien’s vindication of escapism as a positive literary value, and his protestation against “the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used”14. In real life or in a state of war, escaping from one’s enemy is not only highly desirable, but it is a sacred duty. Those critics who are reproaching him with escapism are confusing, he said, “the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter”. If The Lord of the Rings is built on the motif of the quest romance, it has often been remarked that it is an inverted quest aspiring not to acquire, but to get rid of, an object of power. To say the same thing over again in the terms of Isaiah Berlin in “The Two Concepts of Freedom”, this is a war waged for negative, not positive freedom, freedom from rather than freedom to. The Lord of the Rings is a Christian myth in so far as it is the story of an escape from the Prince of this World.15 And as Tolkien explained, this is “the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death”16. In this world the quest and escape is bound to fail. Although the ring is destroyed at the end of The Return of the King, the victory over Sauron is only temporary and evil remains to stay. Just as Bilbo’s character was damaged by bearing the ring too long, the object of power has taken its toll on Frodo, who finds himself unable to destroy it of his own will. He only manages to do so by a trick of the tale rendered possible by the pity he has shown to Gollum by not killing him, so that the creature, a hobbit utterly perverted by prolonged intimacy with the ring, is hurled to destruction along with it by his own craving for it. Says Tolkien, Frodo’s “exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed”17. Both Bilbo and Frodo find redemption by being granted to leave this world and go west with the Elves.

3. Eucatastrophe The distinctive quality of myth or fairy-story, as Tolkien sees it, is precisely this happy ending, or rather this promise of one that they have the unique capacity to produce. Both this Primary World and the Secondary World of myth or fantasy are dominated by the Fall. “History often resembles ‘Myth’”, said Tolkien, “because they are both ultimately of the same stuff”18. And “There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall—all 14

Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 148. John 14:30 16 Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 152. 17 Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 326. 18 Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 129. 15

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stories are ultimately about the fall”19. But they contain, he said, “some samples or glimpses of final victory”20, and he considered it a distinctive characteristic of good myth or successful fairy-tale that it can produce these moments of “consolation”, in the form of a reversal of situation for the better: it can give to the child or man that hears it, when the ‘turn’ comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears21.

Tolkien called this positive peripety eucatastrophe”22, in contradistinction to the tragic dyscatastrophe of sorrow and grief. In so far as it brings “the joy of deliverance,” he said, “a fleeting glimpse of joy, joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief”, eucatastrophe is “evangelium”23, in other words it is tantamount to the Good Tidings. Tolkien’s eucatastrophe should not be confused with Joyce’s epiphany, although the two concepts are to some extent close to one another. In Stephen Hero, the first, unpublished version of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce defined epiphany in neoplatonician terms as the moment of Claritas or quidditas when the essence of a thing reveals itself — “Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance”24. Eucatastrophe is more than this: it is the moment of faith, the moment of the leap of faith. Says Tolkien, it is akin to the Christian miracles, in the sense that you have not only that sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Anankê or our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us.

It can happen just as well in everyday waking life, in dreams or in the experience of reading. Unlike Joyce’s epiphany, it is not so much a moment of understanding of the radiant “soul” and “structure” of the objective world, as it is a moment of hope against hope, of belief in the unbelievable. It is also a moment of liberation from the material and rational world: said Tolkien, your whole nature chained in material cause 19

Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 147. Ibid., 255. 21 Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 154. 22 Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 100 et passim. 23 Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 152. 24 Joyce, Stephen Hero, 218. 20

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and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. Although eucatastrophe is a moment of irrational revelation, “the sensation,” said Tolkien, is “the same as having been convinced by reason (if without reasoning)”25. Furthermore, if eucatastrophe is close to the idea of a happy ending, it is not structurally linked to it as a literary device. Remarkably, the protracted ending of The Lord of the Rings does not afford a case of eucatastrophe, but there are several in the course of the trilogy. For instance, Tolkien said he could experience a eucatastrophic when rereading The Hobbit long after having written it, at the moment of Bilbo’s exclamation: “The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!”26 and perhaps this also applies to the moment when the Eagles rescue Frodo and Sam from the burning slopes of Mount Doom after the destruction of the ring. But one might quote other examples, as for instance the rescuing of Frodo from the Dark Riders by Glorfindel at the Ford of Rivendell, or the victory at the Battle of Hornburg after Gandalf rides to the rescue on Shadowfax. Yet another instance may be found perhaps in the story of Beren and Lúthien in the Silmarillion, which is partly sung by Strider in The Fellowship of the Ring. It is also possible that each reader is likely to experience this particular emotion at different moments of the tale. But Tolkien goes on by saying that, outside the realm of fiction, or so to speak in the Primary World, “The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history,” and “the Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation”27. So that one may consider that the eucatastrophe affords the missing link between pre-Christian myths and legends and the Gospels, considering that there are elements in pagan mythologies that bring the same emotion to the heart as the Good Tidings in the Holy Scriptures. “The Evangelium,” he said, “has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them”28.

4. Secondary Belief Eucatastrophe may be considered as the object of the quest for both writer and reader in Tolkien’s work. For he took it to be “the primal desire

25

Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 100-101. Ibid., 101. 27 Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 156. 28 Idem. 26

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at the heart of Faërie: the realization, independent of the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder29”. If so, this casts a light on his practice of mythopoeic literature as being an exercise and cultivation of religious faith. He aimed, in fact, at fostering in literature the “literary belief” that children are so capable of as readers of fairy-tales. And in this respect, he challenged again Coleridge on the “willing suspension of disbelief”30, arguing that a story should require of its readers a pretence not to disbelieve, but that on the contrary a successful literary work should induce its readers to genuine belief. This enchanted state, which Bettelheim would later analyse in The Uses of Enchantment for children’s literature, is what Tolkien called “Secondary Belief” and would have extended to adult literature. This practice of literature is therefore akin to magic. But the technique of a magician that “pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World” and aims at “power in this world, domination of things and wills.” Not so the art of the mythopoeic writer, whose “enchantment produces a Secondary World into which both designer and spectator can enter”31. Although it may seem difficult to reconcile Tolkien with Byron, it is interesting to recall that the author of Don Juan once wrote, in an 1814 letter to James Hogg, that “Poetry must always exist, like drink, where there is a demand for it”. In a comparable way, Tolkien realised that one virtue of mythopoeic literature was that it aimed at “the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires,” although rather of a spiritual nature, and that chief among those was the desire “to hold communion with other living things”32. And in a letter to his son Michael, he said that “The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion”33. Of course, in this second instance he was speaking of the Holy Eucharist, but there may well be some very close relationship between the two all the same. For Tolkien said that at some period of his life he had almost ceased to practise his religion, but that he was called back to the Tabernacle by nothing else than what he calls “the sense of the starving hunger”34. The similarity between his religious and his literary practices in this respect is given by his recognition that, in both instances, communion amounts to upholding faith by paradoxically satisfying and rekindling the hunger of belief. He would say that

29

Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 116. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria II, 6. 31 Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 142-143. 32 Ibid., 116. 33 Tolkien, The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 339. 34 Ibid., 340. 30

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fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded35.

5. Recovery That Tolkien’s work is centred on eucatastrophe as a literary means of cultivating belief, according to the mode on which it is produced in fairytales, cannot but bring to mind these words of the Lord to his disciples: “Believe me, unless you become like little children again, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven”36. Tolkien sometimes considered that fairystories were a “prophylactic against loss”37. That he should have had in mind the loss of religious faith seems highly probable, but he also meant simply the capacity for wonder, in a world that had been gradually disenchanted by empiricist positivism. His vision of modern man was very much like Blake’s, who saw him as pent up in the prison of his five senses: If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. / For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.38

Tolkien expressed himself on this topic in very similar terms, saying that we need “to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity—from possessiveness”. At face value, this sounds very much like the notion of defamiliarisation in literature, or ostranenie, as propounded by the Russian structuralist Viktor Scklovsky. But Tolkien, who was hardly a structuralist, called this “Recovery”39, and he envisaged it as a return to what our vision of the world must have been before it was adulterated by empiricist philosophy. This should be considered in keeping with the aesthetics of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, a movement that Tolkien was very close to as an English Roman Catholic. His mother’s conversion to Catholicism was directly related to the Birmingham Oratory of Cardinal Newman. One likely intellectual reference, in this respect, is that of the German thinker Rudolf Steiner, whose 1902 book Christianity as Mythical Fact was discussed in Tolkien’s Oxford literary club the Inklings, and found a 35

Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 142. Matthew xviii. 3 37 Ibid., 146. 38 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 14. 39 Idem., 146 et passim. 36

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sympathetic echo in his friend C. S. Lewis’s essay “Myth Became Fact”. In Mystics of the Renaissance, Steiner developed an anti-Darwinian theory of the history of ideas in four ages. According to him, mankind had drifted away from an initial stage of participation when it was in unison with the creative powers of the world, through a classical age of conceptual thinking, and a modern age of alienation from the world, advocating the advent of a return to empathic participation. This is very much like Tolkien’s idea of recovery, which on the whole may be viewed as a quest for atonement with the Creator through mythopoeic literature. “This recovery fairy-stories help us to make,” he said, “in that sense only a taste for them may make us, or keep us, childish”40.

Works Cited Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings ; C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends. London: Allen and Unwin, 1978. Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man. 1925. Ignatius Press, 1993. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria, 1817. ed. J. Shawcross. 2 vol., London: Oxford University Press, 1965. Joyce, James. Stephen Hero. 1944. London: Jonathan Cape, 1956. Steiner, Rudolf. Mystics of the Renaissance and Their Relation to Modern Thought. 1911. Whitefish, MT : Kessinger Publishing, 1996. Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” Tree and Leaf. London: Unwin, 1964. —. The Hobbit, or there and back again. 1837. London: HarperCollins, 2001. —. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien. 1995. —. The Lord of the Rings. 1954-1955. London: HarperCollins, 1995. —. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. London: HarperCollins 1983.

40

Ibid., 146-147.

MEDIAEVAL MYTH AND MODERN NARRATIVE: DANTE’S MYTH OF HEAVEN AND HELL AND CHARLES WILLIAMS’ DESCENT INTO HELL ROBERT-LOUIS ABRAHAMSON

This paper does not present the findings from research or propose new theoretical approaches to myth—or faith and creation. Instead it attempts to point out some connections between The Divine Comedy and Charles Williams’ Descent into Hell, specifically to investigate how Dante’s mediaeval images become transformed in Williams’ mid-twentiethcentury narrative. We must not, however, rest in mere observation of literary methods. Both Dante and Williams were intensely concerned with the relationship between literature and the reader and we would be unfaithful to our authors if we did not proceed to the next step of asking how these two versions of the same universal truths engage us as readers. What are we doing when we read Dante? What are we doing when we read Williams?

Definition of Myth Before we talk about The Divine Comedy as myth, our first task is to define the way we are using myth. A myth, in the sense that I am using the term, is an image or story that dramatises or incarnates a concept, assumption or belief about the world. The concept, assumption or belief can be expressed in the form of an abstract statement: a philosophical proposition, a theological doctrine or dogma, a definition of a person or society. These abstract statements by their very nature are designed to be clear, even if complex. Their job is to pin down a truth or a way of understanding the world as precisely as possible. The images that become the mythic counterparts of these statements may never be as clear and precise as the abstract statements themselves, but they allow for much

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greater connection between the universal truth and the individual working with the myth. (We will look at some examples shortly.) Sometimes the abstractions arrive after the myths have arisen in a culture, but sometimes, as in the case of Dante, the abstractions come first and the poet then turns the ideas into mythic imagery. While the philosophical or theological statements can, as we have said, be precisely and intellectually understood, the mythic images can never be so rigidly apprehended. If they are good, rich images, they will shimmer with many nuances, revealing new insights to us each time we come to them. The best myths feature what Erich Auerbach long ago identified as one of the chief characteristics of Hebrew prose style in the Bible: reticence, a scarcity of detail, leaving it to the reader to interpret meaning. Thus, as Anne Righter has said, myths “possess a meaning at once irreducible and mysterious. They demand interpretation and expansion.”1 Myths become such an important vehicle for spiritual truths because, providing only a few essential details, they force the reader to complete the picture, drawing the reader to internalise the image as the reader adds his or her details. “Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them,” Camus said,2 and as our imagination breathes life into the reticent mythic images, we enter into the myth; the myth enters into us. We see the meaning of the myth more deeply and the myth enlightens us more deeply about our own life. We have time for only simplified examples. Let us look for a minute at Dante’s myth of lust, one of the best-known incidents in the Inferno. Aquinas, as we would expect, provides an abstract, theological definition of lust: “seeking venereal pleasure not in accordance with right reason”.3 To understand this statement we need to define what “venereal pleasure” refers to exactly. (Does Bill Clinton’s insistence that he and Monica Lewinsky did not have “sex” in the White House mean they also did not have “venereal pleasure”? Was he engaging in the sin of lust? Presumably we can answer yes or no.) We also need to define what it means to act “in accordance with right reason”—a complex definition, to be sure, but one we can grasp precisely with our intellect. In other words, Aquinas’ statement does not need interpretation; it simply needs understanding, and once we understand the statement, we can stand firm. We all need this kind of intellectual rock to stand on. 1

Righter, Introduction. William Shakespeare. The Tempest, 20. Camus. “The Myth of Sisyphus” http://members.bellatlantic.net/~samg2/sysiphus.html (accessed 15 May 2007). 3 St Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica II-II, Question153, 3 http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/aquinas154.htm (accessed 15 May 2007). 2

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But we also need a more flexible approach to the topic, one that brings into play more than just our intellect. This, I believe, is the role of myth. What happens then when Aquinas’ theological statement is transformed into a mythic image? We find ourselves in a place where light is mute, a place that moans as oceans do impelled by storms, surging, embattled in conflicting squalls. The swirling wind of Hell will never rest. It drags these spirits onwards in its force. It chafes them—rolling, clashing—grievously.4

We are in Canto v of the Inferno, with the image of that swirling wind, la bufera infernal, “demanding interpretation and expansion”, drawing our imagination to breathe life into this detail. We let the image work upon us in a state of “wise passiveness”5 as we open to possibilities of interpretation. This swirling wind of hell impels the souls of the lustful. We may recall that a little earlier, in Canto iii, we had seen the souls entering Charon’s boat being compared to the leaves falling from a tree in autumn; we bring something of that image into our reading of the wind impelling these souls in Canto v, no longer in the calm, melancholy autumn scene where leaves gently fall from the tree, but now in the sweeping autumn wind, where the leaves are aimlessly tossed up in the air, swirling beyond all control. So we perceive that the lustful souls are whirled in a futile circle, getting nowhere, just passing through the same place over and over. What does this tell us about a life surrendered to lust? Our first full image of souls not living “in accordance with right reason” (“those who make reason a slave to appetite”, as Dante says) does not ask us to construct careful definitions and distinctions but to exercise our imagination, evoking the aimlessness of leaves blown in the wind, perhaps memories of momentary terror on a fairground ride,6 not to mention our own experience of allowing ourselves to be swept along by sexual desire in circumstances where we know we should not have abandoned ourselves. What comes next? The souls go nowhere—the circular sweep, the return to the same old clandestine or not-so-clandestine meetings to 4

Dante, The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno, 41. Wordsworth. “Expostulation and Reply” The Major Works, 130. 6 Blake’s illustration of this scene shows the souls being swirled in a roller-coasterlike loop. 5

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repeat the one act of surrender but, so long as they are abandoned to lust, not moving beyond that circle. Interpreting the mythic image shows us what it feels like to sin in this way. Now we can examine our own feelings to see how far they do or do not match those that Dante’s myth has depicted. Of course there is more to come in canto v as Dante develops his mythic images of lust: the silent light (which we will examine in a minute), the catalogue of the lussoriosi and the self-deluding seduction act carried out by Francesca. Looking at only 5 1/2 lines as we have above, however, gives us taste enough of the kind of rich mythic reading possible at every moment in the best myths. And as we meditate on even these few lines, we engage in an activity radically different from the intellectual precision required in reading Aquinas. We move—dance might be a better word—among the few images provided in the text, associations with other, similar images elsewhere in the text, our own experiences and little vivid scenes we can create to expand the basic image provided in the myth. We intertwine ourselves with the myth in an engagement always open for further interpretation, and open to the possibility of profound enlightenment within ourselves. To explain this a little more methodically, let me outline two steps I propose this type of mythic engagement asks of the reader.

1. Connecting with the language If we are dealing with a myth on any level deeper than the most superficial (“Oedipus killed his father and slept with his mother”; “Paolo and Francesca gave in to their passion and committed adultery”)—and I recommend that we do move deeper—then were are going to have to open ourselves to the language, whether words or paint or marble. Those trained in close reading may feel at home here, as will those who have practised Ignatius’ composition of place. We empty ourselves as best we can so that we can be as receptive as possible while we look for word play, listen to the sound of the language and experiment with metaphorical possibilities. It is more difficult when (as for many of us with Dante, or especially the Bible) we are dealing with translations, but we do the best we can, trusting our mediating translators or placing two or more translations against each other. In the lines from canto v I cited earlier, we may stop to notice that the “light is mute” (ogne luce muto). Mark Musa gives us a more literal sense

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of the line when he says this was “a place where no light shone at all”,7 but he loses the synaesthesia of soundless light. Dorothy Sayers retains the juxtaposition of light and silence though only by constructing a complex syntax that loses Dante’s condensed image of luce muto: “A place made dumb of every glimmer of light”. Her note, however, connects us back to canto i.60, where the wolf in the Dark Wood drives Dante back down the hill, towards the place, as Sayers puts it, “wherein the sun is mute” (là dove ’l sol tace).8 We must not feel any pressure to “solve” the paradox of light making no sound. We must sit with it, and let it work upon us until, well, until the light speaks to us. The image does not say there is no light. Apparently there is some light in Hell (otherwise how could Dante describe anything?) but it is mute. If we take the light, or the sun, in its metaphorical sense of God (“the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world”9), might we not say that God is present in Hell, as he is in all his works, but he is a presence only, unwilling or unable to communicate. In so far as these are created souls, there is some tenuous connection with the Creator, but their damnation puts them in a state where the connection leads to no communication. This myth of lust, then, shows us that God is still present. As Sayers comments, “Lust is a type of shared sin; at its best, and so long as it remains a sin of incontinence only, there is mutuality in it and exchange:...it is not, in intention, wholly selfish.”10 But, as we see later in the image of Paolo and Francesca where Paolo says nothing, the lustful may be for ever together but never communicate. This togetherness remains mute. Myth, as Righter says, “demand[s] interpretation and expansion”, and it soon becomes obvious how slow this reading might become: an attentive lectio divina, where we stop at every arresting detail for as long as we need to. Another detail of the language here that might arrest us is the “conflicting squalls” (contrari venti) playing over the sea. The image shows us not just a high sea under a strong wind, but a sea “embattled” (combattuto)—at war—contrary impulses raising up contrary movements within the sea. In what ways does an incontinent, lustful soul find itself at the mercy of not just one impulse, but several, conflicting impulses? And then there is the “swirling wind” that never rests. Lust is a continuous buffeting, and the coming together has nothing human about it; it is a 7

Musa, trans. Dante. The Divine Comedy Vol. I: Inferno, 110. Sayers, trans. Dante. Hell, 98. 9 John 1.9 10 Sayers. Hell, 101 8

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dragging, chafing, “rolling, clashing”. To take in what the myth tells us about lust, we have to allow these images to work upon us, both enlightening our understanding and shaping our emotional response. We have to be open to new and surprising responses each time we contemplate the image. The text is as alive as we are. (Or perhaps we should say that the text is only as alive as we are who read it.)

2. Conducting the Inner Work What I have described as the first step can be practised with any kind of good literature. What distinguishes myth (and a few other forms such as fairy tales and parables) is its openness to be read similar to the way Jungians read dreams in the process sometimes called Inner Work. But unlike the dreams, which come from within us, the myths come from without. They connect us to a more communal world. We do not all share the same dreams, but we can all partake of the same myth, even if in different ways. Maybe we can call this the collective consciousness. This Inner Work is the stage where we “breathe life” into the myth— our life. The work integrates the text and my individual self in much the same way as does lectio divina, when I ask what God is saying specifically to me in the reading. The myth shows the pattern of a universal truth; I judge how far my individual life matches the universal truth. That language I have looked so carefully at—how well does it describe my life? How well does the mythic text provide language to help me understand patterns in my life, both those I have been conscious of and those I have not been conscious of? As I read the lines about the mute light, the moaning sea and conflicting squalls, the swirling wind and “rolling, crashing” spirits, I can ask myself where I find such light, seas, winds in my own soul. In particular, I may be checking to locate where in my soul might I find the sin of lust, or at least the sin of incontinence shared obsessively with another. That time I looked at the person sitting across the room and felt desire? No, that’s not lust: where is the wind rolling me around? That time when this other person and I had recently met and hit it off and I could do nothing all day without my attention being whirled back to that person or my mouse rolling to check if any e-mail had arrived? Here I was out of control, swept along. Was this a lustful passion, even though there was no “venereal pleasure” at the moment? I could ask other questions. Is there a divine presence that I feel but cannot communicate with? Where might there be a moaning in my self— perhaps that constant painful knot in my guts is a kind of moan, especially

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if I can perceive that the knot arises from my being “embattled in conflicting squalls”. Here the myth can provide us with insight into our shadow selves. What part of me works as combatting winds? What part seems to be dragging me onwards in its force? Dante can become my Virgil and guide me through my own dark, infernal regions. Or, in my experience, the mythic reading can work effectively in another way. We can watch our own language to see if it connects with Dante’s mythic terms. I remember a time when a friend came to me talking about what she first described as the joys of her new love affair, but after a while it became apparent these were the miseries not joys.11 “Most of the time I feel like I’m all at sea,” she told me. “I don’t know which way I’m going. I think of him all day and then when we meet up he’s all over me. But I feel like I’m drowning. My passion and his passion don’t seem to work together but to clash against each other. It makes for pretty good sex when we’re rolling in the bed, but, well, something feels wrong.” Yes, Aquinas might say that she has been “seeking venereal pleasure not in accordance with right reason”, but how much will this enlighten her? I recognised Canto v in what she was describing—the sea imagery, the conflicting, clashing winds of passion, and even the rolling on the bed—and I told her about Dante’s myth. She looked further and could see other images from the myth in her relationship. She saw that, like Francesca, she seemed to throw the responsibility for the relationship (which was with her boss—almost as much against right reason in our culture as adultery with one’s brother-in-law was in Dante’s)—she threw the responsibility onto some abstract love (“Love…Love…Love,” says Francesca, “drew us onwards….”). What struck her most forcefully, though, was the connection between the way her lover never spoke when they were out together but it was always up to her to explain to those they met why the two of them were together. This was too close to Dante’s myth to ignore. Francesca speaks and tries to win Dante’s sympathy, while Paolo never utters a word. Where was this friend once she had connected her life to the universal truth dramatised in Dante’s myth? Perhaps the best way to describe it is to call it a moment of epiphany. She had a revelation of what was truly happening in her life. Myths do not offer us moral visions; they do not tell us what we should do; they are ontological tools by which we see more clearly the nature of our existence. The Dante connection did not “solve” her problem, but once the myth gave her metaphorical language she could 11

I am retelling this story with some alterations.

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use to speak with deep significance about her experience, then at least she was grounded in some meaning about herself. And only then, grounded in meaning that explained the very depths of her experience, only then could she perhaps take the right steps to move out of the rough seas and the overpowering wind. Suddenly the light was no longer mute, but was speaking to her. The comfort of such a moment is profound. And The Divine Comedy, I find, helps more than any other collection of mythic imagery to open us to all the conditions of the soul—both the damnable aspects and, of course, the blessed ones. There is one more way we can use this mythic reading. Because, as I said before, the myth can connect us to a collective consciousness, it can provide a set of loaded images that carry meaning between us and others. We can speak about a place where the light is mute and, so long as the other person also knows Dante, we communicate in a very few words a whole set of experiences we can both share. In other words, myths can supply us with language to express our deepest experiences to ourselves and to others.

Charles Williams’ transformation of Dante’s myth And how does Charles Williams fit into this? Williams played an important role in Dante criticism of the first half of the twentieth century with his critical study The Figure of Beatrice and with his influence on Dorothy Sayers, awakening in her the love for Dante that led to her translation, the standard translation in English for many years. But there is a deeper connection with Dante in Williams’ late novel Descent into Hell (1937), a book that reincarnates Dante’s myth into a modern setting in something of the same metempsychosis as Joyce’s Ulysses transforms Homer’s myth into ordinary life in modern Dublin. No one would argue that Williams’ novel can compare to Joyce’s on the level of artistic innovation and execution, but on the level of spiritual insight a good case can be made (if we’re into making such cases) that Williams’ novel is much more profound than Joyce’s as he combines the thriller and the psychological novel to dramatise the state of the soul within a variety of different characters. Perhaps in no other piece of literature is the state of the characters’ souls so crucial—except, of course, in The Divine Comedy. The state of these characters’ souls will feel very familiar to someone with a knowledge of Dante. In fact, Descent into Hell’s three parallel plots represent versions of Dante’s three major divisions. In the main plot of the novel, we watch as Pauline Anstruther rises to the world of the Paradiso. Through her grandmother Margaret and the poet Peter Stanhope she learns

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about what Williams called the co-inherence of all souls, and the principle of exchange that governs the heavenly City and that can take the form of substitution, where one soul can bear the burden overpowering another soul. These are the same principles that shape Dante’s heavenly community of saints. The same shaping principles, but in a different shape. As well as the general principles, there are specific moments too that recreate moments in Dante. Here are two. First, Margaret Anstruther, lying on her deathbed, immersed in visions of heavenly light, sees the Dead Man who has been wandering lost in the dark world he entered after his suicide, and she sends her granddaughter Pauline to seek out and help the man towards his salvation. Surely this parallels the opening impulse of Dante’s poem when Mary and Lucy and Beatrice see from heaven Dante lost in the dark wood, and send Virgil to seek out the lost Dante and lead him towards his salvation. Another parallel can be found in the ability of Pauline, now at home in the City, to resist Lily Sammile’s temptation to “cure” Pauline by giving her whatever she wants. “Thank you very much,” says Pauline, knowing that the style of heaven is always courteous, “but I don’t want anything....How could I want anything but what is?”12 Here we find ourselves before Piccarda Donati in the Paradiso, who tells Dante Brother, the virtue of our heavenly love, tempers our will and makes us want no more than what we have—we thirst for this alone.13

Parallels to the Purgatorio appear in the subplot about the Dead Man, who, though he committed suicide, is not damned since he did not know suicide was wrong. In fact, for him it was a positive choice, a desire for something better, rather than, as with Pier della Vigne in the Inferno, a running away from life. His is the story of rising towards salvation. In a deviation from Dante’s myth, the Dead Man does not earn his final judgement at the moment of death because, his life being so miserable and limited, he had no ability to choose. Limbo, for Charles Williams, is not a permanent place at the outskirts of hell, as it is for Dante. It is a temporary state where souls too battered or ignorant in this life at last are given the chance to choose between love or self. Williams’ last novel, All Hallows’ Eve (1945), is concerned primarily with this experience. The Dead Man chooses now, once he is shown a vision of love. He finds himself like Dante at the circle of loving fire in Canto xxvii of the 12 13

Williams. Descent into Hell, 208. Musa, trans. Dante. The Divine Comedy Vol. III: Paradise, iii, 70-72.

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Purgatorio, arrested by fear but once choosing love, then able to face the flames without fear. “Fear, which never but in love deserts mortal man, deserted him there,” Williams says.14 And at this moment of salvation, the whole hill on which the novel is set (also known as “the place of skulls”)—the whole hill trembles, obviously a reference to the Crucifixion, but also a reminder that Dante’s Mount Purgatory shakes whenever a penitent soul is released into heaven. The final subplot, and in many ways the most engaging, depicts the gradual descent of the historian Wentworth’s soul into hell. Wentworth’s damnation comes about because he refuses to embrace what Williams calls fact, the independent being of anything other than himself, specifically of other people, who come together as community. Wentworth denies community and chooses himself at each step of his descent. He chooses to live in his own fantasy world, which culminates in his creation of a succubus, a “secret creature of substantial illusion”15, a soulless model of the young woman the middle-age man desires in order to bolster his selfesteem. Williams shows how at every point Wentworth is offered the chance to choose fact but he denies what is in favour of what he wants. In so far as he denies fact, he connects to the shaping principle of the Inferno, where all the damned souls have lost the good of the intellect (hanno perduto il ben de l’intelletto16). It is the intellect that enables us to discern the world around us and choose the right course. When Wentworth loses the good of his intellect, he loses the power to choose and becomes a ruined soul like all those lost souls in Dante. I want to look at two moments in Wentworth’s story that parallel moments in the Inferno. First, since we looked at Dante’s myth of lust earlier, let us see how this myth appears in the novel. Here is Wentworth early in the novel, trying to decide whether he should spy on Adela, the young woman he desires. Notice how Williams’ description echoes the passivity of Dante’s lustful souls, impelled not by intellect but by that infernal wind: [He was] at last free to make up his mind. He could not do it. He was driven by his hunger...and for some time he wandered about his rooms [as the lustful are blown in circles around their room in hell. Wentworth comes to a stop looking out his bedroom window]. Wentworth stood there now for some seconds, exercising a no more conscious but a still more deliberate choice. He also yielded—to the 14

Williams. Descent into Hell, 208. Williams. Descent into Hell, 102. 16 Inferno iii.18 15

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chaos within rather than the chaos without. [Dante’s “contending squalls”?]...A remnant of intelligence cried to him that this was the road of mania, and self-indulgence leading to mania. Self-preservation itself urged him to remain [and not go out to spy on the woman]; lucidity urged him, if not love....He must act before it was too late. He would not go to spy; he would go for a walk. [Like Francesca’s his self-delusion is the denial of fact.] He went out of the room, down the soft swift stairs of his mind, into the streets of his mind, to find the phantoms of his mind. He desired hell.”17

For Williams, then, the state of lust the older man feels for the younger woman appears with no explicitly sexual language, only the language of aimless, passive movement and gradual yielding, and, as with Francesca, the self-deluding retreat from fact and responsibility. Notice too the way this brief passage differs in literary mode from Dante’s. Dante offers us a few significant images and when we are shown an extended image, as in Francesca’s monologue, the character speaks from where she is at the moment Dante encounters her. Even when she relates what happens in the past, it is from her position in the present. In Williams, we are given an omniscient narrator whom we can trust to take us inside the consciousness of the character across a passage of time. Thus, while in Dante we have an image of what a lustful soul looks like, illuminating for us what the sin itself is like, in Williams we have a drama depicting how the soul progressed—or better, degenerated—into that state. The myth presents us with the ontological view, the being. The novel shows us the movement of the soul, the becoming. This difference in presentation invites a different kind of reading. Before we look at this different kind of reading let us first look at one more example of Wentworth’s descent into hell as another version of Dante’s Inferno. Here are the last pages of the novel, as we watch Wentworth’s final steps towards damnation. Wentworth is attending a dinner to celebrate Sir Aston Moffatt, a historian Wentworth views as a hated rival. In fact, in an earlier passage, Wentworth is so full of wrath at the news that Moffatt is about to be knighted that he crushes the pages of the newspaper and tears the paper open again in a paroxysm of rage, manifesting anger through rending and tearing like Filippo Argenti and the souls attacking him in the wrathful Stygian marsh in canto viii of the Inferno. Wentworth has been losing his grip on reality and has had recurring visions of climbing down an endless rope.

17

Williams, Descent in to Hell, 49-50.

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Notice in the following passage how Williams unobtrusively locates this moment in Wentworth’s descent as taking place in Dante’s Circle of the Violent against God18, the place of the falling flames of fire and burning sands. In Dante’s myth the purifying Pentecostal fire descending from above becomes a destructive fire for those who have abused God and his gifts. In the novel, Wentworth’s denial of the divine gift of colleagues turns his colleague’s friendly words into tormenting fire. Notice too the way we are taken inside the consciousness of this soul about to be finally damned so that we see what it was like to descend into hell—all the blurred incoherence of the world and the bewildered partial realisation of what is going on as he finally loses il ben de l’intelletto. The resources of the psychological novel and the horror story combine to take us where Dante’s literary form could never have gone. I offer an extended passage so the full effect can come across. And there suddenly before him was Sir Aston Moffatt. The shock almost restored him. If he had ever hated Sir Aston because of a passion for austere truth, he might even then have laid hold on the thing that was abroad in the world and been saved. If he had been hopelessly wrong in his facts and yet believed them so, and believed they were important in themselves, he might have felt a touch of the fire...,and still been saved....He looked at Sir Aston and thought, not “He was wrong in his facts”, but “I have been cheated”. It was his last consecutive thought. Sir Aston was decidedly deaf and extremely talkative, and had a sincere admiration for his rival. He came straight across to Wentworth, and began to talk. The world, which Wentworth had continuously and persistently denied in favour of himself, now poured itself over him, and as if in a deluge from heaven drove him into the depths. Very marvellous is the glorious condescension of the Omnipotence;19 the myth of the fire which was rained over the plain now incarnated itself in Sir Aston Moffatt.20 Softly and gently, perpetually and universally, the chatty 18

Canto xiv Dante too pauses before describing the rain of fire, to exclaim, though in a slightly different way, how marvellous this scene shows God to be: 19

O vendetta di Dio, quando tu dei esser temuta da ciascun che legge ciò che fu manifesto a li occhi miei! (Inf. xiv.16–18) Great God! Your vengeance must be rightly feared by all who read the verses I compose to say what there was straight before my eyes. (trans. Kirkpatrick) 20 Here is Dante’s description:

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sentences descended on the doomed man, each sentence a little prick of fire, because, as he stood there, he realized with a sickness at heart that a voice was talking and he did not know what it was saying. He heard two sounds continually repeated: “Went-worth, Went-worth.” He knew that those two noises meant something, but he could not remember what. If all the faces that were about him would go away he might remember, but they did not go. They gathered round him, and carried him forward in the midst of them, through a doorway. As he went through it he saw in front of him tables, and with a last flash of memory knew that he had come there to eat and drink. There was his chair, at the bottom left corner, where he had always sat....He went to it with an eager trot. It was waiting for him as it had always waited, for ever and ever; all his life and from the creation of the world he had sat there, he would sit there at the end, looking towards the—he could not think what was the right name for the tall man at the other end, who had been talking to him just now. He looked at him and tried to smile, but could not, for the tall man’s eyes were blank of any meaning, and gazed at him emptily....His smile ceased. He was at last by his chair; he would always sit there, always, always. He sat down. As he did so, he knew he was lost. He could not understand anything about him. He could just remember that there had been one moment when a sudden bright flash had parted from him, fleeing swiftly across the sky into its source, and he wanted that moment back; he wanted desperately to hold on to the rope. The rope was not there. He had believed that there would be for him a companion at the bottom of the rope who would satisfy him for ever, and now he was there at the bottom, and there was nothing but noises and visions which meant nothing. The rope was not there. There were faces, which ceased to be faces, and became blobs of whitish red and yellow, working and twisting in a horrible way that yet did not surprise him, because nothing could surprise him. They moved and leaned and bowed; and between them were other things that were motionless now but might at any moment begin to move and crawl. Away over them was a huge round white blotch, with black marking on it, and two long black lines going round and round, one very fast and one very slow. This was time, too fast for his brain, too slow for his heart. If he only had hold of the rope still, he could perhaps climb out of this meaningless horror; at least, he could find some meaning and relation in it all. He felt that the great blotch had somehow slid up and obscured the shining silver radiance into which a flash out of him had gone, and if he could get the rope he could Sovra tutto ’l sabbion, d’un cader lento, piovean di foco dilatate falde, come di neve in alpe sanza vento. (Inf. xiv.28–30) And over all that barren sand there fell— as slow as Alpin snow on windless days— a shower of broad-winged fire flakes drifting down. (trans. Kirkpatrick)

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Robert-Louis Abrahamson climb past, or, with great shuddering, even through the horrible blotch, away out of this depth where anything might be anything, and was anything, for he did not know what it was. The rope was not there. He shrank into himself, trying to shut his eyes and lose sight of this fearful opposite of the world he had known. Quite easily he succeeded. But he could not close his ears, for he did not know how to manage the more complex co-ordination of shoulders and arms and hands. So there entered into him still a small, steady, meaningless flow of sound, which stung and tormented him with the same lost knowledge of meaning; small burning flames flickered down on his soul. His eyes opened again in mere despair. A little hopeless voice came from his throat. He said, and rather gasped than spoke: “Ah! Ah!” Then everything at which he was looking rushed together and became a point, very far off, and he also was a point opposite it; and both points were rushing together, because in this place they drew towards each other from the more awful repulsion of the void. But fast as they went they never reached one another, for out of the point that was not he there expanded an anarchy of unintelligible shapes and hid it, and he knew it had gone out, expiring in the emptiness before it reached him. The shapes turned themselves into alternate panels of black and white. He had forgotten the name of them, but somewhere at the same time he had thought he knew similar forms and they had had names. These had no names, and whether they were or were not anything, and whether that anything was desirable or hateful he did not know. He had now no consciousness of himself as such, for the magical mirrors of Gomorrah had been broken, and the city itself had been blasted, and he was out beyond it in the blankness of a living oblivion, tormented by oblivion. The shapes stretched out beyond him, all half turned away, all rigid and silent. He was sitting at the end, looking up an avenue of nothingness, and the little flames licked his soul, but they did not now come from without, for they were the power, and the only power, his dead past had on him; the life, and the only life, of his soul. There was, at the end of the grand avenue, a bobbing shape of black and white that hovered there and closed it. As he saw it there came on him a suspense; he waited for something to happen. The silence lasted; nothing happened. In that pause expectancy faded. Presently then the shape went out and he was drawn, steadily, everlastingly, inward and down through the bottomless circles of the void.21

(When we next reread the Inferno we might want to bear in mind that this passage describes something like what all those ruined souls Dante shows us from the outside are experiencing on the inside. If we remember this, we will never be tempted to romanticise any of those characters. Williams shows us just how hideous the damnation of a human being can be.) 21

Williams, Descent into Hell, 218-222.

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And what happens as we read such hideous damnation? It is obvious that we cannot read it in the mythic way that we read Dante. We cannot connect our particular soul with the universal image Williams presents, precisely because the novel form Williams uses does not universalise; it particularises individual characters’ experiences. I can recognise certain aspects of Wentworth’s mental process as being similar to mine; I can put myself next to Wentworth, but I cannot identify myself with him as, say, my friend could do with Francesca when she realised that she was Francesca in so far as she was deluding herself. I keep going back to Anne Righter’s comment that myths “possess a meaning at once irreducible and mysterious. They demand interpretation and expansion.” Williams’ novel does not have such a meaning. It does not demand interpretation and expansion. It demands an emotional response. When we read these pages of Wentworth’s final damnation (bearing in mind that even the best of us will never understand all that Williams is talking about here), we recoil with fascinated horror at his dissolving humanity. Similarly, when we read those passages describing the emotional experiences of the “heavenly” characters, we are elated by the joyful possibilities shown to us through these characters’ interior life. Perhaps an appropriate way to understand how these passages engage the reader is to pick up Dante’s own concept of the bridle and spur, two ways we can direct our desires away from sin and towards “right reason”.22 What Williams offers us, I propose, are bridles, to pull us back from sinful desires by showing their true, unsentimentalised horror, and spurs, to exalt us and thus prompt our desires more strongly towards the heavenly goal. Like the carvings on the cornice of Pride in the Purgatorio with their visibile parlare, “visible speech”, Charles Williams’ novels at their best render Dante’s myth into the visible speech of the novel, giving us the illusion that we are in the presence of a real consciousness, in order to arouse our desires and direct them towards the proper objects.

22

“Desire never does anything else but pursue and flee; and whenever Desire pursues what it should, and as far as it should, a man keeps within the limits of his perfection. This Desire, however, must be ridden by Reason…Reason, like a good horseman, directs Desire with bridle and spur. It uses the bridle when desire is pursuing…;it uses the spur when Desire flees, in order to turn it back to the spot from which it wishes to flee….” Quoted in Charles Williams, The New Christian Year 3rd Monday in Lent http://tomwills.typepad.com/thenewchristianyear/dante/index.html (accessed 15 May 2007).

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So in the end what do we make of this transposing of Dante’s mythic images into Williams’ novel/thriller genre? Dante’s myth and Williams’ spurs and bridles are based on similar Christian beliefs. They agree about what heaven and hell, salvation and damnation mean to the human soul. Perhaps we could say that Dante’s myths and Williams’ narratives have the same substance, but differ in person. They present the same view of the world, but they come to us in different ways, through different kinds of experiences. The same light speaks to us in both authors.

Works Cited Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy 1: Inferno. Trans. Robin Kirkpatrick, London: Penguin, 2006. Camus, Albert. “The Myth of Sisyphus” http://members.bellatlantic.net/~samg2/sysiphus.html (accessed 15 May 2007). Musa, Mark. trans. Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy Vol. I: Inferno, New York: Penguin, 1984. —. The Divine Comedy Vol. III: Paradise, New York: Penguin, 1984. Righter, Anne. Introduction. William Shakespeare. The Tempest, London: Penguin, 1968. Sayers, Dorothy L. trans. Dante Alighieri. Hell, Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1949. St Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica II-II, Question153, 3 http://eawc.evansville.edu/anthology/aquinas154.htm (accessed 15 May 2007). Williams, Charles. Descent into Hell, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973. —. The New Christian Year 3rd Monday in Lent http://tomwills.typepad.com/thenewchristianyear/dante/index.html (accessed15 May 2007). Wordsworth, William. “Expostulation and Reply” The Major Works, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

JESTING IN EARNEST: LEVITY AND FAITH IN GEORGE MACDONALD’S THE LIGHT PRINCESS DANIEL GABELMAN

Seriousness has seemingly always held dominance over light and playful modes like nonsense, dreaming, the grotesque, folly, and the fantastic. Virgil’s solemn and earnest epic glorifying Rome earned him the friendship and praise of Caesar Augustus, whereas Ovid’s whimsical tales of transformation led to exile. Voltaire and other Enlightenment thinkers— those high priests of seriousness—called Rabelais “chief among buffoons” and said that the nation was “annoyed that a man who had so much wit should have made such wretched use of it.”1 In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries works of fancy and imagination in general and fairytales in particular were increasingly “relegated to the nursery,” as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis noted in the mid-twentieth century (although this trend appears to have shifted as the recent popular and scholarly interest in figures like Tolkien and Lewis suggests).2 Meanwhile, religion and faith have generally been associated with seriousness and as a result placed in opposition to modes of levity. For example, critics often cite the fact that Jesus never laughs in the gospels, or point to the solemnity of religious ritual as evidence of the Church’s love of seriousness. In fact, one definition of “serious” in the Oxford English Dictionary is “earnest about the things of religion; religious” while another is “concerned with the grave and earnest sides of life as opposed to amusement or pleasureseeking.” It would seem therefore that if faith is serious it can never jest. George MacDonald, however, challenges such assumptions in his numerous fantastic stories, both in his message and in his mode, suggesting that levity in all its forms—play, humour, nonsense, folly, etc.—can, at least sometimes, be an indirect route to the divine. Drawing on Derrida, Reinhold Niebuhr and Erasmus, this paper will look at the 1 2

Cited in Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 117. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” 34. See also Lewis, “On Juvenile Tastes,” 476-478.

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relationship between levity and faith in MacDonald’s fairy tale “The Light Princess,” as seen through the interpretive light of Adela Cathcart, the Canterbury Tales-like frame novel in which MacDonald first published the story in 1864.3 MacDonald’s opening epithet to this novel is, in fact, taken from Chaucer’s “The Man of Lawes Tale”: Me list not of the chaf ne of the stre Maken so long a tale as of the corn4

Stories are compared to wheat; their length and value should be determined by the kernel not the chaff. MacDonald develops this image by suggesting that stories are a type of intellectual and spiritual nourishment. Thus, the premise of the frame narrative involves the metaphorical feeding of a young woman, Adela, who is suffering from a general sort of depression. After the young doctor, Mr. Armstrong, finds nothing physically wrong with her, John Smith, Adela’s so-called “uncle” and the novel’s first person narrator, suggests that a prescription of stories be tried.5 Her father agrees, and the doctor adds that he hopes “it may furnish a better mental table for her” for though “only the best thing will make her well...all true things tend to healing.”6 Before Smith begins reading “The Light Princess” to Adela and company, Mrs. Cathcart, Adela’s pretentious aunt, questions him about whether the story is suitable for Christmas, and he replies: “Yes, very...for it is a child’s story—a fairy tale, namely; though I confess I think it fitter for grown than for young children.”7 For Mr. Smith, who throughout the novel consistently reflects views MacDonald himself discusses elsewhere, fairy tales are particularly appropriate during the season celebrating the birth of Christ because they are for the childlike. Then, as if it too were pertinent to the season, he adds, “I hope it is funny, though. I think it is.”8 One stated aspiration for this story is humour, and it should not be 3

Several critics have already discussed the humorous elements of “The Light Princess,” notably U. C. Knoepflmacher in his chapter “Mixing Levity and the Grave: MacDonald’s ‘The Light Princess,’” but the connection between levity and faith remains unexamined. 4 Lines 571-72 of Chaucer’s “The Man of Lawes Tale.” Quoted in MacDonald, Adela Cathcart, title page. 5 Ibid., 50. 6 Ibid., 52, 54. 7 Ibid., 55. 8 Idem.

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assumed that this aspiration is separate from Smith’s (and MacDonald’s) ultimate goal of spiritually nurturing his listeners through the tale. But, we might ask, how can humour be spiritual? According to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr “humour is...a prelude to faith,” and “laughter is the beginning of prayer.”9 This is because, he says, “both deal with the incongruities of our existence”— humour with the immediate and faith with the ultimate incongruities. The most important of these incongruities is the fact that “man is so great and yet so small, so significant and yet so insignificant.”10 Thus, apparently frivolous jokes often contain profound insight; as G. K. Chesterton reminds us: “all jokes about men sitting down on their hats are really theological jokes…they refer to the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.”11 Humour and faith, therefore, both understand the importance of receiving and holding apparently contradictory truths simultaneously and help humans to accept the duality of their existence as both great and small. Erasmus, speaking in the voice of the goddess of Folly, helpfully reminds us of the connection between folly and faith when he says, “it is quite clear that the Christian religion has a kind of kinship with folly in some form, though it has none at all with wisdom.”12 To demonstrate this, Folly says that Jesus “became a fool,” took up the company of “ignorant apostles to whom he unfailingly preached folly,” and “made his appeal through the example of children, lilies, mustard-seed and humble sparrows, all foolish, senseless things, which live by natural instinct alone, free from care or purpose.”13 To drive this point home, Erasmus gives an interesting gloss on Matthew 11.25, where Christ thanks the Father because “the mystery of salvation had been hidden from the wise but revealed to little children, that is, to fools.”14 Nor is this just Folly speaking, for in the first edition of Novum Instrumentum Erasmus actually replaces the Greek nepioi with the Latin stulti meaning “fools.”15 For Erasmus, as with Paul, who called himself a “fool for Christ,”16 folly and faith are allies.

9

Niebuhr, “Humour and Faith,” 99. Ibid., 101. 11 Chesterton, Selected Essays, 26. 12 Erasmus, The Praise of Folly, 201 [sec. 66]. 13 Ibid., 199 [sec. 65]. 14 Ibid., 197 [sec. 65]. 15 Screech, Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly, 30-31. 16 1 Corinthians 4:10. 10

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Similarly, when MacDonald through the narrator of “The Light Princess” hopes his story is funny, this humour is integral to the spiritual meaning of the story and the healing of Adela. For MacDonald childlikeness and the ability to play is not a trait restricted to children; as he says in “The Fantastic Imagination”: “for my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”17 This childlikeness consists in an attitude of intellectual freedom and playfulness which wise adults are incapable of: We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed. He who will be a man, and will not be a child, must—he cannot help himself—become a little man, that is, a dwarf. He will, however, need no consolation, for he is sure to think himself a very large creature indeed.18

Children are like fools in the sense that they do not demand to possess ideas, dissect images or arrive at something graspable like the wise of the world.19 Knowledge is not a commodity to be produced, hoarded or controlled, but a gift to be received and enjoyed. MacDonald plays with this understanding of children and fools in “The Light Princess,” and echoes the Pauline distinction in 1 Corinthians between “the wisdom of the world” and “the wisdom of God” when he depicts the worldly wise as fools and the worldly fool as ultimately wise. The plot of the story is a parody “Sleeping Beauty.” A witch— Makemnoit, the king’s poor, wicked sister whom he forgets to invite to the princess’ christening—curses the baby princess so that she loses her gravity, both physical and spiritual. A “foolish nursery rhyme” is the curse: Light of spirit, by my charms, Light of body, every part, Never weary human arms— Only crush thy parents’ heart!20

Apparently nonsensical words are used to unleash this power over the princess. Not surprisingly, at this point in the narrative Mrs. Cathcart, who 17

MacDonald, A Dish of Orts, 317. Ibid., 322. 19 “Childlikeness” is one of the most dominant themes in MacDonald’s work, and it has many nuances and aspects. See for example “The Child in the Midst” in Unspoken Sermons. Thomas Gerold recently devoted a monograph to this topic: Die Gotteskindschaft des Menschen. 20 MacDonald, Adela Cathcart, 60. 18

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constantly argues for decorum and “high seriousness,”21 objects on the grounds that Smith has introduced “church ceremonies into a fairy-tale.”22 Here MacDonald is taking a position counter to that of much of his culture, which valued dignity, respectability, and “high” morals. To lend support to his critique of such seriousness, MacDonald has the clergyman answer Mrs. Cathcart’s charge, “do you suppose the church to be such a cross-grained old lady, that she will not allow her children to take a few gentle liberties with their mother?”23 Then Smith adds, “if both church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles, without injury to either”24 Levity, apparently, does not besmirch the earnest aims of faith. But can we claim anything more for it? The story continues with the little princess getting blown out of windows, stuck up chimneys, and laughing inordinately at everything, including reports that the capital is about to be overrun by enemy soldiers. At one point, the king and queen begin to argue about the merits and drawbacks of “lightness”: “It is a good thing to be light-hearted, I am sure, whether she be ours or not.” “It is a bad thing to be light-headed,” answered the queen, looking with prophetic soul, far into the future. “Tis a good thing to be light-handed,” said the king. “Tis a bad thing to be light-fingered,” answered the queen. “Tis a good thing to be light-footed,” said the king. “Tis a bad thing,” began the queen; but the king interrupted her. “In fact,” said he, with the tone of one who concludes an argument in which he has had only imaginary opponents, and in which, therefore, he has come off triumphant—“in fact, it is a good thing altogether to be lightbodied.” “But it is a bad thing altogether to be light-minded,” retorted the queen, who was beginning to lose her temper.25

The king and queen each have a piece of the truth. Mind and body must work in conjunction, the mind to give alacrity and lightness to the heavy 21

Interestingly, Ruskin, known for his “high seriousness”, wrote MacDonald a letter after the publication of Adela Cathcart protesting that MacDonald had put some of his arguments about the appropriateness of “The Light Princess” into the mouth of Mrs. Cathcart. Knoepflmacher, Ventures into Childland, 138-143. 22 MacDonald, Adela Cathcart, 60. 23 Ibid., 60. 24 Idem. 25 Ibid., 65.

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body, the body to give mass and concreteness to the ephemeral mind. Then as the king stalks away the queen hurls one last comment: “And it’s a bad thing to be light-haired,”...The queen’s hair was black as night; and the king’s had been, and his daughter’s was, golden as morning. But it was not this reflection on his hair that troubled him; it was the double use of the word light. For the king hated all witticisms, and punning especially. And besides he could not tell whether the queen meant lighthaired or light-heired; for why might she not aspirate her vowels when she was ex-asperated herself?26

Despite the dignity of their station, both king and queen behave quite foolishly, that is, childishly. We should also note that the king “hated all witticisms.” As the representative of worldly power, the king’s primary concern is control, and he therefore despises anything which he cannot straightforwardly possess or command, especially language. And, of course, as Derrida reminds us, the “play of language” is one thing we cannot control: He who through “methodological prudence,” “norms of objectivity,” or “safeguards of knowledge” would refrain from committing anything of himself, would not read at all. The same foolishness, the same sterility, obtains in the “not serious” as in the “serious.” The reading or writing supplement must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities of a game, by the logic of play.27

Using language is dangerous. Proper use of language requires both “play” and “logic”; the “not serious” and the “serious” must work together. You must “[get] a few fingers caught” and risk your dignity—risk looking foolish. Language cannot be shackled even by powerful kings or wise philosophers, as is demonstrated when the king asks “two very wise Chinese philosophers,” Hum-Drum and Kopy-Keck, “to consult together as to what might be the cause and probable cure of [the princess’] infirmity.” Whilst the “king laid stress upon the word,” he fails “to discover his own pun” (terra firma being an expression for “solid earth”). The queen at least laughs, but “Hum-Drum and Kopy-Keck heard with humility and retired in silence.”28 Not only does the worldly king have difficulty controlling and discerning multiple meanings, but so too do the

26

Ibid., 66. Derrida, Dissemination, 64. 28 MacDonald, Adela Cathcart, 73. 27

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worldly wise philosophers, and none of them have the humility to laugh at themselves. Here is the description of the philosophers: Hum-Drum was a Materialist, and Kopy-Keck was a spiritualist. The former was slow and sententious; the latter was quick and flighty; the latter had generally the first word; the former the last.29

Kopy-Keck, perhaps a caricature of the Metaphysical Society and their misapplication of Kant and the idealists,30 believes the princess needs to study every possible history of the earth—animal, vegetable, political, scientific, moral, literary, musical, artistic, and especially its metaphysical history in order to regain her spiritual gravity. On the other hand, HumDrum, perhaps representing the misapplication of Hume and the empiricists, wants to “phlebotomize” her and reverse her blood flow through the use of scientific gadgets. When Kopy-Keck suggests this will surely kill her, Hum-Drum calmly comments, “if it should, she would yet die in doing our duty.”31 The extreme reliance of each of these so-called wise men on one inflexible and unchanging mode of thinking makes them utterly ridiculous. Again, MacDonald appears to be emphasizing the duality of human existence which these “wise” philosophers have divorced from one another. Spirit and body cannot be separated without nonsensical results. The flightiness of the spiritualist is just as ludicrous as the weightiness of the materialist. Luckily for the princess, it is discovered that when she is in water she regains a measure of her gravity, and as a result she spends every possible moment swimming in the nearby lake. A prince comes along and falls in love with the weightless girl, but despite helping her to fall into the lake, he cannot get her to fall for him. This becomes the prince’s favourite pun. When he asks the princess how she likes falling into the lake she responds: “Is that what you call falling in?” “Yes,” answered the prince, “I should think it a very tolerable specimen.” “It seemed to me like going up,” rejoined she. “My feeling was certainly one of elevation too,” the prince conceded. The princess did not appear to understand him, for she retorted his first question: “How do you like falling in?”

29

Ibid., 73. See note 13 in MacDonald, The Complete Fairy Tales, 344. 31 MacDonald, Adela Cathcart, 74. 30

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“Beyond everything,” answered he; “for I have fallen in with the only perfect creature I ever saw.” “No more of that: I am tired of it,” said the princess.32

The two discuss the ironic truth that falling is euphoric and thrilling—a kind of levity. Without assistance the gravity-less princess cannot experience the levity of falling. We should also note how the princess shares “her father’s aversion to punning” and seems unable to understand the prince’s double meanings, whereas the prince is the only character in the story other than the queen who makes intentional puns and picks up upon other people’s puns. Furthermore, the prince is the only proactive character in the story other than the witch Makemnoit—the only one willing to “get a few fingers caught” in order to enter into the games of life and language. When the witch Makemnoit begins draining the lake, the princess languishes with it, and the prince, after debasing himself by becoming the princess’ boot-black, decides to offer his life to plug the magical hole, which leads to the following scene between the king and prince, in which MacDonald contrasts worldly and spiritual folly: Feeling, as he went, that anything sentimental would be disagreeable, [the prince] resolved to carry off the whole affair with burlesque. So he knocked at the door of the king’s counting-house, where it was all but a capital crime to disturb him. When the king heard the knock, he started up, and opened the door in a rage. Seeing only the shoe-black, he drew his sword. This, I am sorry to say, was his usual mode of asserting his regality, when he thought his dignity was in danger.33

With the boldness and demeanour of a court fool, the prince dares to approach the king in the place symbolic of his worldly power, surrounded by his money. As a means of further asserting and defending his authority the petty king wields his sword, another symbol of his worldly power. But the prince is undaunted and continues in the manner of a fool: “Please your majesty, I’m your butler,” said he. “My butler! you lying rascal? What do you mean?” “I mean, I will cork your big bottle.” “Is the fellow mad?” bawled the king, raising the point of his sword.

32 33

Ibid., 81-82. Ibid., 94.

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“I will put a stopper—plug—what you call it, in your leaky lake, grand monarch,” said the prince.34

Using word play and witticisms—those barbs of language which the king most despises—the prince informs the king of his intention to sacrifice himself for the princess. The dim, worldly king—himself the “mad” one— only barely perceives the true meaning of the prince’s words and reluctantly restrains his murderous impulse: “‘Oh!’ said he at last, putting up his sword with difficulty—it was so long; ‘I am obliged to you, you young fool!’”35 The inconsistency of calling the earnest and noble prince a fool, just after this little childish king fumbles around sheathing his very long sword reveals the true fool. In the same way that the “message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18) so too the prince seems a mad fool to the worldly king and philosophers—in his behaviour and his crazy wish to offer his life—yet in actuality, as the humorous narration makes clear, they are the fools. MacDonald is of course making the prince a type of Christ, the greatest fool—who was also called “out of his mind” and “demon-possessed” by philosophers (Mark 3.21) and mocked as a fool by a worldly king (Luke 23.11). We should note, too, how the prince’s earnest intentions were not compromised by his humorous behaviour, and served rather to deflect worldly praise and to reveal the true motivation of love behind his action. In “The Shadows” MacDonald makes a similar point even more clearly when the shadows, protesting the accusation “you do nothing but jest,” reply: “when we do jest, sire, we always jest in earnest.”36 For these creatures, as for the prince, earnest intentions do not exclude humorous behaviour. Thus, when the prince is stuck in the hole, he continues in a lighthearted manner, approaching his death singing songs and kissing the princess’ fingers, content merely to be saving his beloved. Just before the end though, he asks the princess to kiss him “for the fun was all out of him now,” and after she does he says “with a sigh of content, ‘I die happy.’”37 The princess watches initially nonplussed as the water rises, but becomes increasingly agitated:

34

Idem. Idem. 36 Ibid., 189. 37 Ibid., 100. 35

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The water rose and rose. It touched his chin. It touched his lower lip. It touched between his lips. He shut them hard to keep it out. The princess began to feel strange. It touched his upper lip. He breathed through his nostrils. The princess looked wild. It covered his nostrils. Her eyes looked scared, and shone strange in the moonlight. His head fell back; the water closed over it; and the bubbles of his last breath bubbled up through the water. The princess gave a shriek, and sprang into the lake.38

In the face of death—the death of someone she unknowingly cares for— the princess first experiences suffering, though she does not know to call it that yet, she only “feels strange.” This is her first experience of spiritual gravity; it is no coincidence then that the princess is suddenly able to perform tasks that would require at least some physical gravity—she lifts the prince out of the hole, into the boat and then rows him back to the castle. At sunrise the prince awakens from his death-sleep, the princess falls down weeping, and the lake is restored. As the story ends, the princess keeps falling while learning to walk before their wedding; slightly aggravated, she asks: “Is this the gravity you used to make so much of?”...“No, no; that’s not it. This is it,” replied the prince, as he took her up, and carried her about like a baby, kissing her all the time. “This is gravity.”39

In this lifting up, which was not possible for her before, the princess experiences the paradoxical lightness of gravity. It is only with gravity that we can experience the thrill of being lifted, and the joy of rising. Thus, we might add to the prince’s statement “this is gravity” that this is levity too; or in other words, levity is not opposed to gravity—it is complementary to it. With the last line of dialogue and for the first time in the story, the princess clearly understands the prince’s double meaning and enjoys the pun, “‘That’s better,’ said she. ‘I don’t mind that so much.’”40 In the frame novel Mrs. Cathcart immediately asks, “What is the moral of it?,” and Adela replies in the humorous vein of the story, “That you need not be afraid of ill-natured aunts, though they are witches.” Smith initially seems to rebuke Adela for this duplicitous answer but then continues in the same spirit of her fun: “No, my dear; that’s not it...It is, that you need not mind forgetting your poor relations. No harm will come of it in the end.” The doctor then with a not so subtle allusion to Adela herself adds his moral “that no girl is worth anything till she has cried a 38

Idem. Ibid., 102. 40 Idem. 39

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little.”41 Since MacDonald was so fond of multiple morals,42 we might add one of our own: Gravity divorced from levity leads to spiritual folly (as demonstrated by the king and his philosophers), while the gravity-less life of the princess is not only careless and insubstantial but also foolish. Whereas the Christ-like prince who rejoices in both gravity (as when he becomes a boot-black and then sacrifices himself for another) and levity (as in his joyful play with the princess and king) is the true wise man. With this fairy tale MacDonald points the way to an understanding of levity that closely relates it to faith. He reminds us that faith is not always or even usually “serious,” or to be more precise, faith is always earnest and thoroughgoing, but not always solemn or grave. Jesting can be just as earnest as academic prose. So then, levity is not opposed to gravity or seriousness in general. If anything, it is seriousness which sometimes becomes the enemy of other modes of discourse. The king’s serious attitude towards life makes him petty, prideful and childish. He, along with the philosophers, suffers from an excess of gravity—an inability to take himself lightly. And yet, with the princess, MacDonald shows that an absence of gravity is just as bad as an excess, for gravity is also the force which brings order into the cosmos and holds all things in relation to one another. Levity, then, is an affirmation of the truth and validity of apparently contradictory realities. It preserves the freedom of ambiguity, the playful licence of the imagination to invent new worlds, new creatures, new ways of conceiving reality. Moreover, modes such as fairy-tales, nonsense and the grotesque can show certain things better than argumentative prose. MacDonald’s playful style and light tone are themselves part of the message about the intermingling of comic and serious. To quote the title of one of C. S. Lewis’ essays, “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said.” Similarly, I have argued that jesting, play, fairy-tales and other light modes can be indirect routes to the divine. In 1 Corinthians 1:28 St Paul reminds us: “God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things, and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him.” Seemingly innocuous and insignificant literary creations might be just the kind of foolishness that God can use to build up faith.

41

Ibid., 104. In “The Fantastic Imagination” for example MacDonald says that a man may imagine “what he can” in his stories. “If he be a true man, he will imagine true things; what matter whether I meant them or not?” A Dish of Orts, 320. 42

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Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Helene Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Chesterton, G.K. Selected Essays. Edited by John Guest. London: Collins, 1939. Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Erasmus of Rotterdam. Praise of Folly. Translated by Betty Radice. New York: Penguin, 1978. Gerold, Thomas. Die Gotteskindschaft des Menschen: Die theologische Anthropologie bei George MacDonald. Munster, Hamburg, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006. Knoepflmacher, U. C. “Mixing Levity and the Grave: MacDonald’s ‘The Light Princess.’” In Ventures into Childland, 116-149. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Lewis, C. S. “On Juvenile Tastes” and “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said.” In Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, 476-478, 526-528. London: HarperCollins, 2000. MacDonald, George. Adela Cathcart. London: Hurst and Blackett 1864. Republished Whitehorn CA: Johannesen, 2000. —. A Dish of Orts. London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1893. Republished Whitehorn, CA: Johannesen, 1996. —. The Complete Fairy Tales. Edited by U. C. Knoepflmacher. New York: Penguin, 1999. Niebuhr, Reinhold. “Humour and Faith.” In Discerning the Signs of the Times, 99-115. London: S.C.M. Press LTD., 1946. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. OED Online: Oxford University Press, 1989. Screech, M. A. Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly. London: Duckworth, 1980. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories.” In Tree and Leaf, 9-73. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1964.

MYTH, FACT AND “LITERARY BELIEF”: IMAGINATION AND POST-EMPIRICISM IN C. S. LEWIS AND J. R. R. TOLKIEN ROD ROSENQUIST

Richard D. McCall, in an article entitled “Imagining the Other: Toward an Aesthetic Theology” points out that the unity of the three Platonic transcendentals—the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—were finally separated during the Enlightenment with the help of thinkers like Kant.1 Since this time, the notion of the Beautiful has suffered particularly at the hands of the rising currency of Truth. With the rise in favour of the objective over the subjective, that which is considered subjectively beautiful or good is no longer necessarily tied to that which is considered objectively true—thus creating a hierarchy of values never before encountered. Since this separation occurs as a result of the prioritising of reason during the Enlightenment, it is the post-Enlightenment thinking which became evident in the wake of the Second World War—identified at times with an emergent postmodernism—that began to readdress these priorities. Particularly as cognitive reason was imported into social, political and philosophical modes of thinking as part of “the grand narratives of emancipation in the Enlightenment”, any tendency toward complete dependence on rationality as liberating doctrine and totalising structure becomes suspect after Auschwitz.2 Lyotard and other commentators have identified this anti-Enlightenment response to dependence on reason, particularly as it relates to questions of truth, as a central pillar of postmodern thought. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien are authors who often suffer the fate of being read as timeless, mythic and anachronistic. Coming into their artistic maturity at a key moment in the history of western culture, it is 1

McCall, “Imagining the Other: Toward an Aesthetic Theology,” Religion and the Arts 8:4, 479-85. 2 Lyotard, “The Confusion of Reasons” in The Postmodern Explained, 65.

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vital to reposition them within a context of shifting modes of thinking: somewhere between a fading Enlightenment project and an emerging poststructuralist one. Rarely are Lewis and Tolkien considered a part of this shift. In fact, the perception of these two old-fashioned Oxford dons, both scholars of medieval literatures, causes many commentators to see them as pre-Enlightenment in thought rather than post-Enlightenment.3 But both Tolkien and Lewis are clearly working with the burden of the Enlightenment past on their shoulders, fighting an uphill battle to gather support for a position that seeks to use rational argument to support their shared goal of reducing dependence upon rational truth alone. In other words, the two authors spend much of their time attempting to rationalise their belief in the irrational, borrowing from one mode of thinking to defend another. C. S. Lewis is perhaps a more complicated case in this respect. Tolkien is often seen as more confident and at ease in his mythic sub-creation, unconcerned over any tension between his imagination and his theology. But there are diverging opinions on whether Lewis manages to reconcile his imaginative work to the more rational defences of his faith in the nonfiction.4 And clearly there is some tension here, illustrated particularly in his 1944 paper, “Is Theology Poetry?” He asks: “May it not even be that there is something in belief which is hostile to perfect imaginative enjoyment?...In a certain sense we spoil a mythology for imaginative purposes by believing in it.”5 The statement clearly raises issues for all those who wish to build a case for connecting imagination to theology in Lewis’s work. And yet the passage is riddled with qualifiers, and indeed, as very few go on to point out, Lewis later asserts it cannot be taken so far as that. In fact, Lewis suggests later that there is a kind of aesthetic appeal to that which is believed that should be distinguished from the appeal of that which is not believed: “There is a dignity and poignancy in the bare fact that a thing exists....Every man, I believe, enjoys the world picture which he accepts: for the gravity and finality of the actual is itself an 3

Colin Duriez, for one, calls these two authors “pre-modernist rather than postmodernist” in “The Theology of Fantasy in Lewis and Tolkien,” Themelios 23:2: 35-51; 37. Ralph C. Wood suggests Lewis considered himself “a pre-modern man” although he goes on to argue this is not entirely true. See “Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien” in Renascence 55:4, 315-338; 329. 4 Randel Helms for one considers Tolkien removed from the “direct pressure” Lewis was under to always “convert the reader” through his fiction, in “All Tales Need Not Come True” in Studies in the Literary Imagination 14:2: 31-46. 5 “Is Theology Poetry?” ed. by Leslie Walmsley, 12.

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aesthetic stimulus.”6 So Lewis believes we experience the imagined and the real—the beautiful and the true—in very different ways. But it is how they are related, particularly through an experience of myth, that I would like to explore in further detail. The role of experience is highly significant for understanding both Tolkien’s and Lewis’s theological positions, particularly as they engage with questions of religious truth. Neither of these two authors lacks rationality, but for them reason has a close but complex relationship to the subjective and imaginative response. This is highly evident in the oftenquoted elements of Tolkien’s aesthetic as produced in “On Fairy-Stories”, with terms of Consolation, Recovery and Eucatastrophe—all leading readers to an understanding of truth through subjective experience, through encounters with the numinous or the mythic, and all that is other than empirical. Some truth can be reasoned, it might be said, but not all of it. Other truths must be experienced. The primary problem is set out by Lewis in an essay called “Myth Became Fact”. He says, “This is our dilemma—either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste—or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it.”7 These two kinds of knowledge, the propositional truth and the experiential reality, are connected only by myth, suggests Lewis. Myth enacts truth in a way that can be experienced, thus allowing one to taste and know at the same moment. Myth is not abstract, as Lewis claims most propositional truths are, nor does it tend more toward knowing than tasting, as allegorical stories do. “What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.”8 Lewis applied similar notions to the nature of theological truth: the works of imagination lead and the abstract principles of truth follow.9 In fact, this devotion to the experiential or mythic would only grow stronger at the expense of dependence on reason alone as his career developed, with a shift particularly evident in the late 1940s after his apologetic 6

“Is Theology Poetry?” 12–13. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact” [1944] in Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, 140. 8 “Myth Became Fact” 141. Emphasis Lewis’s. 9 He would describe himself in “Religion without Dogma?” [1946] as one “who first approached Christianity from a delighted interest in, and reverence for, the best pagan imagination, who loved Balder before Christ”. See Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, 165. 7

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reasoning suffered a blow at the ‘Socratic Club’.10 In one of his last works, while identifying the relationship between propositional truth and experiential truth, with particular reference to biblical doctrine and biblical aesthetic values, Lewis sides decisively with the aesthetic. Literal truth is not always the aim of scripture, he implies, and he offers two rules for exegesis: (1) Never take the images literally. (2) When the purport of the images—what they say to our fear and hope and will and affections— seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time.11 There is an attempt here to subject theological thought to aesthetic experiences—to how humans subjectively feel in response to the images, stories and forms. Mythic or concrete thinking takes precedent over the theoretical or abstract. The passage continues to say that “our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modelling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of scripture...?” In other words, there is an objective reality, but one cannot engage with it except through subjective experience, including aesthetic and moral understanding, rather than simply assessing its empirical truth value alone. Lewis finishes by suggesting that what many call the “de-mythologising” of Christianity—divesting it of its subjective, aesthetic and image-oriented truths—is actually a “re-mythologising—and substituting a poorer mythology for a richer.” This poorer mythology is tied to the dogmatically rationalist images descended from Enlightenment thinking and reflected in the realism Lewis would have inherited from his education, both before and during his time at Oxford in the first half of the century. But Lewis invests himself in resuscitating a richer mythic approach that neither ignores the power of the subjective experience of aesthetic forms nor the objective knowledge which lays simultaneously obscured and hinted at by the mythic representation—an approach that 10

The shift in thinking is outlined by Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings (2006). See a fuller discussion in Peter J. Schakel, Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis (1984). An argument against the “legend” of Lewis’s abandonment of apologetics is put forward by Victor Reppert, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea (2003), although this does not take full account of many of Lewis’s personal letters written in the ten years following the Anscombe debate. The shift in thinking is responsible for much confusion regarding Lewis’s thought. For example, Ralph C. Wood argues Lewis is indebted to Enlightenment thinking in the conviction that one can “reason without any prior assumptions” (“Conflict and Convergence” 329-30). This seems debatable even considering the 1940s writing, but becomes hard to swallow when considering the revised 1950s views on apologetics and reason. 11 C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, 74.

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flirts with postmodernity as much as rejecting mere positivism. As Richard McCall says in his defence of an aesthetic theology, It is further necessary to begin with an anthropology grounded in human experience because, in the absence of any other agreed-upon first principle in the post-modern world, there is simply no other place from which to begin....Clearly the category of experience becomes even more necessary in post-modern epistemology because it allows us to make an account of inter-subjectivity including feeling, intuition, imagination, and all forms of aesthetic discourse as well as the sense-experiences and rational relationships which formed the outer limits of modernism.12

One of the passages from Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia that seems to engage academics most consistently, though not always on this issue, comes from The Silver Chair, when the two human visitors and their Marshwiggle guide, Puddleglum, find themselves in the underworld, in the lair of the witch who has kidnapped Prince Rilian of Narnia. The scene involves the witch catching the three overworlders in the act of rescuing the Prince, and she attempts to place a spell on them, combining the drugging influences of a potion on the fire, enchanted stringed-instrument music and an incisive and gruelling inquisition of their understanding of reality. She makes them doubt the existence of an overworld, of a sun, and of Aslan himself, the divine being, through a subtle querying of how they know, objectively, what they know. When asked what is a “sun”, the characters point to the lamp hanging from the ceiling: “like the lamp, but far greater and brighter.”13 The witch calls into question their point of reference: from what does the sun hang? She says, When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story.

She does the same with the explanation of Aslan the lion which is described as a bigger form of a cat. “And look,” she says, “how you can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.”14 The faith of the visitors to the underworld is tested and found largely wanting. They cannot verify the existence of what they remember; they can only use comparisons and 12

McCall 482. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 152. 14 Ibid., 154. 13

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analogies—mythic formulations—to link present, concrete objects to the things left intangible in their new environment. But the witch attacks their formulations, proposing that the analogies themselves break down to reveal that all things not objectively verifiable must be fictions copied from the empirical world. The problem for the overworlders is their mythic formulations, relying on images and models to stand for the things they cannot reveal in fuller detail. Because each questionable item of the overworld has its correspondent item in the underworld, it can only be seen to be subjective make-believe by the visitors to the underworld. These things are interesting enough, and reflect no doubt Lewis’s own criticisms of Christianity before his (re)conversion—which might be paraphrased: the Christian story is a rather poor adoption of the richer myths of Adonis, Dionysius, or any kind of ‘Corn God’. But more significant than this, Puddleglum accepts that he cannot prove the overworld to exist, yet refuses to allow this to shake his belief. The Marshwiggle chooses his own experiential knowledge of the sun and his own country even if he has made it up: “I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia”—all because, as he says earlier, “the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones.”15 Objective reality then is one thing, but a limited thing, when placed next to the subjective experience of a world larger than that which can be verified. Puddleglum is here fighting a modernist critique of his objectivity through a postmodernist embracing of his subjectivity. Just because some truth can be proved empirically and objectively does not mean that all things experiential, intuitional or subjective are false. Neither is this meant to suggest that what is false is preferred over what is true for Tolkien and Lewis. That is to fall into the Enlightenment trap of divorcing the true from the good or the beautiful, when Tolkien and Lewis would choose to find them all related. Even those things which cannot be proved to be more than imaginary might be ‘more important’ than those things which can be proved real or true. Nor is it only Lewis who perceives the need for finding postEnlightenment ways of fitting back together notions of the Good, the Beautiful and the True. Lewis, it is fair to say, is more overtly theological in his approach to both fiction and nonfiction, but Tolkien produces at least one major statement in his “On Fairy-Stories”—a work which stands as both his philosophy of art and, to a lesser extent, theology. There are many important statements in this long essay, but it is worth looking particularly at notions of truth and belief within his concept of sub15

Ibid., 155.

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creation and fantasy. Of special note is his disagreement with Andrew Lang on the approach children take to fairy tales, characterised by Lang’s assertion that children believe. Lang says that children always ask the primary question: “Is it true?” Tolkien replies that this kind of belief, dependent on being convinced a thing in a story can or does happen in our own world, is rarely taken up by children or any other readers of fairy stories. Rather it is another kind of belief, called a “literary belief”, which is less concerned with truth than with complete immersion in the storyteller’s work—an acceptance of the mythic, imaginary world even if at the expense of truth.16 While it has been described with varying terminology, this phenomenon of literary belief has received increasing attention since the 1990s, a line of work in aesthetic theory on the relationship between fiction, truth and belief. One account of research in this field relates Alan Leslie’s work with children, where two real tea cups are pretended to be filled with a real tea pot.17 One cup is brought to the experimenter’s lips, upturned to signal drinking, then replaced next to the other. Children are always able to identify the full cup from the empty, although it is proved they are at no point convinced that either cup has at any moment actually been filled. The relevance of this experiment varies according to the discipline under which it is interpreted, but the significance is attached to questions of how belief relates to knowledge. The child, it can be said, believes that one of the two cups has been emptied, simultaneously pretending it is empty and knowing that it was never full—despite the fact that pretending that a thing is true and knowing it are often seen as mutually exclusive activities. Conversely, they pretend the other cup is still full—a kind of literary belief—while knowing it is still empty. This strange conjunction and disjunction between knowledge and belief is of utmost significance when discussing the aesthetic nature of myth and its vital position in forming a connecting link 16

Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” in Tree and Leaf, 37. This idea of literary belief corresponds to Lewis’s argument in The Allegory of Love (1977) that there was a time before the Renaissance when the only options were to engage with that which could be observed and verified, or that which could not, but was still believed to be true. But there comes a time, with the Renaissance, when a third world is opened, which he calls the marvellous-known-to-be-fiction. One need not verify it, one need not believe it, one could simply marvel in it and enjoy its engagement with the imagination. Lewis seems to use these three views of the world widely when trying to work out his theology. 17 Outlined in Shaun Nichols, “Imagining and Believing: The Promise of a Single Code”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62:2, 129. See Alan Leslie, “Pretending and Believing: Issues in the Theory of ToMM”, Cognition 50 (1994), 211-38.

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between the imaginary, the verifiable and the thing in which belief is placed. Many Christians would bristle in defence at the notion that the imaginary or the mythic has anything to do with the kind of belief they profess. And yet for Tolkien and Lewis, the aesthetic, the fantastical and the mythic has everything to do with religious faith. The story of Tolkien’s influence in converting Lewis is most often related in the words of Humphrey Carpenter, revealing how an immersion in myth figured centrally in Lewis finally accepting the role of Christ in Christianity. Tolkien was the one who first urged Lewis to broaden his definition of myth from “lies breathed through silver” to that of an “invention about truth”, part of the human obligation toward sub-creation.18 By the time Lewis’s own mythic world of Narnia had become popular, he was able to reassure a worried Christian child that it was impossible to love Aslan, the divinity of his sub-creation, more than Christ since his fictional character was, essentially, a mythic invention revealing true aspects of the primaryworld Christian divinity. In fact Aslan the myth might increase the child’s love of Christ.19 Therefore, those who might claim that a product of ‘make-believe’ has no direct relevance to reality fails to fully understand the significance of the tea-cup experiment. It is easy to prove, for instance, that the child who completely submits to the “literary belief” of one cup full and one cup only recently emptied—who enters the mythic world by disregarding the “reality” that both cups have at no point been filled with hot tea from an empty teapot—still reacts the moment the mythic hot tea is spilled from a quickly upturned empty cup, a reaction including raised heart rate and other signs of “real” response. Even “literary belief”— divorced as it may be from the kind of belief that insists the mythic world is true—can produce very real responses in the real, primary world. Tolkien describes something very similar. No child thinks they “know” that the fairies exist, and yet some choose to pretend, and therefore to believe in them—in full knowledge that it is pretence. The story-teller, says Tolkien, “makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.”20 There is still a dependence on reason, then, even for the child sitting in front of two empty tea cups—a child is not unreasonable for believing the one cup is empty when in fact both cups were never full—it is only that the laws upon which reason is based are changed by the nature of the secondary 18

Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, 146-7. Lewis, Letter to “Mrs. K.”, 6 May 1955, in Letters to Children, 52. 20 “On Fairy-Stories”, 37. 19

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world. As Tolkien goes on to say, “Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason; and it does not either blunt the appetite for, nor obscure the perception of, scientific verity. On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make.”21 Thus reason remains in place, but the imaginary or mythic world allows for greater play within which the reasonable intellect can find a “freedom from the domination of observed ‘fact’”.22 This freedom from structuralist or positivist thinking is reflected in the shift toward more fluid positions on truth that the post-structuralists would theorise in the latter half of the last century. That this has a relevance to Tolkien’s theology is only made explicit in the “Epilogue”, where Tolkien makes clear that it is always the hope of the story-teller that the “truth” of the imaginary world can in some way connect to truth in the primary world. The ultimate illustration that myth became fact, to use Lewis’s terminology for the same phenomenon, occurs in the Christian redemption story—the Gospels are termed “mythical” by Tolkien, but also “history”. In his phrase, “Art has been verified.”23 This is not to suggest that the sub-creator needs verification of his or her fantasies, theological or otherwise. In fact, Tolkien once asserted in a letter that he was willing to employ what is, in the primary world, false theologically in his fictional imaginings and that this “bad theology” is both “capable of elucidating truth, and a legitimate basis for legends.”24 In other words, even theological truth for Tolkien is not restricted to revelation through “the channels the creator is known to have used already”, but can come through a subjective experience of that which is untrue—even ‘bad’. But the ultimate goal of the fantasist is to attain a new reality which adds a layer of experiential truth to the objective and empirical truth. In this way, human beings can “actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true.”25 This is the Christian faith behind Tolkien the storyteller, and it reveals the complex relationship between the imaginary or mythic and the true. Lewis finds relevance between the make-believe and theological truth as 21

Ibid., 55. Ibid.,47. 23 Ibid., 73. 24 Tolkien, Sept 1954 (to Peter Hastings), Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 189. Many other letters suggest parallel ideas, including Tolkien’s statement to W. H. Auden: “I don’t feel under any obligation to make my story fit with formalized Christian theology, though I actually intended it to be consonant with Christian thought and belief”, 12 May 1965, Letters, 355. 25 “On Fairy-Stories”, 73. 22

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well, as he writes in Mere Christianity. In a chapter entitled “Let’s Pretend”, Lewis also addresses what happens when this kind of “literary belief” is entered into, leaving to one side this time the idea of myth or fantasy, but picking up the notion of pretence described in the illustration of the tea cups above. “What is the good of pretending to be what you are not?” he asks, going on to relate two different kinds of pretence, one negative and one positive. To pretend a thing is true where the pretence will never affect reality is considered negative. “But there is also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing....Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children’s games are so important.” 26 While these comments relate to Christian morality, they reflect the author’s belief that reality is affected by pretence, by imagination, by the mythic world, as clearly as by the real world, and this assertion is also supported by research into the nature of pretence and belief.27 The willingness to enter a secondary world of fantasy, far from negating any relevance to the primary world, increases one’s chances of having an effect on the reality of the primary world. This line of thinking clearly emphasises the complicated relation between the objective and the subjective, between the propositional and the experiential, the empirical and the mythic forms of truth that both Tolkien and Lewis tried to engage with. In seeking to re-integrate the True with the Beautiful and the Good, Tolkien and Lewis are clearly formulating a post-Enlightenment theological position—not one which confuses truth with fiction or fantasy—not returning to a preEnlightenment position of religion being the equivalent of myth—but seeking a recognition that objective truth only has its place within a broader context of other transcendental values, albeit subjective ones. This leads us to the often-quoted statement by Lewis which suggests just how far what is true is entirely dependent on, not what is reasoned, but what can be imagined: “For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”28 So before we can speak about truth, we must speak, and speech does not work like mathematical equations, as early post-structuralists recognised: it is filled with images, with metaphors, with fantasies and myths, and establishes the ground on which truth stands. In this way, the fact that 26

Lewis, Mere Christianity, 161. Shaun Nichols describes how simulation theorists “maintain that several mental mechanisms process ‘pretend beliefs’ just like real beliefs” in “Imagining and Believing”, 131. 28 Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare”, in Rehabilitations. 27

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myths themselves are not necessarily true is not a liability, but evidence that they may form a precondition of truth itself. Myth is the answer to the dilemma of the two forms of knowledge: to taste and experience or to think and to know. It bridges the two: Lewis says that “myth is an isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular.”29 In other words, the one thing that can connect the theoretical or empirical to the metaphysical or experiential is the mythic: simultaneously objective and subjective, simultaneously appealing to reason or truth and imagination or beauty. Tolkien and Lewis can thus be seen as engaging in an early form of post-Enlightenment thinking, searching for the relationship between the objective and subjective forms of truth, between that which can be known and that which can only be experienced—not “only” because it is inferior, but because it is approached solely through a kind of “belief”—not based on what we know, but on a willingness to accept the mythic world as related to, sometimes prefiguring, the truth.

Works Cited Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. —. The Inklings, London: HarperCollins, 2006. Duriez, Colin. “The Theology of Fantasy in Lewis and Tolkien,” Themelios 23:2 (Feb. 1998). Helms, Rendel. “All Tales Need Not Come True,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 14:2 (Fall 1981). Leslie, Alan. “Pretending and Believing: Issues in the Theory of ToMM”, Cognition 50 (1994). Lewis, C. S. “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare”, in Rehabilitations London: Oxford University Press, 1939. —. “Is Theology Poetry?” [1952], in Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. by Leslie Walmsley, London: HarperCollins, 2000. —. “Myth Became Fact” [1944] in Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, ed. Leslie Walmsley, London: HarperCollins, 2000. —. Letter to “Mrs. K.”, 6 May 1955, in Letters to Children, London: Collins, 1985 —. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964. —. Mere Christianity, New York: Macmillan, 1960. 29

“Myth Became Fact”, 42.

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—. The Allegory of Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. —. The Silver Chair, New York: Macmillan, 1988. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “The Confusion of Reasons” in The Postmodern Explained, trans. Julian Pefanis et al. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. McCall, Richard D. “Imagining the Other: Toward an Aesthetic Theology,” Religion and the Arts 8:4 2004. Nichols, Shaun. “Imagining and Believing: The Promise of a Single Code”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 62:2 (Spring 2004). Reppert, Victor. C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, Westmont, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003. Schakel, Peter J. Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1984. Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories” in Tree and Leaf, new edition London: HarperCollins, 2001. —. Sept 1954 (to Peter Hastings), Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter London: HarperCollins, 2006. Wood, Ralph C. “Conflict and Convergence on Fundamental Matters in C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien” in Renascence 55:4 (Summer 2003).

TEMPTATIONS FOR THE TIMES IN THE MYTHICAL REWRITINGS OF BRITISH CHRISTIAN AUTHORS 1933-1945 SUZANNE BRAY

During the interwar period, we have ample evidence that British Christians were well-informed about the international situation. In 1931, for example, The Church Times devoted several pages each week to international affairs, informing its readers about Mussolini and his “attempt to make the Italian youth into good little Fascists and to make it as difficult as possible for them to be good little Christians”1 or warning them of the very real risk of a Nazi revolution in Germany. To make its readers understand the implications of this, the October 2nd edition devoted several columns to “The Spirit of Lutheranism and the Religion of the Nazis,” by an anonymous correspondent, underlining the fact that “the tendency of National Socialism is towards the subjection of religion to Pan-Germanism” and that many Nazis intended to see “their emblem, the Swastika,…set up in opposition to the cross.”2 Although some Christian leaders, like Bishop Headlam of Gloucester, were inclined to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt, the vast majority sympathised with those who deplored both Nazi anti-Semitism and the regime’s tendency to interfere in German Church affairs. In literary circles, Christian writers showed equal concern. As early as December 1928, T. S. Eliot wrote for The Criterion a detailed article on “The Literature of Fascism” and followed it up with an exchange of views between the communist writer A. L. Rowse, the fascist James Barnes and Eliot himself. Eliot’s unflattering conclusion was that both fascism and communism were “surrogate religions,” “variations of the same doctrine” and natural enthusiasms for “the thoughtless person.”3 However, he still 1

“Summary,” The Church Times, 35. “The Spirit of Lutheranism and the Religion of the Nazis,” The Church Times, 378. 3 Stevens, “T.S. Eliot’s Political Middle Way,” Religion and Liberty, 320. 2

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thought them dangerous, and throughout the 1930s The Criterion published a steady flow of articles pointing out the reasons to mistrust both the ideas and the regimes which advocated them. For Eliot, as for many others, the fact that fascism and communism were ideologies inspiring devotion of a quasi-religious nature in their followers meant that they could only be fought with other religious belief systems. He told the British public in 1932 that “Only the Church can galvanise a united response to the chaos of civilisation.”4 In spite of this conviction, Eliot doubted whether it would have the will and the energy to do so, stating pessimistically that: Eliot was not alone in this conviction. Dorothy L. Sayers regretted that the average English churchgoer was “about as well-equipped to do battle on fundamentals against a Marxian atheist or a Wellsian agnostic as a boy with a peashooter facing a fanfire of machine guns”5 and, on another occasion, feared that the British had become “far too lazy about examining the facts themselves and exercising [their] critical faculties”6 and may be preparing the way for a potential dictator. In this context, it is not surprising that many British literary Christians, between the rise of fascism and the end of the Second World War, conveyed their concern for the spiritual and political future of their country in their plays, poems and novels. It is equally easy to understand that, at a time when Britain’s religious, democratic and libertarian roots provided a healthy contrast to the totalitarian, neo-pagan or atheist regimes which were troubling the country, patriotic but anxious Christian writers returned to the cultural foundations of their national heritage to find stories, myths and legends which would, at the same time, be familiar to the British people and also, like all great literature, call them to “remember what [they] are and so rouse [them] to questioning and action”7 in their own times. There are so many examples of this phenomenon that a selection has to be made. C. S. Lewis provides the earliest clear example in his rewriting of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1933, where, combined with a spiritual message with strong autobiographical elements, he condemns the cruel vassals of Savage, both the “black kind with black shirts and a red kind who call themselves Marxomanni.”8 This direct presentation was unlikely 4

Yancey, Christian Century, 1031. Sayers, Creed or Chaos?, 32. 6 Sayers, Begin Here, 117. 7 Ibid., 18. 8 Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, 133. 5

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to provide Lewis’s readers with any new or profound insights on the international situation. However, it opened the way for a series of more subtle works, based on more or less historical popular myths or legends, where the whole plot can be seen as a critique of the times and a call to the English people to return to the Christian tradition underlying their national culture. Four of the most successful of these, which we shall examine in greater detail, are T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral (1935), Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Devil to Pay (1939), C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra (1943) and Charles Williams’ Arthurian Cycle in Taliessin Through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944). T. S. Eliot started work on Murder in the Cathedral during the winter of 1934. Although he had been aware of the dangers of totalitarianism long before this period, the danger Hitler presented to the German Church and the peace of Europe was becoming more apparent to the informed observer. Through his involvement in the pageant, The Rock, Eliot was mixing with some of the most influential clerics in the Church of England, including the well-informed George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, who invited him to write a play for the 1935 Canterbury Festival. Although the principal theme of Murder in the Cathedral is primarily spiritual, the political message was and is clearly discernible to those aware of the international context. Lyndall Gordon, one of Eliot’s biographers, reminds us that Eliot wrote to his brother in 1936, shortly before the play’s opening night in America, pointing out “the difficulty of conveying his intended satire on the totalitarian state to a country where the problem did not exist as in Europe.”9 At the time Eliot was writing, it was reasonable to suppose that most English people already knew the facts surrounding the murder in 1170 of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, at the instigation of King Henry II. Henry, who had already centralised the English legal system, establishing a common law for the kingdom and abolishing all regional differences, now intended to remove the final obstacle to his absolute power, the church courts, which had the right to judge any offending member of the clergy. For Henry, this meant that clerics could escape the king’s justice, which was unacceptable. For many churchmen however, including Thomas, the ecclesiastical courts were the guarantee of the English Church’s freedom and a testimony that the spiritual power could not be expected to submit to the temporal. Whatever Thomas Becket was really like, and opinions vary on this point, it is generally admitted that “in popular memory the archbishop 9

Gordon, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, 276.

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came to symbolise resistance to the oppressive authority of the State.”10 The parallel between Henry II’s England and the totalitarian states of the 1930s was therefore not hard to draw. The principal spokesmen for the totalitarian world view in Eliot’s play are the Second Tempter and the Second Knight with their “discourse of reasonable expediency.”11 The Second Tempter, politically astute, reproaches Thomas with his resignation from the Chancellorship when he accepted the archbishopric of Canterbury. In his opinion, the political power wielded by the Chancellor can be used to “rule for the good of the better cause,”12 enabling him to “set down the great, protect the poor…/Disarm the ruffian, strengthen the laws…/Dispensing justice make all even.”13 In fact, for the Second Tempter, the morally dubious act of ruling as a dictator can be justified by the good which the holder of absolute power can do for the people. The Second Knight is even more explicit, claiming that “an almost ideal State” is one with “a union of spiritual and temporal administration, under a central government,”14 although it is clear from his other statements that the temporal power would be the senior one, keeping the Church subservient in an unequal partnership. Thomas rejects this temptation as an illusion. For him, this idyllic scenario would not work. He tells the Second Tempter that people “who put their faith in worldly order/Not controlled by the order of God…but arrest disorder” and are storing up problems for themselves. In Thomas’s, and also Eliot’s, ideology, the Church must be free to follow its own conscience and fulfil a prophetic and critical role with regard to the State. After the murder, the Second Knight attempts to justify his own and his colleagues’ act of violence, using typical totalitarian arguments like the Nazis at the famous Nuremburg rallies. He tells the audience: “I am not going to appeal to your emotions, but to your reason,” and then addresses them in highly emotional, manipulative language. One brief passage, however, makes his position clear. The Second Knight declares his opposition to any form of autonomy for local government, stating that this is “usually exercised for selfish and often seditious ends,”15 which the British public would have interpreted as meaning for the good of the local population rather than kowtowing to the central authorities. He also 10

Gillingham, The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, 126. Gordon, T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, 276. 12 Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, 28. 13 Idem. 14 Ibid., 86. 15 Idem. 11

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declares that “interference by an Archbishop offends the instincts of a people like ours”16—a manifestly false assertion, as the British public knew very well, seeing as it was the popular Archbishop of Canterbury Stephen Langton who led the revolt against Henry II’s son, King John, which led to the signing of the Magna Carta. Further proof that the knights are the instruments of a totalitarian regime comes from the First Knight’s final request that the audience should “be careful not to loiter at street corners, and do nothing that might provoke any public outbreak.”17 This not very medieval indication that the government of the day had instituted a curfew and discouraged any form of open opposition would certainly have reinforced the English population’s pride in being the people of Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. In Eliot’s play, the four knights represent the unthinking tools of a dictatorial regime, those who, as he said two years later, “simplify issues so as to see only the definite external enemy.”18 For Eliot, this fanatical single-mindedness “brings about the bright eye and the springy step that go so well with political uniform.”19 On the other hand, the Chorus, who represent the ordinary people of England, start the play passive and unwilling to assume responsibility for their own destiny but, through contact with Thomas, gradually admit that “the sin of the world is upon [their] heads”20 and take their place as active participants in the fight against evil. Using Thomas Becket, whom most English people had been taught since childhood to consider as a hero and the innocent victim of the authoritarian King Henry II, as the vehicle of his message to twentiethcentury Britain, gave Eliot credibility not often accorded to those of American origin and rooted his play in an accepted cultural tradition. Dorothy L. Sayers’ Faustus in The Devil to Pay is also tempted, like Eliot’s Thomas, to use morally wrong means to achieve good ends and then, like Eliot’s Chorus, to opt out of all personal responsibility for the suffering in the world. Sayers was asked to write the play for the 1939 Canterbury Festival. After the week of performances in Canterbury in June it transferred to His Majesty’s Theatre in London until the theatres were closed in September after the outbreak of war. Sayers later referred to her work as “an endeavour to bring the fable of the Devil’s bargain to the 16

Ibid., 88. Ibid., 90. 18 Eliot, The Listener. 19 Idem. 20 Ibid., 94. 17

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interpretation of the inter-war period.”21 Well-acquainted from her youth with Goethe’s and Marlowe’s literary interpretations of the Faust legend, Sayers was convinced that the British people in the 1930s did not need “to be warned against the passionate pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.”22 There were still, however, in her opinion, circumstances in which a twentieth-century Englishman might be persuaded to sell his soul to the devil. The Devil to Pay is one possible answer to the question: “What kind of man might do so, and, above all, for what inducement?”23 In 1941 Sayers stated in a letter to Brother George Every that the Devil’s… ...chief business today is the offering of short cuts to perfection, without responsibility and in defiance of the universal nature of things. Irresponsible power, producing effects without cause or consequence, is the very definition of magic.24

The Devil to Pay is a dramatic presentation of this conviction. Sayers’ Faustus desperately wants the suffering in the world to be eliminated for ever, and he wants it immediately. He therefore decides to “command the devil’s power to serve Good ends” and work with Mephistopheles in order to work miracles, to “change/Sorrow to happiness in a twinkling–blot/The word “Despair” out of life’s lexicon.”25 Sayers describes him as “the type of impulsive reformer, over-sensitive to suffering, impatient of the facts, eager to set the world right by a sudden overthrow, in his own strength….”26 However, Faustus’s plans go wrong. The people he tries to help do not thank him for it. Every miraculous trick he uses to try to eliminate evil “merely produces the inevitable evil in a new form.”27 Disillusioned, Faustus sells his soul to the Devil in return for Helen of Troy, eternal youth and a return to the state of innocence before men had the conscious knowledge of good and evil. As a result, a hedonistic Faustus with his “profound scientific knowledge coupled with a total innocence of all moral responsibility”28 becomes the tool of political leaders causing wars and far more suffering than he had ever attempted to alleviate before. 21

Sayers, The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, 238. Sayers, Four Sacred Plays, 113. 23 Ibid., 111. 24 Reynolds (ed.), The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers vol. 2, 269. 25 Sayers, Four Sacred Plays, 140. 26 Ibid., 113. 27 Reynolds, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers vol. 2, 269. 28 Ibid., p.184. 22

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At the end of the play, when Mephistopheles tries to claim the soul of Faustus, he finds he cannot. Returned to primal innocence, he is no longer truly human, but an intelligent, irresponsible animal. His soul runs across the stage in the form of a little dog. God then gives Faustus the choice of remaining as an unconscious beast for all eternity or of regaining a human soul by “willingly accepting all the pains of evil which he had tried to short-circuit.”29 Faustus chooses the latter. Whether this conclusion works from a theatrical point of view is debatable. Nevertheless, Sayers felt vindicated in her choice of theme. First of all because, as she later noted, many people “expressed the opinion that it would have been better had Faustus chosen to remain in his animal state to all eternity,” and secondly, because “the play only ran for a few weeks in London—largely because of the imminence of the war which we had been largely instrumental in bringing about through a refusal of responsibility, and through a determined refusal to believe in the possibility of a deliberate will to evil.”30 As she told a friend, the people who thought “it would be so nice to be turned into an innocent little dog” were, in fact, “exactly the people against whom the play conveys a warning.”31 Sayers, in fact, is of the opinion that the British people had, like Eliot’s Chorus at the beginning of Murder in the Cathedral, become passive and inert, too inclined to accept “without inquiry the ruling of some outside authority”32 and lacking the motivation to think through complicated political and ethical issues. Faustus’s desire to destroy suffering without effort led to him handing himself over to the dictatorship of the diabolical Mephistopheles. Once caught in the trap, his artificial innocence led him to use his power for his own amusement regardless of the consequences. Having no knowledge of good and evil, he no longer had a conscience to check his actions. Sayers’ use of the Faust story, the myth of the man who sells his soul to the devil, was certainly relevant in the climate of the late thirties. A man who was prepared to abandon his country’s Judaeo-Christian traditions and devote himself to a totalitarian master in order to provide a quick fix to the people’s physical and economic sufferings had a clear message to the British people on the verge of war. By using a well-known story based several centuries before the time of writing, Sayers illustrates the lasting

29

Idem. Sayers, The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, 239. 31 Reynolds, Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers vol.2, 130. 32 Sayers, Begin Here, 19. 30

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value of the Christian faith as the only real solution to the sufferings of the world. During the interwar period and the first years of the Second World War, the biblical story of the Fall and Milton’s seventeenth-century poetic rendition of it, Paradise Lost, were frequently discussed. Many fashionable critics condemned it and Milton was accused by some of being “a bad man,”33 writing about a “remote and uninteresting”34 subject. On the other hand, Milton’s supporters often gave him almost prophetic status and critics on both sides of the argument applied his message to the political situation of their times. C. S. Lewis had read widely about Milton while preparing a series of lectures which were later published as A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). In his correspondence he mentions, among other critical works, G. Wilson Knight’s Chariot of Wrath: The Message of John Milton to a Democracy at War (1942), in which the reader is informed that Satan and his minions “meditate on the conquest of Heaven, as Germany, at this hour, plans the conquest of Britain”35 and that the infernal assembly of fallen angels is “not unlike a National-Socialist gathering.”36 Wilson Knight’s conclusion, that Milton was one of a divinely chosen “succession of poet-prophets”37 and that the British people should obey him as “God is speaking now, as of old”38 through his writings, led an unimpressed Lewis to describe the book as “a kind of English version of the Nazi creed with Milton as our Rosenberg.”39 Lewis’s own version of the story of the Fall, Perelandra, is firmly rooted in the Second World War. As a First World War veteran, who had fought in the trenches, and as a university lecturer, many of whose former pupils were risking their lives on the front line, Lewis was particularly aware of the human cost of war. Throughout the novel the reader is reminded that “the Germans may be bombing London to bits”40 and that “there are hundreds of mere boys on Earth facing death at this moment.”41 As Eliot showed the temptations which may lead an otherwise good man to compromise with evil or an ordinary, generally virtuous, group of 33

Williams, The Image of the City and Other Essays, 27. Idem. 35 Wilson Knight, Chariot of Wrath: The Message of John Milton to a Democracy at War, 145. 36 Ibid., 143. 37 Ibid., 141. 38 Ibid., 188. 39 Hooper (ed.), C. S. Lewis Collected Letters Vol. II, 548. 40 Lewis, Perelandra, 295. 41 Ibid., 300. 34

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people passively to allow wrong to be done and Sayers imagined what might cause a twentieth-century Faustus to sell his soul to the devil, Lewis asks: 1) 2) 3)

What sort of temptation would cause a mid-twentieth century Eve to lose her innocence and fall into sin? What could make an educated, civilised man become an agent of evil on earth? Why might a good, Christian, Englishman be tempted to opt out of playing an active role in the fight against evil?

During the Second World War the BBC, and also the Government, presented an image of the British as a people capable of “level-headed, stubborn endeavour” and “humble, everyday heroism”42 as opposed to the “Teutonic images of romantic heroism”43 favoured by the German media. It was also well-known that the German young people in their schools were being fed a diet of “ancient German poetry, Icelandic sagas, or the early medieval German Song of the Nibelungs”44 in order to feed “the romantic dream of an ethnic rebirth of the German nation.”45 Lewis was of the opinion that this romantic element in their propaganda was one of the keys to the Nazis’ success. He was fully conscious of the power of such propaganda and told his brother: Humphrey came to see me last night and we listened to Hitler’s speech together. ...it’s a positive revelation to me how while the speech lasts it is impossible not to waver just a little. Statements which I know to be untrue all but convince me, at any rate for the moment, if only the man says them unflinchingly.46

For these reasons, Tinidril, Lewis’s Eve, is confronted with the temptation to see herself as a romantic heroine and act accordingly. As Evan K. Gibson put it: “In each aspect of the temptation the Un-man tries to tarnish her imagination by separating it from reality and stimulating her individual will to act independently.”47

42 Seaton, The Media in British Politics, Reporting Atrocities: the BBC and the Holocaust, 161. 43 Idem. 44 Knopf, Hitler’s Children, 153. 45 Ibid., 42 46 Hooper (ed.), C. S. Lewis Collected Letters Vol. II, 425. 47 Gibson, The Riddle of Joy, 132.

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Weston, Lewis’s tempter, seeks to entice Tinidril into disobedience by telling her stories. His basic premise, “the world is made up not only of what is but of what might be”48 is illustrated by a series of stories of “extreme beauty and pathos”49 in order to give the innocent woman a “dramatic conception of self”50 and “the first hint of a self-admiring inclination to seize a grand role in the drama of her world.”51 This selfimage would then enable Tinidril to see the act of disobedience as a “Great Deed” or a “kind of martyrdom”52 for the good of her husband and the race to which she was to give birth. In this, Tinidril would join her biblical counterpart and Milton’s Eve in “a deification of her own reason”53 which would declare that the divine law was unreasonable and, therefore, meant to be broken. However, Tinidril is not the only one to be tempted in Perelandra. Ransom, the hero of Lewis’s Cosmic Trilogy, is also tempted to reject God’s purposes for him. As a relatively diffident man, Ransom feels that what he has been asked to do is absurd and says to his friend: “Dr Elwin Ransom, setting out to combat powers and principalities. You may even be wondering if I’ve got megalomania.”54 Although he acknowledges that “when the Bible used that very expression about fighting with principalities and powers…it meant that quite ordinary people were to do the fighting,”55 once he gets to Perelandra and realises that the future of the planet depends on Tinidril’s ability to resist the satanic tempter, he is tempted to believe that “he had been brought there not to do anything, but only as a spectator or witness”56–the same temptation as assails Eliot’s chorus. Ransom, as a physically unfit academic, is horrified by the idea of any form of violence.57 In his ideology up to that point “the notion of physical combat was only fit for a savage.” Finally he realises that his dilemma is the same as that facing many “whitefaced subalterns and freckled corporals who had but lately begun to shave”58 on the battlefields of Europe, who also had to face up to their very real responsibilities. 48

Lewis, Perelandra, 237. Ibid., 257. 50 Ibid., 270. 51 Ibid., 264. 52 Ibid., 262. 53 Gibson, The Riddle of Joy, 132. 54 Lewis, Perelandra, 162. 55 Ibid., 163. 56 Ibid., 240. 57 Ibid., 272. 58 Idem. 49

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Theologically too, Ransom comes to the realisation that winning a spiritual battle could involve physical combat. The Incarnation meant that God had chosen to work through the bodies and wills of human beings and had bound the forces of evil from interfering directly in the history of the universe. Weston, Tinidril’s tempter, is not the Devil. He is merely possessed by a demonic force and is in fact “the enemy’s only foothold in Perelandra…It had entered that body at Weston’s own invitation, and without such invitation, could enter no other.”59 To kill Weston would therefore remove the peril from the planet. This viewpoint justifies such Christians as Dietrich Bonhoeffer who participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler and also makes spiritual sense of the British nation’s armed combat against the Nazis. Lewis’s message here supports the official position of Churchill’s Government in its attempts to make each citizen play an active role in the war effort. The final temptation presented by Lewis in his Miltonian novel is that which has already, before the action begins, persuaded Weston to join the forces of evil and allow himself to be taken over by demonic powers. Here, Lewis returns to Milton’s Satan, the talented angel who “thought himself impaired”60 when required to take second place to Messiah. In his Preface to Paradise Lost, written at about the same time, he applies this principle to everyday life: …[Satan] is suffering from a ‘sense of injured merit.’ This is a well-known state of mind which we can all study in domestic animals, children, filmstars, politicians or minor poets; and perhaps nearer home…When it appears, unable to hurt in a jealous dog or a spoiled child, it is usually laughed at. When it appears armed with the force of millions on the political stage, it escapes ridicule only by being more mischievous…61

It is safe to assume that we have here an allusion to the Nazis, convinced that they had been unfairly treated by the Allies after World War I, and possibly also to Hitler’s own personal mindset as revealed in Mein Kampf and many of his speeches. Weston in Perelandra is a prime example of this phenomenon. He mumbles to himself, repeating his grudges against the world: They won’t let me see my press cuttings. So then I went and told him that if they didn’t want me in the First Fifteen they could jolly well do without me, see. We’ll tell that young whelp it’s an insult to the examiners to show 59

Ibid., 276. Milton, Paradise Lost, V: 665. 61 Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, 96. 60

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up this kind of work. What I want to know is why I should pay for a first class ticket and then be crowded out like this. It’s not fair. Not fair.62

From this passage we can see that the conviction that he has been unfairly treated appears to have been with Weston since his schooldays. As a result, Weston has surrendered his will to a Force which makes him feel special and important. It also leads him to believe that “Man in himself is nothing”63 and requires from him “a total commitment…to something which overrides all our petty ethical pigeon-holes”64 to the extent that he is prepared to murder Ransom, “sell England to the Germans” or even “print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical”65 if any of these would advance the cause. Weston is therefore in the same position as a committed Nazi. As Dorothy Sayers had pointed out: …once we have grasped the full implications of the statement that ‘whatever serves Germany is right’–and Heaven knows it has been reiterated often enough and loudly enough to attract our attention–then we see that breach of faith, cruelty and opportunism are merely the natural results of that statement of principle.66

Weston’s fall into temptation is thus a warning against those feelings of having been unjustly treated or not appreciated at our true worth which, if taken to extremes, may, in Lewis’s opinion, lead the person who cultivates them to hand himself over to an evil cause, or even to evil spiritual forces, in his desire to get his own back on the world. As we have seen, Lewis’s Perelandra is a twentieth-century rewriting both of the biblical story of the Fall and of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The story of the newly created couple, called to be the parents of a new race and tempted by a satanic figure, is a familiar one. However, in spite of the resemblances, Lewis’s tale is not the same. Theologically, it is placed firmly in our era, post-Incarnation and post-Pentecost. God has become a man and has given his spirit to men. Also, the temptations presented in the novel are particularly relevant to the British people at a specific time in their history: dramatising oneself as a romantic hero, refusing responsibility and letting others carry the burdens of the times, allowing oneself to wallow in self-pity at the perceived unfairness of one’s fate, 62

Lewis, Perelandra, 261. Ibid., 225. 64 Ibid., 229. 65 Idem. 66 Sayers, Begin Here, 89. 63

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placing the victory of a cause above common human ethical standards. All of these were very real temptations at the time Lewis was writing. Perelandra places the Second World War in the context of an immense, cosmic struggle and encourages his readers to assume their responsibilities in the fight for the greater and the “lesser cause.”67 Lewis’s desire to fight the greater cosmic battle against the powers of evil, rather than just the war against the Nazis, was clearly demonstrated in his prayer life. He asked his former student Dom Bede Griffiths: “When you pray for Hitler and Stalin, how do you actually teach yourself to make the prayer real?”68 The main help he found was in remembering that “one is only joining one’s feeble little voice to the perpetual intercession of Christ, who died for those very men.”69 Lewis’s fellow-Inkling, Charles Williams, shared this concern, considering that an understanding of it among British Christians was vital for the spiritual health of the country. He clearly expressed the dilemma at the beginning of the war: What is the duty of church-folk as church-folk? Precisely the opposite of their duty as nationals. Their duty as nationals involves separation from and killing of German nationals. Their duty as church-folk involves union with and spiritual dependence on Germans. Both duties must be fulfilled.70

For this reason, Williams did what he had hesitated to do before and created his “Order of the Co-inherence,” creating a bond of prayer and spiritual solidarity between a committed group of his friends for the good of all. Alice Mary Hadfield, one of the members, explained that the aim of the Order was “to know co-inherence, including the enemy, including Hitler, and he with us and all in Christ.”71 This concern is very present in Charles Williams’ main literary preoccupation at this time, his unfinished cycle of Arthurian poems, many of which were published in two short volumes, Taliessin Through Logres (1938) and The Region of the Summer Stars (1944). In the fraught political climate of the thirties and early forties, such a preoccupation with myths of a former age could easily have been seen as irrelevant but, as Glen Cavaliero assures us, Williams’ poetry “whatever its traditional associations…is never anachronistic.”72 Equally, for Alice Mary Hadfield, 67

Lewis, Perelandra, 276. Hooper (ed.), C. S. Lewis Collected Letters Vol. II, 391. 69 Idem. 70 Williams, The Image of the City and Other Essays, 116. 71 Hadfield, Charles Williams: an Exploration of his Life and Work, 176. 72 Cavaliero, The Charles Williams Society Newsletter, 8. 68

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the last published poem, “The Prayers of the Pope,” is explicitly “a long poem on the world of Charles’s time, on the 1939-45 war.”73 Like the works we have already studied, Williams’ Arthurian cycle deals with the theme of temptation. Arthur, at the moment of his coronation, asks himself the question “the king made for the kingdom, or the kingdom for the king?”74 His choice, to regard, in Williams’ own words, Guinevere as “a convenient adjunct of his royalty”75 and to consider his throne and his kingdom as his personal property, lead to a similar attitude to his religion where he keeps “the Grail cooped for gustation and God for his Glory.”76 This selfish choice, which Llewellyn Dodds calls “a radical act of improper self-exaltation,”77 eventually leads to the breaking up of the round table and the wars which destroy the kingdom. This temptation, for a ruler to consider his land and people as his own possessions, in Williams’ world view, prevents the land in question from fulfilling its divine vocation. The purposes of God for Logres/Britain were not worked out in practice during the reign of Arthur, therefore the kingdom could not come at that time. The glorious destiny of the nation was therefore, in his own day, still awaiting its final realisation. When rulers fall into temptation and God’s reign cannot be established, as was the case while Europe was at war in both the fifth and the twentieth centuries, Williams insisted that “the rule of the Kingdom must be kept alive in individual souls,” so that the vision could be revived at a later date. The second volume of poems, The Region of the Summer Stars, published towards the end of the war, takes the story further and shows Mordred, Arthur’s son, tempted to a still greater state of self-absorption. Mordred has fallen into the trap which Weston laid for Tinidril. He has “gone whoring with fantasy”78 and lives in a self-glorifying world of illusion. Unlike Arthur who, although imperfect, has genuine relationships with his wife and friends, Mordred is “entire egotism”79 and completely isolated. Those who support him he regards as “moral wantons, whose

73

Hadfield, Charles Williams: an Exploration of his Life and Work, 219. Llewellyn Dodds, Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams, 36. 75 Williams, The Image of the City and Other Essays, 176. 76 Llewellyn Dodds, Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams, 67. 77 Ibid., 9. 78 Williams, The Region of the Summer Stars, 51. 79 Williams, The Image of the City and Other Essays, 176. 74

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spines are tree-stretched up towards me.”80 He rejects the mature Christian advisors his father had relied on and, although an unbeliever himself, draws in “pagan chiefs”81 to play influential roles in the kingdom. He also despises his father’s desire to seek the Holy Grail, claiming that: “I can manage without such fairy mechanism.”82 This is, for Williams, the height of depravity, to cut oneself off from family affection, from friendship and even from attachment to things. It is the ultimate result of the Fall, represented in Williams’ mythology as the dolorous blow, which he describes as “personality guarding itself completely in its own selfhood, instead of yielding itself completely up.”83 The poem “The Prayers of the Pope” describes the “wars of identity” which have inevitably followed Arthur’s and Mordred’s abandoning of the moral law. The results are racial hatred, “race by sullen marshes separated from race,”84 omnipresent fear, death, destruction and the division of Christendom—in fact, very much what Williams saw in the Europe of his own day as the theoretically Christian countries had weakly allowed a pagan regime to deny the essential unity of mankind and ravage the continent. His prayer, like the Pope’s in the poem, was that hope may be kept alive for the future by the faithful few who would, in love, maintain their spiritual solidarity with all. As we have seen, in this difficult period for Britain, several Christian writers, concerned for the wellbeing of their country, chose, instead of inventing their own plots, to retell, in a new way, well-known myths and legends with particular significance for the British people. If the original versions of these stories all contained their own temptations, the twentiethcentury authors, finding that some of these were no longer relevant to their contemporaries, put others in their place. Eliot, Sayers, Lewis and Williams, who shared a similar world view, asked themselves what temptations were preventing those around them from fulfilling the purposes of God for their land in their generation. All four feared, as Lewis put it, that… …many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the

80

Ibid., 134. Williams, The Region of the Summer Stars, 55. 82 Ibid., 135. 83 Llewellyn Dodds, Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams, 9. 84 Williams, The Region of the Summer Stars, 52. 81

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By reaching, through these traditional, much loved stories, down into the roots of British culture, they found an acceptable way of warning their fellow citizens against the temptations of using political tyranny or even occult power for good ends, of opting out of the battle and refusing responsibility for the evil in the world, of dramatising one’s self-image and living in a romantic illusion, of feeling oneself unjustly cheated in an unfair world, of using political power for one’s own ends or of forgetting the Christian call to solidarity with all, regardless of race, origin or appearance–even with those who have fallen victim to the powers of evil and become their instruments in the world.

Works Cited Cavaliero, Glen. “Charles Williams and the Arthuriad: Poetry as Sacrament.” In The Charles Williams Society Newsletter, Autumn, 2003. Eliot, T.S. “Church, Community and State.” In The Listener, 1937. —. Murder in the Cathedral, London: Faber and Faber, 1968. —. Selected Essays, London: Faber and Faber, 1932. Gibson, Evan K. “The Centrality of Perelandra to Lewis’s Theology.” In The Riddle of Joy, London: Collins, 1989. Gillingham, John. “The Early Middle Ages.” In The Oxford Illustrated History of Britain, London: Oxford University Press, 1984. Gordon, Lyndall. T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, London: Vintage, 1998. Hadfield, Alice Mary. Charles Williams: an Exploration of his Life and Work, London: Oxford University Press, 1983. Hooper, Walter (ed.), C. S. Lewis Collected Letters Vol. II, London: Harper Collins, 2004. Knopf, Guido. Hitler’s Children, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2002. Lewis, C.S. A Preface to Paradise Lost, London: Oxford University Press, 1960. —. Perelandra (The Cosmic Trilogy), London: Pan, 1990. —. The Abolition of Man, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. —. The Pilgrim’s Regress, London: Collins, 1987. Llewellyn Dodds, David. Arthurian Poets: Charles Williams, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1991. 85

Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 81.

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Reynolds, Barbara (ed.). The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers vol.2: from novelist to playwright, Hurstpierpoint: The Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1997. Sayers, Dorothy L. Begin Here, London: Victor Gollancz, 1940. —. “Creed or Chaos?” Creed or Chaos? Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1995. —. Four Sacred Plays, London: Gollancz, 1948. —. The Poetry of Search and the Poetry of Statement, London: Gollancz, 1963. Seaton, Jean. The Media in British Politics, Reporting Atrocities: the BBC and the Holocaust, Aldershot: Dartmouth, 1989. “The Spirit of Lutheranism and the Religion of the Nazis,” The Church Times, October 2 1931, 378. Stevens, Michael R. “T.S. Eliot’s Political Middle Way.” In Religion and Liberty, September and October 1999, http://www.acton.org/publicat/randl/article.php?id=320 (07/01/07). “Summary,” The Church Times, 10 July 1931, 38. Williams, Charles. The Image of the City and Other Essays, London: Oxford University Press, 1958. —. The Region of the Summer Stars, London: Oxford University Press, 1944. Wilson Knight, G. Chariot of Wrath: The Message of John Milton to a Democracy at War, London: Faber and Faber, 1942. Yancey, Philip. “T.S. Eliot’s Christian Society: Still Relevant Today?” In Christian Century, 19 November 1986.

INCARNATION AS META-NARRATIVE IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S SHORT STORIES ISABELLE BOOF-VERMESSE

A quintessential Southerner, Flannery O’Connor once described the “writer’s country” (any writer’s country) as “a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet”.1 Her fiction displays an intimate knowledge of her region, including the way people talk, walk, dress, eat, work, and relate to each other: The best American fiction has always been regional. The ascendency passed roughly from New England to the Midwest to the South; it has passed and stayed longest wherever there has been a shared past, a sense of alikeness, and the possibility of reading a small history in a universal light.2

But another dimension is added to “manners”, that of Mystery, the mystery of eternity and the absolute in that they can be approached by man. Mystery can be read at first sight as the Catholic equivalent of pagan myth: like myth, it bridges the gap between man’s limitation and what is out of reach, the un-limited. Contrary to mythic nostalgia, however, Mystery does enact the meeting, here and now, so that a discussion of myth in Flannery O’Connor’s fiction can hardly avoid addressing also her Catholicism. In “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” (1963), she shows that Southern culture is a treasure for the writer, especially if she happens to be a Catholic, for it acts as a kind of antidote to the temptation of (admittedly well-meaning) Catholic abstraction; the depositary of a narrative tradition derived from its intimacy with the Bible, the Southern text has a taste for the concrete. The work of Flannery O’Connor explores the necessity for art, the celebration of incarnation, to be itself incarnated. Hence the primacy that 1 2

O’Connor, “The Regional Writer”, Mystery and Manners, 59. Ibid., 58.

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is granted to “stories”, to the narrative form as such, to mythos, over abstract content or “message”. A story is not so much a vehicle for meaning as an experience in itself. Such a story must rely on a predecessor, on a “pre-text”, trying to emulate the original experience this pre-text was the first to enact: We have to have stories. It takes a story to make a story. It takes a story of mythic dimensions; one which belongs to everybody; one in which everybody is able to recognize the hand of God and imagine its descent upon himself. In the Protestant South the Scriptures fill this role. The ancient Hebrew genius for making the absolute concrete has conditioned the Southerner’s way of looking at things. That is one of the big reasons why the South is a story-telling section at all. Our response to life is different if we have been taught only a definition of faith than it is if we have trembled with Abraham as he held the knife over Isaac.3

This essay will propose to examine the specific way in which Flannery O’Connor’s stories actualize, revitalize and participate in the “grand Christian narrative”, how the word is made flesh in the narrative gesture, turning meaning into experience.

Religion, myth, fiction: the return of the repressed To use Lyotard, who famously advocated a return to a “pagan” mode of thought (Rudiments paiens, or Lessons in Paganism ), calling for a rejection of universal absolutes to embrace multiplicity, in order to assess Flannery O’Connor’s relationship with her own Christian metanarrative, might sound irritatingly paradoxical. But Lyotard’s own production allows for the paradox: his critique of metanarratives evolved from the celebration of pagan multiplicity (Rudiments paiens, 1977) through the debunking of modern reason as idolatrous (La Condition postmoderne, 1979) to the exposure of postmodernism’s relativism (his own included in fact) as cynically pragmatic (Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, 1986), thus displacing his own initial displacement. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard proposes a definition of postmodernism as scepticism towards all metanarratives, those narratives that are legitimized through their appeal to universal reason. Hence the grand narrative by excellence is not so much the Christian myth as it is the myth of science: postmodernism does not distrust myth as such but what 3

O’Connor, “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South”, Mystery and Manners, 202-203.

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tries to pass as undeniable since it is based on reason. Postmodernism attacks the arrogance of Cartesian intellectualism, that insists that a “god’s eye view” is possible and that reason can reach the ultimate truth and warns that self-proclaimed universal reason is relative, that it depends on context. Lyotard shows for instance that Science carves its own pedestal by grounding it on a supposedly undeniable metadiscourse, making an explicit appeal to a grand narrative (Darwin’s or Einstein’s paradigms spring to mind), a “master story”, with all the other narratives subordinated to this great blueprint. This grand narrative or metanarrative can be summarized as the story of emancipation through reason, “all that is rational is real and all that is real is rational”. In a strikingly revisionist gesture, The Postmodern Explained to Children documents the confiscation of the modern project (yet more reason) by a perverse outgrowth of postmodernism, “technoscience”. The postmodern relativization of the ambition of reason led to an archpragmatic approach: in postmodern times, scientific reason is no longer questioned in cognitive terms (the evaluation of the possibility of truth concerning the referent), but in pragmatic terms (the assessment of the impact of the discourse on the recipient); the raison d’être of what Lyotard calls the System being the deliberately candid seeking of consensus rather than truth.4 When faced with eccentric manifestations of faith, Flannery O’Connor’s rational characters are shocked: “Greenleaf” is the story of the confrontation of reason and respectability with, precisely, forces that are at the same time pagan and fundamentalist Christian. Mrs May, the respectable owner of a “New South” farm, comes across her tenant’s wife engaged in a ceremony of “healing”: Mrs Greenleaf swayed back and forth on her hands and knees and groaned, “Jesus, Jesus” Mrs May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.5

Although she is a conservative white lady whose diegetic universe is set in the late Fifties, Mrs May displays the correct postmodern attitude: seasoned scepticism combined with a regard for efficiency based on the 4 5

Le Postmoderne expliqué aux enfants, 90. O’Connor, “Greenleaf”, The Complete Stories, 326.

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image, here for the Christian religion. The story stages her confrontation with unleashed forces, as her farm is invaded by a straying bull until she ends up with her heart pierced by the Dionysian/Christian return of the repressed: She looked back and saw that the bull, its head lowered, was racing toward her. She remained perfectly still, not in fright, but in a freeing unbelief. She stared at the violent black streak bounding toward her as if she had no sense of distance, as if she could not decide at once what its intention was, and the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip. She continued to stare straight ahead but the entire scene in front of her had changed—the tree line was a dark wound in a world that was nothing but sky—and she had the look of a person whose sight has been suddenly restored but who finds the light unbearable.6

Like Mrs May, whose rational scepticism is exploded by the horns of the bull, Lyotard finds his critique of metanarratives comes full circle when relativism towards metanarratives is itself relativised as self-serving nihilism. There is thus another way to look at postmodernist scepticism: it can be seen as more than just incredulity towards myth, but rather as the realization that all knowledge can only be grounded on myth—a step towards the “post secular” intuition that knowledge, as opposed to faith, can only be relative. In the summary contextualization that has been provided above, the modern (in the wide sense of the term) has been described as a movement away from mythos (the eternal and the universal) to logos (the rational, the pragmatic, the scientific). Yet mythos also means story: Flannery O’Connor’s displacement and replacement of the alternative between mythos and logos into the realm of fiction aims at reasserting the power of storytelling. Seen in this light, mythos is the artistic version of the divine logos, itself the word made flesh.

Logos, mythos, and analogy As opposed to a gnostic perception of the “proto-incarnation” of Genesis as a lapse, a Fall of the logos into the material, Flannery O’Connor sees Creation as an ongoing process in which men participate. 6

O’Connor, “Greenleaf”, The Complete Stories, 333.

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Her stories are informed by an analogy with History, the Christian narrative of Creation (beginning), Incarnation (transforming apotheosis) and Last Judgement (end)—but this textual practice goes way beyond mere mythic re-enactment. In the wake of Mircea Eliade, myth is traditionally seen as the antidote to the destruction operated by time: myth is a re-enactment meant to regain the Golden Age, the “time before time”, to connect back with it (re-ligio: to link again); in times that have become absurd, it is compensation for meaninglessness: stories have a comforting dimension, they unite their audiences to the heavenly dimension they have lost in the course of time.7 Myth thus has to do with the Past, while the Christian/Catholic vision emphasizes the presence of God here and now: more specifically, the Biblical narrative is given a “performative” power thanks to the notion of sacrifice: narrated events are no longer frozen in the past but have a bearing on the present so that Incarnation is an on-going process. Analogically, story telling for Flannery O’Connor—although it tells of events past, by definition—reproduces, as a gesture, not necessarily in its content, this participation. Stories are part of History, they not only “reproduce” the “blueprint” of History (the definition of metanarrative) but constitute, in fact, the flesh of History. Some people have the notion that you read the story first and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.8

This poetics is based on Aquinas’ concept of analogy, which constitutes a response to the aporia of having to choose between the univocal and the equivocal ways of talking about God; univocal predication is impossible because of God’s sublime dimension, exceeding the power of our intellect, and equivocal predication can only breed skepticism. Only analogy allows us to approach the divine. A framework used in biblical exegesis, analogy is also “an attitude toward all of creation, and a way of reading nature which included most possibilities”9, for it blurs the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. Thus Flannery O’Connor’s stories do not “reenact” Incarnation as they incarnate Incarnation. “The Temple of the Holy Ghost” focuses on a twelve-year-old girl who is immersed in two experiences of corporeality. She receives the visit of 7

The Myth of the Eternal Return, 76. O’Connor, Mystery and Manners. 73. 9 Idem. 8

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two older cousins who are students in a Catholic school, and call each other derisively “Temple One” and “Temple Two” after an old nun had advised them to think of themselves as “Temples of the Holy Ghost” if a young man should ever behave in an ungentlemanly manner with them at the back of an automobile: Sister Perpetua said they were to say “Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!” and that would put en end to it.... The child didn’t see anything so funny in this....Her mother didn’t laugh at what they had said. “I think you girls are pretty silly,” she said. “after all, that’s what you are—Temples of the Holy Ghost.” The two of them looked up at her, politely concealing their giggles, but with astonished faces, as if they were beginning to realize that she was made of the same stuff as sister Perpetua.... I am a temple of the Holy Ghost, the child said to herself, and was pleased with the phrase. It made her feel as if somebody had given her a present.10

The second encounter with flesh comes in the form of a fantasy about a hermaphrodite. As they return from a freak show, the girls discuss in elliptic terms the “youknowwhat” with the child and initiate her into Mystery: male and female like Christ who is human and divine, the monster becomes monstrance as the child starts fantasizing about him during Mass: When the priest raised the monstrance with the Host shining ivorycoloured in the center of it, she was thinking at the tent at the fair that had the freak in it. The freak was saying, “I don’t dispute it. This is the way He wanted me to be.”11

Narrative as incarnation Fiction as “incarnational art”, according to Flannery O’Connor’s own expression, must then be understood as narrative not only the imitation of, but also as being in an intrinsic relation with, historical Incarnation in Christ. Her stories are thus, literally and not only allegorically, re-crucifictions. Verbal creation is contiguous with divine creation, and analogy functions very much like the Romantic symbol, shown to be synecdochic 10 11

O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 238. O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 248.

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by Paul De Man in “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, since it is part of what it represents. Yet being a “part” is not being the whole thing, and thus contiguity is marred by finitude. De Man’s “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” shows that the Romantics’ desire to draw closer and closer to the natural object—given an ontological primacy—is also the recognition of its own failure: There can be flowers that “are” and poetic words that “originate”, but no poetic words that “originate” as if they “were”12.

In the same article, De Man notes that the Romantics’ selection and use of myth is informed by this consciousness of finitude: A useful study could be made of romantic and post-romantic versions of Hellenic myths such as the stories of Narcissus, of Prometheus, of the War of the Titans, of Adonis, Eros and Psyche, Proserpine, and many others; in each case, the tension and duality inherent in the mythological situation would be found to reflect the inherent tension that resides in the metaphorical language itself.13

Flannery O’Connor’s trust in the power of language—of narrative, to be exact—to act and not merely represent is a leap of faith in this context of linguistic skepticism. Based on the polysemy of the Hebrew term dabar, a polysemy somewhat lost in the New Testament use of the Greek term logos, the word as she understands it is an utterance and an event at the same time. It participates in participation, and allows man to partake of creation: “The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning”14; experienced meaning is incarnated meaning, meaning that is actualized here and now intradiegetically, for the characters, and extradiegetically, for the reader, the ultimate experience being that of conversion, always violent as seen above with Mrs May and the bull. Meaning is thus always immanent in narrative, for narrative is not an illustration but an enactment rather than a mythic re-enactment: When you write fiction, you are speaking with character and action, not about character and action 15

12

De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 70. Idem. 14 O’Connor, Mystery and Manners. 96. 15 Ibid., 75. 13

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Flannery O’Connor’s stories are not only analogous in that they exploit intertextual references to the Bible, thus anchoring their narration in the grand narrative of the Bible, but in that they imitate, as seen above, and partake of, creation. There is thus a spiritual continuity in what appears at first sight to be heterogeneous: disparate events can be spiritually identical events in the light of History. Even pagan myth can be recycled to “do its part” in the evergoing work of creation. The motif of the bull derived from Euripides’ Bacchae is subsumed in “Greenleaf”, as the Dionysiac bull doubletimes as a Christ-like figure who wears a wreath, a “prickly crown”16 across his horns. The Bacchae, madwomen priestresses with snakes entwined in their hair, are an apt description of Mrs Greenleaf, Mrs M’s bete noire, the wife of her tenant and a self-proclaimed “healer” who performs strange rituals rollicking in the mud to celebrate Jesus. The (harmless) snake that crosses Mrs May’s path on her way to claim the removal of the bull from her property is thus as much a Pagan emblem of fertility as it is a Christian allegorical representation of evil. Last touch of grim humour for those who have read Euripides’ Bacchae, the ritual celebration of Dionysos includes sparagmos, ‘tearing’, an anticipation of Mrs May’s end, a somewhat welldeserved end for Mrs May, whose behaviour betrays her name, is like Pentheus the disbeliever looking down on the Bacchae/Maenads: she disapproves of the Greenleafs and denies irrationality and faith. Like Pentheus, she ends torn apart, pierced by the bull who has strayed on her property. Myth is revisited and given an impact where pagan and Chistian meanings are compatible: in both cases, contempt of the flesh and refusal to participate meet with their proper retribution and provide the material for the narrative to participate in Creation. However, Flannery O’Connor’s narratives depart from pagan myth in that they systematically feature the advent of grace forcing its way through cold aloofness and denied participation; the grace that hits Mrs May at the end, piercing her in the heart, restores her sight and allows her to contemplate the invisible. Similarly, like the bull, Flannery O’Connor’s Bacchic story opens for the reader a passage to the invisible: [The writer] ’s looking for one image that will connect or embody two points: one is point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed by him firmly, just as real to him, really, as the one that everybody sees.17

16 17

O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 312. O’Connor, Mystery and Manners. 42.

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The story builds a bridge over the visible and the invisible, the invisible that is nevertheless real; mystery is what belongs with the divine but can be contemplated by man, thanks to the act of creation, analogous to the divine incarnation in a human body. Gnostic abstraction is as untoward in the realm of fiction as it is in that of metaphysics.

Idol and icon In the first chapter of God Without Being, Marion outlines the distinction between icon and idol, with the warning that the same object can be both idol and icon for different men, or even for the same man at different times. According to Marion’s typology, the idol presents itself to man’s gaze and purports to be a representation of the divine; it is endowed with divinity because of the gaze, but the gaze stops here: it does not try to seek the divine beyond the idol. The invisible thus remains invisible forever. In contrast, the icon is not constructed by the gaze fixed on it but forces the gaze to rebound. The invisible is not reduced in the icon, on the contrary the icon tries to render visible the invisible, making it visible as such, as the invisible, which manifests itself in its own terms, transcending the human scope. In a later text about painting, The Crossing of the Visible, Marion highlights one of the main characteristics of wood-painted orthodox icons that allows them to insert the invisible in the visible: all feature a face whose gaze looks at the beholder, so that in effect the icon looks at the believer who worships God through it. It dramatizes the gaze of the invisible, inviting us to exchange our gaze for this gaze. Even presented by the icon, then, the invisible remains invisible or “invisable” (untargetable), and this is precisely this invisibility that the gaze aims at reminding the beholder. The icon then does not represent, it presents in the sense that it renders present. This interplay between idol and icon idol is explicitly developed in O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back”, whose central emblem is, precisely, the tattoo of a Byzantine Christ. Parker, a drifter described as “as ordinary as a loaf of bread”18, is several times the victim of grace—which takes the form of an intense desire to engrave his bodies with tattoos. The last occurrence sees him falling the victim of a tractor incident, presented as a parodic burning bush episode, which prompts his decision to print a Christ tattoo on his body. To please his Fundamentalist wife, he chooses a stern vision, that of a Byzantine Christ: “the eyes that were forever in his back were eyes to be 18

O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 513.

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obeyed. He was as certain of it as he had ever been of anything,”19 and being called “Obadiah”, “servant of God”, the tattoo is a perfectly adequate representation of his identity or rather corroborates what Marion sees as the necessity for the new subject to subject himself: “it is himself he couldn’t understand”20. In its design as well as in its function, the tattoo is similar to an orthodox icon with its eyes that stare back at the beholder. The tattoo first glares at Parker in the tattoo parlour, commanding immediate attention: On one of the pages a pair of eyes glanced at him swiftly. Parker sped on, then stopped. His heart too appeared to cut off; there was absolute silence. It said as plainly as if silence were a language itself, GO BACK. Parker returned to the picture—the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes. He sat there trembling; his heart began to slowly beat again as if it were being brought to life by a subtle power.21

When on Parker’s back, the eyes of the icon pierce his Puritan wife, but she fails to recognize the icon and mistakes it for an idol: ‘Don’t you know who it is?’ he cried in anguish. ‘No, who is it?’ Sarah Ruth said. ‘It ain’t anybody I know.’ ‘It’s him,’ Parker said; ‘Him who?’ ‘God!’ Parker cried. ‘God? God don’t look like that!’ ‘What do you know how he looks?’ Parker moaned. ‘You ain’t seen him.’ ‘He don’t look,’ Sarah Ruth said. ‘He’s a spirit. No man shall see his face.’ ‘Aw listen,’ Parker groaned, ‘this is just a picture of him.’ ‘Idolatry!’ Sarah Ruth screamed, ‘Idolatry! Enflaming yourself with idols under every green tree! I can put up with lies and vanity but I don’t want no idolater in this house!’ and she grabbed up the broom and began to thrash him across the shoulders with it.22

Sarah Ruth Parker sees God as pure spirit (the very definition of the idolatry of metaphysics for Jean-Luc Marion) and like an iconoclast she beats the face of the tattooed Christ with her broom, forcing Parker to 19

Ibid., 312. Ibid., 510. 21 Ibid., 522. 22 Ibid., 529. 20

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experience Christ’s Passion in his flesh. Incarnation aptly doubles over with the slapstick humour beating: the tattoo registers the inscription of God in Parker’s body, and the welts and scars resulting from the beating complement it with the inscription of Christ’s pain—those domestic stigmata make the tattoo doubly real and doubly symbolic at the same time, just like an icon. Like myth, the story re-enacts original creation and incarnation, but unlike myth no nostalgic distance is established with the frame of reference. On the contrary the narrative emphasises the actuality of the incarnation process. Focused on conversion, as seen above, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories are very much interested in the transformation of objects from idols into icons. Another example of this iconization of the idol is to be found in “Artificial Nigger”. After the two main characters, an old self-satisfied man and his grandson, get lost in a strange city and experience betrayal, anger and misery, and drift apart as they drift along the labyrinthine streets of the Atlanta Inferno, with no hope of reconciliation, they come across a pathetic statue: It was not possible to tell if the artificial Negro was meant to be young or old; he looked to miserable to be either. He was meant to be happy because his mouth was stretched up at the corners but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at gave him a wild look of misery instead. The two of them stood there with their necks forward at almost the same angle and their shoulders curved in almost exactly the same way and their hands trembling identically in their pockets. Mr Head looked like an ancient child and Nelson like a miniature old man. They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as is they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy.23

The metamorphosis of an inert, kitsch statue into a full-fledged icon coincides with the sudden revelation of the eternal. The icon is thus not so much symbolic, for it does not stand for something absent, as it what makes possible the immediate apprehension of the invisible, reverberating towards the characters their own potential for the infinite. If narrative imitates the history of Creation, placed as it is in a relation of analogy with it, conversely the very unfolding of narrative is in itself the revitalization of Incarnation.

23

O’Connor, The Complete Stories, 269.

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On an intradiegetic level, the drama is one of simultaneous descent towards flesh and spiritualization of this flesh by grace. On an extradiegetic level, the story not only TELLS about History, but INCARNATES History. In it those two dimensions intersect as crucifiction. As opposed to myth trying to recapture meaning from a distance in a nostalgic gesture of representation, Flannery O’Connor’s parables enact Incarnation in their very corpus: governed by faith, the acquiescence to mystery as what is, precisely, intelligible and alive here and now, the text ignites the spark of Creation again and again to give the reader reiterated coups de grace.

Works Cited De Man, Paul. “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image.” 1960. Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism. Harold Bloom ed. New York: Norton, 1970. —. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” 1969. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981. Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954. Marion, Jean-Luc. The Idol and Distance. 1977.Transl. Thomas A. Carlson. New York: Fordham UP, 2001. —. God Without Being. 1982. Transl. Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991. —. The Crossing of the Visible. 1991. Transl. James Smith. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. O’Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. —. Mystery and Manners. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957.

PART III: MYTHOLOGY REVISITED INTRODUCTION PETER MERCHANT

“If words be not…an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it,” wrote William Wordsworth (in “Essays upon Epitaphs, III”), “then surely will they prove an ill gift.”1 Either the thought is anterior to the words in which it comes to be dressed or that very search for its wrapping of words is what brings the thought to birth. Edging away from expression as re-embroidering, Wordsworth’s assumptions about literary creation rather regard words at their most welcome as a seamless embodying of what the writer has to express. After 1850, in the post-Wordsworthian era, the relation of myth to faith seems subject to the same repositioning that the relation of language to ideas underwent with the shift from neoclassical to Romantic literary theory. By some writers, of course, myth is handled no less firmly than ever, to illustrate a faith already formed and fixed; but there are others for whom faith is something only to be hammered out through an experimental exploration of the full range of expressive possibilities that the myths themselves have opened. The works studied in this third group of essays complement those considered earlier in that these incline towards a more exploratory approach to faith and a more syncretic use of myth. The Yeatsian blending discerned and discussed by Elizabeth Muller is a recurring feature. Fusion can seldom have been carried further than in the fires of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Feux (1935), on which Evans Lansing Smith turns an eye duly watchful for the “archetypal images that appear in the text.” Structured as they are by the motif of the descent into the underworld, Yourcenar’s poetic stories offer not so much an alignment of the mythic and the modern as a model for the total absorption of the one into the other. In order to reach the rich seam of suggestion that they mine, they 1

The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 2: 84.

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behave like the myths on which they draw; and in doing so they reflect not just upon the origins of those myths but, since the descent motif is “paradigmatic of the exploration of the unconscious mind,” upon the processes of their own composition. Analysis of these stories is itself a descent and an adventure, with the audacious imaginative transformations that energise each one constituting the furnace into which they dare deep readers to go down. Drawing examples from the poetry of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson and Armand Schwerner, Bradford Haas’s essay discusses the dynamics of that same transfusion of myth into modernity which is so emphatically managed by Marguerite Yourcenar. Their capacity for “a significant modal shift” is the basis, Haas argues, for the enduring cultural centrality of myths. The function myths fulfil, as exemplary attempts to confront contemporary reality, means that a culture experiencing change will find the nature of myth itself correspondingly modified. A myth belonging to classical antiquity may sometimes connect compellingly with the modern (or postmodern) condition—as Camus’s use of Sisyphus served to show— but frequently some fresh form of myth needs to be devised and developed. Ted Hughes, as Haas’s essay reminds us, was the author of Crow (1970) as well as of Tales from Ovid (1997). The subject of Nora Clark’s essay is the significant shifting on which “the symbolic endurance of Aphrodite” has depended. For Swinburne she has the tenacity—and the temerity—to defy reports of “the throned Cytherean…fallen, and hidden her head,” while Mallarmé also gives her a fresh lease of life, and Seferis then contributes to the twentieth-century reinvention of Aphrodite. Beginning with Swinburne’s own, which deliberately “dismantles Catholic iconography to pagan purpose” and “casts aside God-given agape in favour of goddess-style erotas,” each successive appropriation of Aphrodite after 1850 amounts to a rededication of the temple. Yeats termed Aphrodite “that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,” 2 and in poetry such rising is a feat she endlessly repeats. Yeats himself is discussed in an essay by Elizabeth Muller which effects a salutary correction of what it “seems natural to assume” about Yeats’s view of the Dionysian cult. He might be expected to disparage it, but in fact “figures of Dionysus become more and more obtrusive in Yeats’s theatrical output,” and two mystery plays (The King of the Great Clock Tower, 1934, and A Full Moon in March, 1935) are dedicated to 2

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 188.

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him. In the end Apollo needs his opposite, so that the poet can “work his way towards unity via contraries”; “Yeats’s predominant theme is the merging of contraries to reach completeness.” One of the qualities that Muller notes in Yeats, his “dexterity in blending several myths in which he also adds his own personal vision,” is equally in evidence in the work of Jean Giono. The mythic patterns of Giono’s Regain, which Peter Merchant’s essay considers, are not only intricate but integrated absolutely into the movement of the action. In a fictional village, Aubignane, the life that had seemed all but snuffed out begins to be rekindled; and the advancing narrative conjures, from the embers of ancient mythology, the same bright blaze. Giono, like Yourcenar, is to be ranged among that celebrated company of 1930s writers (also including André Gide and Jean Giraudoux) who respond keenly to myth as metaphor, and who look directly to it for their inspiration. Where Giono gives us myth revitalised, the disenchantment wrought by the “philosophical persons” (as Shakespeare has Lafew term them) of positivism is discussed in Jacques Coulardeau’s essay. With things supernatural and causeless becoming through rationalisation more and more modern and familiar, any element of the sacred in the Faust legend is effectively erased. Myth and faith eternally return, however, in the form of new mythic narratives protesting precisely against the growth of godless science, or in the form of belief systems which—having come in to replace the theology of the past—require a corresponding act of faith, and work likewise to draw the assent of their adherents. “Freudian psychology is an allegory in reverse,” according to Graham Hough; “but for all its positivist intentions it may be helping to sustain the dislocated allegorical mode.”3 Dislocation, division, the divorce of reason from faith: such are the discontents of civilization as analysed in Doris Lessing’s space-fiction series Canopus in Argos, which itself is analysed by David Waterman in the concluding essay of the present volume. Revealed here is an author whose view of society may be bleak yet whose mythmaking is done in a spirit so idealistic that the award to her of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, even as this volume was being compiled, seemed most fitting. “Lessing’s space fiction does nothing if not insist that…identity…be understood on a universal basis.” As the method of these novels is syncretic, so their convictions are holistic. There is hope for a transition from “an ideological system based on binary opposition” to “[a] more universal, more androgynous perspective,” hope for a reunion of the 3

Hough, “Didactic Schematic,” 391.

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dissociated sensibility, and—ultimately—hope, as with Yeats, that we may work our way towards Unity Among the Stars. Several of the authors studied in this section, indeed, might make us wonder how far the Sea of Faith—whose “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” Matthew Arnold reported hearing in the summer of 18514—has really receded. Rather than receding, perhaps, faith has tended (like the hills unto which Tennyson’s eyes at that time were lifted up) to “flow / From form to form.”5 The same could certainly be said of myth. What might appear altogether eradicated has really been undergoing continual metamorphosis, as new needs arose for the old myths to meet. Since the 1850s, indeed, the kind of continuities between old and new that were already discernible then—when, for instance, Kingsley invited readers of Hypatia (1853) to recognise themselves in “the old Egyptians,” since “there is nothing new under the sun”6—have been powerfully reaffirmed. Recent ventures like the Canongate Myths Project, an outlet from 2005 for the retelling of familiar stories by well-known contemporary authors including Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson, have shown that when they are appropriately modified ancient myths can still supply a sort of Ariadne’s thread for our surer and securer negotiation of all the complexities of modern living. Even where myths have ceased to be inducements to faith, they remain capable of the carrying home of many a true illumination such as may—again in the words of William Wordsworth—”make [us] less forlorn.”7 Exactly two hundred years after the publication of that poem, “The world is too much with us,” Wordsworth’s nostrums for the forlorn have become (in her Nobel acceptance speech) Lessing’s lifelines for the torn, the hurt, the destroyed: “It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed.”8

4

Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott and Super, 136, 529. The Poems of Tennyson, 973. 6 Kingsley, Hypatia, 345. 7 Wordsworth, “Poems, in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800-1807, 150. 8 Lessing, Nobel Prize in Literature 2007 acceptance speech. 5

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Works Cited Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott and Robert H. Super. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 135-6. Hough, Graham. “Didactic Schematic.” In The Times Literary Supplement, 11 April 1975. 391. Kingsley, Charles. Hypatia; or, New Foes with an Old Face. 1853; London: Macmillan, 1893. Lessing, Doris. Nobel Prize in Literature acceptance speech, 2007. 8 December 2007. . Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam CXXIII. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks. London and Harlow: Longmans, 1969. 973. Wordsworth, William. “Essays upon Epitaphs, III.” The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. 2: 80-96. —. “The world is too much with us.” “Poems, in Two Volumes,” and Other Poems, 1800-1807, ed. Jared Curtis, revised ed. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990. 150. Yeats, W. B. “A Prayer for my Daughter.” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran, revised ed. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. 188-90.

THE GODDESS AND THE UNDERWORLD IN MODERNISM: MARGUERITE YOURCENAR’S FEUX EVANS LANSING SMITH

The descent to the underworld is the single most important myth for Modernist authors. Nearly all of the major writers from 1895-1945 use the myth as a central allusion in major works. The myth gives the works that “shape and significance” which in his 1923 essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” T. S. Eliot saw to be the consequence of the “mythical method.” The Modernist underworld can be seen as an ancestral crypt, an inferno, a temenos (i.e., a sacred site of initiatory transformation), or as a cornucopia of the archetypal forms of the mind, which give shape and significance to life and art—a granary, where the seed forms of the imaginal are stored. It is this latter mode, the underworld as granary, that this paper focuses on. The Modernists used a diverse and flexible vocabulary for the notion of those fundamental forms of the mind to be disclosed at the climax of the nekyia.1 Most fundamental to my formulation of the problem is James Hillman’s provocative affiliation of Hades, lord of the underworld, with the Platonic term eidos, referring the Doctrine of Forms; the descent to the underworld catalyzes the revelation of those perfect forms which serve as the basis for all creative endeavours, whether it be cosmogenesis (the creation of the world), poiesis (the creation of a text), or hermeneusis (the generative process of reading itself). I call these fundamental forms of the mind, catalyzed by the descent, necrotypes—a coinage combining the terms nekyia and archetype. My use of the term has something in common with the diverse diction developed by the Modernists and their critics to signify the fundamental structures of literary form (elementary idea, archetype, schema, memorial image, monad, minute particular, image cluster, hieroglyph, etc.). At a very basic 1

Smith, The Descent to the Underworld in Literature, Painting, and Film, 18951950, Introduction.

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level, however, I use the term with reference to certain images which typically occur in narratives structured by the nekyia, images like rivers, mountains, doorways and divestiture, mirrors, bees and honey, birds, eyes, and geometrical figures. These images are the elementary constituents of the nekyia, analogous to functions, motifs, archetypes, and complexes. The necrotypes are the fundamental elements of that myth—archetypal images that appear in the text at the point when allusions to the descent become explicit. All of these necrotypes—geometrical, ocular, catoptric, aquatic, oreographic, apian, lepidoptric, ornithological, along with images of doorways and divestiture—occur in the many works of Modernism that employ the mythical method. Many of the archetypes associated with the nekyia inform close readings of Marguerite Yourcenar’s collection of lyrical prose pieces, Fires (Feux, 1935). A traditional iconography associated with the nekyia is found in Fires in eight out of the nine pieces—an iconography which includes: the maze; doorways and divestiture; ocular, apian, and ornithological symbolism; and the night-sea journey. The use of the myth in these lyrical prose poems connects them to a wide range of Modernist works in which the nekyia serves as a metaphor for the processes of poetic composition. Yourcenar also asserts the centrality of the myth—at least for the lyrical pieces to follow the “Preface” in Fires—in her discussion of “Phèdre” in the “Preface” itself: If, to get back to Fires, Phaedra to go down to Hell takes the ‘oars’ (rails) that are both those of Charon the ferryman and those of the Metro, it’s because during rush hours this human swell pouring into the underground corridors of our cities is perhaps for us the most terrifying image of the river of the dead. (Si, pour en revenir à Feux, Phèdre emprunte pour sa descente aux Enfers des rames qui sont à la fois celles de Charon et celles du métro, c’est que le flot humain tourbillonnant aux heures d’affluence dans les corridors souterrains de nos villes est peut-être pour nous l’image la plus terrifiante du fleuve des ombres.)2

A close reading of the tales reveals how very central indeed the myth of the descent to the underworld is to their theme, structure, and overall organization. 2

Yourcenar, Fires, xix; Œuvres romanesques, 1080. All quotations from Yourcenar’s Fires are followed in this essay by the corresponding passages from the original French text; and page numbers are given for both.

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In “Phèdre ou le Désespoir,” the myth of the descent is fused with the myth of the maze, in a way characteristic of much Modernist literature. Early on in the récit, Phaedra remarks that “the boy’s profile recalls Knossos and the Cretan two-edged ax” (“le profil de cet enfant lui rappelle Cnossos, et la hache à deux tranchants”),3 and she sets about planting “the signposts of Minos’ palace” in “the virgin forest which is Hippolytus’s domain” (“Dans cette forêt vierge qui est le lieu d’Hippolyte, elle plante malgré soi les poteaux indicateurs du palais de Minos”).4 The labyrinth which these signposts inscribe in the forest is unicursal, a “one way road leading to fatality” (“le chemin à sens unique de la fatalité”),5 and it is conflated with the imagery of the underworld: “she turns into a specter; she haunts her body as if it were her personal hell. She recreates inside herself a deep Labyrinth where she is bound to dwell again; Ariadne’s thread will not pull her out, since she winds it around her heart” (“elle se change en spectre; elle n’habite plus son corps que comme son propre enfer. Elle reconstruit au fond de soi-même un Labyrinthe où elle ne peut que se retrouver: le fil d’Ariane ne lui permet plus d’en sortir, puisqu’elle se l’embobine au cœur”).6 The implication that love is a labyrinth of destructive passions is derived from Racine, while the related idea that the maze is to be found within the self, in the depths of the psyche, was a notion very au courant in the mid 1930s. As Fires was being written, French psychoanalysts and surrealists alike used the descent into the labyrinth as paradigmatic of the exploration of the unconscious mind,7 at the same time that Pablo Picasso was painting his marvellous sequence, “Minotauromachy.”8 For painters like Giorgio de Chirico—or, for that matter, filmmakers like Jean Cocteau and Ingmar Bergman—the labyrinth served as an image of the nightmarish, urban cityscape. The myths of the maze and the underworld are often interchangeable, and extremely flexible; they lend themselves to innumerable metaphorical applications. Hence, Phaedra’s descent is into a maze that is simultaneously herself, her ancestral home, the underworld, and the Paris Métro. Her post-mortem journey concludes the récit: feeling herself “engulfed by death” (“s’engouffre dans la mort”), she “confesses before dying” (“se confesse avant de mourir”), then departs

3

Ibid., 6; 1085. Ibid., 6; 1085-6. 5 Ibid., 6; 1086. 6 Ibid., 7; 1086. 7 Rubin and Fleugel, Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective, 127. 8 Ibid., 306-42. 4

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for the “family palace, where sin is innocence” (“le palais familial où la faute est une innocence”):9 Pushed by the throng of her ancestors, she slides along these subway corridors filled with animal smells; here oars split the oily waters of the Styx, here shiny rails suggest either suicide or departure. At the bottom of the mining galleries of her underground Crete, she will undoubtedly end up meeting the young man disfigured by her claws, since she has all the detours of eternity to find him.10 (Poussée par la cohue de ses ancêtres, elle glisse le long de ces corridors de métro, pleins d’une odeur de bête, où les rames fendent l’eau grasse du Styx, où les rails luisants ne proposent que le suicide ou le départ. Au fond des galeries de mine de sa Crète souterraine, elle finira bien par rencontrer le jeune homme défiguré par ses morsures de fauve, puisqu’elle a pour le 11 rejoindre tous les détours de l’éternité.)

The evocation of the ancestors in this passage is archetypal: both Odysseus and Aeneas (for example) encounter their dead parents and all the progenitors of Greek and Roman heroism during their respective descents. So also will Dr. Tsun encounter his ancestor Ts’ui Pên—author of a novel in the form of a labyrinth in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a story that Jorge Luis Borges wrote a few years after Yourcenar’s Fires, in the early 1940s. In Borges, the maze is both the novel and “[a]n invisible labyrinth of time”;12 similarly, in Yourcenar, Phaedra has “all the detours of eternity” to find Hippolytus, who has been transformed into a kind of Minotaur in this passage, disfigured by her own “claws.” The imagery of underground corridors in “Phèdre” modulates towards the motifs of doorways and divestiture in the following récit, “Achille ou le Mensonge.” Doorways and divestiture frequently form a kind of mythic iconography of labyrinthine descent in Modernist literature, painting, and film. In Yourcenar’s tale, the nekyia again comes at the climax, when Achilles escapes from the palace where he has lived many years disguised as a woman. After strangling Deidamia, Achilles is led by his guide Misandra, “this girl knowing her way in the shadows” (“cette fille à l’aise dans les ténèbres”), through doors that “unfolded, then folded on them” (“Des battants cédaient, puis se refermaient’) in a rapid “spiral-like

9

Yourcenar, Fires, 8; Œuvres romanesques, 1086-7. Yourcenar, Fires, 8. 11 Yourcenar, Œuvres romanesques, 1087. 12 Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Labyrinths, 25. 10

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descent” (“descente en spirale”).13 Their descent leads at last to another door that “opened on the cliffs, the seawall, the lighthouse stairs” (“Une porte enfin s’ouvrit sur les falaises, les digues, les escaliers du phare”), standing in which Misandra hands Achilles a mirror.14 Here, the catoptric and divestiture are combined with the threshold passage through doorways and down staircases: Achilles “tore off his belt, untied his scarf,” but stopped short of removing “his cumbersome muslins,” afraid of “being more exposed to the guards’ fire if he rashly showed himself nude” (“arracha sa ceinture, défit son écharpe, voulut se débarrasser de ses mousselines asphyxiantes, mais craignit de s’exposer davantage au feu des sentinelles, s’il avait l’imprudence de se laisser voir nu”).15 One recalls that Inanna in the Sumerian myth—archetype of all subsequent descents—is stripped down at each of the doorways through which she passes on her way to the underworld. Numerous examples combining doorways and divestiture in Modernist descents might be adduced here, from Cocteau to Cortázar, and from Bergman to Pynchon. In Yourcenar’s récit, the icon persists in the passage that follows: after Achillesstrips down, “Misandra opened the double doors that seemed to groan for her own destiny, and with her elbow she shoved Achilles out toward everything she would never be” (“Misandre écarta les deux battants qui gémirent à sa place, poussa du coude Achille vers tout ce qu’elle ne serait pas”).16 Then, Yourcenar writes in a single telling and incisively feminist sentence that “The doors closed on this woman buried alive” (“La porte se referma sur l’ensevelie vivante”).17 But if Achilles thinks the doorway through which he has just been pushed demarcates the life to which he is proceeding from the underworld he imagines he has just escaped, he is mistaken. As he tumbles down the labyrinthine network of ramps, steps, ramparts, and precipices that will take him to the boat bound for Troy (“Achille courut le long des rampes, dégringola des marches, dévala des ramparts, sauta des précipices”), the imagery of divestiture continues, and anticipates the eventual death to which his descent is leading him—after “the edges of the rocks tore his clothes” (“Les pointes du roc déchiraient ses vêtements”), Achilles “stopped, untied his sandals, giving his naked soles the chance to be wounded” (“s’arrêta, dénoua ses sandales, offrit à ses plantes nues une chance d’être blessées”).18 13

Yourcenar, Fires, 19; Œuvres romanesques, 1094-5. Ibid., 20; 1095. 15 Idem. 16 Ibid., 21; 1095. 17 Idem. 18 Ibid., 21; 1095-6. 14

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It seems therefore logical that the boat Achilles then boards—a sea voyage or river crossing being the archetypal icon of the journey to the underworld will lead him into the realm of death in the next story in the sequence, “Patrocle ou le Destin,” where he sits bound in the underworld of his tent, grieving over the corpse of his dead friend. The two stories are linked by the descent to and arrival in the underworld. The funereal imagery of “Patrocle” is fitting and emphatic: “now that Achilles had locked himself up with this dead man, the living appeared to him only as ghosts” (“depuis qu’Achille s’enfermait dans ce mort, les vivants ne se montraient à lui que sous forme de fantômes”).19 In his “Apocalyptic night” (“ce soir de fin de monde”), “it was the dead who seemed submerged in the vile deluge of the living” (“c’etaient les morts maintenant qui lui paraissaient submergés par l’immonde déluge des vivants”).20 The three stories that follow (“Antigone,” “Léna,” and “MarieMadeleine”) return to the female version of the descent into the maze of the underworld with a stronger emphasis on the political, bureaucratic, and religious ramifications of the metaphor. In “Antigone ou le Choix,” the threshold imagery associated with the descent motif occurs in three separate but interlinked sections of the story: when Antigone departs from and returns to the city of Thebes; when she goes down to the battlefield to bury her brother’s corpse; and when she descends into the prison that will be her tomb. First, she and Oedipus leave a Thebes “where hardened faces are molded like those on tombstones” (“où les visages durcis sont faits de la terre des tombes”), passing through “yawning doors that seemed to vomit him out” (“des portes béantes qui paraissent le vomir”).21 Then she returns after the battle that killed her brothers, slipping “through the seven circles of the armies camping around Thebes, invisible as a lamp amid the fires of Hell” (“Elle se faufile travers les septs cercles des armées qui campent autour de Thèbes invisible comme une lampe dans le rougeoiement de l’enfer”).22 Threshold imagery is then added to the labyrinthine complexity of the seven circles of Hell, as Antigone “enters by a secret door in ramparts topped with the heads of victims...sneaks through streets emptied by the plague of hatred...climbs up to platforms where wives and daughters howl in fierce joy [and finally] appears in battlements along the rows of severed heads” (“Elle rentre par une porte dérobée à l’interieur des remparts surmontés des têtes coupées...se glisse dans les rues vidées par la peste de la haine...grimpe jusqu’aux plates19

Ibid., 29; 1102. Ibid., 29-30; 1102. 21 Ibid., 38; 1107. 22 Ibid., 39; 1108. 20

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formes où les femmes et les filles hululent de joie...prend place sur les créneaux dans la file des têtes tranchées”).23 This meandering ascent only precipitates a recursive descent, which takes Antigone “back down” (“Elle redescend”) to the battlefield, where “she walks on the dead like Jesus on the water” (“marche sur les morts comme Jésus sur la mer”) to find Polyneices—“Beaten, stripped dead” (“Vaincu, dépouillé, mort”), lying at the “bottom of human suffering” (“le fond de la misère humaine”).24 Once again the passage through secret doorways and convoluted thresholds has combined with the imagery of divestiture to form a grim icon of death. Only here Christian motifs of the harrowing of hell are added (in anticipation of “Marie-Madeleine”): Antigone carries her brother’s corpse as if she were “carrying a cross” with a “crucified victim” (“elle porte son crucifié comme on porterait une croix”);25 and the soldiers see her as a “benevolent ghoul” (much more resonantly linked to Mary Magdalen in the original by the phrase “cette goule de la Résurrection”) whom they want to drag out of the cemetery.26 But the most fully developed variation of the nekyia in “Antigone” is the last, in which she goes down into the prison to which Creon condemns her. This journey from the palace to the prison takes the form of a passage through a labyrinthine sequence of corridors and doorways. As in “Phèdre,” the descent involves a reunion with the ancestors, a return “to the source of origins, of treasures, of germination” (“au pays des sources, des trésors, des germes”).27 There she seeks “her star at the farthest reaches of human reason, a star that can only be reached by going through the grave” (“à la recherche de son étoile située aux antipodes de la raison humaine, et qu’elle ne peut rejoindre qu’en passant par la tombe”).28 Her fiancé Haemon follows her down, running “behind her in dark corridors” (“les corridors noirs”) to meet his own death in the “absolute darkness” (“noir absolu”) of an “abysmal midnight” (“minuit profond”).29 It is only left for Creon to make his descent: after he is awakened by an “underground beating” (“un battement venu de dessous”), Creon “feels his way to the door of tunnels known only to him” (“trouve la porte des souterrains dont il est seul à savoir l’existence”), at the bottom of which he 23

Idem. Ibid., 40; 1108-9. 25 Ibid., 41; 1109. 26 Idem. 27 Ibid., 42; 1110. 28 Idem. 29 Idem. 24

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“discovers in the underground clay the footprints of his eldest son” (“découvre dans la glaise du sous-sol les pas de son fils aîné”). This doorway and these steps lead him to the hair-raising sight of Antigone and Polyneices hanging together from the rafters, moving beyond him, “farther into the grave” (“plus avant dans la tombe”).30 The political tenor of the metaphor of the nekyia persists in the next récit, “Léna ou le Secret,” with an emphasis on the bureaucratic machinery of the State. Allusions to the underworld surface early in the tale, when Lena, “Aristogiton’s concubine and more his servant than his mistress” (“la concubine d’Aristogiton et sa maîtresse bien moins que sa servante”),31 sees him as a “livid specter” (“ce spectre exsangue’), and as a “somnambulist” who is “already a dead man sleepwalking towards his grave, like Jewish corpses pilgrimaging to Josephat” (“Ce somnambule du crime n’est déjà plus qu’un mort qui s’achemine vers sa tombe, comme les cadavres des Juifs pèlerinent vers Josaphat”).32 Lena also sees Harmodius, lover and co-conspirator of Aristogiton, carrying “the dowsing stick of Hermes leader of souls” (“la baguette de sourcier d’Hermès, conducteur d’âmes”);33 and she notes that “the Styx ferryman of the dead knew that he was an orphan and that his father had just landed on the other bank” (“le passeur du Styx ... savait qu’il était orphelin et que son père venait d’aborder sur l’autre rive des jours”).34 These references prefigure Lena’s own journey to the underworld, here portrayed as an interrogation chamber in the palace of a police state— rather like the way Cocteau will present Hades in his film Orphée, some fifteen years later. Lena’s nekyia begins when “She climbs into the police van like the dead climbing into the fateful barque,” and then “crosses a stagnant Athens” to the Chief of State’s palace (“elle monte dans la voiture cellulaire comme les morts montent en barque. Elle traverse une Athènes stagnante”).35 Arriving at the entrance to the palace, Lena encounters Aristogiton, whose eyes “are already glazed like the pupils of the dead” (“ses yeux déjà pareils aux pupilles vitrifiées des morts”).36 The emphasis on the eyes here recalls the long line of archetypal tradition which links ocular symbolism with doorways leading to the land of the dead. It is a tradition that can be traced back to the spiral eyes of the Mediterranean 30

Ibid., 43; 1110. Ibid., 48; 1113. 32 Ibid., 54; 1117. 33 Idem. 34 Ibid., 50; 1115. 35 Ibid., 58; 1119. 36 Idem. 31

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goddesses, inscribed on monoliths;37 to the staring “eye of death” Ereshkigal fastens on Inanna in the underworld of Sumerian myth;38 and from these remote prototypes on up to Postmodernist works by Bergman, Leonora Carrington, and Thomas Pynchon. Perhaps closest in spirit to Yourcenar is Carrington’s little surrealistic gem of 1944, called Down Below, in which the heroine is raped by a demonic psychotherapist with huge, ghastly staring eyes.39 In Carrington’s work, the rape and descent into madness figure the malign machinations of the patriarchy, a theme Yourcenar also implies in the conclusion of “Léna.” While detained in the inferno of “a whitewashed room where tortured people look like dying animals and the executioners like vivisectionists” (“une salle blanchie à la chaux où les torturés prennent l’aspect de bêtes à l’agonie et les bourreaux de vivisecteurs”),40 she is interrogated (like Eurydice in Cocteau’s film Orphée)—but to no avail: “She has cut off her tongue to keep from revealing the secrets she doesn’t have” (“Elle s’est coupé la langue pour ne pas révéler les secrets qu’elle n’avait pas”).41 A more vividly ironic image of self-mutilation in response to the futility of patriarchal domination is hard to conceive, since Lena’s sacrifice is for a man who took her servitude for granted, and who favoured homosexual love over her feminine charms—perhaps reflecting the complications of Yourcenar’s passion for André Fraigneau.42 The last récit in which the descent to the underworld is fully developed in Fires, “Marie-Madeleine ou le Salut,” also involves the complications of female passion, to which it adds the crucial dimension of religious significance. This is the fifth story in the collection, following a “Preface” which announces the central motif that links them all together—the nekyia. But this time the descent to the underworld will lead to an affirmation (however difficult in the attaining) that makes new life possible. It is therefore a turning point in the collection, involving both elements Aristotle designated as essential to a complex action: the recognition (anagnoresis) of the climax, and the reversal (peripeteia) of the resolution. Mary Magdalen uses chthonic metaphors early on in the tale: she first sees Jesus as a man whose feet have been “worn down to the bone by 37

Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, 58f.; DiStasi, Mal Occhio {Evil-Eye}: The Underside of Vision, 95-103. 38 Wolkstein and Kramer, Innana: Queen of Heaven and Earth, 60. 39 Carrington, Down Below, 36. 40 Yourcenar, Fires, 58; Œuvres romanesques, 1119. 41 Ibid., 60; 1120. 42 Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life, 102-5.

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having walked on all roads of our Hell” (“ces pieds usés jusqu’à l’os à force d’avoir marché sur tous les chemins de notre enfer”);43 and she later calls him a “sublime vampire” (“ce vampire sublime”).44 The combined threshold and ornithological motifs so often affiliated with the nekyia (as in the Egyptian imagery of the passage of a bird-soul through a sequence of doorways) then emerge when, after the Crucifixion, Mary Magdalen calls Jesus a “gentle owl nailed to the door of Time” (“doux rapace cloué à la porte des Temps”).45 Then begins the journey to the Holy Sepulchre on the morning of the Resurrection. Walking along a suburban road, Mary Magdalen feels as if she “was going down a pit dug into the deepest part of myself,” descending into her “own grave” (“j’entrai dans cette caverne creusée au plus profond de moi-même...ma propre tombe”).46 As in “Phèdre,” so here: the labyrinth and the underworld are symbols of the inner self—the doorway of the tomb, where Mary Magdalen screams “ghoulish howls” (“hurlement de goule”) and bangs her forehead against the “lintel stone” (“linteau”), leads into the psyche.47 Turning away from the entrance of the sepulchre, Magdalen mistakes Jesus for a gardener, holding a rake on his shoulder and carrying a “ball of thread and the shears the Fates had entrusted to their eternal brother” (“le peloton de fil et le sécateur confiés par les Parques à leur frère éternel”).48 Perhaps, she muses, he was “getting ready to go down to the underworld by way of the roots” (“Il se préparait peut-être à descendre aux Enfers par la route des racines”).49 The image of Jesus as a gardener after the Resurrection comes from the Gospel of John (20.15), and it is a motif frequently found in Christian iconography, as for example in the glorious stained glass window from Nuremberg depicting Mary Magdalen kneeling in front of Jesus, who holds a spade in one hand and points to the doorway of the garden with the other, or Albrecht Dürer’s “Crucifixion” of 1500, which shows John and the Virgin Mary spading and watering the base of the cross. 50 Although Yourcenar’s additional motif of the ball of thread which Jesus holds in his hands seems entirely her own, it too has a long 43

Yourcenar, Fires, 70; Œuvres romanesques, 1127. Ibid., 72; 1128. 45 Idem. 46 Ibid., 75; 1129. 47 Ibid., 75; 1130. 48 Idem. 49 Idem. 50 Kahsnitz, “Stained Glass in Nuremberg,” Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg, Pl. 174; Campbell, The Mythic Image, Fig. 176. 44

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iconographic lineage, one that links the harrowing of hell with the descent into the labyrinth. The motif that links Jesus and Theseus goes back to Jerome, who, in his Commentary on Zacharias, writes that “We endure labyrinthine errors and guide our blind footsteps by the thread of Christ,” and proceeds on from there to Dante’s Divine Comedy.51 To this imagery Yourcenar now adds the mirror-door, another motif frequently associated with both the maze and the underworld—as for example in later films, like Cocteau ‘s Orphée (1950) and Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957), novels like Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) and Pnin (1957), or long poems like James Merrill’s Changing Light at Sandover (1976-82). In Yourcenar’s récit, Mary Magdalen feels her hands become cool, as if pushing against glass. She says “my dead Master had gone through the mirror of Time to the other side” (“mon maître mort avait passé de l’autre côté du miroir du Temps”).52 Then the mirror cracks, leaving her empty and alone. That crack marks the turning point of the collection, since, in the tales that conclude Fires, there is either no nekyia at all (as in “Clytemnestre”), or, if there is one (as in “Phèdre” and “Sappho”), the climax of the journey bears the seeds of an affirmation which makes new life possible. Phaedo’s journey across Athens with Socrates, along “the Royal Portico, where death hooted for him like an owl” (“portique Royal où la mort hululait pour lui comme une chouette”)53 recalls the combined threshold and ornithological imagery of “Marie-Madeleine.” And, as in previous récits like “Antigone” or “Léna,” Phaedo’s descent takes him through an “open door (“la porte ouverte”), dug into the side of a rock like the Holy Sepulchre, down into “the bottom of the cavelike jail” (“du fond de la prison pareille à une caverne”).54 This happens at twilight, the time of the sun’s descent; a boat is coming into the port in the distance, “folding its two wings” (“Une barque regagnait le port, repliant ses deux ailes”)55— fine touches which combine the night-sea journey of “Achilles with the birdflight of the soul in “Marie-Madeleine.” But from the cavernous prison where Socrates prepares to drink the hemlock, Phaedo and his friends look out upon “the pale Parthenon” in the distance, shining “like a divine Idea” (“le temple pâlement mauve se révélait à nous comme une Idée divine”).56

51

Doob, The Idea of the Labyrinth, 64, 285-6. Yourcenar, Fires, 76; Œuvres romanesques, 1130. 53 Ibid., 92; 1141. 54 Ibid., 94; 1142. 55 Ibid., 93; 1142. 56 Ibid., 94; 1142. 52

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The classical myths of Phaedra, Achilles, Patroclus, and Antigone; the religious mystery of the Resurrection; the philosophic grandeur of the death of Socrates—these demarcate three foundation stones of modern European culture. They affirm and sustain life. We should not therefore find it surprising that the last nekyia in Fires does not end in death, although it does reiterate the basic motifs of the previous descents of the collection. The imagery of the maze comes up when Sappho and Phaon search, by sailboat, for the lost lover Attys in “all the sad cafés along the shore, in restaurants of the island, in the modest boarding houses on the Asian coast” (“dans tous les cafés démodés qui bordent le rivage, dans les restaurants des îles, dans les pensions de famille de la côte d’Asie”).57 Sappho sees in Phaon’s features “certain traits” that link him both to Attys and to the Minoan mythology of the maze and the underworld: he has a “pouting mouth that a mysterious bee seems to have stung” (“bouche tuméfiée que semble avoir piqué une mystérieuse abeille”), and hair that “seemed to have been dipped in honey” (“semblent trempés dans le miel”).58 While sailing, Sappho lies “down on the bottom of the boat” and “yields to the new sensations of the floodwaters parted by this ferryman” (“Couchée au fond de la barque, elle s’abandonne aux pulsations nouvelles du flot que fend ce passeur”).59 The ferryman and the sailboat recall the night-sea imagery of the descents in “Phèdre,” “Achille,” “Léna,” “MarieMadeleine,” and “Phédon.” But the bees and the honey are new. These evoke the mythologies of death and the maze found in the Minoan myths of ancient Crete which linked honey to mortuary magic;60 the bee to the goddesses of death, regeneration and prophetic poetry;61 and the honeycomb to the maze.62 Many of these Minoan images were published in The Palace of Minos, by Sir Arthur Evans, the last volume of which came out in 1935, when Marguerite Yourcenar was working on Fires, and when Picasso was at the peak of his Minotaur series. The final descent in Fires takes Sappho from her apartment to the circus tent, where she performs as a trapeze artist. It marks the resolution of the crisis, and completes the peripeteia begun in “Marie-Madeleine.” Her nekyia begins after her male lover, Phaon, “opens the folding doors of the wardrobe,” where “Sappho’s dresses hang like women who have killed .

57

Ibid., 124; 1162. Idem. 59 Ibid., 124; 1163. 60 Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, 407. 61 Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, 270-73; Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 442. 62 Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination, 59. 58

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themselves” (“ouvrir enfin les deux battants de l’armoire où ses robes pendent comme des suicideés”).63 When the robe Phaon selects swishes with a “ghostly shudder” (“frisson des fantômes”) as he walks towards her, Sappho panics and “runs to the door to escape from this fleshly ghost” (“court nu-tête vers la porte, fuit ce spectre de chair”).64 She then “descends” into the streets that lead her past all doorways “but those leading to death” (“lui bouche toutes les issues qui ne donnent pas sur la mort”),65 until she arrives at the circus: A wardrobe woman lets her into her dressing room, which she enters now as if condemned to death; she strips as if for God; she rubs white makeup all over herself to become a ghost. (Une habilleuse ouvre à Sappho sa loge de condamnée à mort: elle se dénude comme pour s’offrir à Dieu; elle se frotte d’un blanc gras qui déjà 66 la transforme en fantôme.)

These images combine the descent with doorways and divestiture in a manner which recalls the earlier récit, “Achille Sappho flees through her apartment door “nu-tête” (“bareheaded,” a detail omitted by the translation), and is stripped down in preparation for her act. Her dressing room ritual “transforms the creature tired of being only half woman into a bird” (“change en oiseau cet être fatigué de n’être qu’à demi femme”),67 a motif which recalls the ornithological images of “Marie-Madeleine” and “Phédon.” And this time, as in the previous two récits, the nekyia ends on an affirmative note: as Sappho dives towards what she hopes will be her death, her body is deflected by a “lamp shining like a blue jellyfish” (‘“ne lampe pareille à une grosse méduse bleue”).68 She is then caught by the meshes of the nets, and “fished out from the bottom of the sky” (“repêchée des profondeurs du ciel”) like “a drowning woman pulled from the sea” (“comme une noyée d’eau de mer”).69 These are fine, subtle touches, which evoke one last time the diving descent of the night-sea journey. The fact that Sappho falls into the net like a “statue” with a “marble pale body” (“ce corps de marbre pâle”) may perhaps be explained by the “technique” (elucidated in the “Preface”) of 63

Yourcenar, Fires, 126; Œuvres romanesques, 1163. Ibid., 127; 1163-4. 65 Ibid., 127; 1164. 66 Idem. 67 Idem. 68 Ibid., 129; 1165. 69 Idem. 64

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the “lyrical pun that draws in a single word the two branches of a parable” (“calembour lyrique, qui fait pour ainsi dire dessiner au même mot les deux branches d’une parabole”).70 It is a pun that eludes translation: the word for “jellyfish” is “méduse” in the original, which conjures up the image of that face no one may look upon without being turned to stone. Might it not be pertinent to note that Medusa was a goddess of the Sea, the only mortal sister of the Gorgons, and that, like Persephone—goddess of the underworld Medusa was ravished by a “dark god,” in this case, Poseidon?71 Persephone “sends the Gorgon’s head, ‘the gigantic shape of fear,’ to meet those who seek to invade her Underworld”72—those like Sappho, perhaps, who attempts to force entry by means of suicide, and who is deflected from Hades by a lamp with a Medusa face. This deflection completes the reversal of the movement of the first five nekyias in the collection, a reversal that began with “Marie-Madeleine,” just as surely as Sappho’s last dive recapitulates all the themes of a collection dedicated “To Hermes,” guide of souls to the underworld.

Works Cited Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions Books, 1964. 19-29. Campbell, Joseph. The Mythic Image. Bollingen Series C. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974. Carrington, Leonora. Down Below. 1944. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1983. Cocteau, Jean. Orphée,. 1950. Video Images. Davenport Guy. The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays by Guy Davenport. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. DiStasi, Lawrence. Mal Occhio: The Underside of Vision. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order and Myth.” 1923. The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson. New York: Oxford UP, 1965. 679-81. 70

Ibid., xvii; 1080. Kerényi, The Gods of the Greeks, 49. 72 Idem. 71

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Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989. Harrison, Jane Ellen. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. London: Merlin Press, 1980. Kahsnitz, Rainer. “Stained Glass in Nuremberg.” Gothic and Renaissance Art in Nuremberg. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986. 87-92. Kerényi, Karl. The Gods of the Greeks. London: Thames and Hudson, 1979. Merrill, James. The Changing Light at Sandover. New York: Atheneum, 1982. Rubin, William S. Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1968. Rubin, William and Jane Fleugel. Pablo Picasso: A Retrospective. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1980. Savigneau, Josyane. Marguerite Yourcenar: Inventing a Life. Trans. Joan E. Howard. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Smith, Evans, Lansing. The Descent to the Underworld in Literature, Painting, and Film, 1895-1950: The Modernist Nekyia. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001. Walker, Barbara. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer. Innana: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Yourcenar, Marguerite. “Feux, poèmes en prose.” Œuvres romanesques. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1982. 1073-1167. —. Fires. Trans. by Dori Katz in collaboration with the author. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1981.

MAKING IT NEW: CHANGING FORM AND FUNCTION IN MODERN MYTH BRADFORD HAAS

Several years ago I was re-reading Crow by Ted Hughes (1970), an admittedly embattled volume of English poetry, lionized and demonised at turns, yet one that had a definite impact on my development when I encountered it for the first time as an undergraduate. Its bold diction and primitivist forms created a muscular texture for the apparent mythology Hughes was developing, one that revolved around the eponymous trickster character of the title. Hughes’s hybrid of the familiar and the unfamiliar, of western and non-western, of archaic and modern, created something approaching the structure and tone of traditional myths. What made this so appealing to the young undergraduate seemed the essence of the dilemma to the seasoned reader: I was conscious of reading Hughes’s book as I would traditional myths, from the outside. On the one hand this makes perfect sense. The myths and tales that inspired Hughes were, by their very nature, encountered in forays beyond his indigenous culture. In attempting to capture the spirit of his sources, Hughes created the “little fables, visionary anecdotes, apocryphal lectures and totem songs of Crow”1 in such a fashion that the reader experiences a similar distance to that felt when reading traditional myths. The distance, in this case, might be stated simply as a disbelief in the actuality of the character Crow. We do not expect to meet Crow––at least in any literal sense––walking down a city sidewalk, just as we would not expect to meet the god Apollo––in any literal sense––in the same scenario. And yet there are those who believe–– in a literal sense––that one might meet an angel or even Christ himself walking among us. The importance for us is not merely the distinction between “living” and “dead” myths, but a more fundamental point: if true myth mirrors and adapts to the shifts in culture over time, then our current myths would naturally have different characteristics from those developed thousands of 1

Faas, The Unaccommodated Universe, 104.

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years ago. While our culture has generally accepted the drastic changes in nearly all fields of human activity, the common post-enlightenment conceptions of myth as ancient, primitive, pre-rational, and even “false” continue to persist. In the following I challenge these conceptions. In part one of what follows, assumptions will be stated which tie myth to language, and which emphasize the functionality of myth over its matter. Four observations developed from the assumptions will follow, each building the case that myth, being inextricably tied to language, has continually modified to deal with the ever-shifting challenges of modern culture, with specific attention to the contribution of experimental literature to this process. I have always contended that literary criticism at its best should lead us to further interaction with literature. The second part of this paper, therefore, includes descriptions of innovative strategies in the poetry of Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and Armand Schwerner that are exemplary attempts to confront modern reality, creating more inclusive forms and stretching what is possible in language. It is posited that these types of literary works constitute “new” myths, yet this notion is presented with a caveat: if the form and function of myth has changed, we must expect similar changes in its dissemination, reception and use. The influence of these works in general culture is difficult to assess, but it is clear that these may serve the individual––not through indoctrination of specific matter––but through allowing the reader to experience the processes for filtering and organizing the materials of modern culture.

I To expedite things, I have borrowed three main ideas to act as assumptions: Assumption 1, derived from Roland Barthes’ essay “Myth Today,” describes myth as a second-order or parasitical metalanguage.2 Put another way, mythical language only develops in the realm of pre-existing language systems, filling the words with extra-signification that co-exists with ordinary meaning. A simple example might be the word “tree,” which on the mundane level signifies a class of plant life common to our organic environment––maples, oaks, elms––but filled with mythical significance the word “tree” might call to mind the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden, the fruit of which resulted in a fall from grace into a state of sin. Further mythical resonance might cause some minds to connect “tree” with the cross that Christ was crucified upon to pay for the 2

Barthes, Mythologies, 114-5.

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sin originating at the tree in Eden. In order for the mythical meanings of “tree” to exist, the sign “tree” must pre-exist in ordinary language, a base upon which the extra-signification can be built. Mythical language, then, is tied to the conditions of ordinary language. Assumption 2 is from late Wittgenstein, namely the implication in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) that reality is defined––or even shaped––by language, rather than the other way around (as Wittgenstein had earlier expressed in the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, 1922). Wittgenstein was a central figure in the “linguistic shift” which moved from an attempt to delineate the boundaries of reality by defining the limits of what can be thought to an attempt to delineate the boundaries of reality by defining what can be said, thus situating language and its usage in a place of paramount importance. Assumption 3 is a central idea in Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth (German edition, 1979; translated edition, 1985). Blumenberg contends that myth is the solution to a problem he terms “The Absolutism of Reality,” or the state (suggested through consideration of archaic humankind) wherein natural instincts are not enough to deal with new challenges and dangers that develop in a given reality. In claiming myth to be a constructed solution to this problem, Blumenberg emphasizes the function as opposed to the matter of myth.3 With these assumptions in hand, it is possible to make several observations that have a direct bearing on our interest in the nature of myth itself: First Observation: Language is not static; therefore myth, as a secondary or parasitical language, is likewise not static. The dynamic changes in language and myth mirror and perhaps propel the general metamorphoses of human culture. Second Observation: If, as Wittgenstein implies, the limits of language are the limits of “reality,” then the activities of the literary avant garde are of great interest, since experimental writing pushes language to new extremes and potentials, thus extending the boundaries of reality in that we are able to recognize, describe, and discuss its further reaches in the newly expanded language (admitting that application of Wittgenstein’s observations in the arena of creative literature and myth includes certain non-rational modes and materials that Wittgenstein would term “nonsense” or “non-sense”). Experimental literature also develops tools necessary to interact with and understand our constantly changing and 3

Blumenberg’s focus on the functionality of myth is derived from the seminal work of Ernst Cassirer in the Mythical Thought volume (1925) of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923-9).

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increasingly complex “reality.” Literary experimentation over the past two hundred years has broken down genre barriers, notions of conventional narrative and poetic forms, easily identifiable voices and characters, and standardized language and grammar. The resulting genre ambiguity reflects a culture that has gradually shifted its focus from a search for systemic unification to the confrontation of a dynamic and chaotic mass of unfiltered materials. The common perception of myth as largely narrative, character-laden, and highly symbolic does not often correspond with the actuality: that myth, being a secondary language, has undergone a significant modal shift as the avant garde has pushed the limits of language in order to meet the challenges of multiplicitous culture.4 This reaction to multiplicity is, to my mind, directly related to Blumenberg’s concept of “The Absolutism of Reality.” Third Observation: Blumenberg has posited that myth is the solution to the problem of “The Absolutism of Reality.” The original condition that spawned primitive and ancient myth, however, is markedly different from the hybrid reality of the modern world. Along with the concrete reality of mother nature, we now need to confront the man-made or man-altered environments, such as the religious, philosophical, scientific, and technological, which are at times partly or wholly abstract. How does one face the void of existentialism? Or the harsh terrain of Machiavellian politics? Or the elegant speculative dimensions of string theory? Or the boggling expanses of raw information on the internet? How does one confront all of these “realities” at once? Modern myth develops forms and strategies that mirror and attempt to manage––not “The Absolutism of Reality”––but possibly “The Absolutism of Realities.” Fourth Observation: Living myth is like a pair of spectacles through which reality is viewed; it is not only what is viewed through those spectacles, but how we interpret what is seen. When we view myth from historical periods, we tend to study it from our own place in time, which is outside the time of its creation, thus giving the impression that we are viewing myth objectively. This is not how the people of the past would have perceived the situation, as they would have been living with their myth, looking through it. When modern authors self-consciously attempt to create a new “mythology” (such as in Hughes’s Crow, or Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings), they often produce bodies of narratives that have the look and feel of previous myths, and thus there is already a built-in distance, a sense that the works may be visited, read, and discussed from 4

To clarify, the traditional characteristics usually ascribed to myth are not necessarily excluded, but might be utilized in new and unexpected ways.

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an objective vantage point. We may learn from such “myths,” we may take their principles and apply them to our lives, but they do not function for us as true myth. It may be impossible to see with clarity our current, living myths from our subjective vantage point, peering from the inside out. We may speculate and make an attempt to say how we are viewing the world, yet it could take decades or centuries for others, looking back, to see the shape and content of our present worldviews. Then again, the nature of our particular myths may never be very clear, seeing that they include multiple perspectives, various disciplines, and an unprecedented amount of documentation—much of it, as mentioned previously, unfiltered and problematic.

II Having outlined the conditions of modern myth, we will now look at practical and creative strategies developed by certain poets to respond to these conditions. While we could look at work from practitioners in any field, poets are a particularly interesting lot. In earlier culture phases it was the poets who were the official rememberers,5 in charge of shaping and retailing common inheritance and creating a sense of identity and order through myth.6 While poets do not hold such an overtly central role in our contemporary culture, one wonders if their activity––to some extent or other––still mirrors and/or shapes the way we view the world. This question intensifies when one comes across a statement such as the following from the conclusion of John Gray’s Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age (1995): The present inquiry embodies the wager that another mode of thinking––found in some varieties of poetry and mysticism, for example–– can assert itself against the domination of the forms of thought privileged by both science and philosophy in Western cultures. It is with these

5

Jones, The Anathemata, 21. The poetic function of the “ancient bard” should be recognized as a combination of our modern historian and literary artist. The ramifications of this are profound, as in the past the myths that gave identity and direction to a people survived due to their literary strength, specifically myths retold in a memorable form. Blumenberg in Work on Myth posits that the versions of ancient stories that have come down to us did so through a “Darwinism of Words,” whereby the best retellings survived due to their memorable nature. It makes one wonder if the disconnection between our contemporary culture and the past is due to our failure to create memorable forms for our cultural inheritance.

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Taking Gray’s cue, we will look into the “humiliated mode” of poetry with reference to Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, and Armand Schwerner. These poets from successive literary generations in the twentieth century evince consciousness of the changing conditions in modern culture. Their works in various ways confront the present with the past, and through this aim towards “cultural recovery.” Furthermore, each poet can be seen to make adjustments in his working methods in response to the relative success or failure of immediate literary predecessors. In this sense the constant innovation and adaptation by these poets does not suggest a yearning to “recover” a state of perfect stasis, but rather a continual process that is in itself a constant regeneration. A corpse, in modern parlance, may be “recovered”; the desire is not to reinstitute dead form, but––as Pound would say––to “MAKE IT NEW.”

Example 1: Ezra Pound That his work lacks sincerity could never be levelled at Ezra Pound, nor is there any doubt at the start of The Cantos (published 1917-70) that Pound believes a bard can write civilization out of hell and establish a paradiso terrestre. Pound’s transformational aims are embodied in phrases like “MAKE IT NEW.” The phrase is both a rejection of traditional forms of expression in favour of new modes, and a mandate to make what the past holds relevant for the present. In reclaiming this phrase that had been inscribed on a Chinese emperor’s tub, Pound induces a multiple perspective of time, in which several historical periods can be seen simultaneously; it is a literary equivalent to the multiple perspective of space in Picasso’s cubist works. Pound’s work creates a Janus view, one that gives the reader a sensation of looking backward (in this instance) to ancient China, and forward to a rejuvenation of modern culture; it is through a re-vision8 of the past that we find a way to proceed into the future.

7

Gray, Enlightenment’s Wake, 184. I use the form “re-vision” to suggest something more than a “going over the same old ground.” It is that, but also a fresh viewing, a new way of looking at something that has lost its lustre in time. In this sense, I am also suggesting a potential “manipulation” of the past for a particular purpose. This final sense of revision can in the right scenario bring about triumphs, and in other situations bring about

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It was with this dynamic view of the past that Pound wanted his long poem The Cantos to be “a poem including history,” and to function as “the tale of the tribe.” Even a poem with such lofty aims, however, could not include everything. Pound recognized this principle as early as 1915 in his series of essays titled “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris” in which he espoused the method of “luminous details.” These historical facts and ideas gleamed like golden threads through the fabric of time, and when placed to best effect in his poetry would resonate for contemporary culture.9 Despite filtering history to identify luminous details, Pound still included a huge amount of material. Space (the length of such an epic) and time (the urgency of modernity and mortality) were at a premium, which necessitated another strategy: the use of condensed diction.10 “Great literature,” Pound contended, “is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.”11 Pound certainly packed in as much meaning as possible by cutting and pasting his found materials into a grand collage in a manner approximating the form of a musical fugue. Themes would be introduced and interwoven, juxtaposed to create historical rhymes (rather than merely aural ones) that were sometimes jarring, sometimes sublime in effect. Connective passages were largely absent, leaving the reader to investigate the plethora of references and somehow to make sense of it all. His younger cohort Basil Bunting critiqued this method saying, “You allude too much, and present too little.”12 The abundance of references in The Cantos has at times earned Pound a reputation as an elitist writing for a very small, very select audience. There may be some surprise, therefore, that a work such as Pound’s ABC of Reading (1934) is meant to be a textbook for use “by those no longer in school; by those who have not been to school; or by those who in their college days suffered those things which most of my own generation tragedy. As such, the responsibility of curating and repackaging the past is a great one. 9 Pound, Selected Prose 1909-1965, 21. 10 James Joyce’s unique contribution of condensed diction in Finnegans Wake should be noted here. Unlike Pound’s pure cutting-and-pasting, Joyce creates multiple perspective through grafting or fusing words together to create a translucent effect. One brief example of his metamorphic language is the word mamalujo, created by taking the first two letters of each Biblical gospel: ma(tthew), ma(rk), lu(ke), and jo(hn). When we read mamalujo, we clearly have a sense of both the four individual gospels, and that these gospels collectively tell the single story of Christ (as a cloverleaf demonstrates the 3-in-1 nature of the Trinity). 11 Pound, ABC of Reading, 36. 12 Kenner, The Pound Era, 430.

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suffered.” As for professors and teachers, he writes, “I am not idly sowing thorns in their path. I should like to make even their lot and life more exhilarating and to save even them from unnecessary boredom in classroom.”13 Pound’s prose works are far from obscurantist; rather, they aim to provide clarity on his various interests and obsessions, and by extension to reveal inroads to his poetry. That Pound viewed his prose in such utilitarian terms can be glimpsed in this comment in the wake of the first serious academic study of his poetry by Hugh Kenner in 1951: “I usually find my own simple statements more comprehensible than the eggsplantation by flatchested highbrows.”14 Pound is actually interested for his readers to fully understand the important “truths” he is propagating. Because he recognizes that his readers might not be prepared to undertake his new approaches to matter and form directly, he has created prose works which—acting as “user’s manuals”—help to elucidate both his poetry and the views that it contains. The sentiment that artworks should ideally be self-contained and self-explanatory might be invoked here, but modern creative works can be just as complex as new technologies. We do not need a user’s manual to count on our fingers, but we may want to refer to one when we are troubleshooting a new audio-visual system with only minutes before the start of a big sports match. Despite his innovations and the earnestness of his positions, Pound failed––in his own terms––to achieve the ultimate goal for The Cantos: a paradiso terrestre in 120 completed cantos. He could not “make it cohere,” and the edifice turned from a classical order to a large romantic folly. But a poem that begins with Odysseus voyaging can be seen another way: Pound is an implicit Odysseus, but so is twentieth-century culture in general. Noble though the aims might have been, “errors and shipwrecks” waylaid and misdirected the journey. While Pound intended The Cantos to be an epic journey to a realized paradise, it evolved into a myth of the world not as it should be, but as it is.

Example 2: Charles Olson Charles Olson began his poetic career at the late age of thirty-six, in the wake of World War Two. He acknowledged that Pound had supplied the modern poet with the tools needed to tackle large cultural issues, even if he was disgusted by particular political views Pound espoused during

13 14

Pound, ABC of Reading, 11. Carpenter, A Serious Character, 799.

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their often heated dialogues at St. Elizabeths Hospital.15 Another influence on Olson was the long poem Paterson by William Carlos Williams (194658), a work in which Williams sought to conflate the individual and the city, Paterson being both the city in New Jersey and a personification of that city. The Maximus Poems, Olson’s major work, is clearly indebted to these two sources, yet the work includes stances and developments that make it original. Like Paterson, The Maximus Poems take a particular geography as their locus: Gloucester, Massachusetts. Unlike the city of Paterson, which was a studied choice for Williams, Olson was actually a native of Gloucester, which induces a sense of ownership and intimacy in The Maximus Poems that is lacking in Paterson. Like The Cantos, The Maximus Poems is a didactic work concerned with the matter of history, but whereas Pound wanted to write a long poem including history, Olson wanted to write one as history. This shift to a process of immediacy was made possible through Olson’s concept of “projective verse.” Olson’s seminal manifesto Projective Verse16 (another user’s manual) contains the Robert Creeley worded dictum: “FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.”17 In other words, Olson would not sit down to write a poem with a preconceived form––say, a sonnet–– but would instead think on certain themes and materials, and these would mingle in the act of poetic creation with simultaneously emerging form, and thus be “projected” onto the page. Good analogies contemporary with this methodology might be Jackson Pollock’s “action paintings,” or jazz improvisation. Action painting, jazz improvisation, and projective verse all attempt to allow the raw energy of spontaneous creation to carry over into the artwork––be it painting, musical performance, or poem––and, further, to pass on that energy to the audience with as little loss as possible. To Olson, Pollock, and the jazz musician, revision and refinement tamper with the projective artwork, and are therefore not only unnecessary but counteractive to the process. Olson is often very powerful in his projective mode, mainly since he is immersed in his subject matter absolutely. His intense scrutiny of Gloucester provides the content that determines the form of The Maximus 15

See Olson’s fascinating diaries recounting his discussion with Pound during his internment in Charles Olson & Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. While information on Pound from this period is quite common, this is a rare document from the beginning of Olson’s poetic career. 16 Projective Verse was written in 1950, but came to have a larger influence when published as a pamphlet in 1959, and after it was included in the ubiquitous 1960 anthology The New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen. 17 Olson, Collected Prose, 240.

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Poems. Given its large format and length of over six hundred pages, the complete edition of Maximus is the size of a fairly thick telephone book, raising comparisons to the massive bulk of The Cantos. So what materials make up The Maximus Poems, and how did Olson filter and utilize them? Apparently Olson forged ahead with the actual writing of the poems, in search of both understanding and a working process, until the eureka moment in the poem “Letter 23” in which Olson is investigating an historical site named “fishermans ffield”: What we have here - and literally in my own front yard, as I sd to Merk, asking him what delving, into “fishermans ffield” recent historians... not telling him it was a poem I was interested in, aware I’d scare him off, muthologos has lost such ground since Pindar The odish man sd: “Poesy steals away men’s judgment by her muthoi” (taking this crack at Homer’s sweet-versing) “and a blind heart is most men’s portions.” Plato allowed this divisive thought to stand, agreeing that mythos is false. Logos isn’t—was facts. Thus Thucydides I would be an historian as Herodotus was, looking for oneself for the evidence of what is said 18

Olson contends that it was Thucydides, the father of modern historical methods, who distinguished between muthos (false) and logos (true). Both muthos and logos, according to Olson, mean essentially “from the mouth.” Herodotus, predating Thucydides, created history that was more inclusive, and hence looked at all of the evidence, including much of what Thucydides would leave out as “false.” Olson the poet does not want to be restricted like the professional historian Merck, and instead “would be an 18

Olson, Maximus Poems, 104-5.

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historian as Herodotus was, looking / for oneself for the evidence of / what is said.” He recombines muthos and logos and thus allows “all that is said” into the poem. Olson is an explorer of his own back yard, so to speak, and what he finds is the content that is digested and “projected” onto the page. The poem is an act in the instant of the present, history in the making, and therefore the emphasis is as much on the process as on the matter. Olson is not advocating that we all make Gloucester the centre of our attention; rather, he is divulging a practice that will lead us to our own “back yards” to have primary experiences, looking for ourselves at what there is to be found, sensing the energy of connections, hopefully expressing it, and passing it on. This is a powerful pair of mythical spectacles that places emphasis on primary rather than secondary experience, “making new” the objects in our environment, invoking the excitement of children wondering at the world. Pound’s aim, if not realized, had been to complete an earthly paradise in 120 cantos. While Olson also wanted to inaugurate a new society, his organic poetry had no such clear termination point; by the late 1960s such a synthesis had occurred that Olson seemed less to write Maximus than to live it. In this sense the poem was not so much an open-ended work as one whose formal conclusion was Olson’s death. Always focused on the writing of poetry rather than its editing, Olson left a mass of manuscripts– –poems written on every conceivable scrap of paper––for his editor to arrange as best he could in chronological order for the third and final volume of Maximus. At the time of his death in 1970 he left––as Pound would do two years later––a mixed legacy: inspiration to some, and a cautionary tale to others.

Example 3: Armand Schwerner When Armand Schwerner began to conceive his long poem The Tablets in the mid 1960s, Pound had fallen into silence, and Olson was entering his final phase. At first glance, the postmodern wit and parody in The Tablets could not seem further from the serious purpose of the Cantos or the Maximus Poems. The work takes the form of supposed ancient Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform tablets that are translated by a persona called simply the “scholar/translator.” The individual Tablets appear in various states of “completeness,” with parts marked as “missing,” “untranslatable,” “confusing”, or as intercalations by the “scholar/translator.” Early editions of The Tablets gave no clue to readers as to how the text was to be approached. By the 1980s, however, newer editions offered an organic “user’s manual” in the form of “Journals and

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Divagations” divulging Schwerner’s thoughts and intentions regarding the text. “Why leave fictive experiments to the prose writers?” one note asks.19 In another he reveals that his strategy in some odd way is building upon the work of Pound and T. S. Eliot: Eliot and Pound structured ironic and tragic commentaries by confronting past and present. Why not go further, I thought, and recreate the past itself, in a series of subjectively ordered variations suggestively rooted in the archaic? And, more, why not augment the confusions between illusion and reality by the further invention of a scholar-translator whose fictive but oppressively present self would add a dimension of narration?20

The archaic roots are culled from the period of the clay tablets––in other words, at the moment when humankind crossed the threshold from pre-history to recorded history. As with the multiple perspective already seen in Pound and Olson, however, this is overlaid with the historical moment of the “scholar/translator,” since the “tablets” are only seen through the (supposed) act of modern translation: we can only see the past through the filter of the present. In addition to layers of history, there are layers of voices so that it is impossible to pinpoint the “author” of any statement, thus augmenting “the confusions between illusion and reality.” As we read a text, we might think that we are reading the expression of some ancient individual, but it is not that simple. The texts can be seen as the product of chains of voices, each link potentially placing subjective spin on what is presented: Utterers––Scribes––Translators––Readers / Hearers The texts cannot be ascribed to any one individual, and as such suggest the communal nature of language and meaning, rather than emphasizing individual expression. Furthermore, the exploration of the relationship between the individual and the communal is highlighted by the physical and aural aspects of the text. The visual aspects of The Tablets are revealed through the solitary and silent act of seeing the text and reading it, while the aural aspects––very much in evidence in Schwerner’s own performances of the text––emphasize the communal act of hearing.21 In 19

Schwerner, The Tablets, 128. Ibid., 134. 21 The latest edition of The Tablets, the last Schwerner saw into print, was issued with a CD containing readings from the text by Schwerner. These readings add an entire 20

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this sense, the text embodies the ambiguity of the modern individual and the stance towards community. Are we individuals, autonomous creatures, who are in a sense alone? Or are we indelibly linked, with a particular function and place, in a greater organic structure? Some combination of these? While this is an effective display that hints at certain truths, we have to remember that The Tablets is a fiction, with Schwerner the lone puppeteer manipulating his creation. And yet, Schwerner insists, “the work doesn’t exist in a realm of fantasy; there’s too much deep structure of familiar archaeology and paleography and ritual for that easy course.”22 What exactly is the work, then? The form it takes falls between so many genres that this ambiguity also creates multiple perspective: If categories disappear and genres disappear, if it is the new perspective which shows the essence of what had been cliché or unseen, if the Gnostics have meaning (if they are) we cannot have a Babel of tongues if they are the speech of the poem. Joyce started it. Extension of the dramatic monologue into plurilogue.23

The Tablets lures us in with its wryly comic tone and seemingly postmodern undermining of many things that once seemed clear to us: the difference between “fact” and “fiction,” the distinguishing characteristics of particular genres, and the ability to discern the individual from the group. We play along as if we know what is happening. Our modern minds are too rational and academically savvy to actually believe the sincere gospels according to poets. In this case we feel free of commitment, since Schwerner is not presenting a “real” situation. This stance is naïve. As in a Beckett play, we like to think we are an objective audience, and we laugh at the confusion of the clowns in their existential angst until the moment we recognize that we, too, are the clowns…or perhaps that we are the “scholar/translator.” The “scholar/translator” approaches the tablets with academic fealty, is following all of the appropriate guidelines according to his discipline, and yet at the end of “Tablet VIII” we find this unsettling confession: There is a growing ambiguity in this work of mine, but I’m not sure where it lies. Some days I do not doubt that the ambiguity is inherent in the

dimension that is missing when merely viewing the texts. It is clear that the poem is meant as both a visual and an aural work. 22 Foster, “Interview with Armand Schwerner,” Talisman 19, 35. 23 Schwerner, The Tablets, 130.

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language of the Tablets themselves; at other times I worry myself sick over the possibility that I am the variable giving rise to ambiguities. Do I take advantage of the present unsure state of scholarly expertise? On occasion it almost seems to me as if I am inventing this sequence, and such a fantasy sucks me into an abyss of almost irretrievable depression, from which only forced and unpleasurable exercises in linguistic analysis rescue me.24

While revelling in the tragicomic irony, the implication for our own existence becomes evident. Are we mere egos assuming our scholarly methods can objectively master the materials we work with? Think back to Blumenberg’s concept of the “Absolutism of Reality,” the state wherein natural instincts are not enough to deal with new challenges and dangers that develop in a given reality. Schwerner’s work presents an “Absolutism of the Text,” as The Tablets is a textual reality that is constructed to throw us off balance, while simultaneously forcing us to modify our view of the world from a limited linear model to a more open and dynamic plurality. While the product of “fictive experiment” necessitated by our sceptical culture, The Tablets presents the very “real” conditions of interpretation in contemporary society––whether making sense of actual cuneiform tablets, traditional myths, or Pound’s Cantos. The Tablets is the solution to its own dilemma. While permitting our lack of faith in ultimate factual “truth,” it allows us to see the world through the processes of the text, and to transfer the sensibilities of this work into our mundane existence. Pound, Olson, and Schwerner all produced works that attempt to confront the “Absolutism of Reality” of the twentieth century, specifically the sense of disconnection with the past, and an overwhelming mass of cultural information to assess and organize. While they were not alone in their endeavour, the examples provided demonstrate––it is hoped––a progression in working methods. Pound’s project mingled modernity and romanticism in the belief that an ultimate unity could be achieved; Olson reflected the shift of focus, from product to process, evident in areas of art and music of the post-war era; and Schwerner utilized slick postmodern strategies to consider some of the same issues Pound and Olson had been wrestling with. All three created more inclusive forms that are able to contain great amounts of material. If John Gray senses that poetry is a “humiliated mode” which could potentially effect “cultural recovery,” I would suggest that the seeds of such a potential have been in development for the past hundred years in works such as those discussed in this paper. Pound and Olson are re-emerging as literary forces, and in time 24

Ibid., 32.

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Schwerner’s ultimate influence will be determined. It would appear that the modernist writers have become increasingly relevant as we progress further into the age of the internet, since the knowledge that information technology makes available to us is unfathomable––there could have been no comparably challenging “Absolutism of Realty” facing archaic man, or a greater necessity for further adaptations of myth to confront it. The importance of the foregoing examples from modernist poets lies not only in the demonstration of strategies for filtering and ordering materials, but in the poets’ cognisance of their actions, and their dedication and commitment to getting it right (even in the event of their going wrong). We can only wait to see what further developments emerge––potentially in digital form––from this tradition, and trust that mythical processes will continue to evolve as they always have, to deal with the “Absolutism of Reality” in whatever guise it assumes.

Works Cited Allen, Donald, ed. The New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. by Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1993. Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Trans. By Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. New York: Delta, 1988. Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thought. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1955. Faas, Ekbert. Ted Hughes: The Unaccommodated Universe. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1980. Foster, Edward. “Interview with Armand Schwerner.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 19 (1998-9): 30-44. Gray, John. Enlightenment’s Wake: Politics and Culture at the Close of the Modern Age. London: Routledge, 1995. Hughes, Ted. Crow. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Jones, David. The Anathemata. Second edition. London: Faber, 1955. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Olson, Charles. Charles Olson & Ezra Pound: An Encounter at St. Elizabeths. Ed. by Catherine Seelye. New York: Grossman, 1975. —. Collected Prose. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. —. The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.

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Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, New Classics Series, n.d. —. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1970. —. Literary Essays. New York: New Directions, 1968. —. Selected Prose 1909 – 1965. New York: New Directions, 1973. Schwerner, Armand. The Tablets. Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1999. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Third edition. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

“IN THE GODDESS’S NAME”: SYMBOLIST AND MODERNIST REVISIONS OF THE APHRODITE MYTH NORA CLARK

Lyrical tributes to Aphrodite have been recurring objects of desire, echoed in the earliest extant fragments down to contemporary verse. Cyprus too has always been a meta-text, an island but never insular, and since the third millennium BC a place of pilgrimage where the full gamut of human passions was played out in the Aphrodisia festivals, introduced by Phoenician colonists expanding westwards. Travellers through Roman, Crusading and Napoleonic times recorded diverse levels of engagement with the goddess cult. Some, like this German priest in the fourteenth century, looked askance at her birthplace as dissolute space: “For the soil of Paphos, if a man sleep thereon, will all night through provoke a man to lust.”1 Contrariwise, dramatic incantation in situ was the priority of classical scholars who, with Virgil’s Aeneid in hand, would seek the goddess at her temple, “where, for HER, the hundred altars glowed with Arabian incense.”2 Aphrodite is signifier of beauty, mother of Love (Cupid), queen of laughter, mistress of pleasure, and holds numerous emblematic titles such as “Venus” (verse / art), “Urania”, “Cytherea”, “Aphrodite” (afros / foam), “Paphia”, and “Kypris” (Cyprus). She was a guile-weaver to be sure, but of capricious seduction and earthly pursuits, many centred on her glorious Sanctuary at PaleoPaphos and its quasi-oracle “Venus Paphia,” patronized by emperors and nurturing its own legend of a sanctified landscape: one that still links ancient times with our modern sensibility.3

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Jennings, Christians and Muslims, 14-5. Kinglake, Eothen, 57. 3 One nineteenth-century traveller, Edward Daniel Clarke, noted of “the Paphian shrine”: “Indefinite as are our notions of such idealized beauty, we seldom differ in assigning the place of its abode.” See Sources for the History of Cyprus, 5: 128. 2

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In the beginning were Homer’s mythopoetic hymns (eighth century BC), actually elaborate but devout recitations at a music festival: “honeysweet goddess…favour my song.” (VI, 9, 20).4 His hexameter is lyric mode, not heroic, although tribute to the goddess links the Iliad and the Odyssey where the bard Demodocus talks of “Aphrodite the laughterlover” and “Paphos in Cyprus, where she has her precinct” (Book VIII). In “Hymn V” (the earliest and longest) the poet is mouthpiece for the Muse, heralding some of the more than forty Homeric epithets that have delineated the deity ever since: “Muse, speak to me of the works of Aphrodite, / the golden one, the Cyprian / she who awakens sweet longing in the gods / and subdues the race of human beings” (V, 1-3). Hailed throughout antiquity as the tenth muse, the leading female author of the classical world was born about 612 BC. “Psappha”, as she called herself in her Aeolian dialect, belonged to a thiasos or etaireia, a women’s club venerating Aphrodite, which she directed through her superior verse and lyre. Her only fully extant poem, “Ode to Aphrodite” (“Fragment 1”), is a rhetorical Ode of female solidarity unique among the male-authored literature of antiquity: “Immortal Aphrodite, on your patterned throne, / daughter of Zeus, guile weaver, / I beg you, goddess, don’t subjugate my heart / with anguish, with grief ” (1-4).5 The erotic plea to the love goddess is designed to transform Sappho’s status from unrequited lover to maddening object of desire. But in the event the ode to Aphrodite, itself a dramatic ritual of lyric performance, actually steals the limelight from the Lesbian’s troubled psyche. Literary re-workings of Aphrodite during the Renaissance and Romantic periods were deferential to classical translations from Homer, Horace and others. For instance, the bard of the Hundred Tales of Love drew on Ovid and Petrarch for his milestone humanist text Famous Women (1361-2). This first biographical collection of women in western literature, 106 of them to be exact, includes Sappho and Venus. True to the fierce detraction of the goddess by the Christian Fathers, Boccaccio presents a mortal Paphian, thus dictating a semantic incompleteness between fact and fiction, between Trojan history and Olympian myth. In Chapter VII “Venus, Queen of Cyprus” is a model of degenerate impropriety, her divine parentage a shoddy device of “the blackest ignorance” of the Paphians. “Owing to her character defects or the general influence of Cyprus (where lasciviousness was rampant) or through the 4

From The Homeric Hymns, 99; The Odyssey, 93. The poet Ezra Pound (18851972) in The Pisan Cantos (1948) draws on Latin translations of Homer’s “Hymn VI” to record the soul’s passage through darkness towards a vision of Aphrodite. 5 From Sappho: Poems and Fragments, 66.

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corruption of a wicked mind, Venus seemed to tarnish all the splendor of her beauty with her incessant acts of fornication.”6 Boccaccio hereby overturns a designated, elitist title to distort the lyrical subject. More particularly, the Cypriot cult of Aphrodite had long inspired antiquity with the concept of visible perfection, a radiant quality often captured in marble as with the Aphrodite of Milos, or the Ludovisi Throne in Rome; “sculpture’s marble language,” Shelley calls it (Revolt of Islam I, 50). One can only speculate on the magnitude of artistic response to a real theophany, “Venus Anadyomene” (“Venus Rising”). Botticelli’s gesture to the Renaissance revival of myth, his Birth of Venus (1484) at the Uffizi, emulates the legendary painting by Apelles (fourth century AD), depicting an anthropomorphic beauty about to step onto the Paphos shore. In this moment of flux an act of nature becomes an act of fabled culture. Rising from the sea is an inauspicious royal birth, derived from a nasty family feud of mutilation and bloody foam during the creation of the world. Homer glossed over this Hesiodic tradition in favour of the Zeus-Dione lineage but modern poets have reacted very differently. Rimbaud, for instance, downgrades the myth with a flabby, ulcerated prostitute rising from a rusty bath tub in “Vénus Anadyomène” (1869). Yeats, in “A Prayer for My Daughter” (1919) wishes for his first born Anne a restrained comeliness, since “that great Queen, that rose out of the spray, / Being fatherless could have her way / Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man” (26-8). More graphically, “The Birth of Venus” (1958) by the American poet Muriel Rukeyser tersely satirizes gory mutilation as turning out a “wellborn goddess” (23). Two earthquakes in the third century AD demolished PaleoPaphos and its temple of hallowed goddess rites, and by the early fourth century Cyprus had embraced Pauline Christianity, which reigned supreme over myth through its Scripture, a discernible Master, and dogma. Despite such historical determinism claims are made for the sustainability of Aphrodite worship beyond the shores of Cyprus,7 and her symbolic endurance is asserted tenaciously in A. C. Swinburne’s (1837-1909) “Hymn to Proserpine” (1866), set in the same fourth century. Here is a dramatic monologue of impressive rhythm by “the laureate of mid nineteenthcentury unbelief,” censured in his time for an anti-Christian stance, but well-memorized all the same in Victorian homes where reading out loud

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Boccaccio, Famous Women, 19-21. Byron in Canto I of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) writes: “not to one dome circumscribeth she / Her worship, but, devoted to her rite, /A thousand altars rise, for ever blazing bright.” Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, 2: 33.

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was much in vogue.8 The verse expounds man’s need to believe, yet the remarkable rhythm of the lines endorses the poet’s antagonism towards a non-numinous Christ who simply “being dead art a God” (73). The persona, a lauded patrician poet, echoes the sentiments of the theurgist Emperor Julian the Apostate who worshipped the god of light and poesy Apollo as sublime deity. He failed to revive paganism in 361 AD “After the Proclamation in Rome of the Christian Faith” and allegedly capitulated on his deathbed in 363 AD: “Vicisti, Galilaee” (“Thou hast conquered, O Galilean”).9 Thus, while historicism is conceded in imperial Rome, a religion preaching eternity is doomed by a maledictory sea metaphor in diluvian terms: “behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last” (68). (This polarized stance forms a striking contrast with another Victorian poet of devout upbringing; Arnold’s metaphoric Sea of Faith in “Dover Beach” (1867) signifies the Christian faith itself in quandary). The alienated persona in his last poem seeks respite from public acclaim: “I am sick of singing” (9). Concluding, this Epicurean opts for “a season in silence” (105), implying that the drab Christian deities, epitomized by the “pale Galilean” (34), stultify literary endeavour, and deprive him personally of an assured activist function in this new order. Furthermore, by challenging the supremacy of a self-effacing Virgin in the wake of paganism’s decline he intimates that gender dynamics have been marginalized by Christianity. Polemic rebuttal declares Marianism inferior to Venus worship: Though before thee the throned Cytherean be fallen, and hidden her head, Yet thy kingdom shall pass, Galilean, thy dead shall go down to thee dead... Not as thine, not as thine was our mother, a blossom of flowering seas,

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Wilson, God’s Funeral, 205. Ironically, the death of Julian the Apostate, son of Constantine I’s half-brother, marked the end of the Constantine dynasty. His neo-paganist comment is probably apocryphal but his standpoint has inspired many literary works. Notably, Thomas Hardy borrows the “Hymn to Proserpine” line, “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath” (35), for his controversial novel on eroticism and religion Jude the Obscure (1895). Henrik Ibsen wrote a historical drama Emperor and Galilean in 1873. The Russian Symbolist Dmitri Merezhkovski’s novel The Death of the Gods (Julian the Apostate) is part of his historical trilogy Christ and Anti-Christ (1896-1905). Gore Vidal’s anti-Christian novel Julian (1964) is the emperor’s “autobiography.” 9

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Clothed round with the world’s desire as with raiment, and fair as the foam, And fleeter than kindled fire, and a goddess, and mother of Rome. For thine came pale and a maiden, and a sister to sorrow; but ours, Her deep hair heavily laden with odour and colour of flowers, White rose of the rose-white water, a silver splendour, a flame, Bent down unto us that besought her, and earth grew sweet with her name. For thine came weeping, a slave among slaves, and rejected; but she Came flushed from the full-flushed wave, and imperial, her foot on the sea. (73-4, 78-86)10

The long single stanza (110 lines) is Proserpine’s “Hymn” but the “Cytherean” dominates midway. One notes Botticelli’s layered sensuality now augmented by the maternal, to contest the Virgin’s designated role. In the sixteen lines eulogizing her sea birth and “silver splendour”, the pictorial intensity and pagan devotion are very Pre-Raphaelite, one of the tendencies shaping aestheticism in the 1880s and 1890s.11 The verse is concerned with transience, the rise of Christianity a mere interlude in the cyclical pattern of civilization and faith. This message, Swinburne implies, was timely for his age as well, with western Europe in a crisis of faith, and the First Vatican Council (1869) declaring papal infallibility in an effort to stem the tide. With Christianity encoded as a tolerated Roman religion the speaker holds true to the Heraclitean doctrine of fatal necessity. Hence, in his rules of engagement, religious crusades are 10

From Swinburne’s Complete Works, 1: 67-73. The intoxicating musical virtuosity, the pounding effect of the rhythm and alliteration in the sixty-two poems of Swinburne’s first collection (Poems and Ballads: First Series, 1865-66) brought a new momentum to Victorian verse. Swinburne himself was regarded as the best public reader of his poems. The Poems and Ballads: Second Series and Third Series (1878, 1889) were more subdued, the poet’s health deteriorating through alcoholism. 11 Aestheticism is linked with myth in Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885), a historical novel set in the time of the philosopher Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121-180 AD). Pater presents his responses to paganism, Christianity and Rome as he explores the origins of the beautiful, anonymous poem “Pervigilium Veneris” (“Vigil of Venus”), from the second or third century AD. He outlines his PreRaphaelite notions on aestheticism, and the pursuit of beauty as an ideal in itself.

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uncalled for, since the “kingdom [that] will never end” (Luke 1.33) “shall pass.” In “solemn exultation” he prophesies re-instatement of the GrecoRoman gods.12 Venus Victrix (a Roman but never Greek title) bides her time, awaiting a Second Coming. Within the larger framework of the seasonally dualistic Proserpine myth the verse is also a wider reflection on female presence in the mortality and renewal cycles of both faith and literary creation. Initially Anglo-Catholic, and along with Byron and Shelley one of the few aristocratic poets since the Renaissance, Swinburne when at Oxford renounced his staunch Christianity for atheism, or what he termed antitheism, and unlike his political allegiances this never waned. It fired him as a poet. A. E. Housman maintained that “Aphrodite was a much more interesting goddess of poetry than Liberty”, noting that Swinburne’s later political verse was inferior in theme and drive.13 Atheism is rife in the volume Poems and Ballads: First Series (1865-66) yet the more offensive poems often position the femme fatale Aphrodite within a Christian framework. This is not surprising, since the poet’s public school had been the strictly Christian Eton where the principal text, the polytheistic Greek Anthology (tenth century AD), kindled his lifelong admiration for mythology, Aeschylus and Sappho. In his “Sapphics”, for instance, as McGann has identified, Swinburne actually inverts the goddess as a poetic mirror image of Sappho’s “Fragment 1.”14 The “white implacable Aphrodite” (9) summons Sappho, but then flees an alliance, sickened by Sappho’s song. One could argue that the poet is challenging both repressive Victorian morality and lesbianism’s limited homoerotic appeal to the promiscuous goddess of Love. In the 106 stanzas of “Laus Veneris” (“Praise of Venus,” 1866), Swinburne presents a revival of a Hörsel legend which was the source for Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser (1845). Venus occupies centre stage in a medieval psycho-drama which appealed alike to Pre-Raphaelites, 12

Chew, Swinburne, 94-5. Chew’s perspective is akin to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s view of parallel time-lines of eventful history and longer cycles of mythic patterns. 13 A. E. Housman (1859-1936) refers to the pro-Mazzini Italian poems Song of Italy (1867) and Songs before Sunrise (1871). He contends that the Poems and Ballads: First Series “may fairly be called the most conspicuous event in the literary history of the reign of Queen Victoria…Aphrodite has the knack of causing both her friends and her enemies to lose their heads and to make more fuss about her than she is worthʊstill the stroke was both effective and salutary, and entitles Swinburne to a secure though modest place among the liberators of mankind.” In The Confines of Criticism, 10-35. 14 McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism, 115.

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Decadents and opera buffs attuned to mythic renditions. The new persona is a minnesinger (Love troubadour), lured to courtly romance in Venusberg by a beautiful woman, herself detached from the world above yet earthbound, not ethereal. The speaker hastens to verify the divine origin: “she came out of the naked sea” (390). At this point a resisting reader might long for that hierarchy of voices typified by the classic realism of Swinburne’s literary counterparts. Yet faith and myth have traditionally been illustrated by idiosyncratic individual narratives, of conversion or denial, exemplary or discredited, internalized in monologue, or recorded in text. The claustrophobic grotto inside a German mountain (unlike the shimmering Paphian temple by the sea or Ovid’s al fresco scenarios) is in fact a hellish underworld of abnormal bewitchery akin to Keatsian neomedievalism. After seven years of gratifying the “feverish famine in my veins” (165) Tannhäuser sustains a Fall from Venerean grace through God’s paternalism, a welcome retreat from temptation. The pilgrim goes to Rome for Papal absolution, which is withheld (we are told), and his erstwhile Catholic conscience concurs: “there was no sin like mine” (206). Unforgiven, the prodigal returns “home” (385) to the sepulchre of Venusberg for his consolation prize, a sensual destruction verging on religious ecstasy: “Behold, my Venus, my soul’s body, lies / With my love laid upon her garment-wise” (29-30). He is literally in love with Love, not merely its songs, if one considers the metonymic title: “Laus Veneris” / “Praise of Love”. The melodrama (with a mute Venus) could have been an erotic tour de force of ego-history, if it were not for the absence of moral didactics and the incarceration of his human spirit in a decadent malaise. Like “Hymn to Proserpine” this narrative deals with the historical conflict of pagan eroticism versus Christian sin and expiation. One should add here Swinburne’s complex cross-sexual remark on viewing Titian’s reclining Venus of Urbino (1538): “Sappho and Anactoria in one…how any creature can be decently virtuous within thirty square miles of it passes my comprehension. I think with her Tannhauser need not have been bored—even till the end of the world; but who knows? ”15 Far from a stark scenario, the tableau is a veritable wonder-land and Venus is all: a mythic ideal, a real woman to whom the poet-lover-knight clings “out of all men’s sight / Until God loosen over sea and land / The thunder of the trumpets of the night” (422-4), that is until the Last Judgement of St. John’s eschatology. The speaker, now living a parody of 15

Swinburne visited the Uffizi with the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell in 1864. Letter to Lord Houghton, 31 March 1864, in The Swinburne Letters, 1: 98.

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life, acknowledges his spent alter-ego: “For I was of Christ’s choosing, I God’s knight, / No blinkard heathen stumbling for scant light” (209-10). Importantly, this earlier devotion to the Almighty is now transposed to a subterranean goddess who cannot offer God’s warrior salvation through sacraments. In a particular cameo the knight views the Venus-Adonis relationship as one of sexual histrionics, even manic energy, unlike the Renaissance poems of Spenser and others which depict a leisurely idyll in the Paphian hills. Venus’s desire is about lustful experiment, not love; he is passionately obsessed with sinning, with being ravaged (self-lessly) by a panther-predator: “There is the knight Adonis that was slain; / With flesh and blood she chains him for a chain; /…Cry, for her lips divide him vein by vein.” (133-6). One love-sick “knight” identifies with the Classical other, a pose of victimization negating culpability for their willed “conversion”; euphoria, epithalamia are conspicuously wanting.16 Interestingly, Swinburne adds a fictitious epigraph to the poem to stress Venus’s temporal-spatial appeal, beyond the purely aesthetic. Hence, the three eras of Medieval, Renaissance and Victorian are interlocked through their speakers’ pseudo-historic testimonies of the perpetuated goddess myth.17 Swinburne identified strongly with the aristocratic Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), himself the author of a Tannhäuser essay in defence of Wagner’s maligned opera. He composed the Catullian “Ave Atque Vale” (1867) in response to an erroneous report of the Symbolist’s death, portraying Baudelaire as Venus’s subsequent prey after Tannhäuser (who survives his account). Like “Laus Veneris” the vampire image both underlines the Medieval Venus as a fallen divinity sidelined by Christianity, and also demythologizes the archetype of divine love and beauty. Here within this fine elegy is a lesser Venus, a pastiche of Homer’s laughter-lover, her rule defunct while Christ reigns: “That 16 The painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones (1833-98), to whom Poems and Ballads: First Series was dedicated, incorporates in “Laus Veneris” (1870), one of his four Venus paintings, elements from Swinburne’s verse: the Hörsel, love songs, knights, a crowded tapestry of still-life figures, all reflecting his artistic philosophy of anti-realism. 17 The epigraph cites a Livre des grandes merveilles d’amour, escript en latin et en françoys par Maistre Antoine Gaget (1530) as spurious chapter and verse for the Venusberg legend: “Hélas trop malheureux homme et mauldict pescheur, oncques ne verrai-je clémence et miséricorde de Dieu. Ores m’en irai-je d’icy et me cacherai dedans le mont Horsel, en requérant de faveur et d’amoureuse merci ma doulce dame Vénus, car pour son amour serai-je bien à tout jamais damné en enfer.” For both poem and epigraph, see Swinburne’s Complete Works, 1: 10-26.

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obscure Venus of the hollow hill, / That thing transformed which was the Cytherean, / With lips that lost their Grecian laugh divine /…A ghost, a bitter and luxurious god” (157-61). Swinburne’s ongoing preoccupation with morbidity complements Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), yet is convoluted on the timelessness and mutability of the goddess. Aphrodite assumes an underhand yet empowering role in the spirited Atalanta in Calydon (1865), a highly acclaimed tragic drama of Aeschylean fatalism which brought Swinburne condemnation for its humanistic-cum-aetheistic spirit of revolt against a vindictive deity that “Smites without sword and scourges without rod” (1150), an intransigent god as decidedly Biblical as Olympian. Swinburne called it “pure Greek”; John Ruskin defined it (in January 1866) as “the grandest thing ever done by a youth—though he is a demoniac youth.”18 In her copy of the drama the devout Christina Rossetti erased the lines “The supreme evil, God. / Yea, with thine hate, O God, thou hast covered us” (1151-52). Her good friend Swinburne called her “spiritually infected” with “the criminal lunacy of theolatry”, his term for those intellectual absurdities he associated with Christian piety.19 In the famed mythical episode Meleager slaughters the Calydonian boar and presents the prized head to his beloved Atalanta. This act enrages his fellow warriors and uncles who die in the ensuing bloodshed; passion will wipe out Meleager too. The reproving Chorus laments “A perilous goddess”, a product of bad breeding: “For bitter thou wast from thy birth, / Aphrodite, a mother of strife” (766-7). The naissance at Paphos—“a world’s delight”—is marred by her meddling with Meleager’s heart: “For an evil blossom was born / Of sea-foam and the frothing of blood, /…the seed of it laughter and tears” (741, 729-32). At a Balliol College dinner in the 1870s Swinburne spoke of these contentious poems of the first volume, which a scandalised public had taken strong issue with, forcing the eminent publisher Moxon to withdraw them after a few weeks. To be fair Robert Browning, then an Honorary Fellow at Balliol, weighed them up as “moral mistakes redeemed by much intellectual ability.”20 Students paraded through Oxford chanting “Dolores” (“Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows,” 1866), a poem defined by Swinburne as autobiographical. Indeed, the 400-odd lines present an iconoclastic view of the sorrowful Virgin, constant emblem of chaste 18

John Ruskin (mentor to Burne-Jones and upholder of moral realism), quoted in Thomas, Swinburne: The Poet in his World, 86. Swinburne relished the emotional liberties of the Greek tradition, in contrast to Arnold’s classical reverence. 19 Wilson, God’s Funeral, 205. 20 Quoted in Thomas, Swinburne, 103.

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repose with seven swords through her heart.21 Sidestepping theology, he dismantles Catholic iconography to pagan purpose, as with the same downcast Virgin in “Hymn to Proserpine”. In effect, the poet casts aside God-given agape in favour of goddess-style erotas. More personally, scorned by his cousin Mary Gordon, this votary indulges in latter-day fleshly Venuses at a “house of unquenchable fire” (23), the Verbena Lodge brothel in St. John’s Wood. Self-conscious mythological role play characterises such libertarian escapades as a frenetic over-reaction to perceived religious tyranny: “I have passed from the outermost portal / To the shrine where a sin is a prayer; / What care though the service be mortal?” (129-31). This reiterates a rebellious motif of the whole volume, a sado-masochistic plea for deliverance from the strictures of Christianity: “What ailed us, O gods, to desert you / For creeds that refuse and restrain? / Come down and redeem us from virtue, / Our Lady of Pain.” (277-80). The perverse substitute for the Virgin is foregrounded in a fervent religiosity surpassing mere whoredom: “She is the darker Venus, fed with burnt-offering and blood-sacrifice…the daughter of lust and death…Our Lady of Pain, antagonist alike of trivial sins and virtues: no Virgin, and unblessed of men; no mother of the Gods or God.”22 Swinburne was not alone in his darkly sensual treatment of Venus. He met D. G. Rossetti when the latter was painting Arthurian frescoes at Oxford but “Little Carrots,” as Rossetti dubbed the flame-haired manikin, was more vehement against Christian morality. Rossetti’s harmony of the classical and medieval in “Venus Verticordia” (1866) and “Astarte Syriaca” (1877) demonstrate a pronounced eroticism of verses endorsed by sensuous paintings.23 The latter echoes in its compound title Venus’s Eastern origins as an object of sacred but profane love. The former’s Latinate title creates ambivalence since “Verticordia,” coyly musing in 21

Similarly, “The Triumph of Time” (Poems and Ballads: First Series) uses religious terminology—prayer, heaven, repentance, Eucharistic languageʊto colour the speaker’s dejection over his unfaithful mistress. He puts himself in the place of the Virgin with seven swords in her heart, from witnessing the Crucifixion: “Though the swords in my heart for one were seven” (253). 22 Notes on Poems and Reviews, 1866 (repr. in the Complete Works, 6: 353-73), where Swinburne seeks to vindicate his poems as art for art’s sake, and defends his excessive interest in sex and morbidity. Baudelaire’s essay defending Wagner partly informs Swinburne’s view of this sadistic lady. She is supposedly the child of Priapus (deformed son of Venus by Bacchus) and of Libitana, Rome’s funerary goddess, though also called Venus and Proserpine. 23 Relevant here is the Scottish author Robert Buchanan’s denunciation in the Contemporary Review (1871) of Swinburne, Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites as “the fleshly school of poetry,” on account of their wearying, lascivious sensuality.

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reflective gaze, signifies Venus’s ability to render women chaste. Rossetti had removed the qualifying surname (yet another prompt of this multifaceted myth) but restored it in 1881. In this aspect, at least, Rossetti reflects demure Victorian stereotypes of feminine refinement. One might question to what extent Rossetti’s sonnets to Aphrodite simulate visual art or extend beyond mere artifice. However, Swinburne’s treatment of Aphrodite also allows him to explore his professed doctrine “art for art’s sake” in correlation with the senses. Generally regarded as “England’s preeminently musical poet”, he resembles Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) in viewing music “as the proper analogue for pure poetry.”24 For the Symbolist Mallarmé language, the artistic self and the world are disconnected semantically, but they evoke multiple correspondences. Reference to Aphrodite in his sonnet “My Books” (1887) is quite undramatic in contrast to Swinburne’s energy: “My old tomes closed upon the name Paphos, /…a ruin, blessed with myriad ocean sprays /…of its triumphal days” (1, 4). The lines uphold PaleoPaphos as a metaphoric destination vanquishing detritus. A nostalgic poet-speaker shuts his books on myth yet, disgruntled with the unreceptive modern world, yearns for a distant temple landscape. The French text is self-instructive with “Paphos” and “triumphaux” (1, 4) aligned in rhyme to defy syntactic regularity, and thus affirm the inherent open-endedness in Aphrodite worship. In fact, Mallarmé’s earlier essay The Ancient Gods (1880) traces Aphrodite’s Hindu and Syrian origins in terms of aurora in the east, the rising of beauty, but also talks of the sea birth and Adonis. Paradoxically, he singles out her most sensual titles as “Urania,” patroness of chaste love, and “Pandemos” of vulgar sexuality.25 Of more direct interest is the remarkable poem “A Faun’s Afternoon” (1876), a hazy, solipsistic recollection of the morning. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book I) Mercury tells how the beautiful wood nymph Syrinx scorned Pan’s legendary lustiness and was transformed into a clump of marsh reeds. The faun’s melancholy of loss creates audible beauty, “the sweetness of the music.”26 In retelling Ovidian myth the demigod narrator lacks his father’s self-assurance. (Incidentally, Nijinsky, in his 1912 Parisian choreography of Bakst’s ballet, claimed that Mallarmé’s and Debussy’s fauns were insipid; he danced the faun with primitive lust, causing outbursts of controversy.) The sacred, namely 24

McGann, Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism, 59. For the sonnet, see Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, 81; for the essay, see Stéphane Mallarmé, “L’Aphrodite Grecque et La Vénus Latine” in Les Dieux Antiques, in Collected Works (Œuvres complètes), 1198-1200. 26 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 47-8. 25

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Venus, is evoked in afternoon reverie when timid Pan reviews the morning’s events: his voyeurism of bathing deities, and abduction of two nymphs who then elude him. Can one love a simulacrum, a fleeting dream? Apparently so, in vacuous words and deeds when Pan, conjuring up Venus’ seductive love girdle, boasts of male rapacity: “I’ll speak perpetually / of goddesses; I’ll lift more of the drapery / up from their shadows with idolatrous displays” (54-6). Momentarily, the faun fancies Venus in his clutches but too late; this is a unilateral, intuitive vision from a mal-functioner in a bucolic world. The disordered spaces speak volumes as elliptical silences: I’ve seized the queen! The punishment is certain… No, but the soul void of words and heavy body slowly fall before noon’s haughty calm. No more ado; must sleep now, must forget the blasphemy and blame… (104-7)

For Mallarmé, then, Aphrodite is an elusive quality but the “purple, freshly ripe” (95) pomegranate allegorizes erupting Mount Etna, both of them hearts on fire. This lush Sicilian locale rekindles nuances of the goddess’s wealthy temple Eryx, and also idyllic tributes to her by the Syracusan Theocritus (third century BC) who enjoyed revived popularity in the Victorian period. Venus’s own nocturnal visits across “laval ground” (102) to Vulcan’s forges under Etna inspire an extended analogy. This ingenious artisan, who broke his leg falling from Olympus, became the butt of ridicule for Aphrodite and her lovers. Yeats’s “bandy-legged smith”, like the ineffectual faun, holds but cannot hold on to the queen. The faun, too, in this flight of fantasy, brags of possession in a false triumph. Desire evaporates, since “sad slumbers are sounding and the flame has ceased.” (103) The events of the poem, like the goddess, are equivocal. Edwards argues that the poet brings a definite revision to conventional mythology and classical eclogues where gods are typically separate entities. Definitely, Mallarmé’s Eclogue performs another metamorphosis by rendering Ovid’s tale fluid, less precise; it blurs the real and imagined, the mortal and divine, not as illusion but as deliberate ambiguity, duality.27

27

Alan Edwards in his article “Syrinx and the Music of Language” notes the recurrence of the number two as reinforcing the duality in the poemʊtwo nymphs,

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Possibly, the two nymphs also represent polarization of a single goddess the wanton Paphian (Pandemos) and the demure prude (Urania) hand in glove. This mysterious poem about man’s subliminal desires for a perfect “music” reflects Arthur Symons’s comment that Mallarmé is “one of those who love literature too much to write it except by fragments.”28 Modernism too, following on, became preoccupied with dislocation. However, one modernist poet, the Nobel Laureate George Seferis (1900-71), had a frank engagement with the diachronic application of goddess myth. When Greek Ambassador to the Levant, he first visited Cyprus in 1953, reading Herodotus’s text on the plane from Beirut. Earlier, on a visit to Delphi, he had discerned pagan elements common to Christianity (such as fasting and sexual abstinence before worship): “The ancient forms of worship have not been extinguished altogether. Anachronism? I would rather have that anachronism…until modernized man finds something valid to put in its place.”29 Seferis reconciles both religions in his compositions on Cyprus. In fact, Aphrodite’s sacred island stirred in this Greek poet a peculiar if disruptive fascination, the ruins of antiquity all around him. “There’s a sensuality about this place, it’s drenched in it,” he wrote on his first evening about a topos of enclosed boundaries, strictly contextualized intramurally.30 The myth traditionally embodied Arcadian notions but also unprejudiced cult practices ingrained in public consciousness. Religious prostitution, devoid of licentious stigma, was required once in a lifetime within the temple confines. Herodotus explains the line-up of ostensibly devout role-players: “When a woman has taken her place there, she does not go home before some stranger has thrown money into her lap and has had intercourse with her outside the temple. As he throws the coin, the man has to say ‘In the name of the goddess,’ the silver coin cannot be refused, for that is forbidden by the law, since once thrown it is sacred.”31 Seferis’ title—“In the Goddess’s Name I Summon You…” (1955)— assumes this mystical authority to develop a more complex response to twin-reeded pipe, morning and afternoon, action and recollection, alternating regular and italic type for the lucid and languid moments. 28 Symons, “Studies in Two Literatures,” in Collected Works, 8: 172. 29 Beaton, George Seferis, 387. Beaton points out the significance of Seferis stating elsewhere: “I was born into the Greek Orthodox tradition” (that is, not “faith”). 30 Ibid., 308. 31 Herodotus, Histories, 89-90. Herodotus, in chronicling Near Eastern cultural diversity, asserts Aphrodite’s origins in Ishtar-Astarte (ancient Semitic love goddess), identifying practices common to Phoenicia and Paphos, such as public prostitution.

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temple ritual than the narration in the Histories. In parallel he is defining the Cyprus present in the past, connecting poly- and monotheism over five thousand years, with the goddess myth offering that “something valid” for the modern world. She hovers, unnamed, allusive, when her tangible rites bypass the customary Homeric invocation to divine Love: “Oil on limbs… / as on the chapel’s / oil-press here, / as on the rough pores / of the unturning stone” (1-6).32 The festive Aphrodite is notably absent but symbolism centres upon that black Idol monolith ritually anointed at the temple, since the ancients deemed her compelling beauty unconveyable in human form. Reference to “statuettes offering / small breasts with their fingers” (12-13) recalls the token figurines of the fertility goddess, used profusely as sanctuary or funerary offerings; that is, recurring hallmarks of mythic ritual in Aphrodite’s very own domain. Stanza 2 is a vignette of religious lore in retrospect: “the leaves shuddered / when the stranger stopped / and the silence weighed / between the knees. / The coins fell: / ‘In the goddess’s name I summon you…’” (15-20). The verse raises an alternative cult aspect which Renaissance and Romantic writers, conscious of Botticellian sensuality, never pursued. Religious orthodoxy is endorsed by a human being within contemporary liturgical time: “I spoke in the churchyard / with a crippled man” (26-7). He is an emasculated male, the word “crippled” linking the sexual and lexical. Here is a variation on “Laus Veneris” with its cyclical inference but this is no medieval knight caught between two great religions, merely a rightful inheritor of both. Cyprus is a religious iconic diptych; it is “Kypris” but also the first land to adopt Christianity. The maimed one marks time in the modern precinct. The waiting is not unbridled promiscuity but still an uneasy pilgrimage for someone imperfect. Herodotus notes this of the women in the holy enclosure: “women who are tall and beautiful are soon released, but others who are ugly have to stay a long time. Some have waited three or four years.”33 More specifically, Eastern depictions of myth were often perverse, revealing Adonis, for example, as a sexually ambivalent youth dominated by strong-willed Aphrodite, yet adept enough at female guile with Apollo. In fact, the oldest version of the goddess is the double-sexed Duplex Amathusia /Aphroditus of her Amathus (but not Paphian) temple, in female form and dress, male stature and beard (Venus barbata). This 32

Poems from Logbook III or Cyprus, Where It Was Ordained For Me.… dedicated “To the People of Cyprus, In Memory and Love,” Athens 31 January, 1955; from George Seferis: Complete Poems, 176. 33 Herodotus, Histories, 90.

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androgynous divinity revered by both sexes in cross-dressing had its origins in primordial worship of the unity of creation and was superseded in the fifth century BC by the seductive, Hellenistic goddess. Even so, Catullus (d. 40 BC), the first Roman poet to emulate successfully the Greek writers, appropriated this bisexual “duplex amathusia” in his poem “LXVIII” where “the treacherous goddess of love…scorched me, / when I burnt as much as Sicily’s volcano” (51-3). Catullus, of course, is caught up in troubled liaisons with the youth Juventius and the married “Lesbia” and attributes to both Venerean properties arousing passionate anguish.34 In correlation, Swinburne’s androgynous “Hermaphroditus” (1866) points to the sterility of Aphrodite’s offspring by Mercury who became conjoined with a nymph: “thee that art a thing of barren hours” (42). Either way, Seferis was fascinated with this disquieting cult extreme, especially the anarchy typified in the hermaphroditic physiognomy of the local people, and he exchanged such ideas on the island with writers like Lawrence Durrell. In the poem “Pedlar from Sidon” (1955) ongoing allusions delineate an effete Eastern pedlar in Nicosia’s side streets. This is nothing new; pedlars had been coming to Cyprus since the times of the prophet Isaiah. The boy with “crimson lips” (15) carries surreptitiously (or protectively?) inside his shirt a statuette of mixed resemblance; “a naked youth that glides, / uncertain, on the effeminate couch / between concave Hermes and convex Aphrodite” (25-7). In coveting this emblem of classical Cyprus its bearer, “like a walking god” (13), is equally oblivious of both the Turkish girl and the imposing monuments of conquering civilizations. His duplexity, too, symbolizes Aphrodite’s origins in the East and indeed Durrell ponders whether or not “the extraordinary number of hermaphrodites on Cyprus did not perhaps betoken some forgotten race, bred for the service of Aphrodite’s temple.”35 Seferis, then, explores a sexuality differing from Mallarmé’s feminine duality. His source (in the epigraph) is the Greek Anthology (Book II), in which the epic poet Christodorus of Thebes (fifth century AD) describes the hybrid statue in the Greco-Roman gymnasium of imperial Byzantium. The fusion of eras, of faiths, of cultural crossroads on record here recalls that other peripatetic, the Roman Saul-Paul, peddling Christianity across pagan Cyprus in 47AD but in no “uncertain” terms, an epitome of that self-assertion which accompanies the proselytizers of new faiths. In effect, Seferis reveals the goddess cult as an agency of historical discourse, impacting diachronically on 1950s Cyprus, its people still under 34 35

Catullus, ed. Goold, 180-1. Durrell, Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, 101.

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colonial rule but planning imminent revolt. His perspective is not Swinburnian dichotomy between glorification of the flesh and Christian mortification but a religious practice singularly pagan yet also Christian, and referentially sound against the fragmented present. In seeking to retrieve the past for the sake of the future, Seferis is committed to keeping alive this struggle for national identity. The Cypriot, a crippled Vulcan, is suspended temporarily between passive and active performance when the patient compliance of temple women is re-directed as pre-text to delineate their colonized descendants. Aphrodite, fabled spray-born goddess of dubious origin, is a potent divinity for ancient writers, a buttress for their daily joys and woes, as they encapsulate her genesis in verse. When polytheism as a primeval worldview was later relegated to antiquarian study, Aphrodite was reinvented as an apologue of love and beauty, which Christianity in the tradition of Jerome and Augustine could acknowledge as literature. In this realm, Aphrodite as mythical prototype keeps regenerating herself, whether in postures of excess or submission, of custom or distortion, of sanctity or wantonness. For Victorian poets she is an alternative model of divinity, counteracting the spiritual drift in that newer Christian faith: a timely reminder that the doctrine of “god” and “faith” means different things to different eras. For the modernists she resists classification as a synaesthesia of ambiguous patterns, titles, morphologies working through history, and pre-history, and indeed through language itself. Ultimately, her diffused presence in literary imagination is redolent of an eternal constant in an ever-changing, increasingly secular world, of a theocentricity without end.

Works Cited Beaton, Roderick. George Seferis. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Famous Women (De mulieribus claris), translated by Virginia Brown. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, vol. 2, ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Catullus, ed. with introduction, translation and notes by G. P. Goold. London: Duckworth, 2001. Chew, Samuel C. Swinburne. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1966. Durrell, Lawrence. Bitter Lemons of Cyprus, London: Faber & Faber, 1957.

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Edwards, Alan. “Syrinx and the Music of Language,” in A Faun’s Afternoon, 1998, www.starbank.co.uk/faun/faun6nb.htm, accessed 3 March, 2008. Herodotus. Histories, translated by George Rawlinson. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1996. Homer. The Homeric Hymns, translated by Jules Cashford and Nicholas Richardson. London: Penguin, 2003. —. The Odyssey, translated by Walter Shewring, Oxford University Press: 1980. Housman, A. E. The Confines of Criticism: the Cambridge Inaugural, 1911, delivered by A. E. Housman; complete texts and notes John Carter. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press: 1969. Jennings, Ronald. Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus and the Mediterranean World, 1571-1640. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Kinglake, Alexander. Eothen. Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1992. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Collected Works (Œuvres complètes), ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. —. Collected Poems and Other Verse, translated by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2006. McGann, Jerome J. Swinburne: An Experiment in Criticism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Ovid. Metamorphoses, translated by Mary Innes. London: Penguin, 1955. Sappho. Sappho: Poems and Fragments, translated by Josephine Balmer. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992. Seferis, George. Complete Poems, translated, edited and introduced by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. London: Anvil Press, 1995. Sources for the History of Cyprus, vol. 5, ed. David W. Martin. New York: Greece and Cyprus Research Center, 1998. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Complete Works, vols. 1 and 6, ed. Sir Edmund Gosse and T. J. Wise. London: Heinemann, 1925-7. —. The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1959-62. Symons, Arthur. Collected Works, vol. 8. New York: AMS Press, 1924. Thomas, Donald. Swinburne: The Poet in his World. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979. Wilson, A. N. God’s Funeral. London: John Murray, 1999.

THE CULT OF DIONYSUS IN THE WORK OF W. B. YEATS ELIZABETH MULLER

Whenever confronted with the most elliptic poems or plays by W. B. Yeats, what Helen Vendler calls “Yeats at his most maddening,”1 one generally turns to the major Yeatsian critic F. A. C Wilson and his famous exegesis of Yeats’s plays and poems. However, what I somewhat ambitiously set out to do here is to demonstrate that, in the case of Dionysus, Wilson’s erudite research does not quite manage to give a satisfactory account of Yeats’s constant reference to this elusive God. As the cult of Dionysus bears a strong similarity to Christianity and since the latter religion fares rather badly in Yeats’s estimate, it is generally supposed that both religions are rejected as “inferior” forms of worship. Yeats often quotes the neo-Platonist Proclus on the subject of Christianity: “a fabulous, formless darkness mastering the loveliness of the world.”2 According to Wilson, therefore, any similarity between Dionysus and Christ can but spell out a debased view of the Greek god, but this interpretation deserves to be investigated further. As Wilson aptly shows, Yeats did not fail to grasp the similarities between Christ and Dionysus.3 Both are immortal gods and yet they die; both resurrect and finally ascend to heaven for each has a “Father in heaven,” God and Zeus. More subtle connections, some of them part of esoteric mythology, others devised by Yeats himself, can also be noted: like Christ’s, Dionysus’s birth is associated with the appearance of a new star as well as the protective presence of a virgin. The pagan star is that of the goddess Astraea, or in Yeats’s spelling Astrea; the daughter of Zeus 1

Jeffares and Knowland, A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, 119. 2 Proclus lived in the fourth century AD. The quotation is given by Brian Arkins in Builders of My Soul, 114, and used by Yeats himself in his first and last chorus songs in The Resurrection, The Poems, 259. 3 See the chapter on Calvary in Yeats’s Iconography, 163-203, and the chapter on The King of the Great Clock Tower, in W. B. Yeats and Tradition, 53-94.

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and Themis, she lived on earth during the golden age, but later withdrew in horror, and will return when the golden age is restored. Meanwhile she shines as the constellation Virgo with its star Spica.4 Thus the star of the Magi has a Greek counterpart and, for reasons I shall subsequently explain, Yeats assimilated Astraea to another Virgin, Athena. Finally, the death and resurrection of Dionysus, like that of Christ, occurs just before the full moon in March. For Yeatsian scholars the full moon immediately triggers off a wealth of references to the poet’s esoteric treatise A Vision (1925 and 1937). However, one need only study the lunar calendars of Antiquity to grasp a few essentials. The Greek lunar year actually began in July but March was an important time which started the great Dionysian festival in Athens, traditionally set just before the first full moon in March and preceded by the Anthesteria, the third day of which constituted a sort of Greek Samhain where the dead were allowed to walk abroad and mingle with the living.5 Later, in Roman times, the first full moon in March acquires increasing significance because, in the new calendar established by Romulus, it marks the beginning of the year; hence the fatalistic doom the Romans had grown to associate with the Ides of March.6 In addition, the full moon has special import in the world of Antiquity for people believed it betokened the triumph of some god over the powers of darkness. Herodotus, for instance, ascribes a religious significance to the waxing and the waning of the moon by referring to Egyptian mythology where the moon is regularly eaten by a black pig but resurrects every month at the full moon. For the Egyptians, the black pig eating the moon represents the god Seth and his treacherous murder of his brother Osiris.7 Since Herodotus clearly equates Osiris with Dionysus, the full moon therefore represents the victory of Osiris/Dionysus. As regards their religious messages to the world, both Christ and Dionysus promise liberation but on the condition that their worshippers lose themselves in the process. In Christianity, one must forget oneself in order to become one with God; in the Dionysian cult, one is so to speak lifted out of oneself. In the words of E. R. Dodds, “The aim of [this] cult

4 Harvey, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 54. The story of Astraea is a later Roman myth, and not part of Hesiod’s Cosmogony. 5 Ibid., 176. Other similar cults, like those of Adonis and Attis, had their celebration rites at the same time. 6 The death of Socrates at that particular time preceded the murder of Julius Caesar. 7 Herodotus, Histories, Book II, chap. 47.

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was ecstasies—which…could mean anything from ‘taking you out of yourself’ to a profound alteration of personality.”8 In view of those similarities, it seems natural to assume, as Wilson does in his critical study of Yeats’s plays, that the cult of Dionysus, like Christianity, is, if not rejected totally, at least considered as inferior.9 Thus, in the world of Greek Antiquity, a time of subjective heroism for Yeats, the cult of Dionysus would constitute a sort of regrettable “exception,” prefiguring Christianity. Indeed, in his critique, Wilson draws upon The Resurrection (1927), one of Yeats’s plays about Christianity which seems to substantiate this argument since Yeats by setting the two cults (Dionysiac and Christian) in parallel seems to court such an interpretation. In that play, the three principal characters—a Greek, a Hebrew and a Syrian—speculate about the divinity of Christ who is said to have resurrected and to be nearing their house where the apostles also dwell. Those three characters are rather unconvinced Christians but they are surrounded by two kinds of devotees: firstly, the apostles sitting in a room that cannot be seen by the audience; secondly, a company of orgiastic Dionysian worshippers, also unseen, but described by the indignant Greek who finds the Bacchic rout more and more repellent as it approaches the house. The Dionysian thiasus is composed of men dressed as Bacchantes, wearing masks and given to outrageous behaviour. Thus, a sort of competition between the two gods is staged as the play unfolds: the Greek’s violent vituperation against the thiasus makes us “see” it while the chorus sings of the passion of Dionysus and of Christ alternately. Yeats’s tour de force here is to have an invisible minor cult supersede the major one and vicariously invade the stage. At the acme of the play, it is the awesome, silent figure of Christ who slowly enters upon the stage but he is wearing a mask, one of the traditional attributes of Dionysus, whose simplest representation consisted in a mask tied to a pole or a tree.10 In addition to the obvious similarities between the two cults, Wilson’s interpretation relies upon Yeats’s reading of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where the latter draws a famous distinction between two types of men: the Apollonian who never surrenders his self or his selfmastery; and the Dionysian personality who craves for the ecstasy which will carry him out of himself in a wild orgy of violence. Since Nietzsche 8

Dodds adds that Dionysus’s cognomen was lusios, the liberator, the god who “enables you for a short time to stop being yourself, and thereby sets you free.” The Greeks and the Irrational, 76-7. 9 See note 3. 10 Walter Pater, “A Study of Dionysus,” in Greek Studies, 14.

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definitely sides with the Dionysian, more attuned to the spirit of music (the book was written as a panegyric on Wagner), Yeats is supposed to have used Nietzsche’s theory but to have taken the contrary position. According to Wilson and many other critics, Yeats, in The Resurrection, clearly sides with the Greek who is supposed to represent the author’s viewpoint unconditionally. On the surface, this makes good sense, especially since it more or less corroborates the theories of two other writers who also had a marked influence on Yeats: Walter Pater and Sir James Frazer in The Golden Bough. Walter Pater draws his inspiration from sculpture, unlike Nietzsche who draws his from music, but he too opposes two trends in the world of Greek art. In Greek sculpture, the Dorian (or European) is opposed to the Ionian (or Asiatic) and the former is superior to the latter: the Dorian influence is defined by discipline, self-mastery, the sober perfection of the athlete, whereas the Ionian is decadent, all curves and sensuousness, a dichotomy which Yeats seems to have endorsed in A Vision and indeed elsewhere for he often upholds European Greece against Asiatic Persia. In his poem “The Statues,” the Irish fighting the British are compared to the outnumbered Greeks at Salamis who yet manage to overcome the whole Persian Empire against overwhelming odds; the Persian Empire is referred to as “All Asiatic vague immensities.”11 It is tempting, therefore, to identify the Dorian influence with Nietzsche’s Apollonian principle and the Ionian with his Dionysian.12 In Pater’s estimate, the Dorian trend is exemplified by Homer and Plato, two important authors for Yeats, whereas Hesiod belongs to the second more Asiatic category. Finally, it is necessary to mention Sir James Frazer’s famous book The Golden Bough (first version 1890), which deals with religious practice in Antiquity. Frazer highlights the Asiatic violence which is part of the Dionysian cult: firstly, the cult itself is supposed to have originated in Thrace so that one might indeed argue that it is “non-Greek”; secondly, its early celebration consisted in rather unsavoury, savage rites during which a young boy (the god’s surrogate) was torn to pieces and sometimes eaten by the Maenads as a sacrifice to the Great Goddess, the keeper of the crops, also known as the Great Mother or the Moon Goddess.13 In keeping with the cult’s obvious reference to the cyclic return of the seasons, Frazer relates these rites to the ancient matriarchal religion, later superseded by 11

The Poems, 384. In addition to “A Study of Dionysus,” Greek Studies, 29, one can look up the references to Phidias and Praxiteles in “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone” ibid., 142. 13 In Yeats’s play The Resurrection, the Bacchants tear a young goat to pieces. 12

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the Hellenic patriarchal gods of the sky. In classical Greece, the cult of Dionysus existed in a subdued version. But, at the time of Greek decadence, i.e. Roman rule, the rough barbarity of cults coming from Asia swept over the world of Antiquity and revived the initial savagery of ancient Dionysian worship. The parallel between Cybele, the Asiatic Great Mother who sacrifices her son/lover Attis, and the Greek Great Mother Rhea (wife of Cronos) or Dione (worshipped in Dodona) is thus easily drawn and to it may be added another cult, also from the East and also famous for its bloody rites, that of Adonis, the lover of Aphrodite. Frazer makes a point of asserting that such debased forms of worship could only attract the Romans and that no self-respecting Greek would condone such outrageous practice.14 Hence, the Greek in The Resurrection, the epitome of classical rationale, bitterly denounces the approaching thiasus: “They are Asiatic Greeks, the dregs of the population.”15 In Yeats’s play, the Dionysian cortege bears a strong resemblance to that of the Asiatic Cybele since the so-called Bacchantes are in fact men disguised as women, an allusion to the ritual of self-castration which her priests practised. Thus, it can be argued that Frazer’s book and Walter Pater’s Greek Studies have reinforced Nietzsche’s initial distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian in Yeats’s thought and that all these theories appear to have left their mark upon his work, particularly in The Resurrection where part of the chorus’s last song runs as follows: Odour of blood when Christ was slain Made all Platonic tolerance vain 16 And vain all Doric discipline.

However, Yeats is never in the habit of slavishly imitating the writers he is indebted to and there is no reason to suppose he was influenced by The Birth of Tragedy more than by any other work of Nietzsche’s. Besides, Wilson’s interpretation does not hold when one analyses the whole of Yeats’s corpus and his decided dedication to the Greek god, particularly in his theatrical writing. As Roy Foster contends in The Apprentice Mage, Yeats evolved his theory of the theatre as Dionysian (not Apollonian) three years before he even started to read Nietzsche.17 And, indeed, Yeats independently reasserts his views on the theatre as Dionysian: “I have aimed at tragic ecstasy, and here and there in my own 14

The Golden Bough, 356-7. The Collected Plays, 368. 16 Ibid., 373. 17 Foster, W. B. Yeats, A Life, I. The Apprentice Mage, 213. 15

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work and in the work of my friends I have seen it greatly played.”18 We also know that Yeats wanted to recreate ritualistic plays similar to the mysteries of Eleusis, and Eleusis celebrates the resurrection of Dionysus as the divine Bacchus.19 It is therefore not surprising that figures of Dionysus become more and more obtrusive in Yeats’s theatrical output until at last he writes two mystery plays, The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934) and A Full Moon in March (1935), which are clearly dedicated to the Greek god. In his personal philosophy as well as his poetry, Yeats also proves partial to Dionysus. Indeed the very definition of the Yeatsian hero owes much to Dionysus for the hero is supposed to suffer so that he may conform to his Mask (also called his anti-self), in order to reach “full possession of his arete,”20 heroic virtue. About his conception of the hero, Yeats says: “I thought the hero found, hanging upon some oak of Dodona, an ancient mask.”21 As another Yeatsian critic, Brian Arkins, points out, Yeats’s syncretism leads him to identify his Cabbalistic tree of life with the tree where the mask of Dionysus or Attis hangs.22 Thus, the Attis/Dionysus cult regularly appears in poems like “Vacillation,” with its usual connotation of ecstasy: “My body of a sudden blazed,”23 or like “Her Vision in the Wood” where the persona conjures up a vision of fire and music in the midst of a dark solitary wood: “But the dark changed to red, and torches shone, / And deafening music shook the leaves.”24 In this preternatural setting, the woman catches glimpses of a cortege of dishevelled women lamenting over the torn body of a young man who could be either Dionysus or Adonis. In view of all these facts it seems difficult to maintain that Yeats fullheartedly embraces Nietzsche’s Apollonian principle. But, before I proceed in my disputation of Wilson’s argument, it might be interesting to have a look at the way classical Greece transformed the gruesome 18

Explorations, 415. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 283. 20 John Rees Moore about Cuchulain, in Jeffares and Knowland, A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, 94. 21 “Per Amica Silentia Lunae” in Mythologies, 335. Before becoming Zeus’s most ancient shrine, Dodona was dedicated to Mother Dione, another version of the Great Goddess. For Dione, see Graves, Greek Myths, 1: 50 (myth 11, paragraph 2) and 1: 180-1 (myth 51, paragraph 1). 22 Builders of My Soul, 110. For the cult of Attis, see Graves, Greek Myths, 1: 263 (myth 79, paragraph 1); also Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 362. 23 The Poems, 301. 24 Ibid., 325. 19

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matriarchal sacrifice of the yearly king of the crops. In the Olympian version of the story, Dionysus is the illegitimate offspring of Zeus by a mortal Theban princess, Semele, and therefore subjected to the wrath of Hera (the usual story). Hera duly curses him with a raving madness that sends him roaming throughout the world, even as far as India, accompanied by his faithful Maenads, originally nymphs, but now also crazed, until Rhea, the mother of all the immortals, restores his sanity and forces Hera to accept him as one of the major gods.25 Interestingly, Dionysus keeps his close connection with the Great Mother but, unlike the Asiatic Cybele or the ancient Moon Goddess, Rhea is a benevolent figure who tempers the vindictiveness of Hera. On the other hand, the god’s characteristics remain far removed from our traditional vision of Apollo, since Dionysian inspiration comes through madness, and a breaking down of boundaries symbolized by his constant intoxication, laughter, and wild dancing. As Paul Woodruff notes in his introduction to Euripides’s Bacchae, Dionysus is a god who has a gift for combining opposites...he does not merely cross boundaries, he blurs and confounds them, makes nonsense of the lines between female 26 and male, between powerful and weak, between savage and civilized.

This bears a strong resemblance to what Yeats himself contends about tragedy: Tragic art, passionate art, the drowner of dykes, the confounder of understanding, moves us by setting us to reverie, by alluring us almost to the intensity of trance. 27

This quotation also goes a long way towards explaining why Yeats in his work develops this special rapport with madness, as the prevalent figure of the Fool which haunts his production bears witness. The Fool in Yeats’s work represents alternately the hero or the poet or both, and Yeats strongly identifies with this symbolic figure. Conversely, Yeats’s so called wise men are often foolish, or malicious, or self-seeking. When, in the play The Hour-Glass (1907), the Wise Man vents his opposition to the Fool and the latter’s belief in the Other World, he does so in unmistakably Dionysian terms:

25

See Graves, Greek Myths, 1: 103-11 (myth 27, passim). Bacchae, xli. 27 Essays and Introductions, 285. 26

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A moment more and Frenzy will beat his drum And laugh aloud and scream; 28 And I must dance in the dream.

So far I think I have proved my point that, whatever Yeats may think of Christianity, he does not reject the worship of Dionysus since the god has, so to speak, invaded his work; but I have not really explained why Yeats, unlike Nietzsche, cannot possibly oppose Dionysus to Apollo. The answer lies in Yeats’s affiliation to the Rosicrucian movement which resorted to another esoteric interpretation of the Dionysus myth in keeping with the teachings of the Chaldean Oracles as well as Orphic beliefs concerning the Mysteries of Eleusis. I realize this is the place where critics fear to go, but one has to follow one’s author. The esoteric version of the Dionysus myth is linked to the Cretan tradition in which the god’s name becomes Dionysus Zagreus.29 In the Cretan story, Dionysus is the son of Zeus and some other goddess (either Demeter or Persephone); therefore he is immortal and not merely half divine, which is of paramount importance, as will be seen. Owing to the endless strife between the gods and their predecessors, the Titans, the latter decide to wreak their revenge by luring young Dionysus away from Olympus. Having done so, they kill him and eat his flesh. As soon as the irate Zeus hears about this, he storms down upon the Titans and strikes them with his lightning bolt while Athena steals away the young god’s heart.30 This heart is placed in a gypsum statue, and, in due time, life is breathed back into it so that, owing to the Virgin Athena’s intervention, young Dionysus can be resurrected.31 In The Resurrection, Yeats states his

28

The Collected Plays, 198. From the outset, one can dispute the assumption that Dionysus is “non-Greek” for his name appears in the Linear B, the first fragment in Greek writing dating as far back as Mycenaean times. His cult is also extremely widespread in Crete and the close link between Crete and the Mycenaean kings is well-known. For the story of the Zagreus myth, see Graves, Greek Myths, 1: 118-20 (myth 30, passim). 30 Incidentally, the remaining ashes of the Titans’ bodies will become the stuff mortals are made of. And this lies at the origin of our human predicament: our bodies are earthly because they come from the Titans, but the Titans had just partaken of the divine flesh of the god before they were annihilated and this explains our divine spark, the soul. See Harvey, The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, 148. 31 That Yeats knew about this tradition is attested by his own notes to Autobiographies where he cites a father of the Church, Firmicus Maternus: “The Cretan Jupiter ‘made an image of his son in gypsum and placed the boy’s heart…in 29

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preference for the Zagreus version of the myth, as the first chorus song in the play illustrates: I saw a staring virgin stand Where holy Dionysus died, And tear the heart out of his side, And lay the heart upon her hand 32 And bear that beating heart away.

Similarly, the story of the young child Dionysus being lured away and devoured by the Titans is recounted later in the play where we note that the god is associated with the Virgin Astraea, the alter ego of Athena: Astrea’s holy child! A rattle in the wood Where a Titan strode! His rattle drew the child Into that solitude.33

At the end of The Resurrection, the figure of Christ not only emerges wearing a mask but stands as a statue whose heart is beating, a clear allusion to the gypsum statue where the heart of Dionysus Zagreus is laid. The Greek in the play is unequal to this confrontation with the uncanny miracle; his rational reaction in front of such “heart mysteries”34 closely resembles the Wise Man’s in The Hour-Glass, a character whose position Yeats does not propose to vindicate. And, even if Wilson is probably correct in assuming that Yeats voices his rejection of the debauched Dionysian cult practised during Roman times through his main character, this does not necessarily entail that the poet endorses all of the Greek’s supposedly “Apollonian” assertions throughout the play. Finally, Yeats blends the two rival cults, not because he wants to equate them but because he usually describes a new religious dispensation in terms of the preceding one; this favourite device of his is also illustrated by “The Second Coming.” The esoteric interpretation of the myth clarifies two important issues: firstly, the link between Dionysus and Persephone in the mysteries of Eleusis; secondly Dionysus’s ambiguous relationship with Apollo, another that part of the figure where the curve of the chest was to be seen.’” Autobiographies, 578. 32 The Collected Plays, 364. 33 Ibid., 368. 34 “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” The Poems, 394.

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god of art and prophecy. Persephone can be Dionysus’s sister or, as already stated, his mother,35 while for Rosicrucians Dionysus is Persephone’s celestial bridegroom who, once a year, helps her arise out of Hades and return to eternal light.36 Thus, the final ceremony in the Mysteries of Eleusis was a procession from Athens to the cry of “Iacchus, Iacchus.”37 Indeed, regardless of their rather flexible family ties, Dionysus and Persephone are bound by the same unfortunate experience: they are two immortal gods who fall into Hades. If Dionysus is lured by the Titans, Persephone is fatally attracted to a beautiful narcissus flower, also a lure, this time devised by Hades himself.38 Both Persephone and Dionysus have plunged into the abyss that the ancient Chaldean oracle warns us against: “Stoop not down to the darkly splendid world wherein lieth continually a faithless depth and Hades wrapped in cloud, delighting in unintelligible images.”39 It is now time to examine Yeats’s two miracle plays, A Full Moon in March and The King of the Great Clock Tower. The heroes of both plays are wanderers and half-demented (a state bordering on inspiration, as we know); both are beheaded on the authority of a cruel Queen who yet dances with the dead head and kisses the dead lips. One may of course think of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. But the archetype is obviously Euripides’s play about Dionysus, The Bacchae. In The Bacchae, which was one of Yeats’s favourite plays and whose opening chorus he quotes as an epigraph to one of his short stories, “Rosa Alchemica,” the antagonist of the god, young king Pentheus, suffers the same fate as Dionysus Zagreus as he is torn to pieces with the additional horror that his own mother, 35

Graves, Greek Myths, 1: 53 (myth 13, a) and 1: 56 (myth 14, b). Schuré, Les Grands Initiés, 302-3. 37 See note 19. Walter Pater in “A Study of Dionysus”, (Greek Studies, 39-40), stresses that both Persephone and Dionysus were worshipped at Eleusis. Pater calls Dionysus a Doppelgänger like Persephone. He also asserts that both descend and ascend from the earth, remain long in Hades, but come out again every springtime. “The Myth of Demeter and Persephone” in Greek Studies, 130. 38 “Hymn to Demeter”, in Homeric Hymns, 5-14. According to the Rosicrucian tradition, young Dionysus falls from Olympus when he falls in love with the reflection of his own image in the skies, holds out his arms to it, and finds himself within reach of the Titans who kill him. Thus the story of his initial fall is the archetype of Narcissus, longing for his own reflection. See Schuré, Les Grands Initiés, 284. This is consistent with Frazer’s account of an ancient taboo, namely that it was thought unlucky to look at one’s reflection in the water because one might lose one’s soul and die. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 192. 39 Autobiographies, 255. Also Explorations, 57. The oracle itself is the Chaldean oracle 167. 36

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Queen Agave, blinded by madness, is responsible for the deed. Obviously, Pentheus, who is punished here because he has opposed his cousin, the god, has become the surrogate of Dionysus just as his mother can be seen as the surrogate of the Moon Goddess, as she comes on stage dancing with the head of her son. Although Euripides’s main source is the Olympian version, traces of the blood-thirsty cult of the Moon Goddess still linger. Like the Queen in A Full Moon in March, the Theban Agave could sing: “Child and darling, hear my song / Never cry I did you wrong.”40 Indeed, all sorts of famous figures of mythology—Attis, Adonis, and Pentheus, who are all boy-heroes torn to shreds like Dionysus—literally haunt both Greek literature and Yeats’s writing. In A Full Moon in March, Yeats’s Queen is clearly linked to the esoteric version and she represents the immortal goddess, Persephone, before her fall. Her seemingly unlikely suitor, the Swineherd, lends himself to this interpretation, for a swineherd plays an important part in the story of Demeter and Persephone. The swineherd Eubuleus, who is in fact the son of a king and a soothsayer, sees Persephone disappear in a crack of the earth and helps Demeter in recovering her lost daughter.41 Obviously, we are in a magic world where things are not what they seem, and Yeats, with his usual syncretism in such matters accentuates this magic potential for transformation by turning Dionysus and the Swineherd into one person. Great emphasis is laid on the Swineherd’s wanderings, madness and loss of memory and the song of his severed head alludes to the Zagreus myth although in a rather irreverent manner: “Jack had a hollow heart, for Jill / Had hung his heart on high / The moon shone brightly.”42 In A Full Moon in March, Yeats describes the initial process, inherent to all creation, the desire of the godhead for incarnation. This desire is responsible for Queen Persephone descending into the world below and this is why the goddess must come down from her pedestal and yield to the brute desire of the Swineherd. At the end of the play, what has been achieved is the loss of virginity, “desecration and the lovers’ night.”43 The Queen, who is associated with the moon, has had to abandon her lofty

40

The Collected Plays, 395. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 469. The benevolent swineherd is a recurring theme in Greek tradition, as may be seen in the Odyssey, where Eumaios helps Odysseus. Both their names start with the prefix eu, good in Greek. Moreover, being a swineherd in early European myth means being a soothsayer or a magician, according to Graves. Greek Myths, 1: 94 (myth 24, paragraph 7). 42 The Collected Plays, 395. 43 Ibid., 396. 41

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status to mingle with “the dust and mire.”44 As to our Dionysus figure he represents the ritual dismembering of the divinity which is a reflection of the primordial sacrifice which God, the One, consents to in order to become two, the Sacred Dyad from which the triad and then the rest of creation stem. Certainly the kiss, a celebrated symbol in fairy tales and mythology, is the kiss of life or incarnation. In the esoteric version of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the celestial Dionysus kisses Persephone to bring her back to eternal life but in Yeats’s play the opposite process is accomplished and the Queen’s kiss sets the created world into motion. But if Yeats’s two plays reassert the connection between Dionysus and Persephone, they also establish a link between Apollo and Dionysus by focusing more particularly on artistic creation. Thus, the severed head in both A Full Moon in March and The King of the Great Clock Tower sings, a detail which owes nothing to Wilde but a great deal to Greek mythology. In my list of ritually dismembered boys, one important icon is missing: the poet Orpheus, whose severed head drifts until it is carried into the sea but continues to sing. In The King of the Great Clock Tower, a more romantic version of A Full Moon in March, the potential victim of the Queen is a Stroller who comes to woo her before the whole court. The Stroller rather brazenly announces his intention to the king, but he quite clearly possesses the creative logos of the poet:45 A year ago I heard a brawler say That you had married with a woman called Most beautiful of her sex. I am a poet. From that day out I put her in my songs, And day by day she grew more beautiful.46

Assimilating Orpheus to Dionysus deserves some explanation since on the surface Orpheus is a priest of Apollo, fittingly torn to shreds by Maenads whose cult he has supposedly ignored.47 And yet many writers of Antiquity, Herodotus among them, seem to identify him as a priest of Dionysus as well. Apart from the fact that Orpheus suffers the same fate as Dionysus/Pentheus, his singing head after drifting to Lesbos is buried at 44

Idem. Wilson notes this in W. B. Yeatsand Tradition, 72. 46 The Collected Plays, 399. 47 The following about Orpheus’s life can be found in Graves, Greek Myths, 1: 111-15 (myth 28, passim). Orpheus comes from Egypt to initiate a cult to Osiris. Certain traditions relate this to Apollo, others to Dionysus, others again to Dionysus Zagreus. 45

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Antissa in a cave which is sacred to Dionysus while his lyre (originally a gift from Apollo), ends up in Apollo’s temple in Lesbos.48 Orpheus thus seems closely related to both Apollo and his lunar brother, Dionysus. In the esoteric tradition, Orpheus’s head in Dionysus’s sanctuary is prophetic and represents intuition, whereas his lyre in Apollo’s sanctuary betokens a more accessible art. And the reason why Orpheus is devoted to both gods according to ancient as well as Rosicrucian interpretation is that both Apollo and Dionysus are really but two aspects of the same god. This may help to explain why the Stroller in this play strikes a Dionysian keynote with his wandering and apparent insanity, and seems to represent Orpheus at the same time. If we accept the esoteric assumption that Dionysus is the celestial Apollo, these significant details fit better into the general picture, for then we have to assume that Orpheus is the initiator of Dionysus’s cult as well as Apollo’s, and such is the widely accepted account of him throughout Antiquity. Indeed, that Dionysus and Apollo, representing respectively folly and wisdom, seem mysteriously linked is attested by numerous details about Delphi, the most important being Apollo’s demand that Dionysus’s remains be buried there in the Zagreus myth.49 Since both Apollo and Dionysus are connected with inspiration and prophecy, the Rosicrucian interpretation is that the two gods instead of opposing complement each other.50 Dionysus is but the hidden, dark face of his brother Apollo and their joint rule embodies the union of the lunar and the solar principles, silver and gold, Moon and Sun; one rules in heaven and is hidden from view, the other remains in Delphi and delivers oracles which are open to all.51 The gold and silver symbolism can also be found above the solar 48

Later to be transformed into a constellation. The ceremony where his mother Semele of the Olympian myth is supposed to ascend to heaven is also situated in Delphi. See Graves, Greek Myths, 1: 109 and 110-11 (myth 27, paragraphs 5 and 9-11), and also Pater, “A Study of Dionysus, in Greek Studies, 13. In Euripides’s Ion, which is set in Delphi and centres upon the fathering of the Athenians by Apollo through Ion, many allusions to Dionysus are made: apparently Bacchanals take place in Delphi and the chorus sings an invocation to Bacchus twice. Ion, 714-8, 1074-6. 50 One might also add that, if we accept Herodotus’s theory, according to which Apollo is Horus and Dionysus Osiris, the former god is the reincarnation of the other. Herodotus also testifies to a strange correspondence between the cult of Dionysus in Thrace and that of Apollo at Delphi. Histories, Book V, Chap. 7. 51 Schuré, Les Grands Initiés, 288. Most traditions assert that Dionysus is Apollo’s counterpart: one can look for confirmation in Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris (28 and 35). This is the explanation for the gods’ so-called quarrel over the supremacy of the tripod, and Yeats could not possibly ignore it, since Walter Pater insists on the 49

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bark in Egyptian friezes, the reunion between sun and moon symbolizing a return to primeval unity. This even throws some light on the name Yeats chose for himself in his Golden Dawn initiation: “Demon Est Deus Inversus,”52 for Yeats likes to work his way towards unity via contraries. Thus, wisdom and folly, darkness and light, Apollo and Dionysus are, like the Wise Man and the Fool, two sides of the same coin. Without taking the myth of Dionysus Zagreus into consideration, the identification between Apollo and Dionysus could not be fully understood, nor could we quite grasp Yeats’s subtle interweaving of various myths in his work. The poem “Parnell’s Funeral” is a perfect example of Yeats’s dexterity in blending several myths to which he also adds his own personal vision. One of his most famous visionary experiences occurred in 1896 and is variously described throughout his work. One night, Yeats saw a beautiful woman, obviously a goddess, shooting at a star.53 At the beginning of “Parnell’s Funeral,” we are immediately given to understand that the star which is shot represents Parnell/Dionysus: “…a brighter star shoots down…What is this sacrifice? Can someone there / Recall the Cretan barb that pierced a star?”54 References to Parnell as a star shot down by a “Cretan barb” first point to the more barbaric cult of Dionysus killed by the Moon Goddess who was much honoured in Crete and whose worship is opposed to that of the chaste Astraea and her star Spica. The second stanza bears out this first interpretation for Dionysus is also a tree god, hence his mask hanging from the branches: Rich foliage that the starlight glittered through, A frenzied crowd, and where the branches sprang A beautiful seated boy; a sacred bow; A woman, and an arrow on a string; A pierced boy, image of a star laid low. That woman, the Great Mother imaging, Cut out his heart.55

fact that Dionysus rules in Delphi during the four winter months, and generally asserts a strong connection between the two gods. “A Study of Dionysus, in Greek Studies, 38-9. 52 Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 99. 53 Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 409. The vision is recounted in Autobiographies, 372-5, but also in Mythologies, 340; it is alluded to in “The Phases of the Moon, The Poems, 216. 54 The Poems, 329. 55 Idem. As Kathleen Raine notes in Yeats the Initiate, 229, the goddess who brings about the death of Dionysus is in fact Hera, not Athena who preserves him.

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Thus, on a first level, Parnell is both the star and the young boy laid low by the Great Mother, and, in the third stanza, Parnell’s heart is devoured by the Irish whom Yeats accuses bitterly since they are responsible for his downfall: Hysterica Passio dragged this quarry down. None shared our guilt; nor did we play a part 56 Upon a painted stage when we devoured his heart.

This also refers to the more barbaric cult of Dionysus since it represents an act of sympathetic magic: the future leaders of Ireland might have attempted to eat Parnell’s heart in order to become imbued with some of his qualities and Parnell’s death would thus have inaugurated a new era for Ireland. Unfortunately, such was not the case, and “the bright new age miscarries and fails to be heroic.”57 Thus the cruel ritual sacrifice has been performed in vain and this failure highlights the useless tragedy of Parnell’s fate. But Yeats once more mixes his mythologies and blends the image of the cruel Great Goddess with the more benevolent figure of Athena. Indeed, on a second level, the star falling from the sky is a well-known symbol for an accepted sacrifice and the usual import of such an event in Antiquity is that a divine hero has died and is accepted among the gods. Strangely enough, Maud Gonne, who was present at Parnell’s funeral, recorded such a sign as well as other bystanders. Since the goddess, the heart and the star directly point to the Zagreus version as well as to Athena as a rescuer, we may assume that Athena failing to save Parnell’s life in Yeats’s poem has at least conferred immortality upon him. This is warranted by the beautiful boy who is not only a sacrificed victim, but, on the esoteric plane, a symbol of the rejuvenated soul, also called a Bacchus.58 His description as one of the possible fiery manifestations of the divine is given in the Chaldean Oracles: “…a boy fiery, or clothed with gold…”59 So we can assume that Parnell’s unavailing sacrifice on earth has enabled him to reach undying fame as well as a transcending state through the agency of Athena. As in the Zagreus myth, the goddess has “cut out his heart” but for the sake of immortality, which explains the 56

The Poems, 329. Albright in The Poems, 751. 58 Wilson, Yeats and Tradition, 201. 59 Taylor, Oracles and Mysteries, 45. This apparition of the fiery boy was common in Greek magical practice, as Dodds points out in The Greeks and the Irrational, 298. 57

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claims that Athena/Rhea is only “imaging” the Great Mother and that she sends a “Cretan barb,” both allusions to the Cretan version of the story in which the goddess is benevolent. In this intricate reading of several variants of the same myth, the goddess of the poem can be identified with Hera/the Great Goddess as well as Athena/Rhea. In her first capacity she is destructive and Yeats has her replace the Titans of the esoteric myth, whilst in her second capacity she comes as Athena/Rhea, the rescuer. As is the case with Dionysus, Athena brings Parnell back to life on Olympus. In the words of Daniel Albright, “The meteor witnessed at Parnell’s funeral became, then, a sign that Parnell was himself a kind of god.”60 Yeats, therefore, has used his masterful command of mythology to compose a richly-textured, multi-layered poem in order to pay a bitter tribute to his hero. To conclude, it seems that Yeats whose predominant theme is the merging of contraries to reach completeness cannot really fall into step with Nietzsche’s dichotomy. One could even go so far as to say that Yeats’s own Platonic streak reinforces the argument against any form of discrimination between Dionysus and Apollo. In Plato’s otherwise very stern Laws, the philosopher invokes the agency of both Apollo and Dionysus in order to relieve the sad fate of man: “In their pity for us, the gods have granted us companions and leaders of our choirs in Apollo and the Muses, to whom, you may remember, we added Dionysus as a third.”61 In the Phaedrus, Plato had already written a eulogy of madness which he divides into four kinds, each pertaining to one of his favourite gods: Eros, the Muses, Apollo and Dionysus. A somewhat surprising definition of the true poet as a madman follows: But if any man come to the gates of poetry without the madness of the Muses, persuaded that skill alone will make him a good poet, then shall he and his works of sanity with him be brought to nought by the poetry of madness, and behold, their place is nowhere to be found. 62

This definition of art as god-inspired madness is echoed by Yeats’s very Dionysian statement which I shall give here to conclude my study: All art is dream, and what the day is done with is dreaming ripe, and what art has moulded religion accepts, and in the end all is in the wine cup, all is

60

The Poems, 752. Laws, 665, a, translated by A. E. Taylor, in The Collected Dialogues, 1261. 62 Essays and Introductions, 285. 61

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Works Cited 1. Works by W. B. Yeats Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1955. The Collected Plays. New York: Macmillan, 1953. Essays and Introductions. London: Macmillan, 1961. Explorations. London: Macmillan, 1962. Mythologies. London: Macmillan, 1959. The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright, updated edition. London: Everyman, 1994.

2. Biographies Ellmann, Richard. Yeats: The Man and the Masks, 1948, rev.1979; reprint, London: Penguin Books, 1987. Foster, R. F. W. B. Yeats, A Life, I. The Apprentice Mage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

3. Criticism on Yeats Arkins, Brian. Builders of My Soul: Greek and Roman Themes in Yeats. Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble Books, 1990. Jeffares, Norman A. and A. S. Knowland, A Commentary on the Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1975. Jeffares, Norman A. A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan, 1968. Raine, Kathleen. Yeats the Initiate: Essays on Certain Themes in the Work of W. B. Yeats. Savage, MD: Barnes and Noble Books, 1990. Wilson, F. A. C. W. B. Yeats and Tradition. New York: Macmillan, 1958. —. Yeats’s Iconography. 1960; reprint, London: Methuen, 1969.

4. Classical Texts Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. and ed. Paul Woodruff. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998.

63

Essays and Introductions, 285.

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Euripides, Ion, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Richard Grene and Richmond Lattimore, IV. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1960. Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt and rev. John Marincola. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, Epic Cycle, Homerica, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, with an English translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White, rev. 1936. Harvard: Loeb Classical Library, 2002. Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Pantheon Books, 1963. Plutarch, Moralia, V. Harvard: Loeb Classical library, 1998.

5. Criticism on Greek Literature and Religion Dodds, E. R. The Greeks and the Irrational. 1951; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Frazer, Sir James. The Golden Bough. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1993. Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths, 2 vols. 1955; revised edition, 1960; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985. Harvey, Sir Paul, ed. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. 1937; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Pater, Walter. Greek Studies. London, Macmillan, 1895. Schuré, Edouard. Les Grands Initiés. Paris, Librairie Académique Perrin, 1960. Taylor, Thomas. Oracles and Mysteries. Frome, Somerset: The Prometheus Trust, 1995, rev. 2001.

“BREATHED ON BY THE RURAL PAN”: THE ATMOSPHERE OF ARCADIA IN GIONO’S REGAIN PETER MERCHANT

Three years after the posthumous completion of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, Jean Giono (1895-1970) published a novel which likewise made time run backwards. Regain (1930) begins with the effective end of life, “mort” being the word towards which the opening chapter inches its wistful way,1 but it ends with a new life beginning. By turning itself on its last pages into the chronicle of a birth foretold, the book completes a journey far more momentous and magical than the route of the coach-ride to which the first lines of all had referred. The passengers on that are taken from Manosque to Banon. The reader of Regain is taken on a journey from the dead to the quick, from November to spring, from a dearth to a fulfilling, from privation to plenitude. In working up to another bleak narrative division, with the sentence “Maintenant, je suis seul” (“Now I am alone”),2 the second chapter places us at the very vanishing point of privation. The backdrop against which that sentence is spoken— by Panturle, the last inhabitant of Aubignane left standing—is the empty shell of what was once a viable village but is now reduced to one man and his goat. “Derrière lui, il y a Aubignane vide.” (“Behind him was Aubignane, empty.”)3 Giono’s Aubignane is just as deserted as the neighbouring “bowers,” not on the coach-route but in the literary gazetteer, of Goldsmith’s Auburn. The novel’s conclusion, however, will set solitariness in an entirely different context. The exposed first person 1

Giono, Regain, 15. Every subsequent quotation from the French text of Regain is followed either by my own translation or, in parentheses, by the corresponding passage or phrase from the English translation—with the title Second Harvest—by Henri Fluchère and William Myers (references to which are likewise parenthesised). 2 Ibid., 36 (30). 3 Idem.

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singular will vanish, with “Maintenant, je suis seul” given the wider angle of “Maintenant Panturle est seul” (“Now Panturle was alone”);4 and so will the note of lamentation, with the solitariness now turned from a chronic condition which none appear able to alleviate into a warm cocoon of delight that no imaginable intrusion could undo. Panturle, “tout embaumé de sa joie” (“all wrapped up in his joy”),5 no longer sees “Aubignane vide” but instead has seen (as a caprine emblem of its future repeopling) Caroline “pleine,” and delivered of a kid, and has subsequently had his own companion tell him that—at what must have been the very time she helped the goat give birth—she too conceived. The outline of Giono’s story would itself be empty, however, without the detail of a very specific setting—the villages and valleys and cornfields, the hawthorn and the lavender, of Giono’s native HauteProvence—to fill it. Aubignane’s ragged remnant are quite precisely positioned, on a slope where their homes are perched as precariously over the drop into a narrow valley as their histories appear poised on the brink of oblivion. The “3 or 4 Families in a Country Village” that for Jane Austen had been “the very thing to work on”6 have shrivelled here into next to nothing, and the valley into which Aubignane is slipping—with Panturle’s home, at the edge of the village, leading the slide down the slope—is a valley of Biblical barrenness, like the valley of the shadow of death or the valley which was full of bones. Whether the bones can live is in even graver doubt when, from the final trio of village veterans with which at the start of the novel Aubignane is left, first Gaubert the former wheelwright and then the widow Mamèche have to be subtracted. The village by now is unsexed, with even the milk that has come from Caroline the goat destined to dry up, and Panturle himself—like John Donne in the middle of winter—is “every dead thing,”7 or at least is dead lonely. After the last word of the opening chapter has been “mort,”8 the last word of the following chapter can only be “seul” (“alone”).9 However, Mamèche’s last act has been to tempt into Panturle’s territory the companion that he craves; and the wind of spring, which comes not as mistral but as “marieur” (“[a] wind that...marrie[s]”)10 is set to co-operate with her contrivance by so knitting this pair, Panturle and Arsule, that they will feel 4

Ibid., 123 (121). Idem. 6 Jane Austen’s Letters, 275. 7 Donne, “The Elegies” and “The Songs and Sonnets,” 84 (“Twicknam Garden”). 8 Giono, Regain, 15. 9 Ibid., 36 (30). 10 Ibid., 88 (85). 5

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cemented together—“ils sont cimentés, chair contre chair” (“they were cemented, flesh to flesh”)11—and the dry bones of Aubignane will, with that union, rise reanimated from the oubliette of the valley. What unfolds, with Panturle and Arsule beginning to be kneaded into “une même boule de chair” (“into a single ball of flesh”),12 is a form of agricultural Robinsonnade. The castaway must independently rediscover, or two people who think and act as one must jointly recollect, how early man managed to live off—and in harmony with—the land. The general pattern of human history, hunting followed by the planting of crops, applies as much to Panturle as to Crusoe. Corn is sown, bread is made, and a firm foothold is found for Aubignane’s climb back to civilisation. In the end, with five new faces in the village as a farmer’s family is drawn there to work the land, a community is built which promises to restore Aubignane to its previous prosperity. Across the ripening fields all of the necessary conditions are in place for laughing Ceres to reassume the land; and her laughter will be echoed in the laughs which Arsule looks forward to having, in those same fields, with the infant she is expecting.13 Giono has taken that vision of the waste land which in France—where of course acre upon acre of earth had been scorched by the First World War— haunted the imagination as much before T. S. Eliot’s poem as because of it, and has supplied it with a happy ending: the recovery and regeneration of the blighted land. What Regain in this regard has to offer chimes with several of the perceived political imperatives of the postwar period: the need to promote local attachment, to reverse what was presented as a rural exodus, and to stimulate agriculture. The book was bound to speak very strongly to a readership that was aware of these pressures and that had in addition inherited unawares the nineteenth-century “ideology of flight,” as Stanley Pierson has termed it,14 which interprets cities and towns as oppressive and (like Panturle and Arsule when with relief they withdraw from the bustle of the fair in Banon)15 seeks a redeeming rural retreat. As Giono set about writing Regain, therefore, the return to—and renewal of—land lately left was an officially encouraged aspiration, and a dream that had passed emphatically into the public domain. Since necessarily it is as myths that dreams which go public will echo down the ages, any narrative expressing what Regain expresses can achieve a double resonance by planting its feet as firmly in the soil of myth as Panturle in 11

Ibid., 105 (102). Ibid., 105 (103). 13 Ibid., 123. 14 Pierson in Dyos and Wolff (eds.), The Victorian City, 2: 875-6. 15 Giono, Regain, 104-5. 12

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the novel’s closing line, “Il est solidement enfoncé dans la terre comme une colonne” (“He stood firmly planted in the earth like a pillar”),16 plants his in the fields that he is rendering fruitful. Few writers have had more powerful artistic reasons for such planting than Giono has here. Where he can give the characters and incidents of his story a base or seedbed in classical mythology, he will be seen to have lifted the local up into the universal. Where a deliberately inserted allusion can revive and remobilise mythic motifs which may have long lain dormant in Western culture, that recuperation will make the project of Giono’s novel match the land reclamation in the novel. One of the chief sheaves or clusters of mythological reference in Regain is, it appears, gathered into Giono’s novel from the ending backwards. For, as laughing Ceres finally reassumes the land, and Panturle and his companion Arsule bring in their “benediction de blé,”17 or collect their cornucopia of corn, Giono creates a sense of the Golden Age returning. The materials for such a climax are only in place because he has carefully written a part for the daughter of Ceres, or of Greek Demeter, by making Arsule very palpably a modern Persephone. Persephone was abducted by Hades, but then was wrested back from the underworld, at least for long enough to allow the harvests which without her presence could not happen. Arsule’s abduction has been at the hands of Gédémus the itinerant knife-grinder, a character about whom there is something engagingly absurd but also something chilly and menacing. One day in Sault he picked Arsule up, “je l’ai ramassée” (“I picked her up”),18 only to treat her ever after as his ass or harness horse and keep her, if not literally underground, very much under his thumb. Panturle secures her redemption, when he and Gédémus finally come face to face, with a ransom of sixty francs, just the sum needed to cover the work which she once did: – Achète-toi un âne. – C’est cher… – Voilà: l’âne, je te le paye. Mais, tu me comprends; je te remplace la femme par un âne. Tu me comprends? Je te donne de quoi acheter un âne et c’est fini. Il tire de la boîte un billet de cinquante francs. – Oui, mais le harnais, dit l’autre, et la longe, et tout?...parce qu’il faut que je fasse mettre un brancard à la charrette alors… 16

Ibid., 124 (122). Ibid., 86. 18 Ibid., 109 (106). 17

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Peter Merchant – Bon, fait Panturle, ça sera donc soixante, et voilà… L’homme prend les deux billets, il les compte: un, deux. Bon. Il les garde un peu dans les mains. Si des fois il y avait encore à y revenir…Non. Il les met dans sa poche. Ça y est. – Mais, tu vas me faire un papier, dit Panturle. – Un papier, et de quoi? Ça se fait pas pour cette chose. – Ça se fait pour tout. Tu mets: «Reçu soixante francs» et puis tu signes. Pas plus. Ça ira. On saura, toi et moi, ce que ça veut dire. Va. (“Buy yourself a donkey.” “It’s a lot of money.”… “Right. I’ll pay for the donkey. But you must understand this: I’m replacing the woman with a donkey. Do you understand? I’m giving you enough to buy a donkey, there’s an end to it.” He took a fifty-franc note out of the canister. “Yes, but what about the harness,” said the other, “and the tether, and all that? ... Because I’ll have to fit my hand-cart with shafts now…” “Right, said Panturle; “that’ll be sixty, and that’s that.”… The man took the two banknotes, he counted them: one, two. All right. He kept them in his hands a moment. Was it any good bringing the matter up again?... No. He put them into his pocket. That was that. “But you’re going to sign me a paper,” Panturle said. “A paper? What for? It’s not done for a thing like that.” “It can be done for anything. You’ll write: ‘Received sixty francs,’ and you’ll sign. Nothing more. That’ll do. We’ll both know what it means. Go ahead.”) 19

Distilled into that terse exchange, and barely reined in by it, is a tremendous battle of wills between the two men. In any plot-grammar of so-called regional fiction, the climactic face-toface encounter of Panturle and Gédémus would have a very near neighbour, as near as Auburn to Aubignane, in the grand showdown scene of a novel sixty years older than Giono’s. Max Keith Sutton’s pioneering piece of 1974 on a romance to which “large mythic dimensions” are brought by a heroine whose “role is like Persephone’s” and who embodies “the freshness of returning life” might very well have taken Regain as its subject but it in fact discusses R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone (1869).20 19

Ibid., 111-12 (109-10). Ellipsis after “et tout?” (“and all that?”), after “la charrette alors” (“with shafts now”), and after “y revenir” (“bringing the matter up again?”) not mine but indicated in the text. 20 Sutton, “The Mythic Appeal of Lorna Doone,” 435-6 and 443.

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Lorna Doone concludes with a struggle between Carver Doone, who has held Lorna captive, and John Ridd, who is her destined husband and her soulmate. Blackmore’s Carver closely corresponds to Giono’s knifegrinder: a man who cuts across the natural order of things by imprisoning the heroine, as winter locks up spring, and by blocking the union which is clearly ordained for her. Even though (stolen “from that vile Glen Doone”)21 Lorna comes out of her underworld to stay with the Ridds at their farm, and even though Arsule comes out of hers to live at—and extensively refit—Panturle’s tumbledown dwelling, the threat from their former captors remains. It is not until both men are finally overcome, Gédémus by being simply shown the door and Carver by succumbing rather more luridly to a “black and bottomless bog,”22 that growth can resume and the pair who truly belong together be finally united. For each of the victors, Giono’s Panturle and Blackmore’s John, there is in this spring awakening a delight second only to that of Gerard Manley Hopkins in his sonnet “Spring”: “What is all this juice and all this joy?”23 Panturle the proud prospective parent certainly savours the juice of his joy, “une joie dont il veut mâcher toute l’odeur et saliver longtemps le jus” (“a joy of which he wanted to savour all the smell and taste the juice as long as possible”),24 and in the first edition of Lorna Doone the text has John’s cup running over as well: “I felt my life come back, and warm; I felt my trust in women flow.”25 Lorna has been responsible for John’s revival once before, at that very point in Blackmore’s novel where Giono’s seems most strikingly foreshadowed. The resemblance involves an adventure which John embarks on when just “turned fourteen years old”26 and which ends with a mighty rush of waters disgorging him in Doone Valley, where the captive Lorna is confined. Here he opens his eyes and finds Lorna kneeling beside him: When I came to myself again, my hands were full of young grass and mould, and a little girl kneeling at my side was rubbing my forehead tenderly, with a dock-leaf and a handkerchief. “Oh, I am so glad,” she whispered softly, as I opened my eyes and looked at her; “now you will try to be better, won’t you?” 21

Blackmore, Lorna Doone, 271. Ibid., 651. 23 Hopkins, Selected Poetry, 115. 24 Giono, Regain, 123 (121). 25 Blackmore, Lorna Doone, 679-80. 26 Ibid., 56. 22

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Peter Merchant I had never heard so sweet a sound as came from between her bright red lips, while there she knelt and gazed at me; neither had I ever seen anything so beautiful as the large dark eyes intent upon me, full of pity and wonder. 27

John is too self-conscious and too dazed to answer Lorna’s question; but in several ways this “yeoman’s boy” will indeed be “better” for having met, in Lorna, “a lady born.”28 Since the day of their meeting becomes an anniversary whose recurrence will measure out his life, and since that life will be lived—with Lorna—happily ever after, the current has in effect carried him out of linear time and deposited him in a kind of mythic time in which all will be forever golden: “Year by year, her beauty grows.”29 The parallel passage in Regain sees Panturle tumbling into a stream, finding that he cannot clamber out, and losing consciousness. When he comes round, and opens his eyes, he is lying on the bank with a taste in his mouth which is like neither juice nor joy: Depuis un moment, il a recommencé à vivre, mais il a gardé les yeux fermés. Il est venu un grand bruit doux et une fraîcheur: plusieurs voix d’arbres qui parlaient ensemble. Il s’est dit: c’est le vent. C’est de là qu’il a recommencé à vivre. Il a reconnu la nuit au goût de l’air dans son nez. Alors, il a ouvert les yeux…il a vu que sa tête était au milieu de l’herbe. Qu’est-ce qu’il fait là? Il est resté un bon moment à se le demander puis il a reconnu le goût de sa bouche. C’est une odeur de boue et de mousse d’eau. Il a bougé doucement sa langue et ses mâchoires comme pour mâcher cette odeur et voir au fond si ça ne ferait pas souvenir de quelque chose. Il y a des petits grains de sable qui ont grincé entre ses dents. (He had begun to live again a few moments ago, but he still kept his eyes closed. A persistent quiet sound and a freshness stole over him; voices of several trees were talking together. He said to himself: ‘It’s the wind.’ It was then that he came back to life. He recognized the night by the taste of the air in his nostrils. Then he opened his eyes…he [saw] in a twinkling that his head was lying in the grass. What was he doing there? He remained motionless for a good while, wondering what had happened, then he recognized the taste in his mouth. It had a smell of mud and water-moss. He moved his tongue slowly and 27

Ibid., 64. Ibid., 66. 29 Ibid., 663. 28

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worked his jaws, as if to chew the smell and see if it did not remind him of something. Small grains of sand grated between his teeth.)30

Soon Panturle becomes aware of a presence by his side, and the sound of a woman’s voice: Elle est assise là, dans l’herbe, à côté de lui; elle regarde. Elle a parlé; personne n’a répondu. – Alors, ça va mieux? elle demande… – Mieux, oui; et vous? – Moi, j’ai bien eu peur. Et j’ai pas pu dormir. Je suis venue, comme ça, voir un peu ce que vous faisiez; juste vous étiez en train de vous tourner. Alors, j’ai pensé: ça va mieux; ça m’a enlevé un poids de dessus la poitrine. Elle est dans la lune. Il la voit bien: sa figure pointue et pâle comme un gros navet, presque pas de menton, un long nez en pierre, lisse, des yeux comme des prunes, ronds, veloutés, luisants, sa lèvre gonflée par ces deux dents qui pointent quand elle rit. C’est la plus belle! – Vous êtes bien brave, dit Panturle. Et alors, c’est vous qui m’avez tiré sur l’herbe? Il crache pour faire sortir ce goût de sable et de source qui est dans sa bouche. Elle se traîne dans l’herbe sur les genoux jusque près de Panturle… (She was sitting there in the grass beside him. She was looking at him. She had spoken; nobody had answered. “Well, are you better?” she asked… “Better? Yes; and you?” “Oh, I had a great fright. I could not go to sleep. So I came just to see how you were getting on. You were just turning over. So I thought: ‘He’s getting better.’ It took a weight off my chest.” She was in the moonlight. He could see her well: her face was pointed and pale like a big turnip, almost no chin, a long smooth nose like a stone, eyes like plums, round, velvety, and sparkling, her lips swollen by those two front teeth which stuck out boldly when she laughed. She was lovely! “You’re very kind,” said Panturle. “So it’s you who pulled me out onto the grass.” He spat to free his mouth of that taste of gravel and water. 31 She approached on her knees in the grass, right up to Panturle.)

30 31

Giono, Regain, 63-4 (60-1). Ibid., 64-5 (61-2).

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Arsule, as she kneels beside Panturle, has no dock-leaf like Lorna’s with which to rub him, but her ministrations have still assured his survival: “«Il n’est pas mort, il va revenir.»” (“‘He’s not dead. He’ll come round.’”)32 Moreover, just as through her Panturle has now recommenced living, so— through their partnership—will his ailing village. That too will cease to be the dead thing which it had till then appeared: “la terre d’Aubignane va repartir…Ca va partir de bel élan et ça reviendra de la terre à homme” (“the earth at Aubignane is going to start off again…. It’ll start off again with a good spurt and it will become man’s earth once more”).33 Elsewhere, the similarities between John’s role in Lorna Doone and Panturle’s role in Regain seem the product of similar circumstances. Both characters, given the rustic wildness of the district into which each is dropped, have to be adept at living off the land. The creators of both have drunk deep at the Pierian spring of classical mythology. However, Giono’s Panturle and Arsule are much more adult and less innocent than Blackmore’s John and Lorna. On first meeting Lorna, John thinks her “the queen of all the angels”;34 but Arsule is certainly no angel. Because Giono’s characters as initially conceived are far further from the ideal than Blackmore’s, and thus more resistant to receiving the imprint of a mythic or archetypal identity, the stamping has to be considerably more strenuous. Robert Langbaum’s comparison of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” notes that “the Lockian split between the real and the ideal” has by the 1920s grown so wide as to require from the later writer an altogether “more radical transformation.”35 Giono, at the end of that same decade, would seem to have likewise decided that Panturle and Arsule must louder sing for every tatter in their mortal dress. So his mythologising of these characters can be no mere subtextual murmur; it has to become a foregrounded and fortissimo effect. That mythologizing effort of Giono’s is nowhere more significantly in excess of anything to be found in Blackmore than when it is directed towards putting the “Pan” into Panturle. Giono in fact is among literature’s most prolific Pan-handlers. As his Présentation de Pan (published in the same year as Regain) serves to show, there are many openings in his work and world for the Arcadian god who was half man and half goat; and Aubignane, especially, is classic ground. The anvil that was once the very pulse of village life used to sing out his name with a small p, “pan pan;

32

Ibid., 65 (62). Ibid., 84 (80-1). 34 Blackmore, Lorna Doone, 66. 35 Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience, 27. 33

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pan pan; pan pan.”36 Panturle, however, is Pan writ large. He looks like a woodland god: “Le Panturle est un homme énorme. On dirait un morceau de bois qui marche. Au gros de l’été,…c’est un arbre.” (“Panturle was a huge man. He looked like a piece of wood walking along. During the heat of the summer,…he was just like a tree.”)37 He keeps a goat as well, of course, whose lovelorn condition mirrors his own. More importantly, when in logic there is no possible way of changing that condition some power within him very strangely works such change by so enchanting a plateau already unsettling and unearthly in its desolation—“immense et nu, et tellement, tellement plat à donner le mal au cœur” (“huge and barren, and so flat that it made you feel sick”)38—as to draw Arsule magnetically across it towards him. The mysterious nocturnal noises which visit her there to disturb her sleep,39 and by her own subsequent acknowledgement ‘push’ her40 in the direction of Aubignane, are produced in the physical sense by the subterfuge of Mamèche; but they also appear partly produced by the sheer force of Panturle’s desire. (Keats makes Pan a master of “mysterious enticement” and “[s]trange ministrant of undescribèd sounds, / That come a-swooning over hollow grounds, / And wither drearily on barren moors.”)41 Once Arsule is within Panturle’s field of influence, he accidentally (or providentially) waylays her—as Pan is said to have waylaid Syrinx—on a riverbank, although he nearly drowns himself in the process. He has no pipes to play, but she will later give him a pipe to puff on: – Attends-moi, je vais m’acheter quelque chose. Il a attendu, là, près de la poste. Elle a quitté la foire et elle est descendue dans la rue qui va à la grand’place. Au bout d’un moment, elle est revenue avec un petit paquet plié dans un papier de soie. – Tiens, elle a dit. Ça a été une belle pipe toute neuve. En bois de bois, et un paquet de tabac. Il en avait les larmes aux yeux. (“Wait for me, I’m going to buy myself something.”

36

Giono, Regain, 27. Ibid., 16-17 (10). 38 Ibid., 45 (40). 39 Ibid., 48-9. 40 Ibid., 89. 41 Keats, The Complete Poems, 114. 37

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Peter Merchant He stood and waited there, near the post-office. She left the fair and went down into the street leading to the main square. After a while, she came back with a little parcel folded in tissue paper. “Here you are,” she said. It was a beautiful, bright new pipe—the best of wood—and a pack of tobacco. Tears rose to his eyes.)42

This is the pipe which Panturle is to smoke during his confrontation with Gédémus, proving as he does so that in the end the pipe is mightier than the knife. Although the hero of Blackmore’s novel has one too,43 the tobacco-pipe—like the myth of Pan generally—is instrumental only in Giono’s. Blackmore and Giono, just like Keats and Yeats, were born a lifetime apart: exactly seventy years in each case. Over that stretch of time, both the need for and the nature of literary reference to classical mythology can be seen to alter. As the gap between the real and the ideal widens, with ever more desperate measures becoming necessary to bridge it, so writers find correspondingly increased occasion to evoke both the name and the spirit of Pan. In 1888, nineteen years after the publication of Lorna Doone, Roden Noel in his Modern Faust is continuing to counter the celebrated phrase of Plutarch, “Great Pan is dead,” with “Pan lives, though dead.”44 If nature is instinct with the Godhead, we cannot afford to lose the god of wild nature. But Pan was already being restored to life, or at least being paid the tribute of poetic allusion, nineteen years before the publication of Lorna Doone. A sonnet of 1850 sees Elizabeth Barrett Browning “thanking the true PAN / Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love.”45 An alternative interpretation of Pan is offered in 1852 by Matthew Arnold, whose “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens” explain in the following terms why he enjoys the life of the glade more than the life of the city that on all sides surrounds it: In the huge world, which roars hard by, Be others happy if they can! But in my helpless cradle I Was breathed on by the rural Pan. 46 42

Giono, Regain, 104 (101). Blackmore, Lorna Doone, 73, 231. 44 The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, 145. 45 Barrett Browning, Selected Poems, 195. 46 Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott and Super, 147. 43

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Pan breathes again, and again and again and again; Arnold packs in the aspirates until the reader can actually hear his breathing. And what Pan stands for in those lines is the aspiration after some kind of withdrawal, the retreat to a redeeming rurality. Arnold presents Kensington Gardens as if he were Hardy introducing Little Hintock: “one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action.”47 The poem creates, therefore, just that sort of extraterritorial space in which Arnold will later situate the critic. His 1864 lecture on “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” calls upon the critic to inhabit and address “the sphere of the ideal,”48 but abandon “the sphere of practical life” and ignore its “rush and roar”49as resolutely as the “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens” turn their back upon the roaring world hard by. In the poem the speaker relishes his seclusion, beginning “In this lone, open glade I lie, / Screen’d by deep boughs on either hand”;50 and in the lecture the critic embraces “the Indian virtue of detachment.”51 That connection—or congruence—between the lecture’s advocacy of detachment and the poem’s apparent preference for meditation over action holds troubling implications for Giono, whose Provence is at least as much an extraterritorial space as Arnold’s Kensington Gardens. Is the Provence of Regain purely a place of retreat for Giono’s readers, and is the province of fiction ever that for Giono himself? Is his writing damagingly disengaged, as the kind of “criticism” which Arnold cultivated could sometimes seem to be, from “practical life”? Does it peddle a dishonourable ideology of flight? Giono here is of course not helped by the fact that the events of the ten to fifteen years following Regain’s first appearance in the late autumn of 1930 made detachment look less like an Indian virtue and more like a collaborationist tactic. As the lurch towards war caused the sphere of the ideal to contract, any novel or novelist thought still to be cleaving to it might attract considerable opprobrium. W. D. Redfern accounts for Giono’s vulnerability as follows: Giono conducts, up to 1935, an alternate movement of advance and retreat with respect to his fellow-men, which reflects his swing between an involvement with nature and a withdrawal to meditate and to create in the

47

Hardy, The Woodlanders, 8. Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott and Super, 335. 49 Ibid., 330. 50 Ibid., 146. 51 Ibid., 330. 48

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Peter Merchant study. The progressive stress on the second movement, towards alienation, suggests the gradual collapse, or at least the diminution, of an idealism.52

For Giono to carry others with him became, after 1935, increasingly hard. The Contadour experiment—which, as Redfern explains,53 was partly a Utopian community and partly a dissident think tank—left him looking at that time more and more like a writer ready to relinquish his historic responsibilities, and reluctant to oppose a rising sea of political troubles. The unfortunate susceptibility to fascist appropriation of much that Regain had embodied or encouraged (the movement back to the land, the idea of the strong man who initially stands alone attracting others to him and building a new social order) plainly came to count against its author, as did the pacifist stance in which Giono stubbornly persisted even past the outbreak of war. All of this apparently invites the same aspersion that G. D. Boyle cast upon Matthew Arnold: “An indolent, selfish quietism pervades everything that ‘A.’ has written…”54 As applied to either writer, however, the aspersion would be ultimately unwarranted. The sphere of the ideal is not just a bolt-hole for Arnold; and nor, for Giono, is the countryside between Manosque and Banon. The reason Giono’s gravitation towards it appears an indecent scramble is that, already in the 1920s, the creation of any extraterritorial space is becoming a more arduous and intensive undertaking; the effort now required to shore up idealism against the prospect of its collapse is growing ever greater. The twentieth-century reversion to myth, if it is to hold out anything worth having, has to become increasingly insistent and energetic. The figure of Pan needs to be not just writ large but set as if in stone, or in some other equally solid material. Sir George Frampton opted in 1912 for bronze. Sixty years after Arnold’s “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens” had found the intangible peace of the glade, and the civilised words and tones of poetry itself, a sufficient answer and antidote to “the girdling city’s hum,”55 nothing short of Frampton’s elaborate statue in the same spot—a statue not of Arnold’s rural Pan but of Barrie’s Peter Pan—was going to work. The answer offered by Giono later still, and after the First World War had intervened, would therefore have to be copper-bottomed: the promise of a demi-paradise regained, in some rural location outside the gates of the world; a broader accompanying sense that just as the age-old

52

Redfern, The Private World of Jean Giono, 56. Ibid., 82-6. 54 Matthew Arnold: The Poetry: The Critical Heritage, 69. 55 Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott and Super, 146. 53

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anvil’s pulsatory “pan pan” still lingers in Panturle’s memory,56 more haunting by far than the urban hum which makes him mad,57 so something else that “lives, though dead”—at least, lives in desire and imagination—is the power of Pan himself. Regain duly demonstrated that, always providing the progressive loss or erosion of their actual contact with nature did not prevent people from dreaming about it, the rural Pan might rise— and breathe—again; he in fact might be seen eternally returning, the myth which wouldn’t grow up. John Alcorn, for whom “the nature novel” effectively ends with D. H. Lawrence, proposes in his “Epilogue: Is Great Pan Dead?” that we should take the year 1910 as having marked “the beginning of the demise of Pan” and that the early 1920s, by which time “the green world of the naturists is gone (except as memory),” should be seen as completing the process. 58 For Patricia Merivale too, the Pan motif was as good as laid to rest again by E. M. Forster in 1910, and without Lawrence might not have experienced enough of a revival to take it even into the 1920s.59 Yet to those who read Regain in 1930, recent and raw though the memory of Lawrence’s death might (after a matter of months) still remain, reports of Pan’s would surely appear greatly exaggerated.

Works Cited Alcorn, John. The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1977. Arnold, Matthew. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott and Robert H. Super. Matthew Arnold. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 31738. —. “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens.” Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott and Robert H. Super. Matthew Arnold. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 146-7. Blackmore, R. D. Lorna Doone: A Romance of Exmoor, ed. Sally Shuttleworth. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989; reprint, 1994. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Selected Poems, ed. Colin Graham. London: Everyman, 1996.

56

Giono, Regain, 27. Ibid., 104-5. 58 Alcorn, The Nature Novel, 116, 115. 59 Merivale, Pan the Goat-God, 194. 57

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Dawson, Carl, ed. Matthew Arnold: The Poetry: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1973. Donne, John. “The Elegies” and “The Songs and Sonnets,” ed. Helen Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Giono, Jean. Regain. 1930; reprint, Paris: Fayard, 1935. —. Regain. 1930; translated as Second Harvest by Henri Fluchère and Geoffrey Myers, London: Harvill, 1999. Hardy, Thomas. The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Selected Poetry, ed. Catherine Phillips. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Keats, John. The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973. Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. 1957; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. Le Faye, Deirdre, ed. Jane Austen’s Letters, 3rd ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Merivale, Patricia. Pan the Goat-God: His Myth in Modern Times. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. Miles, Alfred H., ed. The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, revised ed. London: Routledge, 1905. Pierson, Stanley. “The Way Out,” in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. 2: 873-89. Redfern, W. D. The Private World of Jean Giono. Oxford: Blackwell. 1967. Sutton, Max Keith. “The Mythic Appeal of Lorna Doone,” NineteenthCentury Fiction 28 (1974): 435-49.

GOD’S DEATH AND SUBSEQUENT RESURRECTION FROM FAUST TO APOCALYPTO JACQUES COULARDEAU

Across the two centuries which this essay spans, from Goethe to the present day, imaginative treatments of its stated theme have been both literary and extraliterary; the pages that follow attend to the two types equally, moving freely between the many media in which fictional forms can flourish and recourse be had to the narrative mode. Goethe’s Faust may be taken as the first staging of God’s death. Faust, if we consider both of the two parts, is the direct reflection of the passage from a world in which God and Satan were real beings to a world in which God and Satan become imaginary and eventually mental or spiritual. The first part ends with Gretchen’s salvation, dead, and Faust’s damnation, alive. Through the peripeteia of the second part, Faust liberates himself from God, from Satan, to become the servant brain (Geist in Goethe’s original) of history, and so associate himself creatively with work involving hundreds of hands (Händer) and thus identified with the industrial revolution taking place at the time in Europe. His death and ascent to heaven brings him initially to three impersonations of the Father, of God, viz. Pater Ecstaticus, Pater Profundus and Pater Seraphicus, hence a male trinity; then to the transitory Doctor Marianus, an allusion to Dante’s Paradise; then to an impersonation of the Holy Virgin, the Mater Gloriosa; to a triple impersonation of the holy woman with Magna Paccatrix, Mulier Samaratina and Maria Aegyptica, the triple goddess so dear to Shakespeare; and finally Una Poenitentium, a redeemed Gretchen who is going to plead for Faust. This constitutes a pentacle or pentad of five women with a triad in the centre. At this moment Faust, or man, or human civilization, has grown beyond the triple identity of God, beyond God and Satan, to the female essence of the universe realized in the number five with all its promises and all its dangers, the most pagan dimension of life and yet the most Christian dimension too. In other words, Goethe tells us the story of an agonizing God confronted by the

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industrial revolution that enables man to reject both God and Satan. Hegel will easily declare God dead. The conclusion of this Faust (in French translation) is as follows: “Toute chose périssable / Est un symbole seulement, / L’imparfait, l’irréalisable / Ici devient événement; / Ce que l’on ne pouvait décrire / Ici s’accomplit enfin / Et l’Eternel Féminin / Toujours plus haut nous attire.” 1

God’s Death When the fortunes of Faust are followed through nineteenth-century music, among the main landmarks is Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust (1846).2 This opera suggests a universe divided into two worlds. On the one side we have the dark male voices of Mephistopheles, a baritone, the Dionysian student Brander, a bass, and the chorus of the Damned and the Demons at the end entirely composed of very low and dark male voices. On the other side we have the chorus of celestial Spirits composed of female voices that reach higher and higher, higher than Gretchen herself. Heaven is calling and pulling us up from the heavy dark hell that pulls us down. According to French post-revolutionary morality, however, Marguerite cannot be put to death for “fornication” but only for a real crime that has nothing to do with any Christian moral code. Marguerite has received a sleeping potion from Faust to put her mother to sleep while she is waiting for her lover. She overdoes it and her mother dies—making Marguerite a “parricide,” as Berlioz calls her, a matricide in fact. Thus the Christian teleology is replaced by a more secular (and more obviously French) teleology. The distortion goes slightly further: Faust only signs the pact with Mephistopheles when he learns Marguerite is going to be executed, and only does so in order to be able to save Marguerite, but it triggers his descent into hell. Marguerite then is saved by some divine intervention but for reasons that have nothing to do with religion or morality. She is a victim due to her naïvety in the face of love, that perverse passion into whose traps it is so hard not to fall. This, too, could be felt to be very French and very unchristian. Love can even excuse causing the death of your own mother; and justice, while obviously unable to excuse this, softens it from a sin into a crime. We can see here that Berlioz is rewriting 1

Goethe, Faust I et II, trad. J. Malaplate, 497. Although there is space here to consider only Berlioz, Gounod, and Liszt, Faust has also inspired (among others) Richard Wagner, Robert Schumann, Louis Spohr, Ferruccio Benvenuto Busoni, Anton Rubinstein, Gustav Mahler, Johannes Brahms, Arrigo Boito, and Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov.

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Genesis: the original sin has been erased. Gretchen is not responsible because in a way her naivety and ignorance absolve her from such responsibility; the burden is borne, rather, by Faust, and he it is who has to be damned. This teleology, though not entirely dechristianised, is largely governed by civil law. Soon after came Liszt and his Faust Symphonie (1854), using the concluding verses whose French translation was quoted earlier. It is now necessary to look at the German original, which is more remarkable than has yet been recognised: Alles Vergängliche Ist nur ein Gleichnis; Das Unzulängliche Hier wird’s Ereignis; Das Unbeschreibliche Hier wird’s getan. Das Ewig Weibliche Zieht uns hinan. 3

Those lines are lent an extraordinary and admirable musicality by their rhyming pattern, which folds the masculine (the consonantal endings of the second, fourth, sixth, and eighth lines) into the feminine (the sounded vowels of the first, third, fifth, and seventh lines): (g)li-che (feminine) (ch)nis (masculine) (g)li-che (feminine) (g)nis (masculine) (b)li-che (feminine) (t)an (masculine) (b)li-che (feminine) (n)an (masculine).

This quadrupling of the feminine is consistent with the grouping of women into fours. There are the four Ms (Mater Gloriosa, Magna Peccatrix, Mulier Samaritana, and Maria Aegyptica), and the four penitents (Magna Peccatrix, Mulier Samaritana, Maria Aegyptica, and Una Poenitentium). The four last plead the cause of Faust to the first of women, Mater Gloriosa, who does not speak but intercedes. The redemption is here inscribed in eight lines, an octagon; and “[t]he octagon was a very common font shape. It was interpreted as representing the ‘eighth day,’ the 3

Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil, 219.

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day of Christ’s resurrection, into which we enter in baptism.”4 Over the space of these eight lines, just three endings are rotated (-liche, -nis, and an). If the pattern is felt to reach far enough back in each line to permit the addition of the bracketed letters, however, the three turn into six (-gliche, chnis, -gnis, -bliche, -tan, and -nan), to give us a double triangle which evokes the six-pointed Star of David and Solomon’s Seal. As three and three make six, so four (masculine endings) and four (feminine endings) make eight. The redemption which in these lines is conjured from the number eight could be either a redemption of the feminine by the masculine or a redemption of the masculine by the feminine; or, alternatively, it could be produced by the equal union of both. It is notable that, grammatically, every noun in the stanza is neuter (Vergängliche, Gleichnis, Unzulängliche, Ereignis, Unbeschreibliche, Ewig Weibliche); but the neuter gender of the final noun and of its root (das Weib, “woman”) is denoting a feminine. After Berlioz and Liszt comes Gounod’s Faust (1859), and the logic leading to the erasure of the divine nature of the source material and the replacement of God’s law with civil law is reinforced. Mephistopheles here is a Master of Ceremonies. Marguerite is an infanticide who (rather than accidentally administering too powerful a sleeping potion to her mother) wilfully kills her own child, and civil law condemns her to be executed. And yet, abandoning the logic to which he had seemed to subscribe, Gounod elects to end happily by having Marguerite saved. The typically Christian deus ex machina sounds faintly ridiculous in a work from which God has otherwise been totally eradicated and which, prior to this final miracle, has had no religious dimension at all. In the libretto written by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, the concluding lines are sung by a chorus of angels: “Sauvée! / Christ est ressuscité! / Christ vient de renaître!...Christ est ressuscité!” (“Saved ! Christ is resurrected! / Christ has just been reborn!...Christ is resurrected!”) 5

God is Dead and so is the World: Toward a Virtual Teleology The Christian vision of Christ resurrected is purchased, of course, with the harrowing image of Divinity dying on the Cross; and many find in this an adequate explanation of the modern sense that God is dead. BernardHenri Lévy writes as follows: 4 5

Bradshaw, New SCM Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship, 211. Faust...de J. Barbier and M. Carré, 265-7.

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Ce n’est pas Nietzsche, mais Hegel, qui, le premier lance sur la scène philosophique le thème de la mort de Dieu—c’est lui qui, le premier annonce: « Le sentiment sur lequel repose la religion moderne est le sentiment que Dieu même est mort. » (Foi et Savoir, traduction Méry, p. 298)...La mort de Dieu encore. Le christianisme est la première grande religion à s’être bâtie, non sur la naissance (banal), mais sur la mort (unique) de sa figure adorée du divin. Incarnation, résurrection, corps glorieux: tout part de là—tout procède, oui, de cette théologie, sans précédent, de la mort de Dieu. (It’s not Nietzsche but Hegel who first launched on the philosophical stage the theme of God’s death—he is the first to announce: “The feeling on which modern religion stands is the feeling that God himself is dead.” (Faith and Knowledge, Méry translation, p. 298)…God’s death again. Christianity is the first great religion erected not on the birth (trivial) but on the death (unique) of its worshipped representation of the divine. Incarnation, resurrection, the glorious body: it all starts there—it all proceeds from this unprecedented theology of God’s death.)

That account needs to be tested against an alternative explanation: that, since any man or woman contains a measure of divinity, killing any human being is killing God himself. God is dead because human beings have not respected their divine dimension and have for centuries gone on killing one another. For test cases subsequent to Gounod’s Faust, it would of course be perfectly possible to stay within the field of music—exploring Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1892) or Das Lied von der Erde (1908), or Stravinsky’s Œdipus Rex (1927, rev. 1948). In prose fiction and in cinema, however, there are test cases more pertinent even than these. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine is a natural place to turn, being a book which has spawned several celluloid spin-offs and also a work which— with a publication date of 1895—sits conveniently at the end of, and as if in judgment upon, the nineteenth century. Over the course of the nineteenth century, divine teleology came to be placed under increasing pressure from developments in history, economics, and science. History is conceived in certain quarters as something that is logical and can be described, explained and even foreseen. The economy is seen by Mill and by Marx as determining the structure of society and indeed its destiny. Darwin emphasised biological determinism and showed each animal species evolving from another through genetic mutations and natural selection. This principle became so powerful in the nineteenth century that social Darwinism developed: success proves moral goodness and moral goodness cannot fail to produce social and economic success.

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Each of these is a positivistic approach which creates a particular kind of teleology. History has a meaning, and moves in one direction; and all those opposing this direction must be eliminated. The economy moves in a set direction, and all those opposed to this must be eliminated or neutralized. Equally, if the world is to be seen through the lens of race science, then all races or individuals who lack the proper genetics or who oppose those so fortunate as to be genetically perfect—and therefore ethically perfect too—are to be eliminated. H. G. Wells’s is the loudest of the voices which, before the nineteenth century had even ended, sought to draw attention to the future (fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, McCarthyism, colonialism, etc) that these ideologies were preparing. The Time Machine is an apocalyptic vision of the future. The future world the time traveller visits is entirely devoid of God, a world in which humans have no funeral rites and do not bury their dead. This world is the direct development of social Darwinism coupled with Marxism. The upper, or “capitalist,” class has become a separate species that lives on the surface of the earth just picking vegetables and ignoring hunting or fishing. It does nothing at all and depends for its survival on the necessities delivered to it by a second species, living in underground darkness. This second species descends from the labouring class. Members of the “upper” species appear able to feel gratitude, but have a very limited ability to concentrate. They do not look after their children, and live completely abandoned to their enjoyments despite their fear of the night, particularly moonless nights. They know danger may come from airshafts that reach into the ground, and know their predators; but they are no longer sufficiently intelligent to invent defensive devices. Meanwhile, the creatures belonging to the “lower” species look after machines and produce the goods necessary for the survival of the upper species; for those they feed and take care of are their game or livestock, and provide them with meat and animal proteins. In the species living in the light of the sun, the Elois, Wells therefore shows us the upper classes of the past transformed now into cattle. In the species living totally in the dark and blinded by sunlight, the Morlocks, he shows us the old mining or industrial working class turned into carnivorous underground predators. The fear of regression seems to be what fuels the fantasy here—as is further confirmed by another sequence that opens back into a geological period in which predator is pitted against prey. (Animal and vegetable life has reverted to monstrous red crablike crustaceans, and what looks like a species of big white butterfly is attracted to the green fungus or algae growing on these.) This fear of regression implies a very pessimistic

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conception of humanity. The intellectual deficiency which stops the Elois from ever acting upon their sense of danger is, Wells suggests, an essentially genetic mutation. Homo sapiens has regressed to a state in which the species can no longer claim to be sapient at all. Wells’s despairing predictions anticipate later work by Aldous Huxley, in whose Brave New World (1932) the social streaming—albeit into five distinct groups, not two—is similarly deterministic, and Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis, where the industrial working class again inhabits a lower world, and where again there is a sacrificial feeding, with battalions of workers marching into the mouth of the machine. As well as these analogues, however, the cultural afterlife of The Time Machine includes direct cinematic adaptations, of which those directed by George Pál (1960) and Simon Wells (2002) appeared at particularly interesting and revealing historical moments. Although Pál’s adaptation is as faithful as it can be to the original book, it is inevitable that Wells’s meaning should be altered by the mere lapse of years. In 1960, fifteen years after World War Two, in the midst of the cold war and frantic development in the west, the film became, in the west, a warning about “working-class ideology,” a philippic against Marxism, and also a diatribe against the nonchalance of those in the west whose task it was to eradicate communism as a serious menace to humanity. Even so, the film’s aims have more to do with entertainment than with politics. With Simon Wells’s recent adaptation, however, it is a completely different story. The first change is that the future world is the result of a cosmic accident: the moon exploding and falling to the earth. The connection to social Darwinism and Marxism is severed. No teleology here: it is a pure accident. Secondly, the Elois live in a reconstructed community with their own habitat, even if the ruins of New York are not very far away. They practise some agriculture and some of their lost technology (for example light at night-time) has been recovered. Since they live in houses hanging on the flank of a cliff, their habitat makes them unreachable at night. It is only in the daytime, when they come down to work on the plain, that they may be attacked. However, the Morlocks, living underground in darkness, are not able to attack by day. These Morlocks are governed by an Über-Morlock and live in a highly hierarchized industrial society. Their leader needs female Elois for the purposes of procreation. The biggest change of all is that the time traveller uses his own machine as a weapon, entirely destroying the Morlocks and saving the Elois, although it is illogical that his machine can change the course of things in the underworld while in the surface world it could not.

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Yet the time traveller becomes forever blocked in this future because his machine is destroyed. He takes up teaching, finding a use in that profession for the remnants of the New York Public Library. He educates the Elois into reinventing human civilization. It is characteristic of the twenty-first century that the Elois are seen as having developed enough to reconstruct a primitive autonomous world with a certain level of technological know-how and a certain capacity for self-defence. Although in this vision God is dead, man has a project, a future based on education and invention. Even the Morlocks require some inventiveness, or at least their “chief” does; and his genetic search for the proper female Eloi mate shows that there is something beyond determinism. The Elois are producing what they need to live and are not cattle any more. They remain game but know, or at least can learn, how to defend themselves and (up to a point) how to fight. In the 1960 film version they knew nothing of self-defence and went to their deaths as soon as some horn summoned them. The film is most questionable when it reaches the total annihilation of the Morlocks and represents this as a genocide justified on the grounds of self-defence. Human beings can kill whoever they feel is a potential predator and may come to threaten their survival. The justification for this act of destruction can in no sense, in an entirely godless film, be spiritual; rather, it is to be inferred, contemporary crucifixions are entirely rational, chillingly sane, and ‘necessary.’ The cold, demystified rationalism which H. G. Wells denounced has triumphed here, showing that God’s death leads to the worst imaginable crimes.

Back to the Future I-II-III: We can change the future This trilogy of films by Robert Zemeckis (whose three parts were released in 1985, 1989, and 1990) is a modern fable in which the time travel motif is wittily reworked in the light of the American fetish for cars. The trilogy visits four distinct points in time—1885, 1955, 1985 and 2015—but strictly observes the unity of place, remaining rooted throughout in the same Californian town. The spiritual state of play also remains constant, with Zemeckis always noting the absence of any church and the absolute absence of religion and God. This does not imply a life without aims and goals. The renovation and restoration of the library clock, erected in 1885 when the town was a western settlement but destroyed in a thunderstorm in 1955, continues to be aspired to and worked towards in 2015; and this symbolizes the positive objectives which society will always find necessary. The clock’s destruction, just as (in the

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films’ terms) the modern age began to dawn, need not be taken as pointing to a lack of spirituality in modern man. Rather, science and technology have become the spirituality of modern times. Out of American empirical pragmatism grows a new spirituality that needs no clock—nor any divine clockmaker—for its survival. The films also exhibit an ideology far removed from social Darwinism. The black man who in 1955 was the janitor of the main square bar will later in life become the town’s mayor. Education and the will to succeed make the whole world go round and drive every individual to whom society presents opportunities for self-betterment. Cheating can completely pervert the world (as the second film shows), and the ruthless and wealthy can become socially dominant, but the whole thrust of the films is that cheating can be prevented or corrected. Naturally, such optimism has its limits. Just as Dr Brown Emmett will always have the upper hand with his knowledge, so—in any generation— the Tanners will always be brutal, ruthless, violent hooligans. That brutality is transmitted, as if genetically, from father to son and then to grandson. Marty and his father and mother are in between these opposed extremes; neither absolutely good nor absolutely bad, they avoid extreme brutality and extreme intelligence eludes them. They follow trends, obeying the inspiration of the moment, but they remain safe by dodging all difficult situations. In respect of Marty himself, who would react irrationally whenever he was called ‘chicken,’ the possibilities for change are sketched at the end of the third film, when he tricks the challengers. For humanity to be surviving without any spiritual dimension suggests that mere security, material comfort, and conspicuous consumption are sufficient for its needs and its salvation. Given these, we can save ourselves, though others will not save us; the perception that all others are hostile is illustrated when some Islamist terrorists come after Dr Brown to retrieve the plutonium he has stolen from them. We are in a world kept going by our desire to have more of everything—sometimes more money, sometimes more knowledge. Moreover, suggests the cultural and cinematographic teleology of the third and final film in the trilogy (alluding to Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone’s 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars), we are in a world which reproduces what has already been done or imagined; it is as if we were psychotically locked up in our imaginary vision of things. Even in ethical terms, therefore, God is now dead; such ethical rules as we do still consent to live by survive on top of a chaotic historical mess and come from nowhere identifiable. A point is reached here from which, literally, the only way is up.

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Terminator I-II-III: The Rebirth of the Divine Whereas the Back to the Future trilogy was ten years in the making (including the five which elapsed between the scripting and release of the first film in the series), the Terminator trilogy extended over the space of twenty years. Yet the third part, “The Rise of the Machines” (2003), is already implicit in the teleology articulated in the first part (1984): The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind had raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present, tonight.

This teleology posits the destruction of humanity by machines through a nuclear holocaust. The aim of the victorious machines is to come back to kill the two people who will give birth to the future leader of the human resistance against machines. They try to destroy him by annihilating his origin. The future can be changed by a manipulation of “our present.” Darwinian natural selection is transferred here to a battle between indestructible machines and humans. The machines, which are androids, are programmed to survive; in intelligence they are the equals of any human, and they are superior in strength. The advantage which humans enjoy is that they have will power, stamina, and blind courage. Their intelligence is not programmed and not predictable. The films follow the life of the main character, John Connor. The adult of the third film is a teenager in the second film, and in the first he is not yet born but only exists in the future. He sends a human emissary to protect his own mother, who is not yet pregnant, and this emissary will be the father of the future hero. “The child is father of the man,” as Wordsworth wrote in “My heart leaps up.” The child is to be born to an unmarried mother, who—convinced that she was impregnated by someone from the future—will turn psychotic and have to be placed in an institution. In the second film, the young John Connor lives in foster homes using his hi-tech knowledge to rob ATMs and get money to finance his disordered life. “The childhood shews the man,” wrote Milton in the final Book of Paradise Regained, “[a]s morning shews the day.” The resistance sends a second android to protect him. When the mother leaves her psychiatric hospital a second objective appears: to destroy the invention that produced these machines. But it is doomed to fail. Although the inventive process can be slowed down, the invention will come anyway. Its logical dynamic transcends man’s will, consciousness and power. Since

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this teleology is not determined or produced by humans, no human can change it. In the third film, John Connor, now a young adult, is afraid of the future. The resistance sends an android hours before the holocaust. Rather than preventing the holocaust it must make sure John Connor survives it. John Connor is to be forced to accept survival, becoming the chosen one who has been rescued from the massacre. Of course, although after the release in 1986 of Russell Mulcahy’s film Highlander some cinemagoers perceived the name as alluding to that film’s Connor Macleod, “John Connor” carries the initials of Jesus Christ. Nor do the biblical echoes end there; for the film uses an archetype that gives depth and value to the story by linking it formally with others. The holocaust is called “Judgment Day,” and this allusion to the Book of Revelation makes it a twenty-firstcentury scientific-technological apocalypse. Only one man and one woman, but not just any man and any woman, can survive to restart human history. It is the end of Nordic Ragnarok and the beginning of Genesis. Nordic Ragnarok is clear, in that the woman is Lif (life) and the man is Lifthrasir (desire for life), but unclear as to whether the desire is anterior to the desired object or else produced by it. In the Book of Genesis, of course, the creation of the man precedes the creation of the woman: “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2.23). It is, in any case, a sexualised teleology; the future is entrusted not to one man only but to a couple, John Connor and the companion he acquires in the third film, Kate Brewster. They survive because the android takes them to the Presidential nuclear shelter and the film concludes: “Our destiny was never to stop Judgment Day. It was merely to survive together…Never stop fighting and I never will. The battle has just begun.” The concept of a transcendent power—destiny, teleology, god—thus emerges from these films as our guarantee, after the final apocalypse, of the survival of humanity in a couple entrusted with the procreation of a whole new humanity to resist the machines that have conquered the world. This teleology leads us back to biblical or Nordic patterns.

Conclusion The termination of the argument carried forward by the Terminator trilogy was, in a sense, left to Mel Gibson. Its natural conclusion, for the purposes of this essay, comes not so much with The Passion of the Christ (2004) as with Apocalypto (2006). Here, as with John and Kate, a couple are entrusted with the task of starting humanity all over again. Each has survived a difficult ordeal, in fact a programmed death. The man was set

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to die on a Mayan pyramid, his heart ripped out of his chest, when at an opportune moment the eclipse which these human sacrifices were to make benevolent arrived. He is therefore saved by both sun and moon, with the female moon covering (as the standard Freudian reading would have it) the masculine sun. The woman has survived in almost equally extreme conditions, giving birth to her second son in a pit filled up with rainwater. She escapes death due to the timely arrival of her husband, by whom both she and their two sons are rescued. When the conquistadors arrive on the beach, all four leave, going into the jungle where everything can begin all over again. But the two sons make this a postlapsarian rather than a prelapsarian fresh beginning; Cain and Abel are with Adam and Eve, and their presence promises the murder of one son by the other, Mayas sacrificing other Mayas, brothers ripping the living hearts of brothers out of their panting chests. This extends the Genesis allusion of Terminator, but with a significant addendum. Each fresh beginning is nothing but a repetition of all the mistakes of human history—no longer a destiny, nor a teleology, but a nightmare, a calamity. Human history will always repeat itself because it is written in our genes that the communities we build must contain contradictions such as will bring both progress and the downfall of everything.

Works Cited Printed Sources Bradshaw, Paul F., ed. The New SCM Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship. Norwich: SCM / Canterbury Press, 2002. Faust, Opéra en 5 Actes, de J. Barbier and M. Carré, Musique de Ch. Gounod. Paris: Choudens, n.d. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Faust: Der Tragödie zweiter Teil. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1986. —. Faust I et II, trad. Jean Malaplate. Paris: Flammarion, 1984. Lévy, Bernard-Henri. “Le Bloc-Notes de Bernard-Henri Lévy.” Le Point 1630 (12 décembre 2003): 154. Wells, H. G. “The Time Machine” and “The Invisible Man.” New York: Signet, 1984.

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Films Cameron, James, dir. The Terminator. Orion Pictures / Metro-GoldwynMayer, 1984. —. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Lightstorm Entertainment, 1991. Gibson, Mel, dir. Apocalypto. Touchstone Pictures / Icon Entertainment, 2006. Lang, Fritz, dir. Metropolis. Paramount Pictures, 1927. Mostow, Jonathan, dir. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Warner Bros. / Columbia Pictures, 2003. Pál, George, dir. The Time Machine. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1960. Wells, Simon, dir. The Time Machine. Dreamworks / Warner Bros., 2002. Zemeckis, Robert, dir. Back to the Future I. Universal Pictures, 1985. —. Back to the Future II. Universal Pictures, 1989. —. Back to the Future III. Universal Pictures, 1990.

UNITY AMONG THE STARS: FAITH AND REASON IN DORIS LESSING’S CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES1 DAVID WATERMAN

Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. —Niels Bohr

If major newspapers like the Herald Tribune and Le Monde are right, at least in April 2007, something is missing in Europe (“Separation Anxiety,” “L’Occident aussi a besoin d’un renouveau spirituel”), and that something is faith. While in the United States secularism has for the most part been defined as the absence of a state-sanctioned religion, in Europe Enlightenment rationality, according to Matthew Weiner, “defeats religion and relegates it to the private sphere.”2 The debate surrounding the separation of Church and State, or of faith and reason in the domain of science, is not new: Arthur Koestler reminds us that the founders of modern science were often religious believers—Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton—before Robespierre made the “symbolic gesture of deposing God and enthroning the Goddess of Reason in the vacant chair.”3 In the twentieth century, the behaviorism of J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner assumed the status of “hard science” by modeling itself on Newtonian physics,4 paradoxically around the same time that modern theoretical physicists like Einstein were reporting that physics was much more mysterious than exact; one cannot discuss quantum mechanics, for example, except in terms of “probabilities.” Holistic thinkers like Erich Fromm lament the fact that, while much technological progress has been 1

Elements of this paper have appeared in my previously published book Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction, New York: Cambria Press, 2006. 2 Weiner, “Separation Anxiety,” International Herald Tribune, 6. 3 Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine, 255-6. 4 Ibid., 7.

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made, advancement in the social and political spheres has not kept pace,5 or further, Arthur Koestler regrets that “Our hypnotic enslavement to the numerical aspects of reality has dulled our perception of non-quantitative moral values.”6 Koestler goes so far as to claim a “unitary source of the mystical and scientific modes of experience; and the disastrous results of their separation,”7 reminding us that a functional whole “is defined by the pattern of relations between its parts, not by the sum of its parts; and a civilization is not defined by the sum of its science, technology, art, and social organization, but by the total pattern which they form, and the degree of harmonious integration in that pattern.”8 The contemporary British writer Doris Lessing is one of these holistic thinkers, and has been for a long time now—her past interest in Sufi philosophy and Marxism, both tools to consider the big picture, has been well documented. Lessing’s space-fiction series Canopus in Argos: Archives is the tale of what happens to intergalactic empires when they divorce reason from faith, and their subsequent struggle to recover the harmony which has been lost. Within the novels, the enlightened characters are kept busy as they continually try to lead a divided, predatory population away from its spatial and temporal reference points, its anchors in reason, toward a universal way of thinking, with its promise of utopian existence. Their message is clear: the only laws that matter are not those created by people, but those laws which are inherent in the universe, readily available for all to see if they would simply open their eyes. Such perception, however, requires faith in a power beyond the individual, beyond the groups which constitute society; throughout the Archives, Lessing illustrates the catastrophic results of divorcing reason from faith in so-called advanced (i.e. scientific) cultures. Included in this study are three novels from Canopus in Argos: Archives, all of which have more to say about inner rather than outer space, at least in terms of our interest in faith and reason. If Lessing defines collective identity along philosophical lines, one must include the Sufi component within that philosophy; Müge Galin reminds us that Lessing, since the 1960s, has never hidden her devotion to Sufi philosophy,9 although in a 1991 interview with Tan Gim Ean Lessing minimizes the role of a grand belief system in her life, Sufi or otherwise:

5

Fromm, The Sane Society, 194. Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, 552. 7 Ibid., 432. 8 Ibid., 527. 9 Galin, Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 3. 6

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“The older I get, the less I believe.”10 Galin highlights some of the principles of this philosophy, normally tied very closely to Islam, such as community life, working together for the good of the group, which in turn ensures the development of the individual, as well as the necessity of having a spiritual guide.11 Sufi philosophy insists that each individual is only one element in a master plan, and it is this idea of a grand, selfregulating mechanism, where each one plays his or her role, which is interesting in a discussion of the complementary roles of faith and reason. For Lessing, Sufism is a tool, much like Marxism, to look at the big picture, as she makes clear in The Golden Notebook: “I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world ethic.”12 What is essential is the big picture, a situation in its entirety, and, even if Lessing recognizes the practical problems and limits of tools like Sufism or Marxism when establishing a well-founded, solid unity, she insists on the necessity of at least making the effort. The fragmentary world as it exists (or the fragmentary universe, as in Canopus in Argos) must be reconceived on a foundation which favours the master plan if the members of this society are to avoid mutual destruction. Shikasta, published in 1979, is the first volume in the series Canopus in Argos: Archives, a series composed of five novels. Presented in the form of reports, official documents and letters, the novel creates a body of knowledge regarding the planet Shikasta, for the use of students of history on Canopus, the mother planet. Shikasta is in decline, largely because of an individualistic atmosphere, wherein Lessing sees the symptom of a degenerative sickness: “To identify with ourselves as individuals—this is the very essence of the Degenerative Disease, and every one of us in the Canopean Empire is taught to value ourselves only insofar as we are in harmony with the plan, the phases of our evolution.”13 The choice of the word “degenerative” is important, since it signifies an organism which was in good health but is now deteriorating; often “degenerative” implies a psychological illness or a moral shortcoming as well. This dysfunction is caused by the individual who sees him or herself as separate from the collectivity, a collectivity which Lessing always defines in the largest sense, including all races, genders, generations, as well as animals, buildings and the stars, what Nancy Topping Bazin has referred to as 10 Gim Ean, “The Older I Get, the Less I Believe,” Doris Lessing: Conversations, 203. 11 Galin, Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 12. 12 Lessing, The Golden Notebook, preface 15. 13 Lessing, Shikasta, 38.

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androgyny.14 A subject who sees him / herself as a member of a racial group, for example, has fixed his identity as a function of the group, and hence feels insecure when he is reminded that he is a “probability,” in other words, a multiplicity and a movement, lacking fixed co-ordinates. We, as individuals, generally accept this state of division as given and unalterable, an unavoidable product of what Michel de Certeau calls “the machinery which transforms individual bodies into collective bodies.”15 Most subjects simply do not realize their situation, and even those who do cannot seem to change it, but we must remember that powerless people are not guilty, even if they unwittingly collaborate in maintaining the status quo. By presenting the utopian ideal of collective identity before the rupture on Shikasta, Lessing suggests that we need to look at the foundation of the current, divided system, and examine what we are now willing to accept as normal, for example the generation gap, or the tendency toward excessive consumption and competition. Shikastan society as it exists is not the only one possible; if another social system is imaginable, it is potentially realizable; the obstacles to collective identity which stand in our way—such as the rigid separation of disciplines, of systems of knowledge and meaning—are cultural constructions which generally serve the interests of the dominant power. Those enlightened few, the Link people on Shikasta, find themselves marginalized, even locked up in psychiatric hospitals, given the disbelief with which the Shikastans receive their message. The divide has become so wide that Canopus’s messengers are considered insane, even though they are proposing a utopian philosophy: “…they were quickly driven out, or destroyed, or themselves succumbed from the weight of the pressures on them. Sometimes it was only in madhouses or as outcasts in the deserts that these valuable individuals could survive at all.”16 We are reminded of Thomas Szasz’s warning, that most psychiatric illnesses are simply “communications” which express ideas that are unacceptable in the current ideological climate.17 Lessing clearly demonstrates that this “insanity” has no real, objective basis, but is instead a cultural phenomenon according to which “abnormal” individuals are defined as crazy by the dominant power, supported by the majority out of fear: “I was mad then. According to their ideas…Because so many people have said so. But it was lovely…I have 14

Bazin, “Androgyny or Catastrophe: The Vision of Doris Lessing’s Later Novels,” Frontiers 5.3, 11. 15 de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien: arts de faire, 209 (my translation). 16 Lessing, Shikasta, 110. 17 Szasz, Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man, 19.

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not known that niceness since.”18 However, these Links are “abnormal” only because they possess divine knowledge; although they cannot comprehend everything in the universe, they are able to penetrate further than the rest into the structure which surrounds them and in which they are involved: “The answer is some people are born to receive not 5 percent but perhaps 6 percent. Or 7 percent. Or even more. But if you are a 5 percent person and suddenly a shock opens you to 6 then you are ‘mad.’”19 The Links’s insanity, according to Lessing, is simply reduced to a question of point of view within a certain socio-historic context, wherein the dogma supported by majority opinion is given the status of absolute truth. We should be mindful of David Hawkes’s admonition, that “Human history shows that the most treasured beliefs of one age have very often been regarded as utter delusions by later epochs,”20 a necessary reminder since people generally become uneasy when their stable points of reference are removed, and some of the solutions which Lessing asks us to consider require exactly that. What seems possible in outer space, in the domain of “space fiction,” somehow seems impossible to us in our everyday world. The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980) also questions the basis of an identity which is defined in spatial and geographic terms, in other words by group formation; on this planet, the forced mixing of diverse cultures is commanded by the Providers as a means of healing the current social fractures. The organization of space is a very important tool in subject formation, since we find our place in relation to others on a geographic map which has, apparently, all the characteristics of a natural space in the real world. Each zone seems independent, and as long as each subject stays in his / her assigned place everything is fine. Those who approach too closely one of the borders of a Zone become uneasy, even physically ill, which discourages curiosity regarding the residents of other Zones. The boundaries between the Zones are, in fact, much more permeable than the residents would have believed. As the novel progresses, Lessing exposes the lie of impenetrable borders, an idea constructed in service of the dominant power(s) as a way of achieving certain political objectives. Borders are thus fictions, but with very real effects, which define “us” in relation to “them” and at the same time give a sense of protection and security which comes at the price of isolation. Movement is limited, not only in a geographic sense but also in the sense of social evolution, since for Lessing social problems like war and imperialism are only symptoms of a deeper and more troubling illness, 18

Lessing, Shikasta, 182. Ibid., 186. 20 Hawkes, Ideology, 75. 19

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that of division into competitive and predatory groups. The principal characters, the rulers Al Ith and Ben-Ata, are involved in a mandatory social experiment; the two are disoriented by their movement, both geographic and ideological, which leaves them with a feeling of alienation. They can no longer claim group membership, since their frame of reference has been displaced. This destabilizing movement must continue, not only for the king and queen but for their subjects as well, otherwise their social evolution will once again stall. As we have already seen, Lessing’s view of the universal order of things has been influenced by such tools as Marxism and Sufi philosophy, and the inter-galactic setting of The Marriages is a way of encouraging the reader to adopt an objective distance during a critique of the current system and an exploration of possible solutions, always considering the system as an enormous whole, as an interconnected network of cause and effect. The long, difficult process of change begins with Al Ith, the Queen of Zone Three. The first indication Al Ith and her people have that something is wrong in Zone Three comes not, in fact, from the realm of humans, but from the animals. They seem unwell, and the birth rate is down. Al Ith has had messages regarding the problem with the animals, but she has been too preoccupied with her forced marriage to the warriorking of Zone Four to give it the attention required, for which she reproaches herself.21 Her self-reproach is justified, she knows, because the animals are a part of the whole to which every living being belongs, an aggregate in which humans have no claim to superiority. And as she searches her mind for the origins of this current problem, Al Ith understands that a disregard for universality is to blame: We asked ourselves if we had grown into the habit of seeing ourselves falsely. But how could it be wrong to approve our own harmonies, the wealths and pleasantness of our land?...And we saw how long it had been since we had thought at all of what lay beyond our borders. That Zone Three was only one of the realms administered generally from Above, we knew. We did think, when we thought on these lines at all, of ourselves in interaction with these other realms, but it was in an abstract way. We had perhaps grown insular? Self-sufficing?22

Although Al Ith is undergoing her first sentiments of alienation, she is also beginning to have her first insights about collective responsibility

21 22

Lessing, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five, 26-7. Ibid., 14.

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regarding the present crises, as well as the necessity of considering all of the other Zones too, not simply the association with Zone Four: …she had not lost the knowledge, which was the base of all knowledges, that everything was entwined and mixed and mingled, all was one, that there was no such thing as an individual in the wrong, nor could there be. If there was a wrong, then this must be the property of everyone, and everybody in every one of the Zones—and doubtless beyond them, too. This thought struck Al Ith sharply, like a reminder. She had not thought, not for very long, about what went on beyond the Zones…for that matter, she thought very little now about Zones One and Two—and Two lay just there…23

As she rides around her realm, Al Ith tries to deepen her insight, all the while struggling with feelings of guilt about the current state of her people and just as she is turning her horse in the direction of home, she receives the Order to return to Zone Four.24 The transition, from Zones which are defined and limited by each other to an ideal space which includes all the Zones and whatever is beyond, has begun. Al Ith carries and creates, during this continual phase of transition, a sort of hybrid space which resists what Michel de Certeau calls the stability of place and favours the movement characteristic of space.25 Al Ith is no longer sure of her place, and it is exactly that sense of stability and being content with the status quo which must be abandoned for social transformation to occur. The loss of one’s proper place, of stability, is also the obstacle which provokes the most resistance, the most fear. Glancing over her shoulder on her way back to Ben-Ata, Al Ith continues the process of expanding her mind, trying to see diverse elements as a whole: “…this beautiful realm of hers was held in her mind extended, or lengthened: it had been finite, bounded, known utterly and in every detail, self-enclosed…but now it lapped and rippled out and upwards beyond there into hinterlands that were like unknown possibilities in her own mind.”26 She is beginning to understand that external, “realworld” space, divided and fixed as it seems to be, is in fact a social and mental construction; the cartographic frontiers between the Zones have not moved, yet as Al Ith’s ideas and perceptions change she finds that the division of space is not so clear or absolute as it once was. Her perception changes reality, and in her role as queen and guide she is in a position to 23

Ibid., 77. Ibid., 79. 25 de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien: arts de faire, 173. 26 Lessing, The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five, 80. 24

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change the perception, and hence the reality, of others as well. Al Ith is drawn closer and closer to Zone Two, the misty, mountainous Blue Zone, until, one day, she does not return.27 Others follow her. Birth rates among people and animals have returned to normal, and people of Al Ith’s way of thinking came to be near her, unable to live in Zone Three as they had: Each one suffered from an inability to live in Zone Three as if it was, or could be, enough for them. Where others of us flourished unreflecting in this best of all worlds, they could see only hollowness. Fed on husks and expecting only emptiness, they were candidates for Zone Two before they knew it, and long before the road there had been opened up for them by Al Ith’s long vigil.28

And people from Zone Four come to Zone Three, and sometimes go in the opposite direction as well, a continual movement between the Zones: “There was a lightness, a freshness, and an enquiry and a remaking and an inspiration where there had been only stagnation. And closed frontiers. For this is how we all see it now.”29 Initial feelings of displacement are slowly being replaced by a feeling of belonging to humanity in a larger sense, not as a member of a particular geographic Zone, or gender, or other culturally-constructed group. A more universal, more androgynous perspective is replacing an ideological system based on binary opposition, as these enlightened people begin to realize that a subject is a function of the whole. Radical new spaces are being opened up, new spaces which create and change history, not without a good deal of displacement, alienation and suffering along the way. If what Lefebvre calls the space of jouissance does not yet exist, at least these people from the diverse Zones have not given up the search for real change.30 They understand, at least to a degree, that such an ideal space is not simply found, but made, created by people willing to consider humanity as a whole, not as insular and contented fragments. Like the Shikastan Link people, or the queen Al Ith, the representative of the title of The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982) must look beyond the current situation, in this case the physical extinction of the entire population of a dying planet. The residents of this formerly peaceful planet fall away from the utopian ideal as soon as their conditions begin to deteriorate as they undergo an ice age. Fear is predominant, competition 27

Ibid., 296-8. Ibid., 297. 29 Ibid., 299. 30 Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 194. 28

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for ever-scarcer resources begins, defensive groups form and violence rises. While waiting to die, the key characters literally change their identities as necessary, as a function of the group’s needs. While it is difficult, these people try to understand why they must resist the idea of a closed identity. Identity must always be understood as relational and representative in the largest possible context, and as the residents of Planet 8 die one by one, those who remain, those who go furthest in their understanding, come to recognize their errors of perception from their ordinary senses; they will see more clearly with their “new eyes” and will radically change their way of thinking as a result. The collective identity of these residents has been recovered, freed from any material anchors in a body or a geographic zone, to become an identity ultimately understood as both plural and one, but never fixed. Even death does not interrupt the evolution of identity, since the death of a person or even an entire planet is, after all, perfectly normal in a universe which is constantly changing. If the residents of Planet 8 have made the mistake of seeing their world as the totality to which they identify (as in Marriages), those who survive are led to a new way of seeing the ensemble, a way of defining their relation to the whole which does not depend on geography. The residents of Planet 8 are disoriented, and with good reason. Evolutionary change is so gradual as to be imperceptible to the subject, but the cataclysm which threatens the planet leaves relatively little time for adaptation. Disorientation becomes a tool, whether for the residents of Planet 8 or for the reader, by which Lessing hopes to create a space in which to look at things differently, to think more objectively by avoiding the simple, reflexive formulas of day-to-day routine. Lessing makes frequent use of such destabilizing situations, and Müge Galin (in a discussion of Lessing’s interest in Sufi philosophy) relates this technique to Sufi teaching stories: “The Sufi teaching story aims to shake the audience’s existing worldview to such a point that one stops looking at the world through any single lens. The story allows for no fixed points of reference, daring its audience to transcend rational boundaries.”31 The mental space thus created will, hopefully, allow for more critical, objective thinking, free from the “common sense” of everyday life and the influence of ideological inculcation. It is this sort of disorientation which is necessary if the teachings of Canopus are to be understood by the people on Planet 8, in order to comprehend the master plan of which Planet 8 is only a small part:

31

Galin, Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing, 103.

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Solidity, immobility, permanence—this was only how we with our Planet 8 eyes had to see things. Nowhere, said Canopus, was permanence, was immutability—not anywhere in the galaxy, or the universe. There was nothing that did not move and change. When we looked at a stone, we must think of it as a dance and a flow.32

Viewed as such, the fate of Planet 8 does not mean the death of a planet and its inhabitants, but a transition to another state of being, which in turn will evolve into yet another state of being.33 Rather than signal a cataclysmic final event, such transitions, Henri Lefebvre reminds us, always create new spaces,34 and Lessing’s novel ends with a similar situation, a frozen world which is not dead, but changing into something else: “a swirl of gases perhaps, or seas of leaping soil, or fire that had to burn until it, too, changed…must change…must become something else.”35 As the prevalence of intolerance, selfishness and violence rises, we recognize the status quo which Lessing warns against—another strategy for survival is possible, as we see later in the novel, and the difficult process of the death of a planet and its people becomes the training ground, the preparation, the “making” of the representative who learns another way to carry the promise forward. This waiting, this hope, this despair, is part of the formative struggle as the residents’ identities evolve in the midst of catastrophe: It is a very remarkable thing how ideas come into a mind, or minds: one minute we are thinking this or that, as if no other thought is possible to us; shortly after, there are quite different beliefs and possibilities inside our heads. Yet how did they get there? How do they arrive, these new notions, thoughts, ideas, beliefs, dispossessing the old ones, and to be dispossessed, of course, soon enough in their turn? I knew…changes were going on inside them that they were not conscious of.36

The ultimate goal, and the ostensible reason for all of the waiting, despair and formative struggle, is to teach the residents of Planet 8 that they are part of “an overall plan. A general Necessity,” an idea which is not so easily received.37 Through the struggle, “they” and “we” are 32

Lessing, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, 26. Ibid., 151-2. 34 Lefebvre, La production de l’espace, 58. 35 Lessing, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, 161. 36 Ibid., 142-3. 37 Ibid., 28. 33

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evolving, crossing once distinct boundaries as collective and individual identities change and develop, a mutation between the Representatives and those whom they represent. Collective and individual, or universal and specific, seem to merge into a unitary identity which refuses classification into distinct categories: “The thought in our minds was that they were being changed by what we were forced to do; that we were being changed by their being made to stay alive when they would so very much rather have drifted away from our common effort into death.”38 If the residents of Planet 8 are overwhelmed by the immensity of the universe and their implication within it, their real initiation to accommodating and imagining the impossible is when Canopus delivers to them a sort of microscope, which changes forever their perspective and removes any stable reference points they may have had: But then there was a change, and it was when you, Canopus, brought the instrument that made small things visible—yes, Canopus, that was when a certain kind of naturalness and pleasantness ended…we saw the substance of our bodies, and found that it vanished as we looked, and knew that we were a dance and a dazzle and a continual vibrating movement, a flowing. Knew that we were mostly space, and that when we touched our hands to our faces and felt flesh there, it was an illusion…39

Difficult though it may be, these people are learning new ways of seeing, and by extension new ways of thinking: Fromm reminds us that “it takes a long evolutionary process to arrive at objectivity.”40 The Planet 8 residents continue their learning process, becoming each other and freely exchanging identities as need be, asking themselves the continual question, “what am I, who am I, and what is my name? Or, what was our name?.”41 As they take the symbolic step of crossing to the other side of the wall (where they will die in the snow), they cross as well the final barrier to understanding who they are, for physical death provides them with “new eyes” with which to perceive the universe, and the first thing they notice is the beauty of the snow crystals which surround them, the same snowflakes which smothered Planet 8.42 Although they are physically dead, they still exist; like Planet 8, they have passed from one

38

Ibid., 136-7. Ibid., 123-4. 40 Fromm, The Sane Society, 65 (original italics). 41 Lessing, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8, 147. 42 Ibid., 156. 39

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state of being into another, a transition rather than a passage from life to death: …if we had lost what we had been, then we were still something, and moved on together, a group of individuals, yet a unity, and had to be, must be, patterns of matter, matter of a kind, since everything is—webs of matter or substance or something tangible, though sliding and intermingling and always becoming smaller and smaller—matter, a substance, for we were recognizing ourselves as existent; we were feelings, and thought, and will.43

As the Representatives are swept up and away, the question is still hovering, “Who went? And what was our name?”44 Ultimately, Canopus has kept its promise, by rescuing the core identity of the people of Planet 8, the collective, representational essence of identity stripped of what can now be seen as superfluous. Human bodies, an enormous wall, even the planet itself have revealed their impermanence and mutability, as identity is shown to transcend the need for such material anchors, continuing to exist as a collective “me / we” even in their absence. “We, the Representative, many and one,”45 have been taken to Canopus to continue the process of instruction and growth, since even the residents of Canopus are never really at their final destination; the movement never stops. The residents of Planet 8 have completed an especially difficult phase in their voyage toward understanding, passing through the predictable roles that we recognize, as members of competitive groups founded on fear. While none with their “old eyes” could have foreseen the result of their struggle and hardship, none with their “new eyes” would have refused the journey. New ways of seeing have resulted in a different conception of identity, away from a geographical form of social relations toward a sense of universal identity where individual and collective are inseparable, indifferent to the evolution of the material world, freed from the constraints of the status quo. In an interview with Margarete von Schwarzkopf, Doris Lessing reminds us that it is the “much longer story” of humanity which must be our preoccupation, and our place within this whole: “…I have long recognized that the salvation of this world cannot lie in any political ideology. All ideologies are deceptive and serve only a few, not people in

43

Ibid., 158. Ibid., 159. 45 Ibid., 161. 44

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general.”46 Lessing’s space fiction series identifies the universal problem—society’s division into competitive and predatory groups—and places it outside the bounds of time and space, encouraging a critique which takes into account our inherited blindness, our failure to unite faith and reason, our “degenerative disease” which must be addressed before positive social transformation can take place. The principal anxieties of our day—discrimination of all sorts, economic exploitation, war—are all symptoms of this underlying problem, namely that people are defined and identified by their place within certain groups, and if we are to improve our condition we must address this fundamental cause rather than simply treat the symptoms. Otherwise, we deceive ourselves with the rhetoric of change, all the while playing into the hand of an elite class of technocrats whose interests are served by the lack of a collective identity among people in general. Identity must be constructed as a function of our probability—incorporating the element of chance, recognizing the impossibility of localizing identity definitively and understanding the universal necessity of flow, impermanence and mutability of all matter. People, after all, are / do matter. Material anchors ground everyday reality, and Lessing’s space fiction does nothing if not insist that such hierarchies and group affiliations, which propose order and security at the price of isolation and conformity, must be abandoned if identity is to be understood on a universal basis, without credentials, without exclusion, and ultimately, without violence.

Works Cited Bazin, Nancy Topping. “Androgyny or Catastrophe: The Vision of Doris Lessing’s Later Novels.” Frontiers 5.3, Fall 1980. 10-15. de Certeau, Michel. L’invention du quotidien : arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Etzioni, Amitai. “L’Occident aussi a besoin d’un renouveau spirituel.” Le Monde. Samedi 7 avril 2007, page 18. Traduit de l’anglais par Myriam Dennehy. Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. New York: Fawcett, 1955 (by arrangement with Holt, Rinehart and Winston). Galin, Müge. Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

46

Schwarzkopf, “Placing their Fingers on the Wounds of our Times,” Doris Lessing: Conversations, 105.

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Gim Ean, Tan. “The Older I Get, the Less I Believe.” In Doris Lessing: Conversations, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1994. 200-3. First published in The New Strait Times (Kuala Lumpur), September 11, 1991. Hawkes, David. Ideology. London; New York: Routledge, 1996. Koestler, Arthur. The Ghost in the Machine. London: Arkana / Penguin, 1989. First published by Hutchinson and Co, 1967 —. The Sleepwalkers. London: Arkana / Penguin, 1989. First published by Hutchinson and Co, 1959. Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience. New York: Ballantine Books, 1967. Lee, Richard E. Life and Times of Cultural Studies: The Politics and Transformation of the Structures of Knowledge. Durham and London: Duke University Press; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003. Lefebvre, Henri. La production de l’espace. 4ème édition. Paris: Anthropos, 2000. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. London: Grafton Books, 1962. —. The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. London: Flamingo, 1994. First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1982. —. The Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five. London: Flamingo, 1994. First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1980. —. Shikasta. New York: Vintage Books, 1981. Schwarzkopf, Margarete von. “Placing their Fingers on the Wounds of our Times.” In Doris Lessing: Conversations, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll. Ontario Review Press: Critical Series / distributed by W. W. Norton and Company, New York, 2000. 102-8. Szasz, Thomas. Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1991. Weiner, Matthew. “Separation Anxiety.” International Herald Tribune. 21-2 April 2007, 6.

CONTRIBUTORS

Robert-Louis Abrahamson is Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Maryland University College’s European Division in the UK. He lectures in the Bible as literature, ancient and mediaeval mythic literature, fairy tales, Shakespeare, drama and theatre. He has co-authored two writing handbooks, and has written and spoken on the role of the imagination in integrating literary reading and spiritual growth. He has written on Stevenson’s Fables and has appeared in the Italian short film on the Fables: Ai minimi drammi: Tales of Moralities. His CD Journey through the Seasons: Meditations on the Five Chinese Healing Energies appeared in 2007. J. Jackson Barlow is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Politics at Juniata College, USA, where he teaches courses in Political Philosophy and US Constitutional Law. His published works and papers have covered topics as diverse as the political thought of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Law of War during the US Civil War, and civic education. He is preparing a volume of writings by American statesman Gouverneur Morris. In 199899 he was a Fulbright Lecturer in the Czech Republic; in 2007-08 he was the Garwood Visiting Fellow in the Politics Department at Princeton University, under the auspices of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. Isabelle Boof-Vermesse is a Senior Lecturer (maitre de conférences) at Lille III University, France, where she teaches American literature. A former student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she wrote her PhD dissertation on Raymond Chandler. She has published articles on Raymond Chandler, E. A. Poe, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Carver, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor, Edith Wharton and Katherine Mansfield. Her main interest and domain of research is detective fiction, California, postmodernism, and she is currently working on James Ellroy. Suzanne Bray is Professor of English Studies at Lille Catholic University in France. She specialises in the areas of history of ideas and literature and theology, mainly in Britain, during the 20th century. Her PhD dissertation

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examined the success of four Christian authors (G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis and Dorothy L. Sayers) during the period 1900 to 1963. She publishes extensively in both French and English and her latest book, C. S. Lewis: la vocation d’un best-seller, was published by Imago in October 2007. Nora Clark is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the European University Cyprus, Nicosia. She represents Cyprus on the International Byron Council. Her thematic areas of research and publication include Byron and the Near East, British/French Romantic verse, Latin poets and Cyprus, Near Eastern travel writing (16th–19th century), the language and literature of topos, and literary motifs of faith, apostasy and pilgrimage. Jacques Coulardeau has academic interests in linguistics, American literature and cultural studies, especially cultural and linguistic research from the ninth to the twenty-first Anglo-Saxon centuries. His research also includes Germanic, African, and recently Sri Lankan, Indian, Pali and Sanskrit linguistics and cultures, and a strong emphasis on multimedia arts, science and technology, music and art, and spirituality and religion. He has taught as a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Davis, in Ngiri Ngiri High School and Cours Descartes in Kinshasa, at the Universities of Bordeaux III, Lille III, Perpignan, Paris Dauphine, Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne, and has spoken at some eighty conferences worldwide. He has two Doctorates, one in general and Germanic linguistics, and one in the didactics of foreign languages, particularly English. He contributes to a dozen journals or publications, including Cercles, Théâtre du Monde, Duels en Scène, Forum, La Tribune des Langues Vivantes, Les Langues Modernes, AsP, and has published in the daily press and on radio. Daniel Gabelman is a PhD student at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, where he is a member of the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts. His thesis is an investigation of the relationship between levity (i.e., non-serious modes of expression) and theology with a particular emphasis on the fantastical works of George MacDonald. Adrienne E. Gavin is a Reader in English Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK where she specializes in Victorian Literature, Children’s Literature, and Crime Fiction. She is author of Dark Horse: A Life of Anna Sewell (Sutton, 2004), the proposal for which won the

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Biographers’ Club Prize 2000, and co-editor of Mystery in Children’s Literature: From the Rational to the Supernatural (Palgrave, 2001) and Childhood in Edwardian Fiction: Worlds Enough and Time (Palgrave, forthcoming). She is currently working on a scholarly edition of Caroline Clive’s 1855 crime novel Paul Ferroll to be published by Valancourt Books. Bradford Haas is currently the Director of the Honors Program and a member of the English faculty at Columbia Union College, USA, where he received the 2007 President’s Award for Outstanding Professional Activities. As a contributing editor for the webzine FlashPoint, Professor Haas has worked to promote modernism in the arts through a number of articles and reviews on figures such as Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Basil Bunting, David Jones, Ronald Johnson, Melvin Tolson and Morris Cox. He is currently working to finish his doctoral thesis at the University of Warwick titled The Word Made Flesh: Literary Mythmaking in the Modern Era. Peter Merchant gained his doctorate at Cambridge University and has worked since 1983 at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, where he is Subject Leader for English. A Victorian specialist, he is the editor of three Wordsworth Classics (A Tale of Two Cities, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and The Way We Live Now) and has contributed essays to journals including The Dickensian, Dickens Quarterly, Victorian Poetry, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, and Recusant History. Joanny Moulin is Professor of English Literature at the University of Provence (Aix-Marseille I), France, where he teaches English poetry and literary history. He is the author of several books on Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Robert Burns, Derek Walcott, W. B. Yeats, biographer of Ted Hughes and translator of some of his poems in Anthologie bilingue de la poésie anglaise. Elizabeth Muller has a BA from the University of Colorado, Boulder and obtained all her other diplomas at the Sorbonne in Paris. She is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Nantes in France where she teaches literature and translation. She is primarily a Yeatsian scholar with a slant in comparative literature, being a Hellenist as well. Her PhD dissertation was on “Yeats and Hellenism” (2003) and she published in November 2007 a guide on Yeats intended for the students preparing the Agrégation (Yeats, collection Clefs concours, Neuilly: Editions Atlande). She has

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published articles including: “Yeats and the Figure of the Bard,” “Highroads and Lowroads in Yeats’s Dramatic Production: In and Out of Attic Tragedy,” and “Reshaping Chaos: Platonic Elements in Yeats’s A Vision and Later Poetry.” She is also working on the publication of her thesis by UCC Press. With Meg Mills-Harper, in collaboration with the University of Lille and Emory University, Atlanta, she is organizing a joint conference for the anniversary of Yeats’s death in 2009. Mari Niitra is a PhD student in semiotics at Tartu University, Estonia. Her main subject of interest is children’s literature. She is interested in folklore and mythological elements in children’s books, as well as the social dimensions of children’s literature and children’s cognitive development. She has published articles about metaphors, the role of proper names in children’s books and contemporary Estonian children’s literature. She is one of the authors of the Dictionary of Children's Literature (Lastekirjanduse sõnastik, 2006). Rod Rosenquist is Senior Lecturer at Newbold College (Berkshire, England), specializing in twentieth-century literature and contemporary writing. His research interests include innovation as the dominant aesthetic in the modernist period and the effect of this on late modernism. He is the author of Modernism, the Market and the Institution of the New, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, and is currently developing papers on literary memoirs of the 1930s and on literary belief in postmodernist fiction. Deborah Sarbin is a member of the English faculty at Clarion University, USA. Her PhD was completed at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Research interests include pedagogy, spirituality and literature, and contemporary Irish and British literature. Previous publications have addressed the work of Harold Pinter, Eavan Boland, and the dynamics of introductory literature classrooms. Evans Lansing Smith is the author of eight books and numerous articles on comparative mythology and literature. He has a BA from Williams College, Massachusetts; an MA from Antioch International (Dublin and London); and a PhD. from The Claremont Graduate School in California. He travelled with the late Joseph Campbell, on study tours of northern France, Egypt, and Kenya, and he studied literature at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. He was nominated for “International Writer of the Year 2003” by the International Biographical Centre in Cambridge,

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England. He has taught at colleges in California, Switzerland, and Maryland, and is currently Professor of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas, and Adjunct Professor of Mythological Studies at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. His book James Merrill: Postmodern Magus is soon to be published by The University of Iowa Press. Daniel Warzecha teaches English in Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3 University, France. He is writing a PhD thesis on C. S. Lewis, which deals with the connections between the Christian faith and his works of fiction. David Waterman is a Reader (MCF, HDR) at the University of La Rochelle, France, and a member of the research team CLIMAS (Literature and Cultures in the English-Speaking World) at the Michel de Montaigne University, Bordeaux III, France. His publications include Disordered Bodies and Disrupted Borders: Representations of Resistance in Modern British Literature (University Press of America, 1999), Le miroir de la société: la violence institutionnelle chez Anthony Burgess, Doris Lessing et Pat Barker (Longo Editore Ravenna, 2003), and Identity in Doris Lessing’s Space Fiction (Cambria Press, 2006).

INDEX

Achilles, 165-167, 172, 173 Adam, 254, 26n. 36 Adonis, 120, 150, 200, 203, 206, 214, 215, 220, 211n. 5 Alighieri, Dante, 74, 87-102 America (United States), 1, 6-16, 129, 256 Annist, August, 34, 36, 41, 46 Annus, Epp, 35, 36, 46 Antigone, 167-169, 172, 173 Aphrodite, 158, 193-210, 214 Apocalypto, 253 Apollo, 159, 177, 196, 206, 210228, 221n. 47, 222n. 49, 50, 51 Argos, 159, 257, 258 Ariadne, 3, 4, 52, 55n. 39, 56-58, 60, 61, 160, 164 Aristotle, 170 Armstrong, Karen, 4 Arnold, Matthew, 160, 161, 196, 238-241 Arthur, 140, 141 Athena, 211, 217, 218, 224, 225, 223n. 55 Bacchus, 28, 57, 58, 215, 224, 202n. 22, 222n. 49 Back to the Future, 250, 252 Balder, 20, 21, 23, 25, 117n. 9 Barker, Paul, 71 Barthes, Roland, 178, 191 Baum, L. Frank, 1, 2, 4, 6-16 * Wizard of Oz, The, 6-16 Beowulf, 79 Blackmore, R. D., 228-242 * Lorna Doone, 232, 233, 236, 238 Blumenberg, Hans, 179, 180, 190, 192 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 194, 195, 208 Borges, Jorge Luis, 165, 175

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 238, 241 Bunyan, John, 18, 128 * Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 128 Byron, Lord, 84, 198, 208, 195n. 7 Campbell, Joseph, 175, 273, 171n. 50 Camus, Albert, 88, 102, 158 Carrington, Leonora, 170, 175 Cassirer, Ernst, 191, 179n. 3 Catullus, 207, 208 Chesterton, G. K., 79, 85, 105, 114 Christ (Jesus), 2, 22, 25, 27, 28, 74, 75, 83, 104, 105, 111, 113, 122, 139, 149, 151-154, 172, 177, 178, 196, 200-211, 214, 218, 246, 253 Cocteau, Jean, 164, 166, 169, 170, 172, 175 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 77, 78, 84, 85 Creon, 168 Crow, 177, 180 de Certeau, Michel, 259, 262, 268 Derrida, Jacques, 103, 108, 113 Dionysus, 58, 158, 210-227, 219n. 37, 222n. 49, 50, 51 Donne, John, 229, 241 Durrell, Lawrence, 207, 208 Eliade, Mircea, 48, 148, 155 Eliot, T. S., 127-143, 162, 175, 187, 230 * Murder in the Cathedral, 129, 133 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 15, 16 England, 4, 63, 68, 69, 129-131, 138, 203 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 114 Eros, 150, 225

276 Essays Presented to Charles Williams, 77 Estonia, 1, 2, 3, 32-47 Eucatastrophe, 17, 75, 77, 81-83, 85, 117 Euripides, 151, 210-227 * Bacchae, The, 151, 216, 219, 226 Eve, 135, 136, 254 Faehlmann, Friedrich Robert, 3, 3247 * Kalevipoeg (Kalev’s Son), 3, 36 Faustus/Faust, 131-133, 135, 159, 238, 243-247, 254 Fenrir, 22, 27 France, 230 Frazer, Sir James, 213, 214, 227, 219n. 38, 220n. 41 * Golden Bough, The, 219n. 38, 220n. 41, 231, 227 Fromm, Erich, 256, 266, 268 Genesis, 80, 147, 245, 253, 254 Germany, 127, 134, 138, 142 Giono, Jean, 159, 228-242 * Regain, 159, 228-242 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 132, 243, 254 Grail (Holy), 140, 141 Graves, Robert, 61, 227, 55n. 39, 215n. 22, 216n. 25, 217n. 29, 219n. 35, 220n. 41, 221n. 47, 222n. 49 Greece, 213-215 Hades, 162, 169, 175, 219, 231 Hardy, Thomas, 239, 242 Helen of Troy, 132 Hermes, 169, 175, 207 Herodotus, 186, 187, 205, 206, 210227, 222n. 50 Hesiod, 211n. 4, 213, 227 Hippolytus (Hippolyte), 164, 165 Holy Ghost, 148, 149 Homer, 94, 194, 195, 200, 213 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 233, 242 Housman, A. E., 198, 209 Hughes, Ted, 49, 61, 158, 177, 180, 191, 272

Index Inklings, The, 19, 79, 85, 118n. 10 Ireland, 224 Italy, 198 Joyce, James, 82, 86, 94, 189, 183n. 10 Jung, Carl, 49 Keats, John, 236-238, 242 Koestler, Arthur, 256, 257, 269 Kreutzwald, Friedrich Reinhold, 3, 32, 34-41, 44-46 Lacan, Jacques, 52 Leda, 55, 57, 60 Lessing, Doris, 160, 161, 256-269 * Canopus in Argos, 159, 256-258 Lévy, Bernard-Henri, 246, 254 Lewis, C. S., 2-4, 17-31, 48, 73-75, 79, 86, 103, 113-126, 128, 129, 134-139, 141, 142 * Allegory of Love, The, 121n. 16 * Chronicles of Narnia, The, 2, 1731 * Horse and His Boy, The, 22, 25, 28 * Last Battle, The,28, 19n. 9 * Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The, 20-26, 28 * Magician’s Nephew, The, 22, 23, 25-28 * Mere Christianity, 29, 124 * Perelandra, 134, 136-139 * Prince Caspian, 22-25, 27 * Silver Chair, The, 21-25, 27, 119 * Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The, 22, 24-28 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 74, 115, 126, 145-147 MacDonald, George, 75, 103-114 * Adela Cathcart, 75, 104, 107n. 21 * Light Princess, The, 75, 103-114, 107n. 21 Made, Reet, 3, 4, 32, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46 Maenads, 28, 151, 213, 216, 221 Mahy, Margaret, 3, 4, 48-62 * Tricksters, The, 3, 4, 48-52, 54, 61 Maitland, Sara, 3, 4, 63-71

Re-Embroidering the Robe: Faith, Myth and Literary Creation since 1850 277 * Three Times Table, 3, 4, 63, 71 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 158, 203, 204, 205, 207, 209 Marion, Jean-Luc, 74, 152, 153, 155 Mary Magdalen (Marie-Madeleine), 167, 168, 170-175 Medea, 58 Medusa, 175 Mephistopheles, 132, 133, 244, 246 Metropolis, 249 Minotaur, 56-58, 165, 173, 55n. 39 Mordred, 140, 141 New Zealand, 1, 3, 48, 49, 51, 52 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 103, 105, 114 O’Connor, Flannery, 74, 144-155 Odin, 22-26 Oedipus, 90, 167 Olson, Charles, 158, 178, 182, 184, 187, 188, 190 Orpheus, 221, 222 Osiris, 183, 211, 221n. 47, 222n.50 Ovid, 54, 56, 194 Pandora, 57 Pater, Walter, 213, 214, 227 Phaedra (Phèdre), 163-165, 168, 171-173 Plato, 186, 213, 225, 227 Plutarch, 227, 238, 222n. 51 Poseidon, 175 Pound, Ezra, 158, 177-192 Prometheus, 150 Psyche, 150 Pullman, Philip, 1, 5 Rhea, 214, 216, 225 Sappho, 173, 174, 175, 194, 198, 199, 209 Satan, 65, 69, 134, 137, 243, 244 Sayers, Dorothy L., 75, 91, 94, 102, 127-143, 271 * Devil to Pay, The, 129, 132 Schwerner, Armand, 178, 182, 187191, 188n. 21 Tablet, The, 187-190 Seferis, George, 158, 205, 207, 208, 209 Siegfried, 18

Silenus, 28 Socrates, 172, 173 St Thomas Aquinas, 88n. 3, 102 St. George, 63, 68, 69 St. Margaret, 4, 63, 64, 66-71 Steiner, Rudolf, 85, 86 Styx, The, 165, 169 Sufi, 257, 258, 261, 264 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 158, 195, 197-203, 207, 209 Symons, Arthur, 205, 209 Tennyson, Alfred, 160, 161 Terminator, The, 252-254 Theseus, 4, 57, 58, 172, 55n. 39 Thor, 20, 22 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 9, 16 Tolkien, J .R. R., 18, 20, 50, 51, 74, 75, 77-86, 103, 114-126, 180 * Lord of the Rings, The, 50 77-79, 81, 83, 86 * On Fairy Stories, 77, 117, 120 * Tree and Leaf, 121n. 16 Ulysses, 94, 162, 176 Virgin Mary, 171 Wells, H. G., 247-250, 254 * Time Machine, The, 247-249 Williams, Charles, 73-75, 79, 87102, 129, 139-141, 143 * All Hallows’ Eve, 95 * Descent into Hell, 73, 74, 87-102 * Region of the Summer Stars, The, 129, 139, 140 * Taliessin Through Logres, 129, 139 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 179, 192 Wordsworth, William, 30, 102, 157, 160, 161, 252, 272 Yeats, W. B., 158-161, 195, 204, 210-227, 236, 238, 272, 273 * Autobiographies, 217n. 31, 218, 223n. 31 * A Vision, 211, 213, 273 * The Resurrection, 212-214, 217218 Yggdrasil(l), 20, 78

278 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 157-159, 162-176 * Feux (Fires), 157, 162-176

Index Zeus, 55, 194, 195, 210, 216, 217, 215n. 21