The Productions of Time: A Study of the Human Imagination 9780228005582, 9780228006473, 9780228006480

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Acknowledgments

THE PRODU CT IONS OF T IME

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mcgill-queen’s refugee and forced migration studies Series editors: Megan Bradley and James Milner Forced migration is a local, national, regional, and global challenge with profound political and social implications. Understanding the causes and consequences of, and possible responses to, forced migration requires careful analysis from a range of disciplinary perspectives, as well as interdisciplinary dialogue. The purpose of the McGill-Queen’s Refugee and Forced Migration Studies series is to advance in-depth examination of diverse forms, dimensions, and experiences of displacement, including in the context of conflict and violence, repression and persecution, and disasters and environmental change. The series will explore responses to refugees, internal displacement, and other forms of forced migration to illuminate the dynamics surrounding forced migration in global, national, and local contexts, including Canada, the perspectives of displaced individuals and communities, and the connections to broader patterns of human mobility. Featuring research from fields including politics, international relations, law, anthropology, sociology, geography, and history, the series highlights new and critical areas of enquiry within the field, especially conversations across disciplines and from the perspective of researchers in the global South, where the majority of forced migration unfolds. The series benefits from an international advisory board made up of leading scholars in refugee and forced migration studies. 1 The Criminalization of Migration Context and Consequences Edited by Idil Atak and James C. Simeon

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THE PRODUCTIONS OF TIME A Study of the Human Imagination

MICH AEL DOLZ ANI

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 isbn 978-0-2280-0558-2 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0647-3 (epdf) isbn 978-0-2280-0648-0 (epub) Legal deposit first quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The productions of time : a study of the human imagination / Michael Dolzani. Names: Dolzani, Michael, 1951– author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200348345 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200348418 | isbn 9780228005582 (cloth) | isbn 9780228006473 (epdf) | isbn 9780228006480 (epub) Subjects: lcsh: Mythology in literature. | lcsh: Criticism. Classification: lcc pn56.m95 d65 2021 | ddc 809/.915—dc23

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

Acknowledgments

To the Merry Band: Stacey Clemence Bonney Harnish Robert Klips Dennis McCurdy K.C. Smith

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Editions Cited xi Overture: Concerning Mandala Symbolism: The Symbol with and without Meaning xiii Introduction: The State of Criticism at the Present Time 3 PART ONE FIRST THERE IS A MOUNTAIN : THE VERTICAL AXIS ASCENDING

I II III IV V

Revelation, or Imagination 25 Emanation 84 Creation 94 Scripture as Creation 104 “Our Great Salvation from Above”: Traditional Mythology and the Point of Transcendence 115

PART TWO

I II III IV V VI

Paradise 127 The Fall 139 The Fallen World of Cyclical Time: Law and Sacrifice Tragedy 178 Comedy 191 The Form of Drama 207

PART THREE

I II

THERE IS A SEASON : THE CYCLE

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THE EYE BEGINS TO SEE : THE HORIZONTAL AXIS

The Affirmation of the Cycle 213 The Progressive Vision 218

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III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX XXI

Contents

What the Hammer? The Forge of Language 222 The Ironic Cycle and the Clarification of Vision 227 The Recreation of Evolution: Hunting Cultures 231 The Recreation of Evolution: Gathering and Planting Cultures 235 The Mythology of Urban Civilization and Empire 239 The Progressive Vision of the Bible: The Trickster God 242 The Progressive Vision of the Bible: Letter and Spirit 245 The Progressive Vision of the Bible: Typology 246 The Progressive Vision in Classical Mythology 249 The Middle Ages and Renaissance: Romantic and Spiritual Heroes 258 Shakespearean Tragicomedy or Romance 265 Summary and Prelude: The Historical Nexus of Romanticism 267 In the White Giant’s Thigh: Romantic and Anti-Romantic 272 Prometheus Agonistes: German Idealism and Marxism 297 Romantic Internalization 310 The Novel: The Realistic Horizontal 317 The Historical Novel and Science Fiction 323 The Novel as Epic 329 The Lyric as Epic 330

PART FOUR

I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV

YOU WANT IT DARKER : THE VERTICAL AXIS DESCENDING

Decreation and the Descent Quest 333 Decreative Realism 341 Creative Non-fiction: Surface and Depth 344 The Lyric: Surface and Depth 346 The Decreation Myth of Language 350 The Otherworld: Traditional and Dark Romance 366 The Sublime 376 The Urban Otherworld 378 The Demonic: The Principle of Negation 382 The Pluralistic Afterlife 385 Nothing 387 Reversal 389 Satire and Apocalypse 391 Satire, Laughter, and the Redemption of Time 397

Notes 405 Index 435

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Acknowledgments

In a very real way, this book has taken me a lifetime to write. It is what Northrop Frye calls an anatomy, an encyclopaedic work, and it anatomizes almost everything I have read and thought about in a long life. A small group of kindred spirits, to whom this book is dedicated, has known me through much of that period. Their genial tolerance of my unceasing preoccupation, over decades, with literature, mythology, and depth psychology, with certain writers in particular, and with certain issues; and their faith in me and this project, even when almost all they knew about it was my obsession with it, have made it possible for me to complete a work that at times seemed, and may well be, absurdly overambitious. One of them is both friend and life partner: Stacey Clemence not only managed to live patiently with me while I was writing but also read parts of the manuscript, caught errors, and made suggestions. In addition, she kindly employed her computer skills to rectify various issues of formatting that the author would have found maddening to wrestle with on his own. To these long-time companions has been added recently another source of inspiration, friendship, love, and support, Sandral Goodings, whom I only wish I had met earlier. And now we are seven. I owe a more specific debt to four fellow scholars, Bob Denham, Graham Forst, Jeffery Donaldson, and Adam Carter, who read the entire manuscript with painstaking care. When the folder with his comments disappeared from my computer, Graham went through the manuscript a second time and reproduced them. These four readers not only pointed out mistakes and informed me when transitions in my sometimes labyrinthine arguments were harder to follow than they should be, but each also made creative suggestions that inspired me both to clarify my own thinking and to develop it further in ways that would not have

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occurred to me without their stimulus. This was particularly true of Adam Carter, whose reading of the original manuscript was so thoughtfully, relentlessly sceptical that it impelled me to rewrite the entire book from the ground up, transforming it immeasurably for the better. To compare small things with great, he performed a role comparable to that of Carlos Baker as reader for the original manuscript of Frye’s Fearful Symmetry (first pub. 1947), thereby demonstrating something of what Blake meant when he said that opposition is true friendship. This quaternity of readers has been the fourfold Muse of this book, although that does not make them responsible for its remaining limitations, which are the limitations of its author. Thanks to Adam Noble for creating cosmos out of chaos by translating my messy sketch into the diagram of the mandala. Everyone at McGill-Queen’s University Press involved with this present production of time was a pleasure to work with, including Kathleen Fraser and Filomena Falocco. Special thanks to David Drummond, who in conjunction with Elena Goranescu designed the wonderful cover. As a vision of order, my mandala diagram floats up like a golden egg from the unfathomable depths of the unconscious, whose creative process is often symbolized by water, the most recurrent image of my dreams. Thanks also to my copy editor John Parry, who acted as a textual personal trainer tightening flabby prose into something lean and muscular. But my greatest debt is to Mark Abley, who as my editor coached me through a major revision with just the right balance of critical acumen and moral support. I am enormously lucky that my manuscript ended up in his capable hands. Finally, I am grateful to Baldwin Wallace University for its recognition of my scholarship throughout my academic career, and specifically for a Faculty Development Grant that aided me in completing the writing. August 2020

Foreword

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Editions Cited

The following editions have been used for frequently cited authors. In parenthetical citations within the text, cp stands for Collected Poems or Complete Poems, P for Poems. Quotations from Blake are cited as E (Erdman) plus the page number. Quotations from Shakespeare are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 4th ed (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). The notes at the back of the book contain many citations from The Collected Works of Northrop Frye (cw).

cp Auden, W.H. Collected Poems. Ed. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House, 1976. Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1969. – Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957. – Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972. – Thomas, Dylan. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas. New York: New Directions, 1957. cw Frye, Northrop. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 30 vols. Various editors. General editor Alvin Lee. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996–2012. E Blake, William. The Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V. Erdman. Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1965. P Yeats. William Butler. The Poems of W.B. Yeats. A new edition. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1983. –

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OVERT U RE

Concerning Mandala Symbolism: The Symbol with and without Meaning

My title is a double reference. “Concerning Mandala Symbolism” is the title of an essay by C.G. Jung, the writer most influential in drawing attention to the mandala as a central mythological and literary symbol. “The Symbol without Meaning” is the title of an essay by Joseph Campbell, taking issue with some of Jung’s conclusions about the mandala, especially his view of it as a kind of final, containing symbol. Campbell’s position is that there is no such thing as an ultimate, all-encompassing symbol. I affirm that view entirely, while still making the mandala my map of the mythological and literary universe, and I think both Jung and Campbell would validate my procedure. Their perspectives are not antagonistic but complementary. Eastern mandalas typically seem to consist of a series of nested circles and squares. Out of a centre springs a fourfold square shape, often identified as a city or fortress with four walls (and, in the Book of Revelation, three gates per wall: the twelve-gated city of the New Jerusalem). That square is in turn contained within a circle whose boundaries represent those of the cosmos itself. The spatial image of containment is paramount. I am the editor of Northrop Frye’s Third Book notebooks (1964–72), which offer a different visualization of the mandala, whimsically referred to by its creator as “the Great Doodle”: instead of four walls, there is a circle divided by a cross-shape into four quadrants, designated by the names of four presiding deities: Hermes, Eros, Adonis, Prometheus, or what in his notebooks he called “the heap scheme.”1 This crossedcircle shape seems more common in Western mythology and literature, perhaps influenced by the crossed-circle symbol of the solar wheel that goes back to the Neolithic combined with the Christian cross. In Dante’s Paradiso, crossed circles or circular shapes united with linear appear every-

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where, along with the imagery of light, culminating in the final vision of God himself as three circles within which is the figure of a man in cruciform shape. Dylan Thomas’s early poetry is full of crossed-circle mandala symbols, as I have shown elsewhere. Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is a circular narrative divided into four sections. Frye never wrote the Third Book: instead, he quarried his material for what became Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (1990), which stacked these four quadrants as an ascending / descending vertical axis. Chapters 5–8 of Words with Power concern respectively the Hermes, Eros, Adonis, and Prometheus clusters of imagery, from top to bottom. Because I edited The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972 for the Collected Works of Northrop Frye, and the Collected Works version of Words with Power, the four parts of the present work may seem to correspond to the fourfold division in those two volumes. And yet I find it is not really so: even though all the parts are there, and despite Frye’s profound influence on me, I have my own purposes, which are more temporal than spatial, more oriented to transformation and change than to spatial stability. I do have my own fourfold organization, reflected in the four parts of this book. Before them comes an introduction that acts like Blake’s “Preludium”: his shorter Prophecy Milton serves as Preludium to his longer, fourfold Jerusalem. Perhaps it could also be thought of as a Kantian Prolegomenon, or a discourse on method. My four parts, however, are intended to be flow charts as well as loci or topoi. Part 1 concerns the emanation from a central Monad of a vertical axis between two poles. In the course of intellectual and mythological history, these poles have been given many names, including Plenitude and Vacancy, Being (or All) and Nothingness, and, of course, Heaven and Hell. In the vocabulary of this book, they are the poles of Identity and Difference. The vertical axis between them is the axis mundi of many mythologies. However, these poles are also the top and bottom of the larger circle, which represents the cycle of spirit, as the inner circle represents the cycle of nature. “Spirit” is an invisible dimension beyond ordinary reality. Its relationship to nature or ordinary reality is both transcendent and immanent: it is both supernatural, above and beyond nature, and the realm within which nature and natural creatures are comprehended, in which we live and move and have our being. Hence the further designation of the apex and nadir as the Point of Transcendence and the Point of Immanence respectively. This circle is eternity, but timelessness is only one way of conceiving it, for it is also a process, defined

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by the other two key terms of this book, decreation and recreation. Like the points of a compass, identity and difference are North and South respectively, while decreation may be associated with the West, where the sun disappears into darkness, and recreation with the East, where it rises at dawn. But that is really for convenience of reference: decreation and recreation might more accurately be drawn as arrows pointing towards nadir and zenith respectively. They are processes keeping identity and difference in constant transformation. The cycle of the spirit is one way of speaking about God. But, as Wallace Stevens observes, “We say that God and the imagination are one … / How high that highest candle lights the dark” (cp, 524). With notable qualifications, it represents what M.H. Abrams, one of the presiding Muses of the present endeavour, called “the Great Circle” in his magisterial Natural Supernaturalism, whose theme is the Romantic and postRomantic modulation of this pattern from its monistic form in the Neoplatonic tradition – assimilated in the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the circular form of the Biblical narrative, the falling away from and return to the divine source – to an open-ended pattern, no longer a circle but a spiral, beginning in Unity, falling into Multiplicity, and ending but also beginning anew in what Coleridge calls “Multeity-in-Unity.” This mythical pattern is a key not only to Romantic literature but to that era’s philosophy, particularly Schelling’s, perhaps the profoundest philosopher of mythology after Vico and before the twentieth century. Our outermost circumference also resembles what Joseph Campbell calls “the Cosmogonic Cycle” in the second and lesser-read half of The Hero with a Thousand Faces. His Monomyth of the individual hero’s quest is congruent with the inner circle symbolizing the temporal cycle and is thus contained within the larger circle of the universal Cosmogonic Cycle. Like Abrams, Campbell finds the recognizably modern form of that cycle emerging in the Alexandrian milieu of the Hellenistic period, where he defines it as “syncretic monotheism,” whose unifying capacity is suggested in his famous titles, The Hero with a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God. Campbell differs from Abrams, however, in two ways to be discussed later: he universalizes the pattern beyond any single historical context into the form of mythology itself, and he jumps directly from the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the modern period, almost entirely ignoring the crucial changes the cyclical pattern underwent as part of the Romantic revolution. Part 2 of this book examines the inner circle representing the cycles of natural time. It distinguishes between the unfallen and fallen states of the

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natural world. In the unfallen state, the upper pole is the paradisal, and the lower an uncanny yet surprisingly common counterpart of the paradisal that I have called the “Otherworld.” The ascent from the top of the inner circle – the paradisal – to the top of the outer circle – the spiritual or heavenly – is the ascent of the spiritualization of matter spoken of by Milton in Book 5 of Paradise Lost. But after the Fall, this ascent is rendered difficult and problematic. A different kind of vertical structure replaces it: the hierarchical one of law and ideology, of the Chain of Being and all its political implications. The Fall also perverts the natural cycle into Darwinian competition, the survival of the fittest, with ominous consequences for human society, including tribalism and scapegoating, the negative form of sacrifice. The form of literature most closely related to both the cultural rigours of law and ideology and the natural cycle of fallen time is drama, whose traditional tragic and comic plot patterns disclose affinities to ritual and death-and-rebirth sacrifice, even if such affinities do not necessarily derive directly from religious ritual. The subject of part 3 is the horizontal axis of linear time, within which may occur the process of recreation of a previous vision, which was the central theme of Frye’s historically minded Fearful Symmetry (1947) yet dropped out of the synchronic vision of Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In Western literature, the major vehicle of this theme is the epic tradition. Part 4 follows the vertical axis downward, first from ordinary reality to the Otherworld that underlies it, then further into the realm of the unthinkable and unspeakable realm of Nothing, the Nadir. The centre of gravity of parts 1 and 2 is traditional pre-Romantic literature: that of parts 3 and 4 is Romantic and post-Romantic. Part 4 is in particular a crowded bus, with a great number of modern and contemporary literary forms being related to the descent journey. The reader is urged not to worry overmuch if none of this is perfectly clear at this point. I offer it merely as a rough sketch of the journey to come, to propose that, yes, there really is a forest, not merely a proliferation of trees. The overture suggests the themes that will be worked out in the body of a symphony. In 1957, Joseph Campbell broke with the mandala preoccupations of the Jungian camp: “The Symbol without Meaning” praises the shaman’s vertical flight beyond the timid order-obsessions of priestly drawers of mandala structure.2 But he not only admits but implicitly celebrates the resulting dimension of flight and freedom beyond the mandala diagram of his own Monomyth. This discovery has its relevance to the outer circle of my diagram, which is not still another mandala but the process or energy or creative power of imagination that comprehends, in all senses, but

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also decreates and recreates all mandalas. It signifies the entirety that unites all the loci and processes of the total diagram and of this book. What if we could think this, all at once, the whole diagram? We cannot. Why? Because the outer circle is also one whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere: it represents a transcendent mystery that no system of thought can master, manifesting itself as a Trickster spirit who delights in kicking over every house of cards a critical Demiurge can build, keeping things open ended. It is the motley juggler who keeps everything up in the air, in polymorphous, polyvalent play. Alchemically, it is Mercurius, the Hermes who is both the god of hermeneutics and the god of thieves. It is the spirit of paradox, its circular path a via negativa without a ground, bent rather around into the ouroboros serpent that swallows itself. Yet it is also the spirit of the most childlike, abiding wonder. For the ouroboros has often been misinterpreted. Is the snake swallowing itself into nothingness – or is it giving birth to itself eternally?

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The only mandala worth having is impossible, undefinable. But such a mandala can be experienced – something to live by, so to speak, our compass on the seas of chaos, as well as the constellations we navigate by in this darkness. And it can be written. Three writers who have influenced me most profoundly have tried to do so: Blake, Joyce in Finnegans Wake, and Dylan Thomas. Each of these writers has been influenced by his predecessor in a manner characterized in part 3. And here I am at the end of the line, unworthy but willing.

Acknowledgments

THE PRODU CT IONS OF T IME

If you go to thinking, take your heart with you. C.G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus

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Sound and Noise

Introduction

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I N T RO D U C T I O N

The State of Criticism at the Present Time Eternity is in love with the productions of Time. (E, 36) The Ruins of Time builds Mansions in Eternity. (E,705) William Blake

This book begins by asking why so many readers and writers are interested in mythology, thereby raising a question about its audience. Presently, that audience does not include most academics in my own field. Since the short-lived heyday of “myth criticism” in the 1960s, the conventional opinion has been that myth criticism is, or was, a combination of bad scholarship and cultural imperialism, or what one writer has called “the voice of authority.”1 One of the purposes of the following discussion of the present book is to confront rather than avoid such allegations, to admit what is undeniably true in them, rebut what is wrong or wrongheaded, and make a case for a study of mythology, literature, society, and their inter-relationship that is not reductive. The book-length discussion that follows is intended to be more than merely an argument, for I am not interested in “winning” an argument, much less in provoking a verbal war of the sort that dominated literary theory through much of the 1970s and 1980s. Still, any statement is an assertion and, as such, needs to be challenged. Writing is purgatorial: what we create needs to be tried by fire, so that the dross may be vaporized and the true metal refined. My best hope is to find, within the academic world, an audience that, through patience and good will, may be interested enough to engage with me, thus inaugurating a conversation. I do not seek agreement, at least not primarily or past a point, for there are things more precious than agreement, as Blake knew when he wrote that “Opposition is true Friendship” (E, 41). That’s not true of all opposition, but one may learn more from respectful, spirited disagreement than from

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easy consensus. Indeed, such back and forth – the root meaning of “conversation” – is the only kind of consensus possible or desirable in the humanities, or in any community in this fallen world. The sentiment is not some kind of contemporary relativism or scepticism: Milton said as much in Areopagitica in 1644. What then holds the community together? Exactly what Milton said united it: the common root out of which we grow, on a level far below logical argument, ideological conflicts, and personal differences of vision and temperament. To seek the nature of that common root is one of the purposes of this study. There will be plenty who say that no such common root exists, but so long as they are willing to engage in dialogue, we remain bound together by something. It is only when dialogue fails that oppression and violence begin. I say this at the outset because the charge most frequently levelled against myth criticism is that of wishing to terminate dialogue by reducing all human culture to a single, unvarying pattern. Mind you, I have my common pattern, although it is anything but unvarying and, I hope, as little coercive as possible while making a statement at all. The book sketches the outlines of a comprehensive vision, suggesting the wild possibility, the dim intuition, the Tom O’Bedlam’s dream, of a widespread if not universal pattern in all human culture, an anatomy of the imagination, as evidenced in its productions. The controversy begins here. Intellectually curious common readers, who I have the optimism to believe still exist, may wish to skim or skip such passages as arise from polemics within the academy, but I urge them to stick with it, for much more is at stake than the turf wars of academic politics. For half a century of poststructuralist criticism, any attempt to postulate common patterns within or among texts has been deemed “totalizing,” one meaning of which is totalitarian. I do not find a common pattern in other texts, so the argument runs: I impose it, and thereby dominate other visions with my own. Critical interpretations are in fact secondary totalizations, for myth itself is totalizing. I have a healthy respect for the wariness behind such a view. Myth, literature, and criticism are all vehicles of ideology, although that is not all they are. There is no such thing as “pure” myth, religion, or art, and the line between ideology and imagination may be unendingly debated, as one person’s ideology is so often another person’s imaginative vision. Deconstructive criticism unmasks claims to “truth,” while cultural criticism unmasks “values,” whose imposition serves one party or another. What has been called a “hermeneutics of suspicion” has been the method within literary studies for half a century. Such negativity, paradoxically, enriches the

Introduction

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study of myth or literature: there is much to be suspicious of, the more so because so much deception is self-deception. No critic wants to be like Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, who humiliates himself by misreading a letter in light of what his unconscious power drive wishes to find in it – much less like Othello, whose misinterpretations, driven by unconscious anxieties about race, gender, and class, lead to tragic violence. These are not idle fears: while students are often drawn to myths as colourful tales of wonder, myths can be used as instruments of ideological oppression. What is called for is a kind of criticism capable of refining the wonder from the ideology, or at least working progressively towards that goal. Indeed, such a process already exists within the mythical and literary tradition itself, and is the subject of part 3. But no work is without blind spots, limits where vision fails. This Introduction tries to acknowledge at least the limits of which I am aware. Nevertheless, the grand vision, along with an encyclopaedic commentary, I offer unapologetically, indeed exuberantly. To explore such complex terrain, a map is really necessary. Mine is in the shape of what is called a “mandala,” in this case a double circle containing two crossed axes, representing the cosmos of mythology and its literary offspring. The purpose of the book is to build up a vision of eternity from the ruins of time, including the ruins of texts, and to do so will take time. As Jung liked to say, you can’t grow a tree quickly, and the world tree is one of the modulations of the abstract mandala image into a “living form,” another version of which is a cosmic human body. As a construct, the diagram is, like all constructs, selective, simplifying as a map or blueprint simplifies. The map is not the territory, and the blueprint is not the house. But the point is not to substitute the one for the other. We have no desire to replace the journey with the map, but if we wish to navigate without getting lost, we need the map, not despite but because of its abstract symbolism. We cannot live in a blueprint, but if we want to understand the structure of a house – in particular if we want to build one of our own – we need the blueprint. Thus, the diagram is a teaching device, useful, though not the only way to order the subject. My fondness for it is pragmatic: it works; it performs work, and is therefore one form of what Blake calls “the productions of time.” What work does it do? It discovers the order inherent in the mythological and literary universe, although its symbolic representation of that order is a construct, not something “in” a text or set of texts. The paradox, like many we shall meet later, is real and inescapable. Literary interpretation is at once discovery and creation. While my diagram does not

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claim any kind of scientific status, the same is true of any scientific theory: E = mc2 is a concept that came out of the mind of Einstein, but it would be perverse to say it is therefore a mere fiction unconnected with the physical world. Of course the Kantian critique that set the agenda for modern philosophy suggests exactly that: we never know whether the mind’s interpretive categories correspond with the “thing in itself.” Nevertheless, although that challenge is an invitation to a deeper critique, for practical purposes we continue to use Einstein’s equation to understand and at times manipulate an “order of nature.” And the objective world responds to our attempts to understand it. The same practicality can be claimed for an “anatomy” of mythology and literature. The philosophical difficulties inherent in any such “hermeneutic circle,” as it has been called, eventually have to be grappled with, but applying it pragmatically, while remaining aware of its limitations, is arguably a pragmatic educational necessity. For any teacher, the purpose of greater understanding is to open students to a more deeply felt encounter with texts, at its most intense becoming a feeling of inexplicable union, even though the dialogue or interaction involves conflict, a wrestling with an unknown angel. There are texts I have experienced so deeply that they are part of me, and I in some way part of them, despite their otherness. Thus, as we shall see again and again in what follows, the vision of order is also a vision of love – of love and beauty, in fact, for whatever is loved opens and shows forth its hidden beauty to the beholder. The word “cosmos” means both order and ornament. Although one would not know it in this postmodern period, preoccupied with ugliness and despair, the imagination is rooted in the pleasure principle equally with the reality principle that critiques it. Munch’s The Scream and Picasso’s Guernica are central to any history of modern painting, but do not completely define it. The landscapes of the post-Impressionists, the bright and colourful interiors of Matisse, the lyrical, visionary doodling of Klee and Miró, are also part of the story. Stevens postulates about the “supreme fiction” that “It Must Give Pleasure.” One wishes that criticism gave more pleasure, that it remembered to delight even as it instructed. But the other root of imagination is the will to power, and, to reiterate, all theories are assertions: all marshal and select data according to some agenda. Including poststructuralist theories: a vision of conflict and fragmentation and aporia is still an assertion, and a universalizing one. Any theory must necessarily presuppose some underlying total pattern. To say that all theories deconstruct or that all texts are a web of power relations

Introduction

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implies that the critic knows something that is true, and true of all texts. All Cretans are liars, says the Cretan theorist. I make these obvious remarks because the immediate dismissal of phrases like “total pattern” has for fifty years frequently been so lacking in rigour. Literary criticism has been possessed by a smouldering anger against oppressive systems, and literary theory has at times been turned into a weapon in a war of liberation. I think we need a war of liberation, carefully defined, but radical theories of the sort that attack any type of order, pattern, or structure are nuclear weapons: they destroy indiscriminately, and may end by destroying both their users and the oppressed they claim to liberate. We cannot live without pattern: experience without pattern is the psychosis of Sartre’s Nausea. We do need liberation from false structures, not just social but perceptual. From Blake’s desire to open the doors of perception to Pound’s desire to Make It New to the naked risks of contemporary performance art, modern art has set itself the task of liberating both itself and its audience not only from outworn formal conventions and passive social conditioning but from stereotypical, dully habitual sensory and bodily experience. What is released is energy, the energy of life itself, but energy is form under a different aspect: it is when energy is exhausted that entropy increases. Myth and its progeny the arts are inherently formal because life is, and revolution against superficial or worn-out or downright false pattern, one aspect of what I shall later call “decreation,” leads inexorably to a recreation of form. Moreover, forms are interconnected in culture just as they are in nature. Many scholars have resisted Northrop Frye’s postulate of a total verbal order comparable to the total order of nature studied by science, keen to preserve the autonomy and independence of individual authors, texts, and reader responses. The notion that any emphasis on form and the interconnectedness of forms will destroy a work’s uniqueness hints at the shortcomings of a certain type of individualism. The limited formal features of the human face and body plan produce a variety of the human form that is wonderfully inexhaustible: the same is true even of relatively simple formal conventions such as the twelve-bar blues. Another misconception, and a remarkably stubborn one, is that myth criticism believes that mythical and artistic forms are Platonic, existing in a pure and perfect condition either synchronically in an ethereal Neverland or diachronically in some ur-form at the primaeval beginning of time. No such assumption is necessary. To look for a Platonic or primal twelve-bar blues or sonnet would be a silly endeavour: ditto for a Platonic or primal tragic or mythic Form of forms.

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The Productions of Time

Mythical and artistic forms are Aristotelian, and exist only in their existing variations. Admittedly, the theme-and-variations form in music is a bit misleading in this regard. There are actually thirty-four Diabelli waltz variations, the actual Diabelli waltz being another variant of the pattern. But all thirty-four have something in common – which is why we perceive them as variations. It follows from this line of thought that the formal organization of the present work is a variation, or perhaps a set of variations. It does not pose as a meta-Form standing in a transcendent, superior position to the cultural forms it examines, nor pretend to excavate some kind of super-Myth that has been buried under the midden of history. All that being said, creation is selective. All creators, mythical, artistic, or critical, must choose a particular organization, and the choices are acts of power. In my view, the best choice of what Joseph Campbell called “a myth to live by,”2 and what I might call “a vision to see by,” is one (a) that at least attempts to critique its own patterns even as it critiques and appropriates others’ – for appropriation is also inevitable; we cannot even cite without appropriating; (b) that aims, however imperfectly, for a pluralistic, difference-affirming, transformational flexibility comprehending the varieties of imaginative experience; and (c) that recognizes how ideology enters right at that point, because the only thing progressives like me cannot tolerate is intolerance: we are absolutely against absolutism. To the charge that my leftist-progressive privileging of pluralistic tolerance is an imposition of my own values on the rest of the world, my only reply is Luther’s “Here I stand,” a response that is not merely intellectual but also necessarily moral and social. In Personal Knowledge, physical chemist Michael Polanyi denied the existence of purely objective knowledge as maintained by positivism, which is not true science but merely scientism.3 All knowledge is personal knowledge, arising not from an inhuman objective detachment but from passionate commitment. Influenced by Polanyi, humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow spoke of “love knowledge”4: when we love someone, we know him or her or them as no detached observer ever could. It was in this spirit that Northrop Frye deemed criticism, including myth criticism, a science. He was universally misunderstood because positivism is so completely dominant that, to most people, positivism, with its objectivism and reductionism, is what science is. The present investigation is personal knowledge. What may look like a grand metaphysical system in nineteenth-century fashion could be seen more accurately as a report on a lifetime of reading. Montaigne is known as the inventor of the personal essay. Yet if you actually read him, you find that

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the autobiographical element is often subsidiary to an attempt to process the vast welter of his reading; another book that functions much the same way is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. This will come as no surprise to habitual readers. We are what we read even more than what we eat. The philosopher Jacques Derrida, asked about the key events in his life, produced for his interviewer Imre Saluszinsky a reading list.5 The limitations of the present investigation are in part those of its author’s reading. Its foundations rest, for one thing, heavily on the traditional canon of British and American literature. It does, however, attempt to encompass types of writing that have been marginalized, including some aspects of popular culture. Omissions should not be interpreted as implying value judgments about what is “worthy.” The canon is a social construct for social purposes, but the verbal universe sketched here is far larger than the traditional canon. All mythical and literary texts are part of it, whatever anyone might think of their aesthetic, moral, or political value, just as all people are part of a society, from saints to serial killers. Another bias of the discussion is the prominence in it of the Christian Bible and Greek mythology and literature, which I have taught for years. These are of course the twin pillars supporting the traditional canon. But I approach both Classical and Biblical mythology more often than not from their visionary underside rather than from their surface, which, in the case of Christianity, means an orthodoxy largely controlled by ideology. The reason for this method will emerge gradually below, but this practice grows inevitably out of the book’s central premise of a mode of perception disclosing a reality alternative to the world of ordinary experience, which is based on the persistent illusion of the subject–object paradigm. The alternative reality, which can be called “imaginative” or “spiritual,” depending on whether the context is artistic or religious, respectively, is what speaks out of the texts, breaking through the barriers of reductionism that attempt to imprison it. Versions of Christianity vary drastically in the proportion of reductionism to genuine vision, but the essence of the former is literalism, the reading of narratives according to the subject–object paradigm, whose standards are the logical, the factual, and the historical. According to this mode of interpretation, some texts, including Classical mythology and literature, are “fiction,” not to be read literally. A good many people believe that fictions are only a kind of escape into a world of illusion, and that the humanities therefore are an exercise in frivolity. The Bible, in contrast, cannot be just a fiction: it therefore has to be read as if it were logical, fac-

10

The Productions of Time

tual, and historical: the fact that it is clearly none of these elicits the hysteria that so often accompanies Biblical literalism. Institutional Christianity from its very beginnings has been challenged by individuals and groups who have not interpreted the Bible literally, including not only those outside the church like the Gnostics but some of the greatest Church Fathers. None the less, the move to declare such views heretical has been so successful for so long that mainstream Christians are either unaware that heterodox views even exist or think of them as eccentric and marginal, products of an extremism not to be taken seriously: they are not “really” Christianity but someone’s twisting of it into what it is not. But the “real” faith is merely the viewpoint of the institutional churches, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox. Pronouncements about orthodoxy versus heresy usually ignore the fact that orthodoxy is not “in the Bible,” and was not there from the start – in the beginning was a Jewish heresy – but was established over centuries by a series of institutional proclamations of doctrine based on interpretations of enigmatic scriptures, whose inclusion in the biblical canon was itself a matter of human selection. All of these decisions were made in the teeth of vociferous opposition. It is therefore illegitimate to discount the alternative tradition of visionary or imaginative Christianity, representatives of which include Origen, Pseudo-Dionysius, Joachim of Floris, Scotus Erigena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus, Jakob Boehme, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Gerard Winstanley, along with various Gnostics and alchemists, and, in literature, Donne, Milton, Coleridge, Blake, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, and Loren Eiseley, among others. Of course, these figures do not always agree, and by no means everything they say is visionary. For all that, they are kindred spirits. On the Classical side there are the Neoplatonic and Hermeticist schools that made such an impact on Renaissance art and thought, as shown by Edgar Wind and Frances Yates,6 as well as poets from Spenser through Shelley to Yeats who recreated Classical and other pagan mythologies on a visionary basis. These too are more than oddball special-interest groups, however much oddity may be mixed in with genuine intuition. The visionary tradition in mythology and art produced, in the twentieth century, a corresponding tradition of visionary interpretation. It will be obvious at every point how much I owe to Northrop Frye in literary studies, to Joseph Campbell in comparative mythology, and to C.G. Jung in depth psychology. All three figures have generated frequent critics, some possessing a vehemence startling because they clearly have not read

Introduction

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these writers – the only inference that explains these critics’ inaccuracy and distortions – but are relying on hearsay or what they assume must be true. I say this with more puzzlement than defensiveness: I have never really understood why the three provoke such visceral negative responses, at least at times (of course all three have also inspired a certain amount of enthusiasm, by no means all of it uncritical). I assume the answer lies in the accusation of “irrationalism,” blaming them for a property of the visionary tradition itself, especially in its modern form, which was born in the Romantic revolution. All three have spiritual precursors in the Romantic tradition: Blake for Frye, Joyce (who is rooted in Blake) for Campbell, Goethe for Jung. Irrationalism means reliance on a faculty other than the senses and reason – fact and logic – for apprehending reality. The Romantics called that faculty the “imagination,” thus revaluing a formerly negative term. Fear of the imagination has a long history, as Theseus’s attack on it in his famous speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes evident. Although Descartes and Hume show that any version of reality derived from reason and the senses could not be trustworthy, the ordinary ego perceives any subversion of them as a threat to its very existence. The fact that ego consciousness, reason, and the senses are all eclipsed in sleep, replaced by a dream world whose imagery and events resemble those in myth, folktale, romance, and fantasy, accounts for the negative portrayal of both dream and imagination (or “phantasy”) in much literature before Romanticism. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud sees the arts as based on the wish-fulfilments of “fantasy,” which he calls a “narcosis” and opposes to the truth-discipline of science. A conservative view rightly sees the imagination as not just a mode of perception but a creative power, and views Romanticism as a dangerous replacement of the external authority of God with the megalomania of a humanity worshipping its own internal power, in effect worshipping itself as God. Most anti-Romantic critics share this anxiety about a will to power that is in truth a real temptation inherent in the Romantic and post-Romantic perspective. Possession by a will to power is what Jung called “inflation” of the ego, and there is more than a trace of it in Yeats, Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and Heidegger, at times nearly eclipsing their genuine vision. Yeats and Pound’s flirtation with the Irish and Italian versions of fascism, Lawrence’s authoritarian fantasies in The Plumed Serpent, and Heidegger’s espousal of Nazism show the link between corrupted Romanticism and cultism, both political and religious. Critics who disapprove of Frye, Campbell, and Jung are often responding not

12

The Productions of Time

to their actual writings, but to what they see as a tendency to cultism among some of their followers. The tendency exists, although I think it has been exaggerated. The three authors themselves are, however, free of will-to-power– corrupted Romanticism, which really is irrationalism. Still, the question remains: is any commitment to a mode of perception beyond the subject–object mode of ordinary experience (on which both positivistic science and orthodox supernaturalism are predicated) at best delusional, at worst dangerous? A full answer will require a full book, which I present here. For now, we can be content with observing that Theseus got at least one thing right: the lunatic – by which he meant religious visionary – the lover, and the poet have never resigned themselves to the “reality principle” and have lived by a faith in what we may call a “higher irrationalism.” “We reason about them with a later reason,” in Wallace Stevens’s phrase from Notes towards a Supreme Fiction. If we are mad, we are mad in good company. Is it hopelessly 1960s to ask, given where the reality principle has taken us, whether it would be such a bad thing if the inmates took over the asylum? Taking our bearings to assess our journey thus far, we may say that from the standpoint of ordinary perception, the verbal universe of myth and literature is not universal at all but rather a heterogeneous collection of texts with no organizing principle. For a long time now, most criticism has been interested in difference, not unity. In many ways, this has been a welcome development. Everyone now knows that the old literary canon achieved unity by means of rigid exclusion: it was kept “pure” by ideological filters screening out differences of race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and politics. When Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism said in 1957 that all texts belong to the verbal universe, or what he called “the order of words,” and hence all potential objects of critical study, it caused an uproar. His aptly titled “Polemical Introduction” had in its previously published version been titled “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” ironically subverting Matthew Arnold’s notion that criticism’s role was to canonize “the best that has been thought and said” without asking by whose standards. A good number of critics regarded themselves as the guardians of high standards. Nowadays, probably the best index of what literary studies considers proper texts to analyse is what universities teach. The works belonging to the old canon still bulk large, but there are, even in smaller schools that are by no means “cutting edge,” usually an equal number of courses whose texts are non-canonical in just about every way possible. What was radical

Introduction

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in 1957 has become the prevailing view, to the great enrichment of both literature and literary criticism. What has not prevailed, of course, is the theme of the rest of Anatomy of Criticism, that the verbal universe, for all its infinite variety, displays to the educated imagination a common pattern. Why do we need to look for a common pattern, anyway? Why can we not rest content with an indefinite pluralism, celebrating the diversity of texts? This objection takes two forms, aesthetic and social, not that they can be separated in the long run. The aesthetic retort is that a common pattern or set of patterns imposes sameness, thus turning literature into a set of stereotypes and abstract formulas. The temptation to achieve unity at the cost of variety is a real danger, seen on the high cultural level in some of the cookie-cutter examples of second-rate myth criticism in the 1960s. In popular culture, it means the banal formulas of potboilers and much commercial music. None the less, the objection is based on the fallacy that unity and diversity are mutually exclusive, so that we can have only one or the other. As usual, the Romantics reached this point long before us, as when Coleridge defines beauty as “multeity-in-unity” or as identity-in-difference. This may sound like a “have your cake and eat it too,” wish-fulfilling obfuscation that needs to be demystified, but it is readily demonstrable. When we speak of the originality or uniqueness of a work of literature, we are comparing it, consciously or not, to other works of the same general type. It makes no sense to say that a sonnet by Shakespeare is original compared to the Iliad or The Great Gatsby: this is comparing apples to oranges. It makes sense only to compare apples with other apples – that is, with objects that generally share the same formal features, yet which are also different. We do learn a great deal by comparing Shakespeare’s sonnets to the hundreds of Elizabethan “Insert Conceit Here” sonnets, including that individuality does not consist of abandoning form but of using it differently. Actually, Shakespeare’s sonnet does have resemblances to the Iliad and The Great Gatsby, but on a higher level of generality, as when we say that all three are literary texts. So the observation might have some point if we were discussing on that level of generality, say if we were trying to think about the difference between literary and non-literary texts. But the point is that individuality is always a matter of both sameness and difference, of common pattern and a particular variant of that pattern. There are a couple of pitfalls at this stage of the argument. A frequent fallacy is the assertion that form does not exist because it is a mere abstraction or generalization. To generalize is to be an idiot, said Blake (E, 630),

14

The Productions of Time

but, as has been pointed out, the remark is itself a generalization. It is true that the form of the sonnet does not exist in some transcendent Platonic realm – but it does exist as embodied in individual sonnets, and discloses itself as the element of sameness uniting them. To call the sonnet form an “illusion” because we cannot point to it, only to various actual sonnets, is tantamount to saying that the mathematical form “five” does not exist because you cannot point to “five”: you can point only to five apples, five pencils, five people. It exists, though not in the material world in which apples exist, but granting the imagination status as “real” comes up against a good deal of social resistance. A diachronic version of the same fallacy shows up in comparative mythology, as when Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough is regarded as refuted because there is no evidence of an original or ur-myth of the dying-and-resurrecting god figure, only particular myths with great variations occurring in widely differing cultures, which interpret their version in a distinctive manner. Frazer may well have over-read some of his evidence, but the dying-god myth is a real pattern, as Milton already knew when he wrote Lycidas. We would fall into another kind of pit if we assumed that the motive for comparison is value judgments. Sometimes it is, as in book reviewing, but scholarly comparisons are perhaps the closest criticism comes to experimentation in the sciences. They are thought experiments designed to tell us something about the formal properties of works of literature or mythology. In semantics, prototype theory explores how much of human understanding derives from categorization: we feel we understand something when we know what category it fits into.7 Prototype theory says that people think in terms of typical and atypical examples of a category: a typical dog is a Labrador retriever; atypical is a Basenji, which does not bark. Even more atypical would be a portmanteau dog like a puggle, which “violates” the “proper” boundaries of categories by combining a pug with a beagle. The peppering of quotation marks indicates irony: to say that a puggle is “not really a dog” or is an inferior kind of dog is a social judgment, and resembles the kinds of value judgments that have been made about groundbreaking works of art, which refuse to fit the “normal” categories. Measuring works against the “proper” or “normal” standards is not the task of criticism, however. Say we ask which work is a more typical tragedy: (a) Romeo and Juliet, (b) King Lear, (c) Death of a Salesman, or (d) Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. The answer is probably King Lear, but we do not ask the question in order to hold up Lear as a better work. Posing the question makes us think more deeply about the similarities and differ-

Introduction

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ences among the works: it makes us realize, for example, that Romeo and Juliet, which we might think of as typical because we are so familiar with it, is rather experimental, challenging the usual conventions of tragedy. It has two protagonists rather than one, of which one is a woman, and both are teenagers in love, not ruling figures dealing with issues of power. Likewise we could ask which is the more typical novel: (a) Portrait of a Lady, (b) Silas Marner, (c) Moby-Dick, or (d) Kurt Vonnegut’s SlaughterhouseFive? The vote would probably go to Portrait of a Lady, but again, not necessarily because it is the best novel, merely the more typical. The argument would be over categorization: Silas Marner is really more of a folktale, right? And are Moby-Dick and Slaughterhouse-Five even novels at all? If not, what in the world are they? In other words, the attempt at categorization forces us to consider our presuppositions about a category, and why, and why any particular category should exist in the first place. What is it about the forms of comedy and tragedy that have given them such a long and varied life? Most of all, where do the forms come from, and where do they exist? There are three common answers: the author, the text, and the reader. In formalist theories of various kinds, there are in effect no authors and no readers: the forms and patterns are “in the text,” the problem being to understand what that means, as the text literally is a series of black marks on a white page. Since the material text cannot be what is intended, we are forced to say that the text is a pattern of meaning. But meanings are mental constructs, and in whose mind does the text then exist? Authors think of the text as the pattern of what they were working so hard to convey, although they certainly hope to transfer that pattern into the minds of their readers. Reader-response theory, at least the sort represented by Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class?, locates the text in the mind of the reader. Fish’s answer to his own question is “no”: there are no texts, only readers, although the readers are constrained in their readings by the rules of the interpretive community that has authority over them. There is no text until the reader creates one. In 1948, René Wellek and Austin Warren’s remarkable essay, “The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art,” explored all the possibilities delineated above, long before literary theory as a whole did so. Theories that posit an objective text and theories that posit a subjective text, whether in the mind of the author, of the reader, or in the collective mind of the interpretive community, alike break down into paradox. Wellek and Warren concluded that the literary text must have a “special ontological status,” although they were not clear about what that status was.8

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The Productions of Time

This provides an additional motive for considering a mode of perception that unites rather than divides subject and object dynamically and dialectically as an identity-in-difference rather than a featureless oneness. Such a theory would not eliminate paradoxes: indeed, it would multiply them for the ordinary reason trapped in the subject–object mode. But a later reason (à la Stevens), such as the Reason that some types of German philosophy proposed as higher than mere logical Understanding, would be an aspect of the imagination itself. Blake used the word “states” to designate modes of imagination. It is a useful word because of its polysemy. A state can be a place (or at least a description without place). Physics uses the word to describe a type of process or energy level, a state of affairs. But we also speak of states of mind. The four parts of this book each concern a state of the imagination in this polyvalent sense: the fourfold verbal universe formed by their identity-in-difference is also a state. Out of many, one. But also, out of one, many. Any literary or mythological text is thus a state. We have been speaking of aesthetic objections to the idea of pattern (a word I prefer to “structure” because it is less mechanical in its connotations), although the aesthetic has modulated fairly quickly into the philosophical. There is also a social objection that modulates quickly into a moral one. After various attempts to be objective, from the New Criticism to structuralism, literary criticism turned towards cultural and ideological criticism in the 1960s, at which point words like “unity” or “total” or “central” (that point which “governs” a structure) took on negative connotations and words like “difference” became positive, along with terms whose metaphorical roots suggested division or fragmentation, such as “deconstruction,” “aporia,” “abyss,” and, for that matter, “poststructuralism.” A conformist society and a conformist literary canon began to break up like lake ice in a spring thaw, and one formerly suppressed group after another began to express openly an individual identity and a liberated voice. But spring is often a season of difficult weather, and, for several decades, a storm of anger, the inevitable result of long suppression, swept across society in general and literary studies in particular. Any and every type of unity or commonality was suspected of being an attempt to return to the old conformity in a new guise. The most intense alienation verged on separatism, as some suggested that only African Americans understood African-American experience enough to write about it without appropriating it, and only women could make critical statements about women writers. Virginia Woolf’s idea that the writer, as writer, is androgynous and not inescapably gendered was respectfully set aside, and the Walt

Introduction

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Whitman who claimed to contain multitudes and to be able to identify with every possible type of human being was less prominent than the gay Whitman who wrote expressly homoerotic passages. A changing social situation, however, may make it worthwhile to reconsider the function, or the state, in the polysemous sense defined above, of criticism at the present time. For one thing, the critical paradigm that we have inherited from the twentieth century never managed to resolve the issue of otherness. For a long time, various groups have been insistent about their difference as a reaction to what we may call “the coercive centre.” The United States in the 1950s posited an “American way of life” based on a social least common denominator. The “average” was normative – white, middle class, Christian, heterosexual, and male-dominated. A restricted literary canon reflected these supposed norms (though often critiquing them sharply). It was natural that those who had been made to feel ashamed of their difference from the “normal” would react by proudly and sometimes aggressively insisting on that difference. At the same time, cultural studies warned of the dangers of turning people who are different into “the Other”: someone who is Other is so different as to be incomprehensible, alien, not really human, and therefore threatening. Though often merely evaded, a conundrum lurked: are we caught between a unity bought at the price of suppressing difference and a plurality of difference bought at the price of paranoia and separatist isolation? People who differ from one another have to be able to feel that they nevertheless have something in common, or else they cannot even talk to one another. What Adrienne Rich called “the dream of a common language” never entirely disappeared, for all the cultural conflicts of the era.9 The literary and mythical patterns I sketch in the present study are a tentative formulation of a symbolic language common perhaps to the human race, for all the enormous differences of people’s experiences and values. It is an attempt not to limit variety but to enable it: perhaps a lingua franca that might bridge the gulf of difference. And such a vehicle necessarily presupposes a common human nature on a deep level, below that of ideological and personal variations. This notion has been unpopular for quite some time. The prevailing view has been that there is no common human nature, just a variegated social construct. What Northrop Frye called “primary concerns” that unite the whole human race are a fiction: people unite only on a level of ideology, which means that all unions are temporary marriages of convenience motivated by the will to power. Thus, what began as a celebration of difference darkens into a vision of all human relations as mere power politics, one precarious step from

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The Productions of Time

Hobbes’s war of all against all. Literature, including mythology, is merely the verbal form of this essentially Social Darwinian conflict. I cannot accept the inevitability of this bleak picture. What I am offering here is an alternative. Of course, it speaks the common symbolic language with its own ideologically inflected accent, and certain elements of it will have to be set aside or modified by those who find my version of it uncongenial for reasons of their background, temperament, or commitments. Nevertheless, my hope is that it will be a bridge – not a superhighway, paving over neighbourhoods where other people live. With the disappearance of a consensus society (at least enforced on the surface), a new form of separatism, different from the kind described above, has become prominent in American society. There is much talk of income inequality these days, but the drive of the 1 per cent for ever more wealth and privilege is probably being driven by more than mere greed (however much there may be of that). Wealth enables those who reject increasing American diversity to live apart, in a separate world of institutions and communities belonging to an elite, who then do not have to associate with “those people.” Appeal to any kind of common good falls on deaf ears, because “common” means people whom the elite views as parasites. Government is evil to the extent that it exists to promote the common good. This attitude trickles down far below the level of the 1 per cent, which is how a wealthy elite can make (the irony is deliberate) common cause with other groups which, for religious or economic reasons, also hate and fear the new face of U.S. society. It may therefore be time for those of us in literary and cultural studies to retool our rhetoric. The idea that we are all in this together, that we are all interconnected, may be due for a new hearing. The two greatest crises we are facing, climate change and a pandemic, are forcing this realization on us whether we like it or not. I would like to make clear that the present book’s habit of jumping, often within a single paragraph, from mythology to politics to literature to popular culture is quite deliberate and not a result of the author’s confusion about what kind of book he was trying to write. If I can show that these things are always deeply interconnected, each affecting, each casting light on the others, I will consider myself to have succeeded. Attempts to sequester them have debased political and cultural discourse and made liberal education look like a waste of time. Poststructuralism, postmodernism, revisionist Marxism, cultural studies, and gender studies dominated the era of high theory – the “theory wars” – from roughly 1965 to 1990. The enemy was defined internationally as

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Western imperialism, rationalized by Cold War paranoia, and domestically as global capitalism, including the bourgeois individualist humanism that was its supposed ideological disguise. The theories were complex, varied, and often at odds with one another, but the rhetorical tone was unremittingly negative, antagonistic, angry, divisive, because the enemy was the power structure that so many people accepted as respectable, normal, and normative. Anything that suggested commonality or universality was immediately dissolved in the acid bath of the hermeneutics of suspicion. I remember a prominent postmodernist critic intoning at a session of the Legacy of Northrop Frye Conference in Toronto in 1993, “We do not need unity, we do not want unity.” Of course, it depends on what kind of unity we are talking about. We do not want the death march of the lemmings, but anything like solidarity is out of the question if one starts from the presuppositions of high theory. Now in the twenty-first century we are facing enemies like right-wing nationalism and crises such as climate change that we cannot successfully confront, possibly not even survive, without some sense of genuine solidarity. I may not be the only one to feel that the function of criticism – literary, cultural, political – at the present time may be to revisit the question of Northrop Frye’s “primary concerns,” which are universally human. In a book of interviews with him published in 2015, Christopher Norris, one of the foremost advocates of deconstruction, is willing to commit himself to Kant’s advocacy of transnational, even global political structures superseding competitive and warlike nation-states: “We should recognize that the most basic human interests are universal human interests, and we should construct our political systems in the light of that universality. We may never get there: in fact, Kant thought we never would, not to the stage of actually achieving global democracy, ‘perpetual peace,’ an international sensus communis, etc., but at least this can serve as a kind of regulative idea that guides our various imperfect efforts in that direction.”10 Norris is aware that in the old days he would have been attacked for this “Enlightenment” position by people such as Foucault, who would have regarded any kind of larger social unity as imposed and coercive.11 Yet Norris feels that another stance is possible. When an interviewer asks whether he would agree with the following characterization of his views, he replies, “Well, yes, that’s right”: “So, in a way, you are agreeing with Ricoeur that the main thing … is to bridge linguistic and cultural differences, to achieve a background of shared understanding against which we can then work more effectively to grasp those differences and make due allowance for them. Rather than coming at it from the oppo-

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The Productions of Time

site end, starting out from the supposed fact of radical difference and then raising it into a full-scale theory of ‘incommensurable’ language games, conceptual schemes, paradigms, or whatever.”12 Yet the differences, Norris offers, can be bridged only through a sense, however tentative and revisable, of a primary concern based on universal human needs: But I think it’s possible to defend a notion of human needs, without falling into a crude biologism or essentialism or what used to be called humanism by post-structuralists. “Humanism” is a term that’s been widely and unjustifiably devalued, a word that’s been abused. There is no good politics without humanism. Our needs extend all the way from the basic human needs, the physical needs for shelter, and food, and at least a decent level of material provision, to the human need not to be grossly misinformed, not to be made the victim of large-scale systematic distortions through the media and the ideological system.13 Without wishing to use Norris as a human shield, I quote him at length to show that someone with impeccable poststructuralist credentials is willing both to state that we need a vision of human solidarity based on the primacy of universal human needs and to agree that it just might be imperfectly possible. The logical place for us to begin looking for a universal human vision, I propose, is in mythology and the mythological patterns of literature, even if, as Kant and Norris say, “We may never get there.” We will certainly never get there if we never start. None the less, our attempt to articulate something universal is never more than a particular, and therefore limited, version of the universal. All vision is personal – however much we may invoke traditions and precursors – and therefore to some extent idiosyncratic. We may say, sincerely, that we admire individuality, but real individuality is always somewhat embarrassing. There may be more enterprise in walking naked, as Yeats said, but most of us feel safer and more dignified clothing our peculiarities in a collective style. It is one of the contradictions of modern criticism that arguments for difference and diversity dress down in a heavy, impersonal, sometimes nearly impenetrable professional rhetoric that makes every writer sound alike. In classroom discussion, whenever a student prefaces a remark with “This is probably wrong, but” or “This is probably just weird, but,” it is invariably the most insightful comment of the hour. But the student is

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afraid of it, a bit embarrassed by it, precisely because it is original, and therefore lacks the safe, familiar, respectable feel of the contribution that merely articulates the common-sense insight that any competent reader would have. Yet it is “weird” insights that are evocative to others, and therefore most useful. Loren Eiseley quotes Sir Francis Bacon as saying that “There is no Excellent Beauty that hath not some strangeness in the Proportion.” 14 The teacher’s job is not to provide the “right answer” but to be evocative, to spark insight in the student that will be his or her own insight, which will be different. In the same way, the critic’s job is not to proffer a definitive reading or theory but to be useful to readers as they formulate their own visions. Their varying visions will have something in common, but they will be individual, snowflakes infinitely various while possessing the same crystalline pattern. This is what “agreement” means in the humanities. Works such as Terry Eagleton’s After Theory and Vincent Leitch’s Literary Criticism in the Twenty-first Century roughly agree that an era of “high theory” began to wane somewhere after about 1990, giving way to a more fragmented, localized criticism with two foci, popular culture and cultural studies, including gender studies. Enriching as such criticism has been, especially in widening the grounds of empathy, I will risk noting a pervasive, uneasy feeling that criticism, or at least theory, has been parked and idling for some time. The “theory wars” temporarily made any attempt at a larger vision taboo, yet any effort to revitalize theory must return to a larger context, despite the dangers of “totalizing.” We do have to go back to about 1990 to pick up the strand of a lost conversation. If we do so, the results could enrich and broaden both studies of popular culture and cultural studies. This is not the place to outline this larger dimension, except to suggest that it would expand beyond the by-now predictable iterations of identity politics and jeremiads against the debasements of late capitalism. Studies of popular culture still seem to revolve around its consumerist, commercial examples: meanwhile, types of popular culture that do not go multi-platinum or viral on the internet are scarcely even familiar, let alone studied, outside of a small niche audience that has increasingly to crowdsource to keep them alive. In a revitalized myth criticism – which explores not just myths proper but any and all products of the mysterious power we call “imagination” – at least three marginalized but immensely popular areas would immediately loom large – in literature: fantasy and science fiction; in the visual arts: comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels; in music: folk and blues. Whatever possessed the Nobel Commit-

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tee to award Bob Dylan its prize for literature – some high-culture gurus seemed to suspect Poe’s Imp of the Perverse – both Dylan’s often-visionary lyrics and their power to open the doors of perception and thus help effect social change would be objects of study of a myth criticism properly conceived. This is true from “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” and “When the Ship Comes In” through “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna” to “Señor.” What is true of Dylan is true of Gordon Bok, Dave Carter, Leonard Cohen, Richard Shindell, Richard Thompson, Robin Williamson, and others. In comics, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are among the great formal achievements of the graphic novel. Each of their (symbolically significant) seven chapters stands on its own as a counterpointing of myth and memoir, while the whole book is greater than the sum of its parts. Lynda Barry’s work complements Bechdel’s: What It Is and Picture This are studies of the process of creativity, of the arising of an “image,” which is more than a mere memory and eludes the understanding, from a hidden ground that the present work refers to as the Otherworld. As for fantasy and science fiction, they are the great mythmaking genres of our time (not that every book bearing one of those labels either is great or makes myths). To give but one example of major work needing to be done, the critique of myth in the work of a writer like Samuel R. Delany deserves a deeper treatment than it has yet received. These popular musical, visual, and literary genres, finally, are not chosen randomly, or because they are favourites of the author’s. They are in many ways interrelated: they all reject commercialism and its reductive formulas, and thus remain close to the origin of all the arts in the primary process of the unconscious, to what Northrop Frye called “babble” and “doodle,” of which more in part 4. Theory could learn much by establishing an observation site at this horizon of emergence. Postmodernism has derided the Romantic and Modernist search for the “primitive,” a hidden source of energy that might revitalize an intellectual and artistic culture that seems increasingly paralyzed by its own self-consciousness. Much confusion, to be sure, has been attendant on that quest. The primitive is not a regression to the “savage,” nor is it to be confused with its racist and elitist projections on a lost place or a lost time. It resides not in “darkest Africa” or some primaeval era before history. Its true location is the mysterious country of the mind, whose inhabitants speak a kind of Pentecostal common language that is somehow understood by every human being as a dialect of his or her own native tongue. The popular arts we have been speaking of are primitive in that sense.

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This work is partly about myths, those texts which speak that common language most clearly because they are, in a sense, naked, or, as Frye says, undisplaced. But it is also a piece of mythmaking itself, as is any act of interpretation. It is a myth to live by, but also a myth to teach by, much of it having arisen in a quite direct way from a career of teaching. As such, it is my project to help build a better world. I am an unabashed utopian, so long as one defines utopia not as a perfect community but as a model for building a world that, though imperfect, is at least better than the “chartered streets” on which we walk, less full of “marks of weakness, marks of woe,” on every human face. As Blake knows in “London” (E, 26–7), that means breaking the “mind-forg’d manacles” that are so much stronger than those of steel. Echoing Blake, Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus says, pointing to his forehead, it is here I must kill the ghosts of the priest and king. Change the world by studying and teaching mythology and literature? Absolutely. I know of no better way. This, then, is one of the productions of time, an example of its own subject, a study of the creative act of the mind, and secondarily of the products of that creative act. Utopia is one of the “ruins of time,” and therefore transient.“All things fall and are built again,” says Yeats in “Lapis Lazuli.” I feel akin to that group of fifth-century writers, including Boethius, Isidore of Seville, Macrobius, and Martianus of Capella, who, as the Roman Empire vanished into air, into thin air, and left almost not a rack behind, wrote encyclopaedic works intended as time capsules, Noah’s Arks, messages in a bottle, attempting to preserve a vision for posterity. The writers die, whole civilizations are buried in the desert of the waste land. But down there, something abides, and may rise again.

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Introduction

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PA RT ONE

First There Is a Mountain: The Vertical Axis Ascending First there is a mountain Then there is no mountain Then there is Donovan

I . R E VEL AT I O N , O R I M AG I N AT I O N A. The Case against Mythology: Escapism, Magical Thinking, Ideology Perhaps the first question a book about mythology should address is why myths fascinate so many people in our own time. Traditional mythology comes from pre-modern societies – whether ancient or contemporary – yet modern people, from ordinary readers to some very sophisticated creative writers, are drawn to it, despite enormous cultural differences. At the same time, much of the intellectual elite is intensely suspicious of this widespread enthusiasm, as well as of the myths themselves. Responses to mythology have so often been negative that it becomes necessary to confront the commonest criticisms in order to clear the ground for a more positive construction. A sceptical attitude ascribes the enthusiasm for mythology to two false motivations. The first is simply escapism: a lot of people are looking just for entertainment to distract them from reality and its serious problems. There is no doubt some truth to this. There is nothing wrong with entertainment: if this book managed to mount, while dealing with many other matters, a defence of the pleasure principle, especially in the form that Schiller called the “play instinct,” in which mythology and the arts are rooted, its author would be pleased. Entertainment or pleasure does not

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have to be reduced to the passive distraction of anxious and exhausted consumers in a late capitalist society. I will have more to say about this later. But of course “entertainment” does very often mean mere distraction, and, if that is all myths are, then their study is not a very serious subject. Myths, which are sacred stories, usually exist alongside secular or profane (sometimes in more than one sense) stories known as “folktales.” These can be didactic, but they do not claim the weight of myth, and are often narrated with a light, at times outright satiric, touch. Some myths are close to folktales in this regard. For example, the Homeric Hymn to Hermes narrates how, while still an infant, the trickster deity Hermes stole Apollo’s cattle by hiding them in a cave into which he had them walk backward, so the hoofprints would show only cows seeming to walk out of the cave. In Norse mythology, a giant wagered with the god Thor that he could not lift his cat (who knew giants had cats?). Thor indeed failed, only to discover that the cat was a disguise for the Midgard serpent that girdles and is the foundation of the world.1 According to scholars, who have found its many variants, the Cyclops episode of Homer’s Odyssey really was a folktale incorporated to become one of Odysseus’s adventures. Some myths seem outright sardonic: in a Native American creation myth, a Trickster deity creates the world by defecation, and in a Yao-Bantu creation myth the gods leave the earth, climbing up the spider’s web into the heavens, to escape the murderous malice of humanity.2 The tone of such tales is tongue-in-cheek, anything but the solemnity that accompanies the revelation of sacred truths. Are we to conclude that some myths are not “really” myths, not to be taken seriously, let alone literally? If so, where do we draw the line between true myths and mythic parodies? Or are all myths no more than “just so” stories, some merely more deadpan than others? Entertainment as distraction is just one form of escapism. Another is what is sometimes called “magical thinking,” which indeed is found in magical practices as well as in certain types of myth and ritual that are not light-hearted at all but instead express social anxiety. The twelve volumes of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1906–15) exhaustively catalogue fertility rituals involving a god who dies or is sacrificially put to death but revives, embodying the cyclical fertility of nature.3 What makes the work a classic in the study of mythology is the author’s intuition that the deathand-rebirth pattern is central to mythology, as we see later in part 2: but its Victorian rationalism reduces the pattern to what social practice sometimes rendered it: an attempt at magical control that amounts to a collective obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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Gathered around Frazer in the 1900s and 1910s was the so-called Cambridge school of mythologists, who reversed the order of myth to ritual, saying the latter came first. These “Cambridge ritualists” claimed that the mythical stories emerged only later, as a way to explain the reason behind the rituals. But why should people compulsively perform ritual actions without knowing what it was they were doing? Because they were driven by unconscious desires and fears. In the dying-god rituals, they feared disruption of the food supply. Psychology tells us that obsessive-compulsive disorders such as self-mutilation and anorexia are driven by a need for control; their victims are people who feel powerless over their own environment, and sacrifice parts of themselves to gain the feeling of control over their fate, even if that is destruction. Likewise, putting a dying god to death and then celebrating his return is a way of taking control of a blind, uncertain natural process. The ritual makes fertility happen by enacting it. Frazer notes the affinity with sympathetic magic, the attempt to bring something about by performing an action that is sympathetic, i.e., resembles what is desired, such as sticking pins in a doll to punish one’s enemies. He clearly saw that obsessive-compulsive anxiety drives much of ritual, but his ethnocentrism reduced ritual to nothing but neurotic compulsion, although our exploration of its deeper roots must wait until part 2. No doubt some of it was compulsive: Paul Radin made the point in Primitive Man as Philosopher that myths and rituals are understood on different levels by various members of any culture.4 But Frazer assumed that all mythical thinking and all ritual behaviour were superstitious, which he contrasted with his own scientific rationalism. However, as Freud and Jung soon pointed out, human beings are as capable of magical thinking today as they ever were. We feel superior to people worshipping fertility gods only because we do not have to worry about our food supply. But in traditional societies, one crop failure could wipe out a whole population. Freud, who had his own form of scientific rationalism, would ascribe the escapist impulse behind mythology to the pleasure principle. But clearly much mythology serves the other Freudian drive, the will to power that develops out of aggressive impulses. The motivation behind creation myths may resemble the intellectual curiosity that drives modern science. But such myths often rationalize the society’s power structure: they give divine sanction to the ruling class and to the laws that it enforces (or that enable it to maintain its power). In the Christian culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this creation myth took the form of the Chain of Being. God created the order of nature, as many Christians still believe,

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but also the social hierarchy, in which kings and popes were more powerful than aristocracy and clergy, which in turn had more power and authority than any proto–middle class, which was in turn superior to the peasants, who lorded over the animals. Men were superior to women, and women to children. This explains the intense anxiety of the Roman Catholic church that led to the persecution of Galileo and the martyrdom of Giordano Bruno. If the church was wrong about the order of nature, it could be wrong about the order of society that was really an extension of nature’s order. The anxiety proved justified. What toppled the Chain of Being ideology in the end was the rise not just of science but of literacy. When people outside the ruling elite could actually read the Bible, they discovered that the Chain of Being was not in it at all. The king was said to be “God’s anointed” – but in the Bible, that phrase referred only to the the kings of Israel, not to every monarch in history. Indeed, the central events of the Old and New Testaments, the Exodus and the career of Christ, were revolts against kings and lawful authority. Although Jesus resolutely refused to be the kind of political rebel that the Zealots wanted the Messiah to be, the hymn his mother spontaneously bursts into in the Annunciation, known as the Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55), speaks of the toppling of princes and the comforting of the downtrodden. Newly literate people began to realize that Christian mythology – in the sense of sacred stories – had been hijacked for centuries by a self-interested elite. The result was a series of revolutions, including the American, that brought modern democratic society into being. Myth as ideological propaganda and conditioning is more obvious because more large-scale in the so-called higher civilizations, such as medieval Europe or ancient Egypt, where the pharaoh’s status as incarnate god served the purposes of a priesthood and political power structure: in India, the system of dharma and karma kept in place the caste system. But myth as a framework of social control is equally present in smaller and less centralized societies: totemism divided society into clans with an intricate system that decided who could marry whom. As for the Old Testament, when Yahweh gave the law to Moses on Mt Sinai or Horeb, most people think of Moses as striding down the mountain with two tablets of ten commandments defining a simple and universal moral law. But it did not take forty days for God to dictate ten brief commandments. Moses is the traditional author of the Pentateuch, and, from the middle of the Book of Exodus through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, those five books contain a complex body of laws governing every last aspect of the life of

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the chosen people. By the time of Jesus, for people like the Pharisees, religion had to a marked degree contracted into a legalistic observance of the laws. Myths are stories, but they come to embody a way of life for those committed to them: around them grows the institution of religion, whose root is said to mean “binding together,” as in “ligament” (the etymology is disputed, but the observation remains valid). Religion binds society together around a common mythology, but the process seems inevitably to replace the original binding agent of an inspiring, imaginative vision with the ligaments of ideological power. Part 2 will have more to say about the power structures of ideology and the law where it examines the lineaments of the fallen world. There is no use denying that much, perhaps most of mythology, especially when taken hostage by institutional religion, has always served the purposes variously of escapism, magical thinking, and / or ideology – all three of which, however, contain as well humane and life-preserving possibilities. Despite the negative judgment latent in the word “escapism,” life is sometimes simply too hard to bear. Some children, growing up under adverse conditions, would not be able to survive emotionally if they could not escape through books into another world, or worlds. Some of these children grow up to become authors themselves, and “children’s literature” such as the Narnia books and Harry Potter abounds with young protagonists who stumble through some escape hatch. Adults learn to be ashamed of their need to escape, but require it no less than children do. As for magical thinking, no doubt there are some atheists in foxholes, but there are also non-believers willing to pray that a hospitalized child will not die. Even ideology, the villain of so many poststructuralist and Marxist critical arguments, provides at times a merciful comfort for human frailty. While the need for comfort may be scorned as childish, to deny – as men in particular are conditioned to do – that at heart we remain children can lead to self-protective bravado or even self-proving violence. The symbols of religion, myth, and the arts are exactly what Stevens shows them to be in “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” (cp, 431–6): toys that comfort the human race in the dark, especially in the face of death. They may still comfort even when no longer “believed in”: it is easy to sympathize with the people who continue to light their Christmas lights long into the winter as a stay against the darkness and the cold. Ideology also helps to make community possible: people need to belong to a group of kindred spirits, and it is, once again, individuals who deny or feel excluded from such belonging who may take revenge against

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the group by mass murders. There are genuine forms of patriotism, of devotion to church or school. There are also groups that make outsiders insiders by bonding them with a minority of fellow mutants – with fellow fans of video games, science fiction and fantasy, folk or rock music, and the like. Belonging to a team is more important to many student athletes than competition or masculine self-proving, and the theatre becomes a place to belong for many undergraduate theatre majors. The problem is that, if the “reality principle” is the final criterion, these ways of coping are at best noble lies, the life-giving illusions that Nietzsche said humanity required to shield itself from staring at the abyss. Worse, they may become the opiate of the people, effective as pain-killers, but, like Huxley’s soma, rendering their users oblivious to the way that the will to power, embodied in any number of Grand Inquisitors, uses escapism, magical thinking, and ideological fantasies to further its own ends. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, attacks religion as a menace to human well-being.5 To the objection that not all religion is the combination of magical thinking and ideological aggression that he is attacking, he responds that profounder and more civilized versions are not genuine because they are only a minority view. The appropriate response to this is Sturgeon’s law, promulgated by the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon. When someone complained to him that 90 per cent of science fiction is crap, he replied, “Ninety per cent of everything is crap.” In other words, it is the 10 per cent that counts and should be the benchmark, not the crap, however ubiquitous. The present book is concerned with the 10 per cent of mythology that is not escapist, superstitious, or ideological crap, aware though it is of their prominence. As such, genuine mythology belongs to an often-esoteric or “secret” counter-tradition that seems to have existed parallel to the whole history of more socially normative myth and religion, but so different that it was invisible to the more socially conditioned. Within the European mythological tradition, certain aspects of Hellenistic syncretism, of Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticism, of visionary rather than doctrinal Christianity, and of alchemy helped shape the culture of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, which in turn influenced Romantic creative artists and philosophers, who in turn inspired such Modernist artists as Yeats, Joyce, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot, at times despite these creators’ professed anti-Romanticism. The Renaissance, the Romantic period, and the Modernist period not only revalued mythology but constitute three great outbursts of mythopoetic art, or what Joseph Campbell calls “creative mythology.”6 In these

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movements and some of these writers, genuine mythical vision is contaminated with magical thinking, ideology, and sometimes outright instability: in his notebooks, Northrop Frye spoke of what he called “kook books.” But Frye read many of them, not only because profound intuitions at times lie buried there in a good deal of nonsense, but because they helped inspire great works of the mythopoetic imagination such as Blake’s Prophecies, Goethe’s Faust, and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The phrase “secret wisdom of the ancients” today sounds very quaint, but the belief it referred to is still current: that myths, the earliest stories of the human race, are still relevant because their timeless, universal truths may still guide us in the contemporary wilderness. But ascribing truth value to myth raises the question of belief, and the will to believe collides headlong with the exuberant implausibility of myth. Could traditional peoples really have believed that the world was created by talking animals (the creation according to Pixar); that a woman could turn into a tree, like Daphne; that a burning bush might talk to you in the desert and claim to be God; that the universe rests on the back of a cosmic turtle; that you should not eat that burger, as Ovid’s Pythagoras admonishes, because the cow it came from might have been your reincarnated grandmother; that God is three and yet one, and also fully human while fully divine, and also bread and wine; that creatures have existed who were half man and half goat, bull, or horse; that people can walk on water, stand in mid-air, rise from the dead? Some people have made it a triumph of faith to believe six impossible things before breakfast: “I believe because it is absurd,” said Tertullian, and Kierkegaard praised Abraham’s “leap of faith” in blindly believing that the voice telling him to sacrifice his son like an animal was the voice of God. But the Inquisitors of Shaw’s St Joan might have answered him as they answered Joan: “How do you know it is instead not the voice of the Devil?” Mythological stories defy not only the laws of physics but plain common sense. It is not unreasonable to ask whether societies based on mythology lacked a reality sense: did people not pause to consider that nowhere in ordinary experience do we find anything to correspond to the imagery of myth, which is often more bizarre than people realize if they know myth only as it has been cleaned up and repackaged for modern consumption. Retellings of Greek myth for younger readers are not likely to include the origin of Aphrodite, who arose from the womb of the foaming sea after it was impregnated with the bloody genitals of Kronos, castrated by his own son Zeus. Most people have accepted the truth of their own faith and its mythology not only because they grew up within

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it but because most societies in history were relatively isolated. But awareness of the range of world mythology and religion has been growing since at least the eighteenth century, when Voltaire was already challenging believers to defend their complacent assurance that, of the hundreds of belief systems in the world, theirs and theirs alone was true. B. The Doors of Perception It slowly dawned on people that, if myths did not resemble the world of ordinary experience, it was because they were the product of a mental state quite different from that of ordinary ewxperience. By the time of Freud and Jung, it was becoming clear that myths related more to the unconscious than to reason and the senses. Mythic narratives bear a striking resemblance to dreams and obey the same Freudian dream-laws of condensation and displacement, whereby time, space, and identity are metamorphic rather than logical and discrete. In 1910, the French scholar Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s How Natives Think spoke of a “pre-logical mentality.”7 Because primitive people have a different mode of consciousness, it said, they live in a different world. The volume later became so controversial that the author repudiated it, but at its heart lay a genuine insight, which he unfortunately applied in a reductive, ethnocentric, and frequently racist manner. In this view, pre-modern people are purely pre-logical, somnambulists caught in a waking dream; or grown-up children, with a childishly underdeveloped sense of the real world. In its virulent form, this becomes the myth of the “savage,” whether projected on the native peoples of “darkest Africa” or of the American west. Comparative mythology has never recovered from this disastrous corruption of a genuine intuition: there is still a widespread feeling that it is not a genuine discipline but a covert form of cultural imperialism. The root error is the assumption that “they” are pre-logical while “we” are rational and realistic. Freud and Jung, along with a good part of Modernist literature, such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, showed that prelogical thinking is very much alive under a veneer of supposed “higher civilization.” But Conrad has been criticized for regrettably perpetuating the fallacy in the first half of the assumption: his “natives” are still the “savages” of cultural stereotyping. What is wrong is the reductionistic eitheror. Human life is an interplay between two modes of consciousness, one based on the ordinary ego, reason, and the senses, the other deriving from deeper sources in the unconscious. People who could build the Pyramids or Stonehenge; or track and hunt mammoths with stones; or survive in

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the harshest extremes of climate, from desert to Ice Age; or paint the breathtaking Palaeolithic cave paintings: the idea that such people were living in a dreamland of childish fantasy is not just laughable but offensive. The knowledge, skill, and, yes, technology necessary for such achievements prove that “primitive” people are just as aware of the conditions of the “real world” as we are – perhaps more so. The pressure of survival in a dangerous environment no doubt does wonders to sharpen one’s sense of reality. But we should also be wary of generalizing: any culture is likely to have its share of ignorant and superstitious fools, along with a small but precious number of wise visionaries. Doubtless a good part of mythology is simply fabricated, whether for reasons of ideology or as part of an editing process. But its vital core derives from a kind of experience that transcends the ordinary world or transforms it into the extra-ordinary. Ordinary consciousness, or the ego, draws conclusions about the external world by means of reason operating on the data of the senses; science may reach conclusions quite different from those of “common sense,” but it refines ordinary perception rather than generating a new mode of consciousness. Science is based on the assumption that the world we wake up to every morning is the actual world, even if our imperfect senses and emotional biases give us a distorted picture of it that must be corrected by the proper lenses, so to speak. It is on that basis that science has become the truth-language of our time: hysterical attacks on it by religion prove only that religion protests too much. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould is willing to grant the two realms their separate but equal “magisteria,” or areas of authority, but he seems to have little sense of what the magisterium of religion is, and his separatebut-equal solution seems mostly a kind of peace treaty to end their centuries-long war.8 Yet his approach is grounded in a genuine, indeed a quite traditional distinction. Some Christian theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, granted that reason and the senses, although they give knowledge mostly of nature and the secular realm, could also arrive at some knowledge about spiritual truths: even pagans have a limited sense of God. But if humanity gathered evidence and reasoned on it for thousands of years – which is exactly what it has in fact done – it could never arrive at some of the central truths of Christianity such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, which indeed reason cannot understand except as paradoxes even when presented with them. Reason has to be supplemented by, and in the end subordinated to, a second mode of knowledge often known simply as “revelation,” whether directly by God or indirectly through Scripture and the

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teachings of the church. Subordinated to, because what is revealed transcends what Kant called the a priori categories of time, space, and (others added) causality that structure both common reality and reason itself. Rudolf Otto spoke of epiphanies in which “the holy” manifested itself, inspiring twin emotions of awe and dread; Mircea Eliade produced an encyclopaedic catalogue of types of “hierophany” in which “the sacred” disclosed itself in the midst of “the profane.”9 We have no time for a catalogue, but briefly may distinguish two types of revelation. First, the spiritual or the sacred may ascend or descend from its normal abode and enter the mundane world. In doing so, it may transfigure objective reality by charging it with the grandeur of God, to use a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem about the subject.10 Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion methodically lists hierophanies of the sky, sun, moon, water, stones, earth, vegetation, animals, human beings, buildings, sexuality and fertility, and time itself: any aspect of the profane world may suddenly blaze with the numinous energy of the sacred. Blake speaks of knowing the world in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour (E, 481). Or it may work through the subject rather than the object, either speaking to those it chooses, often making them take dictation, as with Moses, the prophets, Muhammad, and Joseph Smith, or seizing and possessing them, as with shamans and the Delphic oracle. Such dictations and seizures may be artistic as well as religious: the line is not easy to draw. The Muses became a mere poetic convention, but did not begin that way. Taking sacred dictation shades over into the use of divination to bridge the worlds of the sacred and profane. Yoruba religion in west Africa has an amazingly complex system of divination that has been compared to the I Ching. In the West, the Ouija board is mostly a game, but James Merrill claims that his three-part verse epic The Changing Light at Sandover, recording conversations with worlds beyond over a period of decades, was based on actual Ouija-board sessions with his partner, David Jackson. Yeats asserted that he based A Vision on his wife’s automatic writing, although it was later suggested that she cheated. Second, rather than the sacred’s ascending or descending to us, we may travel up or down to worlds above or below what Anglo-Saxon literature calls middengeard, from which Tolkien derived his Middle Earth. In the second half of Words with Power, Northrop Frye catalogues a wide variety of such “journeys.”11 Poetic inspiration may take the form of a journey, as it does in Dante’s Divine Comedy or Chaucer’s House of Fame. Dante likens his, to heaven, to St Paul’s account (albeit in the third person) of a vision

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of being rapt into the “third heaven” (II Corinthians 3). Part of the rites of initiation in some North American tribes was the vision quest, in which a young man ventured into the profane wilderness and, through fasting and discipline and meditation, achieved a vision of his own. The fact that revelation discloses levels of reality above and below this middle earth of subject–object perception gives us a rough but convenient way of defining mythology. The word “mythology” has been made to mean so many things that, as with “love,” no definition of it can ever be precise and all-inclusive. But we capture something crucial if we define it as a type of discourse, whether narrative or thematic in style, whose universe possesses a vertical dimension in addition to the horizontal dimension of ordinary life. This wider characterization fits more of the facts than its commonplace definition of a tale about the gods. A story begins to take on a mythical dimension to the extent that the reality it depicts is open to the possible manifestation of higher or lower modes of being, gods and supernatural figures being only one type of such manifestation. Whether the higher and lower dimensions are “believed in,” as in religion, or regarded merely as fictions, as in folktale and its modern descendants, romance and fantasy, the mythopoetic impulse remains the same. To say that a folktale is “mythic” would confuse the issue because of the common identification of myth with religion and belief. But the more imaginatively haunting folktales are secular versions of the type of narrative found in myths. The same is true of the literary forms that descend from folktale such as the literary fairy tale and romance. And at this point, our initial question about why people are drawn to mythology finds a belated answer. To the extent that they feel the higher and lower dimensions of reality walled off, their ordinary life may seem claustrophobic, a prison. Imaginative works – for mythopoetic writing is the expression of the unchained imagination – reassure us that there are more things in heaven and earth – and below the earth – than are dreamed of by Horatio’s philosophy. A word often used, from the romances of Shakespeare to modern science fiction, to evoke the emotional response to this revelation of wider possibilities is “wonder.” Nor is the “sense of wonder” limited to non-realistic writing. The great realistic novelists, while faithfully recording the details of ordinary life, often hint, and sometimes more than hint, at heights and depths of experience beyond and yet informing quotidian reality, one of the more powerful examples being Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych.

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C. The Subject–Object Paradigm What is this mode of experience that results in revelation? To gain some sense of its nature, we must first define what happens in ordinary experience, in which a subject or self-aware consciousness perceives a world that is objective, that is, external to itself. The I, or ego (Latin for “I”), confronts the not-I. Scientific method grew up as a critique of this paradigm, pointing out how objective reality is distorted in ordinary experience by subjective desires and anxieties. Science provides strict training in a detached impersonality that eliminates subjective bias and leaves objective truth. However, the subject–object explanation of reality breaks down into a series of intractable problems and unanswerable questions that have troubled not just science but philosophy since the seventeenth century. Indeed, the history of modern philosophy, since Descartes, is usually narrated as a series of attempts to find a way around the central epistemological difficulty first announced by Descartes himself. The English empirical tradition, represented by John Locke, merely assumed the validity of the subject–object model of knowledge. There is a real, objective world external to us, about which we gain knowledge through our senses. This is the view that grounds science, which insists, however, on training the observer to be unbiased and to test sensory data to be sure it is accurate. But Descartes saw the problem that has troubled people ever since, and not just philosophers. Both scientists and self-proclaimed hard-headed realists accept without question two basic assumptions: that there is a reality that is “out there,” external and apart from us, and that we know it from the data of the senses, prudently corrected for accuracy by other evidence, itself either sensory or logical-mathematical (as when my vision tells me the earth is flat but I have seen a photograph of the earth from space, or when equations lead scientists to postulate the existence of a dark matter that cannot be otherwise perceived). Yet these two assumptions are not facts: they are articles of faith, and scientific materialism is ultimately a religious commitment. Like all such, it is based on value rather than fact: a lot of people very much want there to be a solidly external reality. And, to be fair, their belief is not mere blind faith but is grounded in one powerful element of human experience: however much we may doubt or even disprove its existence, the world out there simply will not go away. The stubborn persistence of a reality independent of our desires and fears is the great strength of the subject–object position. Children live within the realm that psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls the Imaginary, or

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sometimes simply the moi, French for “me.”12 For them, there is no real Other: the images that appear in their senses are not distinct from their sense of self. Growing up is precisely a process of learning about otherness, and, for Lacan, the crucial Other is the mother, sometimes expressed by the play on words (m)Other. Children learn, when the mother does not gratify their desires or is absent, that the Other is separate from themselves. They mature through a series of disillusionments, as they learn time and again that neither their mother nor indeed anything in the world exists to make them happy. Not only that, but the world makes demands, must be coped with, sometimes as a matter of survival. Magical thinking holds it at bay imperfectly, and at the cost of a loss of reality: Wallace Stevens has a wonderful poem called “The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts” (cp, 209) in which the rabbit fantasizes itself tall as a house, dwarfing the predatory cat. Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Ulysses knows that, in order to mature into the artistcraftsman signified by his last name, he must accept the reality of the world and the senses, despite his youth and his extreme intellectuality, or he risks instead coming down to earth in the disastrous, involuntary manner of Daedalus’s son, Icarus. That is why he says that external reality is “fabled by the daughters of memory. And yet it was in some way, if not as memory fabled it”13 – the allusion to “daughters of memory” indicating what might seem to be an argument with Joyce’s mentor William Blake, who would certainly agree that the objective world cannot simply be wished away. Whatever the outcome for Stephen Dedalus, those who fail to accept a reality not created by the ego are narcissists, trapped in the condition of Narcissus, in love with his own image reflected in the water. Historian Christopher Lasch spoke of The Culture of Narcissism that he felt the United States seemed well on its way to creating by the 1970s.14 It was a prophetic book, even if it now seems to have underpredicted how dangerous was the rough beast it saw slouching its way to be born. It is hard to blame Lasch for failing to anticipate the internet, which replaces objective reality with not one but many competing virtual realities whose truth status is questionable, or for not foreseeing an American president with clear symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder governing the country through Twitter, who does not really lie because he has so little sense of reality outside his own fantasies and impulses, yet who has the enthusiastic support of the perhaps 40 per cent of Americans who display the same symptoms, and who dismiss any facts inconvenient to their fantasies as “fake news.” It is thus easy to sympathize with those who are leery about

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moving away from the subject–object model and its “reality principle.” Science in particular confronts in our time forms of religion so permeated with magical thinking as to seem almost solipsistic. And yet, even in the seventeenth century, Descartes had insisted that the stubborn persistence of the objective world is no argument for its reality. We know the objective world only through the evidence of our senses. But what if our senses are misinforming us? What if they misrepresent the external world they present to us – or fabricate a world outside us that is not there at all? What if, Descartes asked, some mischievous demon has us trapped in an illusory world systematically feeding false data to our senses? If the demon were good at his job, and avoided inconsistencies, there would be no way to break out of the illusion: empirical testing would operate only within its circumference, confirming or denying phenomena within its parameters without being able to challenge the illusion itself, any more than characters in a dream can be aware that they are in a dream. The world as a dream is in fact a metaphor that long antedates Descartes’s prestidigitating imp. The name of the dreamer varies: Vishnu in Hinduism, the Red King in Lewis Carroll, either Finnegan or someone else in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Shakespeare was fascinated by the idea, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Tempest, in which “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” (4.1.156–7). In the latter, the world as a dream combines with the world as a theatrical presentation, which is also a deliberately summoned illusion that fades away and leaves not a rack behind. To this epistemological uncertainty is added an ontological one: the notorious mind–body problem. Mind and matter are opposites: intangible and tangible, conscious and unconscious. But human identity unites these opposites: I am a mind or consciousness that is “in” a physical body – and yet my body is also part of my identity, not a mere vehicle. Within the subject–object framework of experience, we oscillate unstably between these two ways of experiencing the self, never sure which is true. We are left experiencing our own identity as what Jacques Derrida calls an “aporia”: a situation that is undecidable because two opposite conclusions are both necessarily true. Blake would call it a Negation: a set of opposites that negate or mutually cancel each other out. It is hard to see, within the subject–object perspective bound by the law of non-contradiction, how psyche and matter could ever unite or even interact. The result is dualism. Consequently, Blake referred to the subject–object perspective as a “cloven fiction,” cloven like the devil’s hoof.15

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There are two possible responses to the paradoxes generated by subject–object dualism. One is to challenge the framework itself, to burst out of it into the wider perspective that is the theme of this book. The other is to attempt to remain within it, attempting to suppress or somehow conjure away subject or object. By the nineteenth century, two traditions had arisen as a response to Cartesian dualism: Idealism eliminated the object and asserted that all reality is mental, created by the perceiving subject; materialism abolished the subject. It was the latter that had triumphed by the twentieth century and remains the basic paradigm not only of science but of most of the cultural elite in the twenty-first. The most advanced theory of consciousness maintains that consciousness does not and cannot exist: it is a kind of illusion, or, if we prefer fancier language, an epiphenomenon, like the illusion that a desk top is solid to the touch when both desk and hand are really fields of conflicting energy processes. In the world of materialism, we are not conscious: we only think we are conscious, but are really just programs, like the ones in our computers. If we protest, as Descartes did when he said, “I think; therefore I am,” that I know consciousness exists because I experience it, science digs in its heels and insists that consciousness is simply brain function. Thus science begins by reinforcing the subject–object paradigm of ordinary common sense, but eventually outrages it by eliminating the subject and leaving only the objective, the realm of materialism. The identification of consciousness with brain function is not inevitable: the brain may be merely a receiver, like a radio receiver. If it is broken, it will not be able to pick up the broadcast, which may none the less exist. But positivistic science has a powerful incentive to ignore such arguments. We have seen that in the cloven fiction, subject and object do not remain on an equal footing: the more detached the subject is from the objective world that grounds it, the closer it comes to dissolving into unreality, the condition that positivistic science ascribes to it anyway. With the subject blown away like smoke, the air clears on a world of matter and energy operating blindly and automatically, nature as a machine. As there is no life or consciousness, it is a world of death – even though it is what we call “ordinary life.” Loren Eiseley fantasizes this realization breaking in on himself in his essay “Instruments of Darkness,” announcing, “Finally, as the greatest mystery of all, I who write these words on paper, cannot establish my own reality. I am, by any reasonable and considered logic, dead.” There is no life in the fossil lying on his desk. But like-

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wise, he says, there is no life in any of the elements that make up his body. “There is no life in the carbon in my body … There is no life in the iron, there is no life in the phosphorus, the nitrogen does not contain me, the water that soaks my tissues is not I. What am I then?”16 The subject’s anxiety in the face of the overwhelming objective realm is the theme of another book by Christopher Lasch – titled significantly The Minimal Self.17 Already in the seventeenth century, Pascal said that the silences of those vast empty spaces terrified him. Scientists may protest that a less alienated attitude is possible: to Einstein, the mathematical order of the universe was an object of mystical contemplation, a union of beauty and truth. Such a view implies a kind of godlike detachment – precisely the stance of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker, a deity who contemplates the universe as a work of art. In the original Cosmos television series, Carl Sagan found inspiration in the idea that “We are made of star stuff”: part of the universe, not its orphans. But this alternative perspective is no longer truly scientific: while still employing scientific vocabulary, it has shifted from the objective to the imaginative, a view in which subject and object are connected, even identified. The conventional scientific outlook in itself is purely materialistic. What began in astronomy and physics spread to biology with the Darwinian revolution. Evolution rules out the conception of “life” as unscientific: it’s really just matter and energy in process. That the process is organized does not imply a Creator: nature is a blind watchmaker, as Richard Dawkins puts it.18 He borrows the idea from a famous eighteenth-century analogy of God as a watchmaker, but his thoroughgoing materialism does demand that he conceive of life as essentially mechanistic. In the revised edition of The Selfish Gene, to the challenge that his view reduces us to machines, he responds: what else should we be?19 His friend the philosopher Daniel Dennett eliminates not just life but consciousness – both, in a materialistic view, mere superstitions: like believing in ghosts – after all, consciousness has been called the “ghost in the machine.” He titles one section in his book “Consciousness Explained, or Explained Away.”20 It is, he tells us, like a little man inside your head making all the decisions – but who knows where he came from? So consciousness is illusory: thought and decision are programmed, with the mind an organic computer, or “wetware.” The proponents of artificial intelligence, for example, agree. To the objection that, while computers can become self-programming, they are not sentient or self-aware, ai advocates reply that more sophisticat-

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ed designs will somehow reach that state, as in Spike Jonze’s movie Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix’s laptop operating system unexpectedly turns into Scarlett Johansson. But this is an article of faith, and raises another problem: if it does so, how will we know? Computers already can in limited ways pass the Turing test for artificial intelligence: some can fool a human being into thinking he or she is interacting with another human being, and they will no doubt keep improving. But isn’t even the most sophisticated mimicry of human responses simply the programming of an automaton? When we interact with such a machine, we are not really communicating with another self any more than we are when we speak back to the voice-recognition software of a telephone menu system. Proponents of the Turing test do not seem to see the weight of this objection. They say that when I interact with another human being, I assume an interior consciousness based on exactly the same criterion of external behaviour patterns. But the case is not the same because other people have not been designed. I do not have reason to suspect that their responses, so akin to my own, are the result of programming rather than interiority. But of course this is less of a problem if one does not believe that human beings are really conscious either. The alternative to the materialist view can be stated thus: consciousness exists because it is a fact of direct experience that no amount of logical refutation can exorcize. We know self-awareness; we feel emotions; we experience the impact of sensory data as what are called qualia. A machine can register certain wavelengths of light, but only a living being can experience blue; a thermometer unconsciously measures heat, but I feel it radiating from a hot stove. These are not responses to stimuli on the behaviourist model: they are conscious experiences, a good part of what we mean by feeling alive and human. Those interested in hearing the two camps directly critique each other’s views may consult a collection of essays and responses titled The Third Culture, edited by John Brockman.21 Dennett is included, described by Brockman as “the philosopher of choice of the ai community” (149), as are Marvin Minsky, whom he calls “the leading light of ai” (148), and Roger Shank. Dennett’s opposite number is Nicholas Humphrey, who responded to Dennett’s dismissal of consciousness with Consciousness Regained.22 It is fascinating to see how the two viewpoints appeal to William James’s tough- and tender-minded personalities, even more riveting to observe that the debaters are quite aware of the fact. Dennett calls his

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opponent a “romantic scientist” (205), who retorts that his interlocutor is a “purist,” whose tough-mindedness sprang from logical positivism and behaviourism: “Dan got trapped by the beauty of this approach. And it meant denying the reality of things we all know are important – like sensations, raw feelings, all the qualitative aspects of consciousness – too bad” (190). A bit later, he adds, “For Dan, the basic constituents of consciousness are ideas, judgments, propositions, and so on … To caricature it, his picture of the mind is of a kind of cerebral office, with memos, faxes, and phone calls flying around and competing for the attention of the frantic office staff” (203). In short, Dennett is objective. Whether or not the “strong ai” view is correct, it is more prestigious among scientists for exactly that reason. To the extent that it allows consciousness at all, it reduces it to its informational, computational, most machine-like functions. Humphrey defends subjectivity, which means making a place for squishy things like sensations and feelings. A rather more aggressive defender of the dissenting view is Raymond Tallis, whose book titles conveniently summarize their theses, such as Why the Mind Is Not a Computer and Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis, and the Misrepresentation of Humanity.23 But Humphrey and Tallis are outliers: objectivity earns more respect in our scientistic society, even when its limitations become evident, as they have done in economics, a field now dominated by “scientific” mathematical models that fail to predict behaviour accurately because they assume a population dominated by “rational self-interest” – by objectivity. There are no equations for irrational behaviour.

1. the cloven fiction: we have met the enemy and he is us: the mind as its own other Having argued that the subject cannot be elided out of existence, we return to the subject–object paradigm. Before I suggest a way beyond it, we need to explore it from the subject’s point of view, in order to demonstrate how a condition taken as normative is in fact deeply and increasingly problematic. The ego’s experience is, to state the obvious, egocentric: I am the centre of my universe, which, as if in the aftermath of some catastrophic Big Bang, recedes from me in a series of concentric circles of the not-I into ever-increasing distance and alienation. There is nothing from which I am not potentially distanced and to a greater or lesser degree alienated. I may be alienated from my own mind, from my body, from the language I use to bridge the gulf between me and the outer world, from other people, from nature, and from God and the spiritual

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realm. We may go on to explore this expanding series circumference by circumference. Freud was hardly the first to show the mind in conflict with itself: as he was well aware, the divided self had been dramatized for centuries in the Greek and Shakespearean tragic heroes as well as in Milton’s Satan, who is modelled on them. But Milton is also drawing on the Christian tradition, which interiorized the battle between good and evil – a psychomachia whose greatest exemplar is probably Augustine’s Confessions. What Freud provided was theoretical understanding: he showed that the Cartesian model of a consciousness always present to itself is wrong. Even the conscious mind is split: the unconscious can be defined as that part, or parts, of the mind that have calved from the ego and objectified, turned into the Other. We are always conflicted, arguing with ourselves, although we admit it only rarely, for fear of seeming abnormal. In fact, nothing is more normal: the internal residents of the community of the psyche are what Freud and Jung called “complexes,” which are just as typically in disagreement as the citizens of the outer social community. Severe dissociation can result in multiple personality disorder. Complexes that have not at the moment seized the microphone, so to speak, remain submerged in the unconscious, about which the ego as a rule knows quite little. Nor is the unconscious mind itself a unity. From its first model of a simple division between conscious and unconscious mind, depth psychology went on to elaborate a schema in which unconscious complexes, charged with psychic energy or “libido,” interacted and often warred with one another, achieving at best an imperfect and usually temporary consensus. Blake’s long poems are mythological epics in which the characters are the embodiment of psychic forces. They (along with their counterparts in other Romantic poems) are remarkable precursors of the pantheons of modern depth psychological theory: Freud’s ego, id, and superego; Jung’s persona, ego, shadow, anima / animus, and Self. Thus the most intimate symptom of the subject–object division is that the ego finds the Other lurking within itself, where it thought itself to be most secure and protected, and it reacts, often as not, with anxiety and a sense of being threatened – with, in a word, paranoia. This reaction, however, because it tends to be projected, has serious social consequences: we have come to understand that violent homophobia may be an attempt to expel homoerotic impulses secretly within; that misogyny is a masculine protest against an inner feminine; that racism and xenophobia are denials of certain traits by projecting them on others who are identifiably “different.” Jung’s concept of the projected shadow, the alter ego who embod-

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ies personality traits repudiated by the ego, explains the seeming irrationality of such prejudices in a way that no sociological or economic explanation can. The motto of such paranoia is “Build the wall,” not just in the literal sense of political and even material barriers, but even more so in the form of extremist and fact-proof attitudes. Even an attempt to argue against such barriers is itself seen as threatening. The attitude is not new: in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” the neighbour, who keeps repeating the phrase learned from his ancestors, “Good fences mean good neighbors,” seems to the speaker like “an old stone savage armed.” But it has taken on a new and ominous immediacy in recent times.

2. the cloven fiction: the body of this death: the body as other As we saw earlier, it is difficult to understand how consciousness could arise from or have any intimate relationship with a material substrate that is in every way its antithesis. This becomes more than a logical difficulty in the relationship of mind with body. To the extent that the subject identifies itself with consciousness, it detaches itself from the body, objectifying it into something other. Historically, such detachment has frequently deepened into an anxious and nauseated repudiation. The Platonic ladder climbs from the physical world into a world of pure mental Forms: this reverses the fall into matter of some Gnostic and Hermetic myths. Medieval Christianity developed a whole discipline of ascetic practices aimed at breaking the attachment to the body by attacking its chief hold on people, namely, sensual pleasure. The mortification of the flesh ranged from deprivations such as fasting and celibacy to the infliction of pain through self-flogging, hair shirts, and the like. Even when I was growing up as a pre–Vatican II Catholic in the twentieth century, the basic rule was, if it feels good, don’t do it. In fact, don’t even think about it: sexual fantasies were as sinful as sex itself – maybe more so, since fantasy is free of the imperfections and limitations reality imposes on actual sex, and is thereby the more addictively enticing. From a rational point of view, this is all quite mad. Yet modern attempts to be rational about bodily pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, run up against a deep ambivalence. Why this fear of the body and its sensations and desires? Because the body is not only the source of pleasure and sensory gratification: it is also the source of sickness, pain, and death. The older one becomes, the more one understands the protest of the sixty-year-old Yeats

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in “Among School Children” at being attached to “a dying animal.” What is death? It is the subject become an object. Hamlet remembers that Yorick used to ride him on his shoulders when he was a child, and what is Yorick now? A skull in a graveyard, reeking of decay. Dying of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Ernest Becker wrote The Denial of Death, contending that all human culture is an immortality project, an elaborate evasion of the fact of death. The poets preceded the intellectuals in their awareness that, from the moment we are born, life is one long dying: the progeny of Hamlet include Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s Death’s Jest Book, which in turn inspired the early poetry and prose of Dylan Thomas, who sits and watches “the worm beneath my nail / Wearing the quick away.” My consciousness persists relatively unchanged through time, giving me the feeling that I am the same person I was at the age of seven. But since that time, my body has undergone a slow, strange metamorphosis. If the child of seven were to see the old man he would become at eighty-seven, he might well recoil in horror. It is one thing to know that ageing is normal: it is another to live it, or rather to die it. One conclusion from all this is that Blake’s condemnation of the subject–object point of view as a cloven fiction does not mean that it is a merely intellectual error: it is a mode of experience in which we are deeply embedded, a nightmare from which we do not know how to awaken, from which, one day, we will not wake up again. And it is the body that dies, taking consciousness with it, whether to another realm or simply into oblivion. But even the healthy body is an object – using the term advisedly – of disgust to consciousness, although we pretend otherwise. And it is precisely its physicality from which consciousness recoils. Why else should we be so careful about covering it up, disguising its odours, pretending that its excretory functions do not exist, and idealizing sex by neglecting to acknowledge that the sexual act is sweaty, sticky, and undignified? Moreover, the beautiful bodies displayed in art museums and on movie screens are possessed by a tiny fraction of the human race. The idea that teenaged girls become anorexic by trying to achieve such bodies is too simple: that is only a cover story, even if it is believed by the victims themselves. After all, an adolescent who weighs seventy-five pounds looks not like a movie star but like a concentration-camp survivor. The “fat” that anorexics are trying to lose is really the body itself: they would not be thin enough in their own eyes until they had starved it away altogether, liberating themselves into pure consciousness.

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As if all this were not enough, the ego sometimes becomes aware that the body is more than a passive excrescence: the word “psychosomatic” signals that soma may affect, alter, even at times overpower psyche. When we are exhausted, anxious, or depressed, our view of both ourselves and the world changes: body chemistry – hormones, serotonin, pheromones – puppeteers us until we ask ourselves such questions as “Is it me or the depression talking?” If Richard Dawkins and other evolutionary psychologists are correct about the “selfish gene,” human behaviour is genetically programmed. Is there such a thing as pure consciousness apart from its somatic ground? Emotion in particular is physical as well as mental: fear, anger, joy, pity produce involuntary physical responses. Long before people dreamed of uploading consciousness into virtual reality, science fiction performed thought experiments exploring what consciousness without a somatic basis would be like. In Catherine L. Moore’s classic story “No Woman Born,” the consciousness of a dancer whose body is critically injured in a fire is transplanted into a robot form. Her new mechanical body has capabilities far beyond the bodies of normal dancers, but the story ends tragically as she feels her humanity slowly fading away into a cold detachment. H.G. Wells’s Martians in War of the Worlds are monsters precisely because they have become pure brains, that is, pure analytic consciousness without feelings or empathy. Once again we are left with an aporia: the body is an alien other, yet the body is myself. Can I really imagine being a disembodied consciousness, without emotion and the physical vividness of the senses? The human condition in the subject–object realm thus becomes a condition of ambivalent vacillation.

3. the cloven fiction: the forked tongue: the equivocal nature of language True language is what is often said to set us apart from the other animals, who have, with a few possible exceptions, only relatively limited signal systems. If Noam Chomsky is correct, we are genetically hard-wired to learn language quickly and almost entirely untaught, due to universal deep structures that underlie all the thousands of languages of the world. At the same time, the advent of language can be seen as a fall from a prior condition of wordless consciousness. Some thinkers have denied that any thought is possible prior to language, which, they contend, is the precondition of thought. If “thought” means abstract conceptualizing, possibly so, but consciousness includes more than conceptualization. Otherwise the conclusion would be that babies and animals are not conscious.

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Pure conscious interiority could be considered a type of solitary confinement: those of us of a certain age may remember the climactic moment in the 1962 film The Miracle Worker when Helen Keller realizes that a sign-language signifier stands for the signified “water.” The ecstatic joy on actor Patty Duke’s face was itself a sign, the look of someone who has discovered the way out of loneliness. But another point of view speaks, like Fredric Jameson, of “the prisonhouse of language.”24 Language is a set of rules, what Saussure called langue, and the subject’s rich inner world has to be codified in some way, always imperfect, to allow for communication to take place. This kind of self-objectification, like all objectification, is alienating. It may engender a longing for something that evades the opposite fates of solipsistic interiority (the Cartesian cogito as autistic isolation) and dehumanizing objectification into a labyrinth of signifiers – in short, a yearning for a wordless communion. This last takes, in science fiction, the form of telepathy, for which Theodore Sturgeon in his classic novel More than Human invented a portmanteau word, “bleshing,” a combination of blending and meshing, and evoking “blessing.” Yet, compared to writing, speech involves only a first-level objectification. Speech comes naturally to us, so much so that it seems a spontaneous and immediate expression of our consciousness. Moreover, it is physical, generated out of the body, its vehicle the power and vitality of the human voice: whereas writing is disembodied, disconnected from its author, enabling it to communicate over vast distances of time and space but at the cost of a certain ghostly abstraction. Speech has a direct impact on an audience that is necessarily present: oral language is thus performative, whereas writing is comparatively contemplative and detached. For all these reasons, as Jacques Derrida says in Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference, speech reinforces the sense of the subject’s self-identity, its presence to itself. Hence the periodic denigration of writing within a culture increasingly based on writing. But objectification logically culminates in the complete subsuming of consciousness into a material form. In poststructuralism as in materialistic science, the subject disappears, is subsumed into the objective: as consciousness is an epiphenomenon of brain activity, so is the signified of the play of signifiers. Growing awareness of this speech / writing contradiction has led to postmodernism’s preference for the “writerly” text that privileges the play of signification and by doing so dispels the illusion of the subject. There is in reality neither author nor reader: that is a mystification belonging to “humanism.”

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Privileging the object over the subject, however, the signifier over the signified, is, as the more sophisticated versions of deconstruction are to some extent aware, only a coping mechanism, and there seems to me a better way to think about and deal with the inevitable paradoxes. The real subjective–objective split in language is not between speech and writing but between the monologic and the dialogic, between the self-expressive and the socially communicative, and these irreconcilable demands exist in speech and writing equally. The self-expressive is rooted in Lacan’s Imaginary Order: it is narcissistic, even solipsistic, yet represents the legitimate claims of the subjective in the face of pressure to conform to the social conventions of the Symbolic Order, which is objective and therefore communicative, but at a cost of suppressing individuality. Part 4 below takes up this subject again in a discussion of decreating language back to the common root out of which speech and writing grow. To sum up the argument thus far, the cloven fiction appears in language as the gulf between inward subjectivity and the outward, materially based system of phonemes, whether oral or written, that are somehow supposed to express inward thoughts, feelings, and sensations, a linguistic version of the mind–matter contradiction. The speaker or writer’s meaning is somehow – that word again – ensconced within the signifier as its signified, which is taken to mean either the signifier’s dictionary definition or what it points to in the external world, in other words its referent. Meaning is said to be transferred by signifiers from speaker or writer to audience: we feel sure that this happens, yet it is impossible to say how. The versions of poststructuralism influenced by Saussurean linguistics assure us that, on the contrary, it cannot happen. The meaning of a signifier can be expressed only by other signifiers, which in turn have to be defined by still others. We never in fact arrive at the signified, but merely slide along an endless chain of signifiers. Meaning is always deferred, one meaning of Derrida’s punning term différance: it can never appear beyond the black hole’s event horizon. An occasional poststructuralist phrase for signification (adapted from the criticism of painting) is mise en abyme: a plunge into a bottomless abyss. Deconstruction would eventually seem to arrive, consequently, at a total linguistic scepticism, and, when Derrida arrived on the scene in the 1960s, he was attacked as a nihilist. He protested that he was only pursuing what has been the main task of philosophy since Socrates, to follow a line of argument to its logical conclusion, no matter how inconvenient the outcome. And if there is no alternative to the subject–object framework, his conclusion appears inescapable.

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One of Derrida’s most respected commentators, Christopher Norris, has said of the sceptical tradition in philosophy, “Its proponents have never pretended that life could be conducted in a practical way if everyone acted consistently on sceptical assumptions.”25 What is true of practical life is true of philosophy and criticism: “Deconstruction can sustain its sceptical position only to the point where its findings have to be argued in more or less persuasive terms,” at which point the interpreter faces a dilemma. A persistent scepticism “must open up an endless series of further deconstructions … [but] the critic can acknowledge, with [Paul] de Man[,] that there must be an end-point to this dizzying regress … when scepticism encounters a figural will to power beyond reach of further deconstruction.”26 That is the moment we call “truth,” which explains how Derrida can say, I think honestly, that he has never renounced the idea of truth, yet speak at the end of his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences” of the need to adopt a Nietzschean stance “without truth.”27 We need truth, we must have truth: it is Nietzsche’s life-giving lie. But in the end, it is still a lie. We may pass over from philosophy to literature by noting that rhetorically deconstruction is a form of irony, the expression of disjunction. Irony is a sophisticated and self-conscious mode, wary of falling into a naïve belief in appearances, especially attractive ones that may be the result of escapism, magical thinking, or the brainwashing of ideology. It commonly surfaces in adolescence, in the form of an almost-existentialist chic, that form of posturing that asserts that just about everything “sucks.” Adolescents going through this phase almost always identify with Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A mature form of ironic scepticism entered literature with the intolerable yet unforgettable voice of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, and also with the mocking voice of the later Nietzsche. Since then it has become the dominant literary mode, the expression of divided, alienated consciousness that has intensified to such a degree that not just Western culture but the world is pervaded by a feeling that humanity has reached some sort of crisis out of which must come either transformation or apocalyptic destruction. On the level of myth, an important trope of irony is a kind of antimetaphor, which reduces or eliminates the subject by identifying it with a lower and less conscious level of the Chain of Being. This is the kind of downward metamorphosis that ends all but a few of the tales in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that turns Milton’s devils into hissing snakes (with a nod to Ovid) at the end of Paradise Lost, and Gregor Samsa into a cockroach in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” On a cosmic level, it can become an

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image of the Fall: Blake’s Albion contracts to become the landscape of fallen England, as the character hce in Joyce’s in Finnegans Wake does of Ireland. It is a fall out of language altogether, often featuring the motif of being trapped within a lower material form, conscious and yet unable to speak.

4. the cloven fiction: hell as other people According to deconstruction, Western culture is constructed as an interlocking set of opposites in which one term is repressed or subordinated to the dominant term. This can be diagrammed with one term atop the other with a bar representing their difference and opposition, an ideological version of the vertical axis that we met above. The following gives an idea of this organization but is far from exhaustive: sets of opposites could be added to it almost indefinitely: culture

mind

: nature

reason

: matter

order

: emotion

elite

white

: energy

: oppressed

masculine

: of colour

feminine

We may add to the list by mapping the binaries that structure the thought of a number of influential writers: Blake

Shelley

Schopenhauer

Angels

Jupiter

World as representation

: Devils

: Prometheus

World as Will

Nietzsche

Marx

Apollo

:

capitalists

: Dionysius

Freud conscious

: proletariat

Spengler Space

: unconscious

Time

The colon represents equivalence: if we read across, all the dominant terms show a certain affinity, as do the subordinated terms. All these relations involve power, reinforced by ideological rationalizations such as the Chain of Being in olden times or Social Darwinism and the survival of the fittest in our own. That the human race is so easily, endlessly dominated has troubled advocates of social change over centuries. Ideology is only a partial answer, but why is it so effective? Why do the oppressed not rise up and overturn their oppressors, given that “We are many, they are few”? And when revolutions do occur, why do they so often falter and collapse back into a new tyranny? Milton faced this question after the Puritan revolution failed, Blake after the French Revolution did the same. Part of the answer: people resign themselves passively to authoritarian social structures because the cloven fiction makes them seem inevitable:

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if self and other are antagonistic, one must be hammer or anvil. Some therefore are determined to become hammers; their anvil-victims tend not to question the structure of domination itself, but instead resign themselves in their subservience and comfort themselves by finding some other group even less powerful to lord it over or at least blame their misery on. If there is nothing to bind self and others except power relations, as seems to be the conclusion of poststructuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault, influenced by Nietzsche’s theory of the will to power, war is then not an interruption but the human condition – not only war between nations or tribes, but among classes, races, religions, and sexes. From this point of view, private social relations are simply war by other means, beginning with the Freudian Family Romance, which subordinates women to men and children to adults.

5. the cloven fiction: nature red in tooth and claw Another form of war is the antagonism in the cloven world between humanity and nature, between consciousness and its natural environment. Despite well-meaning attempts to convince us otherwise, human beings have difficulty feeling fully part of nature. The environment is too harsh, too full of predators, diseases, and other dangers for us to relax and feel at home: we are not adapted to living directly in it as the animals are. To survive, consciousness has used its power of reason to construct a second, distinctively human environment called “civilization” or “culture,” depending on whether its material or mental aspect is stressed. Certain animals have invented tools, but humanity has forged a vast technology capable of conquering its natural enemy. Tools may be mental as well as material: language and mathematics are mental devices that enable us to invent and construct the physical tools that alter our objective surroundings. Civilization and technology have vastly improved the quality of human life (as well as having increased its length), but eventually, as it becomes increasingly urban and dominated by technology, a new alienation sets in, for several reasons. First, the actual urban environment is not the stuff of world’s fairs: cities may have slums, some of them urban jungles as full of danger and deprivation as any natural jungle. Second, the urban environment often seems dead, a wilderness of concrete, stone, and steel. Tucked away in city neighbourhoods may be backyard gardens that provide the sort of natural nurturance that many if not most human beings seem to find necessary. Apparently our natural home resembles our familial one: can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Third, the urban world is typically

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ugly. The suburbs attempt to preserve trees and lawns, but these days may be encircled by strip malls and choked traffic like a frontier camp encircled by hostile forces in one of the old westerns. Fourth, and by far most important, the technology that makes modern medicine and iPads possible also stands a good chance of ending all life on the planet, if not by nuclear war then by climate change. As we saw earlier, because our identity is cloven, the human condition is one of vacillation. One part of us may be drawn to the “urban experience”: the city is where it’s happening. It holds the museums, concert halls, universities, and good restaurants: it is also the locus of diversity, compared to the clannishness of rural and small-town communities. Another part of us wants perhaps to return to the peace, quiet, greenery, and animal life of nature. We are, in the end, exiles in both worlds, natural and urban. Biblically, we began in a garden and will end in a city. The Book of Revelation tells us that we will get our garden back as well: with its tree and water of life, it will return as a park in the centre of the New Jerusalem. But that presupposes an end to the fallen world of subject–object alienation. If our attitude about our natural surroundings is ambivalent, so are our feelings about human nature. The traditional view is that God created human beings to be superior to and master of the natural world, including the animals. The “natural man” or “savage,” nature without nurture, is a regression, portrayed in King Lear as Poor Tom. But Shakespeare’s depiction of Caliban in The Tempest indicates that he knew that the character was more complicated than that. The misshapen creature is ignorant and has poor impulse control, to put it mildly, but he is a more sympathetic figure than the idiots he hangs around with, Stephano and Trinculo, not to mention the villains Antonio and Sebastian. He is a harbinger of a shift in attitude that would occur in the mid-eighteenth century, most often associated with Rousseau, who votes for the natural rather than the civilized man, for the “noble savage” who is still going strong in the figure of Tarzan in the early twentieth century (and later in film). For him, humanity has been corrupted by culture and must return to nature, an attitude inherited in our time by hippies and environmentalists. With Darwinism, however, came a stress on competition in nature and the survival of the fittest, which in turn spawned the unscientific but influential movement known as Social Darwinism. Unscientific because cooperation and interdependence are as Darwinian as competition: successful species manage to find a balance between the two. But the fear and

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hostility to the Other born of the cloven fiction are projected not only onto nature, which is seen as something to dominate, not love, but onto other human beings, leading to extreme libertarianism of the Ayn Rand variety. We are animals, but we are predatory animals who prey on those outside our group because “it is our nature.” This includes not only other human beings but the “lower animals,” who do not really – from this point of view – have feelings and who in any case do not count. But domination is the rule within the group as well, and he (it is typically a he) who achieves the status of alpha male deserves his pick of food, wealth, and women.

6. the cloven fiction: the demonic god In our notional heuristic diagram of what might be called the “egocentric cosmos” – concentric circles of increasingly objectified otherness radiating outward from the subject – the outermost circle is that of the divine. God has indeed sometimes been defined as the absolutely Other, inscrutable, completely beyond our understanding. The greater the degree of otherness, the greater the alienation, so, pious clichés about “God is love” notwithstanding, the common image of God historically has been that of a sadistic and capricious tyrant, a kind of omnipotent Caligula. I am not referring to the hostile characterizations of atheists such as Voltaire or Shelley: I am speaking of the actual God of the Bible and Judaeo-Christian tradition, even of apologists like Kierkegaard, who is willing to take a leap of faith to commit himself to a deity whose cat-and-mouse cruelty to Abraham is unconscionable. But at least Abraham was spared at the last minute from having to go through with his “test”: Job is spared nothing but his life, in order that God may win a bet with Satan. Jung generated controversy by pointing to the outrageousness of such behaviour in his Answer to Job. The Yahweh of the Old Testament decrees genocidal holy wars, then turns against Saul for granting mercy to an enemy king. Because Joseph Campbell criticized what he saw as a violent tribalism in such narratives, he is sometimes labelled anti-Semitic. Jung and Campbell are clearly aware that Judaism and Christianity cannot simply be reduced to these narratives of God’s scandalous behaviour: there is much else in both traditions that comes from another perspective altogether. But surely there is virtue in speaking out, as Cordelia and Kent do against the madness of King Lear, despite the bonds of love and loyalty to something they see in Lear beneath his capricious and volcanic temperament.

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We are exhorted to love God as well as fear him, but it is impossible to love either a cosmic enigma or a figure of wrath and judgment. The Incarnation was supposed to close the gap between humanity and God. Christ not only became human but originally acted as a figure of mercy counterbalancing the Father’s demand for justice and punishment. But as Christian history evolved, emphasis shifted from the compassionate Christ of the first coming to the Christ of the Second Coming, the terrifying figure portrayed in medieval representations of the Last Judgment. At the same time, his sacrifice was interpreted legalistically in the doctrine of the Atonement. In truth, the central myth of Christianity is the Resurrection, not to placate a God who demands that the whole human race be punished for all of history because of the minor offence of eating unauthorized fruit, but because the Crucifixion and Resurrection are the Christian images for the death of the egocentric self and the birth of a greater self that is thereby made possible. But it has been the legalistic attitude that has largely prevailed, with the result that God’s image has become that of his opposite, the Accuser. As if all this were not enough, humanity, when undergoing God’s “tests,” is predestined to pass or fail depending on whether or not God, for reasons even the angels say they do not understand in Dante’s Divine Comedy, grants or withholds the grace that enables people to repent and change their ways. And, should we fail, and not be granted the grace to repent, God has invented elaborate tortures, as elaborated in Dante’s Inferno, Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God,” and the Jesuit sermon on hell in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. By this point it has become clear that there is indeed such a thing as original sin, the sin of the origin. But we need to redefine the concept: what is “sinful,” in the sense of evil and destructive, is the corruption of both human nature and the objective world, not the failure to obey an arbitrary command. Original sin is the advent of the subject–object perspective, from which comes “all our woes,” as Milton says. What brought it about is a mystery, the mystery of evil. But locating the cause of our fall into that abyss that cleaves our experience in twain may prove to be less helpful than finding whether there is something worthy of being called “redemption,” a binding force that may heal the wound at the heart of things without eliminating our joyful participation in the miracle of difference, the burgeoning creativity and endless transformation which we are privileged to observe, yet in which we are involved.

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D. Breaking Down the Walls of Partition: Identity-in-Difference To arrive at the different mode of perception out of which mythology, religion, and art all spring, we may begin by trying to reverse the characteristics of subject–object perception. As we cannot solve the problem of dualism by eliminating the subject, we must rethink its relationship to the object. What would a subject be that was not “cloven” from its object? Some would say, no experience at all: perception requires distinction and otherness. Nor do we want to abolish distinction, difference, otherness: that sacrifices multiplicity for the sake of unity: it is, as Hegel joked about Schelling’s Absolute, a night in which all cows are black.28 Still, if subject and object are not cloven, they must be a unity. The alternative to the cloven fiction must necessarily be a mode of perception in which perceiver and perceived are two aspects of the same phenomenon. Blake called such identified opposites “Contraries”; Romantic philosophy spoke of identity-in-difference and multeity-in-unity, the perception of the latter being Coleridge’s definition of beauty (unless of course he stole it from Schelling).29 These are philosophical abstractions, which are always suspect because they solve a problem easily on paper. Moreover, they are paradoxical – what poststructuralism calls “mystifications.” But perhaps paradoxes have their own reality, however outrageous to the reason. Physicists, after all, have had to learn to live with the fact that light is both particles and waves. Moreover, these paradoxes need not remain pure abstractions: uniting perceiver and perceived results in an epiphany that we have called “revelation,” out of which leap the hierophanies catalogued by Eliade. Terms like “revelation” and “hierophany” imply extraordinary phenomena. Yet, as we will soon see, revelatory and transformative visitations are not the sole province of gifted elites but are democratically available. Moses wished that all the Lord’s people were prophets (Numbers 11:29), but in fact they potentially are. Many common experiences reunite the mind with the concentric circles of otherness from which it is alienated – with other parts of the psyche, with language, with the body, with other people, with nature, with the spiritual realm and God – and by doing so reconstitute a shattered mandala. Integration and interconnectedness are the real standard of mental health, rather than adherence to a set of social norms. No one is totally sane, and if “forgiveness of sins” means anything it means bearing compassionately with one’s own and others’ failure to achieve perfect integration. At the same time, we must refuse to renounce

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our faith that the imperfect could be our paradise, no less paradisal for being imperfect.

1. marriage of contraries: the mind with itself Thus the visionary dimension may be seen as transcendent or immanent, as beyond ordinary experience or as latent within it. As the last, it may break into the realistic world at any moment. Not all such epiphanies are the transforming visions of prophets, shamans, or mystics: they may happen to anyone, unpredictably. Yeats records one such moment in his poem “Vacillation” (P, 251). As he was sitting in a London shop, idly looking at the interior and the street, his body “of a sudden blazed,” and for perhaps twenty minutes his happiness was so intense “that I was blessed and could bless.” Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychologist, called such moments “peak experiences.” All human beings are capable of them, and many more have them than are willing to admit to them, for fear of seeming weird or abnormal. In such an epiphany, normal ego consciousness is replaced or reinforced by a different mode of mental functioning. Individual peak experiences clearly vary a good deal in feeling-tone and emphasis. What they have in common is the sense of experience of the identity of perceiver and perceived, except that “identity” does not mean simple unity or lack of difference but rather a complex interrelatedness that includes both unity and difference. The mythical and poetic imagery for the ascent towards a higher, intensified level of consciousness is that of ladders, stairs, towers, pyramids and ziggurats, and sacred mountains: Frye offers an exhaustive account in chapter 5 of his Words with Power. While Maslow insists that peak experiences cannot be willed – resembling, and maybe even being forms of, God’s free gift of grace in Christianity and inspiration in the arts – the body’s meditative ascent through Kundalini yoga’s seven “chakras,” or levels of consciousness, suggests that certain types of mental discipline may open such possibilities. The ascent sometimes dispenses with material means and becomes free flight: shamans fly in a trance state to other worlds, and one Hermetic image of transcendence is a spiritualizing ascent through the levels of the traditional seven heavenly bodies, which Dante mimics in the Paradiso. Two qualifications may be noted. First, the ascent, because it is not a product of the will and in fact requires its surrender, may depend on the prior descent of a higher, enabling power such as that of the Holy Ghost

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on the apostles in the form of wind and tongues of flame at Pentecost. Milton’s Nativity Ode shows all of Creation lifted up the ladder of being as a response to the descent of its Redeemer. Second, peak experiences, although they may transcend time, are transitory, and what goes up must come down. They are moments of ecstasy – in the original sense of the word, “out of or beyond one’s self” – and no more sustainable than an orgasm. In his later career, Maslow recognized a counterpart nadir experience, acknowledging that another kind of wisdom may result from suffering and loss.30 I have borrowed for it the term “decreation” from Wallace Stevens (who in turn took it from Simone Weil), to express what I think Maslow was groping towards, and it will be a central concern of part 4, below.31 But just as ordinary people can have everyday epiphanies – they’re not merely the privileged blessings of prophets and visionaries – so nadir experiences also occur in our lives every day, as well as every night, for the commonest nadir experiences occur, as Freud and Jung showed, in dreams. Peak experiences are Apollonian moments of clarity and insight; nadir or depth experiences are something else. Dreams cannot be translated into morals or messages without turning them into narrative fortune cookies. Their mechanisms, at least for Freud – condensation and displacement – lead towards Dionysian metamorphosis, things “morphing,” as my students say, into other things. What this provides is the counterbalancing wisdom that no insight is final, no understanding definitive. Something eludes us, leaving our understanding tentative and openended, never final or closed. The fact that we do not understand our dreams keeps us from delusions of mastery that would prove fatal. Yet dreams are not merely ironic expressions of disjunction and ambiguity. As Jung has shown us, certain dreams stand out, not wrestling with life’s ordinary muddle, but vivid, gripping, deeply meaningful, even if not “interpretable” by any rational cryptography. These “big dreams,” as Jung sometimes called them, are clearly Contraries of Maslow’s peak experiences, providing the one thing those peaks lack: a sense of dark mystery and wonder based on the energies of endless transformation that lie in the hidden depths. Yet their dark waters mirror the symbol of identity-in-difference that organizes this book: the mandala, symbol of a Self that, unlike the ego self, is metaphorically inclusive of all the shattered aspects of the multiply cloven fiction. The mandala unites Self with self, with body, with language, with other people, with the natural environment,

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with God. It is the goal of Jung’s process of individuation: we never reach it, are always in process, never whole in any simple sense of the term. Except that, to adapt Derrida, we “always already” are. The theme of time has already entered into our discussion. The diagram of concentric circles of alienation representing the subject–object condition is essentially a shattered mandala, the Negation of identity-indifference. We have been speaking of it in largely spatial terms: the circles symbolize Stevens’s “dumbfoundering abyss between subject and object” (cp, 436). But there is a temporal aspect to the cloven fiction as well, in which the past recedes from the subject, seemingly into nonexistence, leaving behind only its after-images, as it were, that we call “memory.” Blake is hostile to the Daughters of Memory because he sees them as sirens tempting people to lose themselves in a limbo of memory. It is true that literature is full of characters who have stopped living in reality, imprisoned within the ghost-world of the past, whether positive or negative. Examples of the former are the mothers in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, and, of the latter, Dickens’s Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. But the imagination’s limits are not the ego’s, even if most days we have at best dim intuitions of a dimension of the self not bound by time and space. Imagination seizes on memory and recreates it: Blake’s Los, the imagination embodied, is also creative time. But in what sense does Los build mansions in Eternity out of the ruins of time? The motive for memoir is not mere nostalgia, at least not for memoir that has become art. Autobiographies often begin with an expression of anxiety about whether the author is writing truth or fiction. Even beyond the possibility of false memory, the selectivity necessary for a coherent narrative seems to be pulling the text away from the accuracy of “what really happened.” But this is a necessary risk for those who are seeking more than an album of verbal photographs. The writer senses a shape lurking within the randomness of memory – a myth, in this book’s sense of a significant form that expands into dimensions beyond the ebb and flow of time. It is a mansion in Eternity, and some very great writers, including Wordsworth in The Prelude and Proust, have embarked on a quest, as Proust’s title puts it, In Search of Lost Time. This redemption of time will be the subject of part 3; the descent quest it makes necessary for memoir and autobiography will be treated in part 4. Peak and depth experiences are transitory, and most of our lives are lived on a middle level of consciousness that Maslow named “plateau” experience. In a phrase of Lacan’s, we are constituted by a split, and even

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in self-actualized people “wholeness” cannot mean anything unitary. As I observed earlier, we human beings are split into many selves, many psychic components or complexes, so no simple “authentic self” exists. It follows that mental health is the ability to manage these multiple selves synergetically, so that they function productively rather than at cross purposes. The natural metaphor is performative: we are not a single personality but an ensemble cast united in the common effort to put on a show. Shakespeare, an actor himself, was fascinated by the process of role-playing, of wearing masks. It is a major theme in Much Ado about Nothing, which features a masked ball, but in other plays as well. Joseph Campbell revolves around this theme on the mythological level, exploring the hero with a thousand faces and the masks of God. In the Christian tradition, God himself is a multiple personality, the Trinity: Blake’s unfallen Albion in his Prophecies is fourfold, constituted by his four “zoas,” based on Ezekiel’s vision of a God with four faces. On a more human level of lived experience, an unexpected yet attractive model might be the Odysseus of the Odyssey, who is described in its opening as polytropos: literally, “the man of many turnings,” which Robert Fagles translates as “the man of twists and turns.” In a work that has given us the word “protean,” from Proteus the shapeshifter, Odysseus survives in a dangerous world of shifting appearances by the resourcefulness that enables him to play many roles, some of them theatrical, as when he disguises himself as a beggar. Transactional analysis has shown how much social life consists of the acting out of scripts: not only does Odysseus unfailingly play the right role at the right time, he rewrites the script to suit his purposes – which is to say that he is an influential storyteller, often telling lies to manipulate others. All the characters do this: Menelaus and Helen tell Telemachus contradictory stories about Helen’s behaviour during the Trojan War. But Athena congratulates Odysseus on being a better liar than anyone but herself, and she intends it as a high compliment. The ability to shift roles widens our range of possible experience. The shifting is not always contrived, but rather a natural response to interacting with other people. The Odysseus who sleeps with Circe is somewhat different from the Odysseus who is married to Penelope. In actual life, being polytropos enables some people to cross social boundaries: no doubt Odysseus, in living as a beggar, learns how the other half lives in a way that might benefit a ruler. Shakespeare’s Hal claims that his disguise as the “madcap Prince” is an educational venture of the same sort. Liberal education seeks to make students polytropos by widening their horizons,

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which can still occur without it. Kipling’s Kim moves comfortably in a world of difference, relating to people of various races and classes, from the highest to the lowest.

2. marriage of contraries: self and language Utilitarian prose is suited to communicating within the horizon of the subject–object perspective, which its sentence construction mirrors: a verb linking the two expresses the interaction between them. But another type of construction is possible in which subject and object are made identical by the verb; that is the typical formula for the metaphor: A is B. Ordinary writing and even most poetry dial down this statement of radical identity to the level of simile. “A is like B” is innocuous and does not violate the law of non-contradiction. Even most poetry uses metaphors as shorthand similes, which merely help to describe the ordinary world, and perhaps decorate it a little. Such devices are figurative: literal metaphor is transfigurative, a metamorphosis of reality into a strange and wonderful new world. It transfigures ordinary language as well, translating it back to the original tongue humanity spoke before subject and object split. It occurs as the highest level of meaning in Scripture, that which the Middle Ages called “anagogic.” Many central Biblical truths are literal metaphors, including the Trinity (three persons, yet one God), the Incarnation (fully God yet fully man), and Transubstantiation (bread and wine, yet body and blood). But the basis of Taoism, the identity of the opposites yin and yang, and of Hinduism, expressed in the phrase “Atman is Brahman” or “Thou art That,” equating the human spiritual identity with the creator god Brahma, is also literal metaphor. In literature there have been three spontaneous outbreaks of the speaking in tongues that is literal metaphor: Renaissance, Romantic, and Modernist. When the Romantics refer to the creative imagination, the word “creative” is descriptive, not just honorific. Here, perception creates the perceived, brings it into being, as artists bring into being the worlds they imagine. If the artist is a writer, he or she creates as God did, by the power of the word to conjure rather than describe. In the subject–object context, such an assertion is delusion or humbuggery. “I can summon monsters from the vasty deep!” exclaims Owen Glendower to Shakespeare’s Hotspur in Henry IV, Part I. “Why so can I, or so can any man; / But will they come when you do call for them?” Hotspur replies (3.1.52–3). But the common-sense view is, as so often, wrong.

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The use of words is indeed a form of magic; Shakespeare’s Prospero, who is no fraud, refers to his magic as “my art”: an art that creates illusions that transform reality for the denizens of his desert island. Whether artists or not, we all live in a reality that has been created by our imagination, on a level far below the awareness of ordinary consciousness. This is not mysticism. My life experience, past and present, is my world: it is unique to me, even if other people were present at its events. That is what makes it precious: recognition of this may be what drives me to write creatively, in order to recreate my world in a form that can be shared with others, and thus not lost. But did I create my life, or just passively experience it? My ego passively experienced, but imagination broods on the face of life’s deep, chaotic waters and creates a form, a world, a story. That is why people grow up within the same families and yet emerge not only with different personalities but different memories, why one person may be twisted, even destroyed by a tragic event or pernicious environment, while another may emerge unscathed, or even in some way enriched by the encounter. Because we are, in Jung’s terms, ego and Self, our experience is always double: we feel that we are helplessly enduring our lives, while, on some deep level, we are shaping them, although the shaping Self is far greater than the quotidian ego. With these reflections in mind we may return to the reductio ad absurdum performed on the theory of signification by deconstruction and similarly sceptical forms of critique. The absurdities arise from the analytic method itself, because analysis by definition splits, dissects the object of study into component parts. It divides signifier from signified, author’s consciousness from textual signifiers, and reader’s consciousness from both signifiers and author’s consciousness. There are many good reasons to do this, but it will not explain how language allows us to create meaning, pass it on, and receive it. What such rigorously logical analysis does is in fact the opposite, it demonstrates the sheer impossibility of creating and transferring meaning – a kind of linguistic version of Zeno’s paradox. This may be useful as a monkey wrench to throw into the gears of Western metaphysics in order to cripple the death-machine of modern civilization: the so-called theory wars were called that for a reason. But if we want to move beyond an impasse that I think savaged high theory some decades ago, I think we have to return to the paradoxes and go through them, treat them as portals, linguistic wormholes, which means what Blake called “going through a Vortex,” turning the ordinary analytic perspective inside out. That is why my argument so often returns to circle

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above the battleground of 1965–90: it is coming home, and not, I hope, just as a carrion crow. The battle ended in exhaustion, with nothing decided. That is why the storm clouds are gathering again today. It is urgent that we return to try again. Linguistic analysis, whether conventional or deconstructionist, is a kind of reverse engineering, taking apart a product and trying to deduce from its parts and their assembly how the mechanism must work – or not work. The machine metaphor, latent also in the word “structure,” is deliberate. If we think, however, about how writing takes place, how texts come into being, we obtain a very different picture. Certain aspects of composition theory, such as process writing and reader-response theory, are relevant here, but even more telling are the accounts of writers and readers of their own compositional and interpretive process. I speak personally here, hoping that my own experience will evoke a confirming response from many if not most other writers and readers. When I attempt to write, whether creatively or critically (the difference is only a matter of degree), it is indeed a process akin to magic, of trying to summon words from the vasty deep, hoping they will come when I do call for them, apparitions out of the white abyss of the blank page. I do not have Glendower’s confidence – indeed his confidence is one thing that marks him as a fraud. Words are not mine to command, and there is never a moment when I feel that I have mastery. They come if and when they choose: Milton speaks of “my unpremeditated verse,” as if words were living things with a consciousness and will of their own. Whose consciousness, whose will? Lacan says that, because the unconscious is structured like a language, my words are the Other speaking through me. This theory fits well enough the traditional notion of the inspiring Muse who speaks through the poet, yet I do not feel like a ventriloquist’s dummy, or like the passive medium of a séance. I prefer James Merrill’s metaphor – although he claims it is literal – of a Ouija board. I feel as if I am having a conversation, a dialogue back and forth (the root meaning of “conversation”), and that through the cooperation of that dialogue something quickens between us, a third identity that incorporates the Other and me in a relationship of identity-in-difference, which appears in the subject–object realm as a kind of freeze-dried text. This sounds like a secular version of Martin Buber’s I–Thou relationship, although I am not sure it is really secular: Dylan Thomas has a poem titled “The Conversation of Prayer.” Bakhtin’s preference for the dialogic rather than for the buttonholing harangue of a monologic ego is clearly analogous.32 Jung’s name for the process that unites conscious and unconscious through

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interaction is the “transcendent function,” and he developed a technique of “active imagination” that could at times involve actual conversation with archetypal figures summoned through fantasy. His own “confrontation with the unconscious” consisted largely of such visionary conversations, which he recorded in his Red Book, whose effect resembles that of the mythical figures’ long, rhapsodic debates in Blake’s later Prophecies. There are obviously parallels in the visual arts – for example, Michelangelo’s declaration that he did not invent his sculpted forms but simply helped liberate them from what we shall call later, in a discussion of Creation, their “immanent” or “enfolded” form. Another example is Maurice Mearleau-Ponty’s meditation on a film that captured Matisse in the act of painting – it was a partly improvisational give-and-take, in which the initial forms that Matisse put on the canvas both inspired and controlled the decisions he made subsequently.33 Anyone writing poetry or song lyrics who has searched for a rhyme knows exactly the process involved. So does anyone familiar with improvisation in blues and jazz. Readers begin not with a blank page but with an author’s text, but the dialogic interaction between reader and text is the same process moving the other direction, with some symmetrical parallels. Stanley Fish is partly wrong to say that readers, or at least the interpretive communities that he claims control readers, can construct a text as arbitrarily as they please: a text is an Otherness that resists and must be wrestled with like Jacob’s angel before it will give up its blessing. Fish is of course right that the ego may attempt to bypass dialogue with the text’s Otherness and instead impose a monologue of its own, whether it is a student interpreting a poem or a theological tradition interpreting Scripture. Deconstruction and other demystifying critical procedures originated in part as a defence against such textual kidnappings. But at no point are we speaking of an author with a message who somehow packages that message in a set of inert signifiers, sends them off like carrier pigeons to readers, who unpackage the signifiers and extract the message. Writers, text, and readers are in a relationship of dynamic metaphoric identification, a Heraclitean process of exchanging identities, dying each other’s lives and living each other’s deaths. This is, one should add, just as true when the relationship is combative. That both poststructuralism and scientific (or scientistic) materialism undoubtedly would reject such a theory as mystification might well say more about their desire to appear appropriately hard-headed and not “mystical” than it does about the explanation’s value. At any rate, they appear to have nothing more useful to offer.

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Nor is it necessary to invoke words such as “mystical” and other euphemisms for “irrational.” First, writing originates in primary process and is not entirely rational, although this is more obvious in “creative writing” and more disguised in utilitarian prose. Second, more philosophical and scientific hypotheses are available. Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of process, for example, rejects the idea of “simple location” presupposed in the subject–object account as itself irrational. In a passage that deeply influenced Northrop Frye, Whitehead says (in a chapter significantly titled “The Romantic Reaction”): “In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.”34 Frye’s word for this is “interpenetration.” Writer, text, and reader are all “locations” and are, to use a religious term, “consubstantial.” Contrary to the inevitable objection, this is not magic in the wrong sense: that is, magical thinking. The world of difference and alienation does not disappear, but a second kind of reality manifests itself in the midst of it as what we have called “revelation”: this is what Frye called the “double vision” in his book of that title.

3. marriage of contraries: self and body Human identity is a bodily identity, and all human experience is psychosomatic. Perception itself is gloriously physical in a way that we often take for granted. Many years ago, I had a whole series of dreams in which the common element was the colour red, so brilliant that it was as if I had never seen red before, the image I most remember being that of tulips in the backyard of the house I grew up in. It was a hierophany in a dream. Yet such experiences are possible in waking life: I once stood in a parking lot and looked for perhaps five minutes at flowering goldenrod blazing in sunlight, rapt, staring at a common weed as if I were in another world – and I was. Blake said that if the doors of perception were cleansed, man would see everything as it is – infinite (E, 39). Aldous Huxley titled his account of his experiences with hallucinogens The Doors of Perception, and the two writers inspired Jim Morrison to so name a rock band. But the experience of the senses, the qualia, is not esoteric, nor does it depend on drugs, although drugs may help some people break out of the prison of deadened, routine perception. Sensory experiences are the miracles we sadly take for granted. Husserl’s phenomenology may not have entirely thought its way out of the dualism of the Cartesian cogito, but the phenomenological tradition, especially perhaps its greatest thinker, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, did help to return psychology and philosophy to the

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data of actual sensory experience, rather than dismissing such data as “secondary qualities,” as in Locke’s psychology. Merleau-Ponty was understandably interested in the arts, for one of the primary purposes of art is to re-sensitize us to the glory of the senses. Painting gives us the joy of sight, music the joy of sound. Literature gives us the magic of words. The mark of a real poet is not a compulsion to recount personal feelings and experiences, however useful such a motive is, but rather intoxication with the incantatory shape, sound, and feel of words, words, words. So many of the greatest human experiences involve the body and the mind acting as one: ask any dancer, any athlete, any musician, any singer. A guitarist whose mind is separate from his fingers, thinking about what they are about to play, is about to play badly (trust me, I know). As William James and Samuel Butler saw, mind and body achieve unity in habit.35 Musicians have to practise until scales and chords become habitual, but an enormous range of human behaviour, not just art, depends on learned habit, from driving to typing to tying one’s shoes. Samuel Butler found satiric mileage in observing that the ideal of human behaviour is thus to become as unconscious as possible, but the arm of a percussionist is not unconscious in the way that a piston is. Playing drums is a mental act: it is just that all consciousness is not ego- or self-consciousness; another type unites mind and body as Blakean Contraries, without which there is no progression. The type of non-dualistic mind–body relationship that these Englishlanguage thinkers are exploring appears in a different yet related way in phenomenology. Heidegger’s central coinage, Being-in-the-world, implies a very different mode of experience from that of subject–object dualism. I would not agree that the latter is merely a theoretical delusion that Descartes discovered only by a process of abstraction. On the contrary, though an error, it is a lived error. We may feel alienation from our environment more strongly at some times than at others, but alienation is the default human condition, though not necessarily inevitable. That is what Heidegger’s phrase suggests: that subject and object, Being and the world, are or can be a unitary phenomenon. In a deliberate effort to ground this contention in the everyday rather than in some esoteric mystical experience, he speaks of a relation to the object that he calls “readiness-to-hand.” Objects perceived as merely existing, apart from us, are “present-to-hand” – merely present, merely there. But the relationship of a carpenter to his or her hammer is quite different. The hammer is no longer just a Thing but is an aspect of a moment in which subject, object, and the action that unites them fuse.

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Hammering is not just a knowledge of a tool and its use, “but it has appropriated this equipment … The less we just stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become.36 A bit later he says that when we use and manipulate objects, “this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly character.”37 Habitual skill unites carpenter and hammer so that the latter becomes an extension of the former’s being: Zen and the art of nail driving. But the two are not separable from the process of nail driving, and the unifications do not stop there: “On the contrary, that with which we concern ourselves primarily is the work – that which is to be produced at the time; and this is accordingly ready-to-hand too.”38 And, in a final widening, work – the productions of time – is an aspect of what he calls a few sentences later “our concernful dealings.” Work transforms the present-to-hand world according to human concern. At that point, debate begins about what kind of work and what kind of concern we might be talking about: driving a nail in your pastoral retreat in the Black Forest is one thing, but cutting down the forest to build yet one more strip mall is another, and Heidegger did later become, well, concerned about the question of technology. Goethe had preceded him: Faust’s reclamation project of land from the sea in order to build a utopian community destroys the home and the lives of the aged Philemon and Baucis. But the possibility of a unitary mind–body experience, in which the dancer becomes the dance, as Yeats says, is our interest here. To some extent influenced by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, particularly in two remarkable books, The Philosophy of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible, moved to counteract the abstractive tendency that had led Husserl, in a search for essences, into Idealism, and he did so by grounding perception in the body. Lawrence Hass provides an articulate explanation: “Perception is not ‘inside’ me, like a beetle in a box, but rather emerges between my organizing, sensing body and the things of the world. It is a synergy, to use Merleau-Ponty’s favored term. It is a working together of my body (with its neurophysiology and sensory systems), transcendent things, other creatures, and the world as the field of their relatedness.”39 Synergy was integral to the theory of Abraham Maslow, who borrowed it from his mentor Ruth Benedict, who had used it to contrast synergetic and non-synergetic societies. Another word Merleau-Ponty employed to the same end was “symbiosis”: “The embodied self, other selves, and the world are symbiotic, interwoven, entangled – with each ‘component’ contributing to the synergy of living experience.”40

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If phenomenology persisted in its folly, it might become even wiser. When Blake said that, while looking at the sun, he did not see a round disc looking like a coin but a company of the heavenly host singing hallelujah, he was implying that perception could continue to expand beyond the temporo-spatial limits of the subject–object condition. The argument returns at this point to the phenomena of revelation, which often take the form of voices and visions that are extra-ordinary, exceeding the sensory limits that are to Blake not physical but the result of mental passivity. The perceiver in such moments of revelation is not the ego but rather an identity like Jung’s Self. Such a larger identity, which all human beings possess, though most do not know it, has, or rather is, a spiritual body. Christianity has often confused this with a disembodied soul, Idealism with a “transcendental ego,” but St Paul is clear that the spiritual self is a soma pneumatikos, a spiritual body. Frye notes that the word for “spirit” in all three Biblical languages has a root metaphorical meaning of “air”: pneuma (Greek), ruach (Hebrew), and spiritus (Latin). Why are we not aware of the spiritual body and the entire spiritual world? Because, although that body surrounds us, it is invisible to the natural self. Like the air, which is free and bloweth where it listeth, the spiritual body is not bound by the limits of materiality. Milton’s angels have bodies of this sort, enjoying the pleasures of the senses, such as eating, drinking, and even sexuality. During angelic sex, two bodies unite completely, adding an unexpected sexual twist to Frye’s term “interpenetration.” Actually, Merleau-Ponty did make a bold attempt to persist in his phenomenological folly when in his late phase he sometimes replaced “matter” with what he called “carnality” or “the flesh of the world.” In The Visible and the Invisible, he writes: “The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term ‘element,’ in the sense that it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea.”41 This may not be quite clear, but, as Hass points out, it makes flesh the fifth element. As he does not but perhaps should point out, that identification of flesh as the quintessence relates Merleau-Ponty to the psychosomatic underside of alchemy as explored by Jung.

4. marriage of contraries: self and others It was perhaps Rousseau’s greatest insight that human society cannot be held together merely by laws and coercion or, despite the protestations of utilitarians and libertarians, by the pursuit of rational self-interest. What

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keeps the human race from descending into Hobbes’s war of all against all is empathy, the ability to cross the gap between self and Other and actually enter into other people’s inwardness, understanding how they think and feeling what they feel. This kind of empathic love is what Christianity calls agape and Buddhism “compassion,” each religion extending its reach to the entire human race rather than limiting it to tribe, clan, or family. Within the latter groups, the empathetic bond is reinforced by various social bonds, into which one is born. This type of empathy transcends the instinct of self-preservation, and sometimes even the instinct of species-preservation of the “selfish gene.” In his Power of Myth interviews with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell tells the story of a young policeman in Hawaii, where Campbell lived, who grabbed hold of a would-be suicide who was attempting to jump into a volcano. He did not have strength enough to pull the man back, and was being slowly dragged over the ledge himself, but refused to let go. Luckily, his partner was able to pull both men back to safety. A reporter, interviewing the officer, asked why he risked not only dying but widowing his wife and orphaning his children for a total stranger. The officer, no philosopher, merely replied that he would not have been able to live with himself if he had not done that.42 To Campbell, it means that underneath our surface sense of separateness is a buried, largely unconscious feeling that we are all part of one identity. It is often only under some pressure like wartime emergency or an epidemic that the walls of ego partition fall and we recognize that we have a single root. In the New Testament, Paul speaks repeatedly of the mystical body of Christ, and says we are one in Christ. The church, being a temporal institution, usually interprets such statements institutionally: we are all members of one social group. But Paul was a mystic, not just an administrator, and he meant something far beyond being part of the in-group. When we enter the realm of erotic and romantic love, we encounter a complication: namely, that of desire. Desire implies a lack, a distance between the subject and the object of desire, which has sometimes been taken as evidence of our fallenness. God, it was said, does not move, because God desires nothing and does not need to move towards any object of desire. Alienated desire is indeed a part of the Fall, and in a sexual context is the true definition of lust. The conservative view, represented by Augustine, is that all desire is alienated, and therefore a type of lust. As the human race cannot be reproduced without desire, this made for a certain practical complication. While Augustine stopped short of con-

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demning desire aiming at reproduction as a sin, he did regard it as a necessary evil, insisting that in the unfallen state humanity would have reproduced by will rather than desire.43 His position was revived in the twentieth century by the Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren, whose book Agape and Eros condemns the inevitable selfishness of Eros, of desire-love.44 Agape is not based on a craving that needs to be satisfied, but erotic love is self-interested: it wants something. The Renaissance conceit that same-sex friendship, or philia, is superior to romantic love is also based on this premise. A more liberal view is that our experience is not completely and utterly fallen: we are still capable, on a higher level, through the imagination, of a degree of unfallen experience, however imperfect and transient, and it is the goal of the human quest to “repair the ruins of our first parents,” in Milton’s phrase, by moving through any means possible to that higher level.45 In this view, desire differs from lust in that lust seeks only selfgratification through mastering or using the other, while true desire seeks mutual gratification, resulting in the union of self and other. Here desire is not only good but is the active energy leaping from subject to object, or subject to subject. The “is” in metaphor’s “A is B” represents not merely static being but dynamic becoming and transformation: it is a copula in every sense. Not just sexual desire but all desire is good because its fulfilment is good. The value of hunger and thirst is that they provide the gratifications of eating and drinking, and the same is true of sex. In Paradise Lost, Milton is at great pains to validate the unfallen sexuality of Adam and Eve, but sexual desire and gratification are such great goods that, as we saw earlier, even the angels have sex. It is a short distance from this to Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, wherein the energy of gratified desire is not only “true delight” but transforms the world. Nor did Blake stop there: his poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion advocates what is sometimes called “free love,” with sexual desire as freely and guiltlessly gratifiable as eating and drinking. Polyamory has been tried over the centuries, by various utopian communities, by the 1960s’ counterculture, and by certain segments of the gay community, and it is undergoing a quiet revival in our time. The fact that it usually shipwrecks on the rocks of jealousy and possessiveness does not necessarily mean, as its detractors assume, that those emotions are human nature. That assessment is only half right: we have two natures, and it is the essence of morality to choose the better over the worse. Jealousy and possessiveness are not

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a norm: they are capable of destroying any kind of human relationship, married or unmarried. Postulating them as inevitable turns one into Iago, complete with his violent misogyny. What about romantic love, which, in contrast, chooses one person and says, “You are the only person in the world for me, forever”? In the first place, we have to distinguish between two kinds of “romantic” love. One is companionate love that usually results in a marriage or lifelong partnership, the love of Odysseus and Penelope. The traditional marriage ceremony says that such a couple become one flesh, and in close marriages or partnerships that last into old age, often one partner does not long survive the other’s death. It may seem strange to say that love is an act of imagination, but that is what Shakespeare’s Theseus means in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he proposes that the lover and poet “are of imagination all compact” (5.1.8), even though to his realistic and rational mind it means only that they both see things that are not there. Sexual desire, however, is what Freud termed the “polymorphous perverse” – Freud, like the Catholic church, felt that all non-reproductive sexuality was perverse. But sexual desire is polymorphous all right, and its basis in the imagination more than in biology is betrayed by fantasy’s powerful role in it, which deeply discomforts many people. Polymorphous “free love” and companionate love with a single, lifelong partner seem contradictory, but imagination’s A is B articulates a unity that is also a multiplicity, and the two types of love can be compatible, although demands for respectability have usually rendered the negotiation clandestine. In any generation, things go on that everybody knows that everybody knows, but no one ever talks about. More recently, such things are beginning to be talked about and accepted more openly, so that open marriages and polyamorous relationships are perhaps on the way to being included in the range of the “normal.” More difficult is romantic love proper, which does indicate a split, often with tragic consequences. We speak of falling in love, and romantic love does seem to be a fall, yet one that countless poems, songs, and stories insist on regarding as a secular equivalent of the Fortunate Fall. Companionate love is grounded in the limits of social reality, and hence is a kind of compromise, a self-limitation of desire based on practicality and the need for security and stability. But sooner or later, temptation in some form comes along. The more deprived and constricting the life circumstances, the more it is likely to happen sooner, as the examples of Emma Bovary and Goethe’s Faust prove.

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But no relationship is invulnerable to it, and the split, in a heterosexual context, produces triangles of both possible combinations: two women and one man, or two men and one woman. Examples of the first type include Dante’s companionate marriage to Gemma Donati and his romantic-love relationship with Beatrice Portinari, and Jung’s marriage to Emma Jung and soulmate relationship with two other women in succession, Sabina Spielrein and Toni Wolff. Examples of the second type are Yeats, soldier McBride, and Maud Gonne; Leopold Bloom, Blazes Boylan, and Molly Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses; also the Mark-Tristan–Isolde and the Arthur–Lancelot–Guinevere triangles, both out of the courtly-love tradition of the Middle Ages. That tradition, however, bequeathed to posterity the notion that romantic love is a quest for a transcendent ideal: its kingdom is not of this world, so that it often ends in a Liebestod, a love-death, as in the case of Tristan and Isolde. Both of Shakespeare’s pairs of star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, die in full confidence that they will be together in another world: in “The Phoenix and Turtle,” after their fiery consummation, the titular birds are said to have passed to a higher realm expressly identified with the imagery of the two-in-one. Donne’s “The Extasy” and “The Canonization” also play with the imagery of two become one. Jung says that what heterosexual men pursue in romantic love is a female figure out of their own unconscious, the anima or soul-woman, representing their individual romantic ideal but also being an archetype out of the collective unconscious. Women have a masculine counterpart, the animus. Anima and animus are projected on members of the opposite gender who fit the type. This would once again seem to be an illusion born of the cloven fiction, an endless donkey’s-carrot chase for the ultimate object of desire. Anima and animus tempt people out of their companionate comfort into risk, danger, adulterous affairs, and even outlawry, and consequently sometimes take on a dark form: the siren, femme fatale, or Dark Lady; the “bad boy,” irresistible not despite his badness but because of it. In Thomas Mann’s homosexual version of the pattern, the tempting figure is a beautiful boy, as it is in Shakespeare’s “beautiful youth” sonnets. Yet romantic love has inspired too much of the world’s great literature to be dismissed as mere pathology. It is some sort of necessary derangement, needful exactly for its madness, its intensity, even as companionate love is a requisite sanity. Erotic, companionate, and romantic love: three

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ways by which the imagination breaks down the walls that imprison people in their loneliness. Irreconcilable, yet consubstantial. Moving from the level of personal relationships to social organization, what kind of social model reconciles the divisiveness of the subject–object paradigm and the non-repressive inclusiveness of identity-indifference? If the former condition is not inevitable, and social change towards the latter is therefore possible, the society implied is basically utopian. The objections to a traditional utopia are well known: it is a perfect society, hence beyond human capability; it is static and unchanging; and it is narrow and coercive, enforcing a single set of values and way of life on every citizen. But, despite these valid objections, we can redefine the utopian dream. First, utopia is not perfection: it is simply the model of an imperfect society that none the less is better than our own, so that we can use it as a goal. Thus, second, we can re-imagine utopia as an ongoing process of social change. Western societies have in fact been conducting a utopian experiment of this sort for at least two hundred years, and the pace has quickened within the last fifty. During my lifetime, in the United States at least some forms of segregation (though not racism) have been abolished; women have achieved a great deal of economic and social independence; attitudes towards sexual orientation and sexual practices have become more liberal; some non-harmful drugs are beginning to be de-criminalized; and people are increasingly challenging sexual misconduct. In addition, the generation before mine created a social safety net, even if it is not nearly as comprehensive or enlightened a one as in western European nations. All of this is utopian, and begins by implication to respond to the third objection, that utopias impose a narrow set of values on all members of society. It is not only possible to imagine a pluralistic utopia, but we are already moving in that direction, despite the protests and obstructions of those who would like to re-impose a monolithic value system. Nevertheless, if a society can never be perfectly pluralistic, who decides its values? If it is established on the principle of identity-in-difference, the basis of identity must be a kind of universal human nature achieved without conformism and the imposition of the elite’s preferences. Maslow’s basic needs and Frye’s primary concerns are common to the human race beyond all differences of culture, despite the objections of the view often called “social construction.” A society is utopian to the extent that it seeks to progressively realize basic needs or primary concerns by alleviating or transforming the adversities and alienation born of the subject–object perspective, while preserving individual and group diversity. The view

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that there is no common human nature will not stand up to serious scrutiny: when people object that healthcare is not a universal right, they are not denying that health is a basic value, only objecting to how such care is provided and paid for. The state of criticism at the present time is, as I proposed in the Introduction, not the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. Back then, the arguments in the preceding paragraph would have been protested, at times angrily (indeed I witnessed them being contested at more than one academic conference). But times have changed, and so have people. In 2015, Christopher Norris’s Deconstruction after All offered his reply to an interviewer: “I agree with that, the idea that these much-touted disputes between various thinkers, schools, or movements are a lot less important than their points of contact. If you start off from that fairly ecumenical but not too fudgy position, then all sorts of possible working alliances come to mind.”46 This is utopian in the best sense. Yet Frye’s similar assertion in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) – which indeed made possible the book’s “synoptic” viewpoint – was, to put it mildly, not popular during the poststructuralist era. There is one more step to take. The danger of Rousseau’s general will is that it could lead to a tyranny of the majority or, worse, to fascism: in other words to unification of a society by external coercion or by psychological collectivization. There is another way to interpret it. Utopia defined as a society based on symbiosis or synergy is made possible only by empathy, compassion, rooted in primary concern or basic needs and desires. Merleau-Ponty’s idea of a symbiotic or synergetic mode of perception does not stop at unifying mind and body but inevitably expands into a social dimension that he calls “syncretic sociality.” According to Lawrence Hass, “psychogenetic research confirms this kind of ‘syncretic’ interaction with infants as early as six weeks old. These empirical facts emphasize something that we all know perfectly well but forget in our Cartesian or Sartrean musings: that we literally find ourselves in an intersubjective world … It is in this world, amid these behaving others[,] that we come to distinguish ourselves from them.”47 Hass and Merleau-Ponty are aware of the obvious objection. In Lacanian terms this merely describes the mirror stage, in which the child is not truly empathetic because he does not recognize mother as truly other: the relationship is actually narcissistic, as betrayed by the fact that an idealized body image is also involved. That is why Merleau-Ponty in his later writings tended to replace words such as “symbiosis” with ones that preserved more of a sense of difference and separateness within their unity,

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the primary one being écart, literally “gap,” defined by Hass as “separationin-relation” and “the subtle differentiation in experience that is not an opposition.”48 Écart displays the aspect of identity-in-difference that Merleau-Ponty calls “reversibility”: his image for it is the relation of one hand touching the other.49 If Jung were to translate these concepts into his own vocabulary, he would say that latent within the infantile relationship of participation mystique, which by no means entirely disappears in adulthood, there is also a developmental tendency towards true individuation, whose goal is not the ego but the symbiotic, synergetic, empathetic Self, even if such a goal is never perfectly attained.

5. marriage of contraries: self and nature In the subject–object world, nothing is really alive: “life” means simply the automatic processes of matter and energy. But in the world of imagination, where consciousness suffuses its object, where the perceiver is inherent in the perceived, everything is alive, not just organic nature, but even down to the level of stones. The idea of living stones is central to alchemy, and accounts for the mystique of gems and precious stones, which fascinate us because their light-catching facets seem to harbour some internal quasi-living energy. From the rationalist perspective, this is “animism,” once thought to be the oldest and most primitive form of religion. It is indeed old: Homer’s pantheon of gods has been thoroughly anthropomorphized, but the Olympians show signs of having evolved from an earlier stage when they were embodiments of natural energies. Zeus hurls the lightning bolt as his weapon, but it is clear that he was once, like the Old Testament Yahweh and the Norse Thor, a storm god who was the power of wind and lightning. Poseidon was a hierophany of the power of sea and earthquake, Aphrodite of the energy of sexuality that runs through all living nature, not just humanity. These gods in their late development are transcendent, living on a mountain in Olympian detachment. But they once were immanent, not really different from Frazer’s dying-god figures in The Golden Bough. In Jane Ellen Harrison’s strange, extraordinary book Themis, a neglected piece of modern mythmaking, all these deities are forms of an ultimately immanent eniautos-daimon, or Year Daimon, an embodiment of creative time.50 If alchemy had faith that it could produce a living stone – the lapis, or Philosopher’s Stone – clearly the inorganic as well as the organic realm can be animated. In the Renaissance, poets such as Spenser and the early Milton give us an entire world animated with an enthusiasm not matched until modern fantasy. Drawing on Renaissance traditions of natural

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magic, Shakespeare’s Tempest shows Prospero as magician commanding spirits of the natural elements. Of his two chief servants, Ariel is associated with the spiritual elements of air and fire, Caliban with the material elements of earth and water. On a higher level of organization, there were spirits of trees, water, and the like: dryads, nymphs, and so on. If we define the world of the cloven fiction as the “fallen” world, and the “spiritual” as its reversal, where subject and object are united, we reverse the image of God from transcendent to immanent. Any attempt to locate God or spirit within nature orthodox Christianity will likely condemn as pantheism, but what about Jesus’ statement that the kingdom of heaven is within us or among us? And what of Milton and the whole Inner Light tradition of Protestantism, which pointed to the indwelling aspect of God, and which Milton, in his several invocations to an inspiring Spirit in Paradise Lost, identifies with his poetic imagination? His invocations of that inward Spirit are far more satisfying both aesthetically and religiously than his portrayal of the transcendent God the Father. Moreover, Spirit is immanent not only in humanity but in nature: in Book 5 of Paradise Lost, Milton borrows from the Neoplatonic lore of the Middle Ages and Renaissance an image of the progressive spiritualization of matter: the flower rooted in its material ground but growing towards a spiritual goal symbolized by the sun. Granted, he is speaking of the unfallen world, but the older brother’s speeches in Comus make clear that Milton believed that discipline could spiritualize matter, including the human body, even in the fallen world. Within Catholicism, Gerard Manley Hopkins managed somehow to evade his Jesuit censors to produce a series of visions of God as immanent in the natural world, including “God’s Grandeur,” “That kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” and “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire.” Those sufficiently alienated by the anxieties of the Christian tradition, however, have sometimes seceded and attempted to establish a new tradition of revived paganism: either, in a line that runs from Shelley, Keats, and Hölderlin to Heidegger, by modernizing Greek mythology, or by updating the more northern (often Celtic) tradition with which contemporary Wiccans or witches identify. Frye observes that air is apt as an image of spirit: it is not only intangible and free, but the agent of a constant interchange by which we breathe the environment into us, make it part of us, and expel it again, so that we are not really separate from the world but part of its continual process.51 In “The Eolian Harp,” Coleridge imagines an immanent spirit animating nature by sweeping through it the way wind sweeps through an æolian

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harp. In the Victorian period, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus captured the idea of spirit latent within nature in a single phrase, “natural supernaturalism.” He also identified that inner spirit with the Kantian noumenal realm lying beneath the phenomenal world that covers it like clothing over a naked body: hence the metaphor in his title, “the tailor retailored.” The German Idealist Naturphilosophie that influenced Carlyle, while also beginning from the Kantian paradigm, went a good deal further. In Schelling’s version, much of which Coleridge “borrowed” in his Hints towards a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, Nature is Spirit objectifying itself by a process of self-emergent emanation from forces in a relation of dynamically creative polarities. A more adequate image in this case would be the skin that is an organic and inseparable part of the body rather than a detachable outer covering. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Samuel Butler, George Bernard Shaw, and Henri Bergson, in different ways, articulated a vitalistic theory in which evolution is driven by an indwelling Life Force, and, as we saw above, Whitehead articulated a philosophy of process explicitly influenced by Romantics such as Wordsworth. When we move up the Chain of Being to the level of conscious life, a confrontation of attitudes occurs. In the subject–object world, animals are what Descartes regarded them as: basically organic robots with no consciousness. People are able to mistreat them, not to mention slaughter them, out of an attitude that “it doesn’t matter: it’s not as if they’re people or something.” Only a good deal of rationalizing can repress a very different attitude, and underestimating animals’ intelligence and individual personalities helps to keep the repression in place. The opposite attitude is Blake’s “Every thing that lives is Holy” (E, 44). It is a very ancient attitude, appearing in the animal art of the Palaeolithic caves. Hunting cultures, which had to kill animals to survive, dealt with the trauma of killing a fellow creature through an imaginative identification that revered the animal for sacrificing itself for the hunters’ good. In more modern cultures, alternatives to killing animals for food have led to a number of vegetarian conversions, including including those of Shelley and Shaw. Animal-rights groups and pet lovers are sometimes satirized as excessive and sentimental, but there is an uneasy underlying sense of guilt at human entitlement. From Disney and Pixar to Calvin and Hobbes, cartoons have returned us – all of us, not just children – to a primitive animism in which not just animals talk but sometimes cars, trees, and flowers. Hugh Lofting’s Dr Doolittle speaks the languages of the animals and becomes their champion: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan not

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only speaks the language of the apes but prefers their company to that of the human beings he has known as Lord Greystoke. Jane Goodall has said that the Tarzan novels were a major influence on her decision to study chimpanzees by actually living with them. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials takes the bond with animals one step further: the book’s characters have animal alter egos called daemons who are an embodiment of their deeper selves. Jung’s theory of synchronicity assumes that matter and psyche have a common root at some deep level, making possible certain events that transcend the limits of space, time, and causality.52 He did not “believe in” telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis, or in such synchronistic occurrences as clocks stopping at the hour of their owner’s death, but granted that they were theoretically possible and merited scientific investigation. The issue is clearly a very touchy one, but, as Jung was well aware, the acquisition of powers beyond normal human limits is not a fringe belief historically. Adepts in yoga acquire such powers, called siddhi, as an accidental byproduct of the quest for enlightenment, and they are warned not to be distracted by them from their real goal. Our culture is highly ambivalent about the idea of superhuman powers – a dangerous superstition, yet enormously popular in superhero comics and movies, in Star Wars, in Harry Potter, in Lord of the Rings, which reveals its deep imaginative appeal. Fans of the books and movies may not “believe in” such powers, but we should take their escapism seriously, for by now we have ample evidence that the subject–object “real world” is something to escape. In his late work on alchemy, Jung circles repeatedly around the idea of unus mundus: there is one world, not separate ones of dead matter and of consciousness. If consciousness can interpenetrate even inorganic matter like stones, that unearths a wealth of implications, some of them relevant to recent theories of “posthumanism.” Wordsworth, who knew the chemist Humphrey Davy, says in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads that the results of science will someday be humanized by the poetic imagination. So will the products of technology. In the blues ballad “John Henry,” the titular character wins a contest with a rail track–laying machine but dies from the effort. Subject versus object, man versus machine: we can contrast this with Whitman’s “To a Locomotive in Winter,” with its magnificent vision of the locomotive burning like Blake’s tiger through the wintry night. Likewise we can compare the man being literally worked to death by a machine in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927) to Hart Crane’s “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge” (1930), with its rhapsodic mood,

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even though Crane knew that labourers had died in its construction. Literally rhapsodic: both Whitman and Crane address their objects as “thou” and “thee,” not only animating but sacralizing them. It is easy to satirize the technological utopias common in the early American pulp science-fiction magazines during this period, such as Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C41+ (book form 1925), so crudely written that they more or less satirize themselves. A similarly naïve technophilia appeared in the “world of tomorrow” visions of the 1964 New York World’s Fair, and in the prophecies of coming cybertopia inspired in the 1990s by the birth of the internet. But the idea inspiring much of the pioneering science fiction – that science and technology could not only improve human life but turn it into a kind of wonderland – is not in itself ignoble: it can trace its ancestry back to Bacon’s New Atlantis. It forms a fascinating contrast with the gloomy (H.G.) Wellsian pessimism of the British tradition, which was so much better written that it won the day: for the most part, the New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s returned to its darkness, especially in England. But there were contrary voices. In Nova (1968), Samuel Delany hypothesized a future in which human beings could link their nervous systems directly to machines by jacking in, so that an individual could change a starship’s course by a mental decision as easy as deciding to move her arm. This innovation, we learn, transformed work: machines became direct extensions of people, which minimized the amount of “alienated labour” that Marx felt would lead to revolution. The human subject and the machine object wed, literally became one flesh. In one of Delany’s short stories, “Driftglass,” human beings are fitted with artificial gills and can return to the element of water from which we came. Pacemakers and prosthetics directly wired to the nervous system already exist: we are starting to inhabit a posthuman future that increasingly blurs the human–machine distinction. Long before he could have witnessed a college student bonded to a smartphone, Marshall McLuhan’s intuition led him to subtitle his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Whether this sea change is a good or bad thing is the subject of considerable debate.53 It seems to me to depend on the attitude of the technology’s users. After all, technology is applied science, and science is just as much a product of the human imagination as the arts. Science as mechanistic materialism, and technology as the hired servant of power structures, have sold themselves to the devil, who, in Paradise Lost, invents gunpowder in order to defeat the angels in the war in heaven. But science and technology harnessed to the imagination may

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not only renovate human life materially but expand the sense of wonder that clearly made life worth living even to Stephen Hawking, confined in his wheelchair. Beyond technological humanism, there is a philosophical posthuman questioning of the biological basis for human identity as a false limit. What happens to the concept of primary concerns if the human race uses technology, including electronic technology, to transform human consciousness into disembodied information patterns? Is that progress or dehumanization? Perhaps it depends on how alienating one’s experience of the biological has been. It is quite understandable that posthumanism should be of interest to women who have suffered from an essentialism defining them in biological terms of gender and race.

6. marriage of contraries: self and god We have been following a trajectory outward from the alienated subject, reconnecting it through imagination with everything that has been cloven from it. Beyond the personal, the social, the natural, at the furthest remove from ordinary consciousness lies the spiritual world. Earlier, we touched on the contrast between two ways of understanding both God and the entire spiritual world, the difference between them lying at the heart of all debates about religion. One way is to think of the spiritual as an outlying suburb of the subject–object universe, one that is super-natural, i.e., above nature, but objectively existing. Literalism or fundamentalism, Christian or otherwise, insists on this point of view as necessary, because within it God and heaven are objective facts, and without it they are fictions, fairy tales for children and secularist liberals. If science, whose domain is the subject–object universe, says that no such realm exists, then so much the worse for science. But, once again, even without the dissenting voice of science, an objective God eventually becomes problematic, an ultimately inscrutable, alien Other. As for the other way: even though evangelical Christianity so often clings to this notion of a distant God, the heart of its tradition – the feeling of being born again by means of a deep inward connection with God – is in fact its opposite. This form of Christianity is akin to the Inner Light movement of seventeenth-century, left-wing Protestantism that produced Milton. Milton’s heirs, the Romantics, especially Blake, were even more explicit than he in identifying that inward spiritual presence with the imagination. The imagination and God are thus the inward and outward manifestations, respectively, of the same thing, the microcosm that is somehow identical to the macrocosm. To repeat the words of Wallace

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Stevens, “We say that God and the imagination are one. / How high that highest candle lights the dark” (cp, 524). Such a conception is, if anything, more common in the East, where it is less obstructed by the demand that God be an objective being above and beyond his creation. In the theory of sacrifice in the Brahmanas, the sacrificial victim, the sacrificing priest, the altar, the gods, and the universe are all metaphorically identified in the performance of the ritual.54 Later, in Hinduism, the metaphorical statement “Atman is Brahman” or “Thou art That” identifies the inward spiritual self with Brahma, creator of the cosmos. Within the Biblical tradition, such a notion of God is heretical outside of the unique case of the Incarnation, although it exists in the Kabbalah (Jewish, Christian, and Hermetic variants) in the figure of Adam Kadmon (the first man), and in some of the Gnostic scriptures. Milton’s remarkably complex view tries to find a place both for an externalized, supernatural God and the Inner Light: but he also hints at a third conception by his repetition of Paul’s mysterious comment in I Corinthians 15 that at the end of time, God will be “all in all.” Quantum physicist Erwin Schroedinger speaks rather of “the profound rightness of the basic conviction of Vedanta … No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you – and all other conscious beings as such – are all in all.”55 Blake’s Albion is derived from Gnosticism via Milton, and Joyce’s Finnegan from Blake, like Dylan Thomas’s “long world’s gentleman” in “Altarwise by owl-light.” Gerard Manley Hopkins says in one poem, “I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am.”56 And in another, the just man “acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is – / Chríst – for Christ plays in ten thousand places, / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.” 57 Jung speaks of the Self in its macrocosmic form as a Cosmic Man, the Godimage in the human psyche. The central act of the imagination is the decreation of the subject– object world and its recreation into the world of identified Contraries. In the diagrammatic form that has organized our argument, the ego sits as an isolated centre like a castaway on a desert island (a metaphor Frye uses in the first chapter of The Educated Imagination), surrounded by receding circles of alienated otherness. But the central myth of Christianity is the Resurrection, not because Christ had to sacrifice himself to appease a wrathful God, which is a legalistic perversion, but because the Resurrection is the model for the birth of the spiritual self out of the decreation (not necessarily the literal death) of the natural self. To the degree that this

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happens, the egocentric cosmos of our bull’s-eye diagram is decreated and recreated into the mandala vision. Here, the centre is not the ego but the immanent spirit – in Paul’s phrase, “I, yet not I, but Christ in me.” The vertical axis then becomes what Jungian psychology calls the “ego–Self axis,” a ladder of ascent towards the outermost containing circle. That circumference is an image of God as transcendent, but not in the sense of being a supernatural object. In his later work, Frye occasionally spoke of a “spiritual otherness” that is the imagination’s necessary Contrary, and that has nothing to do with the objectified God who is the blustering tyrant on the throne, Blake’s Nobodaddy. When God speaks out of the whirlwind to Job, he seems to be very much the blustering tyrant, the God of Book 3 of Paradise Lost who blames humanity for everything before it has even done anything wrong (“But I know you’re going to mess it up”: the image of an abusive parent). But the God of Job is a very great poet, and that should give us pause. If we liberate the idea of a transcendent God from those people who would use him to justify the misery of the world, what image appears? As I see it, such a spiritual otherness could be understood only as one more marriage of Contraries, symbolized by the north and south poles that are united by the mandala’s outer circle. The north pole, so to speak, the apex of the ladder of ascent, is a total consciousness that takes the form of a Logos vision, a vision of universal order, but, yet again, achieved not by annihilating difference: rather by allowing it to live and move and have its being: an identity-in-difference. It is a vision of plenitude, of All, and, being an image of Truth, it is, as Keats tells us, also an image of Beauty. At the south pole, the goal of the descent quest that is the subject of part 4 below is that vision’s Contrary, the Nothing out of which all things come, including Job’s God, rising out of the Vortex of his whirlwind. This is the impossible, paradoxical God, Paul Tillich’s “God beyond God,” Heidegger’s Being that is beyond all beings and yet not a being itself. This is the God lying beneath all possible grounds, beyond both existence and nonexistence, and who is therefore forgotten, as Heidegger says, unless the poets remind us of him, or who lies asleep and dreams the world, like Vishnu or the Red King of Lewis Carroll. The world he dreams is the mandala itself, and he is a Trickster: he is what keeps the mandala from any final closure. He is the counterpart of the Beautiful, that which the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries called the “Sublime,” and as such he is power, the unfathomable power that can hook Leviathan and capture the unicorn, that can fling the galaxies across the sky like stones skipping

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on water, that could if he chose topple the usurping sky-gods who pretend to be him but are really only projections of human tyranny. The mystery is: why should he show himself to Job, other than to insist that his ways cannot be justified to men? Why should Job be to him more than one more ant out of the human anthill? In Blake’s illuminations of the Book of Job, God and Job have the same face. What does this mean? It is the goal of the imagination as creative time, the subject of part 3, to strive towards an answer to this question, as well as to the one that is clearly related to it: if the subject–object perspective is “fallen,” an illusion, is it possible that it can be decreated finally and replaced by identityin-difference? This is the problem that Blake wrestled with in his later Prophecies. The Ninth Night of The Four Zoas is an apocalypse that does exactly that. But Blake was dissatisfied with that resolution, because it is still too bound up in the ego’s perception of time. If Eternity exists, it “always already” exists: it is “Eternity in an hour.” This is comparable to the difference between Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhism. Whereas the goal of the former is to pass away from the illusion of this world, the latter says there is nothing to pass away from. Samsara is nirvana: illusion is enlightenment. If we did not have our moments of revelation, of peak and depth experiences, this would seem only playing with words. But such moments may lead us, as they led Northrop Frye at the end of his life, to what he called a “double vision,” ending his eponymous final book, “In the double vision of a spiritual and a physical world simultaneously present, every moment we have lived through we have also died out of into another order. Our life in the resurrection, then, is already here, and waiting to be recognized.”58

7. the discipline of vision: the role of the arts and aesthetic education “There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid,” says Shaw in his Preface to St. Joan, “that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure” (11), naming, along with Joan, Socrates, Luther, Swedenborg, Blake, and St Francis.59 In the play itself, when a “realist” tries to tell Joan that her voices come from her imagination, she cheerfully replies, “Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us” (68). We have thus far compiled a surprisingly lengthy catalogue of what we might call the “epiphanies of everyday life,” but, still, not many of us have imaginations powerful enough to produce voices and visions. That points to the central role of the arts in both religion and secular life. Shaw’s Preface goes on to speak of Joan’s “dramatic imagination” (12),

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but widens the discussion to “the diverse manners in which our imaginations dramatize the approach of the superpersonal forces” (14). The arts may both entertain and instruct, but they function above all as what Northrop Frye spoke of as a mode of symbolic meditation, by means of which all of us see visions and hear voices, decreating ordinary reality and recreating its spiritual form. The arts have to begin where we are, however, in ordinary experience, where voices and visions are just illusions. As a first step, they invite us to enter into a special, liminal, yet very common state of mind – that of play. Joseph Campbell begins his four-volume treatment of mythology, The Masks of God, with a chapter titled “The Lesson of the Mask,” drawing on the book Homo Ludens (Man the Player), by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga.60 Play is a state of mind apart from subject–object experience, where appearances are either true or false. Children engaged in role-playing games, including video games, adopt an attitude of “as if,” or Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief. Campbell uses the example of the mask. Children are fascinated by the way a simple donning of a mask changes someone’s identity, even though they do not cease to be aware, unless they are very young, that the same everyday person is “really” under the mask. Exactly the same was true in Greek theatre, in which the actors wore masks, and in the types of religious rituals out of which drama perhaps arose, or to which it is at least related. We go to what we call “plays,” but we also “play” music: the experience is aural as well as visual. Music is ecstatic in the original meaning of “out of oneself”: it can remove us to another state of being, although we would be hard put to say what. The most influential spokesman for the ecstatic power of art is the author known as Longinus, in his treatise On the Sublime. The sublime is first of all a certain kind of language: “elevated” beyond the level of ordinary speech or writing, possessing a supercharged intensity that illuminates like a sudden flash of lightning. But it acts on the reader as well as on the subject: rhetoric produces persuasion, but the sublime engenders transport, ecstasis, fusing the reader in identity with both text and author. Longinus seems unsure about the sublime in language; he calls for Great Thoughts and Great Passions, but is aware that striving for these usually results in bombast. But he focuses on figurative language, looking for what Frye in his late work called “ecstatic metaphor,” which is not merely rhetorical or figurative but a power that leaps like lightning between two points and unites them into an expanded identity.61 Art is experienced on both levels of human identity simultaneously. To the ordinary ego, its voices and visions remain what Frye calls “hypothet-

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ical”: not illusory, because not attempting to deceive, yet also not real. That is, art begins and to some extent remains on the level of play. Even as creative illusion, it may widen our narrow horizons by presenting the full range of imaginative possibilities beyond what we dream of. This in itself is a liberating force, and may provoke intermittent social anxiety. But art can also provide revelation and ecstasy for those of us who are not naturally visionaries. Unlike ritual – although the differences are not as great as are sometimes asserted – it merely presents and does not demand a committed response. But it makes one possible. No artist disclaimed the prophetic role more emphatically than W.H. Auden, and what readers tend to remember from his “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” is the line “For poetry makes nothing happen” (cp, 197–8). But the poem ends with a moving catalogue of art’s powers: it can “still persuade us to rejoice,” “make a vineyard of the curse,” even “let the healing fountain start.” This may not be as radical as Blake’s hope that his art might restore the Golden Age, or Shelley’s assertion that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of humankind, but it still claims that poetry replaces the wilderness and desert of the Fall with the vineyards and fountains of paradise, the “mind-forg’d manacles” with freedom, rejoicing, and praise. I I . EM A N AT I O N “Does God exist?” seems like a very simple question, and those who ask it are often hoping for a a simple answer. Some of them will see it as an intellectualizing evasion to say that God is not a being within the cosmos but is rather a consciousness that is the circumference of that cosmos, its precondition – its matrix, that which gives birth to the universe. Such a God does not “exist”: he is prior to both existence and nonexistence, which are aspects of the space–time system that he embodies, sustains, and yet transcends. Consequently, some theologians and philosophers prefer to describe God not as a being but as the “Ground of Being” (Urgrund, original ground, sometimes Ungrund, groundless ground), or as “Being-itself” – neither object nor subject, but the fertile soil whence both have grown.62 Before the exfoliating of the ten thousand things, Being-itself would be a centre, a singularity or Monad, the seed that holds the universe in potentia: not the circumference but the centre of the mandala order of the cosmos. Yet, before Creation, that seed is unmanifest, a Zero, a Singularity with a somewhat startling resemblance to that postulated in the Big Bang theory of physics. Before Creation, God is a state prior to both existence

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and nonexistence, which paradoxically includes and yet eludes all antitheses, and which Schelling called “indifference,” where opposites co-inhere without conflicting as Contraries or a Negation. Such a state resembles the Gnostic pleroma, the fulness, or the Buddhist shunyata, the Void. But God decides to manifest himself to become manifest, to exist, and that is the Origin, the primary act of mythology described in Creation myths throughout history and around the world. In What Is Metaphysics? Heidegger claims that the first question of philosophy is, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”63 It may appear a rather inane query. In an early monologue, comedian Bill Cosby reminisces about being a college jock with a girlfriend, a philosophy major, who went around asking similar-sounding questions, such as “Why is there air?” His impatient answer was, “To blow up basketballs.” Yet a philosopher of the opposite school of modern philosophy from Heidegger’s, Ludwig Wittgenstein, said something very similar: “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.”64 A moving passage in Jung implies that an adequate response to Heidegger’s question may be existential and emotional rather than ontological: “But why on earth,” you may ask, “should it be necessary for man to achieve, by hook or by crook, a higher level of consciousness?” This is truly the crucial question, and I do not find the answer easy. Instead of a real answer I can only make a confession of faith: I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the Athi plain of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial, touched only by the breath of a primeval world. I felt then as if I truly were the first man, the first creature, to know that all this is. The entire world round me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment it would never have been.65 Surviving a dangerous or near-death experience sometimes makes people realize that every moment is potentially the same kind of miracle as Jung’s literal peak experience. Every moment is, then, the moment of Creation, as it is in the paradisal perspective of innocence in Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill.” Deconstructionist philosophy insists that there can never be

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any pure present or any pure presence: every moment is entangled with both past and future, and therefore never really exists. Any moment we focus on has already moved into the past. This is our ordinary experience of time, the linear horizontal timeline in which each moment is caused by its predecessor and is the cause of its successor: tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Like other forms of poststructuralism, as well as secular rationalism and scientism, deconstruction exercises a constant vigilance against any contamination by a vertical perspective, which it sees as dangerously irrationalist. But in the mythological perspective, each moment may also be seen not as caused by the previous one, but as leaping ex nihilo, out of nothing, or so it would appear, but perhaps actually out of a mystery lying beneath the antinomies of something and nothing. Loren Eiseley speaks of “the dichotomy present in the actual universe, where one finds, behind the ridiculous, wonderful tent-show of woodpeckers, giraffes, and hoptoads, some kind of dark, brooding but creative void out of which these things emerge – some antimatter universe, some web of dark tensions running beneath and creating the superficial show of form that so delights us.”66 Blake conceives of such a moment as the one minute of the day that Satan cannot find (E, 136). It is not a pure present isolated from past and future but “Eternity in an hour,” containing past and future in the identity-indifference of an Eternal Now. If we ask which came first, the chicken or the egg, the creating subject or created object, we may say “both,” for the Monad is the total unity of subject and object. Beyond both existence and nonexistence, it decides, for unknown reasons, to exist. Erich Neumann quotes one of the Brahmanas: “In the beginning this world was nothing at all. Heaven was not, nor earth, nor space. Because it was not, it bethought itself: I will be.”67 Or, more playfully translated: “‘Let there be me.’ And there was me.” We note that the “it” is both world and Creator, and is thus a self-creator. One Egyptian version of Creation is sufficiently lacking in either inhibition or taste, depending on one’s point of view, to have the deity create the world through masturbation, a motif echoed by a poem of Dylan Thomas’s that takes the joke one step further by equating the masturbatory Creation with the flushing of a toilet: “He pulls the chain, the cistern moves” (cp, 11).68 When God creates the world in Genesis 1, heaven and the angels apparently already exist. The fact that we are never told how they came about may be a hint that they were never created. Creation implies a prior “stuff” out of which things are formed. Christian theologians decreed that the

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world was created ex nihilo, out of nothing, because, if it was created out of something, where did the something come from? And indeed, the theologians notwithstanding, there is “stuff” in Genesis 1, which presents us not with a void but with the spirit of God moving on the face of “the deep,” a mass of waters or formless substance. Later tradition identified the deep with Chaos, the primal stuff out of which, in some mythologies, the four elements emerged. In Book 7 of Paradise Lost, the Son creates the world by imposing order on Chaos. The theologians’ problem may be solved by assuming that both the angels who watch the Creation and the heaven from which they view it were never themselves created but were rather emanated directly from God, along with the primal Chaos itself. It is this emanation that was ex nihilo. The term is Neoplatonic and Gnostic rather than Biblical, but it can be adopted as a useful supplement. Prior even to the emanation of heaven and the angels is the “begetting” by which a Trinity comes into existence out of a monotheistic God, and this too must necessarily imply some kind of timeless emanation. Heaven is God as a place, emanated from his being: for the same reason, the angels are God as a plural. The latter is yet another heresy, because theological orthodoxy is always concerned about idolatry, the worshipping of anything, including angels, instead of God. But in the Old Testament, God manifests himself as an angel when he needs an avatar. The “angel” that Jacob wrestles with is recognized by the commentators as a form of God himself. In an explosion of literal metaphor, Ezekiel sees God as a charioteer who is identical to the vehicle he drives, drawn by four angels who are also four “beasts” that are also forms of the divine presence. Christianity has expended much energy defining monotheism as the highest – the only high – form of religion. Schemes have been drawn up of the evolution of the concept of the divine from animism through polytheism to monotheism. But God is beyond the singular / plural binary as well. That does not mean that angels are not beings in their own right. Angelic or human, we are all ourselves different, unique, yet also masks of God. The angels are just more transparently so, which is what makes them “messengers,” the meaning of their name. God and his word shine through their transparency unto us. Heaven has no furniture: Dante’s souls float like fish in a tank, and angels are traditionally depicted with wings. The figures in Blake’s engravings soar and dive in a swirling celestial ballet. Mythologically, flight represents a transcendence of the limits of the human condition, symbolized by gravity. Angels can fly because they have spiritual bodies. So did unfall-

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en human beings, but the fact that the former were emanated and the latter created may account for the difference between paradise and heaven. Adam and Eve were originally unfallen, and yet still were “a little lower than the angels.” As usual, Milton asks – and answers – logical questions that tradition sidesteps. Since the Fall, human beings have died and thereby gone to heaven. But what if Adam and Eve had not fallen, and death had not come into the world, “with all our woe”? Would humanity have remained in paradise forever? Milton audaciously imagines, with Neoplatonic assistance, matter become spirit, so that heaven and earth, the emanated and created unfallen worlds, would have become equal Contraries, with both angels and human beings travelling between the two via Jacob’s ladder. The title of M.H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism, borrowed from Carlyle, comes close to capturing what Milton had in mind.69 The archangel Raphael tells Adam that nature and human nature would become progressively spiritualized: at the same time, he and the other angels are already naturalized, so to speak: they eat, drink, and even have sex. Heaven is the unfallen condition and, as such, suitable for unfallen beings, but since the Fall it has become an “afterlife” admitting fallen human beings after death. More than belief in God, it is the expectation of personal immortality that has caused religion to be dismissed as the opiate of the people. Actually, the expectation is by no means as universal as some people might think. In Egypt, it was originally only the Pharaoh, the incarnate god, who was immortal: universal immortality was a later innovation of the Osiris cult.70 In both Greek and Old Testament religion, the dead survived only as shades in a dark and gloomy underworld, not fully distinguished in Hebrew from she’ol, the grave. Originally, only the gods and Yahweh were immortal in the heavenly sense. How far does personal immortality debase religion in the direction of narcissistic self-interest? Hope is included with faith and love among the three theological virtues (perhaps most famously by Paul in I Corinthians 13). Hope for what? Much popular religion to the contrary, the “personal” aspect of immortality does not refer to the ordinary ego. What resurrects is not the ego but the second, spiritual self, which bursts from the tomb of the natural ego-body complex. When Paul says that, in eternity, after the trumpet’s last call, “we shall be changed” (I Corinthians 15:31), he means that the locus of identity shifts from the natural to the spiritual self altogether, in Jung’s terms from ego to Self. The ego cannot believe in resurrection, but the imagination does not have to believe in heaven because it knows: to some extent, it lives on that plane already. Kafka claimed that “it

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is nevertheless possible that not only could we live continuously in Paradise, but that we are continually there in actual fact, no matter whether we know it here or not.”71 “The kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it,” says Jesus, according to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas.72 Consciousness of this occurs in a peak experience: some of the late poems of Dylan Thomas, such as “Author’s Prologue,” “Poem on His Birthday,” and “In Country Heaven” work to evoke the awareness that we are in heaven and that, at least sometimes, we do know it. The knowledge is a renewal of Innocence, conquering the cloven knowledge of good and evil. When Wordsworth says that it is in this world that we find our happiness or not at all, he is not necessarily being an atheist. Heaven transcendent is metaphorically identical to heaven immanent, a different perspective on the same reality, as in Milton’s representation of the two unfallen states, which helped shape Blake’s depiction of his two unfallen states of Eden and Beulah. Milton’s Raphael tells Adam that angels switch gender for “change delectable, not need” (5.629), and the two unfallen states are likewise a matter of change delectable, satisfying the two Contrary aspects of human nature. Paradisal afterworlds such as the Isles of the Blessed or Elysian Fields are variants of heaven immanent. The most famous portrayal of heaven transcendent is Dante’s Paradiso. Heaven is the spatial version of the spiritual condition. The temporal equivalent is “eternity.” Paradoxes of time are the aspect of the unfallen condition that is perhaps most difficult to grasp. When we speak of time and space, we normally have in mind what those are in the experience of the ego. But eternity cannot mean endless time as the ego experiences time. An ego with even five thousand years of “time to kill” would have fallen into screaming madness or a catatonic trance long before the time was up. This is rather the unendurable, endless succession of Dante’s damned souls and Milton’s devils in hell. But if eternity cannot mean indefinitely extended time, what can it mean? To answer this, we may seek out certain experiences in everyday life that seem to have a quality of timelessness. We have all at some point been so absorbed that we have lost track of time: we look up at a clock, and several hours have passed, yet, during those hours, time did not exist. To the question, what kinds of experiences are these, the two sides of human nature respond differently – from reason and emotion, or from head and heart: Dante’s era referred to intellect and will, and the description of heaven in the Paradiso unites them as equal Contraries. Intellect is contemplative, whereas will moves towards an object of desire, and is therefore active. From these capacities arise the two paths of

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salvation in Christian tradition, the contemplative and the active life. Heaven transcendent is an Eternal Now in which the intellect is totally absorbed in contemplation. What it contemplates is a vision of order. This order is divine, and therefore beautiful, true, and just: it is the image of God himself imprinted in both nature and human nature. This vision, shorn of its anthropomorphism, survives among some scientists, notably Einstein. But it is far older than modern science, often expressed in geometrical symbolism such as the mandala, a circle containing a cross, signifying the union of opposites, identity-in-difference. In the West, the first city-states such as Sumer and Akkad laid out streets in a mandala pattern, with the temple in the centre.73 It is no accident that these city-states invented sophisticated forms of astronomy and higher mathematics. But Mircea Eliade shows, with his usual exhaustive catalogue of examples, that such a city pattern is a development on a larger order of magnitude of a pattern that has been the blueprint for construction of houses, temples, villages, and cities, East and West, for thousands of years, including the medieval cathedral, with its nave and transept oriented in four symbolic directions and its Gothic spire a vertical axis heavenward.74 The opening lines of Dante’s Paradiso announce that there is an order in the universe that makes it resemble God. Heaven knows, so to speak, where he discovered it, but Dante employs the mandala as one image of that order: various modulations of crosses in conjunctions with circles appear throughout the Paradiso, culminating in the famous image of God himself as three circles that are metaphorically one circle. The second circle also takes the form of a man, Christ, inside the circles, cruciform. Understanding how the man and the circle are one is said to be equivalent to the old conundrum of squaring the circle. The vision of order is what Nietzsche called “Apollonian.” He sees Apollo, god of the sun, as lord of the visual arts, and many of our words for thought have spatial and visual connotations: “reflection,” “illumination,” “enlightenment,” “theory” (etymologically “show,” “spectacle”), and so on. The vision of order finds its apotheosis in heaven transcendent, but, as we saw earlier, heaven can be seen as the true spiritual form of this life and thus in-forms many more earthly literary and speculative works. Writers captivated by the vision of order are fond of charts, diagrams, classification schemes, and numerical symbolism – this “architectonic” approach links them to the urban imagery of buildings, temples, and cities: in other words to artifice rather than to nature. Their vision of order is very often fourfold, as in Blake’s Jerusalem, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Jung’s psychology, Frye’s Anatomy, Campbell’s four-volume Masks of God, and, yes, the pre-

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sent book. Apollo is also the god of music, leader of the Muses, but the vision of order privileges its quasi-visual aspect of harmony. In a C-major chord, the three notes, C, E, and G, sound simultaneously rather than in temporal succession, and their relationship is quasi-spatial. Intervals such as thirds, fourths, and fifths are most easily understood visually, as on a musical staff, in the vertical pattern of notes lined up in harmony. Dante has the reputation of being the West’s most architectonic poet: Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism is perhaps its most architectonic analysis of literature. Some writers pose a deliberate challenge in visions equally of chaos or of order. Joyce’s Ulysses practically nauseated some early readers by its visceral presentation of life’s sensory chaos. Yet it may be the most organized literary text since the Divine Comedy: it employs virtually every ordering device, from mythical parallels and number symbolism to literary allusions. Dylan Thomas’s early poems provoked one outraged critic to write two books attempting to prove that Thomas was schizophrenic. Yet the order-symbol of the mandala appears in disguise throughout the poems, which are intricately ordered by other methods as well. The argument over Joyce and Thomas is usually cast in either-or form – either ironic chaos or ideal order – but that is to misread both writers, who clearly intend a paradoxical both-and. Although we call it “timeless,” the Eternal Now of heavenly contemplation is rather unfallen time in its fulness, experienced as if by God, as the “still point” in Eliot’s Burnt Norton, “where past and future are gathered” (part II). Contemplation implies stillness: we contemplate most easily what does not move, like Keats’s Grecian Urn and Cezanne’s apples. Distance helps too: when I look at a still life, I see it first in a single instant as a gestalt, or total pattern. Thus, the vision of order is a Sabbath vision of fulfilment and completeness, of the peace that passeth understanding, and what is fulfilled and complete is at rest. A complementary form of unfallen experience derives from the other aspect of human nature – what the Middle Ages called “will.” This is the faculty that chooses and acts, but driven by desire, and emotion is desire become conscious. Thus the head’s claims are balanced by the heart’s, the greatest of which is love. Desire as energy is the theme of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell: both Freud and Jung called psychic energy “libido,” differing only in how sexual it was. Therefore desire is dynamic: the Paradiso speaks of God as a total order, but equally as “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” That equality is represented in the fourth sphere of heaven, that of the sun, where Dante meets two groups of theologians (Paradiso, Canto 10). One group, led by the Dominican Thomas Aquinas,

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grants primacy to the intellect: the other, led by the Franciscan Bonaventure, grants primacy to the will. But they unite in a dance: two circles moving in opposite directions. The vision of love takes two forms, seeking either to move towards the object of desire or to attain and unite with it, even though moving towards and attaining are moments of a single process. In the moment of attainment, the vision of love culminates in an eternal consummation, a state of ecstasy like St Theresa’s in Bernini’s famous sculpture. In the Bible, we have the imagery of Christ the Bridegroom and humanity as the Bride, united in the climax of the Last Judgment. In poetry, we have, once again, the blazing consummation of Shakespeare’s phoenix and turtle in the eponymous poem, the probable source for Dylan Thomas’s “A Winter’s Tale,” in which a man transcends time and mortality by uniting in a Liebestod with a fiery bird-woman. In his “Ballad of the Long Legged Bait,” it is the woman who, as the “bait,” dies on the fisherman’s phallic hook, which can thereby pull up from the sea of death, in an apocalyptic rebirth, the whole, unfallen world. When asked the meaning of the imagery, Thomas replied, “It’s a description of a gigantic fuck.”75 The other, dynamic form of the vision of love involves movement towards or away from the goal of desire. Hence its musical imagery invokes temporal dimensions – rhythm and melody – often, as Frye says, in the form of a dance. Jung sees numerical symbolism as a kind of hesitation waltz (3/4 time) between four and three.76 Fourfold symbolism, as we observed earlier, belongs to the vision of order: as an even number, four is exactly divisible and therefore stable and balanced. Three is an odd number, and therefore dynamic, moving towards a completion by “the form of the fourth” (Daniel 2:25). There is always something different about the form of the fourth. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the three canticles (Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso) depict three spiritual realms: the form of a fourth occurs at the end as the Empyrean – not an extra realm but embracing the other three within a greater perspective. Still, Dante has a temperamental disposition towards the vision of order, which is reflected in his complete artistic control, for which so many later poets have envied him. Another, remarkably different poem aiming also towards the vision of love is The Faerie Queene. Spenser clearly intended it to be an architectonic poem like Dante’s, but it escaped from him – which explains its chief virtues. He organized it by threes, sixes, and, most of all, twelves: he planned a dozen books, each featuring a knight exemplifying a separate

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virtue, their identity-in-difference being Arthur. Yet its real form, as others have observed, is not architectonic but interlace. I suspect that few people can remember its plot – or rather its plots – for the narrative keeps proliferating, always seeming about to lose the theme for the variations, and ultimately, of course, only six books, plus the short seventh, the Mutabilitie Cantoes, were completed. Its episodic rhythm makes it seem improvisational rather than planned – in a good sense, like jazz or blues. Spenser borrowed what medievalists call “interlace technique” from the intricate geometrical, intertwining patterns of medieval visual art, especially Celtic. Rather than applying the Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end, he interwove such patterns, often multitudinous and simultaneous, in labyrinthine fashion, with many twists and turns. We might draw the lesson from The Secular Scripture, Frye’s book on romance, that myth, with its ideological temptations, tends to privilege the vision of order, emphasizing control and planning, while romance wanders, stressing spontaneity and intuition, primary process rather than secondary.77 Linking romance to primary process relates it also to the unconscious and dreams, and The Faerie Queene is very dreamlike, taking place in Blake’s Beulah. Disguises, transformations, and metamorphoses abound: the dynamic form of the vision of love, in its most undisplaced form, provides the Heraclitean experience of dying each other’s lives and living each other’s deaths. Blake’s Prophecies, especially The Four Zoas, subtitled A Dream of Nine Nights, with characters bursting from other characters’ chests like something out of Alien, and Finnegans Wake, another dream book, for which one commentator has drawn a chart of “Who’s Who When Everybody’s Somebody Else,” carry these ramifying metamorphoses about as far as they can go.78 This provides a place in myth and literature for that great alternative to a Christian-style vision of a final end-state, reincarnation. As we explore literary texts that portray reality as informed by the visions of order and love, whose apotheosis is heaven, we are dealing as well with the act of reading, in which we inwardly, in imagination, don masks, assume roles, live others’ lives, and die their deaths. In other words, some of us love reading because it gives us a taste of heaven. Wallace Stevens required of his “supreme fiction” that “It Must Change” and “It Must Give Pleasure” (cp, 389, 398): the change is the source of the pleasure, of what the title of another poem of his calls “The Pleasure of Merely Circulating” (cp, 149).

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I I I . C REAT I O N We have been tracing a process of emanation that is logically prior to Creation: a Monad that is beyond the antithesis of existence and nonexistence wills itself to exist, then proceeds to emanate out of its own nature a spiritual world, or heaven, and its inhabitants – in the Christian tradition, the angels. This description outlines not only one type of traditional myth but certain modern, conceptualized ones as well. M.H. Abrams, in Natural Supernaturalism, shows how Neoplatonic and Gnostic Creation myths of emanation and eventual return to the source influenced many Romantic writers. On the other side of the Atlantic, Poe composed his speculative essay Eureka, “I have found it.” What he found looks familiar. “Because Nothing was, therefore all things are,” and they emanate from, and ultimately return into, a divine Ground, in a rhythm that we sense intimately in the heart’s systolic / diastolic contractions and breath’s inspiration / expiration. Trying to explain certain mysterious, seemingly paradoxical quantum effects, physicist David Bohm postulates an “implicate order” out of which has “unfolded” the “explicate order” of nuclear particles and forces.79 The former, while still “enfolded,” would be an all-in-one quite similar to our present Monad, and unfolding resembles emanation. Both in turn may be identified with Kant’s “noumenal,” the “thing-in-itself,” which grounds the phenomenal world. Before modern physics and chemistry there was alchemy, whose laboratory process, though endlessly variable, consisted of two stages: first, decreating ordinary matter back to the prima materia of primal Chaos; second, a new Creation of matter, in its original, unfallen, spiritual form, represented by the Lapis, or Philosopher’s Stone. Creation myths proliferate, yet seem to follow some sort of logic – metaphorical rather than Aristotelian – although this example below is but one possible version, chosen to illuminate those familiar to the educated West. Jung liked to quote the medieval alchemist Maria Prophetissma who spoke of One fissioning into Two; Two coupling to give birth to Three; and Four emerging, as a metaphor for plurality, out of Three; 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10, the number that completes a cycle and begins again.80 The alchemical formula is derived, at whatever remove, from the Pythagorean tetraktys, a triangle composed of one dot at the apex, then two dots, then three, then four at the base. If we add Zero before One to represent the enfolded or unmanifest form of the Monad, the aphorism sums up the process of Creation. Out of a primordial One come two Contraries, one above and one below, whose interaction, or sometimes just whose very

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existence, causes a third, middle entity, between them, which in turn engenders the myriad variety of the phenomenal world. To adapt Lacan, reality is constituted by the splitting of One into Two: to be is to embody a tension of opposites, said Heraclitus, like the bow and the lyre, or like the Taoist yin and yang. The binary oppositions that Lévi-Strauss found to be the structure of South American mythology have been generalized as characterizing mythological thinking.81 The above and below are a form of the vertical axis of the present book’s mandala blueprint, and our middle earth is one form of the third. Creation may proceed, as we explore below, in at least four possible manners: through emergence, copulation, combat, or the power of the word. A. Emergence For example, in one of ancient Egypt’s Creation myths, a hill arises out of the primordial waters, and a phoenix descends to perch on it, reminding one perhaps of Wallace Stevens’s late poem “Of Mere Being,”82 in which a bird alights, in all senses, on the tree, and “Its fire-fangled feathers dangle down.” The Underworld counterpart is the dying god Osiris resurrecting in the form of the djed (stable or durable) pillar. Thus resurrection after death recreates Creation. Egyptologist R.T. Rundle Clark comments: “In both cases, the symbol recalls a myth of origins, having a central idea of rising upwards,” realizing “the victory of the vertical as the manifestation of eternal life.”83 In Central America, the bird combines with the serpent in the form of the god Quetzalcoatl, “the plumed serpent.” The formula “bird above, waters below,” resembles a familiar image: the medieval theologians who posited Creation ex nihilo did not receive much cooperation from the Book of Genesis, where the “spirit of God” floats in the darkness on the waters of the tehom (the deep). In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, Milton speaks of the Spirit that sat “dovelike brooding” on the waters of the “vast abyss,” making it “pregnant,” or hatching its egg, so that the land arises from the waters. In certain Native American Creation myths, an aquatic bird, such as the duck, dives to the bottom of the primordial waters and brings up mud, out of which the land is fashioned, as Adam is formed out of the adamah (mud) of the Garden after it has been watered by a “mist” from the waters of life in the second, or J, Creation myth in Genesis. In the American southwest, which lacks a large body of water, emergence is out of the earth, human beings climbing up through several levels to the surface. One of the profoundest emergence Creation myths is

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also one of the earliest. The most famous hymn in the Rig Veda, 10.129, begins, “There was neither existence nor non-existence then,” so it asks itself, “Was there water, bottomlessly deep?” Then “one arose” and felt desire or heat, summoning into existence a “cord extended across,” i.e., a vertical axis: “Was there below? Was there above?” And thence multiplicity: “The gods came afterwards.” The hymn ends by shrugging, Trickster fashion, at the obsession of any kind of literalism, religious or secular, for univocal conclusions: “Whence this creation has arisen – perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not – the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows – or perhaps he does not know.”84 B. Sexual Creation Myths The image of the bird hatching its egg is not far from the sexual imagery of some Creation myths, in which the sexual union of two beings, often a sky god above and an earth mother below (though occasionally vice versa), results in the birth of a child who is or makes possible our middle world. In cultures with such a myth, the sexual union may be ritually re-enacted in order to renew the world and its fertility, often at the top of a ziggurat symbolizing an original sacred mountain, whose topmost point is the meeting of the heavens and the earth. Ancient Sumer, for instance, was the first “higher” civilization in history. In its Creation myth, Nammu, the primordial sea, brings forth Anu, the sky, and Ki, the earth, locked in a wouldbe eternal embrace until the birth of their son, En-lil, the air, forces them apart.85 Hesiod’s Theogony shows Ouranos and Gaia, the sky and earth respectively, emerging from Chaos, coupling, and giving birth to the Titans and the Olympian gods. The Japanese deities Izanagi and Izanami descend from sky to Japan, where they create the human race by running around a pole or vertical axis, or what Yeats would call “perning in a gyre.”86 Westerners are likely to think of the fertility dance around the phallic maypole. The sky god may take the form of the descending bird: the iconography of paintings of the Annunciation, with the dove of the Holy Spirit descending on the Virgin Mary, is a sublimated variant of this; Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” (P, 214) is a deliberately sardonic variant. What some sexual Creation myths generate may be not a child but a fertilized egg. When it hatches, the shell breaks, which may be a positive image of decreation or a negative image of the Fall. The opening of Finnegans Wake identifies the Biblical Fall with both the tumble of Humpty Dumpty and the brain-scrambling fall of the hod carrier Finnegan. A cosmic egg hatches in a Creation hymn of the Rig Veda (10.21) as the

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Hiranyagarbha, literally “golden egg,” laid not by a golden goose but by Svayambhu, “the Self-Manifested,” a Ground of Being who also created the primordial waters, where it planted the egg as in a womb. Life emerges from water, both prehistorically in the sequence of evolution and individually as the human fetus develops with vestigial gills in the amniotic fluid, and emergence from a primordial sea is a frequent image of Creation in mythology. The sea image modulates into the image of a sea serpent or dragon. Erich Neumann makes the Ouroboros (or “Uroboros,” as he spells it), the serpent with its tail in its mouth, an image of the original unconscious state, which is a unity, but a primitive one, because consciousness has not yet differentiated the opposites. The goal of Kundalini yoga is to awaken the serpent from his circular self-involvement, causing him to rise through seven (the number of creation) centres, or chakras, until he extends as a version of our vertical axis. C. Combat Creation Myths The sexual metaphor for Creation seems inevitable, but in Freud the sexual drive has a twin, aggression. How can Creation possibly take place through conflict, destruction, and death? In a combat Creation myth, defeat of an antagonist by a warrior god or hero creates or renews the world. The Sword from the Rock, by G. Rachel Levy, identifies three forms of epic.87 Two have conventional epic heroes: the heroic contest and the search quest, corresponding to the Iliad and the Odyssey, respectively, are the main forms of conventional heroic epic. But there is a third type. the Creation battle, which occurs in a different type of epic: the mythological epic, exemplified by Hesiod’s Theogony. Despite its opening invocation of the Muses, the Theogony does not seem an epic because its characters – as in others of this type – are gods and its events take place in mythical time, before historical time begins. But the whole poem is a kind of extended Creation myth, combining the sexual myth with the Creation battle. The sexual Creation takes place first: as I described above, out of primordial Chaos comes Gaia, the earth, who first produces Ouranos, the sky, then mates with him to produce an elder pantheon of divine beings, the Titans. But Creation is as yet unfinished, still half-Chaos, an anarchistic conflict of natural powers, symbolized by the Titans themselves and by such monsters as Typhon. The Olympians, led by Zeus, fight a ten-year war with the Titans and cast them into Tartarus, the lowest part of the Underworld; Zeus himself single-handedly defeats Typhon. The apotheosis of Zeus is a victory of law and order over Chaos.

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An even more undisplaced Creation battle is the Enuma elish, the Babylonian Creation myth, whose hero is a god named Marduk. Marduk defeats Tiamat, the salt sea (i.e., the dead sea, the water from which nothing can grow), cuts her in two, and makes the world of her body. This myth appears as what deconstructive critics would call a trace haunting the Creation myth in Genesis. While there is no Creation battle in Genesis 1, scholars observe that “Tiamat” and tehom (the deep) are etymologically related.88 Elsewhere, throughout the Bible, the prophecy recurs that God will someday defeat a sea monster or dragon called Leviathan. This prophecy is fulfilled in the Book of Revelation, and out of the defeat of the seven-headed dragon come new heaven, new earth. As so often, we note in passing an Eastern analogy, the defeat of the serpent Vritra by Indra in Vedic mythology. In the myths we have so far examined, the antagonists represent the unruly forces of nature. In more psychological versions of the Creation battle, the hero’s enemy, if male, represents what Jung would call his “shadow,” the dark and unacknowledged aspect of his own psyche. If there is a generational difference, the struggle may take on Oedipal overtones. At any rate, it is all about power, including possession of a third, female figure, the object of desire that Jung called the “anima,” although more deeply she represents the lost feminine aspect of a man’s own psyche. At times, however, the antagonist may actually be the woman – or there may be two antagonists of opposite genders, as the Dragon of Revelation is accompanied by the Whore of Babylon. If the woman is young, she may be a femme fatale, an anima turned murderous through alienation. If she is older, she becomes what Jung called the “Terrible Mother,” like Tiamat. These identifications shift according to the protagonist’s gender (and sexual orientation). If the hero is male, the Terrible Mother type symbolizes the temptation to regression symbolized by the incest taboo, the desire to return to the safe, protected, passive bliss of the maternal realm. Tiamat embodies the sea and therefore links indirectly to the desire for the “oceanic,” the self’s surrender by drowning in the sea of the unconscious. She fights Marduk to avenge her husband, Apsu, the freshwater sea, killed because he tried to drown his offspring for disturbing his sleep, a halfsatirical image of unconscious inertia. In short, we have three figures – two male, one female – interlinked by varying combinations of desire and antagonism, who nevertheless have arisen from a common ground and who are therefore, in Christian terms, a parody of the Trinity. Dylan Thomas of course has his own version of such a confusing scenario, a difficult poem called “How shall my animal”

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(cp, 100), in which the speaker’s “animal” is at once an animal antagonist, an erotic rival, and a female anima. Blake depicts an equally challenging triangle in his dark lyric “My Spectre around me night & day” (E, 467). In Milton’s Paradise Lost, when Satan tries to leave Hell, he is confronted by two allegorical figures, Sin and Death (2.648ff.). But it turns out that he is really attending a family reunion. Sin has, in the past, sprung from his forehead, like Athena from Zeus’s. Satan then copulated with his own daughter, giving birth to Death, who is therefore his son in a demonic parody of the Trinity. Although all of this may seem abstract, one wonders how it informs the unconscious psychology of adultery and other love triangles. Erich Neumann’s Origins and History of Consciousness attempts to supply a historical dimension for Jung’s theory of individuation via an analogy with the biological principle “ontology recapitulates phylogeny” – individual development recapitulates evolution.89 The argument adopts the Creation-battle myth to depict the ego’s achievement of autonomy as it struggles against the gravitational pull of the unconscious – the Terrible Mother, as in Jung’s breakthrough Psychology of the Unconscious (later rewritten as Symbols of Transformation). The hero descends into the dark abyss of the Mother, defeats or suppresses the feminine principle, and rises in masculine glory like the sun, the solar imagery representing the dawning light of consciousness. The conclusion is that fully autonomous ego consciousness, identified with masculinity, requires an initial repression of or domination over the feminine. There are two problems with Neumann’s scenario. First: psychologically, the return to the Mother’s womb is ambi-valent. While the Creation narrative may contain elements of conflict and aggression, it may also take the form of union with the Other. In Psychology of the Unconscious, Jung stresses the necessity to break the incest taboo in a figurative sense: the ego must unite with the m(Other) – to borrow once again the pun from certain feminist critics – if there is to be a new birth. Neumann sees this necessity, but later in individuation, when the ego must return and integrate with the exiled feminine. But is this a true necessity or merely the residual conditioning of the patriarchal societies of all recorded history, where a supposed need to break sharply with the feminine has been used to rationalize male domination? Second: historically, Neumann’s theoretical narrative runs up against the facts – or rather, their absence. He borrows his schema not from Jung but from the nineteenth-century theorist J.J. Bachofen. Applying his powerful creative intuition to the fragmentary evidence of early Classical texts, Bachofen postulated two pre-patriarchal phases of culture.90 The

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first was a pure state of natural savagery, the social equivalent of Neumann’s Uroboros state of unconsciousness; the second was supposedly matriarchal: hence the need for the patriarchal break. But a century and a half of anthropological investigation has demonstrated that “natural man” is an eighteenth-century fiction, not a historical reality, and, although there were a group of pre-patriarchal, “Goddess cultures,” they were probably not matriarchal, much less resembling anything in H. Rider Haggard’s She. The fierce nomadic patriarchal warriors, such as the Indo-Europeans, overran them: if they were not as peaceable as some of their admirers claim, at least they were not aggressive enough.91 All this unfortunately subverts the urgent message of all Neumann’s work: the great need to re-evaluate the subordinated and despised feminine. We simply need to subtract from his argument the idea that the feminine ever needed to be suppressed in the first place. The metaphor of “depth” in the phrase “depth psychology” implies a theory of intellectual and imaginative creation modelled on the pattern of worlds above and below, in which the upper level of the mind, the conscious and reality-oriented ego, interacts with a deeper, unconscious level in order to give birth to some new insight or epiphany. In his studies of creativity, Abraham Maslow adopted Freud’s terms “secondary process” and “primary process” to refer to the radically differing modes of thinking of the conscious and unconscious realms, respectively.92 Creation in any discipline, whether scientific, social, or artistic, requires access to primary process, in effect a temporary return to primordial Chaos. Thus, while Maslow is best known for his idea of the “peak” experience – the ascent to a higher level of consciousness – he values the complementary descent into the unconscious, borrowed from “depth” psychology. According to Mircea Eliade, many creative activities in traditional societies, such as the building of a house or a city, re-enact the pattern of the Creation myth, which serves as a kind of universal paradigm.93 In a way, that myth holds an entire mythology enfolded latent within itself. D. Creation by the Word In linguistics, where the subject–object perspective circumscribes the scientific viewpoint, a word is an arbitrary signifier. Its connection with the signified is conventional and arbitrary: English “dog” and French “chien” point to the same four-footed, barking signified that bites the mailman. Even the ordinary imagination, however, retains traces of a much older attitude, in which a word, particularly a name, is the essential identity of

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what it signifies. Personal names are truly personal: to change one’s name is to recreate one’s identity. Mary Ann Evans and George Eliot are the same person, yet different identities. Renaming oneself is an attempt at a makeover, to become someone different from one’s identity at birth. “Call me Ishmael,” says Melville’s narrator, thereby bestowing on himself a significant identity to represent himself, and hiding his social name, which is merely an arbitrary label. In some pre-modern cultures, people have two names: a social “tag,” like those worn at conventions, and a true name, kept secret from everyone but intimates, lest an evil magician learn their true name and destroy their very essence. On a higher level of imagination, while many realistic poets write in modes not far removed from common prose, others use what James Dickey significantly calls “magic language.”94 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, and Dickey himself aim not at description but at what Paul Ricoeur calls “redescription,” in which language transfigures what it describes.95 For content, the transfiguring takes place through metaphor; in style, through Frye’s “imitative harmony,” the use of alliteration, assonance, and other sound effects to make the sound seem an echo to the sense. The technique is far older than the twentieth-century poets listed above and is employed by Spenser, Milton, and Keats. Unfallen humanity presumably had an even closer sense of the correspondence between signifier and signified. When Adam names the animals in Genesis, he is in a sense being allowed by God to participate in Creation: naming each animal according to its essential nature in effect brings it fully into existence. On a fully spiritual level, angels, God’s messengers, are winged words, not just delivering God’s message, Western Union style, but embodying it with what Whitehead calls “presentational immediacy,”96 conveying not just ideas about the thing but the thing itself. Angels are the voices and visions of the imagination, which is why Rilke in his first Duino Elegy says that “Every angel is terrifying” to the ordinary personality, as the angel demonstrates who crashes through the ceiling at the end of the first play of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America to announce that the Millennium Approaches, the title of that play. Finally, on the highest, anagogic level, God himself is the Word. On this level, speaker, word, and referent are, in a term borrowed from Charles Williams, co-inherent:97 to think, to speak, to create are the same action, namely, the process we are calling “emanation.” However, we have seen that there are two levels of unfallen reality, spiritual and paradisal, the latter being itself spiritual compared to the profane world of the cloven fic-

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tion and yet less so than the heavenly realm. At some point, God supposedly emanates the formless substance called “Chaos,” but then acts on it as an artificer, a Demiurge like Plato’s in the Timaeus. Michelangelo notwithstanding, God as Logos or Word is the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word that became flesh according to the opening of the Gospel of John. Accordingly, Milton shows the Son of God creating the world like an engineer with golden compasses, then sculpting Adam out of red clay. Milton, stuck with the Biblical account, recognizes that this mode of Creation is inferior, but tries to redeem it by making it the first step in a vertical evolution that would have gradually spiritualized material beings had the Fall not intervened. None the less, Blake’s picture of The Ancient of Days makes Milton’s compass-wielding deity into a sublime yet sinister figure, an ancient, false Father. While Creation by the power of the word is relatively uncommon in mythology, it is by no means uniquely Biblical. At the astonishingly early date of 2850 bce, the “Memphite theology” of the priesthood of the Egyptian god Ptah offered a representation of Creation by the word in its full anagogic sense. There is more than one Creation myth in that culture because rival priesthoods constructed competing theologies out of the common elements of their mythology. Ptah swallows his rivals, so to speak: as Joseph Campbell says, “The gods are thus functioning members of the larger body, or totality, of Ptah, who dwells in them as their eternal vital force, their ka … The idea is here announced unmistakably of the immanent God that is yet transcendent, which lives in all gods, all men, all beasts, all crawling things, and whatever lives. The Indian image of the Self that became creation is thus anticipated by a full two thousand years.”98 If certain Egyptologists are to be believed, Memphite theology, and Egyptian religion in general, were uncommonly aware that mythology is not factual but imaginative, and therefore linguistic. As Campbell quotes Eduard Meyer: “The myths can no longer be taken simply in their literal sense.”99 R.T. Rundle Clark observes: “[Egyptian] Myths told as long[,] connected narratives are a comparatively late phenomenon … They are not long[,] involved relations like those [of] the contemporary Sumerians of Mesopotamia. For the Egyptians, mythology was not a collection of tales but a religious language … That is why [theirs] is so simple, so absurd and sometimes so profound. It is dream, metaphysics and poetry, all at once.” Instead of human motivation and causality, “the connecting link between the events in the mythical texts is generally a play on words.”100

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If Rundle Clark is right, the basic unit of Egyptian mythological language was the pun – “It is of course the technique of James Joyce in Finnegans Wake.” Moreover, “The addiction to punning was related to a reverence for the ‘Word.’ Words meant ideas and the domination of mind over sheer matter. The Egyptian theologians were convinced that the world was governed by ideas, the ‘words’ of the gods. Most myths lead up, not to a deed, but to the saying of something significant.”101 Thus, “Mythology was not the same thing as the telling of tales. It was the explanation of the universe.”102 But the Egyptians were not just philosophical Idealists, Hegel in hieroglyphics. The “ideas” Rundle Clark speaks of are not just abstractions being linked but images, fused by puns, i.e., metaphorical identifications, not logical equations. Uniquely in Egypt, however, the original symbolism, wherever it came from, was elaborated by priests – by theologians, rather than by artists, as was the case in Greece. That is why its myths are thematic rather than fictional, which helps explain why, as Henri Frankfort notes in Ancient Egyptian Religion, that land never developed the storytelling forms of epic and drama.103 Hinduism’s supreme Word is the Sanskrit “aum.” According to the Mandukya Upanishad, the syllable is Brahman, the Creator, who is also atman, the Self, a deity at once divine and human, transcendent and immanent. The three phonemes of aum are the ground of reality, which is the mind of the Self: A is the waking state; U, the dream state; and M, deep, dreamless sleep. The form of the fourth is the silence before and after the Word, the unmanifest transcendence out of which it, as Monad, utters itself.104 In Greek philosophy, the Logos of Heraclitus is evidently another identity-indifference, the unity of the creative tension of opposites that is the basis of his philosophy. Philo Judaeus attempted to read Jewish Scripture symbolically rather than literally, recasting the highly unphilosophical Yahweh in the light of the Logos of Heraclitus and the Stoics. On the esoteric side of Judaism, “In the Hebrew Kabbala, for example, the sounds and forms of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are regarded as the very elements of reality, so that by correctly pronouncing the names of things, of angels, even of God, the competent Kabbalist can make use of their force. The pronunciation of the name of God (YHWH) [the Tetragrammaton], indeed has always been guarded with great care,” says Campbell.105 Superficially, ascribing such creative power to “mere” words, even to the phonemes that make up those words, may seem merely superstitious. But that is another instance of our habit of taking everyday miracles for granted. Science tells us that the infinite variety of the order of nature unfolds

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from the interactions of a finite number of elementary particles and four forces; that all organic life unfolds from the combinations of four dna molecules. The infinite variety of what Frye calls “the order of words” similarly unfolds from a limited number of elements, in English about forty phonemes. Every word is an identity-in-difference of sounds; every sentence is a syntactic identity-in-difference of words. Out of these, we create a world, not the objective world of the cloven fiction but an imaginative world that Wallace Stevens calls “description without place” (cp, 339–46). He calls this “theory of description” “the theory of the word for those / For whom the word is the making of the world.” In the end, “It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.” Elsewhere in the same poem, he says, “Description is revelation” – “the spirit’s universe.” One of our era’s great “magic language” poets, James Merrill, organized his three-volume, mythopoetic epic, The Changing Light at Sandover, according to the elements of the Ouija board, whence he and his partner allegedly received the revelations that ground the work. Each of the first part / volume’s twenty-six sections begins with a letter of the alphabet; the ten sections of the second are numbered zero through nine; the two sections of the third begin with “No” and “Yes.” Out of these atomic units of human symbolism, a whole cosmos unfolds. I V . SCRI P T U RE A S C REAT I O N Creation myths typically feature a deity who creates a world, sometimes through the power of his word. But if God is his own Word, he is co-inherent with the Scripture that is his revelation, however odd it may seem to evoke what Dylan Thomas calls a “walking word” (cp, 80). When Dante re-unites with Beatrice in the Garden of Eden, she is preceded by a parade whose participants are each incarnations of a book of the Bible. By logic, then – metaphorical logic, at any rate – it ought to be possible to discover a Creation myth of Scripture, showing it as unfolding out of a Monad, from which emanate two opposite principles that become poles of a vertical axis, the spinal column of a total anatomy of the Word. By Scripture here we mean the New Testament, which is Christian Scripture proper, the Old Testament having been co-opted from Judaism. Perhaps this experiment, rather than being useless ingenuity, may help us to uncover the Christian vision’s unity, though one not so simple as some people assert. Many Christians assume that their faith has an obvious, simple message: namely, the one they have accepted from their church or community. But the religion is in fact a construction and, as

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with the medieval cathedrals, took a long time to build. Its foundation, of course, is Jesus’ life and teachings, but four Gospels give four versions of those, and many other accounts did not make it into the canon. The party line may be that by God’s grace the church’s inclusions and exclusions were infallible, but it is just as easy to see them as the outcome of fierce ideological and at times psychological conflicts, over several centuries. The same is true of the New Testament’s other two main components, the epistles or letters, principally of Paul, and the Book of Revelation. Despite the legendary ascriptions of authorship, neither the Evangelists nor Paul were witnesses to Jesus’ life and teaching: Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, dates to 70 ce. Some major Christian doctrines were inferences by Paul, or perhaps imported by him from the Mystery religions, and they may or may not correspond to anything taught by Jesus. The Book of Revelation is a riddle wrapped in an enigma, and its book of seven seals signifies that we see now as through a glass, darkly, and that the Word will not be fully revealed short of the Last Judgment. As that Judgment continued not to arrive, the church over centuries interpreted what Scripture does say as best it could, as well as answering questions that Scripture does not address. One can grasp why fundamentalists claim that Scripture has one clear, uncomplicated message, available to everyone, but to understand is not to admire: their theologians do not themselves agree on what that message is. “Conservative” Christians become impatient with “liberals” who pick and choose what they believe or disbelieve, but in practice that is what everyone necessarily does: to accept, say, conservative Catholic theology is itself picking and choosing. An opposite attitude, passionately articulated by Milton’s Areopagitica, is that picking and choosing is precisely what God wills us to do, and forms the essence of the Christian liberty spoken of by Paul. Anyone who simply accepts doctrines by authority is what Milton calls a “heretic in the truth.” What is wrong with blind faith is precisely its blindness, even if it thinks it sees. Like all good teachers, God demands that his students resist the inertia of passive acceptance. Job is praised because he actively, loudly questioned. Jesus in fact did not give his disciples “the right answer,” the one to memorize for the exam. He told them stories, whose point was by no means always perfectly clear – the word “parable” is related to “parabola,” and Jesus’ often throw the disciples a curve. God gave us the power of reason and demands that we use it, for, as Areopagitica says, “reason is but choosing,” a line that is repeated in Paradise Lost (3.108). At one point in Mark (4:13), Jesus says with obvious frustration to the disciples, “Know ye not this parable? and how then will ye know all parables?” In the Gospel

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of John, he gives them metaphors, with which they do no better: a baffled Nicodemus thinks “ye must be born again” means regression to the womb. As one tries to persuade students, there is no pre-existing “right answer” to a story or a metaphor: there are only interpretations. This is not relativism: some interpretations are better than others. How do we find out which is better? The pragmatic way that Adam and Eve did, Milton replies: by choosing, and seeing the outcome. We must commit ourselves to the story or metaphor, or interpretation, that speaks to us: that is the meaning that Frye, in Words with Power, gives to the traditional term kerygma (proclamation.)106 We do not all live in the same reality – meaning, the consensus reality of the cloven fiction – because our imaginations create our world differently for each of us. Likewise, as reader-response criticism tells us, we do not all read the same text, Biblical or otherwise. Reading is but choosing, and is thus a moral act. A reading of the Bible to justify racism and sexism and eternally damn everyone who does not agree with the interpreter’s reading is not only mistaken but morally wrong, because destructive. Who is to say so? I must, for I must choose, and passively refusing to make a choice is itself a choice, with moral consequences. There is thus a Creation myth of reading. A text, Scriptural or otherwise, begins as an Otherness that speaks to us. We commit ourselves, and the ensuing interpretive interaction brings something to birth, sometimes by a natural emergence, sometimes by an intimate mutual possession, sometimes by mortal combat. The heterogeneity of the New Testament, with its variety of texts, authors, and points of view, has inspired institutional anxiety over the centuries. The fear that ignorant and unstable readers will treat it as a Rorschach test, seeing in it whatever matches their ideological, social, or personal obsessions, has inspired periodic witch hunts against “heresy” in the name of various single, official interpretations, which invariably strengthen the church (whatever church), for the Protestant battle cry of “liberty of interpretation,” despite kindling a few left-wing visionary interpretations, especially those of Jakob Boehme, Gerard Winstanley, and Milton, the great precursors of Blake, usually turned out to mean the freedom to interpret as, say, Calvin did, or to be burned as a heretic, as the Calvinists did Michael Servetus. Institutional interpretation was nevertheless not always entirely reductive. In the Middle Ages, the (Catholic) church recognized the principle of polysemy, or multiple simultaneous levels of meaning, both of the Bible as a whole and of any passage within it. However, the first unfolding of the Word as Monad takes place prior to the four levels of meaning postu-

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lated by the medieval church. In the typical Creation narrative, a Monad unfolds (or has always already unfolded) into a realm above and a realm below. When the Word likewise becomes twofold, it polarizes into two modes of interpretation that are in effect two Bibles, nested within each other, yin–yang fashion: antithetical visions, yet equally able to claim grounding in the Biblical text. One of these, corresponding to the top half of the vertical axis of our mandala diagram, privileges Creation and its Vision of Plenitude, climaxing at the north pole in a vision of All. The other, corresponding to the lower half of the vertical axis, privileges decreation and its Way of Vacancy, passing through a dark event horizon at the south pole into the paradox of a vision of Nothing. These two visions call for two genres of theology. One type unfolds into the comprehensive structure of the Summa: its secular counterpart is the encyclopaedic form that Frye named the “anatomy.” The other is the via negativa, or negative theology. It begins by decreating our knowledge of God by showing how he is transcendent, absolutely Other, unspeakable and inconceivable: the categories of language and thought break against him like waves against a cliff. Negative theology has affinities with various Indian texts demonstrating how the ultimate reality is most adequately, or least misleadingly, referred to as the Void, because it is without attributes, beyond form and formlessness, being and non-being, and so on. It has modern affinities with Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. Its secular counterparts are also anatomies, but of a different sort, the satiric sort represented by Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and so on, although there are also narrative versions, such as Menippean satire. I have argued elsewhere that Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism has a foot in both camps,107 and, at the end of his career, he dedicated Words with Power to showing that the Biblical visions of the Word and the Spirit, as he called them, are an identity-in-difference. Theology deals in concepts and arguments, but of course the Bible has shaped culture most of all through its narrative, which has been read in two opposing ways and generated opposing ideologies – we may call them “conservative” and “progressive” – that are at once religious and sociopolitical. The former values tradition and permanence, the latter, change and renewal. Until the mid-eighteenth century, the conservative view dominated Western culture. Despots keen to boost their power modelled the Chain of Being and the divine right of kings on the Vision of Plenitude, which, in its true form, is God’s Sabbath vision of contentment, which we may still pray sometime to share, as Spenser does at the end of the Mutabilitie Cantoes (the short, seventh book of The Faerie

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Queene). In its ideological distortion, it becomes Pope’s “Whatever is, is right” – don’t question the decrees of the political and religious elites. God put them in power, and change is the root of all evil, which came into the world through two attempts at revolution: Lucifer’s and Adam and Eve’s. The progressive interpretation remained largely underground for the almost two thousand years of Yeats’s “Christian gyre,” surviving via certain remarkable visionaries such as Joachim of Floris; in the “secret wisdom” of Gnostic, Neoplatonic, Hermeticist, alchemical, and other symbolic traditions; and in the Inner Light movement of seventeenth-century English Protestantism. It surfaced permanently during the Romantic period, when, by no accident, the French and American revolutions upended the Chain of Being and abolished the divine right of kings. When Blake spoke of giving people “the Bible of Hell” whether they wanted it or not, he meant the progressive way of reading the Bible, which has nothing to do with Satanist posturing. He and others like him saw, as we observed earlier, that the Chain and divine right are not really Biblical at all. Moreover, the central event of the Old Testament, the Exodus, was in fact a revolt against authority. So, Blake suggested, was the career of Jesus, who was put to death by the collusion of religious and political authorities. God is on the side of liberty and the downtrodden, and God’s methods are decreative, because corrupt and decadent structures need to be razed, the walls of partition broken down. When direct political revolution becomes necessary, this may require decreation in its blunter forms, such as gunpowder. But for a poet and religious visionary, it means dissolving illusions and errors in order to reveal and liberate: Blake’s metaphor for this in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is his artist’s engraving process, where acid eats away the metal plate so that the letters emerge for printing. The progressive view has its own ideological corruptions, tempted not so much by authoritarianism and ossification, but by antagonism to any form of authority or even stability, an antagonism that toys with, even slips into, outright nihilism. Acid may burn and blind if not handled carefully. What do we gain by postulating two distinctive readings of the Bible, as if one was not complicated enough? First, people temperamentally disposed to conservatism or progressivism may come to recognize and respect the valid claims made by the other side, rather than demonizing them. Yes, this requires extricating true vision from ideological distortion on each side, an inordinately difficult task. Yet we have a moral responsibility to try. Second, we may realize that each of us has a con-

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servative and a progressive side. The worst are always full of passionate intensity, denouncing any kind of change on one hand and any kind of permanence and peace on the other. But if we allow the opposites to interact, out of their dialectic might evolve a centre that might hold. Again, we have a moral responsibility to try – and what other choice do we have, anyway? Medieval commentary unfolded Scripture even further into four possible levels, thus: 4. 3. 2. 1.

Anagogic Moral Typological Literal

People used the names in different ways, often compounding, or confusing, the typological with the allegorical (in effect a conceptualized version of anagogy). We will see later that these levels correspond to four points along our vertical axis, the anagogic and the literal being at the two poles, although we must clarify the odd identification of the literal with the decreative. Looking at each book(s) in turn, we may better grasp why there are four Gospels with such widely varying styles and intentions if we surmise that each stresses a different level of interpretation; as well, the letters of Paul may seem less fragmented, and the nightmare mélange of the Book of Revelation less, well, psychotic, if we can show where various aspects of the texts fall on the fourfold interpretive spectrum. A. Literal Level: Mark The literal level has traditionally been understood as the historical, factual level, but, for the “Jesus of history,” there are no facts: all we know of the Jesus of history is that there was a Jesus of history. As we saw earlier, neither the Evangelists nor Paul provide eyewitness accounts, and the Roman historians knew Jesus only as a vague rumour from a disreputable quarter. Nor does eyewitness testimony confer greater certainty: we are still not sure who assassinated U.S. President John F. Kennedy, or who should have been declared victor in the American presidential election in 2000. Monty Python satirized this problem in Life of Brian by imagining witnesses present at the Sermon on the Mount – with, unfortunately, seats in the last row, so that they cannot hear very well. When Jesus says, “Blessed are the

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peacemakers,” one of them thinks he said, “Blessed are the cheesemakers.” The literal level understood as historical and factual is the only level of interpretation accepted by fundamentalism, but modern historians are the first to tell us that history is a construct, the facts themselves being constructs, for one has to decide first what counts as a fact. From Rashomon to Finnegans Wake, modern culture is full of works suggesting that history, including Biblical, is Kant’s Ding an sich: real, yet unknowable. In the first three, Synoptic Gospels, the career of Jesus lasts one year; in John, the Fourth Gospel, it lasts several. In the Synoptics, Jesus dies on the day after Passover; in John, he dies the day before. We might minimize these contradictions as trivial, but how far should that attitude extend? In the Synoptics, Jesus typically teaches through parables; in John, there are no parables: in their place, there are seven “I am” metaphors, such as “I am the vine and you are the branches.” If we had only John and thus no parables, would we have a “historical” picture? Nor do the Synoptics entirely agree: each has clearly shaped the material to fit the evangelist’s thematic purpose and pattern. If we shift from the macro- level of people and events to the micro- level of words and sentences, i.e., the “literal” meaning in a literary critical sense, we find again that any attempt to erect a solid structure is to build a house on sand. When the New Critics of the early twentieth century examined poetry line by line and word by word, they found irony and seven types of ambiguity. When deconstruction analyzed the univocal meaning of even the most precise assertion, it dissolved into an abyme, an abyss, of uncontrolled polysemy. Ironically, the literal level of meaning, supposedly the terra firma of all interpretation, turns out to be the level of decreation. We explore this mystery further in part 4. In both the Old Testament and the New, the God of the literal vision is not a figure of perfect goodness and light whose wrath is unleashed only on opposing forces of evil and darkness, Manichean-style. Indeed, the Israelites sometimes felt about the Yahweh of the Old Testament that, with a God like this, who needs enemies? Yahweh punishes all the innocent descendants of Adam and Eve for a minor infraction, drowns the entire world without compunction, justifies his cat-and-mouse tormenting of Abraham and Job by calling it a “test,” demands endless holy wars in the Promised Land – in short, behaves in ways that have been heavily rationalized or passed over in silence in the official picture. Job alone girds his loins and asks this God to justify his ways to men, only to receive a reply that, while magnificent poetry, amounts to: “I am too sublime for you to understand.” The message is equivocal: it is darkly convincing,

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something that belongs to the vision of the depths in part 4, but something too of the Wizard of Oz. All that we know is that, whatever the theologians nervously insist, this God says in Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.” In The Double Vision, Frye identified this deity with the Trickster, an equivocal figure appearing in various forms in mythologies around the world.108 The Trickster eludes categories: it is not quite appropriate to call him either “good” or “evil.” He is at once sublime and ridiculous: if he creates the world, he is just as likely to drown it again, like a child demolishing a sandcastle. He is mischievous, and his job is the decreative one of shaking things up. He is the spirit of imperfection that somehow or other we cannot do without, in life or art. “The imperfect is our paradise,” says Stevens (in “The Poems of Our Climate,” cp, 194). “Oh, isn’t life a terrible thing, thank God?” says a character in Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.109 As for art, “I / never did like anything too well done,” says poet A.R. Ammons (in Sphere, 14). The Jesus of the Gospel of Mark is not as disturbing as his Father was in the Old Testament. Jung surmises in Answer to Job that, after the Job episode, Yahweh was so disturbed by his own blindly unconscious behaviour that he sent himself in the form of his Son to earth in order to wake up, to learn about humanity by becoming it. Nevertheless, while not being exactly a chip off the old block, Mark’s Jesus is also a Trickster, with some of his Father’s disconcerting ways, including his intermittent irascibility. When Peter is horrified by his announcement that the Son of Man will be killed, Jesus snaps at him, “Get thee behind me, Satan” (Mark 8:33), a statement Matthew and Luke transfer to the Temptation story. Jesus’ teaching is as enigmatic as his behaviour, designed seemingly to throw his disciples off balance in order to wake them up, in the style of a Zen master: “And he said unto them, He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable. And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God; but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they shall be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them” (Mark 4: 9–12). This God also tests his followers, not with the physical ordeals of a Job but with the mental challenges of his parables, clearly expecting that a good number will fail: many are called, few chosen. Equivocal to the end, Mark’s Jesus simply disappears after the Crucifixion: the last chapter presents us with an empty tomb, but no actual

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Resurrection, an absence rather than a presence, and the Gospel ends in mid-sentence. B. Typological Level: Matthew Typology is a method of reading the Bible in which every event in the Old Testament is a type foreshadowing or pointing towards an antitype in the New Testament that is its fully revealed form or its fulfilment. Type and antitype reflect each other as what Frye called a “double mirror.” When Dante explains the medieval fourfold method of interpretation in a letter to his patron Can Grande della Scala, he uses a reference from Psalm 114, “When Israel went out from Egypt.” On the literal level, this refers to the historical Exodus (if it was historical: the usual ambiguity of the literal level). But typologically, it foreshadows the antitype of the Exodus in the New Testament, Christ’s deliverance of the world from the bondage of the fallen world. Here, we are considering typological interpretation as one of four modes lined up on the vertical axis. However, typology in itself is a linear principle, a vision of time, and thus is symbolized by the horizontal axis of our diagram as it intersects the vertical axis at midpoint. We explore it further in part 3. Matthew is the typological Gospel. Its whole organization is designed to show that Jesus fulfils Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah. Matthew’s narrative is punctuated by five great discourses, a Gospel parallel to the Pentateuch, the five books of the old law; one of these is the Sermon on the Mount, whose ten Beatitudes (the “Blessed are the … ” sayings) mirror the Ten Commandments. If we call it the Sermon on the Mount, we are referring to Matthew’s version, for in Luke the same discourse takes place on a plain. Was it “in fact” delivered on a mount, or did Matthew want a parallel to the giving of the law on Sinai or Horeb? The Gospel has exactly twelve “fulfilment citations,” in which something that Jesus does or says is said to fulfil what was written in Scripture. C. Moral Level: Luke Each verse of the Bible means something not just historically or doctrinally, but personally, so much so that some Christians have even used the Bible as people in the East employ the I Ching, as an oracle book providing wisdom about life’s moral choices: whatever verse one puts one’s fin-

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ger down on randomly will cast light on some issue in one’s life. In this way, events that happened in the past happen again. “When Israel went out from Egypt” refers to each person’s quest for the Promised Land. On a social level, Frye uses the example of U.S. civil-rights demonstrators singing “Go down, Moses. Let my people go.” In that moment, he says, the Exodus takes place all over again.110 Luke is the Gospel of social concern, and thus fittingly represents the moral level. The story that Luke was a physician fits his emphasis on compassion, especially for the downtrodden: where Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes says “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Luke’s observes simply, “Blessed are the poor.” His most famous parables revolve around the same theme: Dives (the rich man) and Lazarus, the Prodigal Son, and the most famous of them all, the Good Samaritan. It is natural, then, that Luke’s Gospel most strongly emphasizes universal salvation and thus, with its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles, the missionary activity of the church. D. Angogic Level: John Beginning with its opening hymn to the Word made flesh, John is the anagogic or mystical Gospel. Its central teaching device is the literal metaphor: Word is flesh is light. Instead of parables, we have the seven “I am” metaphors: I am the bread of life, the light of the world, the gate, the good shepherd, the resurrection and the life, the way, and the vine. Consequently, the Gospel abounds in people who have trouble with metaphors, showing us that to take metaphor literally is not the same as taking it factually. We have noted Nicodemus’s confusion about being born again. When Jesus says, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up again” (2:19), the disciples think he plans to take a wrecking ball to the Temple at Jerusalem. When he says, “This bread, my flesh” (6:51), they think he means cannibalism. But, to those who do understand, “the words I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life” (6:63), a life that is here and now: John makes so little mention of the Parousia, the Second Coming, that some scholars wonder whether he really believed in it: the centrepiece of his Gospel is, instead, the raising of Lazarus, the conquering of death in this world. John speaks more of love than do the Synoptics, and refers to it as a metaphorical identification: “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us” (17:21–3).

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E. The Letters of Paul The same fourfold perspective might put some order into the letters of Paul. We have the dark Trickster doctrine of predestination in Romans 8–9; the explication of typology in Galatians 4; the great hymn of love in I Corinthians 13; and the anagogic visionary throughout, beginning with Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. As we observed earlier, in II Corinthians 12:1–4, Paul reports a vision of being caught up to the “third heaven”; he reports it in third person, but even Dante ascribes it to Paul himself in the second canto of the Inferno. No one emphasizes more than Paul the transfiguration that grace produces in us, giving birth to a “new man” or “new creature”: as he says in I Corinthians 15:51, “We shall be changed.” The new being is a spiritual body that is also a spiritual self who is neither singular nor collective, but universal, the Mystical Body of Christ that includes each one of us, so that someday God will be “all in all” (I Corinthians 15:28). Yet the experience is not entirely in future tense, but is available to some degree in this life. “I die daily,” Paul says (I Corinthians 15:31), and out of the death of the natural self comes resurrection: “nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20). F. The Book of Revelation If the Book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse ( = revelation), is the culmination not only of the New Testament but of the Bible as a total pattern, it too should disclose a polysemous, fourfold meaning. Its literal level, in our special sense, dominates, with its bizarre and enigmatic symbolism and its dark events of the last days. What it reveals, if nothing else, with its horrific imagery of the sun and moon going dark, the Four Horsemen, the Antichrist, the Great Whore, and the seven-headed Dragon, is the Trickster God’s dark side. Its historical level is a vision of the end of history. Yet it gives a lopsided impression merely to focus on the decreative aspect of Revelation, which has to be seen balanced against its recreative vision of “new heaven, new earth.” The six thousand years of history followed by the millennium gives a 6 + 1 = 7-fold pattern that mirrors the six days of Creation followed by the Sabbath. This is the climax of the whole Biblical vision of typology: “Behold, I make all things new” (21:5). The book’s moral level is present in the imagery of Christ as Bridegroom and his people as his Bride; their union is a final triumph over all the suffering and pain of six millennia: “And God shall wipe away all tears

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from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” (21:4). Its anagogic meaning lies in its vision of God as the Word. John is commanded to write about what he has seen in vision, and that book will be welcoming and lifegiving: “And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the waters of life freely” (22:17). For to write any book is to attempt to convey some part of the Logos who is both Alpha and Omega. V . “ O U R G R EAT S A LVAT I O N F RO M A BOVE ”: T R AD I T I O NA L M Y T HO LO GY A N D T HE P O I N T O F T RA N S C EN D EN C E The centre of the mandala might be labelled “You Are Here.” That central point can be thought of as an eye opening, signifying the dawning of consciousness. But consciousness is always double. The ego looks out and sees a vast and looming reality on all sides: it concludes, “I am an insignificant dot,” and is afraid. Its reflex is either to contract solipsistically or inflate delusionally. The imagination looks out and says, “I am a part of all that I perceive, and it is part of me.” Its reflex is to unfold circumferentially. None the less a complication enters at this point. That the imagination never ceases to perceive by Contraries saves it from the fatal triumph of ever achieving a single, totalizing vision. Between roughly 1964 and 1972 Northrop Frye contemplated and made notes for a Third Book – a kind of Summa, or, to use one of his favourite words, an “encyclopaedic” study of literature, mythology, religion, and society. Its key was the Great Doodle, a cyclical diagram that clearly developed from the cycle of the hero’s quest in his essay “The Archetypes of Literature” (1951), itself influenced by Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. But the Third Book was not possible, because, as he had announced in “New Directions from Old” (1957), there was not a single mythology but two conflicting mythologies, pre- and post-Romantic, or what I am calling “traditional” and “modern” mythology. Nor was this a surprise, really: these are the mythologies – traditional and modern – of Blake’s Angels and Devils in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Their opposition is not reconcilable: a fundamental aporia renders the vision of the imagination “undecidable.” Yet these opposing visions are not necessarily a Negation: one can perhaps characterize a certain horizon of deconstruction to say that it does not always regard both sides of the aporia impartially but clearly, if implicitly, “decides” in favour of

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one of them. On the one side is the logocentric metaphysics of presence, on the other a vanishing act into an abyss of difference, deferral, traces, and supplements. Deconstruction only grudgingly concedes that the metaphysics of presence is inescapable, that we cannot write a single sentence without “falling” back into it. But it appears unwilling to view the fall as fortunate: it always regards presence and plenitude as medieval theologians such as Augustine viewed sex – a necessary evil, of which our hermeneutics must be unremittingly suspicious. It might be more fruitful to ask what happens if we consider Identity and Difference, Plenitude and Vacancy as Contraries rather than as a mutually cancelling Negation. In the second half of Words with Power, Frye rearranged the quadrants of the Great Doodle into a vertical axis to reflect what he called (there and much more frequently in his late notebooks) the “dialectic of Word and Spirit.” I have portrayed the upper and lower poles of the axis mundi as emanating from a central Monad in which they were enfolded in a state of indifference (Schelling’s word). This gives us the basic features that, if not universal, are typical of both traditional and modern mythologies, a middle earth with worlds above and worlds below, along with the processes of emanation and Creation. But if we shift from a purely structural to a more historical point of view, it begins to appear that in the course of history the two poles become the respective anchoring points of two opposing mythologies, each of which tends to identify its pole as the Origin, the true Monad, constructing a narrative in which emanation and Creation proceed either from the top pole down or from the bottom pole up. If this sudden shift of perspective seems confusing, well, “All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics,” as the Devil tells the Angel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (E, 42). The best we can do, says Derrida in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” is to cultivate the spirit of play, nimbly shifting from foot to foot. “There is no final system for the interpretation of myths, and there will never be any such thing. Mythology is like the god Proteus,” says Campbell.111 Still, if we hold on stubbornly, we may find an answer that will suffice for the moment, as Jacob did in his own wrestling match. Each of the two mythological perspectives has a common root in the imagination, but individual temperament and the cultural needs and anxieties of certain historical eras may predispose people towards the one or the other, idealizing one perspective and its values while minimizing, subordinating, repressing, or sometimes demonizing its opposite. Nor is a fuzzy relativism the answer: the tension must be maintained to be cre-

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ative. The relation between the two is compensatory, as Jung said of that between consciousness and the unconscious. While we may commit ourselves, or find ourselves committed, to one perspective or the other, both individual mental health and civilized life depend on the ability to balance opposing perspectives, avoiding both fanaticism and relativism. Developing that ability is the deepest goal of education. The perspective in the present section – that of traditional mythology with its Vision of Plenitude, of presence and total identity, with its version of the Monad established at the apex of the mandala at what I am calling the “Point of Transcendence” – is a top-down system: both emanation and Creation descend from on high. Transcendence lies beyond the clovenfiction limitations of ordinary language and can be approached only through the “not this, not that” discipline of a negative theology. But its first act is to emanate spiritual yet partly objectivized forms of itself, the visions of order and love, of Logos and Agape / Eros, as we discussed earlier. In visionary Christian terms, the inconceivable Father begets the Son and the Holy Spirit, the twin agents of Creation, the Son as Logos, who descends to impart differentiating form to Chaos, even as the Spirit, identified with the feminine form of Wisdom from Proverbs 8 who says she was God’s instrument of Creation, binds the differentiated forms together with love. To put it this way is only to “unpack” the creatively ambiguous language of the opening of Paradise Lost about which person of God did the actual creating, even if Milton follows tradition (or one tradition, anyway) in showing Creation by the Son alone in Book 7. But Christianity did not invent the top-down cosmos. Campbell, in his early Hero with a Thousand Faces, shows that such a perspective already informs the mythologies of the first urban states, emerging to supplant the older, earthbound hunting and planting mythologies somewhere after roughly 4000 bce: “Whereupon the great field of instructive wonder shifted – to the skies – and mankind enacted the great pantomime of the sacred moon-king, the sacred sun-king, the hieratic planetary state, and the symbolic festivals of the world-regulating spheres.”112 In the Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Campbell, at the end of his life, called this perspective “The Way of the Celestial Lights.” The description above from the last two pages of The Hero with a Thousand Faces indicates his awareness even in his first major book of the historical scheme that organizes all his later works. In the mythologies of the hieratic city-states, as Campbell calls them later, human civilization is directed from on high by an order made manifest by the regularity of the heavenly spheres. The higher order, however, remains more or less transcendent, exercising its will

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through the distancing agency of the vertical axis of law and ideology, as we will find in part 2. The next development in the top–down cosmos came with Plato and Plotinus. Plato gives us a realm of perfect Ideas or Forms above that participate in and in-form the realm of matter below. But he also depicts the philosopher-lover’s ascent up the so-called Platonic ladder towards a vision of order that is also a vision of love and beauty. Plotinus tried to close the gap between the Platonic Forms and matter by adopting the idea of emanation: the entire Chain of Being is a continuous emanation from an ineffable One above, so that the material realm is objectified Spirit. But Plotinus seems to have been temperamentally still a dualist, reportedly not happy about being burdened with a physical body, and laid stress on the ascent quest, on the hope of a nostos or return to be absorbed into the purely spiritual One. Beginning in the Hellenistic era, however, Plotinus’s version of Neoplatonism became largely monistic rather than dualistic: instead of being transcendent, unknowable, and otherworldly, spirit is immanent in and the true identity of nature, the cosmos, and even the gods. This transformed Neoplatonism was Christianized during the Middle Ages and reached its full flowering in the Renaissance. As Dante puts it in Christian mode at the start of the Paradiso, God pervades the universe, dwelling in some parts more and in some parts less. In A History of Philosophy, Wilhelm Windelband characterizes the new mythological vision with a lyrical and rhapsodic intensity (and perhaps a touch of scholarly irony) that does justice to its ecstatic fervor: “The fundamental tendency in the natural philosophy of the Renaissance was therefore the fanciful or imaginative conception of the divine unity of the living All, the admiration of the macrocosm: the fundamental thought of Plotinus of the beauty of the universe has been taken up by no other time so sympathetically as this; and this beauty was now also regarded as a manifestation of the divine Idea … In this inheres naturally the inclination to complete monism and pantheism. Everything must have its cause, and the last cause can be but one, – God.”113 The new vision of a pantheistic immanence has implications that are not merely ontological and aesthetic but moral, as Windelband explains: Harmony is accordingly, for [Giordano] Bruno also, the inmost nature of the world, and he who can apprehend it with the gaze of enthusiasm … for him the apparent defects and imperfections of detail vanish in the beauty of the whole. He needs no special theodicy; the

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world is perfect because it is the life of God, even down to every detail, and he only complains who cannot raise himself to a view of the whole. The world-joy of the aesthetic Renaissance sings philosophical dithyrambs in Bruno’s writings. A universalistic optimism that carries everything before it prevails in his poetic thought.114 The optimism, Windelband notes, is not just Bruno’s, and it derives from a sense of God not merely as an inherent order, a natura naturata, but as a vital energy surging through nature and the cosmos, a natura naturans. Such an intuition looks forward to the Life Force theories of Bergson and Shaw, Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of process, and the poetry of Hopkins: God himself, as the unity exalted above all opposites, cannot be apprehended through any finite attribute or qualification, and therefore is unknowable in his own proper essence (negative theology); but at the same time he is still thought as the inexhaustible, infinite world-force, as the natura naturans, which in eternal change forms and “unfolds” itself purposefully and in conformity with the law, into the natura naturata. This identification of the essence of God and the world is a general doctrine of the natural philosophy of the Renaissance; it is found likewise in Paracelsus, in Sebastian Franck, in Boehme, and final also with the whole body of the “Platonists.”115 Campbell understands that the new mythology of immanence was connected with its political and historical context, tending towards what in Occidental Mythology he calls “syncretic monotheism.” There had been regional syncretic movements, he says, as in ancient Egypt, but “nowhere before the period of Alexander the Great does the idea seem to have emerged – or, at least, to have been put into operation – of a transcultural syncretism, systematically cultivated.” And this syncretism was a product of empire: “For in this period the Periclean ideal of the polis expanded to the Alexandrian ideal of the cosmopolis: the oecumene, or inhabited world as a whole, as the common possession of civilized mankind.”116 As he adds, “Syncretic monotheism, recognizing that all concepts of the deity are limited, infers an ultimately inconceivable god above all.”117 All local deities are subsumed as avatars or incarnations of the One. Campbell contrasts this with the “ethnic monotheism” of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which insists that there is but one God and all the rest of the gods are idols. Campbell is aware how syncretic monotheism can help

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pacify a diverse and fractious empire, quoting Edward Gibbon’s remark about the Antonine (second-century) Roman Empire, where the various religions “were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.” Thus “toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious accord. Rome gradually became the common temple of her subjects; and the freedom of the city was bestowed on all the gods of mankind.”118 Syncretic monotheism kidnapped by ideology thereby becomes a kind of mythological imperialism, saying, “Your deity is merely a form of our great One – who is, by the way, incarnate in the Emperor, to whom you therefore need to pay tribute.” When Christianity became imperial in the Middle Ages a pope became a nearly deified emperor, and other religions were graded according to how well they approximated the truth of Christian revelation. The unfortunate historical upshot: nowadays almost any attempt at comparative mythology may look like a disguised revival of mythological imperialism. But Campbell remains our most passionate proponent of something genuine in the syncretic vision worth detaching from totalizing ideology. He is, after all, in good company. A mythology of top–down immanence of spirit in nature, of the One epiphanically visible behind the Many, with its tendency towards a universalizing syncretism and its vision of salvation as an eventual return to the One, helped shape Western culture from the Hellenistic through the Romantic periods. Other scholars exploring this tradition include Edgar Wind in Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance and M.H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism, who coined the phrase “the Great Circle” to refer to the cycle of emanation and return from an original One that launched the Romantics’ mythmaking, even if they eventually transformed it, in a decreative-recreative mode discussed in part 3. As prelude to his discussion of Romantic innovation, Abrams provides a compact and useful summary of Neoplatonic tradition from Plotinus and Proclus and its affinities with Kabbalism and Hermeticism, through the Neoplatonic Christian theologians Origen, Pseudo-Dionysus, and John Scotus Erigena, down to Renaissance figures including Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, Paracelsus, and Jacob Boehme.119 (He is rather oddly muted about the powerful Neoplatonic influence on the Romantics’ major poetic precursor, Milton.) Frye’s contribution to the discussion of traditional mythology and its Vision of Plenitude is chapters 5 and 6 of Words with Power. Instead of using the Great Circle diagram employed by Abrams, who is following many of the original Neoplatonists, Frye employs a diagram of descent

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and return along a vertical axis, shifting the thematic emphasis from the cyclical to the dialectical and so not affecting our argument at this point. His focus is not the descent of the divine power, in the form of the Word, from above, but the human response. In traditional mythology, the redemptive power descends, and the human response is an ascent quest towards the Point of Transcendence. As we shall see in part 4, in modern mythology a mysterious power manifests itself from below, producing a descent quest towards the hidden source – the subject of Words with Power, chapters 7 and 8. What then is the remaining relevance, if any, of the traditional ascent quest in a post-Romantic, not to mention a postmodern age? If we credit Nietzsche, God has been dead for a century and a half. The reality of any kind of transcendence – God, heaven, the One, or merely a “higher power” – has been dismissed by science as superstition, by philosophy as logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence, by Marxism as the opiate of the people, by psychology as projection, and by the alienated and ironic zeitgeist as pie in the sky, an illusion clung to only by the naïve and the fanatical. No surprise: there are not one but a pair of responses, one deriving from the immanent aspect of traditional mythology, whose spokesman in our time is Campbell, and one deriving from its transcendent aspect, whose expositor is Frye. What I am calling (as a convenient shorthand, not a definitive category) “traditional mythology” begins from a Point of Transcendence at the top of the mandala that symbolizes unity, identity, presence, and spiritual plenitude. The universe, including humanity, emanates downward into multiplicity, difference, materiality, and ultimate vacancy. While the physical world is not evil, because it is still emanated spirit, the return ascent to the Point of Transcendence is a consummation devoutly to be wished. But, as we noted earlier, between the Alexandrian period and the Renaissance, the Neoplatonic mythology underwent a Jungian enantiodromia, or reversal of opposites. Stress was henceforth on the immanence of spirit rather than on its transcendence, a perspective that Carlyle called “natural supernaturalism.” It is a shift not only of perspective but of attitude, from rejection of the world, of life itself, to acceptance, from Carlyle’s Everlasting Nay to his Everlasting Yea, from Schopenhauer’s pessimism to Nietzsche’s willed affirmation. Campbell understood all mythology in the spirit of this Way of Affirmation. He has his own mythological Contraries: the Monomyth of the hero’s quest in part 1 of The Hero with a Thousand Faces is a temporal pattern that is nested inside what, in the little-regarded part 2, he calls the

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“cosmogonic cycle.” Like the two circles of the present book’s mandala, these circles can be regarded as congruent, the same pattern under the aspects of time and eternity. The cosmogonic cycle is Campbell’s version of Abrams’s Great Circle, and it signifies his theodicy, his affirmation of life in the face of evil and suffering. Hero opens with a disquisition on the superiority of comedy to tragedy, because the real comedy is cosmogonic: The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed. Where formerly life and death contended, now enduring being is made manifest – as indifferent to the accidents of time as water boiling in a pot is to the destiny of a bubble, or as the cosmos to the appearance and disappearance of a galaxy of stars. Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.120 Campbell’s perspective can be criticized – though “placed in perspective” might be a more useful term – as one-sided. Parts 3 and 4 of the current study will give equal time to its Contrary, an Everlasting Nay, from which issues a Way of Denial, along with a descent quest whose protagonists tend to be not heroes but rebels, anti-heroes, and, above all, Tricksters. The crux will be the question of evil. Not everyone feels up to the task of the hero who is “ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being.”121 Like Frye’s Fearful Symmetry, The Hero with a Thousand Faces emerged in the shadow of and in response to the sickening and insane tragedies of World War II. Years later, in Occidental Mythology, Campbell is open about the price of such affirmation, citing Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra: “It leaves the Buddhist sentiment of compassion (karuna) far behind; for compassion contemplates suffering. And Job’s problem also is left behind; for that too rests upon the recognition of suffering.”122 Whether he intended this remark as a precautionary qualification or not, it would be prudent to take it as one, although one wonders whether the transcendent detachment it speaks of is the only possible stance. Dylan Thomas’s poems of the London blitz, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” and “Ceremony after a Fire Raid,” attempt to see eternity even in the midst of hell on earth, and the attitude is anything but

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coldly Nietzschean. Rather, it is the stance of a poet who used to cite Wilfred Owen’s remark, “The poetry is in the pity.”123 Campbell is somewhat impatient with Gnosticism, with its obsession with the Fall and the problem of evil, differing here remarkably from his mentor Jung, who was fascinated with it, and who is one of the presiding spirits of my part 4 as a kind of, well, Jungian shadow of Campbell. Campbell’s view can certainly be dissented from: it is easy to justify suffering and say that the ills of life are to be accepted rather than alleviated if you are sitting in a privileged position and are not the one suffering. But it cannot be dismissed as New Age sentimentality: the Way of Affirmation is truly what Campbell, with ample erudition, proved that it is, one of the inspiring visions of mythological history – inspiring, among others, the Joyce of that great comic-in-all-senses hymn of acceptance Finnegans Wake: “Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.”124 The other possible defence of the transcendent vision of traditional mythology occurs in Frye. This is an exceptionally crucial issue for those who, like the present author, have committed themselves to the Romantic rejection of supernaturalism in favour of an inward power able to renovate perception and thereby liberate human action, both artistic and social, to change the world. For me, then, it was a momentous occasion when in 1976, in the “Preface” to Spiritus Mundi, my mentor Northrop Frye, the great expositor of Blake, announced that he was looking for “a counterweight to the sometimes exclusive radicalism of the tradition that is embryonic in Milton, fully developed in Blake, and, perhaps, already decadent in Yeats,” finding it to some extent in Wallace Stevens: “Stevens polarizes the imagination against a ‘reality’ which is otherness, what the imagination is not and has to struggle with. Such reality cannot ultimately be the reality of physical nature or of constituted human society, which produce only the ‘realism’ that for Stevens is something quite different. It is rather a spiritual reality, an otherness of a creative power not ourselves; and sooner or later all theories of creative imagination have to take account of it.”125 I think Frye is talking about the great danger of Romantic mythology – what Jung calls “inflation,” or more simply a power complex. There is a reason that Frye went on to write a book called Words with Power. To be told that we have a world-changing power latent within us is a terrible temptation. To continue with Jung’s terms, intellectually we know that that power belongs not to the ego but to the Self, our spiritual identity rather than our ordinary personality. But, delusional or no, the ego will be tempted anyway, and Jung insists that it is inevitable that the ego will “go

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over to the dark side” without some kind of compensatory balance. Moral laws are of no force, not only because the ego is good at rationalizing but because laws are merely social constructs, and the collective nature of society makes it far more susceptible to the temptation of the power drive than the relatively weak and limited ego. The result is Luciferean pride taking the form of what chapter 8 of Words with Power calls “Titanism.” Titanism shows its positive side when it rebels against a God who is himself partly fallen and suffering from inflation, as when Job “rebels” against Yahweh or Prometheus defies Zeus in Aeschylus. But the temptation of the power drive is the great demonic force in modern history, from the Nazis to the right-wing authoritarians currently in office across the world, including in the United States. I do not think it an accident that the former Nazi Paul de Man became a resolute sceptic about Romanticism. Without something to compensate for the power madness of fallen humanity, there is no hope and no future. We may call that power “God,” if we choose, but we have to understand – and experience – him as spiritually other, not other in the cloven-fiction sense of an objective being.126 In his comedies and romances, Shakespeare repeatedly shows that human beings, left to their own devices, will compulsively make their own and others’ lives miserable. Again and again he suggests the possible intervention of some outside power, itself invisible and unexplained, acting to reverse a bad situation, even if it has to act through very fallible human agents. In some plays, such as Measure for Measure, he associates it with the repeated word “grace.” In itself the Point of Transcendence may be unknowable, but when it enters the world and makes the impossible possible we may call it “grace.” There is a bone to pick (elsewhere) about why God chooses to grant or withhold grace – the problem of predestination – but we can still identify our own barriers against grace, the first of which is pride, often taking the form of anger. Nietzsche sneered at the Christian virtue of humility, but despite the warning of Goethe’s Faust he underestimated the inflationary danger of aspiring to become the Superman willing his own affirmation. Faust was a scholar who could not bear it when the Erdgeist (earth spirit) laughed at his intellectual pretensions. But any true scholar or creative writer knows the experience of being mocked by the Erdgeist. Leaving the issue of unwarranted torment aside, it is the same as Yahweh’s mockery of Job. Both Faust and Job are presented with magnificent

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visions of a Macrocosm that is utterly beyond their capacity even to bear, much less understand or put into words. Thomas Aquinas had such an experience and never wrote a word of theology again. But whether such an experience is positive or negative depends on the quality of our response to it. Frye ends Words with Power with a reference to what he elsewhere calls kerygma, which functions in the same way as grace and is perhaps identical to it. “When we become intolerably oppressed by the mystery of human existence,” he says, and have entered the desert of Negation, “After that, perhaps, the terrifying and welcoming voice may begin, annihilating everything we thought we knew, and restoring everything we have never lost.”127 Jesus’ injunction to become as little children again implies a distinction between the simple and the simple-minded, as do the low-life, comicrelief characters of Shakespeare’s comedies, who show their ignorance by their inability with words and their tendency to take fictions literally. But the simple and the simple-minded often appear in the same personality, and it is Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream who is granted the dream so deep that it is bottomless. True simplicity is an openness to wonder, which is yet another word for grace, and from the Way of Celestial Lights in 4000 bce to now, the source of wonder has been the cosmos above, the night sky with its glittering hieroglyphs, at once sublime and beautiful. There is a reason that Dante ended all three canticles of his commedia with the word “stars.” We began part 1 by decreating the supposed solid reality of the subject–object perspective, exposing it as a cloven fiction. The alternative to the cloven fiction is identity-in-difference, an identification of subject with object, whose verbal formula is metaphor’s A is B, the basic unit of the creative imagination. The perspective – Blake’s “state” of imagination, which is also the state we call “spirit” – unfolds from a Monad into two opposites, whose interaction is the process of creation. There are two forms, though ultimately identified, of Creation, one for the order of nature and one for the order of words. The first is the province of emanation and Creation proper in various Creation myths. For the second, we have traced the unfolding of the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, from the Monad of the Word. In passing, we saw that a similar unfolding could be projected for what Frye called the “secular scripture” of literature, which is what he does in Anatomy of Criticism. We have now reached the limit of the unfolding of the Vision of Plenitude, an apocalyptic vision of infinite variety in total unity, reality as it is

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contained within the mind – and body – of God. For the next two parts, we come down to earth, examining the cyclical and linear aspects of earthly experience in parts 2 and 3 respectively, before we descend into the Nothing out of which the Monad arose, and which is its alter ego, its other identity and identity as Otherness, that which Yeats called a “fabulous, formless darkness,” to which All returns and from which All begins again.

Introduction

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PA RT T WO

There Is a Season: The Cycle There is a season (turn, turn, turn) And a time for every purpose under heaven Pete Seeger, from Ecclesiastes

I . PA RA D I S E Part 1 concerned itself with the spiritual realm, with emanation and Creation “in the beginning”: a Monad produces two principles or powers, above and below, and all created things are born out of the interaction between those powers, forming a vertical axis mundi or chain of being between them. Such a narrative on an anagogic or fully revealed level is a Creation myth of the imagination, which comes to consciousness finding itself a centre, with worlds above and worlds below. But we noted that a single myth may appear in two contrasting forms, as a set of Contraries. The famous example is the Creation story in Genesis, which conflates two myths. The Priestly Creation is a top–down myth of the imposing of cosmic order by a divine Artificer: in contrast, the Jahwist Creation story is a kind of emergence myth of the growth of life out of a fertile ground, though somewhat patriarchized, to negate that ground’s mysterious depths, leading to an immanent mystery, linked to the feminine and a serpent or chthonic power, out of which all reality arises. These Contrary versions of one myth are in fact the germs of two Contrary versions of the Bible itself, the traditional text and Blake’s Bible of Hell. Finally, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, a Neoplatonic Christianity stressing the immanence of spirit in nature challenged the orthodox insistence on otherworldly transcendence strongly enough to earn condemnation as pantheism.

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Other Contraries are possible. The total imaginative process of creation, decreation, and recreation is most often portrayed as a turning cycle, signified by the outer circle of the mandala. But the process could also be depicted as one of expansion from and contraction to the centre, analogous to former cosmological theories speculating that the Big Bang might reverse itself someday and fall back into the singularity whence it emerged; some Creation myths postulate repeated cycles of expansion and contraction. These Contraries are dynamic and static respectively, transformations moving around a circumference versus those anchored by an unmoving centre: the myth of expansion and contraction follows the rhythm of breathing, the inspiring and expiring breath of the spirit, or the folding and unfolding of a flower in the cyclical phases of spiritual light and darkness. There is never a definitive pattern, yet always a sense that the patterns are the same anew. When I first sketched the outlines of this book, I gave it four parts, for the four vertical levels of both Classical and Christian mythology as Frye laid them out in book after book: heaven, paradise, the fallen world, and an underworld that I call the “Otherworld.” These four plots of mythological real estate may be imagined as locations – Frye calls them topoi in Words with Power – but they are also modes of consciousness, Blakean states, and, further, they can be considered dynamically as events, acts, transformations. However, my plan has grown more complicated, partly because of my increased awareness of imaginative Contraries. This is not, or so I would like to think, a subversion but rather an expansion of vision. For example, as becomes evident soon, heaven and paradise can be seen as spiritual Contraries, “heaven transcendent” and “heaven immanent,” as I call them. The inner circle and horizontal line represent the “profane” rather than the sacred, although profane may or may not be the same as fallen. Paradise and the Otherworld are interpenetrating Contraries, and the Otherworld and the Unground or the Nothing are lower Contraries mirroring the contraries of heaven and paradise above. Wheels within wheels, worlds within worlds, states within states – it may seem complicated, but perhaps not so much to students of Blake’s Prophecies, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, or the poems of Dylan Thomas, or to readers of contemporary fantasy, a genre increasingly thinking in terms of a multiverse of infinite possibilities. Nevertheless, the fourfold framework remains, and remains useful: part 1 is concerned with the transcendent upper half of the vertical axis; part 2 with the cycle of ordinary time and the ideological form of the vertical axis; part 3 with the linear and progressive

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aspect of time; and part 4 with the lower half of the vertical axis from the Otherworld to the Nothing. I have said nothing yet about the Fall. The Fall is imaged in our mandala as a kind of contraction into a smaller circumference within the larger one, and, at least implicitly, a new and reductive kind of vertical axis. The smaller circle represents the partial collapse of the systolic-diastolic rhythm of eternity’s unfolding and enfolding into the death-and-rebirth cycles of fallen time. Similarly, the fallen world’s version of the axis mundi is a vision of hierarchy, a vertical chain of power relations known to the ancient world as “law” and to us today as “ideology,” a reductive or contracted version of emanation and Creation. Finally, the Fall brings into being the linear aspect of time symbolized by the mandala’s horizontal line – yet this too is a reductive or contracted, fallen version of an unfallen principle of decreation and recreation, as we shall explore in parts 3 and 4. There are two ways of thinking about paradise: either as the lower level of the spiritual world, or what part 1 called “heaven immanent,” or as the apex of earthly life, “green’s green apogee,” as Stevens calls it in “Credences of Summer” (cp, 373). Here, we shall be speaking about it more from the latter point of view, although in the end they cannot truly be separated. If we speak of an earthly paradise, however, it is natural to ask where it is or was located. The location of the Garden of Eden was a topic of scholarly debate in earlier centuries. Candidates included northern Africa, specifically Ethiopia (hence Coleridge’s Ethiopian maid in Kubla Khan), the Tigris– Euphrates area of Mesopotamia, and the Middle Eastern site of what would later be the Holy Land. The last notion led to a piece of folklore that shows up in Donne’s “Hymn to God my God, in my Sickness: “We thinke that Paradise and Calvarie, / Christ’s Crosse, and Adam’s tree, stood in one place.”1 It also appears in the iconography of paintings of the Crucifixion, in many of which the skull that sits at the base of the Cross is understood to be Adam’s. Dante uniquely locates it on an island in the uninhabited and unexplored hemisphere opposite the known world of his time, a notion that resembles various Greek myths, or versions of one, about a paradise usually said to be in the far west, sometimes on an island. The Islands of the Blessed or Fortunate Isles held the Elysian Fields, where heroes who were related to the gods dwelled after death. As I noted, these were most often located in the far west, so that when Tennyson’s Ulysses says he plans to “sail beyond the sunset,” he implicitly has some such goal in mind. These western islands were sometimes conflated with the land

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of the Hesperides, whose name links them with Hesperus, the evening star, and who also dwelled in the far west, guarding, with the help of a dragon, a tree with golden apples of immortality, stolen by Herakles as one of his labours, the subject of another Tennyson poem. Without justification from the Genesis account, both Dante and Milton situate the Garden of Eden on top of a high mountain, so that the Fall of man is literally a descent to a lower level of existence. In Paradise Lost, the Garden is said to be swept away in Noah’s Flood. Eventually, the world would become too thoroughly explored for anyone to believe that Eden or any other “lost world” could be stumbled on by intrepid explorers. Since the Romantic period, the tendency has grown to think of paradise as a transient manifestation of the spiritual world within the fallen cycles of time, at the zenith of a cycle, the apex that signifies rebirth and life’s greatest fulness: paradise is thus located on a temporal rather than a spatial height. Paradise becomes a “peak” experience, or what Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism calls the “point of epiphany.”2 Socially, this manifestation becomes regularized through seasonal rebirth rituals such as Easter. But fallen time is not just one big cycle, although for convenience we are representing it that way: there are cycles within cycles, wheels within wheels. Every human consciousness is cyclic, with its peaks and nadirs, and is embedded within larger cycles that affect it in various ways. Yeats tried to convey some sense of this in A Vision, with its gyres-within-gyres construction. Consequently, paradise manifests itself as a peak experience unpredictably, though not necessarily randomly. But time is linear as well as cyclical. In the unfallen state, linear time is the progressive and temporal (as contrasted with the cyclical and atemporal) aspect of the decreative-recreative rhythm: we shall return to this notion in part 3. Fallen linear time becomes instead what the Renaissance called “mutability,” which Thomas Pynchon modernizes as “entropy,” systems’ tendency to decay from order into chaos (see the Second Law of Thermodynamics). Nothing can go home again: the latest cosmological theory says that the order system brought into being by the Big Bang will keep expanding outward in linear fashion until it finally loses its energy, resulting in the “heat death of the universe.” In fallen linear time, paradise becomes the lost Origin, the happiness that we have tragically lost and for which we yearn, consciously or unconsciously, as part of the human condition. Contemporary readers conditioned by the ideology of progress may find it puzzling that ancient peoples often conceived history as a continual decline from an originally perfect condition, the Golden Age. There are four Ages of Man in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, probably the traditional

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number: Hesiod in the Theogony inserts a fifth age of heroes. But they agree that they, and presumably we, are living in the last and worst age. This matches the Hindu belief in four yugas, where once again we live in the worst of all possible worlds. There have been theories about “primitives” whose myths and rites abolish time so that they live in a pure timeless present. But the more sophisticated historians of myth and religion such as Mircea Eliade are clear that “archaic man” already knows what we know: that the gods have moved away, that we are in exile from the oceanic bliss of the Origin. In his central work, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade says, Everything that we know about the mythical memories of “paradise” confronts us, on the contrary, with the image of an ideal humanity enjoying a beatitude and spiritual plenitude forever unrealizable in the present state of “fallen man” … In illo tempore, the gods descended to earth and mingled with men; for their part, men could easily mount to heaven. As a result of a ritual fault communications between heaven and earth were interrupted and the gods withdrew to the highest heavens. Since then, men must work for their food and are no longer immortal.3 Myths and rites may indeed partly and imperfectly recover the timeless, and perhaps pre-moderns possess a secret of access to it that we have lost: in Eliade’s view that is a reason for respecting and studying other religions. But the recovery is not literal but symbolic, not an end to time and history but an experience of paradise immanent within – “happier far,” Milton may claim, but paid for with an elegiac consciousness of loss. Any salvational view that elides this is an evasion, and deserves to be “demystified.” The mood of paradise is bittersweet. In Finnegans Wake Joyce adopts the motto of Nicholas of Cusa: In sadness, hilarity; in hilarity, sadness, a motto that could also serve for Shakespeare’s “tragicomedies.” On the one hand, paradise is the object of nostalgic yearning: both the good old days and the good old place, our original home, are lost forever, yet we cannot help but long for them. Any nostalgia for a lost childhood is a displaced longing for paradise (or vice versa), explicitly so in Thomas’s “Fern Hill” (cp, 178–89), implicitly so in the childhood sections of Wordsworth’s Prelude. Paradisal nostalgia takes social forms as well. In the United States, a good deal of such nostalgia is projected on the sunny rural South, as in the songs of Stephen Foster and Hoagy Carmichael. Less sentimentally, the Virginian Thomas Jefferson bequeathed to posterity the

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influential ideal of a rural, decentralized nation of self-reliant farmers, an ideal that some still think of as the true American paradise. The haunting power of Thoreau’s Walden derives from the rootedness of the author’s experiment in this home-grown paradisal myth. On the other hand, human distrust of peaceful happiness has been great enough to inspire the motif of the “false paradise.” Odysseus resists the temptations of a whole gamut of them in the Odyssey, including the episodes of the Lotus Eaters, Calypso, Circe, and the Sirens. In The Faerie Queene, Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, destroys Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss. False paradises are regressive, an attempt to hide from the challenges of life by returning to the womb: the proper response to them is Odysseus’s great cry as he rejects Calypso’s promise of immortality if he will only remain in her island paradise of Ogygia, which appropriately means “hidden”: “Let the trials come!”4 Literary works wary of the passive pleasures of false paradise often feature heroes whose main virtue is active striving, beginning with Odysseus himself. Spenser will hardly let his heroes sleep, where constant dangers lurk. Blake distrusts his own Beulah, whose relaxed passivity led to the Fall, and presents Eden, his misleading name for heaven, in terms of constant imaginative effort that he calls the moral equivalent of “War and Hunting.” Similarly, Schiller enjoins the poet not to “lead us backward into our childhood in order to secure to us a peace which cannot last longer than the slumber of our spiritual faculties, but rather lead us forward into our maturity in order to permit us to perceive that higher harmony which rewards the combatant and gratifies the conqueror,” in other words, onto an imaginative battleground in order to lead “man who cannot now go back to Arcady forward to Elysium.”5 It would appear that the traditional development of a major poet from early pastoral to later epic has a deep foundation. Goethe’s Faust avoids damnation because of his restless, ceaseless striving: we last see him in this life at the age of 100, reclaiming land from the sea in a kind of engineer’s Creation myth. This sort of driven ambition that transforms the world, for better or worse, is what caused Spengler to call Western culture “Faustian.” One of its forms is the Protestant work ethic: shorn of its religious content, it becomes the ruthless will to success that many Americans admire in various inventors and entrepreneurs, from Citizen Kane to Steve Jobs. We can see by this point that true paradise differs from two opposing extremes: the torpid passivity of false paradise and a feverish workaholism driven to master the world, the corrupt forms of Freud’s pleasure and aggressive principles, respectively.

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All paradises, however, are not false, as the Odyssey itself recognizes. Scheria, another hidden island, home of the Phaiakians, has many paradisal characteristics: the trees bloom all year round, in sequence; the queen, Arete, has equal power and more prestige than her husband; and the Phaiakians excel in the arts of peace, especially song and dance, rather than the arts of war. Odysseus cannot stay with them, but the memory of how close to paradise human life could approach if we worked at it will remain with him as a model when he returns to rebuild his fallen society of Ithaca. In Paradise Lost, when he evicts Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, the Archangel Michael consoles them by telling them they will still have a Garden within them, “happier far” (12.587) than the original. No matter how ruined and defeated and even corrupted by Experience people become, what remains of their original Innocence blooms deep within, the Tree of Life rooted in the heart, in whatever form that Innocence may take in memory: even Citizen Kane has his “Rosebud.” After the Fall, time took on two aspects simultaneously, like the particle and wave forms of light in physics. Time is linear, ever moving forward in what we call a “timeline.” And yet it does so cyclically, through a perpetual series of births, deaths, and rebirths. The top of the cycle is a kind of asymptotic approach to the original, unfallen condition: visions of paradise as heaven immanent occur at this height, although they are always transient, and the cycle eventually turns downward once more. Still, upper paradise is the setting for one of the most influential and long-lasting conventions in literature, the pastoral. It is difficult to teach pastoral to students, because the conventions seem so artificial and pointless at first: even Shakespeare’s As You Like It is a relatively hard sell, at least for Shakespeare. A typical pastoral work features shepherds, who do not do anything, so there’s no plot. For a poet, sheepherding has traditionally been a good career move: apparently sheep do not need much care, except when they fall into gullies or have to be saved from wolves, and that leaves plenty of time for life’s really important things – love and art. The style is as off-putting to a modern sensibility as the content, when the sophisticated, self-conscious, sometimes-precious style depicts a simple, rural existence. The form was invented by Theocritus in the Alexandrian period, known for its polished artifice; picked up by Virgil, one of the great artistic perfectionists, in his Eclogues; and revived in the Renaissance by writers who sought to demonstrate their virtuosity. Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar has a poem for each month of the year, each in a different style, some of them experimental. Reading Sidney’s Arcadia is like watching roses bloom: the flowers are beautiful,

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but they unfold very, very slowly. On the stage, the vogue for a new genre, called “romance” or “tragicomedy,” in Shakespeare’s late career – for example, the pastoral Winter’s Tale – aimed to please a new type of more educated and sophisticated urban audience. Pastoral could be a rather superficial literary game, but the contrast between sophistication and simplicity goes to the heart of the conventions themselves. Some pastoral characters are fleeing, or at least have returned from visiting, the city or the court. The contrast between urban decadence and corruption and an authentic life spent close to nature and reduced to basics, as in Cymbeline, retains a universal appeal despite changing social circumstances. Thoreau updated it for modern America in Walden, and some hippie communes of the 1960s followed him. With the Romantic era, the contrast between the poet’s refined art and the shepherd’s simple, rustic songs that he evoked gave way, in response to rising democratic sentiments, to writing in the simple, rustic mode itself – in effect, creating folk songs. The Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge junk eighteenth-century literary artifice and return to poetry in its most basic, even primitive, form. Their model was the oral ballads of a lower class perhaps not even literate. Later, Emily Dickinson imitated the naïve style of the hymn books. Beginning with Scott and the brothers Grimm, the Romantics collected as well as imitated authentic folk songs and tales. History repeated itself in the mid-1960s, when traditional folk and rural blues artists who had recorded in the 1920s and 1930s and been ignored ever since found second careers in old age playing to audiences of college students and giving guitar lessons to college drop-outs who aspired to play folk and blues themselves. In direct contrast to the Alexandrian complexities of elitist literary Modernism, this revived, neo-Romantic pastoralism suggested that all you really needed was three chords and the truth, as the country-music people say. So too in the visual arts: from sophisticated Modernist painters such as Miró and Klee attempting to regain a childlike simplicity to the often deliberately roughhewn style of today’s cartoonists and graphic novelists. But the world of pastoral is, we saw, paradoxically at once paradisal and the upper reach of the fallen cyclical world. Milton’s twin poems L’Allegro and Il Penseroso show that cycle in its most ideal, heaven-immanent form: each poem catalogues typical pastoral activities through the cycle of a complete day and night. L’Allegro remains content within the paradisal realm of pastoral proper, with its “unreproved pleasures free,” whereas the central image of Il Penseroso is the “midnight tower” whence the speaker looks upward from the paradisal towards the top of the vertical axis, heav-

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en transcendent, the fully spiritual realm. He can do so because paradise rides atop the cycle of fallen time like a surfer atop a wave – which will finally topple downward. Milton’s Lycidas, and the pastoral elegy that it epitomizes at its best, know all too well that the evil of the Fall may break in on the shepherds’ innocent life at any time, as it did on Adam and Eve, bringing, as Milton was later to say, “death, and all our woe.” Renaissance pastoral paintings sometimes included an inscription, perhaps accompanied by a skull: Et in Arcadia, ego. The ego or “I” is death. The pastoral-elegy form as Milton inherited it from Theocritus and Virgil mourned a dead shepherd, employing the imagery of what Frazer would call the “dying god.” As usual, the form is artificial, but here the situation is real: “Lycidas” the shepherd is a persona for a school acquaintance of Milton’s, Edward King, who died tragically young. Following suit, Shelley mourned Keats as Adonais, and Matthew Arnold mourned Arthur Hugh Clough as Thyrsis. Spenser’s paradisal Gardens of Adonis are situated at the top of the natural cycle, but are its driving engine, so to speak: while Venus sits forever holding the body of her slain lover Adonis, the surrounding Gardens receive all natural beings after death, cloak them with new substance, and send them onward to rebirth. A strange but haunting modern counterpart is James Dickey’s poem “The Heaven of Animals.”6 The events in another, related literary genre, traditional romance, take place in a realm that is paradisal in its vitality, beauty, and sense of wonder, yet infected with evil and danger. Spenser’s Faerie is both a wish-fulfilment dream and a nightmare. The three young protagonists of Milton’s Comus must pass through a dark wilderness, where they are set on by Comus and his hideous rout. Spenser and Milton have been influenced by what Frye, adopting Schiller’s distinction between “naïve” and “sentimental” poetry, calls “naïve romance.” Some of its exemplars really are naïve, but Spenser and Milton are adopting elements of it for more complex purposes, so I refer generally to “traditional romance.” In the early centuries ce, the Greek romances of Heliodorus, Longus, Achilles Tatius, and others recounted the episodic adventures and ordeals of young lovers whose innocence miraculously survives in a world of evil, and Shakespeare imitated them in Pericles. The young heroes of Comus, the Greek romances, and many other works, in their innocence and goodness, embody the paradisal ideal, though surrounded by hell, often associated with corrupt or outright demonic adults. Dickens’s Oliver Twist and David Copperfield repeat the pattern, as do the children in some of Steven Spielberg’s early films. The childlike young couple are the only

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characters in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal not forced to join the final Dance of Death. Still more recent descendants are the protagonists of much children’s literature, including The Hobbit, the Narnia books, and Harry Potter. The isolated innocents of traditional romance, often orphans or alienated from parental figures (including wicked stepmothers and the like), may gather about them a small group of kindred spirits forming a community of outsiders. This can result in a somewhat peculiar social life: both Snow White and Bilbo Baggins find themselves consorting with dwarves, Dickens’s innocent protagonists with a whole gallery of eccentrics. The progressive vision of American paradise is of a whole nation based on such an acceptance of difference, including of the feminine. Paradise is substantially feminine – feared in many of the ways women are feared, longed for just as women, from mothers to lovers, are longed for. Millennia ago, the beautiful seal rings of Minoan Crete depicted a paradise presided over by a Goddess who embodied nature itself, the womb-tomb from which life issues and to which it returns. The values of paradise are those often deemed “feminine”: not masculine striving but patience, endurance, and a Taoistic receptivity. Taoism is “the way of the valley,” and is itself associated with the feminine. A crucial paradisal theme is memory. Mnemosyne, whose name means memory, is the mother of the Muses, who live on the paradisal mountain Helicon. Blake was antagonistic towards both Memory and the Daughters of Memory, for reasons that are understandable. In the subject–object context, memory is perhaps the ultimate false paradise, keeping people trapped in a wraithlike world of people and events long vanished and quite possibly half fabricated. For any number of older people the present is an alien and incomprehensible world that they stopped living in years ago. Even more destructive than memory as wish-fulfilment dream is memory as anxiety dream. Victims of war or rape suffering from posttraumatic stress syndrome live the nightmare of the past over and over again. Those who have perpetrated the violence may feel so guilty that Dante felt the need to divert the river Lethe, with its waters of forgetfulness, from the Classical underworld into the Garden of Eden. Even free of wish-fulfilment illusions and recurrent nightmares, the best memory can do for fallen consciousness is remind us of what is irrecoverably lost, leaving only its ghostly trace behind. Imagination, however, transforms the prima materia of memory by a kind of alchemy. It decreates memories and then recreates them in a new form: they become myths. Writers of autobiography or autobiographical

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fiction write seeking to answer the question that Jung said we all must address: “What myth am I living?”7 By “myth” here we mean a form that gives significance and value. As M.H. Abrams showed in Natural Supernaturalism, autobiography has become one of the quest myths of our time, from Wordsworth to Joyce and Proust to Mary Karr and Loren Eiseley. The two latter prove that imagination can revalue even the darkest and most deprived upbringing. The last volume of Proust’s novel is titled The Past Recaptured, but it is recaptured in a new form, a spiritual body, the form of the Self, a paradise within, made out of words. This is a resurrection from death to life, and there are social forms as well of this resurrection through remembering. When the central Australian Aranda undergo initiation, they trace the paths their ancestors wandered over the land (for paradise can exist in a desert, just as in the midst of snow, as in northern versions of the Christmas myth), remembering in each place what the ancestors said and did as they created the world by their wandering. But by remembering, they become the ancestors, and the Creation myth happens all over again: the past becomes the present.8 When Proust’s Marcel bites into a madeleine cake dipped in tea, and the whole of his past rises like Atlantis from the sea of the unconscious, it hints that nothing is ever lost. Rather, it becomes one of what Blake in Milton calls the “sculptures in Los’s halls,” the forms of the imagination in paradise. The essence of paradise is nostalgia, yearning but elegiac. The postmodern world is full of voices abjuring nostalgia of any sort, for it all derives from the same paradisal longing – not merely an intellectual error but a dangerous temptation towards regression, with dire consequences when it becomes a reactionary political will to restore a supposedly lost state of unity, lack of individual and social conflict and difference, and the transcendence of death. The myth of paradise is inseparable from the theme of temptation. And myth should not be idealized: every myth does potentially have what Frye would call its “demonic parody,” and the rightwing ideology driving fascism and other forms of charismatic authoritarianism is a demonic parody of the Edenic myth. The most inescapable abjuration in our time is that of Derrida, especially at the conclusions of the two early essays that made him famous. At the end of “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” having deconstructed the paradisal yearnings of Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss, he proffers a choice for our time, even if he adds that there seems no question of choosing today: “Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken

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immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.”9 At the end of “Différance,” he says, “And we must think this without nostalgia, that is, outside of the myth of a purely maternal or paternal language, a lost native country of thought. On the contrary, we must affirm this, in the sense in which Nietzsche puts affirmation into play, in a certain laughter and a certain step of the dance.”10 But Nietzsche’s Superman with his heroically willed affirmations is a dangerous role model, another form of the serpent, this time tempting to Jungian inflation. One type of inflation, seen in fascism and Nazism, is the reactionary attempt to impose the unities of paradise on the world by force of heroic will. Another type, however, heroically wills – in the opposite direction – the end of nostalgia, sentimentality, comforting illusions, the pleasure principle, unity and comfort, and paradise and all other redemptive myths, including the myth of the human. It is the obverse of the reactionary myth, and its decades-long grip on literary theory has slackened only in part. In the name of “logical rigour,” an equal but opposite irrationalism has at times insisted on total difference as the only possible defense against the reactionary myth’s insistence on total unity. But that is just as “totalizing,” and the “play” Derrida called for neared at times a radical scepticism with nihilistic consequences should they become more than play and be pursued to their logical outcomes. Nostalgia is the human condition, and when someone attempts to renounce it or any of its cognates (unity, presence, myth, and so on), as opposed to its various false forms, beware a hidden power drive. At some point, the hermeneutics of suspicion must reach around to bite its own tail. Nostalgia has its Contraries: bitter and sweet, melancholia and laughter, the mood of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. We are never outside of the myth of a lost native country of thought, as Derrida beautifully puts it. A more truly Derridean response would affirm this emotional aporia, which is perhaps why his later work eschewed such statements. Derrida indispensably, however, reveals why paradise is always already lost, for if we define it as Blake defined his Beulah – a state in which “Contrarieties are equally True” (E, 129) – we can see what Derrida demonstrates again and again in varying contexts: that difference always lurks within unity. Once again, there cannot be any unity without difference, and vice versa. From the beginning, there was the serpent, embodying forked knowledge of good and evil, of identity and difference. Eden is

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thus demystified, but not debunked, at least not always. Properly, “demystified” ought to mean decreated, revealed in a larger, visionary perspective. Such transvaluation allowed the Romantics to adapt the Great Circle of Neoplatonic Christian narrative to their purposes. In that configuration, reality fell from the One into the evils of difference and multiplicity. But since difference is actually a Contrary of identity, its advent is a Fortunate Fall – in effect, a stage of development. But this realization has at least two consequences. First, difference becomes seen as not a product of the Fall, and we, in affirming it as unfallen, are recognizing time and change, and thereby transience and death, even if the last is accompanied by a “rebirth” that, because it transcends the cycle, is virtually a resurrection. But that is a change of state: it is perhaps the most painful of all paradoxes that the labour pains of rebirth into an eternal perspective remain death throes in the world of change. In fact, this is the use, indeed the necessity, of nostalgia: its affirmation of change and loss is the source of empathy, of the compassion that if anything can change the world. This is why both Euripides and Shakespeare moved towards the creatively ambivalent form of tragicomedy. What we lose remains permanent, but we must accept that it abides on another level. A second realization, not taken up until part 3, is the difference between a Fortunate Fall of this sort, which is really the death and rebirth of Contraries and as such part of life’s dynamism, and a real Fall into Negation and unnecessary loss and suffering. For the first, there is a possible theodicy: for the second, not. In the first, evil is a necessary Contrary: in the second, it is a Negation, never to be justified. I I . T HE FA L L There is probably no mythological pattern that is inevitable and universal, and that is certainly true of the idea of a “Fall,” which is a misleadingly Christianizing term used for want of a better. But the idea that life was once much better than it is now is by no means confined to the Bible. In some myths, the change is not a precipitation but a gradual decline, as in the Greek Ages of Man and the Indian yugas. Thomas Pynchon modernizes this notion by turning “entropy” from a law of physics into a metaphor. The Norse Poetic and Prose Eddas see time as cyclical, ending in Ragnarok, a series of disasters and battles that wipe out even the gods, after which the world begins anew; the Germanic equivalent is Götterdämmerung. But the Greeks also possessed something closer to the Gene-

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sis account in the myth of Pandora, recounted twice by Hesiod. This first woman cannot resist opening a jar, not a box, and all the world’s ills fly out: Hesiod, whose opinion of women on a scale of one to ten was zero, cannot resist the temptation of blaming human misery on woman’s curiosity and lack of self-control. Christianity, however, created for itself a unique problem, one that it has never solved, by postulating an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful Creator. There are two falls in Christian tradition: the fall of Satan and the other rebel angels, not in the Bible but accepted by means of a traditional though inaccurate interpretation of Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14:12–17, and the Fall of man. How did an omnipotent and omniscient deity allow these to happen? The orthodox answer is that the angels and humanity were good when God created them, but, to prevent them from being mere puppets, he gave them free will, which they promptly misused. But this answer is ultimately unsatisfying. Why did they misuse it, especially as God also gave them the power of reason to distinguish right from wrong and moreover warned them of the consequences? Socrates said that all evil is ignorance, that people mistakenly think that doing evil will bring them good, but in the Fall humanity knowingly chose evil. People act out of their essential nature, and if Lucifer, Adam, and Eve were essentially good, they should not have been tempted by evil. A different answer is possible. Every time Iago pauses in his plot to destroy Othello and delivers a soliloquy about his motives, he gives different reasons, none of them remotely convincing. It becomes increasingly clear that Iago has no reason: Coleridge, in a brilliant flash of insight, said in a marginal note that Iago was impelled by “motiveless malignity.” Theologically, in fact, Iago does have a reason, what Catholicism calls “original sin” and Calvinism “innate depravity”: since the Fall, every human will inherits the corruption that resulted from Adam and Eve’s sin. However, the first couple were tempted into sin by Satan. But why did Satan, whose angelic nature was even more perfect than theirs, give in to his own temptation of pride: where did such a proclivity for evil come from? In the Manichean view, there has been an evil principle from the beginning, alongside the good. But that would mean admitting there was something that God did not create, and will not perfectly control until the final battle between good and evil at the end of time. There is no honest way of absolving the Christian God for the twin falls, and occasionally someone is honest enough to say so, to the firm disapproval of those who regard it as blasphemy. But the two falls result from God’s shadow – which Jung did call it, in Answer to Job. The same pattern

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repeats in the Book of Job: God is tempted into allowing Satan to do evil, for which he himself is thereby responsible, and then, when Job asks why, says that his reasons are beyond human comprehension. But they may be beyond all comprehension: motiveless malignity again. Jung was influenced by some forms of Gnosticism, which seem to have influenced Blake in a similar direction. The real fall is the fall of God, and, as God is beyond time, it has “always already” happened, in the language of Heidegger and deconstruction. Something in the Monad was already fallen, and the instant God began to emanate and create, that something was projected into Creation on all levels. Indeed, although the usual reason given for God’s decision to create something out of nothing was a loving desire to share his goodness, there may have been another, equally powerful motive. Perhaps Creation and Fall were God’s way of externalizing the problem so that he could fight it and thus redeem himself along with the rest of the universe. Part 3 explores the quest of what remains unfallen of both divine and human creative power – for, God and humanity being one, their Fall likewise is one – through what Blake called “Mental Fight” across the length of fallen time. Part 4 will show how this process necessitates a further, descent quest through layers of the fallen world, whose object we can conceive of in various manners. It can seek to recover what has been lost through the Fall, which is in essence loss. What is it that has been lost? Perhaps some secret knowledge or wisdom, even if it might be symbolized by some miraculous object such as the Grail, the Philosopher’s Stone, or some manuscript of wisdom – a symbol for some kind of lost mode of consciousness, the mode of identity-in-difference. The secret knowledge or wisdom is not some kind of information but rather a mode of perception: it is Buddhism’s goal of enlightenment, Gnosticism’s gnosis. The moment of illumination is the moment of waking up, and the four-part quest as limned (or limbed) by the present study aims to awaken a sleeping giant like Blake’s Albion or Joyce’s Finnegan. The quest hero who does the awakening is actually an avatar of the fallen giant himself (who should be, and sometimes is, androgynous). Joyce’s satiric image for this agent is the earwig, the insect that burrows into a sleeping person’s ear and wakes him or her. The final image of the self-redemption of the divine-human identity is Resurrection, not only out of death but out of the Nothing that lies below death, the abyss or Unground on which, impossibly, all existence is poised. What is the nature of God’s hamartia, his flaw, his motiveless malignity? Perhaps the idea of entropy noted above has something to it: I have

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tried to show how the suffering of the world derives from the state we have called the “cloven fiction,” the subject–object perspective, and God’s flaw may have been some kind of innate tendency to fall into that perspective, to become a subject confronting alien objects. Part 4 reveals such inherent alienation to be a spirit of Negation and explores it more deeply, in all senses. “Passivity” perhaps best describes the paradoxical concept of a causeless cause. In Blake’s Four Zoas, the Fall begins in Beulah, the pastoral realm, “where Contrarieties are equally True” (E, 129), as a Miltonic temptation to relax too far, too long, from the necessary strife of Contraries. The contrasting active motivation for the Fall is the will to power: instead of withdrawing from the strife of Contraries, the human-divine will lets them possess it and thereby becomes subject to Jungian inflation, the desire to master the warring Contraries’ energy and thus become “as gods.” Megalomania of this sort characterizes many of the famous mythological and literary villains, from Lucifer to Tolkien’s Sauron and countless comic-book super-villains, often aiming to transcend the final limit of the human condition, death. Neither representation, active or passive, ultimately “explains” motiveless malignancy, whose irrationality is the source of its terror. Mirror imagery commonly depicts the Fall’s splitting of Contraries into a Negation. Dante uses it in a positive way in the Paradiso, where Father and Son hold each other’s images within themselves (10.1–6) in what Frye would call a “double mirror.” But mirror images are more often sinister. Racism may have prompted them, but perhaps there is something beyond that in anecdotes about pre-modern peoples who fear a mirror may capture their soul. After all, Narcissus saw his reflection in the water and died obsessing over its elusive Otherness. In the Poimandres, a Hermeticist text collected in the Corpus Hermeticum, the cosmic being is allegedly enraptured by his image reflected in the world of matter and falls to his death.11 Blake borrows this for The Four Zoas to dramatize the fall of his cosmic man, Albion. An imperfect, fallen God seems bizarre and eccentric because centuries of conditioning have locked in place a good and perfect God, but, minority view or no, it may more adequately answer the question of theodicy: why there is suffering, especially by the innocent. And of all religious questions, that one most demands a solid response. Adam and Eve were punished for their defiance: if they did something wrong, that was perhaps just. But innocent suffering and death cannot be “deserved” because human nature is corrupt. Augustine, the main inventor of the doctrine of original sin, urged us not to be sentimental. Imagine what looks like an

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innocent baby nursing at its mother’s breast. Then imagine the baby’s sibling trying to compete for the mother’s attention. The look of murderous hate on the baby’s face should disabuse us of any superficial notions of childhood innocence.12 But for this, do children “deserve” to die in wars, in cancer hospitals, in abusive homes? After tormenting him, God replaces Job’s lost children, but there was no reason to put him, not to mention his offspring, through the agony of their death: nothing can justify such a “test.” Most people simply accept God’s own excuse: his ways are so great that they are incomprehensible, but he must have his reasons, and if he allows tragedy to happen, it is all for the best. To say this in the face of the unavoidable test case, the Holocaust, is to become aware how flimsy the justification really is. People cling to it out of desperation, and to the notion of a perfect God because they need the security of a powerful Father. To put it bluntly, there is no theodicy: the Fall was really a Fall, and while calling it fortunate may be a well-intentioned attempt at comfort, to say that someone’s child had to die as part of God’s plan for the greater good of the universe is an unacceptable moral calculus and encourages a passive resignation that saps our will to fight against evil. The strife of Contraries is necessary and good, but it is not true evil. True evil is not necessary, and it is the hero’s quest to put an end to it, rejecting as temptations all counsels of resigned acceptance to its supposed innateness and inevitability. Romanticism will attempt a more sophisticated philosophical theodicy citing not an inscrutable deity’s arbitrary will, but Neoplatonic emanation from Unity into Difference and return to Unity, yet its crisis, the forthcoming climax of part 3, comes when even such a theodicy has to be decreated and recreated to deal with radical evil. I I I . T H E FAL L EN WO RL D O F C YC L I C A L T I M E : L AW A N D S AC RI F I C E A. The Fall: Creation Reversed The Fall can be understood as a kind of anti-Creation, reversing Creation’s process step by step. The argument will become more complicated later, as decreation also reverses Creation. The Fall, however, becomes an ironic parody of Creation, moving towards destruction rather than renewal: in specific details, the Fall and decreation are quite dissimilar. The first step of the Creation was the advent of the Monad: its decision to come into existence means the unfolding of consciousness, a kind of

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awakening, the opening of an eye. Its reversal would be what we significantly call “falling” asleep. Blake’s Four Zoas is subtitled A Dream of Nine Nights because it took Satan and the other devils nine days and nights to fall from heaven and hell, a number lifted from Hesiod’s Theogony, in which the Titans, defeated by the Olympian gods, take the same length of time to fall into Tartarus, the lowest part of the Underworld. The nine nights are the cycles of human history considered as a dream, a motif that influenced Finnegans Wake, whose cyclical text, circling back on itself, embodies the whole of human history as the dream of a divine being who has fallen into sleep. Joyce denied that he was influenced by Lewis Carroll, but Alice is warned not to wake the Red King because he is dreaming us all, and, if he wakes, we vanish. The “wake” of Joyce’s title means both a funeral wake and waking up, both death and resurrection. The first section of Joseph Campbell’s The Mythic Image is “The World as Dream,” using as example Vishnu dreaming the world in Hindu mythology.13 “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” says Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest (4.1.156–7). The second step of Creation, the unfolding of an enfolded order, is reversed by images of shattering and fragmentation: we noted in part 1 that the counterpart to the hatching of the cosmic egg is the breaking of its shell, an image in the Kabbalah and in “Humpty Dumpty.” A modulation of this is diaspora, the shattering and scattering of a community into a life of wandering, often searching to return home or to find a new home, as in the Exodus story and the Aeneid. Individuals wandering in search of a lost home include Odysseus and Dante, who in his exile journeys, in his own words, “from Florence to a people just and sane,”14 and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. American literature sports a horde of ceaseless wanderers and pioneers, among them Cooper’s Leatherstocking, Melville’s Ahab, and Twain’s Huck Finn. Sometimes “home” in these narratives shares some of the ambivalent connotations of the object of desire in sexual narratives: far off, it is longed for, but once possessed becomes a trap. Huck Finn lights out for the territories while Dante, Tennyson, and Nikos Kazantzakis imagine Ulysses leaving Ithaca to adventure again in old age. The journey often is more exciting than the destination because it is a metaphor for desire itself, as it is in Kerouac’s On the Road. Emergence, copulation, and combat Creation myths have what Frye would call “ironic parodies” in three types of Fall. Myths of natural emergence out of a Chaos of primordial waters are very directly reversed by images of the Fall as Chaos come again. In the Bible, what amounts to a

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second Fall of man occurs as Noah’s Flood: God drowns the world in the waters above and below out of which he had lifted it in the Creation. Floods occur as consequences of storms, and in Shakespeare the tempests in King Lear, Othello, and also in the so-called sea comedies, including of course The Tempest itself, symbolize the overwhelming of order by chaos, of harmony by discord. Any natural disaster, no matter what elements it involves, undoes the original orderly separation of the four elements that is an early step in the Creation myth of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Creation by sexual union followed by birth is parodied in the Fall by sexual divorce, in all senses, and the inauguration of the war between the sexes. The exhaustive treatment of this theme, one of the most brashly original poems in literary history, is Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid is the bad boy of the epic tradition – if he is even a member – for, among other faux pas, he suggests the form of the epic while subverting its conventions. Like a Classical epic, the Metamorphoses invokes the Muses: like the Theogony and the Bible, it starts with Creation and ends in the here and now. In other ways, it parodies both epic conventions and the Aristotelian ideal of the unities. Instead of the traditional twenty-four or twelve books, it has fifteen, apparently just because. Instead of Classical formal balance, with beginning, middle, and end, its narrative ramifies into 200 tales with no connection but the theme of metamorphosis. Tales within tales are common, and so is playing with temporal order: the story of Herakles is told exactly backwards. The tales are retellings of Greek mythology, which Ovid modulates in the later books to retellings of the Greek epics, so that the work became so popular partly as a mythological handbook, consulted by Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and countless other writers. But it owed a lot more to its focus, which was not religious – Ovid, like most educated Romans of his time, did not believe in the reality of the old gods – but sexual, perversely sexual. There are times when Ovid seems to parody his slightly older contemporary Virgil, in both life and work. Virgil became the court poet of the emperor Augustus, who commissioned a poem celebrating the founding of Rome, the Aeneid. Ovid was exiled by the same emperor. The reasons are unclear, but the Roman Empire seems to have become decadent at its founding (perhaps all empires do): at any rate, scholars speculate that Ovid was travelling in the wrong circles just as Augustus was cracking down on dissolute behaviour. The love poetry of Virgil’s youth is in the idealized form of the pastoral: the love in Ovid’s early poetry is of a different sort. The title of his Ars amatoria is accurately translated as “the art of seducing women.” Its sequel was about how to break up with the

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women afterwards, and, as a consolation prize for the women themselves, he wrote a verse treatise on the art of cosmetics. Virgil’s Aeneid is a poem about the renunciation of desire for the sake of duty, epitomized by Aeneas’s renunciation of Dido, and the wandering necessary to find a place to found a new empire. The Metamorphoses is a comprehensive map of the wanderings of desire itself, seeking its elusive object. Halfway through the Aeneid, Aeneas in the Underworld listens to a lecture by his father, Anchises, outlining a vision of cycles of reincarnation. But the cycles turn out to be instrumental to a linear goal of the progress of empire. The Metamorphoses ends with another lecture on reincarnation, this time by the philosopher Pythagoras. But here, the ambitions of empire fall victim to the cyclical rhythm of rise, decline, and fall elaborated almost two thousand years later by Spengler in The Decline of the West. Pythagoras muses on the rise and fall of Troy, then demurely remarks, “I hear that Rome is rising,” and prudently leaves it to the reader to draw the conclusion. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, virtually a companion piece to The Decline of the West, provides the psychological reason for the cycles of history. Civilizations are built by the repression of sexual energy, which goes underground, rechannelled into the work ethic. But as they age they become too exhausted to repress any longer: decadence is what Freud called “the return of the repressed,” one sign of which is a culture’s prurient fascination with sex and violence, the drives of the unconscious. Ovid knows what the whole Chain of Being is really interested in, from the gods down to the nature spirits: he pairs Apollo chasing Daphne with Pan pursuing Syrinx, musical artists from opposite sides of the tracks, to reveal that all the folks on the Chain of Being make fools of themselves in pretty much the same way. In some Creation myths, the original cosmic being is androgynous, another indication of sexual identity-in-difference. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes recounts how humanity originally had three genders, male, female, and androgynous. But the gods split every human being in half, so that each of us is yearning and searching for the other half that will complete us. The split males became homosexuals, the split women lesbians, the split androgynes heterosexuals, a remarkable way of embodying, in all senses, Lacan’s aphorism that we are constituted by a split, a sexual cloven fiction. But in the unfallen state, an identity-in-difference unites people with the whole Creation, not just with one another, as Eros from Lucretius’s De rerum natura works to realize E.M. Forster’s dictum “Only connect,” from atoms to organisms to ecosystems to galaxies. In the

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fallen world, this turns into our original, polymorphous, perverse sexuality (Freud’s idea), summed up by recent popular culture’s “Rule 34”: “If it exists, there is porn for it” – the endless pursuit through fantasy of the unattainable object of desire. Academic psychology finds Freud unscientific, but many great writers echo his insights, some of them centuries before he was born. Ovid does not retell the story of Oedipus, but in Sophocles’ version, Jocasta tells Oedipus that many men lie with their mothers in their dreams. Freud’s “Family Romance” is a fallen-world parody of the sexual Creation myth: the child, united in oceanic bliss with the mother, is divided from her by the father. The “Oedipus complex” is the crisis the male child must resolve or be left with hopeless and forbidden desire for his mother and antagonism towards his father. The assertion that youngsters have no sexual desires or fantasies except those forced on them by adults flagrantly denies the facts of childhood: the games that go on in the attic or the garage. Moreover, children do not compartmentalize: the emotional attachment to the mother as source of security and love unites in a confused way with desire for the first significant female object. But boys are deflected from the mother not so much by her as by the male peer group, which provides mutual emotional support for boys who have already detached from their mothers. The insults thrown at a boy who is seen as not sufficiently masculine are telling: he is a “mama’s boy” who has not “cut the apron strings,” the emotional umbilical cord. The “I hate girls” stage occurs when boys project their need to separate from the maternal feminine onto other females. But inside every male, of whatever age, is a hollow feeling born of loss, and eventually heterosexual male subjects begin pursuing female objects as substitutes for the original lost mother. Ovid catalogues all conceivable permutations of the male chase. But all chases end in frustration, not just because they unconsciously replay the loss of the mother, but because in the fallen world all subjects are cloven from all objects. Marriage is no perfect solution, as adulterous affairs, real and fictional, endlessly demonstrate. An affair does not mean the marriage is a bad one, merely that only unattainable objects are desirable: the phrase “forbidden fruit” shows exactly in what way sexuality repeats the Fall. Hence the endless philanderings of Jupiter, and the endless jealousy of Hera, patron goddess of marriage. Some relationships and marriages hold together because of what Yeats called “the fascination of what’s difficult”: the gravitational pull of one partner’s partial inaccessibility or elusiveness causes the other to orbit

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around him or her in obsessive fascination. Yeats used the phrase to describe his relationship with the theatre, but it applies just as well to his relationship to Maud Gonne. Such relations may darken into actual lovehate, in which two people can live neither with nor without each other, as in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage. Men whose determination to possess the object becomes obsessive turn into rapists and stalkers, like Ovid’s Tereus, who rapes his sister-in-law Philomela and cuts out her tongue so she cannot tell who raped her. Contrariwise, men who give up on the chase and deflect their desire onto objects who are less Other become at least one type of homosexual. Ovid’s Orpheus, bitter at losing Eurydice a second time, turns to young boys. Narcissus turns to an object even closer to hand: he represents all the men who cannot have a successful relationship with a woman because they are too busy being in love with themselves. Because desire for the inaccessible object runs both ways, such men are often irresistible to some women precisely because they are unavailable: such is the case with Echo, who echoes, so to speak, Apollo’s choice of Daphne as object of pursuit. Apollo is so beautiful that he could have almost any woman he wanted: we call a stunningly attractive young male an “Apollo.” Who does he choose? The one woman who wants nothing to do with him. And Ovid makes clear exactly why Daphne is uninterested. She has her own inaccessible object of desire: she wants to remain a virgin and live with her father. Myrrha is not content with the “remain a virgin” part: she seduces her father in the dark. Like many of the protagonists of Ovid’s tales, Daphne, to escape, has to turn into a truly inaccessible object through metamorphosis down the Chain of Being, becoming the laurel tree sacred to Apollo. Shakespeare borrows heavily from Ovid in his own play about the perversity of desire, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which a fairy queen lusts for a simple-minded mortal with an animal’s head, lovers switch objects of desire in the dark, and the rude mechanicals perform a play whose plot, the story of Pyramis and Thisbe, is drawn directly from the Metamorphoses. The “love juice” used by the fairies has its counterpart in the love potion of another famous story of adultery, that of Tristan and Isolde, an objective correlative, in Eliot’s sense, of the irrational yet irrepressible desire of subject for object. Another such correlative is Cupid’s arrows, referred to in Shakespeare’s imagery. Anyone hit by one of Cupid’s gold arrows will fall in love with the next person he or she encounters; anyone hit by one of his lead arrows will be repelled. Naturally, Cupid loves to hit one person with a gold arrow, but the person he or she has fallen for with lead.

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Of course, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not Shakespeare’s only play about the vagaries of desire. The subtitle of Twelfth Night is Or: What You Will, “will” here meaning “desire.” The plot is a love triangle of inaccessible objects: Duke Orsino loves “Cesario” in a way that is increasingly homoerotic, not knowing that Cesario is the disguised Viola; Olivia loves Cesario, not realizing that she is really in love with another woman. The subplot is an intersecting triangle of inaccessible desire: Malvolio (“bad will”) desires Olivia, who desires Cesario. In more uninhibited treatments, the polymorphous perverse does not stop with gender-bending. Titania’s “bestiality,” her desire for a being with the head of an ass, is multiplied by the animal-headed orgiastic rout of Milton’s Comus, who is attempting to seduce, and failing that to rape, a teenaged girl. In Peter Shaffer’s Equus, an alienated teenage boy’s fascination with a horse fuses eroticism with religious worship, and ends in violence when the object of fascination begins to verge on total possession of its subject. Shakespeare’s sonnets fall into two cycles dominated by two objects of the male speaker’s hopeless desire: a fatally beautiful male youth (as also in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice) and a Dark Lady, a femme fatale or Siren type. Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships, is another version of what Blake called the “Female Will.” A good deal of bdsm imagery derives from the Female Will scenario, adumbrated in Blake’s poem “The Mental Traveller,” in which a male and a female figure revolve in an endless cycle, one growing younger as the other grows older, one dominant as the other is “bound down” for his or her delight. The war of the sexes is not just external and objective: in Jungian psychology, the split between masculine and feminine first occurs within the psyche and then is projected outwardly onto real relationships between men and women. Male and female are biological categories, but masculine and feminine are psychological. By psychological, Jung really means culturally constructed: he is quite aware, despite some of his sloppier critics and his own careless remarks, that an archetype is universal only in its form: its content is socially determined and varies with social conditioning and individual identification. Jung did not attempt to theorize about gay, lesbian, or transgender orientations, but he could well have done so: his bitter break with Freud moved him from biological essentialism towards the symbolic and “spiritual” – for him, that aspect of the archetype that is freely creative and dynamic rather than predetermining, progressive rather than regressive. A heterosexual man is biologically male, but his psyche has both masculine and feminine components. The man usually identifies with the

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masculine aspect, thereby repressing his feminine side, which becomes a split-off “complex,” a semi-autonomous entity: the “anima,” Latin for “soul.” The heterosexual woman tends to identify with her feminine aspect, which splits off her repressed masculinity into a masculine “animus.” Because masculine and feminine are culturally constructed, what counts as each varies by society, but the split is always there. Men who repress what their society teaches them is feminine, such as empathy, receptivity, cooperativeness, emotionality, and communicativeness, may fear those qualities in themselves as being signs of weakness and effeminacy, leading to what is called “masculine protest” – against any allegation that there might be something feminine about them – and they are constantly attempting to prove otherwise by exaggerated masculine behaviour. Yet anyone who represses too extremely is vulnerable to what Jung termed “possession.” Anything repressed becomes neurotic, so men who are anima possessed may act feminine in a negative way. When women say, “Men are babies,” they are referring to men who act like a stereotypical sexist portrait of a woman: irrational, touchy, emotional, dependent – all the while denying that they are doing so. Jung’s theory provides valuable insight into one of the great mysteries of history: why patriarchy and male dominance have been so overwhelmingly, dishearteningly prevalent throughout all ages. Men dominate women because they are afraid of them, not because women have often had any real power or posed any real threat, but because men are projecting on actual women their fear of their own feminine side, indeed of femininity itself as an objectified Other.15 It is wrong to stereotype other people, but just as wrong to stereotype oneself, and possession turns people into walking stereotypes. A woman who represses her masculine side is taken over by it and becomes a walking stereotype of masculinity: overly aggressive, opinionated, what earlier times called a “shrew” and our times call a “bitch.” She is catty and cannot be friends with other women because her hypertrophied femininity always feels in competition with them. The third and final Creation myth pattern that is parodied by the Fall is that of Creation through combat. There is no fall of nature in the Biblical account, but one was traditionally assumed in order to account for the present condition of nature, which is anything but Edenic: humanity dragged nature down with it. As the environment becomes objective to human subjects, it becomes harsh and forbidding, indifferent to human survival, with extremes of heat and cold, drought and flood, afflicted with predatory animals and disease. People who “love nature” usually love it in

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the intervals when it is temperate enough for us to feel in harmony with it, but we have always been faced with the task of mastering nature before it masters us. Humanity does so by isolating itself within the artificial environment of civilization, with its protective clothing, houses, cities, and technology, an ironic version of the Creation myth of creating the world out of the body of a defeated monster. Yet the solution often engenders new versions of the problem as fissure between subject and objective world shows up within civilization itself. Pollution poisons us, trash overwhelms us, and climate change produces weather more destructive than anything in the original state of nature. Civilization isolates and protects us from the dangers of the biological as well as the physical environment, from the Darwinian world of nature red in tooth and claw. But the alienating split shows up in human nature as well. At one end of the social-class spectrum, American inner cities can be “jungles”: at the other, the wolves of Wall Street devour without compunction. A century or two ago, the rationale for colonialism was that various pre-modern peoples, whether in Africa, Australia, or the Americas, were still in the state of nature, “savages.” When Kurtz “goes native” in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the disguise of civilization drops from modern man, as it does whenever law and external compulsion break down: the English schoolboys of Lord of the Flies are as savage as any imagined people in “darkest Africa.” Soon afterwards, World War I, in which onethird of the adult male population of Europe was killed within four years, made Hobbes’s “war of all against all” a terrible reality. The second half of the twentieth century was haunted by visions of a third world war that would take the fallen reversal of the Creation combat myth to its logical conclusion in a final Armageddon. Hobbes’s solution to the problem of human barbarity was absolute monarchy, its obvious weakness being that authorities may use their power to become predators, as Shakespeare shows in Measure for Measure. The Social Darwinism of the nineteenth century invented a capitalist philosophy of rule by an elite that is still with us: the Giants of Industry were the new aristocracy – hence “robber barons.” The law of civilization as well as nature seems to be “survival of the fittest”: wealth and power are proof of superiority, and members of the elite deserve their privileges because they are winners. People are poor because of character flaws, not because of bad luck or the lack of upward mobility in a class system, and therefore deserve their lot. The race would be improved if they were weeded out. As women are “objectified” in the gender version of the Fall, the poor are objectified in the class version, becoming a faceless mass of parasitic “tak-

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ers.” Marxism’s vision of class war is the same picture upside down, its sympathies being with the poor and other oppressed. The issue of race in Conrad’s story leads to Jung’s theory of the “shadow,” which is a counterpart to his theory of the anima and animus. Again the psyche projects a split outward onto convenient targets. The subject–object split appears even within our own minds: the shadow is everything I do not like about myself, do not approve of, cannot face, so I split it off and repress it. It promptly becomes an autonomous complex, perhaps appearing in dreams as an antagonistic figure of the same gender, and projected on certain people or groups in the external world. The point of the shadow is “difference”: people likely to be scapegoated when the shadow is projected have something about them that is perceived as different, as Other. This helps to explain the otherwise totally irrational phenomenon of racism. Anti-semitism is based on both racial and cultural difference. But the visceral antagonism to any kind of difference indicates repressed shadow, and that includes homophobia and school bullying, usually of classmates who are designated as “nerds” and are not in the popular crowd. Scapegoating quickly becomes collective: it is highly contagious, liable to turn into lynch-mob mentality if unchecked. School shooters are hitting back, at least as they see it, from the opposite direction. As they have been objectified, they objectify other students and massacre them without remorse. Collective shadow projection often leads to genocidal and ideological wars: at the end of his life, Jung somberly warned that the Cold War was a conflict of mutually projected shadows, each side seeing the other as an evil empire, that could wipe out all life on earth. As a famous Pogo cartoon put it, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” B. The Limits of the Fall: The Natural Cycle The events of King Lear are so dire that some of the characters think the end of the world is upon them. But what remained unfallen of the creative power established after the Fall was Blake’s Limit of Contraction, the foundation of the subject–object world, in the forms of a cycle of fallen nature that he called “Generation” and a vertical order of fallen culture that we would nowadays call “ideology” but whose traditional name was “law.” After the Deluge, the waters recede and the land emerges from the waters in a repetition of the Creation myth, with Noah’s Ark coming to rest on the upthrusting vertical axis of Mt Ararat. Thereupon, God hangs the rainbow in the sky to signify his promise that he will never reduce the

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world to Chaos again. At least not totally: the rainbow is a symbol of the cycle that is the chief form of the order of nature, a cycle of life that still ends in the return to Chaos that is death but with the rainbow promise of rebirth. That is the meaning of the title of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Gravity, which keeps us bound down to earth, is a symbol of the fallen human condition, as flight is of transcendence. Gravity pulls the trajectory of the V-2 rockets of the London Blitz downward in a ballistic arc of death, yet that arc is also a rainbow, symbolic bridge between earth and the spiritual world. This theme of cyclic death and rebirth is the overarching theme of the present part 2. That natural life is cyclical is thus something of a comfort, and human life is deeply grounded in the regularity of cyclical rhythms, internal and external. Music and poetry are rooted in the rhythms that keep the human body alive, those of breathing and the heartbeat. The world we live in is full of uncertainty and strife, but it is a comfort sometimes that the cycles of day and night, of the seasons, of the stars that change with the seasons, and of the stages of human life from birth to old age and death, are themselves permanent, perhaps the only thing that we can count on, even though they consist of constant change. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever,” says the preacher of Ecclesiastes (1:4): “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” (3:1). Both Joyce’s Ulysses and Thomas’s Under Milk Wood are cyclical narratives recounting twentyfour hours of an average day in city and small country town, respectively, ending in night and sleep. Thomas’s narrator, played in the original production by Thomas himself, creates his world by the power of the word: “To begin at the beginning” is his opening line. We have characterized Spenser’s Faerie Queene as a metamorphic, exuberantly proliferating narrative, yet its rhythm is the 6 + 1 rhythm of Creation: to the six main books is appended a short seventh book, a self-contained poem called the Mutabilitie Cantoes. This last dramatizes the legal proceedings brought about by the goddess Mutabilitie, who makes a claim to rule the entire universe. Nature’s final judgment restricts her claims. First, her kingdom is “sublunary,” because the moon’s orbit formed the limit of the Fall. Second, even there her power is circumscribed, because all things, in changing, merely perpetuate unchanging cycles. Spenser had made the same point in the episode of the Gardens of Adonis, where Adonis is said to be “eterne in mutabilitie” and “by succession made perpetuall.”16 The Mutabilitie Cantoes end with a reference to the Sabbath, the day of rest and contemplation (6 + 1).

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Nevertheless, although the cycle of fallen time is permanence and order, something about it is deeply disturbing, at least to people for whom the methods of repression we call “normality” have broken down. The normal attitude fears change because it brings insecurity, as represented by the Wheel of Fortune image in medieval and Renaissance literature. But a deeper fear strikes at the stability not just of external circumstances but of the very self. Ego consciousness is in effect an awareness of constant identity: Henley’s popular poem, “Invictus,” expresses the triumphant defiance of the “unconquerable soul,” no matter what happens to it. But most egos are not such impregnable fortresses and recognize that the body is somehow also part of what we are, that human experience is embodied experience. And while the ego may feel the same at seventy as it did at seven, the body is one long metamorphosis. Pythagoras, at the end of the Metamorphoses, uses the same teaching device as the first-grade teacher who brings a caterpillar to the classroom. Into the chrysalis disappears the caterpillar: out of it emerges the butterfly.17 Nature is cyclic order, which proceeds in a circle that we now call an “ecology” through constant metamorphoses of physical identity. Pythagoras is teaching reincarnation, in which, as he says, the spirit persists, “wandering through change.”18 Donne’s bizarre and extraordinary poem Metempsychosis traces a soul’s journey through the life forms of the whole Chain of Being, imagining how it feels to be a plant, a mouse, and so on. But does the self abide through change? Or does the self become other? This is what therapists mean when they talk about “body image.” The changes every human body undergoes in the course of a lifetime are actually more dramatic than the caterpillar’s. We begin in the womb as aquatic aliens with vestigial gills. The seven ages of man and woman, from infancy through childhood, puberty, and maturity to old age, are a series of dramatic physical metamorphoses. Ovid imagines Helen of Troy in her old age, looking in a mirror, wondering how the face she sees could ever have caused men to fight an entire war.19 Whatever one thinks of the movie as a whole, Titanic achieves a similar shock by showing that the hundred-year-old woman of the framing sequences was once the young Kate Winslet who posed naked for Leonardo DiCaprio. But the final metamorphosis is death, in which the subject becomes an object – a corpse, food for worms. Christianity insists that the soul departs from the body at death, and reincarnation insists that the self survives in a new form. But in the cycle of life, if I am identified with my body, and my body becomes a corpse, eventually it is in-corporated into the identity of an Other. Hamlet is obsessed not just with death but with physical

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death: the metamorphosis by which the jester who played with him as a child is now the grinning skull in the graveyard, and the metamorphosis even beyond that: Hamlet: A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. King Claudius: What dost you mean by this? Hamlet: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. (4.3.30–4) The king’s body is eaten by the worm and therefore becomes part of it; the fish eats the worm; the man eats the fish. This nightmare vision of the recycled self was inherited from Hamlet and Jacobean drama by Thomas Lovell Beddoes in Death’s Jest Book, and passed on to Dylan Thomas, who in his early volumes was influenced both by Beddoes and by Donne’s Metempsychosis, which he echoes in one poem. Anyone who contemplates natural life in this perspective for very long risks madness, as Hamlet does. Hamlet is an order tragedy that describes what happens when the social constructs of the law, which are hierarchies of order and degree, break down. The symptoms of that breakdown are the plotting and counterplotting that Hamlet shares with other revenge tragedies, and with the espionage novels of our time: it is no accident that Thomas Pynchon’s conspiracy novel The Crying of Lot 49 contains a dead-on, so to speak, parody of a Jacobean revenge tragedy. But Hamlet is arguably the most famous tragedy in the world because it dramatizes a deeper fear. In Spenser’s Mutabiliie Cantoes the power of Mutabilitie is limited in a trial scene representing the authority of a cosmic law over unchecked metamorphosis. With the dissolving of the order principle, however, comes the nightmare of unchecked metamorphosis, tantamount to psychosis. Hamlet himself can surmount this anxiety only by a newfound sense of a divinity that shapes our ends. On a level far beneath conscious awareness, Creationism in our time represents a deep fear that, if we relinquish the order principle of fixed species, we risk losing any stable human identity. While the response is reactionary, the anxiety is real. “Nightmare” might be more than a merely emotive term in this context. The dream, according to Freud, is condensation and displacement. In the clear light of day, identities are distinct, but in dreams they may be “condensed,” that is, fused: “It was my father, but it was also the president.” Or one thing may be “displaced,” that is, turned into another, the notori-

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ous instance being of course anything longer than it is wide. Gregor Samsa, in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” finds he has been displaced from his human form into that of a giant insect “after a night of troubled dreams.” In Blake’s Four Zoas, a dream of nine fallen nights, characters turn into other characters or into natural phenomena, emerge from one another’s bodies, and so on. We have so far spoken of the ways in which bodies change simply through growth and ageing, but there is a secondary nightmare arising from our identity as physical bodies that are, in a word, meat. The popularity of movies such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Saw, and Hostel derives from a horrified fascination with how easily the human body may be mutilated: what was just a few moments before a human being is metamorphosed into a chaos of blood, viscera, and severed body parts. The laughter that accompanies screenings of such movies is a way of detaching from and denying the horror. Modern movies did not invent this fascination: it is the attraction of the Roman circus, with its gladiator contests and people fed to lions; of a good deal of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge drama (in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus a woman is raped and her tongue and hands cut off afterwards, outdoing the story of Philomela the episode is based on; in Lear, Gloucester’s eyes are put out onstage); of Elizabethan bearbaiting and modern pit-bull and cockfighting. A hand (or, in the opening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, an ear)20 detached from a human subject becomes a dead object of disgust – becomes, essentially, excremental, for urine and excrement are also objects of disgust because, though emerging from a human body, they are now rejected as non-self to be eliminated in all senses – if they are not fetishized as a way of dealing with the disgust. The horror of cannibalism, of human beings mutilating and eating other human beings, whose flesh thereby through metabolism becomes part of their own flesh, is another aspect of the fallen vision of the subject regarding itself as just one more object. At the bottom of Dante’s Inferno, images of cannibalism begin to recur as parodies of the Eucharist: Ugolino gnaws the skull of the man who starved him and his children to death, with a hint that Ugolino may also have eaten his own children after they died; Satan chews for all eternity on Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot. In Lord Dunsany’s “Two Bottles of Relish,” how the murderer disposed of the body appears in the title. An alarmingly popular image throughout the history of literature has been meat pies made of victims’ bodies, a favourite recipe in the stories of Atreus and Thyestes; of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela; of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus; and of Stephen Sond-

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heim’s Sweeney Todd. We might wish to believe that Hannibal Lecter is merely the invention of a novelist using sensationalism to increase his sales – but Jeffrey Dahmer was no more a fiction than Jack the Ripper, who has so fascinated the popular imagination as to have been transformed into a literary archetype. C. The Limits of the Fall: The Vertical Axis of the Law In one way, the Fall is endless: we have seen how the subject–object split shows up in every aspect of the fallen world. The Fall therefore happens again in every moment. But its progress is at least partly arrested, as we also saw, in nature by cyclical order, and in humanity by law. What is law? It can be defined as the attempt to adapt to and live within the subject–object division, resigned to its seeming inevitability, rather than trying to transform it. We speak of law when the context is one of external structures and institutions, but, now more aware that external coercion alone cannot hold a society together, we may argue that “ideology,” as the inner system of fallen order, internalized through social conditioning, sustains the outer structure of social order. Theorists from Nietzsche to Foucault have shown that the system is based on power: over objects and energy sources in the case of natural law, over people with moral law. Ideology rationalizes, consciously or unconsciously, the rule of power: it redescribes both the natural and the human realms in terms of domination and submission rather than of unified Contraries. Ideological descriptions of nature are not the same as the language of science: the Copernican system was empirical and testable science; the Ptolemaic system that it displaced was ideology intended to reinforce a scheme that was partly cosmological but partly sociopolitical, which is why the church was so sensitive to Galileo’s attack on it. In our time, creationism and “intelligent design” are pure ideology, but Darwinian biology is still struggling to separate the empirical from the ideological. When Lynn Margulis complains that the prevailing “neo-Darwinist” viewpoint favouring competition over cooperation (difference over identity) is based more on emotion than on evidence, she provokes a candidly emotional response from the neo-Darwinist George C. Williams: “I’m probably being unfair but I would say that Lynn Margulis is very much afflicted with a kind of ‘God-is-good’ syndrome, in that she wants to look out there at nature and see something benign and benevolent and ultimately wholesome and worth having. Whereas I look out there with Tennyson and see things red in tooth and claw. In other words, it’s a bloody mess

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out there.”21 The often-heated debate between tough-minded neo-Darwinists and tender-minded theorists of variously cooperation, the Gaia hypothesis, emergent systems, autopoiesis, and other notions that seem quite literally neo-Romantic, harking back to the Romantic nature theories of Schelling, Coleridge, Goethe, and the like, is clearly as ideological as it is scientific. When subject and object, or subject and subject, are no longer experienced as co-inherent, they have to be bound together by force. Once that happens, hierarchical relationships of dominance, S / O (S over O, separated by a bar), or submission, O / S (O over S, separated by a bar) come into being and are elaborated into systems – the word is inseparable from the context of law and ideology – that enforce an order that is at once cosmological and social. In terms of Blake’s Prophecies this is Urizen trying to impose his hierarchical and authoritarian brand of order on a world he feels might otherwise devolve into chaos. Ideological visions of order are ironic or parody versions of the ideal, imaginative visions of order elaborated earlier in part 1, not that the two vistas are always fully separable. Indeed, it is a lingering imaginative resonance that sustains the ideological constructs, as an ideology borrows, or kidnaps, myths and symbols from a fully imaginative vision to build a more reductive perspective. For over a century anthropology has been studying smaller tribal and clan societies before modernity destroys or reshapes them from a form that often grounds speculations about early, “primitive” societies. Occasional claims to have discovered relatively unfallen societies largely free of ideology and power relations have invariably dissolved on closer scrutiny. In addition to myths, two other symbolic order-constructs have attracted anthropologists: systems of classification and systems of kinship and marriage. However, like biology, anthropology struggles to ascertain whether what it sees is objectively there and/or a projection of its own will to order and truth. Some field workers claim to have come upon elaborate systems of classification based on symbolic correspondences and, frequently, binary contrasts that respond readily to a structuralist approach. But, as Brian Morris explains in Anthropological Studies of Religion, other researchers are sceptical: “[Mary] Douglas, [Claude] Lévi-Strauss, and [Robert] Hertz – all Durkheimian sociologists – took an extreme view in implying that all preliterate communities had complex symbolic classifications that ‘unified’ experience. [Jack] Goody’s writings seem to suggest [either] the opposite extreme and to deny [such] systems – or rather that the classificatory symbolism that has been recorded is … a literary elaboration, a function of the ethnographer’s own search for order.

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The truth probably lies between these two extremes.”22 Morris adds: “Complex classificatory symbolism has, of course, been noted in many tribal societies” (296). About larger societies there is no doubt, including Europe’s throughout the Middle Ages, unified ideologically by the interlocking Ptolemaic cosmos and Chain of Being, ornamented by an intricate system of symbolic correspondences, as laid out in E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture and C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image. The order of nature as established by God in the Chain of Being, despite the cycle’s diachronic form, has a synchronic form of a vertical axis of being, with spiritual beings at the apex, humanity in the middle, and animals, plants, and minerals at the bottom. However, an expansion of the human part of the ladder (as it was sometimes called) revealed a vertical, hierarchical social order: kings and popes at the apex, followed by aristocracy and clergy, middle class, and peasants. Thus the social order, it seemed, is not a human construct: it is part of the larger natural order created by God, and disobedience is a rebellion not just against one’s superiors but against God. This vertical hierarchy that originally descended from heaven is a concrete projection of what abstractly is known as law. Far from being unique to medieval and Renaissance Europe, the whole complex, as described by Joseph Campbell, appears repeatedly in the history of civilizations. In Egypt, the law was known as ma’at; in India it was dharma, resulting in the Hindu chain of being, the caste system.23 In China, the emperor ruled according to the mandate of heaven. In all cases, law was not a human construct but part of the ordered structure of the universe – the fallen universe, that is, for this fallen form of vertical axis is an ironic parody of the true vertical axis of Creation. Traditionally, there were three types of law: moral law and ritual law in the sacred realm, law governing property, possessions, and other forms of wealth in the secular. In the Old Testament, the epitome of the moral law was handed down from on high (that is, from the apex of the vertical axis) to Moses atop the sacred mountain of Sinai or Horeb in the form of the Ten Commandments. However, the commandments merely capture the essence of the remainder of the Pentateuch, whose Hebrew name is Torah, or “law.” Moral law, at least in its original form, is external and coercive. Because it is based on antagonism among human beings rather than empathy, its essence is punitive, “an eye for an eye.” Its New Testament counterpart is the doctrine of the Atonement: Adam and Eve broke the law, so Christ has to be sacrificed as an equal counter-action to propitiate

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the Father in his role as judge. In Israelite society, the law was enforced by a priesthood and, eventually, a kingship. In tribal or clan societies, eye for an eye took the form of a code of honour based on revenge. The “letter of the law” is its external and coercive aspect, a counterpart of the laws of nature. If we “break” the law of gravity, we fall as a consequence, automatically and without regard to extenuating circumstances. Law in its primitive form is essentially legalistic, insisting on the letter of the law without exception. In Numbers 8, a man is stoned to death for breaking the Sabbath with no chance to explain that he thought it was Friday. But imagination works to redeem law by internalizing it, through the kind of empathy that enabled Achilles to stop objectifying the enemy and see him as another subject. This imaginative empathy separates the letter and the spirit of the law, exemplifying Campbell’s distinction between atonement and at-onement.24 The spirit of the law is the centre of Jesus’ teachings, the basis for his insistence on the forgiveness of sins, and the moral of some of his most famous parables, including those of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, and judge not that ye be not judged. Jesus’ religious foils, the scribes and Pharisees, are always trying to trip him up by posing legalistic dilemmas, which he simply walks right through. The man who rescues his ox fallen into a hole on the Sabbath does not violate the Sabbath because his family’s survival depends on using that ox for ploughing. Jesus comes at the end of the line of the prophets, who over time tried to convince their society that the word of God written in the heart (Jeremiah 31:31–4)25 was worth more than legalistic self-righteousness and automatic observance. Tragically, however, Christianity forgot that Jesus’ doctrine of the spirit of the law had come out of Jewish tradition. And the forgetting was in part wilful: Paul, originally a Jew himself and trained by a famous rabbi, should have known better when, in Galatians 4, he identified Judaism with legalism and Christianity with the spirit of the law. This helped create the sort of anti-semitism we see in, for example, The Merchant of Venice, where Shylock, the Jew, embodies legalism and the code of revenge. But legalism is a corrupting tendency within every religion. Measure for Measure revisits the theme: while its title suggests legalism’s “eye for an eye,” what it really means is that we must show mercy and forbearance, because we are much in need of them ourselves, a lesson the self-righteous legalist Angelo has to learn by being tempted and falling. The female lead learns as well: Isabella changes from self-righteously wishing her brother Claudio’s execution for what everyone knows is a petty offence to praying that

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Angelo be forgiven, not just for his own sake but because she empathizes with the woman who loves him, Mariana. Much of the Pentateuch concerns not moral but ritual law and ceremonial law, however. It comes to seem as if every aspect of Israelite life was governed by a set of rules: there are rules for sacrifices and other rituals, diets, sin offerings, settling disputes, and so on. Legalism is just as prevalent in this ritual and ceremonial context, so that we begin to grasp Freud’s description of religion, in Totem and Taboo, as a collective obsessive-compulsive neurosis. Legalism shows its psychological underpinnings in the concept of violating a taboo. A taboo may have nothing moral about it: eating a forbidden food or having sex during menstruation does no moral harm. A taboo’s basis is not morality but purity, and Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger, has shown that, in essence, taboos represent an anxiety about maintaining order by observing strictly demarcated categories.26 Taboos we do not respect we call “superstition”: those we take to heart may become moral principles outweighing both the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ teaching. In particular, any manifestation of the pleasure principle, that enemy of strict control, is apt to become tabooed: the “sins” of drinking alcohol, dancing, card playing, and, of course, sex, seem to have become for some legalists almost the whole focus of their religion. Other taboos provoke anxiety about the “violation” of proper hierarchy, such as the ordination of women or the marriage of gay and lesbian couples, because homosexuality is “unnatural,” meaning a violation of a religious law seen as inherent in the order of nature. Taboos about hygiene are often less about health than about bodily and domestic “purity”: not bathing and not cleaning house are seen as moral faults. When a room gets messy enough, people who are habitually neat feel that something is out of control and needs to be brought back to satisfying order. This last example hints at how taboos and strict customary observances that seem to define “civilized” behaviour govern modern social life. Which utensil to use at a restaurant, which foods are normal and which are weird, which colours go together, whether women should shave or men grow their hair long, how to maintain a lawn, how to conduct a conversation, how to behave in a classroom or a classical music concert, whether one eats meat or is vegetarian: the anxiety and anger that violations of these norms so easily arouse suggest that the social order itself seems to be at stake. Even if we do not believe our laws of social propriety descended from a sacred mountain, they are still sacrosanct.

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Taboos and social prescriptions ritualize everyday life, and the purpose of ritual is to renew the order of society and nature, to repeat the Creation, although in this fallen world that means recharging the psychological batteries of law and ideology, renewing the power supply. Frazer’s dying-god rituals renewed nature and the food supply, but also the social order through the killing of a king or ruling figure whose energies cyclically waned. Norms and taboos are part of a larger order complex that includes habit and routine, techniques to reassuringly structure daily life. But our quotidian existence needs periodic renewal through weekends off, vacations, holidays, and sabbaticals (with their apt name). The deathand-rebirth patterns of ordinary fallen existence are designed to maintain the status quo, symbolized by the vertical axis of the law, by allowing limited cyclical periods of change that merely restore that status quo rather than trying to transform it. Modern legal codes, said to derive from a combination of Roman law with English common law, are secular rather than religious. Violation of moral law is a sin: violation of secular law is a crime. There is a definite overlap – murder is a crime as well as a sin – but failing to honour one’s father and mother may be sinful yet not a crime (unless one murders one’s father and violates the incest taboo with one’s mother, like Oedipus). It is an oversimplification to say that secular law revolves around property, possessions, and wealth, including the means of acquiring and disposing of them: but societies, both ancient and modern, have tended to see protecting them as the main, even sole, purpose of government, for example, with the American Founding Fathers, as a glance at the constitution shows. A puzzling issue arises at this point. Frye lists property (including possessions) as one of the four primary concerns organizing Words with Power, yet in what sense is it a primary rather than a secondary and thus ideological concern? This would imply that property is a universal necessity for human survival and flourishing, which seems to contradict a common religious point of view that the spiritual state is rather one of dispossession. Jesus warned the rich man about the camel and the eye of the needle. As often happens, otherwise puzzling real-life problems become clearer in the wider perspective of the mythological vision’s Big Picture. Unfallen human nature is both rooted and free-ranging. The Bible begins with two Creation myths, one cosmic (the P narrative) and one earthbound (J), bringing into being respectively a transcendent spiritual realm of total freedom and a paradisal realm in which spirit is immanent, grounded in humanity and nature. At least that is what Milton makes out

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of the two unfallen realms, seeing them as unified Contraries. The heavenly realm fulfils the primary concern Frye calls “freedom of movement,” symbolized by angelic flight. The earthly realm addresses the primary concern of property – not in the fallen sense, for Adam and Eve are not encumbered by clothes or bank accounts – but in the real meaning of possession, which is identification. Adam and Eve possess a garden, which is not real estate but a home, through a genuine emotional rapport with both the plants and the animals of their environment, so much so that when Eve after the Fall is told she must leave her beloved garden she feels the dispossession might kill her. The repeated association of her body with features of the garden has been noticed by many commentators, a Biblical analogue being the Song of Songs’ identification of the woman’s body with the fertile land. Within the ideological context of Christianity, the implications are sexist: the woman is identified with physical nature, the man with intellect. But the patriarchal attempt to objectify women deconstructs. Yes, Eve was formed from Adam’s body, and is thus subjected to him. But whence came his body? From the adamah, the garden’s fertile soil. The couple’s bond with the garden is metaphorical, one of identityin-difference. This mode of existence is Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, glanced at in part 1, the hyphens indicating that being and world are inseparable, interpenetrating, despite the assertions of Cartesian dualism. In such a state, he says, objects are not merely objective, or “present-athand,” possessions in the ordinary sense. Rather, as part 1 noted, they are “ready-to-hand,” bonded in a close relationship to us that is born of human concern. Heidegger’s common examples are tools: the carpenter’s hammer is an extension of himself, which is why he or she can wield it with such instinctive skill. The same would be true of a musician’s instrument, an athlete’s body – or that most useful of all tools, language. To the extent that something is present-to-hand, it is a possession in the sense of metaphorical identification. This kind of relationship draws a temenos, a circle of enclosure, that turns a place into a “home.” Anything within it belongs, including a house, household objects, and family. The home can be a microcosm within the macrocosm of a “homeland.” All these circles are of course versions of the mandala. It is a commonplace that many novelists achieve a world audience only through the deep rootedness of their fiction in a specific place, whether a city like Joyce’s Dublin or a local area like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Alice Munro’s southwestern Ontario. The examples make clear that in a nonparadisal world the bond includes a good deal of ambivalence, at times

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even a love-hate relationship. None the less, for family, city, community, be it ever so dysfunctional, there’s no place like home. Mention of Heidegger, advocate of the Nazis’ “blood and soil” ideology, makes clear what a fraught subject the attachment to home and land can be in a fallen world, where the secondary concerns of ideology can trump primary concerns. In the Fall, all sets of Contraries lose their interpenetrating identity and become mutually denying and warring Negations. Identity and difference are now mutually exclusive. Identity is reduced to territorialism and tribalism, to possessiveness in the worst possible sense – the child who refuses to share, screaming “Mine!” Books have been written rationalizing such bad behaviour as Darwinian, from Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, which allows altruistic behaviour only within the temenos of the kinship group. But at that point we are returned to the counter-argument that cooperation is as much a part of nature, including human nature, as competition. In The Critical Path, Frye borrows Heidegger’s term “concern” in an attempt to supply its proper Contrary, speaking of the necessary tension between a myth of concern and a myth of freedom. The former affirms identity by collectivizing the inhabitants within its temenos and expelling difference into an outer world of potential enemies. Its Contrary is individualistic and pluralistic, affirming difference with its corollaries of toleration based not on agreement but on interdependence and mutual aid. No subject in myth criticism could be more topical, with the rise of rightwing “populist” movements all over the world, some of them repeating the old Nazi slogans. As we noted previously, “freedom of movement” (Frye’s primary concern) in the unfallen world becomes exile and wandering in the fallen one. In the Bible, the exile of Adam and Eve sets in motion the long wandering of the Chosen People, from the Exodus to the Diaspora after 70 ce. In the Classical tradition, Odysseus and Aeneas are searching for an original and a new home, respectively. It is the wanderers, starting with Cain, who found cities and institute urban life as an alternative to the rooted conservatism of rural and small-town life. Within cities dwells a relatively rootless mass population, much of it immigrant: there is an ill-concealed horror as conservative writers such as Spengler describe the megalopolis. Actually, the localizing spirit of place appears within cities as well, forming neighbourhoods, both ethnic and social class, of kindred people. But the city’s diversity makes it a locus of pluralism, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and therefore of possible social change. Its politics are therefore liberal or progressive in tendency, abetted by higher education,

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its intellectual outlook vacillating between Enlightenment belief in reason and science and a thoroughgoing postmodern scepticism, born of the experience of multiple perspectives, about all “traditional values.” The conservative, earth-rooted view is sustained by a small-scale, localized economy based on material goods and services. It was the rising urban centres that revolutionized the world by the quintessential modern invention: money, capital. By doing so they developed a new hierarchy to replace the old one of the Chain of Being, the new one described by Marx, which we now speak of in terms of a new vertical, hierarchical axis – 1 per cent / 99 per cent – that vanquishes Frye’s myth of freedom, with its ideals of individualism, democracy, and progressive change. Dishearteningly, this new abstract and invisible vertical axis can spread horizontally over modern life in the form of the system or network. Priests and kings can be toppled, armies conquered, but the system is like a parody of the old definition of God: its centre is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. The image of the sinister network of power is that of the law in Dickens’s Bleak House, of bureaucracy in Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, of multinational corporations in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and of communications networks in his Crying of Lot 49 (to which we can add the social “network”), and of the social fabric itself in theories of “systemic” racism and sexism. The ultimate paranoid conspiracy theory is that which suspects that all these systems are really one huge, interlocking system. The work of Michel Foucault verges on the conclusion that such a conspiracy theory might turn out to be correct. In addition to neoliberal and libertarian elitist capitalism, there are forms of socialism espoused by the progressive left. Socialism in whatever form is characterized by a suspicion of property and possessions, by an identification of virtue with dispossession. The slight otherworldliness of such an attitude discloses its kinship with earlier ascetic religious values: it was after all a saint, Thomas More, who invented the literary form of the utopia, and Thoreau, though no socialist, had something of a saint’s asceticism. The sociopolitical vehicle of ascetic socialism is a kind of philosophical anarchism, as in Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. But utopian socialism has never been more than a talking point, although, as will become clear later, if there is a way out of the elite-oppressed Negation of late capitalism, it will come probably from a new form of the socialist position. Since the 1980s, unbridled capitalism has thrown entire communities out of work through automation and outsourcing; it has busted unions and forced many workers to maintain two or three jobs due to inadequate

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wages, with no job security. It has done its best to eliminate the social safety net, and crushes college graduates with a lifetime of debt. The excuse that these phenomena are the inevitable side effects of globalization and modernization will not wash: they are the result of deliberate decisions by an elite that is out of touch, out of control, and, increasingly, out of its mind. The new capitalism has created a demoralized, desperate, nearly despairing proletariat, just as the old industrial capitalism did, with the same result: not a left-wing Marxist uprising but a right-wing populism that is swelling the ranks of reactionary parties all over Europe and in the United States. Why study the old mythical patterns? Once again it is a myth critic who transcends the moment’s chaos and crises and shows us blindly living out patterns that, for better or worse, are mythical in shape. In a series of books, notably in Violence and the Sacred, René Girard expounded a theory of “mimetic desire” to explain human violence.27 We think that our desires are our own, but actually desire is contagious: we want what the Other wants, but not for its own sake, rather because the Other wants it, and our conflict and rivalry with the Other may lead to violence. It is not a hard theory to understand: we see the child who is desperate for a toy only because his brother seeks it, and ends up hitting his brother. Yet why should desire be mimetic? Girard assumes that human society is held together by a collective consciousness. Identity is not inner and subjective: it depends on one’s status in the peer group. The basic need is for status, and objects are desired in so far as they symbolize that status. This exactly fits the situation in the opening of the Iliad. Agamemnon wants Achilles’ war prize, the girl Briseis, because it is his rival’s war prize: the two men are competing really for the status that she visibly represents. I never teach the Iliad without students’ commenting that the two warriors seem like children squabbling over a toy on the playground. Their contest parallels Menelaus and Paris’s for Helen of Troy. which has generated the whole Trojan War. Legend notwithstanding, Helen caused the war not because she was so desirable, not for any personal qualities, but because she was a status symbol, the ultimate trophy wife or mistress. Nevertheless it is hard to help students to see the Iliad’s real tragedy: neither Agamemnon nor Achilles can back down, not because they are stubborn or immature, although they are immoderately both. Whichever man allows his war prize to be taken from him loses face and suffers shame, aidos. One must be defeated – and he will walk away humiliated. Achilles’ humiliation provokes the “rage” that is the first word and the central theme of the Iliad. That is Girard’s point: in society there is one

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alpha male who not only obtains the objects of desire but is made into an almost godlike celebrity. The other combatants are left in humiliated frustration (Nietzsche’s ressentiment), feeling shame that easily turns to violence. They can always turn against the individual winner or winning class, but that would lead to a kind of civil war that would rip society apart. It is more likely that the losers will find an innocent and helpless individual or group and turn them into scapegoats. Girard may overgeneralize, but his theory is startlingly insightful about the psychology of the 40 per cent of Americans who not only voted for Donald Trump but who continue to admire and support him no matter what he does, including when what he does is directly against their own interests. From this point of view the irrational behaviour of much of Trump’s base makes perfect if appalling sense. Many of these people have lived within the temenos of a myth of concern that included bonds to the land, to occupations involving manual labour or direct local services, to family and small communities, an insular and “poorly educated” (Trump’s phrase) people, a homogeneous community of “the same” with little exposure to any type of difference, yet whose working-class life conferred a selfesteem that came from feeling they were the backbone of the nation. I know because I came out of this class in rural, small-town Ohio, haven of Trump voters. Within two generations this class has been devastated: its way of life is dying, and its members know it. Coal mining is being phased out in favour of cleaner energy (which encourages climate denial), the factories are automated, small farms cannot compete with the agricultural conglomerates, mom-and-pop stores cannot compete with Walmart. The only thing the neoliberal elite offers is “opportunities,” mostly bogus, for the younger generation to abandon the community and become part of the urban success story – even as that part of the middle class that recently clawed its way up from the working class is also being undermined and beginning to slip back down the ladder. These people not only experience poverty, despair, and opioid addiction but feel shame, a sense of inferiority that readily turns into rage and seeks someone or something – anything – to punish for their mistreatment. Part of their ressentiment may turn against the system. Trump’s immense destructiveness towards institutions, treaties, and agreements thrills them because it is clearly driven by a Hulk-like rage to smash with which they identify. There is no evident way to revolutionize or reform the invisible network of globalized power relations that is today’s reality, so the only thing they can do is to help destroy it.

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They do not care that Trump has no positive proposals, because those, they feel, always benefit the elite. While they do not totally condone his anti-social behaviour, they put up with it because it eviscerates the elite ideological structures of “political correctness.” Their seemingly naïve readiness to fall for almost any sort of paranoid conspiracy theory is an inevitable result of the beleaguered, paranoid, last-stand position to which they have been driven. That includes their right-wing Christianity, with its longing for an apocalyptic Last Judgment that will bring down the whole corrupt house of cards. With the rise of neo-Nazi and neo-fascist movements not only in the United States but across Europe and the rest of the world, including India, Turkey, and South America, it is clear that history is repeating itself, the evangelical Christian longing for apocalypse and the Rapture mirroring the Nazi longing for a nihilistic Götterdämmerung. The most powerful component of Girard’s theory answers a question frequently posed by pundits: why does the 99 per cent never seem to recognize and rise up against its true enemy, the 1 per cent for whose benefit the system, or network of systems, exists? The answer is psychological: the elite does not seem to be entirely Other and is therefore not an antagonist but rather a symbol of the American ideal. In the old days of upward mobility, of the American dream, the elite was what the working class aspired to become, or at least ensure that its children would become. That dream has faded, but the elite still retains its glitter of success, wealth, and celebrity. Instead, the oppressed, desperate to cope with feelings of inferiority and failure, cast about for a scapegoat to blame for their shameridden inferiority. This search for a scapegoat, Girard maintains, is the main source of social violence: it is, at any rate, the source of the anti-immigrant hysteria of both the United States and Europe. Immigrants, in this view, are to blame for the plight of the lower classes – they steal “our” jobs and social services and disrupt “our” way of life with their allegedly anti-social ways, and, even if these things were not true – which they are not – their very existence, their very Otherness, disrupts the comfortable homogeneity of traditional American ways with their strange and disturbing difference. They are squatters, even when legal: they do not belong inside the temenos. In most American families outside the old wasp aristocracy you need go back no further than two generations to arrive at a point at which everyone was an immigrant, but there is no use trying to be rational here, especially since the trump card, no pun intended, will be that “our” immigrant ancestors were white. And they were ours.

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Girard’s theory of the scapegoat is not as unprecedented as he thinks it is: Jung had covered much the same ground decades earlier in his concept of the shadow. Moreover, Jung is aware of a wider perspective that Girard’s ironic scepticism is too reductive to admit. Girard shows how scapegoating is a demonic form of human sacrifice. He gives great credit to Christianity for its supposed opposition to the compulsion, the crucified Christ being the ultimate innocent scapegoat. This seems, to put it mildly, a bit biased. Whatever was true of Christ himself, his namesake institutions not only made scapegoats of the Jews and, in the Crusades, the Muslims, but the doctrine of the Atonement justifies the whole practice. Christ is innocent, yet he has to be sacrificed as a scapegoat to assuage the shame and placate the anger of a God whose feelings of inferiority led him to blame first Satan, then the human race for “sins” that only he, as their Creator, could be responsible for. Jung caused a furor when he put it this way in Answer to Job, but the point stands. But he was aware of an alternative kind of sacrifice, not of Atonement but of at-onement, not of difference and Otherness but of identity, achieved through the death-and-rebirth experience of sacrifice, that is the only possible way out of the scapegoating dilemma. More of this later. D. Sacrifice Ancient literature is full of ritual sacrifice across cultures East and West – and the appalling amount of bloody carnage can be off-putting. From the Homeric epics to the Old Testament to the horse sacrifices of Vedic India, the accounts are of animals, large and small, killed and offered up to God or the gods. What made these people believe that killing harmless animals was an act of holiness? What made them think their gods loved all this brutal slaughter? Wary as we may be of ethnocentrism and judging from the outside, the questions are troubling. Sacrifice is the linchpin that unites the two elements of order in the fallen world, law and the natural cycle. Sacrifice is, so to speak, the enforcement mechanism of the law: in the legal imagery pervading the Bible, Adam and Eve’s violation of the law requires justice, i.e., a restoration of order, in the form of an equal but opposite Atonement, and this takes the form of a sacrifice. Metaphorically, the prosecuting attorney is Satan, a title that means “Accuser.” Sacrifice is a variety of ritual, and even a modern criminal trial has many ritual features, including the act of

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swearing on a Bible and the wearing of robes and (in England) wigs by the presiding judges. Fallen society cannot do without the external coercion of the law, enforced by punishment, but carried out with impersonal objectivity, as a regrettable necessity from which the authorities derive no pleasure. Such is the official stance: in reality, legal punishment whets the appetite of the human race for sadism of the kind exemplified in The Merchant of Venice, a sadism driven, as Shylock’s is, by the spirit of revenge. The anti-semitism of the Christians in that play is hypocritical, in that Christianity had itself expanded the vague references of hell in the New Testament into the kind of legalistic system seen at its apotheosis in Dante’s Inferno. The judge at the entrance of Dante’s hell is Minos, famed as a judge in the Classical underworld. There is a circle or sub-circle for every variety of sin, and Minos signifies the appropriate circle for each of the damned by how many times he wraps his tail around his body. The principle called the contrapasso that rules the Inferno stipulates that the punishment fits the sin: schismatics are to be split open by an angel’s sword, then to walk in a circle holding their intestines until the wound heals, and repeat. The U.S. constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishment”: some of Dante’s punishments are quite unusual, and all of them are cruel. Yet they are approved as part of God’s justice. The collapse of law into the spirit of revenge, which in turn degenerates into a delight in sadistic torture – the opposite of law, but really Chaos come again – is what Blake called “Druidism,” based on accounts of its human sacrifices. Druidism is the driving force of that collective form of human sacrifice known as war, and at some points war and human sacrifice become the same thing: the Aztecs and some Native American peoples sacrificed enemy prisoners, sometimes through elaborate torture; scalping and headhunting are similarly mutilating warrior rituals. The youths sent to be devoured by the Minotaur were sacrifices owed by Athens for losing a war with Crete. Modern armies forbid such practices as “war crimes” – unless they defend them as necessary for national security – but find it difficult to prevent them. The hut of Conrad’s Kurtz is ringed with human skulls, and his story is updated in the film Apocalypse Now to the Vietnam War, in which, in addition to civilian massacres such as My Lai, tales emerged of soldiers wearing severed fingers of dead Viet Cong soldiers as trophies. Whether such demonic parodies of sacrifice have official sanction, as with the Inquisition’s burning of witches and heretics, and public executions, or represent vigilante justice, as with lynch mobs, makes no differ-

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ence. All of them represent the epitome of human evil, the heart of darkness, summed up in the unspeakable depravity of its most extreme instance, the Holocaust. If there were ever an argument for original sin, this is it. But what is original sin? A state in the Blakean sense, in which an alienated subject, who fears and therefore hates the human beings around him, whom he sees as objects, as Other, takes revenge for his fear, and kills or dominates to feel safe. Ironic parody of sacrifice is not always reserved for traitors, criminals, enemies, and sinners, but can pervade the everyday fabric of society. Thus far, law and ideology have been characterized as an ironic parody of the ideal vision of order, but in other contexts they generate ironic parodies of the ideal vision of love. The basic unit of ideology is the microcosmic vertical axis of a subject dominating over the objective world or vice versa (S / O or O / S). The patriarchal version is man dominating over woman, thus “objectifying” her, treating her as an object. She can become an object of exchange in marriage and kinship relations, the object of exchange in traditional societies, according to Lévi-Strauss. Sometimes what is exchanged may be the wealth or title that is attached to the woman, as with Penelope in the Odyssey, Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and Gertrude in Hamlet. Or sometimes, from the “war prizes” of the Iliad to the “trophy wives” of modern businessmen and politicians, women may be symbolic representations of the wealth and prestige that accrue to the winner of male competition. Yet another form of objectification conditions women as victims of sacrifice for the sake of men’s careers, families, even souls. Jephthah in the Old Testament and Agamemnon in Iphigenia in Aulis both sacrifice their daughters to improve their own fortunes. Shakespeare is fond in an uncomfortable way of putting his heroines through sacrificial ordeals that redeem men who are not really worthy of them: Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, Portia in The Merchant of Venice (who says, before the marriage lottery, “I stand for sacrifice”), Mariana in Measure for Measure, Ophelia in Hamlet, Desdemona in Othello, Imogen in Cymbeline, and Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. While Jephthah’s and Agamemnon’s daughters are young and innocent, lambs to the slaughter, other women with some imagined moral stain on them are sacrificed very much like Old Testament scapegoats, driven out into the wilderness, taking the pollutions of the community with them. This happens to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and also to the five prostitutes murdered by Jack the Ripper in Alan Moore’s extraordinary graphic novel From Hell, in which the murderer is quite conscious of perform-

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ing a series of occultist ritual sacrifices whose blood buys power to prop up the decadent British Empire. In heroic myths women are constantly being rescued from false sacrifices, as Perseus saves Andromeda from a sea monster. The axis of law and ideology is the pillar of stability in the fallen world, but the cyclical power of fallen time constantly threatens to subvert it. There is always anxiety about “revolution,” of the axis being given a push and turned into a revolving wheel. In Blake’s “The Mental Traveller,” the male and female figures revolve cyclically through the possible permutations of domination and oppression, of who’s on top, in any sense of the term. The male begins as a child dominated by a maternal figure, grows up to master a marital figure, and sinks into impotent old age tempted by an elusive girl child. As we see in the lyrics of Blake, the novels of Dickens, Zola’s Germinal, the novel and film versions of Metropolis, and anecdotes about American capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the industrial system often verged on a form of human sacrifice, surrendering workers to the gods Efficiency and Profits. Long workdays, unsafe conditions resulting in frequent mutilating accidents, child labour, and sadistic bosses: all these seem motivated not only by greed but by a punitive resentment of supposedly lazy and shiftless workers. Nowadays, the factories are automated and most people work for businesses and bureaucracies, yet the sacrificing of employees to the system has not changed. We are all working for the pharaoh. Human sacrifice turns out to be an aspect not just of primitive barbarism but of the very structure of fallen society. A more positive function of sacrifice surfaces in another context, where ideology and the power structures have not taken it over so thoroughly. Sacrifice is related not only to the hierarchical vertical axis of law and ideology but also to the natural cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, as is indeed ritual in general. We saw in part 1 how around 1900 a group of English Classicists (anthropology was not quite yet a discipline) associated with Sir James Frazer proposed that rituals grounded myths, rather than vice versa (hence the “Cambridge ritualists”).28 But why would human societies perform rituals for no obvious reason? As we saw earlier, perhaps they tried to control reality through magical thinking. But the ritualists were attempting to go beyond the Victorian rationalism of Frazer, following the intuition that there was something deeper in sacrificial patterns than social anxiety. Of course, many of us today observe our own social rituals without knowing why: few people who put up a Christmas tree realize that it is a

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version of the vertical axis, the world tree, whose roots are in the underworld, with the stars and planets (the lights and bulbs) in its branches. The Cambridge scholars instead speculated that humanity is partly in the grip of what Frye, reviewing Frazer, called “the symbolism of the unconscious.”29 That is, the first rituals emerged as a human and more symbolic counterpart of what in animals is instinctive behaviour. Birds never invented the technique of building nests or the idea of flying south for the winter. They do not need instruction, are hard-wired to perform these feats, and presumably do so without thinking about why. Human rituals are more symbolic and less utilitarian, although they still aim to change the external environment, but they are responses to unconscious drives analogous to instincts. About the same time as the Cambridge ritualists, Jung postulated a collective unconscious whose symbolic contents, or “archetypes,” are, as he said, the form of the instincts. Instincts are blueprints for survival. What is it about ritual actions that helps to ensure survival? In the cycle of nature, death is creative: life survives by killing. The earliest human societies survived in either of two ways: in much of the northern hemisphere by hunting, in equatorial and more southern areas by eating fruits and vegetables that they later learned to plant and harvest. Joseph Campbell shows in his Historical Atlas of World Mythology how these ways of life established the two original patterns of human ritual and mythology. Both, however, seek to bring about rebirth through sacrificial death: something must be given up so that something new may come to be. In the “way of the seeded earth,” as Campbell calls it, the connection between death, burial, and subsequent rebirth is easier to see: “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24). The twelve volumes of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1906–15), one of the most popular studies of comparative mythology ever written, catalogue exhaustively the rituals all over the world involving the death and rebirth of vegetation deities, or what we call “dying gods.” His Cambridge colleague Jane Ellen Harrison referred to the eniautos daimon, or Year God, thinking less of the vegetation that is the god’s physical vehicle than of his essence as the self-renewing energy of time, a kind of cyclical version of Bergson and Shaw’s Life Force.30 A common form of the dyinggod ritual was a three-day spring festival in which the god was put to death on the first day, mourned in his death and absence on the second, and celebrated in his rebirth on the third. A controversial chapter of The Golden Bough’s full edition, often omitted in the various abridgments, drew the obvious comparison with the

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Christian spring festival of Easter. Christ was of course a supernatural deity, above the cycles of nature and death from which he indeed delivers us, but Christianity borrowed some of the ritual patterns of the pagan religions to compete with them. In addition, pagan fertility imagery attached itself to the Christian spring festival just as it did to Christmas at the other end of the year. The Easter bunny is a miniaturized pagan fertility god: there is nothing more fertile than eggs and bunnies. Frazer was attacked for over half a century by anthropologists hostile (as some still are) to the very idea of a comparative mythology, alleging that he greatly over-read and sometimes invented his evidence. Literary critics have no authority for disputing the allegations, but they do not have to: Frazer’s starting point was not so much anthropological evidence as Classical literature, and the dying god, whether or not it exists in various premodern cultures, is a solid fact in Classical mythology and literature, as well as in the Bible, and some very great writers understood, long before Frazer, its meaning of dying in order to live. The dead shepherd of pastoral elegy evokes the dying-god ritual, in which a red or purple flower represents his mortal aspect and a star his immortal aspect: the purple flower shows up in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Milton’s Lycidas, and, as Frye has pointed out, in Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, accompanied by the star in the west.31 The dying god often revolved cyclically around an unchanging female Goddess representing the fertility of the earth. There is a hint of this in Leopold Bloom’s cyclical navigation of Dublin in Ulysses while his wife, Molly, surrounded with imagery of fertility, hardly leaves her bed. The Middle Eastern Adonis began as such a deity before Greek and Roman myth incorporated him as the mortal lover of Aphrodite or Venus, later depicted by Spenser and Shakespeare. Isaiah 17 attacks a fertility ritual in which women throw potted plants called “gardens of Adonis” into the sea. Adonis, whose name means “lord,” may be a form of the Mesopotamian Dumuzi or Tammuz, whom Ezekiel observed women ritually mourning for in the very temple of Jerusalem (Ezekiel 8). In Egypt, Osiris is reborn in the consubstantial form of his son Horus. Myths have different meanings, depending on levels of sophistication. On the simple level of sympathetic magic, the dying-god ritual is an anxious way to try to renew the food supply. But rituals are participatory and more profoundly unite the individual with the deep energies that lie beneath the ever-changing forms of natural life. Thus the dying-god rituals at some point developed into the Mystery religions, most notably the Eleusinian Mysteries focused on Persephone, who cyclically spends winter in the underworld and summer on the earth. Details of the Mystery reli-

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gions’ rituals varied, but initiation typically involved a death-and-rebirth experience for worshippers: the lesson is that we are all dying gods. The relationship between the Mysteries and Christianity is controversial, with some scholars maintaining that Paul remade Christ into the dying and reviving god of the Mystery rituals. But what matters is the move from physical death and rebirth on the natural level to a death and rebirth of consciousness on the spiritual level. Christ’s death and resurrection are more than a promise of immortality: quite the contrary, what they model for us is self-sacrifice. In this, Christianity accords with Buddhism in seeing salvation as achieved by a death to the ego’s self-centred desire and fear. It is the ego that we must willingly sacrifice in order to achieve a “life everlasting” beyond it. Before the advent of the Mysteries and Christianity, traditional peoples had their own version of this transfer of the death-and-rebirth pattern from the divine to the human level. Mythologies recount the deeds of gods and heroes, usually, as Mircea Eliade likes to express it, in illo tempore, “at that time,” the time of the Origin. But what is called a “culture hero,” as part of the original Creation of the orders of nature and culture, often brings down from on high the customs and rituals that order the society’s way of life. Among these are the “rites of passage” that help individuals to progress through the various stages of their life.32 It is profound mythological wisdom that we grow and develop only by means of a repeated death to an older identity and birth into a new one through some kind of transformative ordeal. Societies vary greatly, but we may define four life stages, each inaugurated by a symbolic death and rebirth. The first passage is that of birth itself. Otto Rank’s psychoanalytic theory of the “birth trauma” turned this event into a repetition of the Fall, the infant losing the blissful paradise of the womb and longing for it ever after.33 The Christian birth rite is baptism, which rescues the child from that tragic fate by repeating the birth passage, immersing the child in water in a symbolic death to the natural self and birth of a spiritual self. Second, “initiation rites” mark the change from childhood to adulthood. Whole books have compared such rites all over the world, in part because there are so many similarities. In some societies, male initiation rites are ordeals: manhood is an achievement that must be earned, and some young men must undergo virtual torture, complete with at least symbolic mutilation and sometimes including overt symbolism of death and rebirth such as being partly buried in a pit and dug up again. Some observers claim that societies such as ours that lack initiation rituals doom men to a lifetime of self-proving out of insecurity over whether they have truly achieved manhood. Women’s rites of initiation in some

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cultures begin with first menstruation, at which time young women are sequestered and initiated into “women’s secrets” by the older women. Being secret, these rites are much less understood. The third passage occurs at mid-life. Jung’s remarkable essay “The Stages of Life” asks about the purpose of the second half of a human life.34 By mid-life, the goals of career and raising a family are usually behind one. Lacking a rite to mark this point, modern people have invented the mid-life crisis. Played out conventionally, not to say stereotypically, men’s versions may involve sports cars and affairs with blondes half their age; women suffer empty-nest syndrome. Retirement can mean uselessness and isolation. Dante’s mid-life crisis, he tells us, began at thirty-five, half the Biblical three score and ten, with the usual symptoms: he has “lost the way,” has been having a relationship (as Beatrice angrily accuses him of later) with another woman to whom he wrote love poems, and is increasingly hell-bent. The Divine Comedy is the story of his recovery, through an ordeal that “transhumanizes” his consciousness. It is a “conversion” (turning around) from natural to spiritual self. The comparable mid-life crisis in Classical literature is that of the wanderings of Odysseus in the Odyssey. As Campbell details in The Masks of God, volume 3, this transformative ordeal destroys the hero’s previous identity – he tells the Cyclops that his name is “Nobody” – and he dies and is reborn in a descent to and return from the underworld.35 He sails north to the underworld from Circe’s island in the west; when he returns to her island, it is in the east, “where the sun has his rising.” Campbell thinks this may be solar imagery: a mythological explanation, which Milton alludes to in Samson Agonistes, for the sun’s descent into the “tomb” of an underground passageway before it rises in the east. The greatest of all Classical heroes, Herakles, also has solar associations: his twelve labours are associated with the houses of the zodiac; he descends to the underworld and steals the golden apples of the Hesperides, signifying immortality. He speaks to Odysseus in the underworld and compares his trials with his own – a supreme compliment. Yet the Odyssey is radically revisionist: while Herakles is granted a double identity and a double fate – he is at once a shade in the underworld and an immortal on Mt Olympus – Odysseus rejects Calypso’s offer of immortality on her paradisal island. He returns to home and family, an elderly father, ageing wife, and grown-up son – leaving both Dante and Tennyson to signify their doubts about this choice by having him set out to adventure again in his old age.

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The last stage of life is old age, ending in death. The re-orientation typical of this passage is that which Dante underwent in mid-life, from natural to spiritual. In cultures unlike our own, where they are mostly superannuated, elders are respected figures of wisdom and culture. As for death itself, it is, like birth, a physical ordeal, followed, according to sources such as the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead, by ordeals in the afterlife, yet still with the hope of some kind of rebirth into a higher state, or, failing that, reincarnation into the natural cycle to try again. Although it has been disputed, one of the earliest traces of mythological imagery may be the Neanderthal graves, in one of which the dead was placed in fetal position facing east, covered with flowers whose pollen is still evident, as if the tomb were also a womb.36 Whereas the mythologies of cultures of the “seeded earth” foreground the virtue of self-sacrifice, the mythologies of hunting cultures – if one may generalize – emphasize the virtue of sacrificing others as necessary with an attitude of respect, gratitude, even love. It is more traumatic to kill an animal than a plant: animals experience pain and have feelings; they are sentient and to varying degrees intelligent. From Descartes, who said that animals were just organic robots, to the type of hunter who shoots down animals like targets in a game, many people deny this, and perhaps that was true in prehistoric times as well. But granted a somewhat sensitive hunter, the act of killing, even when necessary for survival, potentially caused guilt. Hunters coped by empathic identification with the animal: the vividly lifelike paintings of animals in Palaeolithic caves reveal the encounter with animals as intense. The animals were thanked, perhaps even worshipped, for sacrificing themselves for the sake of others, and the hope was that they, like the flowers, would return in the cycle of life. Given the fact that most people still eat meat, are there ways we can expand and universalize the values of hunting cultures? There are forms of sacrifice in everyday life that do not involve actual killing but remain sacrificial in a psychological sense. There is, for one thing, the conflict of generations, one form of which is the Freudian. The young have to make a place for themselves, and a revolt against parental authority is a necessary part of it. Zeus’s deposing and castrating of his father Kronos is a hair-raising version of this, but even in the best of circumstances, symbolically “killing the father” (and sometimes the mother) is a necessary declaration of independence. Every new generation declares that its predecessor’s artistic or intellectual style is outmoded and inferior, to be replaced by a new movement

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that is unprecedented and revolutionary – a collective version of the same phenomenon, and probably inevitable: we in effect kill the dying god or ageing divine king. But any teacher knows the positive side of this: we want our students to devour and possess what we try to give them, appropriate it creatively and come up with something fresh, and establish their own vision and identity. We become the sacrifice, and are thrilled to be of use as the altar from which ascends the newest flame. But sacrifice is a double gyre, as sacrifice and victim may exchange places symbolically. Raising a child is always a form of child sacrifice. We call it “socialization”: a huge part of bringing up a child consists of repressing its natural impulses, disciplining it, saying “no” constantly, teaching it to endure hardship and conquer fear, to the point where the child may momentarily say, and mean it, “I hate you.” Like people of all ages, children must die to what they were in order to grow and develop, and it is parents who must facilitate the sacrifice of the younger self. A good deal of guilt grows up on both sides by the time a new generation is grown. Such situations involve the exercise or assertion of power. Anyone in a position of authority puts those he or she supervises through various ordeals: in academe, the processes of earning a PhD and, later, obtaining tenure are death-and-rebirth ordeals of self-remaking, as any survivor can attest; athletes and soldiers undergo an intense process of breaking down and building up, overseen by a coach or sergeant who drives his charges to their limits, or beyond, in order to make them stronger. In The Tempest, Prospero, as both parent and political authority, puts a whole island full of people through death-and-rebirth ordeals. The responsibility weighs on him, makes him melancholic and irritable, and his own blind spots (in particular about Caliban) keep him from doing a perfect job, yet he shows how those with power over others should use it in a way that will improve their world, and its people, not shirking the guilt that one’s inevitable shortcomings bring. He can do this because he has been through a death-and-rebirth ordeal himself. Any teacher (and Prospero is a teacher – he proves it by delivering a lecture so long it makes his daughter fall asleep) understands what he represents. I V . T RAG EDY Tragedy is a mimesis, an imitation, of the fallen world. Imitation in any form of art has two poles, depending on the predominance either of content or of form. If content, the result is realism, what Hamlet, speaking to a theatrical troupe, calls holding the mirror up to nature: today we may

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call it “photographic” realism. Pure realism is an unreachable goal, because form transforms content according to the structural principles of the imagination: Ricoeur’s “redescription”37 or Frye’s “recreation.” In tragedy, the structural principles involved are the ideological form of the vertical axis and the natural cycle, with their derivatives law and sacrifice. Tragedy is a pattern, and stage drama is not its only vehicle, although it has a special affinity for that form, to be discussed later. But whether the vehicle is myth, epic, stage drama, closet drama, film, or novel, tragedies vary along the spectrum between realism and recreation. Aeschylus’s poetic style was renowned at once for its sublime magnificence and its obscurity: Euripides complains in The Frogs that sometimes no one has the slightest idea what he is talking about, including, he suspects, Aeschylus himself. Even when his subject matter is realistic and not mythological, as in The Persians, the stylized treatment is closer to opera than to the relatively realistic Shakespearean tragedy we think of as the norm. It is also closer to ritual – but we are not ready to approach that issue yet. A. Tragedy and Law Of the many theories of tragedy, two are especially useful for our purposes: Aristotle’s Poetics, for exploring its relationship to law, and the ritualist theory, for examining its relations to the natural cycle and the sacrificial rituals that grow out of it. According to Aristotle, the typical tragic mythos, or narrative pattern, traces the rise and fall of a tragic hero who is greater than ordinary men, but whose hamartia (tragic flaw), often hubris (pride), causes him to transgress a limit, the agent of his fall being some form of nemesis. One reason for this theory’s longstanding influence has doubtless been its consonance with the falls of both the rebel angels and humanity, all the more evocative because hamartia is the New Testament word for “sin.” Whereas Adam and Eve disobey a specific command, the tragic hero exceeds the “law” in our more expanded sense, meaning the boundaries of the fallen human condition. Aristotle’s hamartia is ambiguous. Its connection with hubris led to its moral interpretation, and there are tragedies in which a blind, arrogant hero is brought down by his own transgressions: Agamemnon, for example. But a moral theory of tragedy is in fact reductive, and simply does not fit the facts of Greek drama: it works better for s Renaissance tragedy, because of the influence on dramatists of the neo-Classical critics who interpreted the Poetics moralistically. Hamartia really means point of vulnerability, or Achilles’ heel. In the fallen world, something eventually is going to bring you down, and what it is

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depends on your personality and your life situation. For many people, a character flaw does it. But sometimes circumstances conspire: Iphigenia’s hamartia is simply to have a father willing to sacrifice her in order to continue his boy-game – a useless and catastrophic war. The Trojan Women consists of speeches of women caught up in the Trojan War. Why are they its victims? Because their hamartia was to be born female. Philoctetes’ hamartia was unwittingly blundering onto sacred ground, where a snake bit him, creating the perpetual wound that has led to his exile. The moralistic interpretation of hamartia will not work even for Aristotle’s test case, Oedipus Tyrannus. The hero’s hubris led to his road-rage killing of his father at a dark crossroads, but that character flaw allowed the gods to carry out a curse incurred by his father, Laius. Oedipus is “punished” by being fated to kill his father and marry his mother, yet he did nothing to warrant this except to be his father’s child. The idea of a curse, here and elsewhere, heritable down “unto the fourth generation” (a Biblical pattern as well) indicates doom that is systemic rather than the result of individual moral choices. People suffer because they are trapped in the wrong state, in both the geographical and Blakean senses of the term. Although the Odyssey is comic rather than tragic in its overall outcome, Odysseus is kept from returning home for ten years by the curse of the Cyclops, which is operative only through the hamartia of Odysseus, who, in his hubris, shouts out his true identity so that the Cyclops knows whom to curse. A variant of the curse is the vendetta. Euripides’ Herakles endures endless agonies inflicted by Hera because he is the product of one of her husband’s many infidelities. Hera will later become the enemy of Aeneas, not because he has a fault but because he happens to be Trojan, and she hates all Trojans because one of them judged against her in a beauty contest. In the end, Greek tragedy agrees with the Book of Job: while there is law, meaning an order that establishes limits, there is no moral calculus of the sort that Gloucester desperately clings to in King Lear. That order is represented by moira, fate or destiny, later personified in the three Fates, which establishes limits even to the gods’ selfishly arbitrary actions. Christians are not allowed to believe in fate: “What I will is Fate,” says the Father in Paradise Lost (7.173). But in reality that simply makes God personify fate, as the doctrine of predestination proves. In this sense, every human life has its hamartia. If I die of cancer, my hamartia is perhaps my genetic predisposition to it. If I am run down by a car, my hamartia is being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But we are more impressed when great and gifted people are brought down. The

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paradigm of tragedy is sometimes said to be the fall of heroes whose exceptional giftedness or goodness or aspiration causes them to exceed the limits established for fallen life, making catastrophe (turning down) inevitable. In such cases, the heroes’ hamartia is simply the particular vulnerability that becomes the instrument of their fall. Abraham Lincoln was assassinated not as punishment for some moral flaw: it was precisely his greatness that John Wilkes Booth wanted to assassinate. Lincoln’s hamartia was simply to attend a theatrical performance during which a crazy actor was enabled to turn him into a tragic hero in real life. Other historical figures whose greatness led to their deaths include Socrates, Joan of Arc as portrayed by Shaw in St. Joan, and, in modern times, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and John Lennon. (The examples imply a historical shift by which “greatness” is a matter of character rather than birth, giving rise to the debate over whether, for example, those modern warriors, the boxers of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, can be considered tragic heroes.) In drama, Antigone was said by Hegel to be a tragedy of equal but opposite principles, but in fact Antigone is quite right to put her duty to the gods before her duty to her king. Her hamartia is once again simply her hopeless situation; it is Creon, insisting that his word prevail over the gods’ command to bury the dead, who has a moral flaw. Creon suffers horribly for having her put to death, but the play’s title shows who the real tragic hero is. The ultimate paradigm of such idealized tragedy is Christ, crucified by those whose investment in Jewish legalism and Roman imperialism made him intolerable, and this kind of idealized tragic hero is often deemed a “Christ figure.” Christ is unique in willing his hamartia, which is the Incarnation, his choice to become human so that he could be crucified. Yet in other cases heroes’ gifts become their hamartia when they disregard limits and run to excess, an oft-cited example being the ambition of Macbeth. Euripides’ Hippolytus carries his chastity to a fatal extreme. Ulysses’ great speech in Canto 26 of the Inferno defines his own boundless curiosity and hunger for experience as his fatal flaw because it drives him to pursue forbidden knowledge. That very quest destroys Marlowe’s Faust and Actaeon as well, though in different ways. Perhaps the same holds for Hamlet too, if Coleridge is right that his flaw is that he thinks too much, especially about things that will not bear thinking about, like one’s fate after death or one’s mother’s sex life, although conversely his glory is his willingness to think beyond the limit of what is dreamed of in Horatio’s philosophy.

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Forbidden knowledge has a counterpart in forbidden love, a love that goes beyond the limits. Shakespeare plays this out twice, with young lovers in Romeo and Juliet and middle-aged lovers in Antony and Cleopatra. The limit may be represented by adultery, as in the Tristan and Isolde story, and the adulterous love of Paris and Helen that precipitated the Trojan War; by infidelity, as in Troilus and Cressida; or by “perversion,” as with the incestuous desire of Phaedra in Hippolytus. Oedipus Tyrannus involves both forbidden knowledge and forbidden love and parallels the Eden story, in which the snake “seduces” Eve with his appeal to her “lust” for fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. There are of course many dramas that fit the Aristotelian paradigm, in which the hero’s flaw is not an excess of his virtue but a defect that destroys it. Othello’s petty, insecure jealousy is not part of his greatness but a disease that infects and destroys it. Lear’s foolishness, to use the exact word, has nothing to do with his greatness, which is his commanding intensity. Coriolanus’s fierce independence is undone by its very opposite, an emotional dependence on his mother. So many “tragedies” do not fit the Aristotelian mould, however, that perhaps tragedy reduces itself to just anything that has arrived on the stage bearing that label. Maybe defining hamartia inclusively enough to account for all the circumstances that take people down in the fallen world deprives the term of any meaning at all. However, although Aristotle’s definition is appealingly simple, we must not reduce hamartia to “sin” or even “error.” The law that the tragic hero transgresses is not an edict. Law is systemic: it is the system itself, the very fabric of the fallen world, and indifferently hostile to its inhabitants. Sooner or later, we will “violate” some aspect of it, and some kind of nemesis will pursue us. As the title of a Warren Zevon song has it, “Life’ll Kill Ya.” Kafka shows in many of his works that he understood this, most obviously in The Trial. The idea that hamartia is systemic rather than individual and moral is exemplified in the theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss. His main treatment of myth rests on his analysis of the mythological tales of pre-modern peoples of North and South America. The four volumes of his two-thousand-page Mythologiques expand into a vast labyrinth of interconnected tales, united not by plot or theme but by recurrent patterns of insoluble binary conflicts inherent in the human condition, whether traditional or modern. His vision is thus tragic: there are no unfallen societies, as the title of his autobiographical Tristes tropiques makes clear. The oral tales of these peoples, with their magical transformations and talking animals, may seem as much like folktales as myths, especially as

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their religious and ritual connections have been severed, but they function as myths always do: not to resolve the conflicts of opposites but to think about them: for Lévi-Strauss myth is a way of thinking. His version of myth is Apollonian, contemplative, aimed not at problem-solving or change but at a kind of cathartic detachment: hence his proclivity for quasi-algebraic abstraction. It is not clear who is doing the thinking, however, because he sees myths as a kind of language, which, as an a priori structure, orders, and thereby creates, what we think. Hence we do not think the myths: they think themselves through us. Lévi-Strauss considers his work akin to music: the introduction to Mythologiques is called “Overture.” But the spirit of music that informs his tragic vision is, despite Wagner’s influence, not Dionysian but rather analogous to the Apollonian structures of classical music. His method analyzes diachronic horizontal mythical narrative by arranging its elements into vertical columns based on analogous synchronic elements, just as one might figure out musical structure by examining its simultaneous visual layout as a score. His vertical columns are thus harmonic, their elements arranged as “chords,” disregarding the diachronic forwardmoving temporal elements of rhythm and melody. Music and mythology, he therefore says, are “instruments for the obliteration of time,” so that “by listening to music, and while we are listening to it, we enter into a kind of immortality.”38 It is ironic but inevitable that most readers know of Lévi-Strauss’s technique not by his exhaustive and exhausting analyses of North and South American myths but by the bare dozen pages in which he analyzes the Oedipus story in his essay “The Structural Study of Myth.” Assisting us here, he posits that Sophocles’ play is a tragedy of the violation of order and that that outcome is inevitable, not the result of some moral flaw in Oedipus. Incest and parricide violate the law of identity and difference within the nuclear unit of the law, the family. Lévi-Strauss has been criticized for accepting Freud’s view that the incest taboo is universal, but his treatment of the events has less to do with impulse control and socialization than with their subversion of clear distinctions of identity and difference. This danger likewise gives Ovid’s Myrrha pause as she ponders whether or not to seduce her father.39 Incest risks psychological as well as genetic chaos. It threatens the categories of more than the greeting-card industry when you have daughters and sons who are also your half-sisters and brothers. We might wonder whether chaos is the only alternative to hierarchical order and clearly demarcated differences – perhaps the polymor-

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phous has its own kind of order? But the Oedipus story as we have it accepts the traditional ideological assumptions. Lévi-Strauss’s originality begins with his insight that the psychological aspect of the Oedipus tale interlocks with a social theme deriving from a now-familiar territorial binary: homeland versus exile, native versus wandering outsider. Sophocles’ title, Oedipus Tyrannus, turns on a contrast between a basileus, a ruler who achieves his position by succession, and a tyrannos, who uses other means, as Oedipus does by disposing of the Sphinx. But Thebes is also afflicted with a plague because it has been invaded by a polluted outsider – Oedipus – who needs to be driven out as a scapegoat. The eventual irony is that Oedipus is not an outsider: he is the rightful heir who could succeed his father as king, but, because he has killed him, he is at the same time a usurper. The clear distinctions underlying social order are confounded into paradoxes. The Freudians have noted the resemblance of Oedipus to Hamlet, who returns from abroad to find his mother committing “incest” with an uncle who has killed his brother rather than his father. A mirror-image comic reversal of the Oedipal pattern appears in the story of Odysseus, who arrives in Ithaca as a wandering outsider to unite with a queen who is considered available because of the disappearance of her husband. But in the comic pattern the fact that Odysseus, like Oedipus, is not a real outsider but in fact the rightful heir turns out to be good. Pushing the analogy as far as it will go, we may venture to say that Odysseus reverses the Oedipal pattern by killing his mother, who dies of grief because of his long exile, and rejuvenating his dying father. Nevertheless, when Lévi-Strauss calls the conflict in the Oedipus tragedy “autochthonous,” he means more than “native-born.” He refers implicitly to propaganda of the time showing the superiority of Greek to nonGreek peoples because their founders had allegedly sprung directly out of the earth; original rulers such as Erechthonius and Cecrops in Athens were actually depicted with the lower bodies of serpents, who emerge from the earth. Whereas other societies were settled by “barbarians” (immigrant outsiders), the Greeks were pure in the fullest sense. Autochthony is a divine interruption of the normal horizontal line of biological causation by a power ascending or descending the vertical axis. As LéviStrauss does not observe, the chthonic derivation of the Greeks has a counterpart in the Holy Spirit’s descent to impregnate the Virgin Mary, thus obviating the Messiah’s horizontal line of biological descent from the line of David. Bird descends, serpent ascends: an age-old symbolism. Lévi-Strauss adds the binary of autochthonous versus biological origin to the Oedipus story by showing its larger context within the history of

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the dynasty of Thebes. The city was unique in having two, clumsily conflated foundation stories, but its original founder was Cadmus, who arrived in Boeotia in central Greece as a wandering outsider seeking his sister, Europa, who had been abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull. The literally ungrounded Cadmus lets his hubris drive him to usurp the role of a culture hero and slay a serpent or dragon sacred to Ares, thereby bringing down a curse on his whole dynasty. He sows the dragon’s teeth in the earth, whence spring the citizens of a new order, whose inauguration he celebrates by marrying the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, named Harmonia, in the second most famous wedding in Greek mythology after that of Achilles’ parents, Peleus and Thetis, an event attended by the entire Chain of Being, divine and mortal. But the curse was visited down through generations on their offspring, manifesting itself as a return of the repressed in repeated outbreaks of humanity’s instinctive or chthonic drives of sexuality and violence, outbreaks anything but “harmonious.” The four daughters of Cadmus and Harmonia and their offspring all ended in tragedies of sex and violence. Daughter Autonoe’s son Actaeon was torn apart by his own hunting dogs for looking on Diana naked (I use her Roman name because the great retelling of the whole saga is Book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Ino was driven into madness and suicide, jumping from a cliff into the sea, because she helped protect the offspring (Bacchus or Dionysus) of the third sister, Semele, incinerated by the consummation of her union with Zeus. And the son of Agave, Pentheus, was torn apart by his own mother in her frenzy during the rites of Bacchus, whom he, as order-figure, had been trying to suppress as lawless. After an interruption of the dynastic line and its resumption in the second founding story, we have another curse visited on Laius – but really the same curse, as it was provoked by sexually violent homosexual rape. The curse of Laius undoes Oedipus, who in turn curses his sons so that they battle each other to the death, after which his daughter Antigone dies out of loyalty to the gods’ edict to bury the dead, despite the order of the king, Creon, that her traitorous brother’s body should lie unburied. Violence, either sexual or familial or both at once, undoes the entire extended line until Cadmus and Harmonia end the story where it began, Ouroborosfashion, by being metamorphosed into snakes. I have streamlined the discussion to bring out the central point, which is close to that of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Spengler’s Decline of the West. The form of the disorder / order conflict that most interests Lévi-Strauss is that of nature and culture, the raw and the cooked. Within it lies the answer to the riddle of human identity. Nature, includ-

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ing human nature, consists of instinctive drives, dynamic yet chaotic. Culture partly represses yet partly sublimates or re-channels those drives, and by doing so constructs both civilization and civilized human identity. That is the hubris of the whole human race. Yet the victory is only temporary, and the instinctive forces rise again to bring yet another civilization down. This is, in a way, a historical vision, yet reduced to a tragic cycle, heroic in its aspirations, ironic in its final limitations. It is a pessimistic myth, with nothing recreative or progressive possible. The discussion of tragedy so far has been controlled by Aristotle’s assumptions, even as we challenge and revise some of them. For all the genius of his Poetics, it is selective, clearly reflecting a value judgment. Sophocles’ plays constitute Aristotle’s ideal, and he therefore ignores much of Aeschylus, who writes trilogies, the restless experimentalism of Euripides, who pushes beyond the limits of tragedy into “tragicomedy,” and even Sophocles’ late plays Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, which seem to grope towards something like a Fortunate Fall. All three dramatists deviate from the standard model in search of something linear and progressive, beyond the endless rises and falls, to turn catastrophe and suffering to some better end. In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the fall of Agamemnon in the first play follows the standard pattern: the story of Orestes in the following two plays does not. Orestes is faced with a Hegelian conflict between two equal but opposite moral demands: he must bring his father’s murderers to justice, but doing so will make him guilty of matricide. After he kills his mother, he is pursued by the collective nemesis of the Furies and goes mad, but the third play culminates in a trial that absolves him and redefines the cosmic law that rules all three levels of the vertical axis: the realms of the gods, mortals, and Furies. From what we know of the lost second and third plays of the Prometheus trilogy, they would redefine “justice” to incorporate the three vertical levels represented by Zeus, mortals, and the Titan Prometheus, with his underworld associations. This kind of progress, in Aeschylus and elsewhere, needs time to work itself out, and re-emerges later in part 3’s discussion of the horizontal axis. Sophocles’ last two plays work on an individual rather than a cosmic level, but likewise affirm that tragic suffering can be redemptive over time: at the end of his tormented life, Oedipus has become blessed, and is buried in the Furies’ grove. Philoctetes forgives those who have betrayed him – a theme that will be central to Shakespeare’s tragicomedy – and returns to enable the Greeks to win the Trojan War. Euripides’ amazing tragicomic Helen decreates at least a portion of the Greek version of the

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Fall as an illusion. After many years and many trials, Menelaus is united with Helen after finding that she was never unfaithful to him after all: the temptress who had launched the thousand ships was a simulacrum. Because so much of Greek tragedy directly involves fate and the gods, the administration of justice after a transgression of the law tends to be automatic and impersonal. We spoke earlier, however, about the entropy by which nemesis tends to slide over into a sadistic cruelty whose love of suffering and destruction gains momentum rolling downhill until it finally plunges into an abyss of nihilism. In moments of extremity, tragic heroes will repeat in play after play certain aphorisms such as “Count no man happy until he’s dead” that are the equivalent of Gloucester’s “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They kill us for their sport” (King Lear, 4.1.36–7). Euripides shows this directly in his Herakles, which is like Job without the final restoration; on the human level, he gives us his film noir version of Elektra, for whom revenge is a high like shooting heroin. Elizabethan and Jacobean drama provides two types of quasi-nihilistic tragedy. First, in Tamburlaine and the Jew of Malta, Marlowe created the type of the tragic anti-hero. These characters seem to be nothing but hamartia, but they have so much more energy, intelligence, and wit than their opponents that the audience finds itself unwillingly and uneasily admiring them. It is as if Shakespeare had written a tragedy called Iago. Milton borrowed something of this for his portrait of Satan, and the type is widely popular in genres of popular film: Heath Ledger’s Joker in Batman Returns is nihilism incarnate, as he is the first to observe. Second, the revenge play had a long run of popularity, from Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy through Hamlet to the Jacobean revenge dramas of Tourneur, Webster, Ford, and the like. To make this type of tragedy possible, the playwright must simply forget that the pagan code of revenge is anti-Christian: Hamlet may doubt that the Ghost is really his father, but, for all his intelligence, he never doubts the Ghost’s counsel of vengeance against Claudius. Like all evil, revenge is addictive, and after a while characters such as Iago and Vendice start enjoying it for its own sake. Modern popular film is fond of this brand of anti-tragedy as well. I have mentioned film noir, and ironic revenge tragedy shows up also in late, revisionist westerns such as those of Sam Peckinpah and Clint Eastwood. B. Tragedy and the Natural Cycle The first suggestion that tragedy originated out of the choral dithyramb danced and sung in honour of the god Dionysus came from Aristotle’s

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Poetics. The Cambridge ritualists certainly pushed this thesis, but, despite Aristotle’s prestige, contemporary anthropologists have largely dismissed it as hearsay. It is hard to know what to make of this debate. Aristotle was speaking of form: although we lack proof, it is easy to see how the choral singing and dancing, and gradually adding speaking parts for actors, could have developed into ritualized Greek tragedy, with its masked actors, singing and dancing chorus, and highly stylized dialogue. The Cambridge scholars, however, focused more on the content of tragic drama. They assumed, doubtless thinking of the Catholic Mass, that the ritual of Dionysus re-enacted the god’s death and rebirth and that the deaths of the various tragic heroes are displacements of that original mythos, with the vestigial sacrificial elements at times showing through. The sceptics regard themselves as scientists. The Cambridge scholars, being Classicists, were not scientifically trained and are therefore regarded by the sceptics as insufficiently rigorous, willing to accept speculation instead of hard evidence. The latter in fact reject the whole enterprise of comparative mythology as minimizing the differences among myths in order to find universal patterns. But the training they did have as Classicists enabled the Cambridge group to see one crucial thing: the pattern of the god who dies, is ritually lamented, and is reborn has informed literature for millennia. Pastoral elegy mourns the dead shepherd as if he were the dying god. The crucial point is this: that resemblance exists not because pastoral elegy developed out of the dying-god ritual but through conscious borrowing, as poets appropriated religious patterns for artistic purposes. The same is possibly true of Greek drama. Perhaps the Dionysian ritual did not slowly secularize: rather, the poets took some of its elements and adapted them. The ritual-origins controversy distracts us from the ritualists’ central insight: that tragedy and comedy do, taken together, have as a deep structure the outlines of a death-and-rebirth pattern. The pattern is there: it does not matter for the purposes of criticism how it arrived there. Why should the tragic dramatists suggest the ritualized killing of a god, as human beings are not reborn after they die? Perhaps for that very reason: to suggest, in the face of death’s finality, that for mortals the rebirth is on another level, that of the imagination. We have not yet dealt with two of Aristotle’s most important terms, anagnorisis (recognition) and catharsis. Anagnorisis has two possible referents. It can refer to a recognition by the hero, usually relating to peripeteia, the turning point of his fortunes: the moment Oedipus realizes the curse has been fulfilled; that Macbeth knows that Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane, or that Macduff is not of

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woman born. But the audience too can experience anagnorisis, just as it can catharsis. What does it recognize in a tragic action? At the very least, a meaning, a value, and a nobility in human suffering and death. This is true as far back as the Iliad, whose plot was the paradigm of the surface plot of Greek tragedy, as the cyclical death-and-rebirth pattern was its deep structure. In the Iliad, Achilles and Hector mirror each other by playing out exactly the Poetics’ pattern of the tragic hero: Achilles’ pride leads to the death of Patroclus, the person he loves most, while Hector’s leads him to face Achilles in a final showdown he knows he will not win, leaving his family and city doomed. But commentators frequently point out how the heroes’ courage in facing death every day gives them a nobility denied to the deathless gods. What the audience of a tragic drama sees on stage is fall, destruction, and death. The protagonists are mortal: to follow and complete the cycle, therefore, any rebirth is going to have to be on an imaginative level, in the mind’s eye of the audience. What, if anything, is reborn, like the phoenix, out of the fires of tragedy’s destruction? First, in some cases, the hero’s martyrdom may help others, as with Milton’s Samson. In less displaced tragic narratives, the hero’s sacrifice redeems or renews an entire world, as with Prometheus and Christ, and, in a more limited way, with the ordeals of Orestes and Philoctetes. Second, nemesis re-establishes a type of order at the end of some of Shakespeare’s tragedies, including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear, but it is a reduced order, often no more than a demoralized remnant of the surviving characters. Yet noble aspirations brought down are not necessarily defeated. A lost cause may resurrect in the minds of others and inspire them to renew the heroic effort, to dream the impossible dream, as the song from the musical about Don Quixote puts it. Of course, it is always possible to doubt whether the mass of ordinary humanity is capable of living up to the example set for us, as in the cases of Shaw’s Caesar and St Joan, or, for that matter, of Jesus, whose chief disciple, Peter, turns out to be an inadequate rock on which to found a church. Third, some tragic heroes and heroines inspire not by their deeds but by their heroic bearing of affliction, most of all by maintaining their humanity in a world of evil, cruelty, and despair. Such are the Duchess of Malfi and Euripides’ Herakles. Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, in very different ways, affirm the value of their love although a whole world stands against it. Fourth, if nothing else, through suffering, we may break through to a wisdom, and an ability to love, that is perhaps acquired in no other way.

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Lear acquires humanity and compassion, although he dies of a broken heart. Hamlet somehow learns that there’s a divinity shapes our ends. Milton’s Samson conquers his greatest foe, his own despair and self-pity, and, when he does so, finds that God still regards him as his champion after all. We speak of the “production” of plays. Eternity is in love with these productions, because on another level their ruins build mansions. Aristotle’s theory of catharsis relates also to the audience. Perhaps the simplest and yet profoundest question one may ask about tragedy is why people should be willing not only to witness but to participate vicariously in suffering and death. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud regards the experience of art as a “mild narcosis”: a drug without the side effects. Some art is like this, and some people use art simply as an escape. There is nothing wrong with this. But tragedy, along with realism and irony, is dominated by the reality principle, not the pleasure principle: that is one reason Aristotle regarded it as the greatest literary form, and why so many people consider the “tragic vision” the profoundest philosophy of life. Here, the connection of tragedy with cyclically repeated sacrificial ritual is enlightening. Ritual is participatory: even a ritual that seems designed to operate on the external world, like a so-called fertility ritual, aims also to put participants through an experience, raising them into a different state of mind. A celebrated study of the ritual experience, Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, views ritual as what holds traditional societies together.40 Because it is external and coercive, law alone is not enough to forge genuine community. Ritual does that by dissolving the boundaries of the normal ego-self: the participants become part of a larger identity, symbolized by the uniting image of the totem animal in the Australian societies that Durkheim studied. And the community’s central ritual is commonly a sacrificial one: a group may bond by sacrificing a scapegoat figure, or by participating in the willing death of some redeeming figure. Christ was crucified as a criminal scapegoat, but he was really the innocent Lamb of God, or, in vegetation-god imagery, the bread and wine. In a sacrificial meal, the victim is eaten, literally or symbolically as in the Eucharist, because what is eaten becomes part of us. Through sacrifice a participant comes to experience what Paul speaks of in Christian terms, the feeling of being part of a “mystical body.” Modern secular institutions and groups often have initiation rituals: hazing, whether in a fraternity or sorority or in the military, is a vestigial form of death-and-rebirth experience.

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Tragedy differs from religious ritual, however, in uniting the audience on the level of imagination rather than the fallen world. A tragedy’s audience unites not with a clan or institution but with humanity itself, on the level of Frye’s “primary concern.” And we do so by empathetically identifying with the tragic figure, who raises within us the pity and fear Aristotle spoke of, participating unto the death, at which point we undergo catharsis, a purging. What is purged is our ego-identity, that which feels pity and fear, not just for the victim but for ourselves. When that has been cast out, we feel the “calm of mind, all passion spent,” that marks our rebirth into a new identity or Blakean state – the Choral ode of Samson Agonistes, whose final line we have just invoked, uses the imagery of the reborn phoenix – that is the peace that passeth understanding. V . C O M EDY A. The Spirit of Comedy Aristotle is alleged to have written a treatise on comedy that has been lost, but a landmark theory of comedy in our time helps to fill the gap. Northrop Frye’s “The Argument of Comedy” (1949), which he later slightly downsized into a section of Anatomy of Criticism (1957), is so brilliant and comprehensive that the following discussion makes only modest claims to originality and is indebted to Frye at every point.41 Comedy is post-tragic in spirit if not in time. Before the advent of dramatic comedy, that spirit emerged first within the older epic tradition in the form of the Odyssey. “Comic” in the structural sense refers to the shape of the mythos or plot and not to humour, although there is plenty of humour in the Odyssey. Whereas the plot of tragedy is a parabola or upside-down U-shape of rise and fall, one half of a total cycle, the plot of comedy is a U-shape (the other half of the cycle) in which the lives of the main characters descend into a chaos of problems, conflicts, even dangers, that finally, at the bottom of the arc, reach a point of crisis that may sometimes be a point of near or apparent death. At which point there is a turn, a peripeteia, just as there is at the top of the arc of tragedy, and the plot swings upward to a desirable ending for the main characters. Yet comedy is not just a mirror-image reversal of tragedy: it seems to be subversive and revisionist in relation to tragedy and the heroic ideal that guarantees so much tragedy in the ancient world. Odysseus has detached himself from the heroic code of honour enough to be a survivor: the story

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of how he tried to be a draft dodger and had to be tricked into enlisting suggests that he never fully bought into the glory game. Unlike the other warriors, he is thus able to return and restore the society of Ithaca, which has been languishing in near anarchy for twenty years. Thus the Odyssey depicts all three of Frye’s levels of comic resolution: individual, familial and / or romantic, and social.42 Like Greece, India has two epics. The Mahabharata tells a tragic, heroic story with many points of contact with the Iliad. The Ramayana, in contrast, narrates the comic story of Rama, eventually re-united with his Sita, assisted by the Trickster figure of Hanuman, the shapeshifting monkey god. The parallel with the Iliad and Odyssey suggests that the tragic and comic have affinities with Blake’s Experience and Innocence, respectively, the two contrary states of the human soul. There is tragic death, and there is comic rebirth or renewal. But death is realistic, and rebirth is not. Rebirth, even figurative rebirth, depends on a “twist” or reversal that the reality principle utterly denies. While we will go on to examine, as we did with tragedy, comedy’s relationship with the fallen principles of law and the natural cycle, something subversive erupts in comedy. In conservative comedy, it does so only temporarily, long enough to return the order of society to its uncorrupted (though of course still fallen) form, long enough to bring about the renewal that gives us hope every spring, even though we know that all renewals are cyclical, and thus heartbreakingly temporary. In more progressive comedy, we at least glimpse a revolutionary energy working not merely to renew the human and natural orders but to transform them – to re-negotiate the terms of the reality principle. Because this energy works through time, and is sometimes identified as creative time, as opposed to time the destroyer, its artistic representations take on a linear pattern that will form the focus of part 3. We see this happening in both Greek and Renaissance comedy in the turn to tragicomedy by Euripides and by Shakespeare, respectively, in the final phase of their careers. B. Comedy and Law The tragic hero violates the law, in the larger sense of transgressing the limitations of the cosmic and social order, and is brought down by some form of nemesis. Comedy reverses this pattern: the hero or heroine and other sympathetic characters are oppressed or threatened by various figures who either violate the law or twist it to their own corrupt ends. The comic action consists of some form of nemesis that either drives out the

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blocking characters as scapegoats or converts them from their oppressive ways and reconciles them with the sympathetic characters, resulting in a general social renewal. Tragic heroes are individualists by necessity, isolated from the rest of humanity by their very superiority. Often, they have only one trusted companion, as Achilles has Patroclus and Hamlet has Horatio. In so far as comedy mimics this, it may feature a protagonist who is an outsider due to some sort of alleged though ultimately disproved inferiority. Odysseus is an example of this within a heroic context. He was given his name by his grandfather Autolycus – himself a thief, though favoured by Hermes, god of thieves. Because the world of men has been against him, Autolycus names his grandson by means of an equivocation, a pun on the word oddysomai, which means “to hate and to be hated.” It turns out to be an apt name: the adult Odysseus is so distrusted for his guile that in later Greek drama he is at times portrayed as more or less a villain. In the Odyssey, while no villain, he is a loner even by birth, an only child, leading to the plot obstacle he must overcome in the epic’s second half, where he has to conquer Penelope’s 108 suitors with no more help than his son and a couple of herdsmen. He has the unseen assistance, however, of the gods, who turn out to admire Tricksters. During his Wanderings in the epic’s first half, he has the help of that same Hermes who favoured his grandfather: in regaining his kingdom in the second half, he is aided by Athena, because, as she tells him in a supreme compliment, “Two of a kind, we are, / contrivers, both” (13.379–80). Whereas a tragic hero is of elite social status, the protagonists of comedy may be low-born, bottom dogs, like Chaplin’s tramp: Odysseus’s favourite disguise is as a down-and-out, wandering tramp and beggar. A pamphlet called the Tractatus Coislinianus, which is purportedly based on Aristotle’s lost treatise on comedy, identifies the comic protagonist as an eiron (someone who pretends to be less than he is).43 Odysseus the eiron outwits the Cyclops by pretending to be no one at all: “Everybody calls me Nobody,” he says. Comic protagonists are sometimes nobodies in the sense of being orphans, or of mysterious parentage. Jesus, the hero of the divine comedy of the Bible, is an orphan in the sense that his ostensible father is not his real Father, and he is disguised, so to speak, as the son of a carpenter so poor that his child had to be born in a stable. The orphan motif runs from Euripides’ tragicomic Ion through Roman New Comedy, through the novels of Dickens, through Shaw’s Major Barbara, down to the Luke Skywalkers and Harry Potters of contemporary comic romance. Another type is the unlikely hero, often unlikely because he is not heroic. He may be a

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hobbit, for example. Or he may be a she – comedy features a marvellous line of strong female characters who single-handedly bring about the happy ending by being more intelligent and resourceful than the thickheaded men around them, whom they end up having to redeem and reform, if only to have somebody to marry. The alter egos of comic-book and movie superheroes are typically unheroic. Comedy’s values are more social than individualist, however, and a comedy may frequently be more of an ensemble performance than a star vehicle. The protagonist may gather around himself or herself a whole group of sympathetic characters who, because of comedy’s anti-elitist and egalitarian tendencies, at times are something of a motley crew. Jesus’ followers were fishermen, tax collectors, former prostitutes, sinners rather than publicans. The multiple weddings at the end of a Shakespearean comedy fold into the sympathetic group the low-life characters of the comic-relief subplot and such former obstructionists as turn out to be redeemable. Likewise, Dickens’s heroes gather about them a collection of colourful eccentrics and grotesques. Some groups in comedy omit the representatives of the conventional norm: Huck Finn’s outlaw band consists of himself, the escaped slave Jim, and the Trickster Tom Sawyer. Melville’s Pequod sports a very motley crew indeed, and Ishmael’s moving bond with Queequeg is the potential nucleus of another society of outsiders. McMurphy, in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, makes a community out of the inmates of a mental institution. The fellowship of the Ring in Tolkien includes hobbits, dwarves, humans, elves, and a wizard. Luke Skywalker faces Darth Vader’s Empire with a crew that consists of a woman, a Trickster, two incompetent robots, and, thankfully, a Jedi knight. A good number of superhero groups are mismatched sets characterized by a good deal of sometimes-humorous, sometimes-angry bickering. In the Three Stooges comedies, comic bickering, along with slapstick, dominates the foreground, the plot being more or less an excuse for it: something of the sort is true also of the Marx Brothers films. Such bickering is as old as the Roman New Comedies of Plautus, whose surface texture is at least as crude and rowdy. The serious theme lurking behind even some of the sillier pop-culture examples is acceptance of difference, based on empathy. Obstructing the path to that harmonious ending, however, various blocking characters, sometimes even a whole society, need to be transformed, or, failing that, moved out of the way. As Frye has observed, the greater the emphasis on the renewed community of the ending, with its

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forgiveness, reconciliations, and weddings, the more we have what in Shakespeare is called a “festive” comedy.44 But the more ironic the comedy, the more emphasis is placed on the agon, or contest, with the blocking characters. Ironic comedy’s agon here is in effect a battle for the vertical axis, the axis (in the fallen world) of the law and the social power structure. Conservative or moderate comedy stops with returning the social order to a healthy norm: the progressive or revolutionary comedy calls the law itself into question, and ranges from the iconoclastic to the apocalyptic. Conservative or moderate comedy renovates the social order, curing its diseases, in one of several ways, depending upon the blocking characters, who nevertheless all are types of what the Tractatus Coislinianus, following Aristotle, called the alazon, the person who pretends to be more than he really is, the opposite of the eiron. The alazon–eiron conflict plays itself out in five types of comedy. First, in undisplaced, mythical comedy, the blocking characters are devils, demons, and monsters, whose desire is to pull down the axis mundi altogether and return the world to chaos. In the revolt of the rebel angels as dramatized in Paradise Lost, the Son of God casts Satan and the devils down the axis into hell, followed by the counter-movement of Creation, in which the world rises out of Chaos. The Renaissance courtly theatrical form of the masque was an elaborate spectacle whose perfunctory plot led to an epiphany of the Chain of Being, with the king, who would be in the audience, at its apex. Accompanying it as the anti-masque was a separate, though attached, play or skit that, as its name implies, temporarily unleashed the forces of disorder, whose defeat the audience was ideologically supposed to cheer. The anti-masque of Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue featured Comus, son of Bacchus and god of the kinds of pleasure that are not reconciled to virtue, and dancing barrels. Milton took the same material and turned the masque form into genuine drama in Comus, whose characters line up along the vertical axis. The Attendant Spirit, who dwells in a paradisal place “below the starry mansion of Jove’s court,” comes down to the fallen world to guard three children against the forces of the demonic Comus. The anti-masque is close in spirit to what we know of the Greek satyr play, which followed a tragic trilogy. The only one we possess, Euripides’ Cyclops, retells the story of Odysseus’s defeat of the Cyclops. In the Odyssey, Homer turns the folktale of the Cyclops into the presentation of a kind of anti-society: the Cyclopes have no laws or assemblies, have not invented agriculture, and are not even a real community, each Cyclops living apart from the rest in solitude. The kind of superhero comic plot in which a

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super-villain is on the verge of destroying the entire world or even universe updates the more mythical versions of this kind of story in a popular form: Star Wars is the same plot in science-fantasy trapping. So is, more profoundly, the defeat of the forces of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings. Second, down at the human level, the alazon types may be con artists and criminals, enemies of the law, and so have to be exposed and driven out as scapegoats. Jonson’s Volpone and The Alchemist are of this type – but we notice a frequent ambiguity in this kind of ironic comedy. We have seen that the comic protagonist himself or herself may often possess Trickster characteristics and have a somewhat shady relationship with law and respectability. Jonson’s con artists have so much more intelligence and energy than their victims that we feel ourselves cheering them on despite our better judgment.45 Third, Ben Jonson invented what he called the comedy of “humours”: a contemporary version of the two-thousand-year-old comedy of comic types, characters locked into a repeated pattern of behaviour. The traditional four humours, or bodily fluids, were supposed to produce four basic temperaments: choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine, and melancholic. The medical explanation was wrong, but the psychological insight was real: the very fact that these words have all been adopted into English vocabulary and that we all know people who fit their definitions shows that the concept of psychological types has some basis to it. In Shakespeare, Hotspur is choleric and Hamlet melancholic; Falstaff is sanguine, yet, like many comedians, claims to be melancholic under the surface. Jonson expanded the concept into a whole spectrum in Every Man in His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour. He knew there were many more than four types because Aristophanes in Old Comedy, Plautus and Terence in New Comedy, and countless others had employed them before him, as Molière and Dickens did later. The English comedy of manners, from Restoration comedy to the modern comedies of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, are an aristocratic adaptation of the comedy of humours, with an emphasis on wit and satire rather than on sentiment, as the novels of Jane Austen are adaptations to the lives of the landed gentry. Humour characters proliferate in modern comic strips, somewhat refined these days because of increasing sensitivity to the potential harm of stereotyping. The catalogue of humorous types is startlingly extensive, including the bully, the pedant, the pretentious artist, the religious hypocrite, the social climber, the seducer, the gambler, the parasite, the glutton or drunk, the senex or bad-tempered old man, the naïve romantic lover, the eternal optimist, the miser, the misanthrope, the shrew, the beggar or tramp, the con

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artist, the innocent fool or idealist, the enfant terrible, the figure of false power, the ditz, the weirdo, the nerd, the slob, the malaprop. One wonders how much of the human race is left out. Indeed, the titles of Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair and Thackeray’s Vanity Fair hint at the ambition of those works to unfold all of human life as a spectacle of vanity, humorous in all senses. All of these character types are roles: they are masks people don, which make them literally hypocrites (from the Greek for stage actor). This fits the alazon pattern of someone pretending to be what he or she is not. But Oscar Wilde was more than merely witty when he said that the first duty in life was to strike a pose. Role-playing in fact constitutes the greater part of social life: Jung said that everyone has a persona, a social mask, but in fact we play many roles in many social contexts, public and private, and there is perhaps never a time when we are not doing so. Even in moments when we feel we are being sincere and authentically ourselves, we are merely acting the Sincere and Authentic role. Learning to adopt social roles is part of our insertion into Lacan’s Symbolic Order. But humour characters in comedy reflect the alienation that Lacan said was attendant on that insertion. In healthy social interaction we are mostly in control of the role we are playing. Neurosis ensues when a role takes over: humour characters seem to be in the grip of something like an obsessive-compulsive neurosis. The purpose of the persona is manifold. A form of “lying,” as Wilde tells us, it can be used as a weapon, to deceive and manipulate. It is defensive as well as offensive, however, and can shield us from the ridicule we fear on exposure of our intimate selves: clothes are a part of the persona, and protect us not merely from the weather but from the fear of being naked in front of others. More subtly, the persona provides definition: that is, it functions like the baby’s image in Lacan’s mirror stage, assuring the baby that it has a determinate identity. Insecurity and confusion lead to the impulse to hide the seemingly formless welter of thoughts, sensations, feelings, and associations inside us behind the sharp and stable definition of the mask. But of course, that means that we are all humour characters to some degree: Jonson spoke of every man in his humour. The positive side of the comedy of types is the possibility of change, of breaking out of stereotyped behaviour. Sometimes the possibility is not realized: types occur in tragedy as well as comedy, and Othello is a play about what happens when the jealous senex cannot break out of his obsessions until it is too late. Lear shows the choleric temperament become lethal. But the types are masks, and masks can be switched: this is the

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theme of Much Ado about Nothing. The humour in Much Ado turns on the idea that human identity is unstable, because it is a matter of switching masks. The idea that that there is no core, stable human identity, that human life is inherently dramatic, a matter of adopting the mask and the role necessary at the moment, is threatening: it is a fearful notion that if we peel all of the layers of the onion of self down to the centre, what we will find is only an absence. Yet the flexibility of role-playing is the great hope of the play. Both Benedick and Beatrice cling to the “merry” rather than “melancholy” humour: both assume a detached, ironic, and invulnerable stance about love, because they have been hurt in the past. The fact that they can drop these defensive attitudes and admit that they love each other is the great hope of the story. If humours are stubborn and inflexible, as is Shylock’s humour of revenge, they must be rejected and the characters who cling to them must be exiled. The treatment of Shylock is indefensible in its external coercion, but morally right in its rejection of hatred and revenge. Malvolio exiles himself: he is offered the chance to be his own judge about the rather cruel tricks that have been played on him, but instead he stomps off the stage, saying, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” By the time of its festive ending, Much Ado displays the various outcomes possible in a humour comedy. The villain, Don John the Bastard, whose humour is a scaled-down, comic version of Iago’s motiveless malignity, is foiled and cast out of the community. Benedick and Beatrice have, with a little help from their friends, purged themselves of the humour that has prolonged their “merry war.” The community itself has recovered from possession by the spirit of “war,” that is, of male self-proving aggression and its blustering vanity. And the comic subplot, as usual with Shakespeare, consists of the antics of lower-class humour characters, in this case Dogberry and the watch, who are included in a subsidiary way in the festive ending. Fourth, the types of comedy examined thus far are comedies of order, corresponding to tragedies of order, but some of them contain a subplot dealing with romantic love. When that becomes the main plot, we have romantic comedy, which concerns the trials and tribulations of lovers facing various obstacles to their love. This genre became a stage standard with the Roman New Comedy of Plautus and Terence, and it remains so popular in contemporary movies that a lot of people tend to think that it is what comedy basically is. The course of true love is temporarily thwarted by conflicts with both natural and social law. A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrates both

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kinds. The law of natural attraction is transgressed when two people who are obviously right for each other and whom the audience knows belong together are estranged because one party balks at falling in love with the other. The fairies use “love juice” to solve that problem: lovers without such a recourse have to resort to alternative methods, depending on the reason for the other lover’s recalcitrance. If, as happens not infrequently, the comedy’s delightful chaos includes role reversal, and the woman is the one pursuing, the method may be, or at least include, the Cinderella technique of a makeover: a dowdy woman reveals herself to be beautiful, sometimes by as little as taking off her glasses and letting down her hair. Audrey Hepburn does this in Billy Wilder’s film comedy Sabrina, catching a rich playboy although she is only the daughter of his chauffeur. Pygmalion’s Eliza Doolittle transforms herself both physically and socially, although Shaw, true to form, forbids her relationship with Henry Higgins to develop along the traditional romantic lines his post-Victorian audience would have expected. These examples show how natural attraction or repulsion is more often than not closely bound up with social-class distinctions. Helena in All’s Well That Ends Well has to surmount class difference as well as a humour of male immaturity in her pursuit of Bertram. The issue of class distinctions moves the discussion into the area of social obstacles to romantic love. A Midsummer Night’s Dream employs the stock pattern of New Comedy in which a senex father opposes the match, usually for reasons of social class and money, and has to be outwitted, although Hermia’s father, Egeus, seems to have no motive beyond simply asserting his patriarchal power on principle. In some of Plautus’s comedies, the Oedipal underside of this plot pattern is showing, with father and son being rivals for the same girl. The girl may have the stigma of being an orphan raised in a brothel, although she will later turn out to be of respectable parentage. Fielding’s Tom Jones reverses the gender situation: Squire Allworthy opposes Tom’s love for Sophia because Tom is an orphaned bastard. Fifth, as I said earlier, comedy may be either conservative or revolutionary, concerned with returning the social order to its original rightness or questioning its authority altogether. However, the more radical and subversive it becomes, the more it shades into satire: despite its name, the Old Comedy of Aristophanes will appear in part 4 as largely satire, along with modern forms often considered comedies but not in the end contained by comedy’s social assumptions.

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C. Comedy and the Natural Cycle The contest between alazon and eiron is vertical, in terms of mythological schematism. Figures of false authority and illegitimate power (alazons), justifying themselves in the name of the law, lord it over figures representing human desire. While false authority always rationalizes its position at the top of the vertical axis of power as inevitable, unchangeable, and divinely sanctioned, overthrowing it is a “revolution.” The eiron rises as the alazon falls: the very word “revolution” introduces a circular or cyclical principle. This shift occurs by means of a peripeteia, a twist or turn. While in tragedy, this is an assertion of the law’s inexorable limitation, in comedy, the twist that allows the happy ending is deeply subversive. It violates the reality principle, our conviction, sometimes unconscious, that the frustration of desire is inevitable. This triumph of desire is problematic because it seems to validate and promote narcissism. We are not important, and the world does not exist to gratify our wishes: if children are not taught this from a very young age, they grow up to be spoiled, narcissistic brats. As adults, they will be the very alazon figures who obstruct happy endings in the future. This is the wrong kind of circle, a vicious circle of defeat. That is why the cyclical form of comedy necessitates a death-and-rebirth sacrificial pattern by which the characters – and, with them, the audience – are reborn, through ordeal, from the ego to a larger and more inclusive sense of self, transforming desire from selfish to synergetic. What brings about the happy ending in comedy, given that it is improbable, implausible, sometimes even impossible? Three answers are possible: the subversion of false order by the eiron and other sympathetic characters, by a “deputy dramatist,” or by an unseen power. First, the obstructing characters represent false order, usually with power, privilege, and sometimes even the law on their side, so opposing them with force is a losing tactic. What they are vulnerable to is some kind of creative disorder, so the comic protagonist may win the day through some kind of tricksterism. If the agon is directly physical, this means battle tactics: Odysseus locks up the suitors’ arms while they lie in drunken sleep, then faces them the next day in a room with only one exit, where he is standing with a long-distance weapon, his bow. This kind of fight-scene comedy often takes the form of a David-and-Goliath scenario. In humour comedies, elaborate plots are concocted to cure the sympathetic-humour characters and expel the unsympathetic ones, or both at once, as in Tartuffe, where Orgon must be disabused of his naïve belief in

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Tartuffe’s piety and Tartuffe must be exposed, arrested, and jailed. In romantic comedies, boy must contrive to outwit both parental and social opposition and the resistance of girl, which sometimes means prying her from the clutches of some alazon jerk or creep, often a rich one, by showing him in his true colours. At times, the contest is one of wits. An ancient form, revived in The Hobbit, is the riddle contest. Equally time-honoured is the debate. In the comedy of manners, this takes the form of repartee. Modern night-club comedy will sometimes feature a comic duo in whose back-and-forth dialogue one member plays the role of an eiron deflating the pretensions of an alazon. Peacock in his dialogue-novels and Shaw in all his plays expand the repartee dialogue of the comedy of manners into a fully intellectual, if satiric, debate. In undisplaced mythical form, the eiron wins the debate by exposing the “reality principle” as the illusion of a fallen world. Milton’s Paradise Regained turns the Temptation in the desert into a debate in which Satan, as alazon, lifts Jesus up to the top of a high mountain, the apex of the fallen form of the vertical axis, the axis of worldly power, where he tries to convince Jesus, as eiron, to accept the fallen world, of which he is lord, as final, and therefore be tempted by what it has to offer. The temptations escalate from those of necessity to physical appetite to wealth and power to worldly wisdom, in the end to the full range of human temptations. Jesus rejects them all, not just as sinful, but as illusions. There is a close parallel with the temptation of the Buddha under the axis of the Bo tree. By resisting all the temptations, Jesus transforms the vertical axis of the power system into the dynamic form of cyclical revolution: he, whose obscure parentage and poverty marked him as an eiron figure from the bottom of the social ladder, remains standing on the pinnacle of the Temple, another vertical axis, while Satan in his hubris falls. The comic hero is by no means always an active Trickster. Sometimes he is an innocent whose Tricksterism is inadvertent: he simply is a monkey wrench in the works. The famous scene in which Chaplin’s innocent tramp is caught in the machinery in Modern Times is a literal version of this. In other cases, the Trickster is a separate character, in New Comedy a tricky slave who helps out the young lovers. Second, one step beyond that, we arrive at the figure in Shakespeare’s comedy and romance that Frye termed a “deputy dramatist.”46 As Trickster, this character contrives what amounts to, or sometimes actually is, a play within a play, manipulating characters into roles and putting them through ordeals that attempt to bring about the transformations necessary for the happy ending. The most thoroughgoing examples are

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the Duke of Measure for Measure and Prospero in The Tempest. Oberon takes the part in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with Puck in the “tricky slave” role; the fact that his scenario does not go quite as planned reveals that, although the deputy dramatist may seem to be “playing God” by meddling in characters’ lives for their own good, he is himself fallible and, as Prospero recognizes in The Tempest, may also need a bit of transformation. Because tragedy and comedy are mirror inversions of each other, the deputy dramatist’s plans can backfire in a tragic context, as Friar Lawrence’s do in Romeo and Juliet and Polonius’s in Hamlet. Hamlet’s Mousetrap play succeeds in unmasking Claudius, but with tragic results. Iago plays the role of evil deputy dramatist all too successfully in Othello. Happy endings occur through an interplay of chance and choice, to use Yeats’s words. “Choice” here means elaborate plotting – which makes for elaborate plots. Farce is a kind of comedy where much of the entertainment resides in the roller-coaster ride of a high-speed complicated and recomplicated plot: what seems like chaos to the characters caught up in it is actually a complex design of either a deputy dramatist or the actual playwright. Screwball comedy is romantic comedy with a strong infusion of farce. But such plots rarely come off exactly as planned: chance enters the picture through an accident or a new wrinkle, and the comic heroes, or their Trickster allies and deputy dramatists, are forced to be quick-witted and improvise. Improvisation is in fact a primary Trickster characteristic, and the delight of “improv” comedy lies in the resourceful quick-wittedness of the comedians. Third, the shape of the comic plot – the action plunges into conflict and crisis, then through a twist turns back up again, to end where it began, only with the characters, their lives, and their world renewed – is a cycle, and in many plays of Shakespeare is directly identified with the cycle of nature. Nature’s cycle is itself fallen, but its nadir seems to be the point of entry for some unseen power from beyond the cycle itself. When Christianity took over the imagery of the old pagan festivals, it located Christ’s birth at the winter solstice and his resurrection in the spring. What C.L. Barber called Shakespeare’s “festive comedies” have a connection with the holidays and festivities that mark the seasonal cycle: Twelfth Night with Christmas and A Midsummer Night’s Dream with spring celebrations such as Valentine’s Day and St John’s Eve.47 Scholars of the ritual associations of drama have done much research on the “psychology” of the holiday – a time of disorder, a temporary release from the normal restrictions of the social order, a paradigmatic

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example being the Roman Saturnalia. Parties are impromptu holidays, again to relax from normal inhibitions, often assisted by alcohol: a party at which everyone is behaving respectably and with social dignity means no one is having any fun. The whole point is to let go of control and make a bit of a fool of oneself, and the prigs and party poopers, like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, are control freaks with a power complex. How far to let go of control is always the question: the senex power structure anxiously cracks down on the uninhibited behaviour of young people, only partly for the legitimate reason of safety. The same is true for the regulating of sex. Shakespeare’s romantic comedies end in the stability of marriage: life cannot be one perpetual revel, much less debauch, and human beings need the stabilizing rhythm of domesticity. But, before that point, what goes on in the woods of Midsummer Night’s Dream stays in the woods and is polymorphous, even if the plot tries to blame it on love juice. The road of excess in Twelfth Night leads through the byways of gender-bending attraction to members of the same sex. What seems to be suggested is an alternating rhythm of Dionysian and Apollonian, which may not be optional: the fates of Euripides’ Hippolytus and Pentheus are instructive. Shakespeare’s comedy and romance have another relation to the natural cycle most famously explored by Northrop Frye, in his theory of the “green world,” a term that has been found helpful and is widely used.48 In a whole group of Shakespeare’s comedies, the cyclical action runs from court or other social setting out into a forest or natural world and then back again. Transformations and metamorphoses within the “green world” twist or reverse the action towards the happy ending. Green-world comedies include Two Gentlemen of Verona, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and The Winter’s Tale. The green world of Midsummer Night’s Dream is the realm of the fairies, which derives from the realm of Faerie in Celtic mythology, which scholars refer to as the Otherworld, a hidden world on the other side of our own. That realm is a major part of literature beyond Shakespearean comedy or even Celtic mythology: it is the lower midpoint on the vertical axis, mirroring the higher midpoint of paradise, with which it has ambiguous relations. We shall explore this extensively in part 4. As paradise was the entry point for the Fall, the Otherworld is the entry point for some force that redeems the Fall. Frye also distinguishes a group of “sea comedies” in which the symbol of the Otherworld is the sea. As human beings cannot live within the sea, what happens instead is transformative action in another land across the sea, as in The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night,

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Pericles, and The Tempest. Because the sea is a Biblical image of chaos and death, the imagery is baptismal. Shakespeare frequently hints that there is a greater power working through the Trickster hero or deputy dramatist while itself remaining invisible and unknown. He suggests the possibility of identifying that redeeming force with divine Providence, as when Bottom’s speech about his “bottomless dream” echoes the New Testament, but leaves it up to the audience to decide whether or not to make the identification. It leads one to wonder, however, whether the ultimate Trickster is not God himself: at least, as Frye has also noticed, this would help make better sense of some of God’s behaviour in the divine comedy of the Bible. We have already noted the Trickster Jesus of Mark. His Old Testament counterpart is the Trickster God of Genesis, culminating in the comedy of the story of Jacob and Joseph. After what amounts to a second Fall of man in the Deluge, God decides that the human race on its own will keep repeating the Fall indefinitely unless he steps into human history as deputy dramatist and initiates a counter-movement in the Covenant with Abraham. That counter-movement is the twist towards the happy ending, the transformative Otherworld this time being the arid wasteland of the desert, out of which will spring fertility and new life: a Middle Eastern version of the natural cycle. The contest of sterility and fertility runs all through the stories of Abraham and his descendants in Genesis, beginning with Sarah’s impossible fertility at the age of ninety. A Trickster God chooses Trickster worshippers: Jacob, a Trickster who cheats his own brother of his birthright with full divine approval, becomes wealthy through a trick involving the fertility of sheep, and produces twelve offspring who will generate the twelve tribes. These are saved from famine, in other words from infertility, by Joseph, the dream-reader and disguiser, a more sophisticated Trickster than his father. The happy ending is a recognition scene reuniting the family in Egypt. Thomas Mann’s understanding of these patterns led him to choose the story of Jacob and Joseph to expand into the epic-length comedy of Joseph and His Brethren. The God of Moses, later in the Exodus, is still a Trickster God, and he is certainly not easy to live with. But a bottom-dog people like the Israelites needed a Trickster God to prevail over the mighty empires that always surrounded them. The contest between the stammering Moses and imperious Pharaoh is pure eiron versus alazon. Yahweh’s invisibility, which constantly baffled the heathen, in itself is an eiron trait: he seems less than he is. In contrast, the heathens’ idols, seemingly so solid and impressive, are

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knocked over like bowling pins. Only when Israel reaches its apex under David and Solomon does hubris set in and the Old Testament narrative reverses itself into tragedy. As is true of tragedy, a theory of comedy cannot rest with an analysis of plot, characterization, and theme, but must consider audience response, which typically in comedy is laughter, that uniquely human, common, and yet mysterious phenomenon. Despite the many explanations, laughter, for our purposes, is release, the form catharsis takes in comedy. The categories laughter at and laughter with are a commonplace. Laughter at is a weapon, and deadly. Nothing is as painful as being on its receiving end, especially from a group: people have anxiety dreams about it. For Milton’s Samson, being made a spectacle of is worse than all the Philistines’ whips and chains. Such laughter is the ultimate weapon against the blocking figures, who are whittled down to size by its sharp blade. In animated cartoons, much of the laughter is provoked by physical humour. The alazon Wile E. Coyote chases the eiron Roadrunner and ends up squashed flat with an anvil dropped on his head – although comedy’s reconciling spirit ensures that he will momentarily pop back into the third dimension again. In more verbal comedy, the blocking character may be skewered by wit. There is such a thing as revenge comedy, but again the reconciling spirit demands that it not be taken over the line, as happens with Shylock, instantly making him a sympathetic character. But when Charlie Chaplin, in one of his short films, fights a ten-minute battle with an escalator, and loses, we laugh not at him but with him. Even if he is not laughing, his ordeal makes him sympathetic to us, and we are on his side: we have all fought our losing battles with technology. When Don Quixote loses his battle with technology, we laugh at the madness that thinks a windmill is a giant, but salute the nobility that sends him fearlessly charging against something ten times his size. The persona is an alazon device: by wearing one, we are trying to look better than we really are, or at least more normal. Yet the pratfalls of comedy rip away the mask and show the character in his or her clumsy, vulnerable, foolish humanity – and the character is instantly lovable, not despite but because of all the imperfections. Self-deprecating humour is an eiron’s device, a way of trying to look less exalted. Woody Allen’s schlemihl characters wear their neuroses on their sleeve – and fall in love with women like Annie Hall, whose ditziness makes her adorable. Under the masks, any group of human beings is basically like the group in The Wizard of Oz: one needs courage, one needs a brain, and one needs a heart, and occasionally some oil. “You shall love

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your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart,” says W.H. Auden.49 The characters in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood are all foible. Originally, the play was to be called The Town Was Mad – the verdict of respectable outsiders who quarantine it lest the madness prove contagious. Ironic comedy emphasizes laughter at: what we may call the “comedy of reconciliation” emphasizes laughter with. The latter is distinctly out of fashion in the literary world, where irony has ruled unchallenged for over a century. Its practitioners include Dickens, Chaplin, Thomas, William Saroyan, whose title The Human Comedy is definitive of the present mode, and Wes Anderson. The common allegation against all of these artists is “sentimentality.” It no doubt has some truth to it. But irony, despite the misleading echo of “eiron,” is in fact an alazon technique. Irony is defensive armour, a stance of detached and invulnerable superiority. Perhaps the greatness of Joyce’s Ulysses lies in its ability to hold the sentimental and the ironic in a vital balance, and I think Thomas Pynchon learned a great deal from Joyce’s balancing act. Of all the writers just mentioned, it could be said that in the end they are not silly although they go to great lengths to seem so. Comic catharsis then, in the end, coincides with tragic catharsis. Both are a transcendence, through a death-and-rebirth ordeal (once again, the cyclical rhythm), of the innate self-centred perspective of the fallen human condition. Both lead to, and make possible, anagnorisis (recognition). But, while tragedy’s is a kind of detachment from the fallen perspective, comedy’s, as Frye explains at the end of A Natural Perspective, is an invitation to attach oneself, to become a participant in the vision symbolized by the happy ending. Readers may participate so wholeheartedly in the worlds of certain comedies and comic romances that those realms become more real to them than that of quotidian reality. While this can become a bad thing – it is, after all, what happened to Don Quixote when he devoured chivalric romances and to Emma Bovary after she read erotic romances – the ability to transfer allegiance from a “real” to an imaginative world is the comic twist on the level of the reader. In the last chapter of the last book of the Bible, we are shown a “new heaven, new earth,” and invited to participate in it by drinking of the waters of life. To repeat what has been said earlier, but bears repeating, we should be careful what stories we commit ourselves to believing in. But we should also be mindful concerning which stories we disbelieve for fear of being deceived.

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V I . T HE FO RM O F D RA M A We have been speaking of plot, characterization, theme, imagery – elements common to any storytelling genre. But the most typical form of drama, the stage play, gives it a “presentational immediacy” unique in literature. Drama is experiential, not meditative: its events transpire in front of our eyes, just as they do in life, involving us, the audience, in them directly like no other form of art except live musical performance, all the more so in the older Greek and Renaissance theatres that lacked the distancing device of the proscenium arch, which separates the action from the external world like a picture frame. Film has perhaps just as visceral an impact, but in a different direction: film differs from stage drama in having the camera eye that controls the audience’s attention, acting much like a narrator, but more important is the fact of the screen. The events are not live: the viewers have to go through the screen, as it were, into the world of the film, like Alice through the looking glass. In doing so, they enter a virtual Otherworld that will be discussed at greater length in part 4. The events of a film transpire not in life, but in the mind’s eye, and its impact is therefore more inward than that of drama. Where drama retains its relation to ritual, which also transpires in the here and now, film can be more psychological, aided by the possibility of the close-up on the subtly changing expressions of an actor’s face, as well as subtleties of voice impossible for an actor who has to project to a live audience. A close-up in an Ingmar Bergman film may go on for minutes, with little or no dialogue. Of course, in an era of special effects, film also has its extraverted side: it can far outmatch drama for sheer visual spectacle and fast-moving action. But even these take place in a fantasy world, not in our own. There is no substitute for the excitement of live theatre. The theory of the ritual origins of drama appeared just after 1900, in an era of nostalgia for the cultural unity of earlier Western culture, the usual candidates being the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance. In the perspective of Spengler’s Decline of the West, these represent the high point of the cycle of Western culture, and the period of its greatest art. At this apex, art had become individualized beyond the anonymous collectivity of early medieval art, but had not yet begun its decline into a decadence characterized supposedly by egocentric individualism. It still retained much of its original ritual function – to dramatize the culture’s unifying mythology – in drama and ensemble musical performance. Bach’s BMinor Mass and the works of Shakespeare represent a height to which art

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will never return, for lack not of genius, the theory goes, but of a unifying myth. Lacking something objective to dramatize, later artists are forced to make personal experience their content, and art becomes subjective. T.S. Eliot was the most influential advocate of this theory: it lies behind his idea of the impersonality of the artist and of the “objective correlative.” Yeats saw Christianity as mindless collectivism and therefore valued the subjective over the objective. But he too longed for a unifying myth and sought to cobble one together out of a combination of Celtic mythology and occultism. Wagner’s ideal of a “total art form” uniting all the arts to dramatize a mythological vision, in his case the Germanic one, is driven by the same nostalgia. Actually, the theory of the decline from objective to subjective art was a Romantic invention adopted by the Modernists despite their professed anti-Romanticism. Keats praised the poet’s capacity to get out of himself and into the selves of others. Like everyone else, he praised Shakespeare’s virtually anonymous impersonality and wanted to be like him instead of being what he was, a supremely gifted lyrical, i.e., subjective poet. This explains the remarkably thoroughgoing masochism whereby poets for over two centuries have yearned to write poetic drama, to provide a communal experience once again of their culture’s mythology. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Eliot, Yeats, Frost, Thomas, as well as lesser figures such as Christopher Isherwood, Christopher Fry, and Robinson Jeffers, all tried their hand at it. Not every attempt was a disaster, but the few successes still did not revive the form. Other tactics were more effective: Browning, Eliot, and Yeats developed forms of the lyric that were more dramatic, arguably, than their stage dramas. Thomas’s turn to readers’ theatre provided another form of dramatic experience through a basically lyrical vehicle. Thomas also more or less invented, or at least made popular, the public reading of poetry, his own oratorical delivery providing a sort of dramatic performance. A stage performance or a live concert can still provide a valuable communal experience, but communal art of the kind represented in the visual arts is rarely possible today in a pluralistic culture lacking a single mythology. Whatever one thinks of the price we pay for our diversity, with its cultural and social fragmentation, yearning for a return to cultural unity has undesirable consequences. Many if not most of the great Modernist writers were right-wing reactionaries attracted to various forms of absolutism in both politics and religion, especially fascism. Nowadays in the United States, there are still those who advocate “cultural unity,” although they are not of the stature of Pound or Eliot, but what they

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mean is a culture that is Christian, white, heterosexual, and maledominated. While the content of drama can no longer be some communal myth, there are aspects of its form that may expand the dramatic experience beyond the relatively narrow focus of realistic verbal drama into something with greater audience impact and involvement. As Frye has reminded us, it was Aristotle who first pointed out that drama is musical and visual as well as verbal. Frye’s treatment in Anatomy of Criticism of the musical and visual aspects of drama is so thorough that much of what we need do here is simply to recreate what he says within our own context. When Aristotle spoke of melos, he had in mind a type of drama with a chorus that sang and danced. Yeats tried to work his way back to such a drama via the techniques of the Japanese Noh plays. However, there are more mainstream ways to expand the musical aspect of drama, leading to the creation of new forms. Starting with purely verbal drama, we can move along a spectrum in which the musical steadily gains in prominence until it ends by folding the verbal within itself. In film, “background music” is in a supporting role,50 although it is closer to being an equal player in silent films, especially if generated by a live orchestra. In musical theatre and the kind of Broadway revue that supplied much of the Great American Songbook, words and music are contrapuntal, the latter taking the form of intermittent song and dance. In opera, all the words are typically sung and not spoken, although there is still a plot, dramatic action, and dialogue in the form of recitative. The oratorio absorbs plot, action, and dialogue back into the kind of choral production out of which Greek drama is supposed to have emerged by developing in the opposite direction. Even in purely verbal drama, there is a musical aspect to the words themselves. This takes two forms, one extraverted, one introverted. The extraverted is the oratorical, words reaching out to affect the audience. Renaissance verse was declamatory: the meter was used oratorically, but there was a steady move towards the more realistically conversational – from the style of Tamburlaine to that of, say, Coriolanus. Although “ranting” came to be ridiculed, Frye points to a more realistic rhetorical style in the stylized, witty speeches and stichomythia of Restoration comedy, Shaw, and Wilde. American movie and television acting was still relatively declamatory until Lee Strasburg popularized Stanislavski’s Method acting techniques. But the metrical patterns of Renaissance dramatic verse could be put to an opposite use, sometimes within the same play, as in the lyrical passages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Here, the musical elements of meter,

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rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and so on are what Frye would call “centripetal,” moving inwardly towards establishing a pattern that, like music itself, is evocative, even though it is not semantic. Outside drama, lyric poetry itself is based on this type of music, or at least used to be before postmodern verse adopted a conversational style barely distinguishable from prose. As for what Aristotle calls opsis, theatre has the visual elements of scenery, costumes, makeup, lighting, and various special effects. Again there is a spectrum, this time from the word-dominated to the visually dominated. Readers’ theatre brings its dramatic world into being like God, through the power of the word, as Thomas reminds us wittily in the opening line of Under Milk Wood. Here, the visual is enfolded within the verbal, and is visible only to the mind’s eye. Renaissance theatre uses this technique occasionally for external description and is thereby able to dispense with elaborate sets. Not that its producers were incapable of constructing elaborate sets: the court masque was a glittering spectacle in which the text was for most of the audience a mere pretext, to the perpetual frustration of Ben Jonson. At the far end of the spectrum, mimes and clowns are an individual, minimalist form of pure wordless theatre: ensemble forms include ballet and various non-storytelling kinds of troupe dancing, from Busby Berkeley to Riverdance. Jean Erdman, Merce Cunningham, and Pilobolus Dance Theatre have combined dance, theatre, and, in the case of the last, gymnastics, into a new form of wordless theatre that is as enchanting as it is inventive. Performance art is too diverse a category to characterize neatly: nevertheless, as practised by someone like Marina Abramovic, it returns visual drama to its atomic unit, so to speak, the human body, and seems often to revolve around the old ritual theme of sparagmos, the violation of the body. We saw earlier that mimesis has two poles, only one of them captured in English by “imitation.” Mimetic art always has some basis in realistic imitation, but the Greek drama about which Aristotle was speaking was not at all realistic, in the modern sense, and such realism is relatively recent. This is tacitly an answer to the criticism of Plato, who did seem to be speaking of mimesis as realistic mimicry. Art always transforms what it represents, though some styles more than others. Melos and opsis, whether in the external form of musical and visual supplements to the verbal text or in the internal form of sound patterns and imagery, are the transformative aspects of literature, whereas lexis always retains at least some grounding in the semantic and representational. The more the first two take over, the more magically transformative is the representation.

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This comes into focus with the one element of Greek theatre that has no counterpart in later, more realistic European drama: the mask. Changes of costume may transform actors, as changes of dress transform people in real life. But the human face is the locus of personality, of identity, and altering it is one of the most magical acts human beings can perform, whether with a physical mask or with makeup. Children at Halloween or costume parties are fascinated by masks, but we are all children at heart: what the mask represents is the power of becoming another identity. Merely donning a mask is a death-and-rebirth event: it is at the root of women’s fascination with makeup. The puppet play is a variant of the same principle: entire microcosmic human forms substitute for the selves of the puppeteers. Anyone who has been connected with the theatre knows the rhythm of putting on a show: an immense effort goes into mounting a production that struts its hour upon the stage and then vanishes. The consolation, if one belongs to that world, is always the next production. Still, reality itself is a dramatic spectacle: human lives transpire in all their glory – and then disappear, leaving not a rack behind. The principle of the cycle tells us that new lives will come to take their place. But the pain of the disappearance of so much human experience lingers: the older we become, the more we cling to memories of times so vivid and intense that they seem somehow sacred. Yet they will disappear when we die, and sooner or later no one will be left to remember them. Wallace Stevens says, in “The Rock”: “It is an illusion that we were ever alive” (cp, 525). The renewal of time in the next generation is joyful. But the cycle is inadequate to human desire. The cycle redeems the future but not the past, and the future will be the past in the blink of an eye. What is needed is a power and a principle that is not just repetitive but progressive. Each generation, each cycle of human lives, must pass away in order that the young and new may have their time and place. But what was once so good, so beautiful, so true – if it all simply disappears, life is too heartbreaking to bear. Something must build on the past, preserve the past, redeem the past, and yet go forward. That will be the theme of the second half of this book.

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Introduction

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PA RT TH REE

The Eye Begins to See: The Horizontal Axis In a dark time the eye begins to see Theodore Roethke If we could heed these early warnings The time is now quite early morning Pete Seeger

I . T H E A F F I RM AT I O N O F T HE C YC L E We have been examining the mythological and literary forms deriving from the cyclic pattern. The fallen vertical axis of law and ideology is a human attempt to arrest change, to put a spoke in the wheel of time, so to speak, but it is always vulnerable to “revolution,” the upending of the axis that sets it spinning into motion. The cycle is the containing form of the fallen world. It is an ambivalent image. On the one hand, it is the temporal form of Blake’s Limit of Contraction, established by the creative power to prevent the Fall from continuing into complete annihilation. Making the Fall permanent was the price of this mercy: the cycle is the Fall as perpetual recurrence. In Hindu and Norse mythology, the entire cosmos dies and is reborn. Traditional Christian mythology held that the Fall stopped at the sphere of the moon, with the cycles of the heavenly bodies, from the stars’ nightly wheeling to the zodiac’s 25,000-year cycle, being an eternal and perfect dance above the devouring cycles of time. But modern astronomy has abolished eternity: the stars themselves are born, age, and die, and the universe born from the Big Bang ages entropically. Current evidence is

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against the idea, but there has been the hope that the universe too may follow the mythological pattern of cyclic recurrence. Yet the Fall did not happen just once, does not happen even just cyclically: it repeats endlessly, in every moment, both in nature and in human life. The sublunary realm is fashioned of the four elements; of these, air and fire, the intangible and thus more spiritual elements, do not cycle: the air bloweth where it listeth, and fire leaps up towards heaven. All mortal life arises from and depends on the cycles of water and earth. The world of generative life consists of cycles within cycles: the cycle of day and night, of waking and sleep, within the cycle of the seasons and the year, which in turn order the two primary activities of early human survival, hunting and planting; the stages of individual human life from birth to maturity to death, marked by various “rites of passage”; and the longer-range social cycles that eventually become known as history. According to Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return, thinking of history as linear, as a timeline, was an innovation of the Biblical religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.1 Earlier ages looked at it as cyclical repetition, as with the Hindu yugas and the Ages of Man in Hesiod and Ovid. Eliade also said that “primitives,” that is, pre-modern peoples of any era, including our own, have no sense of history, their societies continuing to revolve with the natural cycle. Nowadays there is a justified distrust of such notions as imperialist rationalizations. We now realize that there were indeed Indigenous histories, often extending far back in time – but the European conquerors did not know them, and did not want to, lest they justify legal claim on territory inhabited for hundreds of years.2 Conversely, even as we have found that traditional peoples are capable of linear historical as well as cyclical thinking, modern scepticism about history as linear progress has produced a pessimistic reversion to the cyclical pattern. Ovid challenged the imperial dreams of Rome with a counter-vision of endless reincarnation, bringing the life-to-death pattern full circle by extending it from death to rebirth. The philosophers of history who most influenced the great Modernist writers of the twentieth century were Vico and Spengler, whose cyclical interpretations of history called into question both capitalist and Marxist myths of inevitable progress. It seems clear by this point that the cyclical and the linear visions, in their ironic forms, are what Blake called a “Negation,” a set of opposites that cancel each other out. The ironic form of the cyclical rhythm is, I suggested earlier, a vision of the endless recurrence of the Fall, Sisyphus shouldering his stone to the top of the hill only to have it tumble back

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down, the Greek myth that Camus used as a symbol of the existential absurdity of life. In Marxist form, it is the life of alienated labour under capitalism, working for survival’s sake Monday through Friday at some mindless and meaningless job, seeking respite from boredom and frustration through mindless and meaningless entertainment, dreaming hopelessly of escape by winning the lottery, and rising the next Monday to do it all again. The ironic form of the linear rhythm is the donkey’s carrot, gratification indefinitely delayed for the sake of some cause, whether economic, such as the American dream or the Marxist dialectic; political, as with the restless ambitions of empire; or technological, as in the “scientific progress” that produces longer, healthier lives for many people but also pollution, climate change, nuclear bombs, and unemployment through automation on its way to a utopia of social networking and free downloaded music. One tendency in religion is to reject the cyclical world altogether, deeming it a vale of tears in which no happiness or satisfaction is truly possible. Some forms of medieval Christianity were otherworldly in this fashion: our entire focus should be on the other world, on eternity, not on this life. The original form of Buddhism, Hinayana, began with the realization that “all life is suffering”: the only escape from suffering is enlightenment, which dispels this world by recognizing it as illusion, maya. Otherworldly religions frequently employ various ascetic disciplines designed to detach their adherents from the pleasures of the body and the senses, addiction to which is the chief cause of clinging to this world. But such extreme otherworldliness results in a dualism that is not only unhealthy but, according to an alternate view, ultimately mistaken. Paradoxically, the world of birth, death, and rebirth must be recognized as fallen and yet accepted – not only accepted but affirmed: both the material world and the physical reality of the body and the senses, even though the body feels pain, ages, and eventually dies. We speak of the democracy of the body: whether or not there are any universal values, there are universal human needs, above all those grounded in the body’s nature: the need to breathe, to eat and drink, to sleep, to be protected from the environment through clothes and shelter. These are cyclical in that they need to be fulfilled recurrently, every day of our lives. These are the physiological and safety needs, the bottom two levels of Maslow’s hierarchy: Frye’s “primary concerns.” They are prior to Freud’s twin drives of sex and aggression, the pleasure principle and the will to power, respectively, which are also rooted in our physical nature and appear in Maslow’s hierarchy. Acceptance of the nature, in all senses, of one’s body, with all its needs and

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drives, being a “healthy animal,” is the first principle of basic sanity, and leads towards what the title of a Wallace Stevens poem calls “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating” (cp, 149). And by affirming the body we also implicitly affirm the cyclical rhythms that are its basis. A number of the great Modernist writers of the first half of the twentieth century were reactionary conservatives, sceptical of democracy, attracted to authoritarian regimes that promised to rule the “rabble” with a firm hand. Such elitism needs to be distinguished from a profounder and more genuine conservative vision informing their imaginative productions. That vision celebrates life here and now, always dying yet always being reborn, renouncing the impulse to escape the human condition either by ascending vertically into some transcendent reality or by attempting to remodel the world according to some myth of horizontal progress. The kingdom of heaven is in the midst of you, according to one translation of Luke 17:21. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas says, “The kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”3 Luke 17:21, usually translated “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” could also be rendered: “The kingdom of heaven is among you,” closer to Thomas. Some of the greatest Modernist works celebrate this world of becoming and passing away, including Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” and “The Poems of Our Climate” (cp, 66, 193). Both Yeats’s “Dialogue of Self and Soul” (P, 234) and Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” (cp, 414) abjure the ascetic upward path of the saint and choose the cycle of change instead, finding that everything they look on is blessed. Yeats’s prose work A Vision depicts fallen time ironically, predetermined by the phases of the moon, but his poetry achieves a perspective beyond such fatalism. “All things fall and are built again,” he says in “Lapis Lazuli” (P, 294), “And those that build them again are gay.” Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and Joyce’s Ulysses follow the cycle of a single ordinary day, the latter ending with Molly Bloom’s famous affirmation, “yes.” Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a gigantic comic hymn to the wonderful absurdity of life, is fashioned in the shape of a cycle, its last, unfinished sentence turning back to and being completed by its first. Even T.S. Eliot, despite his conservative Christianity, says in the cyclical Four Quartets: “Only through time is time conquered.” Jung sees a negative legacy deriving from Christ’s injunction, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). Any attempt to become godlike can become unhealthy and needs to be balanced by what Jung frequently called “completeness”: accepting that both human nature and life itself are imperfect. In our

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culture, he says, perfectionism is defined as masculine and completeness as feminine, although Taoism also associates a wise and balanced acceptance with the feminine. The attempt to become godlike risks what Jung calls “inflation,” a megalomania – perhaps a compulsion to remodel the world according to some social, political, or technological program aiming for perfection. His frequent example is Goethe’s Faust late in life, who destroys the lives of the aged couple Philemon and Baucis because their refusal to sell their property stands in the way of his improvement project. Such perfectionism encourages the development of a ruthless and often very male will, which Spengler called “Faustian” and identified with Western culture. Such a will is unable to relax, much less enjoy: it is always restless and striving, and frequently cites a virtuous work ethic, a sign of superiority. Still, acceptance turns out to be a complex virtue. It is not what it may sometimes appear to be, a passive resignation to a fallen world. Affirmation of the fallen world of cyclical time depends on a sense of the immanence of another dimension – a vertical dimension that dwells within the fallen world even though, paradoxically, it is also transcendent. This is Blake’s eternity in an hour, the vision of the Chinese sages atop the mountain at the end of Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli.” It is, I think, what Frye was trying to get at in his last book, The Double Vision (1991). He draws the title phrase from Blake, aware of its possible ambiguity. “Twofold vision” in Blake may refer negatively to the fallen world of Generation, with its cloven fiction, but Frye means the co-presence of a spiritual dimension within that cloven world – in Christian terms, co-present visions of the natural and spiritual self.4 Here the argument becomes a reprise – or, if you will, a Contrary version – of part 1’s affirmation of the Vision of Transcendence. It is the same affirmation, from the perspective of the ever-turning cycle, whereas such writers as Campbell tend to foreground the epiphany of the vertical axis immanent within the cycle. So it goes with the parallax of Contraries. The difference is one of emphasis: at the kairos, the breakthrough moment – potentially every moment – of the intersection of eternity with time, we may emphasize either the eternal’s revelation – the moment the sacred resurrects from the circular womb-tomb of its temporal hermetic vessel – or the vessel’s transfiguration, which is from another point of view not shattered but preserved and raised up (the Aufhebung of Hegel’s dialectic). At that juncture, as Stevens says of an unnamed protagonist, “There was no fury in transcendent forms / But his actual candle blazed with artifice.” In some writers, the experience of that moment becomes the only possi-

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ble theodicy. As Hölderlin says in one poem, “Once I lived like the gods, and more is not necessary.”5 Acceptance of life and its imperfection may entail relaxation of the will, but that can hardly be the whole story. Indeed, plunging into life means becoming, in yet another phrase of Yeats’s, “A blind man battering blind men.” It is only the natural self that is blind, however: Four Quartets alludes to Arjuna’s vision on the verge of battle, in which the god Krishna exhorts him to do his duty and plunge into combat, not to be anxious about the outcome because there is a dimension, symbolized by Krishna himself, beyond all mortal conflicts, to which Arjuna’s spiritual self belongs. Acceptance and detachment seem most attractive, however, to those cushioned from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune by a certain amount of privilege. They are also convenient virtues to preach to the oppressed of the world, who are told it is part of their duty not to rock the boat. But what can affirming life mean to a starving Middle Eastern refugee, to a prisoner in a concentration camp, to the sick and the elderly in a nursing home? Nietzsche admitted that only the Superman could affirm the “eternal recurrence of the same,” although he insisted that it was a sign of strength to do so. An alternative point of view is that not everything can or should be accepted and affirmed. This refusal to accept things as they are is the foundation of a progressive, linear vision of recreation. I I . T H E P RO G RES S I VE VI S I O N If there is a conservatism that is genuine and not reactionary, a reverence for the constancies of both nature and cultural tradition, there is also a genuine progressivism that is more than an ideology of “progress,” progress being defined as whatever furthers the interests of the privileged. It is this genuine progressivism, whose symbol is the horizontal line of linear development, that is the subject of the rest of the present part 3 of this book. Life repeats itself, but it does not merely repeat itself: it innovates. There is something new under the sun. In fact, evolutionary science has shown us that there is a prolific outpouring of new forms. The staggering variety of plant and animal forms, both living and extinct, evokes a sense of awe at the limitless creative power of nature. Variety is endless even within a single species: there is a scene in Peter Greenaway’s film Prospero’s Books in which a parade of naked human bodies, young, old, male, female, of all races, floats across the screen, bodies that do not fit the narrow range of

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Hollywood types but are how the human race actually looks without clothes. That it is hard to take one’s eyes away has nothing to do with voyeurism or pornography. We have forgotten how we actually look, and when we are reminded we are struck with wonder. In one way, cyclic repetition: two arms, two legs, two eyes, mouth, nose. In another, the unique: like snowflakes, no two alike. We have been speaking of the human identity in terms of basic needs, the sum total of which makes up the human condition. But the progressive impulse in the human race originates in the fact that, unlike the animals, we are, first of all, not adapted to nature, and cannot live in our environment directly. Lacking fur, armour, claws, wings, we must create our adaptation through various material and social inventions, surrounding ourselves with a cultural envelope that Joseph Campbell, following Géza Roheim, calls a “second womb.”6 Second, we are not hard-wired with instincts that tell us how to behave. What inherited impulses we have are highly malleable, what Maslow calls “instinctoids,” and even those are not static but, as Jung has shown, teleological. We create and recreate not only our world, but also our own selves. Loren Eiseley’s collection The Night Country contains several essays profoundly exploring the implications of this insight. In one of them, he says, “Man is not man. He is elsewhere.”7 That is, human identity can never be definitely located, because it is not a thing but a process, in every moment on its way to becoming something else. The controversy, of course, is over whether evolution has a direction and a goal. While it is a fact that life began as unicellular, with increasingly complex forms developing over time, the positivism of modern evolutionary theory allows only material and efficient causes. There is no teleological final cause, whether it be a transcendent creator-God, as in the theory of intelligent design, or an immanent Life Force, as in the theory of “creative evolution” espoused by Bergson, Butler, and Bernard Shaw. (Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of Christ as the Omega Point can be seen as an attempt to combine these two types.) It is sometimes said that by this point humanity has ceased to be crafted by nature’s blind watchmaker (Richard Dawkins’s phrase) and is in charge of its own future evolution. Perhaps that was always true – a point dramatized by the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the first human tool, a bone weapon thrown triumphantly into the air by its Australopithecine inventor, turns into a revolving space station in the future. There are, predictably, both conservative and radical objections to the idea that humanity creates its own identity and destiny. The conservative

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or “orthodox” Christian view, whose most influential spokesmen were Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, is that humanity can never redeem itself. Human nature since the Fall is inherently corrupt and, without grace, can will only evil. When Pelagius disagreed with Augustine about this, he was dismissed as a heretic. Hence the need, also predictably enough, for an external, omnipotent God and, more important, for an all-powerful and allegedly infallible external church. But no one ever asks who will watch the watchmen, and those churches that enforce orthodoxy and suppress heresy invariably become authoritarian and suppress their congregations through “miracle, mystery, and authority,” a process rationalized as absolutely necessary both by Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and by the churchmen who burn Shaw’s St Joan. The radical objection to humanity’s creating its own identity and destiny is that theories of cultural evolution and development are always power plays, disguised rationalizations for the ascendancy of the ruling elite, which is said to deserve its privileges because its members have proved themselves Homo superior, more highly evolved than the losers of the social competition. In truth, there has been an appalling amount of such rationalization. Social Darwinism in the nineteenth century and the kind of libertarianism typified by Ayn Rand in the twentieth justified the ascendancy of the rich and powerful in terms of the survival of the fittest. Benefits from the inventions and institutions created by the elite may “trickle down” to the rest of society, but, if they do not, there is no injustice. There is a responsibility not to be poor, to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps, and it is understood that the unfit will not compete successfully, and must be left behind by the march of progress. Pseudo-scientific theories of human evolution were used to justify the ascendancy of the white race over all others, as Stephen Jay Gould has recounted in The Mismeasure of Man, such racism being in turn used to rationalize imperialism.8 By this account, the white race is not only more civilized than the “savages” of India, Africa, or the American south and west: it is more highly evolved, as museums would demonstrate by exhibiting the skulls of an ape, an African American, and a Caucasian along a developmental timeline. Up to a point, it is therefore understandable that developmental theories of mythology and culture have become highly suspect. But only up to a point: there is much injustice in the world, and much suffering, and the genuine progressive vision wants to alleviate as much of it as possible. To critics who object that neither society nor human nature can be perfected, it responds that it is not seeking perfection. We may

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never achieve utopia – but we can do better than this. To those who ask, “Who are you to impose your values and your notion of the good life on everyone else?,” it responds that such relativism is meaningless. It could be used against Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech – a vision of progressive development through time – by a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Genuine progressive visions tend to emerge out of a sympathy for the underdog rather than for the power structure: Shaw’s theory of creative evolution emerged directly from his Fabian Socialism, and its Promethean advocacy for the oppressed is the genuine core of vision in Marxism, and will survive its ideological superstructure. The progressive vision is one of creative work, and the goal of that work is to undo the Fall, to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land, in the words of Blake’s famous poem (E, 94). It is in this section of the present study that we are concerned most directly with the productions of time. The first criterion of real progress is that it moves towards the fulfilment of basic needs and primary concerns. Whatever the political and economic schemes they employ to bring this about, such fulfilment is the objective of most utopian works of literature. But the real liberation of the human race has to begin with an expansion of consciousness. As the Romantic poets came to realize, liberating people from material chains is not sufficient: what actually imprisons us: “Mind-forg’d manacles,” the “Marks of weakness, marks of woe,” that Blake sees on every face in his poem “London.” Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus points to his head and says, “It is here I must kill the ghost of the priest and the king.”9 The creative power within us that might redeem both ourselves and the world is not the ordinary self, the ego. That identification leads to the megalomania that Greek tragedy calls hubris, Jung “inflation,” and the Bible simply “pride,” deadliest of sins, the fault of Lucifer. Instead, various traditions, including Gnosticism, Hermeticism, the Inner Light Protestantism of the seventeenth century, and the Romantics, see that creative power as God within us, working through humanity. Nevertheless, as we observed earlier, Gnosticism and Hermeticism depart from orthodoxy in their assertion that, God and humanity being one, the two fell together. This is blasphemy to conventional Christians, but it makes more sense out of the problem of evil and innocent suffering than orthodoxy ever can. Many mythologies have a myth of a divine being who fell into matter and is buried in the landscape – who is the landscape – or who, like Vishnu in Hinduism and the Red King in Lewis Carroll, has fallen asleep and dreams the world. Blake’s Albion and Joyce’s Finnegan combine these physical and psychological symbols of the Fall. So does Jung’s Self, which

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is why the symbols of alchemy, which attempted to liberate a divine spirit buried in matter, are a key to the psychological symbolism of the process of individuation. Such a conception revises the opening of Genesis, in which an unfallen God creates an unfallen world and finds it good. As a fallen God could not have created an unfallen world, the inference, adumbrated in part 2, is that God, humanity, and nature all fell together, so that the Creation was really a Creation-Fall, that which brought the fallen world into being. The vision of Creation elaborated in part 1 of reality unfolding from a Monad is of an unfallen world, created and then contemplated in a Sabbath vision as both beautiful and true. This vision is too imaginatively resonant to be merely false, but fits elegantly into a larger perspective that sees the relationship between its unfallen creative process and the Fall, including a fall of part of the divine nature, not as successive but as, however paradoxically, coterminous. Yet God is not totally fallen, and the unfallen part of him, identical to the unfallen part of ourselves, is trying to wake himself up, or, in physical terms, to resurrect. Thus the process of redemption takes the form of a fallen humanity trying to clarify its mental vision with the help of an inward creative power, identified by the Romantics with the imagination. If it succeeded, the result would be apocalypse, which means “revelation.” And revelation is revolution. I I I . WHAT T HE HA M M ER ? T H E FO RG E O F L A N G UAG E Because of the human participation in the redemptive process, Nikos Kazantzakis can speak of humanity as “the saviors of God.”10 But we have seen that this mythology of progressive resurrection still has a role for a transcendent God who is a spiritual Other. Sleep is a symbol for the more or less somnambulistic condition of cyclical natural existence. Ordinary life is largely automatic and habitual. We are all basically sleepwalkers – until something breaks in on our routine. As we saw in part 1, this may take the form of an unknown power entering external reality and charging some object with its numinous energy. The object thus becomes a symbol in the Romantic sense: it does not just “stand for” that which it symbolizes but rather embodies it. But revelation is not always visual: prophets and oracles hear voices. When they write down what the voices say, the resulting text is “Scripture,” so the voice of God himself, the aspect of God that remains unfallen. Poets take dictation from a Muse, and a poet such as Hesiod in the Theogony is inspired to perform what is at once a poem and

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Scripture, the revelation of the gods, by the gods, and from the gods. However, secular creative writing may also be visited by what Frye, borrowing from Biblical theology, calls kerygma (proclamation), where something seems to break in from some unknown dimension, defying the normal limitations of signifiers and signifieds in a way that is mysterious and haunting, somehow deeply moving and meaningful even when not understood.11 This is what Longinus meant by the verbal “sublime.” Conceptual writing depends on inspiration just as much as “creative” writing does. Insights and near-wordless intuitions are not one’s own but disclose themselves from some hidden other place. Writers’ perpetual frustration, probably the main reason for their “blocks” or for avoiding writing for as long as they can procrastinate, is that they must “sacrifice” the intuition or epiphany: kill it by rendering it comprehensible and communicable, but at the cost of its original power and perfection. Still, in the better outcomes, something is realized, in both senses of the term. An eye has opened. And the process is progressive, and builds on itself over time. Blake’s “Seven Eyes of God” represent phases of increasingly expanded vision through the course of history. The ruins of time build mansions in eternity – Ernst Cassirer’s “symbolic forms.”12 Gradually we construct, out of the sensory world, a realm that is purely imaginative, both aesthetically (beauty) and intellectually (truth). Children are concrete-minded, still grounded in the body and the senses. But it is an everyday miracle we take for granted when a child moves from “five dogs” or “five boys” or “five pencils” to the concept “five.” Cassirer suggests that, rather than being Homo sapiens or Homo faber, we are Homo symbolicus, man the symbol-maker. Gradually, humanity has built up an entire second world of symbolic forms, the forms of mathematics and the arts: Stevens’s “description without place.” To the question, “Where does this world exist?” the correct answer would be “Nowhere” – it is “without place,” not even Plato’s disembodied world of Forms. “Five” is not a thing: it is not sensory and cannot be pointed to. Yet it is not unreal, not merely subjective: at any rate, to dismiss it as unreal would be to do away with mathematics, which is entirely symbolic. It eludes the subject–object antithesis, and the best we can do is throw words such as “virtual” at it, labelling it without pinning it down. The same is true of the forms of the visual arts, the patterns of music, and the myths and symbols that inform literature. Language itself is symbolic form. Ordinary ego consciousness has adapted it to express its own perspective, that of the subject–object division. In doing so, it sets up a linguistic version of Blake’s “cloven fiction.” Ordinary

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language repeats the Creation-Fall: it engenders a world of subjects, objects, and their interactions, but it remains a subjective realm of the mind’s categorizations that is ultimately unreal. For its categories are too crude to capture the shifting variety of objective reality: as Nietzsche pointed out, the word “rose” is a lie – a generalization that cannot articulate the particularity of any given rose.13 Blake said that to generalize is to be an idiot, but we are all idiots much of the time. For some observers, the human condition means entrapment within what Fredric Jameson labels “the prisonhouse of language”;14 in Lacan’s terminology, acquiring language alienates us into a Symbolic Order with no relationship to the Real, which is outside language, hence unspeakable.15 That condition of ironic alienation is where the progressive process must begin. Out of ordinary language, the imagination forges a new language of myth and metaphor, adopted by religion for social ends and by literature for individual ends. Mythical and metaphorical language is baffling and paradoxical to the ordinary self because it fuses subject and object into a single identity-in-difference. Otherness does not disappear because, in a metaphor, there is still A and B. Yet the Other is not outside the field of consciousness but within it. Such a view is sometimes called “phenomenological”: the phenomenologists eliminated Kant’s troublesome noumenal realm of the thing-in-itself outside the a priori categories of the shaping mind by saying that if something is utterly outside our knowledge then it effectively does not exist. What otherness exists appears within the phenomenal field, not beyond it. The sceptical view is that the paradoxical identifications of myth and metaphor are either madness or mystification; the progressive view is that (in Jungian terms) there is a Self distinct from the ego for whom the kerygmatic incantations of myth and metaphor are a native tongue. Rebuilding the ruins of the Fall is a process of recreating language, and thereby consciousness. The Self is a spiritual Other to the ego, but not in the “absolutely Other” sense of being outside the phenomenological field: the Self is the field.16 In a metaphor common in mystical Islamic poetry, the ego is a drop of water and the Self is the sea: but whether the drop dissolves into the sea or remains separate from it, water is all there is. Perhaps this would have been the theme of Joyce’s proposed sequel to Finnegans Wake, about the primal ocean, had he lived to write it. It should be possible to describe the evolution of the human imagination and its symbolic forms throughout human history – Joseph Campbell’s endeavour in his four-volume Masks of God and his unfinished Historical Atlas of World Mythology. But we must define “evolution,”

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“development,” and “progress” clearly, because so many attempts at tracing them have been either simplistic or ideologically distorted. They do not mean that later cultures are superior to earlier cultures, our own being best of all. Even when such an attitude is not rationalizing domination over or exploitation of other “less developed” societies, it reflects appalling arrogance. Progress is not the achievement of greatness, whatever that means in the arts: the Palaeolithic cave paintings are as great an achievement as the visual arts can produce. Development does not necessarily mean sophistication: in the twentieth century, artists such as Picasso were humble enough to learn from and be inspired by African masks made with the simplest possible means. What then is progressive? The task of the creative imagination is to recreate the fallen world and fallen human life: to take the given world of “things as they are” and create it over again in its own image. It does so by means of the sum total of the productions of time that we call “culture,” with mythology and its offspring, the arts and sciences, as, so to speak, its third eye, which provides the vision that understands and directs what it is doing. The task of improving the world begins with primary concern, trying to provide for all human beings – and, ultimately, for all living things – the essentials for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Our ordinary two eyes look out, however, on the given world – the world of the Creation-Fall, whose conditions seem to make the fulfilment of primary concern impossible. Within the limitations of the subject–object cloven fiction, all that is possible is subject against object, subject against subject, the survival of the fittest, Hobbes’s war of all against all, peace only continuation of war by other means. The imagination’s third eye sees another world, which does not exist, but is not an illusion. It is, rather, a vision, a model, a dream of a new world that the imagination needs to realize by recreating the fallen world. If it is an impossible dream within the confines of the “real world,” then so much the worse for the “real world,” which may need to be decreated – meaning, among other things, exposed as not real after all. The vision of a recreated world may be achieved by any creative artist in any culture, in any period: in that sense, it is timeless. The motivation for artistic creation is to create something new, but it will always be, in Joyce’s phrase, “the same anew,” and thereby an attempt to preserve and pass on an abiding vision. A work of literature is a message in a bottle, sent afloat on the ocean of time in hopes that someone will find it and read it, however long from now and far away. Poststructuralist criticism has focused on the alienating effect of writing, more or less accurately, but

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ignoring the time-binding aspect of the arts. Literature, music, and the visual arts communicate across the centuries, and across cultural and ideological barriers: to say that they are sealed hermetically within their cultural horizons denies their demonstrable communicability. In the early twentieth century, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis said something similar about language: we can think only within the categories of our native language: as you speak, so must you think. The hypothesis in its deterministic form is no longer accepted by linguists, for the simple reason that translation is possible. Not complete translation: it is no doubt true that we cannot have a native speaker’s intimate relationship to the nuances of another language, but a large amount of mutual understanding can take place. Similarly, while we will never feel and understand Shakespeare quite as his contemporaries – or as he himself – did, we are not merely inventing our own Shakespeare. There is a dialectical tension like that between Stevens’s reality and imagination: each interpretive community, in fact each individual within such a group, does indeed interpret every author according to his or her own perspective and values. But the text resists: it has an otherness that the reader must respect, even struggle with, or interpretation becomes an exercise in linguistic narcissism or ideological obsession. It has been fashionable for half a century to say that there is nothing “inside” the text, which is merely black signifiers on a white page: to think that they are haunted by ghostly signifieds is merely superstition. All this proves is that the subject–object paradigm breaks down for language just as quickly as for sense perception. What is a text? It is a dialectical interaction, an identity-in-difference among the author’s meaning, readers’ interpretations, and the black marks that mediate those meanings. The problem resolves into a series of paradoxes. Fortunately, communication continues, however imperfectly and conflictedly, despite the insistence of literary theorists that it is impossible. Anyone who reads with any intensity is changed and shaped by what he or she reads. If I had not read certain writers, I do not know who I would be today: they have become a part of me, and I think many readers can say much the same. Writers are readers too, and their identity as writers is shaped by certain crucial precursors – sometimes a whole school or style; sometimes even an entire culture, as Renaissance writers regarded the Greek and Roman “ancients” with reverence as their models and inspirations. At times, it may be a single spiritual preceptor or “onlie begetter,” who in turn had a precursor, so that a line of influence extends from past to future – as with the apparent line of descent from Homer to

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Virgil to Dante; likewise from Chaucer to Spenser to Milton to Blake to Yeats, Thomas, and Joyce. I V . T HE I RO N I C C YC L E A ND T H E C L A RI F I C AT I O N O F VI S I O N The relationship to the precursor is not always, is perhaps never entirely harmonious. Often the writer has to wrestle with the antecedent like Jacob with the angel: the core of truth in Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence.”17 Often, the struggle is to refine the gold of vision from the dross of an outmoded or unacceptable ideology, as Dante felt he had to revise Virgil in the light of Christian truth, as Blake and Shelley reshaped Milton’s Christian truth in the light of the Romantic theory of the creative imagination. Bloom’s theory, however, recasts the progressive vision into one of decline: instead of becoming consubstantial with his precursor father, the writer has to kill him by misreading him. (The pattern is Oedipal: hence the masculine pronouns.) The blessing of originality sacrifices power and increases self-consciousness. Although it claims to be a universal theory, Bloom based the anxiety of influence on the decline in stature that he sees from the Romantic to the Victorian to the Modernist to contemporary poets. His hypothesis has its own precursor, however, in theories of cultural decline beginning in the Romantic period, such as Schiller’s of naïve and sentimental poetry. What Schiller means by “sentimental” is precisely self-conscious: compared to Virgil, Homer is relatively instinctive and crude. Virgil is more sophisticated and polished, yet Homer has a raw vitality that Virgil lacks. It is easy to find analogous examples in music and the visual arts, and also easy enough to see all the examples converging into a pattern of the subversion of the line of progressive vision into the cycle of fallen time, in which the forms of the imagination are born, mature, decline into sterile and self-conscious decadence, and are finally spent and obsolete. Spengler’s Decline of the West, which began as a meditation on the forms of art, expanded to become a vision of the decline of the whole of Western culture. There is a pervasive fear in the West that the possibilities of its art are exhausted, that its intellectual speculation has become paralyzed by self-conscious scepticism, and that its culture is worn out and slowly dying of the same cause the cosmos is dying of. The entropic cycle of fallen time is the progressive vision’s antagonist, the outcome being what we call “history.”

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In part 1, a double chart showed how the binary relations posited by structuralism are unequal, with one term always being subordinated or suppressed. This is the structure of both fallen reality and fallen human culture, and is a variant way of representing the vertical axis of power and law considered in part 1. Conservatives hold that this hierarchy – for it is really one hierarchy in many permutations – should, must be strictly maintained: doing so is almost the definition of morality. The moderate stance favours preserving the hierarchy, for the sake of social order and security, but enforcing it in a flexible and relaxed manner. Revolutionaries want to liberate the lower terms, with or without violence as necessary – almost their definition of morality. A revolution, as the term implies, changes the vertical hierarchy into a turning wheel, synchronic structure into diachronic cycle, the bottom dogs rising as the top dogs fall. In the generic plot of comedy, that is exactly what happens, and comedy has a subversiveness not always trusted by the elite. The more satiric the comedy, the more subversive. What we take up here is the longer view, which begins in the realization that the happy ending never lasts. Youthful energy rises up and revitalizes the social structure but itself ages into reactionary rigidity, its idealistic dreams unrealized or compromised. Marriages freeze: the comforts of domesticity sacrifice romance and passion, resulting in ossification or adultery. Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods reaches the traditional happy ending halfway through, at which point the plot twists and Prince Charming turns out to be a philanderer. The revolutionary society turns oppressive in its turn, and finally decadent. As we saw above, vital new movements in the arts age into empty formula or self-conscious mannerism. While Spengler’s Decline of the West generalizes the decline-and-fall pattern to apply to all historical cultures, it is clear that the book emerged out of a comparison of the two “gyres,” as Yeats calls them, of Western culture, the Classical and the Christian, each lasting about two millennia. In each, an apogee of small independent city-states (Athens; Renaissance Italy and Germany) gave way to an age of empires, the megalopolis, and increasingly decadent mass culture. Spengler blames the decline of time, defined as vital creative energy, into space, identified with matter and inertia. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud provided a psychological counterpart: libido, or psychic energy, is rechannelled from serving the pleasure principle to building a civilization; but eventually, as the cost soars, the repression of sexual and aggressive impulses breaks down, and a civilization becomes decadent, obsessed with sexual and aggressive fantasies in both art and life.

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Yeats borrowed a good deal from Spengler in contriving his own cyclical scheme in A Vision. Spengler was not interested in the United States, but it would be easy to write a Spenglerian version of its history, from its origins as a set of revolutionary independent states to the birth of an empire in the twentieth century. Spengler was anticipated by Vico, but also by Blake, whose version of the ironic pattern is called the “Orc cycle” by Northrop Frye in Fearful Symmetry.18 In Blake’s mythology, Orc is the embodiment of energy (sexual, social, artistic) with hair of fire; his opponent is Urizen, whose name puns on “your reason” and “horizon,” an old man with a frosty beard, figure of repressive order who claims to be God but who is really only what Blake in some satiric moments calls “Nobodaddy.” Blake began in hopeful sympathy with both the French and American revolutions, and with the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment in the arts. But after it became clear that the French uprising in the name of liberty had succeeded only in replacing one tyrant with another, Louis XVI with the self-crowned Napoleon, Blake increasingly began to see Orc as a limited figure, unable to escape from the cycle, and eventually replaced him with a new hero, Los, the creative imagination seen not as identified with fallen natural energy but rather as a power that works progressively in history to expand human vision beyond the limits of the cycle. The illusion that we call “reality” is too powerful for the imagination, the unfallen part of both humanity and God, to dispel immediately. Time keeps revolving, yet within the cycle is a counterforce attempting to plant the as-yet-unborn vision of an unfallen reality within it like an embryo within an egg, to mature and develop until the moment it is ready to shatter Blake’s Mundane Shell and hatch, realized at last. The real shape of time is neither the cycle nor the horizontal line of progress, but the spiral that is their progeny. Each cycle of history furthers imaginative recreation of the world. The process of Blake’s building eternity out of the ruins of time belongs to everyone, not just to an elite. We all inherit at least a dim intuition of a better world, and the “good life” is one spent attempting, through any of a myriad of ways, to bring it into being. The role of visionaries – artists, thinkers, shamans, social activists – is to wake us up, to inspire us, and to provide a model for the building of a better world. Writers inherit a vision either from a precursor or from the collective body of precursors we call “tradition.” Their first task is to try to clarify and purify that vision. The real form of Bloom’s anxiety of influence is the artist’s struggle to detach the precursor’s genuine vision from whatever personal and ideological blindness occludes it.

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This is a specialized form of the task facing any reader: separating Homer from his cult of violence, Virgil from his imperialism, Dante from his Catholic absolutism, D.H. Lawrence from his hysteria, T.S. Eliot from his anti-semitism and authoritarianism, and a great many male writers from their sexism. If we could bear only to read writers whose ideology we approved of, we would scarcely find anyone to read at all. We continue to read writers who otherwise appall us because there is something indispensable beneath the seas of their madness and destructiveness, buried like Atlantis. The second task, both of the writer and of anyone for whom reading is true education, a way of living life, is to become aware of one’s own ideological conditioning and try as best one can to become wary of it. All of this is what Blake meant when he said that the apocalypse will come about through the clarification of error. Tragedy, realism, and irony work by clarifying the errors of the main characters and their society. The third task of writers is to recreate the inherited vision according to their own unique sensibility, to “make it new,” in Pound’s famous dictum. For art is always “the same anew,” in Joyce’s equally famous phrase. Setting aside ideological deficiencies and discrepancies in talent, all successful works of art, whether “major” or “minor,” simple or complex, build up over time, like a coral island, a total pattern, a theme with infinite, inexhaustible variations. Frye calls this total vision the “order of words”; Eliot, simply “tradition,” though not an ideological one; Shelley, “that great poem which all poets, like the cooperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.”19 The arts are progressive not in the sense that later works are more perfected or knowledgeable, but because all artists are working together across the ages to expand human consciousness, to recreate the vision of reality, and therefore reality itself. Oscar Wilde’s aphorism “All art is quite useless” has to be taken as declaring the autonomy of the imagination, which does not merely reflect passively the ordinary reality around it, as in some of the second-rate realism he despised. So too, when W.H. Auden says, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” he was reacting against the reduction of art to second-rate propaganda, as in the kind of “Soviet realism” satirized by Tom Lehrer as “Moonlight on the Collective Farm.” But part III of Auden’s poem (excerpts quoted in part 1, p. 84), unites him to his precursors, the great Romantic poets, who wanted their poetry to change the world, to renovate the way men and women think and feel and see. Writing is one of the most solitary occupations, and yet people begin writing, especially during that most solitary season of adolescence, prin-

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cipally to escape from loneliness. A recurrent myth in science fiction is that the next step in human evolution will be what Theodore Sturgeon in More than Human calls “Homo gestalt.” Without ceasing to be individuals, Sturgeon’s protagonists, outcasts from ordinary society, bond through a blend of telepathy and empathy into a larger identity that is more than the sum of its parts. The vision of ideal order in Frye’s phrase “order of words” has as its counterpart a vision of love. Haunted by loneliness all his life, Loren Eiseley recounts in a poem how moving it is to read of the loneliness of a man in ancient Sumeria, five thousand years ago.20 Sometimes the writer’s desire to win entrance into the pantheon of great writers is no more than the ego’s desire for the prestige of getting into the Hall of Fame. But it can be so much more than that, the longing to be part of a Homo gestalt of kindred spirits, with whom we often have a far more intimate relationship than with the crowd of mostly strangers that surrounds us. Through reading their essays and creative writing, teachers may come to know at least a few students in a way they do not know friends of many years, because social protocol makes certain types of open communication inappropriate. As this implies, writers’ kindred spirits include not only their precursors but their readers – if not all of them, at least their ideal readers. The role of the critic and the teacher is to facilitate understanding, but by doing so also to facilitate the gestalt by furthering the connection between writers and the rest of society. Liberal education builds an individuated unity of writers, texts, and readers on a deeper level than all social networking. Nor is this some form of escapism. It is those whose vision has been expanded who will go out to expand the vision of the world, and thus to change it. V . T H E R EC REAT I O N O F EVO LU T I O N : HU N T I N G C U LT U RES The first mythologies of Homo sapiens were the hunting mythologies of the northern parts of the world and the vegetation-and-fertility religions of the southern parts. Hunting mythologies spanned the areas of Siberia, northern Europe, and the northern parts of North America; the “seeded earth” mythologies, as Campbell calls them, extended through the Far East, equatorial Africa, Central and South America, and the Pacific islands. The Palaeolithic versions of these mythologies of course left no written record, only highly interpretable artefacts and artwork, so that descriptions rely to a great extent on analogies from more recent societies

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and conjectural reconstructions. None the less, Joseph Campbell’s attempts are highly suggestive, not least because of what they imply for a progressive vision of history. Long before sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, Campbell, influenced by Leo Frobenius, was interested in what traits modern humanity might have inherited from its Palaeolithic and Neolithic ancestors. We have lived through a period, not very long ago, when the very idea of an inherited human nature gave rise to furious controversy, when sociobiologist E.O. Wilson was subject to heckling and harassment when he lectured. Those determined to bring about social change, especially in the area of gender, maintained that human beings are blank slates, that we are “socially constructed”: proponents’ hysteria arose from anxiety that conceding anything about humanity to be innate would render it fixed and unchangeable – a ready excuse for reactionaries. Social constructionists are quite right that no one has proved definitively that humans inherit any behavior patterns, either biologically or simply through millennialong conditioning. And analogies to animal behaviour have often involved flagrant bias, typically comparing human males to aggressive male primates such as baboons, even though primate males such as the bonobo are not aggressive and there is a good deal of gender equality. Moreover, primates, such as human beings, are omnivores: they eat small game opportunistically, but they are not hunters like lions or hawks. Not being carnivores, humans are not hard-wired to hunt, especially not animals far larger and more powerful than they. Hunting in fact may have been the first social construction – certain human societies invented it, imitating the predators. It is an artificial, not a natural activity. Nevertheless, social conditioning is powerfully self-perpetuating: each generation reproduces its offspring not only biologically but socially by instilling in them its own behaviours and responses. It is conceivable, then, that certain patterns of male behaviour perpetuate the patterns of distant male forbears by handed-down conditioning, not by genetic programming. It would at any rate explain some of the aspects of masculine behaviour that sometimes attract, sometimes exasperate, and sometimes repel women. Neither “masculine” nor “feminine” behaviour is innate, so far as we now know, but social conditioning is so powerful and unconscious that it seems innate. If we really want to change gender patterns, it is realistic to recognize that we must do so on a deep, systemic level, and it will take far more than passing a few laws or equal-rights amendments and shaming a few sexist pigs, however necessary such things may be.

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Still, sexuality begins as fluid and polymorphous: sexual orientation and sexual fantasies are the result of imprinting at an early age.21 Until very recently, society has tried to control the imprinting process to make sure, for purposes of reproduction and social stability, that the result is heterosexuality. All non-reproductive desires have been judged to be “perversions” and condemned as “unnatural.” This includes not only homosexuality and the various “fetishisms” but also masturbation and oral sex. It is possible to surprise university students by telling them that there are still laws on the books in some U.S. states making oral sex illegal as a variety of “sodomy.” The point is that sexuality is not fixed by nature but is capable of being progressively recreated, and we are in the process of doing so. The physiological and safety needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are undeniably universal; the need for love and self-esteem – i.e., for power and autonomy – less so. One dies of a lack of food or shelter, but surely people can live a lifetime without either sexual or romantic love, and without any form of power or freedom. Yet even these are basic needs after all when more specifically defined. People do not absolutely need sex or romance, but they do need connection: we are an interdependent species, and “love” defined as relatedness is necessary for survival. No man is an island, and no woman either. At the same time, we need the opposite: the ability to stand on one’s own feet as an independent individual is more or less the definition of adulthood, and without it individuals cannot survive unless, like children and other dependants, someone else takes care of them. Traditionally, relatedness has been defined as “feminine,” autonomous power as “masculine.” The progressive impulse to recreate this historical compartmentalization may find a useful model in Jungian psychology, according to which all men and women have both “masculine” and “feminine” traits. A man’s task is to develop his repressed “feminine” capacity for relatedness, symbolized by the “anima”; a woman’s is to develop her “masculine” sense of autonomy and individual self-esteem, symbolized by the “animus.” Although Jung never really raised the issue, these behaviour patterns are presumably a separate issue from sexual orientation: it seems logical that gay, lesbian, and transgender human beings also need to develop both capacities in order to become fully individuated (in Jung’s terminology) or self-actualized (in Maslow’s). It may be that child-bearing, which in previous ages limited women’s independence, was what originally caused gender roles to diverge. But in our time “masculine” and “feminine” are merely historical markers,

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increasingly obsolete labels for universal human behaviour patterns. There is nothing about being biologically female that makes women “feminine,” nothing biologically male that makes men “masculine.” One way of summing all this up is to say that in our time we may be recreating the traditional concepts of gender and sexuality through a Blakean process of clarifying error. Traditional autonomy and relatedness are human versions of the twin mechanisms of Darwinian evolution, competition and cooperation: these are the biological manifestations of our by-now-familiar principles of difference and identity. For millennia, being a man has been defined in terms of competition within the masculine realms of hunting, war, and athletic games. Men may unite in hunting bands, armies, and teams, and their antagonists may also be collective, but there is a secondary competition within the peer group for status. Men need their own form of relatedness: hence the camaraderie of soldiers, the team spirit of athletes, and other forms of male bonding. At the same time, men are in competition with all other men, the winner being the superstar, the alpha male. Alpha-male baboons, after having bested rival males in combat or intimidated them into submission, get their pick of food and females. In the warrior society of the Iliad, men who have excelled in battle earn “war prizes” of various sorts, including women. What they have really earned is kleos – honour or glory, but really status. But status is intangible: the war prizes are substantial proof of a warrior’s worth, which is why neither Achilles nor Agamemnon can afford to back down in their quarrel over the girl Chryseis. Whichever man relinquished her would suffer loss of status, or “shame”: social scientists sometimes call societies ruled by peer-group status “shame cultures,” and they exist all over the world today, with their honour killings and blood prices. There are also status-driven subcultures within Western society, from gangs at one end of the social hierarchy to predatory capitalists at the other, the latter needing their war prizes – mansions, expensive cars, and “trophy wives” – to prove their worth every bit as much as Achilles did. Competitive male aggression may be verbal as well as physical: women sometimes complain that men like to argue and lecture instead of having a conversation, and certain male-dominated academic disciplines, including law, political science, and philosophy, are at times inordinately fond of no-holds-barred polemics. War has always been regarded as “the greatest game,” the form of hunting in which the stakes are highest: when Hector is dying on the battlefield, Achilles tells him, “I wish I could hack your meat and eat you raw.” Hunting eventually gave way in some societies to the domestication of animals, but the nomadic herding societies were still notoriously aggressive, including the early Semitic tribes that overran the

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Middle East and the Indo-Europeans who overran Europe, wiping out the non- or less-patriarchal “Goddess cultures” as they did so. To kill a sentient living thing, one must close down one’s capacity for empathy, the ability to share another being’s experience. In war, the enemy is always dehumanized, a faceless threat, a monster. In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, Chris Kyle can think of his opponents as only “savages,” and he kills them detachedly, at long distance. Men are conditioned to be detached about their feelings even in ordinary social life, because they may sometimes have to be tough-minded: a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. But people who cauterize all capacity for empathy become monsters, even sociopathic killers who run amok. For normal people, repressed empathy returns as guilt, for which they must somehow atone. This is Campbell’s explanation, as I said earlier, for the Palaeolithic paintings of animals: the hunters asking the animals to forgive them for slaying them. Of course, this is on one level self-serving: no one asks the animals what they think. None the less, Achilles’ greatness lies not in his prowess on the battlefield but in his ability at the end of the Iliad to break through his warrior’s conditioning and see his enemy Hector as a noble human being and Hector’s father Priam as a grieving parent. We are in danger of over-stressing the negative side of the will to power, autonomy, and self-esteem (Maslow’s version of kleos). Aggression may be necessary both to protect oneself and to defend others, and the competitive spirit can engender confidence, self-reliance, courage, and a striving for excellence. Still, the two original manifestations of the will to power, war and hunting, are forms of killing. Real human progress would be towards a condition in which killing is no longer necessary for survival. We no longer need to kill animals: what we need in addition is what William James called a “moral equivalent” of war. Blake saw this a century before him: when he said that in the unfallen state the chief activities were war and hunting, he was transvaluing those words into symbols of what we are calling “decreation,” the imagination’s mental war against illusion and error. When Woody Guthrie put a sticker on his guitar reading “This machine kills Fascists,” he meant pretty much the same thing. V I . T H E REC REAT I O N O F EVO LU T I O N : G AT H E R I N G A N D P L A N T I N G C U LT U R E S Human life plays out as a tension between individualism and interconnectedness, autonomy and interdependence, power and love. The first phase of Darwinism, from the later nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries, emphasized the competitive side of evolution, portraying a

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nature “red in tooth and claw,” in Tennyson’s phrase. But increasing understanding of ecosystems has made it clear that life is a matter of cooperation as much as competition. Individualism of the rugged kind is something of an illusion: we cannot even digest our food without reliance on bacteria with which we have a symbiotic relationship. Indeed, Lynn Margulis, in one of the great achievements of twentieth-century biology, proved in the face of decades of contemptuous resistance, that the basic unit of higher biological life, the cell, emerged out of symbiosis: such organelles as mitochondria and chloroplasts were once independent bacteria. Margulis came to believe that symbiosis (cooperation) drives evolution, not chance, competing mutations, as in orthodox, or “neo”-Darwinism. She criticized the latter as “capitalistic,” and became an advocate of the Gaia hypothesis, which regards the entire earth as a single ecosystem that behaves as if it were a single organism.22 While orthodox Darwinists may regard this as New Age mysticism, there is growing realization that nature is a complex of “emergent systems,” as the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and others anticipated.23 In the earliest hunter-gatherer societies, women were the gatherers, kept at home possibly because of the demands of bearing and rearing children: one can watch and nurse children while gathering plants, but not while hunting animals. In addition to the cave paintings associated with the hunt, a number of carved female figurines have survived from the Palaeolithic. Lacking faces or individuality but with exaggerated breasts and buttocks and a triangular delta, they are near-abstract symbols of female fertility. One is holding what may be either a bison horn or a crescent moon: women have a natural association with the moon because both have a twenty-eight-day cycle associated with fertility. The lunar calendar of thirteen months of twenty-eight days was used by early agricultural societies to mark the proper days for planting and harvesting. A woman experiences interconnectedness in the most direct way possible, carrying another human being inside her for nine months, then nursing it with her own body. Women are trained to this day to be caretakers, and not only of children and the elderly: if someone is standing alone and left out of a party, it is usually a woman who will go over and try to make sure he or she is included. Women are conditioned to be more empathetic and compassionate and are not necessarily more emotional but allowed to show their emotions more freely. A half-century of feminism has made many people aware that these traits are virtues only up to a point. Many women are still raised to be passive and self-martyring and tend to have lower self-esteem; increasing numbers are resisting, with considerable success, but such conditioning has archaic roots.

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The dying-god figures studied by Frazer in The Golden Bough are vegetation deities: some are female, but even with the male exemplars the identification is not with the sacrificer but with the sacrificed victim. Greater love hath no man than he who lays down his life for his friends, but self-sacrifice has feminine overtones up through Tess of the D’Urbervilles. But as male conditioning represses empathy and sometimes causes terrible suffering, female conditioning represses aggression. Depending on how severe the repression is, the backlash can range from depression to multiple-personality syndrome to the kind of total reversal represented by Euripides’ Medea, who murders her own children for the sake of the male “value” of revenge. As women are not usually allowed to fight openly, the result can be a lot of passive-aggressive backstabbing, as well as the inwardly turned aggression of eating disorders and self-mutilation. Agriculture is a collective occupation, demanding cooperation and a division of labour. Fitting in and a willingness to follow instructions are increasingly stressed as agricultural societies grow from villages to towns to the first cities. As civilization becomes identified with the feminine, men become restless and may begin to identify themselves with the wilderness and the frontier. This is a well-known pattern in American literature: as civilization with its feminine values encroaches, James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo moves ever further westward; Huck Finn escapes the clutches of his female caretakers and lights out for the territories. In both cases, the male bonding of freewheeling adventurers replaces the “marriage trap” of domesticity; the same is true in Melville’s Moby-Dick.24 For men who remain inside the social order, laissez-faire capitalism offers the lure of individualism without constraint. The alternative to capitalism is socialism, but there has probably never been a truly socialist society, merely various capitalistic societies with some restraining socialistic features: laws addressing child labour, safety, and environmental protection, unemployment benefits, disability pay, welfare for those in poverty, health care, aid to the elderly, progressive taxation to pay for a social safety net, and so on. These measures actually have little to do with socialism as an economic system: they are instead expressions of a sense that we are all in this together, all responsible for one another, so that there must be limits on the individual’s freedom to make a profit at others’ cost. This sense of mutuality provokes furious resistance on the part of many people. Male dominance is not necessarily the rule in the animal kingdom: one wonders, then, why patriarchy has been well-nigh universal throughout human history until quite recently, even if some societies, the matrilineal

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ones in particular, have been more egalitarian than others. As the answer does not lie in nature, it must then lie in the human mind – which means in the cloven fiction of isolated self-consciousness. Animals are better adapted to their environment and therefore less alienated from it than human beings are. The human ego stares out on an alien and potentially dangerous world, including other people, who may be more alien and dangerous than any predators. The sense of threat breeds fear, and fear breeds aggression. Patriarchy and authoritarianism arise from a need for security and control. Ruling elites have always known how to keep themselves in power by whipping up hysterical anxieties about enemies: the United States lived through one version of this in the Cold War, only to immediately enter another in the post-9 / 11 era of “terrorism,” pre-emptive wars, and the surveillance state. While a country needs to be ready to defend itself against attack, defensive capability is never enough to tranquillize paranoid insecurity. As Noam Chomsky shows in Hegemony or Survival, the United States has been driven for much of its history to achieve not mere national self-defence but world hegemony: it has toppled elected governments, fought pre-emptive wars, and spied on its allies in the name of protecting American “interests.”25 Some of this is greed, the desire to exploit other countries’ resources. But much of it is simply a need for control, motivated by fear. When people such as Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr, advocate peaceful confrontation, the opposition’s answer may be that the enemy is a psychotic monster: hoping to come to terms with it is weak and naïve. Gandhi succeeded, it is said, only because his British opponents had a sense of gentlemanly fair play – Hitler would simply have run him over with a tank. In some types of military science fiction, the enemy actually is alien, hopelessly Other. The American gun culture and militarization of police are driven by a similar paranoid fear. Being sufficiently aggressive and controlling is a matter of survival: the weak, meaning the peaceable and the reasonable, will be wiped out. The idea that male violence and domination are necessary evils is linked to the theory that European civilization was born out of a violent conjunction between the Goddess cultures and the nomadic, patriarchal Indo-Europeans who overran them. The encounter was not an annihilation but rather a forced union, and some of the Goddess mythology was incorporated into the patriarchal mythology. In “Leda and the Swan” (P, 214), Yeats says that what the swan planted in Leda’s womb was the whole cycle of history symbolized by the Trojan War. Although this was rape by

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a god rather than by an invading culture, it resembles Robert Graves’s theory that Zeus’s myriad adulterous relationships are a cultural memory of a time when the invading patriarchal god incorporated the native religion by marrying its Goddess.26 Carefully as the thesis must be stated, a subjugated culture may possess a creative fertility that can revitalize the dominant culture, especially in the arts: examples include the impact of African-American music on white music, of southern writers on American literature, of Irish literature on British. VI I . T HE M Y T HO LO GY O F U R B A N C I VI L I Z AT I O N A N D EM P I RE But long before the patriarchal, nomadic herdsmen – the Indo-Europeans and the early Semitic tribes of the Middle East – swept over the landscape, a new and unprecedented type of civilization had appeared, first in Sumeria and Akkad as early as 4000–3500 bce, and spreading – in Campbell’s view – around the world: westward to Egypt and across the Atlantic to the Mayan, Inca, and Aztec cultures of Central and South America; eastward all the way to China. Unlike the tribal-warrior cultures of the Indo-Europeans and Semites (and their descendants, the Celts, Franks, Danes, Angles, Saxons, Hebrews, Arabs, and so on), these were urban cultures: Campbell calls them the “hieratic city-states.”27 It is a well-established fact that the agricultural revolution made urban civilization possible. Agriculture necessitates a settled life; the more extensive it becomes, the more it demands the kind of organization and division of labour needed to support a larger population, and the more able it becomes to feed more people. Thus villages grew into towns which grew into the first cities. For some reason, this catalysed an astonishing explosion of the Symbolic, including writing, complex mathematics, astronomy, and monumental architecture. Whether this constitutes “higher” civilization or not depends on one’s criteria: such innovations do not necessarily lead to a better life. They definitely, however, involved more abstract symbolization, which the cultures regarded as “higher” in a very literal way and modelled their “hieratic” city-states on an order revealed from on high: the third volume of Campbell’s Historical Atlas of World Mythology, which he did not live to write, was to be called The Way of the Celestial Lights. Luckily, we know a good deal about what that volume would have contained from hints in the author’s earlier work. Where hunting and vegetation-fertility mythologies are earthbound and grounded in primary concern about the food supply, the way of celestial lights is a version of

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the vertical axis. That axis was embodied at the city’s centre by a temple, often in ziggurat shape, whose steps were the stairway to heaven, sometimes representing the spheres of the heavenly bodies. The top of the temple was the sacred place where earth and heaven met, and where rituals therefore took place. From that centre, the city was laid out in mandala shape, with two crossed main streets and a circular wall, all of it representing a timeless, ideal order realized on earth: on earth as it is in heaven. The Chinese emperor, for example, was said to have the Mandate of Heaven; the Egyptian pharaoh was the god incarnate. But no state is timeless, and all emperors sooner or later share the fate of Shelley’s Ozymandias. The insistence on changelessness is ideological rather than spiritual: class divisions are another invention of “higher civilization,” and the vertical axis becomes a Chain of Being enforcing the obedience of the lower orders. Moreover, the horizontal impulse towards hegemony, described earlier, overtook the city-states, and their large armies began the task of building empires. Spengler’s Decline of the West echoes the title of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The rise and decline of empires has been the pattern of human history from the first urban states up to the present time. Is it significant that the two cultures – Hebrew and Greek – from which the West receives its cultural inheritance were underdogs, small societies perpetually threatened by the great empires on all sides of them, yet much more culturally creative? Christ may have been wise to reject the kingdoms of the earth when Satan offered them, for to play the game of empire is to make a deal with the devil. When Athens was small and merely defending itself, it defeated Persia, the greatest empire on earth: when it tried to become an empire itself, it was sucked into the Peloponnesian Wars, lost, and never recovered. When Israel wanted a king and an empire, despite God’s warning to be careful what you wish for, it had a brief moment of glory under David and Solomon, and unmitigated disaster followed, ending in Diaspora. When the greatest ancient empire of them all declined and fell, Europe disintegrated into tribes and small states once again. The anarchism and constant feuding of the small states caused some thinkers, Dante among them, to dream of order and universal peace brought about by their unification either under the pope or the Holy Roman emperor. But when the Catholic church became a de facto empire, the popes acted no differently than the Roman emperors: raising armies, poisoning rivals, issuing decrees of absolute power, siring illegitimate children, squandering enormous wealth while people starved. And the Holy Roman Empire became neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

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With the rise of nation-states, plus ça change. When England was a small but creatively vital underdog country, it defeated Spain, the mightiest Catholic power in Europe, admittedly with a little help from the winds of God. Its later expansion into a much bigger empire than the Roman sealed its eventual fate. When the United States was a collection of underdog colonies, it defeated King (though really Emperor) George III. Its subsequent history follows the usual pattern, even though it says it has never been an empire – a claim gainsaid, however, by much of the rest of the world and by the motto on the dollar bill about a New World Order, taken from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. With Britain and the United States, however, a new thing came into the world: democracy. Was Jefferson right that only small, decentralized nations can remain democratic? Certainly, to the extent that his land became a major power, it also became increasingly an oligarchy, ruled by a political-business-military elite. Is nothing else possible? Is the Federation of Star Trek merely, well, science fiction? For, after all, there are many things that small, independent societies cannot accomplish because of their size. But the question is by no means just one of what is most efficient. Americans have always dreamed of a society in which we are united despite all of our differences: at our best, we have faith that a universally inclusive society is possible if, and only if, it remains faithful to primary concerns. An ideal and yet real United States lies hidden within the crumbling ruins of its empire. This “real America” rejects, has always rejected separatism and tribalism: it has also rejected oligarchy and elitism. The voice of what claims to be realism tells us that we cannot have both unity and diversity: we must choose. Identity-in-difference – out of many, one, and yet still many – is asserted to be a verbal mystification, existing only in imagination’s Neverneverland. So long as we refuse to listen to that tempter’s voice, the American dream is not dead – the true American dream, not the false one of materialist success. If “reality” will not allow that dream, then “reality” must be re-visioned and recreated: that is the progressive task on a political level, and it is a universal task for all societies, not merely an American one. Campbell outlined such a project in a seminal essay, “The Symbol without Meaning.” After describing the growth of urban states into empires that decline and fall, he closes by speaking of “today, when the mandala itself, the whole structure of meaning to which society and its guardians would attach us, is dissolving.”28 Many of us feel increasingly that we live in some kind of end time, that cultural possibilities have been exhausted and cultural order is breaking down. It is the vision of Yeats in “The Sec-

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ond Coming” (P, 187): “The centre cannot hold.” The world reacts by a combination of hysteria and reactionary backlash: “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. / The best lack all conviction, / While the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Campbell, however, holds out hope that the cycle will do more than merely turn around again: the third eye of the imagination can see in the gathering darkness of the evening lands, because it sees by an inner light that is the fire of a creative process working to progressively deliver the world from the fallen cycle altogether: “The first stage of the process of individuation, Jung has described as one of dissolving – not re-enforcing – the individual’s identification of his personality with the claims of the collective archetypes. These, I have tried to show, are functions, not only of the psyche, but also of the history of society, and today are in full dissolution.”29 But the mandala of social, cultural, and psychological order is not merely destroyed, despite the mad-dog nihilism that slips its chains whenever a cultural order weakens. Instead, it is recreated, from Apollonian formgiver to Dionysian releaser of energy: “Two contrasting functions of the religious symbol can now be distinguished. The first is of reference and engagement; the second, disengagement, transport, and metamorphosis. The first is illustrated by the social mandala of the hieratic city-state, which engages every member in a context of experienced significance, relating him as a part to a whole … But when the symbol is functioning for disengagement, transport, and metamorphosis, it becomes a catapult, to be left behind.”30 By “transport and metamorphosis” Campbell means that the dissolution of the static order symbolized by the mandala releases a creative energy that produces dynamic change. He ends by quoting from the poet Robinson Jeffers: “Humanity is the mold to break away from, the crust to break through, the coal to break into fire, / The atom to be split.”31 V I I I . T H E P RO G RES S I VE VI S I O N O F T HE BI BL E : T HE T RI C K ST ER G O D We have been looking at the cyclical pattern of the rise, decline, and fall of empires set in motion with the advent of the first urban states. We now look back at manifestations in various historical eras and cultures of a counter-vision progressively recreating itself within the cycles of rise and decline. As we observed previously, Mircea Eliade claimed, in The Myth of the Eternal Return, that the idea of history as linear progress towards some

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end originated in the three Bible-based religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.32 We eventually discover a similar recreative impulse in Classical culture, but it is true that Jewish Scripture, the New Testament, and the Qu’ran have been a powerful source of the forward-looking vision. In Genesis, humankind falls and is given a second chance – but by only chapter 11 it has debased itself so far that the Deluge is necessary to wash its slate clean again. Clearly, if left to its own devices, it would go on falling repeatedly, so God institutes a counter-movement with his promise to Abraham. As we noted in part 2, he in effect turns himself into a Trickster God. It is not blasphemy, or anyway not just blasphemy, to say that he is somehow beyond good and evil: he explicitly says that he creates both (Isaiah 45:7). He is irrational and unfair just as life is – he is the irrational energy of life itself. The only way to worship him is to adopt his own perspective. Thus his followers tend to be chips off the old block, tricksters themselves. In the film version of Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek, the sensitive young writer is ready to give up wooing the woman he has fallen in love with because it is too much trouble. “Trouble?” Zorba replies. “Boss, life is trouble.” This Trickster God creates his chosen people by the practical joke of making a ninety-year-old woman pregnant. Then he claims, fingers crossed, that he wants Abraham to make this miraculously born child into a human sacrifice. On what grounds? Those of a shady investment broker: “Trust me.” True, Isaac was saved at the last minute, but the standard interpretation of the Atonement has it that God demanded that the sacrifice actually proceed in the case of his own Son. He likes to test people’s loyalty, although loyalty to such an enigma is irrational, and to the Greeks foolish. He even breaks his own laws, as Dante shows: in the sphere of Justice, of all places, Dante is told in the Paradiso that God not only predestines some people for damnation for reasons even the angels do not know, but also saves a few who, according to the letter of his law, ought to be damned (Cantos 19, 20). He is as irascible as King Lear, sending bears to rend forty-two children to death because they made fun of the bald head of his prophet Elisha, turning against Saul for granting mercy to Agag, the enemy king. If he were human, it would be said of him what is said of Lear: that he is either foolish or mad. Yet it may be that it is a Trickster God or no God. The followers of this God are all underdogs. The Hebrews were slaves in Egypt; the followers of Jesus were fishermen, prostitutes, tax collectors. For them, there was no realistic hope: the only possible faith would be a faith in the impossible. The Trickster God is the spirit of reversals: when it is time for the mighty

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to fall, he provides the banana peel. He is deus ex machina and proud of it. For all his cantankerousness, he is the spirit of comedy subverting the reality principle – especially satiric comedy like the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, which is dominated by underdog tricksters: by cranky old men who outwit and outwoo gaggles of young idiots; by puckishly irrepressible women such as Lysistrata; by talking birds who bamboozle both human beings and the gods. Maddening he may be, but the Trickster God is our only hope against the antagonist he is sometimes mistaken for: the terrifying Patriarch, awesome King, inscrutable Judge, he who pretends to be God but is really Blake’s Nobodaddy, the Wizard of Oz. It is this inscrutable, impersonal Other that is the source of our helpless, hopeless imprisonment in a vast system, labyrinth, or prison, and also the source of the sickness in ourselves that colludes with this impersonal fatality. When along comes the Trickster with a skeleton key. Out of the central Jewish myth of the Covenant, Martin Buber developed his notion of an I–Thou intimate relationship between God and man. Buber’s version is idealized, whereas an I–Thou relationship with the Trickster God would resemble an odd buddy flick, with much bickering back and forth. The Trickster God is partly fallen, as we are, and therefore imperfect, as we are. You can love him, or be furious with him, and you may do both. Yet he is hard to hate because he is so, well, human. Some people say that a personal God is naïvely anthropomorphic. The transcendent, sublime aspect of God is the Father, and it is true that Dante’s three mystical circles convey his awesomeness and mystery. But a transcendent God maintains his dignity because he is above the fray. We need someone to come down and stir things up, to pitch into the barroom brawl and take our side: lots of fun at Finnegan’s wake. In alchemical terms, he is Mercurius, the shapeshifting spirit, and we are not going to make the Philosopher’s Stone without him. In Answer to Job, Jung portrayed the God of Job as blind, unconscious, resembling Schopenhauer and Hardy’s Immanent Will, Freud’s Id. Job does this God a favour by yelling at him, because it wakes him up. Jung portrays the Incarnation as a result of God’s realization after the Job debacle that he really doesn’t know how the other half lives, so he decides to become human to find out. The Atonement thus becomes the ultimate reversal: God atoning for his own sins out of love for us. Mea maxima culpa. Then it is our turn to forgive, and say with Cordelia, “No cause, no cause.” We are, in the phrase that Isaiah Berlin borrowed from Kant, “the crooked timber of humanity.”33 And ours is a crooked God, trying to learn

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to know himself and thereby recreate himself progressively. The Duke in Measure for Measure and Prospero in The Tempest are human beings, but there is enough deus ex machina about them to suggest that Shakespeare also meant them as symbols of divine self-education. I X . T H E P RO G RES S I VE VI S I O N O F T HE BI BL E : L ET T ER A N D S P I RI T Yahweh gave the Israelites a Promised Land, but first he gave them the Law. Judaism stresses the contemplation and love of the Law; Christians recreated the Law by setting aside its ritual aspect but still adhering to moral law. But the real progressive recreation began in Judaism itself, the movement from the letter to the spirit of the Law. The prophets are credited with convincing people that God cares more about what is in someone’s heart than about punctilious observance of ritual or rigid adherence to the moral code. Portia’s courtroom speech in Merchant of Venice stresses the need to balance justice with mercy. The letter of the law is justice, but the letter alone quickly becomes unjust because it cannot adapt to particular circumstances: moreover, it demands a moral perfection of which the human race is not capable. The spirit of the law is mercy, and it is a Trickster spirit, highly distrusted by the self-righteous and by many bureaucrats. The Jesus who, being human, was capable of losing his temper, pitching the money-changers out of the Temple, cursing the barren fig tree, was also the Jesus who, being human and therefore complex, forgave even his enemies. He is real: the Jesus of the Second Coming, coming in self-righteousness to hurl most of the human race into eternal damnation, is an ideological bogey. There is another aspect to the letter–spirit contrast. To read Scripture according to the letter means reading it literally, as historical fact and inarguable truth. Whatever the religion, the fundamentalist impulse produces typically both a strict moral righteousness and a literal reading of Scripture: the two are related. The recreation of legalism by the spirit of the law is thus parallel to the method of reading Scripture symbolically rather than literally – not as mere fiction, but as another type of truth than that of literal fact. It is this tendency that is progressive, and finally gaining ground in our time. Another progressive aspect of the Bible, as Frye has shown in The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982), is its attitude that new imagery born of new historical circumstances and new ways of life form an unfolding

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revelation. Thus pastoral imagery of sheep and animal sacrifice is supplemented by, not replaced by, the agricultural imagery produced by Israel’s new life in the Promised Land; the even-later urban imagery likewise incorporates rather than replaces the older image clusters. Christianity takes over this both-and inclusiveness: Christ is the Lamb and the Good Shepherd; he is also the harvest bread and wine; he is also the stone the builders rejected that becomes the keystone of the Temple, which is also Christ. Spiritual reality is infinite, and no set of images can express it definitely, but multiplying images means increasing the richness of our perspective. X . T H E P RO G R ES S I VE VI S I O N O F T HE BI BL E : T YP O LO GY In addition to Tricksterism and the distinction between Scripture’s letter and spirit, a third mode of progressive recreation in the Bible is that of typology. Judaism and Islam are typological in so far as each understands historical events in the light of the future-oriented paradigm provided by Jewish Scripture, though recreated by the Qu’ran, respectively. Typology proper, however, is unique to the Christian Bible. In it, every image in the Old Testament is a type; it has a corresponding image in the New Testament that is its antitype, that is, its fully revealed or fully realized form. In The Great Code, Frye charts the backbone of the typological pattern, an intricate parallel between the details of the central event of the Old Testament, the Exodus, and the details of the central event of the New, the career of Christ. Moses is a type of Christ; like Christ, he has a miraculous birth and mysterious parentage, and he grows up in Egypt, where Christ was taken to escape the Slaughter of the Innocents. He gathers twelve tribes, as Christ gathered twelve apostles; the passage through the Red Sea is a type of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan. The Israelites wander forty years in the wilderness, as Christ wanders forty days in the Temptation story. Moses receives the Law on a mountain; Christ delivers the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. Moses dies, but the name of his successor, Joshua, is a variant of the same name as Jesus, and it is he who leads his people to a Promised Land, as Christ does by his Resurrection. This is a brief synopsis: in fact, even the smaller details of the Passion story have Old Testament types, including Jesus’ cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?,” which occurs in Psalm 22. All history had dreamed of the Messiah without knowing it: not only does the Incarnation interpret

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that dream, but, like Milton’s Adam, humanity awakes to find its dream was true. But Christian typology is not just an awakened knowledge of the past. The dream of history persists, and events in the future are types looking backward to their antitypes in Biblical history. The Biblical vision of creative time has had a powerful influence on Americans’ understanding of their own history. The New World was another Eden, but writers such as Hawthorne and Melville show the “new Adam” repeating the Fall. The myth of the frontier is the American Exodus, with the Native peoples in the role of the Philistines. More recently, the United States, like ancient Israel, decided that it wanted an empire – and, unfortunately, it got one. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Soviet Union, possessed by the Marxist version of progressive history, looked forward to the end of history and the withering of the state. Marx said that he arrived at this vision by an inverted reading of Hegel, who in turn reached his through an inverted interpretation of the Bible. Despite its far-reaching influence, typology is an uncomfortable subject in today’s academic world. For the Jungian shadow of typology is supersessionism, the conclusion that the Jews are passed over, that God has a new chosen people. In Galatians 4, Paul, a converted Jew, compares Judaism to Ishmael, son of the concubine instead of the legitimate wife, driven into the wilderness. This implies rejection of Judaism altogether, and has been a progenitor of anti-semitism ever since. It is not a supportable view, given that Jesus said he came to fulfil the Law, not to destroy it: the Old Testament is also the word of God, not a tissue of errors like pagan scriptures. Still, Christians, even those who are not antisemitic, tend to think of themselves as having the more clarified view; Muslims, in their turn, see the Qu’ran as the antitype of both Old and New Testaments. There is no resolution to this conflict on the ideological level: all that Jews, Christians, and Muslims can do is agree to disagree and treat one another with mutual respect. Blake said that, freed of their ideological trappings, “All Religions Are One” and that “Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.” What he was expressing was more than a warm and fuzzy relativism. The three Abrahamic faiths disagree over how eternity relates to time. For Jews, Kairos, their intersection, awaits the advent of the future Messiah. For Christians, the Messiah has already arrived. For Muslims, Muhammad was much of what the Messiah means to the Jews, a spiritual but also a political leader, but since he was not divine, eternity does not arrive until the Last Judgment.

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Already come, or still to come; human or divine? The argument arises from the distinctions between past, present, and future, between human and divine. But in the perspective of eternity, past, present, and future are co-present, gathered into an Eternal Now, and human and divine are both distinct and identified. Judaism and Islam have mystical traditions, Kabbalism and Sufism, respectively, whose objective is to experience deity as here and now, not just in the future, and human identification with it. Christianity believes in Christ’s appearance in both past and future, but also believes in his presence in every moment: in the Nativity Ode, Milton does not just celebrate Christ’s birth historically but sees it as happening again, now. But not yet: fallen time is not yet abolished, and so Christians are also, like Jews and Muslims, waiting and longing for a future event. The relationship of the three religions is not one of good-better-best. Once again, the imagination works on the principle not of either-or but of both-and. Each of the three is an image of truth, not necessarily superior or inferior: each reveals an aspect of an infinite and eternal, but paradoxical truth. The same holds for the relationship of human to divine: God is Other, like Yahweh, like God the Father, like Allah; yet God and humanity are two forms of one identity – although, as the crucified alHallaj found out, it may be dangerous to say so in the hearing of the devout. On the ideological level, Christianity is revisionist in relation to Judaism, and Islam in relation to both of its precursors. This ideological level cannot simply be wished away in the interests of harmony. But three great modes of vision cannot be reduced to ideological infighting either. Their best adherents recognize that all religions are humanly fallible: no one of them can claim absolute and definitive truth. The minute it does so, it has betrayed itself and become one more system of tyranny and fanaticism. Any faith can learn from other perspectives, and by doing so recreate its own. Thus, all three work together to refine the vision of spiritual reality across the expanse of time. They have a common enemy: the real demonic is what Blake called the “Selfhood,” the pure selfishness that refuses all common vision.34 This author’s limitations preclude all but the most tentative suggestions about whether a progressive pattern appears in Eastern mythology, religion, and literature. However, it seems clear that the Upanishads recreate the Vedas, themselves a radical transformation of the mythology of a warrior people, into one of the profoundest explorations of epistemology and psychology that the human race has ever produced. The various forms of yoga then can be seen as “myths to live by,” the experiential side of enlightenment, its realization within human temporal experience. The Bhagavad Gita attempts a synthesis of the seemingly contra-

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dictory yogas of action, ritual worship, contemplation, and gnosis (karma, bhakti, dhyana, and jnana yoga, respectively). Buddhism recreates Hinduism, and Mahayana Buddhism recreates the earlier Hinayana Buddhism. No doubt these observations are both oversimplified and spoken with a thick Western accent, but an impulse to preserve and yet transvalue earlier forms of vision does seem to be as much Eastern as Western. Whether or not each recreation is a genuine progressive clarification or a new type of error is no doubt as much a matter of contention in the East as it is in the West. XI . THE P RO G RES S I VE VI S I O N I N CL A S S I C A L M Y T HO LO GY It has been much less noticed that Classical mythology and literature also refine vision across time, through a developing process, not active agency. In the Theogony, Hesiod does not merely retell the early Greek myths: he recreates them into a vision of progressive law and order, his hero being Zeus. Zeus conquers monsters and Titans representing the chaotic energies of nature after the Creation. But Hesiod suppresses the side of Zeus that resembles his father, Kronos, whom he deposed and castrated, the arbitrary and ruthless wielder of power. His rather incoherent version of the Prometheus story reveals his revisionism. Prometheus tricks Zeus into choosing the inferior part of the sacrifice, the bones and fat: because he favours Zeus, Hesiod implausibly has Zeus recognize the trick but choose the worse portion anyway. Although we have only Prometheus Bound, the first play of a trilogy, it is clear that Aeschylus is trying to revise Hesiod: justice emerges out of a dialectic between Prometheus and Zeus, neither of whom is totally in the right. The Oresteia is also a meditation on justice and ends in what amounts to a Classical version of the Fortunate Fall. The Furies represent legalism, the letter of the law: Orestes has committed matricide and must be punished, even though he was caught in a double bind, having a heroic duty to avenge his father’s murder. The fact that the Furies are superseded, though placated, represents a real expansion of vision. All the Greek dramatists submitted three plays in Athens’s dramatic competition, but Aeschylus’s seem to be more genuine trilogies because his is more a linear than a cyclic vision, as close to epic as a dramatic poet can reach. For, in the history of literature, it is the epic line that has the deepest affinity with the horizontal vision. There are two types of epic: mythological, descending from Hesiod, and heroic, from Homer. Hesiod, whatever his dates, is a more archaic poet than Homer: the action of the

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Theogony is less displaced, more strange and dreamlike, than Homer’s harsh realism. Judging by the titles of a rather extensive list of Aeschylus’s lost plays, many of them mythological, he had more in common with Hesiod than with Homer. In this, he was unusual: the heroes of most Greek tragedies derived largely from heroic rather than mythological epic. There were two generations of Greek heroes. Prior to the Trojan War an earlier generation’s exploits were not strictly martial: Perseus, Theseus, Jason, and Herakles. Their episodic adventures, featuring a great number of monsters and marvels, are akin to those of romance, and their basic pattern is that of the quest-adventure.35 The first three figures have more than a bit of Trickster in them, and the Odyssey, with its wily, shapeshifting hero and its own plethora of monsters and marvels, has perhaps more kinship with such than it does with the Iliad. Herakles, whose story is basically tragic, sets the pattern for the later heroic as we know it. He begins his career as an embodiment of masculinity in its crudest form: almost a caveman, he wears a lion skin and fights with a club when he bothers with a weapon at all, given his super-strength. But his vulnerable spot, time and time again, is women. In all these ways he has a Biblical counterpart in Samson. Herakles’ twelve labours suggest to some scholars an original version in which a less displaced hero, perhaps a solar deity questing through the houses of the zodiac, descends to the Underworld and achieves the ultimate quest goal, immortality, symbolized by the golden apples of the Hesperides. But this does not happen to the Herakles we know. Instead, he is persecuted from the moment he is born by the feminine he has repressed, symbolized first of all by his inveterate enemy, Hera, who sends serpents to strangle him in his cradle. The super-strong infant strangles the serpents and grows to adulthood, whereupon Hera sends on him a fit of madness in which he slaughters his first wife and all their children. Later, this epitome of the masculine is forced to serve a woman, Omphale, for a year, in which he does women’s work and is even dressed by Omphale in women’s clothes. He meets his death due to the jealousy of another wife, Deianeira, who inadvertently gives him a robe dipped in the deadly poison of the Hydra’s blood. The closest he gets to being a solar deity is to go up in his own funeral pyre, jumping into the flames to escape the intolerable pain of a poison-soaked shirt – and yet it turns out he gains immortality after all. While his mortal shade dwells in the Underworld, where he converses with Odysseus in Book 11 of the Odyssey, his immortal part resides on Olympus with yet another woman, Hebe. This fate differentiates him from another epic hero whom he otherwise

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greatly resembles: the first of them all, Gilgamesh. In the Gilgamesh Epic, the feminine is once again the antagonist of supremely male protagonists: Enkidu is seduced by a prostitute and thereby loses his instinctive harmony with nature; Gilgamesh himself insults Ishtar, goddess of love, and thereby loses both his friend and immortality. Achilles’ one relationship to the feminine is with his mother. Students sometimes find it slightly comical that whenever he is upset he goes crying to his mom. Otherwise, he lives in a wholly male world, dominated by the heroic code, with its masculine value of competition, in which women are powerless war prizes. Yet he too meets his death by means of the feminine: not just through Helen of Troy, who as cause of the war indirectly causes his death and many others’, but more immediately through his contention for the war prize Chryseis. He too has a double fate: while his mortal part (with whom Odysseus also converses) is trapped in the Underworld, his real immortality is his undying glory. Thus we have three early epics, or at least tales of epic dimension, of male self-proving and male bonding in which a rejected and oppressed feminine takes its revenge. Their common tragic outline is that of the ironic cycle, in which the two Freudian drives, Eros and Thanatos, form a Blakean Negation of mutually destructive opposites: Thanatos

male

: Eros

female

The Odyssey may or may not be by the same poet, but it clearly stands in a revisionary relationship to the Iliad. Achilles’ rejection of life in favour of immortality in the form of unending glory and Odysseus’s choosing life instead of immortality are deliberately symmetrical. Additionally, glory (kleos) is the ultimate value in the heroic code of honour, and Odysseus’s meetings in the Underworld with the “A-Team” of the Trojan War – Agamemnon, Achilles, and Ajax – amount to a devastating critique of that code. All three are bitter and miserable. Agamemnon is yet another victim of feminine backlash, his wife having murdered him for sacrificing their daughter, Iphigenia, for the sake of his war. He harangues Odysseus like the drunk at the bar who can’t stop complaining about his ex, and eventually includes all women: “Indulge a woman never, / and never tell her all you know … The day of faithful wives is gone forever” (11.514–15, 534). To Agamemnon, all women exemplify Blake’s Female Will: the minute they acquire any kind of power they become treacherous betrayers. Odysseus

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seems to be sufficiently swayed by Agamemnon’s tirade to take his advice and land on the deserted side of Ithaca, take on a disguise, and test his wife before he reveals himself to her. In addition, the most powerful woman in the book, Circe, is treacherous and has to be raped into knowing who’s boss in a very uncomfortable episode. For all that, the Odyssey remains a remarkable attempt to see through both sides of the fallen cycle: male violence and domination, female cunning and deceit. Indeed, Odysseus has those “feminine” traits in a positive way, which is why he is distrusted by men and popular with women – the irony being that it was his cunning rather than Achilles’ warrior prowess that won the Trojan War. Despite being about the age of the typical leads in romantic comedies, his son, Telemachus, does not get so much as a girlfriend, whereas Odysseus, middle-aged and married, enchants a whole string of women – Circe, Calypso, Nausikaa, and even the untouchable virgin, Athena, who gives him a “caress” and flirts with him when she reveals herself (13.367). The power that finally returns him home again is that of a female monarch, Arete. Not that he is effeminate, of course: Homer is anxious to establish Odysseus’s male credentials. Whereas 108 suitors of his wife cannot draw his bow, even by cheating, and his son succeeds only on the fourth try, Odysseus draws it in one easy motion. But his real gift, of which his cunning and inventiveness are practical applications, is imagination. The first word of the Iliad is “rage”: the first lines of the Odyssey describe its hero as polytropos, literally “many turnings” – he is the “man of twists and turns,” as Robert Fagles translates it. He is as “protean” as Proteus himself: his imagination sees through apparent limits and finds a new way out. It makes him good with disguises, especially because he does not buy into the heroic-status game that would preclude other warriors’ disguising themselves as an old beggar. Most of all, it makes him an exuberant liar, making up false stories as some children do, out of the sheer zest of it, lying even when he does not need to, as to his aged father, never giving the same cover story twice (except for the common element that he comes from Crete, home of the latest remaining Goddess culture). One of the great themes that the Odyssey adds to the epic tradition, and to literature in general, is the power of storytelling to shape other people’s realities. And to reshape one’s own: Campbell has shown that the Wanderings (Books 9–12) – an epic within the epic, recounted by Odysseus himself as his own bard – though seemingly episodic – may contain vestiges of a symbolic pattern comparable to the Labours of Herakles, as Herakles himself points out in the Underworld: “Destined to / grinding labours

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like my own” (11.736–7).36 Campbell points out that there are either twelve or thirteen episodes in the Wanderings, depending on how one counts. Twelve is a solar number, and may imply that Odysseus is a solar hero, going down into the Underworld in the northwest and rising again in the east: at any rate, in the opening to Book 11, someone seems to have moved Circe’s island, which is now said to be in the east, “where the sun has his rising,” where Odysseus had originally arrived by sailing to the far west. Thirteen is a lunar number, and, again according to Campbell, therefore a Goddess number: pigs are associated with the Goddess in her chthonic aspect. Eumaeus also keeps pigs: exactly 360 of them, number of a complete cycle in both time and space. Solar and lunar calendars are out of sync, coming into conjunction once every nineteen years: the number of years Odysseus has been wandering. Is all this patterning over-ingenious, or does it signify something? It means that Odysseus, who has rejected immortality after death, dies, becomes “Noman” or “Nobody,” goes to the Underworld, and is reborn – in this life. Human life is a process of repeated death to an old and outgrown identity and birth to a new one. In traditional societies, we saw earlier, such events are marked by “rites of passage,” especially at the cardinal points of birth, coming of age, mid-life, and death. The Telemachia, as critics call the Odyssey’s first four books, devoted to Telemachus, is the opening of a coming-of-age story; Odysseus’s Wanderings and homecoming are a mid-life crisis.37 What is the use of imagination in ordinary life? The first necessity of life is to be able to change, to be reborn, and the polytropic imagination is what makes that possible. Odysseus is a survivor, when so many of his companions are dead. He survives partly by his own wits, but the gods help those who are like themselves, and Odysseus’s two guardian deities, Hermes and Athena, are both liars and tricksters. On the highest level, the Odyssey reaches towards a re-imagining of the tragic limits of the human condition. In Book 24 of the Iliad, Achilles tells Priam a parable about the two jars of Zeus: one holds good fortunes, the other misfortunes. A man’s fate depends on which jar Zeus randomly reaches into when he gets out of bed in the morning. In striking contrast, the first event of the Odyssey is a carefully placed speech by Zeus that says that humanity makes most of its own misfortune and then blames it on the gods. Throughout the second half of the epic, Athena acts repeatedly as an invisible providence, and Odysseus’s return is heralded by what the Bible calls “signs” and “wonders.” Telemachus is one of little faith: at first he refuses to believe his father can return even when his father is standing before him. Then, later, when he loses faith because of the

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impossible odds, he is told that with the good will of the gods anything is possible. Be careful of what stories you believe: they may doom you, as they doomed the Cyclops and the suitors. But beware equally the stories you do not believe, out of your clever scepticism, out of your despair, out of your fear of being naïve. Perhaps that carpenter’s son, born in a stable, really is the Son of God. The line of progressive vision divides here, one fork comic, one tragic. The Odyssey has no comic successor in the Classical epic line. The writer who would carry the process of redemptive recreation further down the horizontal line is Euripides. Greek drama seems to have become increasingly restless within the episodic-cyclic pattern that became the norm for drama. We have seen that Aeschylus’s natural form was the developmental trilogy. Even Sophocles, who is the norm, was experimenting at the end of his life, in Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, with a theme of a kind of redemption through suffering over a long period of time. Euripides was so dissatisfied with the norms of his culture, both artistic and moral, that he exploded the form of tragedy altogether and out of it forged something new: tragicomedy. Euripides clearly despises the heroic ethic: his perspective is strikingly modern, which the traditionalist Aristophanes sensed and disapproved of. He looks ironically not only at war but at the code of revenge and “honour,” and at male domination. And he often does so by taking the point of view of women. The old charge of misogyny against Euripides is ridiculous: few writers before modern times possess such sympathetic insight into the psychology of women. He is modern as well in loving to make his audience uncomfortable: he forces us to empathize with Medea despite her monstrous act of killing her own children. When he portrays women as evil, the treatment is sociological: women like his Elektra become dangerous psychopaths because of having to live under a dehumanizing social system: the alternative, again, is victimage, as in The Trojan Women. In Alcestis, the title character sacrifices herself, goes to the Underworld, for the sake of a husband who is petty, selfish, and clearly not worthy of her. Homer’s gods, with their aristocratic irresponsibility, were becoming a scandal, and not just to modernists such as Euripides. In a few plays, Euripides toys with the idea of replacing them with a more rational, naturalistic explanation – but he is no rationalist, and has a deep fascination with the death-rebirth pattern. Alongside the Olympian religion of Homer’s warrior elite, what are called the Mystery Religions had developed out of the old vegetation-fertility rituals of the dying gods – most

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famously the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and the dying and reviving Persephone. What little we know of the Mystery cults’ ceremonies suggests they gave initiates an experience of death to their natural selves and rebirth to an immortal, spiritual self. The early Alcestis may be influenced by another mystery cult, Orphism. At the other end of Euripides’ career, The Bacchae is about the cult of the dying and reviving Dionysus in his guise as Bacchus, originally god of wine and drunkenness. The Bacchae is about the terrible fate of someone who tries to resist the Dionysian injunction to let go, to surrender, to be released from one’s social identity. And one’s gender identity as well: King Pentheus is a blustering incarnation of masculine protest, homophobically outraged at this strange new effeminate deity and his ability to lure respectable wives and mothers into dancing orgiastically in the hills. It is one of the great tours de force in drama when Bacchus leads out on stage a hypnotized Pentheus – in drag. Euripides is a social-problem dramatist who became a visionary philosopher as his analysis of social problems ran up against the limits of fallen human nature and the fallen cycle. His direct modern successor is George Bernard Shaw, who shows his love for him in Major Barbara, identifying the Dionysian energy of The Bacchae with the “diabolic” creative energy of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (source of The Devil’s Disciple), and identifying both of them with his own idea of a creative Life Force driving progressively through time. Euripides himself developed the pattern of tragicomedy in such plays as Helen and Ion by adding a linear propulsion to the cyclic resolution of comedy. In both cases, the gods represent a divine creative power working through death and rebirth to a conclusion that gives meaning and dignity even to a whole lifetime of suffering and deprivation. Euripides is sometimes said to have invented New Comedy, but his tragicomedies go far beyond anything Plautus and Terence ever dreamed of. It is fascinating to watch Shakespeare, who knew only Plautus and Terence, re-invent the form of Euripidean tragicomedy for himself much later. The late phase of Classical civilization saw the decline of Athens and the rise of Rome. As Frye has pointed out, Spengler, to preserve his cyclical scheme, insisted that cultures were hermetically sealed: when one culture was influenced by another it was a “pseudomorphosis,” a parasitic distortion of the culture’s natural shape. This means that he is at his weakest in the face of a creative transfusion from one culture to another across time.38 Rome, however, took from Greece not only the form of the heroic epic but the gods and heroes of the Trojan War Epic Cycle. Some

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decades ago, during the “culture wars,” the idea of a body of “classics” that preserved the core values of Western culture was at times promoted in ways that made one wonder whether the promoters actually knew what was in those classics. The epic has perhaps been more self-recreative than any other genre, and the greatest Roman epic, Virgil’s Aeneid, revisionary of the values of both the Iliad and the Odyssey in a thoroughgoing and self-conscious way, unlike any other epic in the tradition. Dozens of Homeric patterns, large and small, are echoed by the Aeneid as patterns of the Old Testament are echoed by the New, a resemblance that may hold some significance. On the largest, structural level, for example, it falls into two halves, like the Odyssey, the first half consisting of wanderings, the second of the finding and claiming of a home. But the Aeneid’s purpose is never to repeat, but always to transvalue: Aeneas leads a band of remnant Trojans who cannot go home again – their home is no more – and who must consequently found a new Troy in an unknown land, which will be called not “Troy” but rather “Rome.” The second half of the Aeneid, Books 7–12, in which the Trojans, with the Latins’ aid, fight hostile native peoples led by Aeneas’s arch-enemy Turnus, parallels Odysseus’s battle with the suitors, but also evokes the battles of the Iliad, with Aeneas and Turnus’s final showdown echoing Achilles and Hector’s. This too is revisionist, and in a retrograde way, turning the comic Odyssey pattern back towards the tragic outcome of the Iliad. The comic happy ending belongs not to Aeneas, who, like Achilles, will die soon after the point at which the epic ends, but to his descendants, for whose fulfilment he sacrifices his own. For Aeneas is a new type of hero. He fights neither for individual glory nor for his own welfare. Quite the contrary, in a repeated epithet, he is pius Aeneas, “pious” to earlier translators but really more like “duty-bound.” A hero is someone who sacrifices himself for a higher cause. And Aeneas’s cause involves a vision of history as progress towards a future goal – the source of both the Aeneid’s resemblance to Biblical typology and of Dante’s interest in it. Like Odysseus, Aeneas descends at the epic’s midpoint into the Underworld to undergo a symbolic death and rebirth: when he returns, he is purged of any remaining selfish attachments to anything but his mission, inspired by a vision of Rome’s glorious future as told to him by his father, Anchises. Yet the whole future history of Rome fits inside an even larger perspective, possibly cribbed from Orphism, involving reincarnation and a moral system that rewards the good and punishes the evil after death. On

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this level, the Emperor Augustus, who commissioned the epic, should have been pleased at the result, and the Aeneid is said to have been taught to the youth of the British aristocracy as virtually a handbook of empire. The poem explicitly says that Rome itself is self-sacrificing like Aeneas: it fights wars in order to secure peace, the pax Romana; it rules not for its own aggrandizement but to bring civilization to barbarians. Centuries later, the British Empire called this the “white man’s burden.” But beneath the poem’s ideological surface lurks a very different theme: what price empire? Freud knew his Virgil: a passage about the descent to the Underworld forms the epigraph of The Interpretation of Dreams. To what extent did he have the Aeneid in mind when he wrote Civilization and Its Discontents? Civilization, that book says, demands self-sacrifice, but such sacrifice exacts a price. On its underside, which is its truly progressive side, the Aeneid seems to be as subversively revisionist about imperialism as the Odyssey was to the Iliad’s heroic code. Like Odysseus, Aeneas is involved in a series of relationships with women – yet he moves through them in reverse order, so to speak, for he loses his own Penelope – his wife and companion, Creusa – before he even leaves Troy. Then he has a go-up-in-flames rebound relationship with Dido, his version of Circe, from which Mercury extracts him to send him back to his duty. Finally, when he has arrived in Italy, he seals a political alliance with the Latin tribes by marrying King Latinus’s daughter Lavinia, who is as much a token as any female war prize of the Iliad, not speaking a single word in the entire story. Aeneas has two opposite numbers, his fatal attraction, Dido, and his enemy Turnus. Both of them are creatures of irresponsibly unrestrained impulse, both of them die from it (I am convinced that Turnus is one model for Shakespeare’s Hotspur) – and both of them upstage the rather wooden Aeneas in the eyes of most readers. On the final page of the epic, his enemy Turnus is lying wounded on the battlefield, asking for mercy. The civilized and restrained Aeneas is on the verge of granting it when he sees that Turnus is wearing as a war prize a belt belonging to a beautiful young Trojan named Pallas, who foolishly went up against him and was killed. We know that Virgil himself was gay, and he associates Pallas with Dido by applying to both the image of a wounded deer. Aeneas loses control for perhaps the only time in his life and, in a fury worthy of Achilles, sinks his sword into Turnus, whose death ends the epic in the mood sometimes described as “Virgilian melancholy.” It is as if the Iliad had ended in Book 22 with Hector’s death, without the breakthrough into a vision of compassion in Book 24. What remains inspiring

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about the Aeneid is its story of a struggle to create a new world out of the ruins of an old – but it offers too a cautionary tale about the means adopted to serve that end. XI I . T H E M I D D L E AG ES A N D REN A I S S A N C E : RO M ANT I C A N D S P I RI T UA L HERO ES The empire promised to Aeneas’s descendants rose, declined, and fell, to be replaced by the second cycle of Western civilization, at whose end we have perhaps arrived. Virgil’s value to Dante went beyond providing the model for an epic poet. A theory of history in Dante’s time held that the Roman Empire was part of the Christian God’s providential plan. It was the matrix of Christianity: once it converted, it spread the faith wherever it expanded, which was to the four corners of the known world: without it, Christianity might not have become a world religion. Consequently, as the Aeneid appropriated the material of the Greek Epic Cycle for its own ends, the Divine Comedy annexes the Aeneid to a more fully revealed vision of history, as if the Comedy were its antitype. Virgil was widely held to have been granted a dim intuition of the greater truth behind the pagan gods, perhaps because of his scepticism about them: his Fourth, or “Messianic,” Eclogue foretold the coming of a miraculous child, born of a virgin, who would return the world to the Golden Age. What was new and distinguished the Christian cycle from the Classical one is that that child’s Kingdom was not of this world. Christianity’s first century, however, was dominated by the expectation that the Kingdom was coming, and quite soon. The medieval church did its best to replace that horizontal hope with a vertical, otherworldly perspective, condemning Joachim of Floris’s prophecy of a coming Third Age of the Holy Spirit, which would render the church redundant. But otherworldly detachment is not the only possible outcome when eternity intersects with time. We may ascend from this vale of tears, yes: but the spirit may, and does, descend, and in doing so transforms a moment of ordinary time. At that instant, the Kingdom has come, as Milton shows in one of the great treatments of this theme, the Nativity Ode, and as his ideological antagonist T.S. Eliot reveals in Four Quartets. The spiritualizing power of Christianity transformed the epic tradition. The warrior hero did not entirely vanish: he appears in the thinly Christianized Beowulf, in the Chanson de Roland, and in the early poems about King Arthur, where Arthur remains closer to what he was in actual history, a heroic defender of his people. But increasingly Christian influence

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worked to redefine the heroic act as mental rather than physical, inward and invisible rather than outward and overtly glorious. This next progressive refinement of imaginative vision introduced two new types of hero to literature, romantic and spiritual. A new kind of love seems a curious invention, yet the idealizing Courtly Love tradition has no real counterpart in Classical literature. Of course, the Greeks and Romans knew all about romantic passion. Whether its object is of the same or the opposite gender makes little difference: from Sappho to Virgil’s Dido, such passion is portrayed as an attractive but dangerous madness, a kind of psychological addiction. Its pursuit of an inaccessible object makes the world go, as Ovid shows, perhaps not around but restlessly forward in a donkey’s-carrot parody of the progressive horizontal. Medieval romantic passion can be mistaken for Courtly Love, sometimes by the lovers themselves: Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fall in love, and into bed, after they read of the Courtly Love of Lancelot and Guinevere. But, despite his sympathy for their situation, Dante is at pains to distinguish their love, which condemns them to the circle of the Lustful, from his for Beatrice, which leads him in the opposite direction. Though not without hinting honestly at a certain uncertainty: he faints with “pity” (a frequent word in the episode) and, at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, suffers the flames punishing the Lustful, the only time he is other than a spectator, a tacit admission that maybe once or twice he had thought about what Beatrice looked like naked. Courtly Love was an attempt at a middle way between such worldly love, which the Greeks called eros, and the otherworldly agape, or selfless spiritual love, of medieval Christianity. Unlike the latter, it sought its fulfilment in this world, in defiance not only of the church but sometimes of marriage laws, remaining faithful to Love himself, sometimes represented as a god (as he is in Dante’s Vita Nuova) and to a higher law than that of marriage. In an often-cited passage from the medieval romance Aucassin and Nicolette, when the main characters are told that their love will land them in hell, they reply that they are content with that: all their friends will be there with them, whereas heaven is full of monks and prudes. Such love may end in tragedy, as it does for Lancelot and Guinevere, for Tristan and Isolde, for the lovers in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, but to die never having experienced such a love is never really to have lived. Heroism is no longer necessarily martial, and therefore no longer exclusively male: all the way up to Romeo and Juliet, Courtly Love thinks in terms of a pair of lovers whose heroic act is the mental one of imagining an ideal love and living by it at all costs. Not everyone was so deadly

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earnest about it: sometimes it was merely a game, originating in the courts, where people had time on their hands. Petrarch’s Laura and Dante’s Beatrice were real women, but the Sylvias and Phoebes of many Elizabethan sonnet sequences were often invented for the occasion. Nor was scepticism inconceivable: at the end of Troilus and Cryseide, Chaucer’s hero laughs in eternity to be free of earthly illusions, including that of ideal love in a world that cares only for power. The spiritual quest also redefines the heroic in terms of a mental act, that of perceiving and having faith in a spiritual reality beyond the illusions we call “reality.” Most of the old heroic ideal is in fact condemned: Dante shows most of the Trojan War heroes in hell for the sins of forza and frode, force and fraud, the twin virtues in the Iliad and Odyssey respectively. The ideal of a spiritual warrior like Spenser’s Knight of Holiness is not out of the question, perhaps unfortunately, given the perversion of this ideal that we call the “Crusades.” But from the saint’s lives of the Middle Ages to Pilgrim’s Progress in the seventeenth century, the spiritual quester may not be heroic at all in the traditional sense – may even, in fact, be something of a reluctant or ironic hero. Some of the few moments of humour in the Divine Comedy derive from Dante the author satirizing Dante the character for being about as much of a “hero” as Frodo Baggins is. When Virgil tells him he has been called to go on a quest, he replies, “I am not Aeneas; I am not Paul” (Inferno, 2.32). Repeatedly he balks, and Virgil has to nag and coax him onward again, usually by mentioning that Beatrice is waiting. What is really heroic in Biblical terms, from Job to Jesus himself, is suffering and endurance, even unto martyrdom, for the sake of an ideal invisible and incomprehensible to others, who may deem the quester mad, like Don Quixote, or demonically possessed, like Joan of Arc. Don Quixote’s chivalric ideal is not specifically religious, yet it acts like one in providing an ideal alternative to the corruptions of society. The Round Table, from The Faerie Queene to The Once and Future King, is similarly an ideal alternative on the political level to the Realpolitik that rules in every age. The spiritual quest may wander horizontally in time and space, but its eventual goal is a vertical ascent. So too for more ambitious forms of Courtly Love narrative, especially the Divine Comedy, which boldly fuses the seemingly incompatible Courtly Love and spiritual quests. Its model is the so-called Platonic ladder of love, whose rungs Socrates describes in the Symposium. Love enters “through the eyes,” in a phrase of the troubadour poets, and the enchanted (whatever her or his sexual orientation) begins by loving the other’s physical beauty. As love deepens, the lover’s

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inner beauty comes to eclipse his or her outward appearance. Since what is valuable in the beloved is only a hint of something that transcends the physical world, the philosophical lover climbs through love to a higher realm of Forms. It was easy enough to Christianize the Platonic ladder. Dante’s love for a human woman ensures his salvation: Dante the character does not heroically rescue the maiden but has to be rescued by her. Beatrice, looking down from heaven, sees that his mid-life crisis is sending him in the wrong direction, and therefore descends into hell itself to beg Virgil, with tears in her eyes, to go and turn him around. This is exceptional, but Courtly Love resembles Christian agape and differs from romantic passion in being unselfish: it is not a form of attempted self-gratification but a discipline and a service. Often it was “platonic” in the sense of being unrequited, the woman either inaccessible (including married) or simply a “cruel mistress,” meaning one who says “no.” There were attempts, however, to recreate both the Courtly Love and spiritual quests in more, ahem, horizontal terms. Both Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Spenser’s Faerie Queene work towards seeing ideal love possible within marriage rather than only in a transcendent realm. Spenser gives the first book of his poem to the virtue of Holiness, but deliberately balances the Redcrosse Knight in Book 2 with Sir Guyon, knight of the worldly virtue of Temperance. Sir Guyon destroys Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss, a false paradise of fantasy lust. Thereafter, the continuous narrative of Books 3 and 4 is dominated by Britomart, who is headed towards marriage with Sir Artegall, a union of equals. In contrast, Dante was married to Gemma Donati, had children by her (one named Beatrice, who became a nun!), and never mentioned her in his writing. While this seems bizarre to us, it is possible to see a certain shrewdness in it. The whole bridal industry depends on a continuing belief, or at least hope, that an ideal love can result in “happily ever after.” The whole divorce industry exists because of the difficulty of maintaining an ideal relationship at close quarters. Starting at least as early as high school, many people unconsciously provoke unrequited infatuations because they are intense and beautiful (and inspire much poetry, however awful) in a way that actual involvement cannot. At any rate, we are still grappling with this question. Both Dante and Spenser further what Harold Bloom called “the internalization of quest romance” in another way as well.39 Despite their epic ambitions, they do not imitate the epic form of Homer or Virgil, but instead write in the medieval genre of the romance. Unlike the relatively

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realistic genres of epic and tragedy, romance transpires in a purely imagined world of wonders akin, as Frye says in Anatomy of Criticism, to the dream.40 Characters, places, and events are archetypal in the Jungian sense, connecting to the ordinary world through allegory: the attaching of religious, philosophical, or political labels to the poem’s images. In the hands of a serious poet, romance technique is decreative rather than escapist: as the scholarly footnotes explain, the Divine Comedy is a detailed, erudite critique of Dante’s Europe, which never appears in the poem directly. Spenser may seem more fanciful, but his use of allegory is Aristotelian rather than Platonic, that is, immanent and teleological, horizontal rather than strictly vertical. Arthur’s knights allegorically represent certain virtues, but not in the vertical sense of transcendent Platonic Ideas. St George, the Knight of Holiness, is an imperfect man who struggles to become holy, and repeatedly fails. He is an action hero: his climactic exploit is the traditional one of fighting a dragon. But the heroes’ profounder ordeals exemplify the struggle, often as much internal as external, to realize a potential ideal within time: hence all the temptation scenes – in the Cave of Mammon, Acrasia’s Bower, Busirane’s castle, and so on. Milton, who regarded Spenser as a precursor, made temptation the central theme of all his longer poems, from Comus through Samson Agonistes. In addition, Areopagitica portrays progress as refining truth out of error by struggle over time. In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve are tempted and fail to resist. Milton’s successful hero is the Christ of Paradise Regained, Significantly, though unexpectedly, he regains paradise not through the physical ordeal of his Crucifixion but through the mental ordeal of his temptation by Satan in the wilderness. Milton expands the three temptations of the Gospel accounts to show Satan methodically presenting Christ with the whole possible spectrum of human temptations. The entire poem consists of a verbal agon or debate: unlike his ponderous Father in Paradise Lost, Christ has a sense of humour, a dryly acerbic one with which he skewers the hapless Satan repeatedly. His point is not that primary concerns are not primary, but that the route to them does not justify the means: to fulfil them in corrupt ways – exactly what the ideologues always say is necessary – is precisely to make a deal with the devil. The hero of Milton’s other late poem, Samson Agonistes, seems at first an odd choice – like Herakles, the epitome of an action hero. But this is after he is blinded – blinded through having failed to resist temptation because, like Herakles, he has a weakness about women. Each of the play’s five, unmarked acts consists of a debate between Samson and another charac-

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ter, followed by a Choral commentary. Each poses a temptation that Samson must resist if he is to become worthy to be God’s warrior one last time. Like his author, he sees now by an inward light; when he could see, he was, like Oedipus, blinded by his pride. Resistance to bodily temptations on the level of physical needs and desires is Temperance, a mental discipline in which the mind masters the body. Milton knew as early as Comus that Temperance is not the same as abstinence or asceticism. We grow up from childhood as creatures of physical impulse: much of socialization consists of learning to control those impulses – not because they are sinful but because otherwise they will control us. As they mature, most people learn that Temperance, which means moderation, in fact liberates pleasure. Slowly savouring one’s food is more enjoyable than pigging out; sensible drinking is actually more satisfying than bingeing; sex with mutual regard is more satisfying than mere lust. But there are always a few people who do not learn how to navigate on the road of excess to the palace of wisdom, and increasingly those around them learn to regard them with some amount of pity. Pity because it is increasingly clear that their over-indulgence, which Milton calls “license,” has become a kind of compulsion, if not physical then at least psychological. People embark on such a program of licence often in pursuit of freedom from society’s endless rules: “Nobody’s going to tell me what to do. To be good means never to have any fun.” But it may be that real sin, as opposed to merely breaking social taboos, is at its core a kind of addictive behaviour, and the addictions are not just physical: people can be addicted to gambling or gaming, and they can become so addicted to power that they run completely out of control, take foolish chances, and destroy themselves. Perhaps that explains a mysterious passage in the Inferno in which Virgil tells Dante that the damned waiting for Charon’s ferryboat to take them across the water are eager despite their fear (Inferno 3.124–6). For the sinners are shown repeatedly to be still locked into the mindset that damned them: Paolo and Francesca, and also Ulysses, are still rationalizing their illusions; Ugolino turns away from Dante because he must keep gnawing on the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri. For Dante knows as well as Milton that the only true liberty is that of internal discipline: that is why, at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, Virgil tells Dante that, having purged himself of all Seven Deadly Sins, he is crowned pope and emperor over himself, and has no need of external laws or coercion. This helps shape the form of romance that Thomas More invented about a century before Milton’s time, the utopia. Utopias have a reputation for

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being at once boring and authoritarian because most of them present constructing and maintaining an ideal society as a matter of regimenting the economy, politics, social habits, thinking. Yet a utopia does not lack conflict: that is neither possible nor desirable, because, as Blake said, opposition is true friendship. The question is how the oppositions are managed. A real utopia would be an anarchy, in which all citizens possessed the kind of internal discipline and responsibility that both Dante and Milton agreed was essential to true liberty, a discipline that would be something other than mindless ideological conditioning. Laws would be essential for social order, but external enforcement would be much less frequent. This seems impossible to us because we live in a fairly dysfunctional society filled with lots of dysfunctional people, which can function only with external compulsion. Therefore, utopia must be, or at least be working towards, Maslow’s Eupsychia, where everyone is mentally healthy. It requires a progressive recreation of human nature, aiming not for perfection but for natural functioning at full health. Since Aristophanes’ The Birds, utopian thinking has been satirized as building castles in the air – Milton speaks of Plato’s “airy burgomasters.”41 The implication is that the inhabitants would have to be purely rational, with their heads in the clouds. But it may be that theorizing about recreating human nature for utopia should start with the body rather than with the mind. Two utopian works of the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death, speculated that the kind of sanity that would make utopia possible would require a new relationship between mind and body.42 Brown argues that the series of repressions that constitute Freudian socialization – the oral, anal, and genital stages – relate the subject to the body and its energies in a pathological manner, going far beyond any necessary internal discipline. The process has become ideological, aiming to produce physically repressed, psychologically paralyzed and docile citizens. Undoing those repressions unleashes a libido that may transform the mind by liberating the body from its normal but unnecessary limitations. This is hardly a radical notion as our society starts to recognize that the most common neuroses, including depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, are psychosomatic. The result may be a liberation not just of the mind but of the body itself. What we consider physical limits might not be so intractable as we have been conditioned to believe. This is not just modern radicalism but an idea with an ancient heritage: Milton’s ideas in Comus about how to spiritualize the body are drawn from the esoteric Western traditions of Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, but are consonant with the discipline of

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yoga in the East, which teaches how to control breathing, heartbeat, and body temperature as steps towards a spiritual transformation. This transformative discipline is what Freud should have meant by “sublimation” – a progressive response to the cyclical pessimism of a book such as his Civilization and Its Discontents. Due to the crises of our time, utopian thinking has all but disappeared in the last forty years, and dystopias are, to use the appropriate word, all the rage. But if the form of the utopia could be re-imagined on the basis described above, it could become a mental laboratory for solving some of those crises where dystopian thought sits passively wringing its hands. XI I I . SH A K E SP E A REA N T RAG I C O M EDY O R RO M A N C E Drama belongs to the cyclic vision, but we have seen that it may strive against its natural limitations to embody something of the horizontal vision of recreative progress, as it did in the trilogies of Aeschylus and the tragicomedies of Euripides. Shakespeare wrote in two genres outside of tragedy and comedy, one cyclical and ironic, the other darkly but progressively hopeful. His history plays grapple with the question of whether English history shows a progression or merely the turning of a cycle, symbolized by the Wheel of Fortune. Tudor propaganda, what is sometimes called the “Tudor myth,” held that there was real progress, and there is an old debate about whether Shakespeare dramatizes this notion or subverts it. In his Henriad, Falstaff, and the lunar imagery surrounding him, represent the cyclic waxing and waning: the solar-associated Prince Hal, as Henry V, establishes law and order internally and leads England to triumph abroad – but Shakespeare had already written a tetralogy about the hideous chaos that immediately followed Henry’s premature death. At the end of that tetralogy, the death of Richard III ushers in the Tudor dynasty, but there is little sense in the history plays that anything is achieved other than a lot of corpses and temporary respite (although of course the efflorescence of the age of Elizabeth lurks invisibly beyond them). Shakespeare’s late romances independently re-invent Euripides’ form of tragicomedy, in which time does become creative, but, in contrast with his earlier comedies, the redemptive process now takes a generation or span of human life and not a mere night in the woods: there is a sixteen-year gap between Acts 2 and 3 in The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest opens twelve years after Prospero and Miranda’s exile begins. As also in the earlier comedies, a recreative power sometimes linked to time itself works

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behind the scenes to renew and reconcile after suffering, loss, and grief, in the pattern of the Fortunate Fall. This creative power has divine associations in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, but it often works through a human agent associated with art. In The Winter’s Tale, Paulina’s statue of the supposedly dead Hermione “comes to life.” Prospero’s magical “art” mostly creates theatrical-style illusions to transform various members of the shipwrecked court through various ordeals. He seems a successor to the Duke in Measure for Measure, who sets up harrowing ordeals for his subjects’ ultimate good. The unseen power relates to the energies of “great creating Nature,” which spawns art, as nature recreates itself through human means. The power works by breaking “mind-forg’d manacles” (Blake), thus remaking an entire society. There is a utopian subtext in The Tempest – but accompanied by a sometimes-troubled meditation on the limits of human power. Because the theme of colonialism has for years dominated discussions of the play, there has been a focus on Prospero’s dark side. That side is real: he is the imperialist who simply assumes he rules the island because its native inhabitant is a “savage”: he disposes of his daughter in time-honoured patriarchal fashion. But it is possible to over-emphasize the ironic side of the picture. Shakespeare knows that Prospero is a flawed instrument, and, again like the Duke in Measure for Measure, sometimes Prospero knows it himself. By temperament he is contemplative, unsuited for rule. Yet someone has to wield power, and it was his neglect of his kingdom in favour of his books that allowed his evil brother Antonio to seize power twelve years previously, so he is determined to make up for his past irresponsibility. He is not capable of changing Antonio and Sebastian, who remain locked in their viciousness at the play’s end, but at least he neutralizes their capacity for tyranny and destruction. Caliban is his blind spot. He never does come to see that Caliban too has a complex identity, one part of him a superstition-crazed potential rapist, the other a childlike being who listens to mysterious, haunting music that no one else can hear, including perhaps Prospero himself (just as it is, of all people, Bottom who has had a “bottomless dream” by the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream). Yet presumably, unlike the imperialists of later centuries, Prospero does leave Caliban after the play’s end to be the king of his own island. Prospero is a character who is difficult to like, but we often resent the authority figures, including teachers and coaches, who put us through ordeals designed to change us until we no longer need that external authority. In Paradise Lost, Milton, a revolutionary who helped depose a monarch in the name of liberty, has Christ

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prophesy that at the end of time his Father will put his royal sceptre by (3.339–41). On one level, Prospero is autobiographical: the poet and dramatist’s art puts an audience through a number of ordeals by summoning illusions, and Prospero’s “art” looks directly forward to the Romantic theory of the imagination. XI V . S U M M A RY A N D P RELU D E : T H E H I STO RI C A L N EX U S O F RO M A N T I C I S M The present part of this book is of course a “master narrative” of the sort that has been vehemently decried by critics, philosophers, and cultural theorists for the past half-century – really since Nietzsche did his best to derail Hegel’s express train heading for the last station of the Absolute Spirit. Those who want “no more metaphysics” – for a master narrative, in my terminology a progressive recreative myth, is metaphysics in motion, so to speak, the diachronic form of a synchronic structure – have serious reason for their objection. Myths are not innocent: they are structures of power, and they can be corrupted by ideology and the will to power into the ironic, and beyond that into the demonic. But the most sophisticated versions of the hermeneutics of suspicion, such as Derrida’s, tell us that we are never outside the structures of metaphysics. Likewise, to think at all is to tell stories, and when we do so we are constructing a myth, a master narrative. The only choice we have is what kind of master narrative we construct: one that collaborates with the will to power, or one that, Trickster fashion, steals at least some of its power and bestows it as a Promethean gift to further primary concerns. Some critics claim that nothing can oppose the corrupt will to power: human will is the will to power, pre-structuring and predestining us. The pessimistic visions of some poststructuralists end in the same conclusion as extreme Calvinism centuries ago, but without an inscrutable deity and his randomly saving grace. There are, it is said, no redemptive master narratives or myths, only ones that manage to disguise the violence with which they impose their will on both texts and history. The most frequent form of textual and historical violence is the coercion of particularities to fit the unity of the pattern, and no progressive mythmaker escapes the charge of ignoring differences and arbitrarily postulating patterns and unities, an act deemed at best irresponsible, at worst sinister. These are serious charges, and no mythmaker is more than relatively acquitted of them: hence the continuing decreation and recreation of previous visions. Still, I am not willing, with all possible puns intended, to accept the fatal-

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istic quietism that the pessimistic view makes inevitable. It is my faith that the imagination, the mythmaking power, can be used, however imperfectly, for good as well as evil, to refine and awaken a vision of identity-indifference founded upon primary concerns. For the demand for an end to metaphysics and master narratives itself assumes a master narrative of ubiquitous power systems. That myth is as potentially totalizing as any other: not only would the alternative of fragmented micro-narratives of merely local political action be subject to the same corrupting tendencies, but – as in fact happens every day – the inability of fragmented factions to unite in any common action would cripple their attempts at social remediation. This is not merely an anxious humanist defending the power structure that guarantees his privileged position: would-be radical theorists themselves admit the problem. Rather than wasting time in “culture wars” that only aid the real enemy, I would rather unite to further a carefully defined progressive process, even with people who might think the present book is wrong or even wrongheaded. If we can unite at all, it proves that there is a master narrative somewhere that does more than manifest the human death wish, even if the most we can do is intuit it through visions and oracles, or, in a waste land without even visions, act on it anyway. It is a common assumption that modern literature and mythmaking begin with the Romantics and that modern philosophy, in a closely affiliated move, starts with Kant’s attempt to move beyond the Cartesian dualism of the cloven fiction. The Romantic mythmakers saw themselves as recreating what was valid in traditional mythology, preserving it for the present age and adapting it to the needs of the future. Their movement regarded itself as refining the myths of the past, separating the elements of genuine vision from the evils and errors that afflict any imaginative products in a fallen world. This “consolidation of error,” as Blake called it, proceeded not, at its best, in the arrogant spirit of superiority that characterizes vulgar myths of progress. As we see elsewhere, what is genuine in any vision is not so much eternal as eternally recreated across time in ever-new forms that are not improvements but variations on a theme: at the same time, a purgatorial process refines such genuine vision from errors born of individual neurosis and ideological corruption. Big Picture attempts in any era seek to identify the elements of common vision and recreate them for the present time by decreating the errors occluding vision. It may be helpful as we pass here from traditional mythology to Romantic and post-Romantic modern mythology to draw together into a single picture the progressive elements of traditional mythology as they

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appear from the perspective of a post-Romanticism looking for what it can use to create a modern vision that is in some ways a necessary Contrary to the traditional view and in others its antitype, clarified of various historical limitations and errors. We began by following the lead of Joseph Campbell, who himself adapts some of the ideas of Leo Frobenius, contrasting the first two manifestations of the human imagination, the hunting and the planting (or at least plant-based) mythologies of prehistoric times. In our terms, these are earthbound mythologies of immanence based on the primary concerns of basic survival in nature, especially the need for food. Our conjectural knowledge of early cultures suggests that hunting mythologies tend to sharpen the sense of difference, the human subject pursuing, mastering, and killing an animal object, while mythologies possessed by the mystery of the death and rebirth of vegetation tend to be inspired by a vision of identity, often taking the form of a sacrifice of the individual as a seed that must die and be planted to be subsumed into a greater whole. The one-sidedness of each type of mythology produces its compensatory opposite within itself. Thus the hunter identifies empathetically with his prey: the dying-god type of sacrificial figure becomes a prototype of the questing hero. The necessary interplay of identity and difference is what is important. The advent of the first cities brings a new kind of focus, on the vertical rather than the horizontal, on the vision of an axis mundi connecting earth and heavens, the latter providing a model to organize civic life. This is the first form of the top–down vision of traditional mythology, and, from the first, the Way of the Celestial Lights, in Campbell’s phrase, manifested itself in myths and archetypal images that combined ideology and transcendent vision seamlessly: the cosmic order is at once mystical or anagogical and an instrument of ideological control, a sense of wonder intertwining with the will to power. It would be no different millennia later when the glittering imagery of a Jacobean masque dramatized the cosmic order of the Chain of Being and ended with an apotheosis of its earthly incarnation, King James. The Greeks brought democracy into the world by resisting one of the celestially directed empires, but in their earlier mythology, deriving from the pre-democratic era, the Olympian pantheon, backed up by Fate, enforced a similar order from on high. Hesiod later imported part of that original schema and recreated it in a progressive vision of order imposed by a heroic Zeus on a world of chaotic natural forces, symbolized by various monstrosities and the Titans.

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In the era of the city-states, Aeschylus, who fought for Greek freedom against the Persians, recreated the earlier top–down mythology by trilogies of plays in which humanity’s claims against the arbitrary autocracy of the celestial powers result in a new covenant between the gods and humanity. What we know of his Prometheus trilogy suggests that it would have played out in a fashion akin to Jung’s Answer to Job: a dialectical conflict between the divine and the human (even if represented by a Titan), the two ends of the vertical axis, turns them from a Negation into Contraries, resulting in the progressive development of both. As happened also in his Oresteia, suffering and error in time transform the vertical axis and give birth to something linear and progressive. The contrast between Aeschylus and Euripides is somewhat parallel to that between Milton and Shakespeare. Though a dramatist, Aeschylus operates more on the level of the epic sublime, while Euripides is more grounded in the down-to-earth human perspective – but with the usual enantiodromia of Contraries, just as Milton is an unusually dramatic epic poet. At any rate, contrasting with the relatively vertical perspective of Aeschylus and Milton (despite the vertical dialectic’s serving a theme of diachronic development), Euripides and Shakespeare independently invented a form of tragicomedy that introduces the progressive theme of creative time into the otherwise cyclical and episodic form of drama. Behind the tragicomedies of Euripides stands its great precursor, the Odyssey: beyond them stand the later Greek romances that they helped to create. To sum up: the two pairs of poets, Classical and Renaissance, all sought to justify the ways of the divine to humanity in a way that made time creative and suffering meaningful. Virgil’s Aeneid recreates the heroic ethos of the epic line by expanding its vision to the world perspective inaugurated by Alexander’s uniting of the Western world into an empire. The central heroic virtue became selfsacrifice to the greater cause of the empire, compensated for beyond death through a supernatural system of rewards and punishments involving reincarnation, borrowed from what Campbell calls “Hellenistic syncretism.” But although Virgil the man may have intended the Aeneid to glorify the imperial cause of his benefactor, Augustus, his imagination turned the story into a meditation on the question “What price universalism?” The Fourth, “Messianic” Eclogue of Virgil’s youth spoke hauntingly of the advent of a mysterious Latin messiah, born of a virgin, who would return Rome to a golden age. But the mature Virgil, and Rome itself, got only Augustus and colonialism. Dante understood Virgil’s disappointment: his own ideal political saviour did not show up either. Nevertheless,

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like his own hero, Virgil did not live to see that his ideal had a real fulfilment, just not the one he dreamed of. Rome’s destiny was indeed fulfilled by empire, but not for the purposes of power: rather, for the purpose of spreading the Gospel of the real Saviour. At least that would be Dante’s point of view. The Christian Bible is a remarkably self-recreating text, incorporating the most disparate materials written and collected over centuries into a book that has to be read by the imagination’s principle of identity-indifference: by ordinary standards of unity, it is a hopeless, self-contradictory jumble. If read imaginatively, that is, spiritually, its vertical theme, so to speak, is the progressive internalization of the law, which is a passage from the letter to the spirit of the law, culminating in the coming of Christ, who as the Logos is the law’s complete spiritualization. During the Middle Ages, this ascent from letter to spirit, from the literal to the anagogic, was expanded into the fourfold polysemous hermeneutic ladder described earlier in part 1. In a letter to his patron, Dante said that he intended his commedia to be read in the same polysemous fashion. Dante the protagonist’s journey down and up the vertical axis is an allegory of the traversing of the axis of polysemy, with the dead letter that killeth at the bottom and the anagogic level beyond both human conception and words at the top. On the moral level of meaning, the passage from letter to spirit results, most explicitly in the Purgatorio, in freedom, Christian liberty, through a discipline that internalizes the law. Dante is most inhibited in dealing with the second level of polysemous meaning, the typological, the level that gives the Bible its horizontal and progressive aspect. It is thus ironic that he explains polysemy through the Biblical example sentence, “When Israel went out of Egypt,” a reference to the revolutionary Exodus story, whose antitype is the subversive career of Christ in the New Testament. Dante shies away from the radical typological vision of someone like Joachim of Floris, condemned as a heretic because his proclamation of a coming Third Age of the Holy Spirit threatened the church’s power. But the price Dante paid for his conservatism was the dark shadow that predestination cast over his epic. The Divine Comedy portrays it as the one law that cannot be spiritualized, the victory of legalism over love. For all his boldness, in this he bows to church doctrine running from Paul through Augustine, a line of thought that has little to do with the teaching of Jesus and much to do with an ideological anxiety about power and control. Augustine’s vision of history is vertical, the City of God above and the city of man below, a return to the Way of the Celestial Lights and

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the top–down dominance of the law, necessary because of Original Sin. The Augustinian tradition’s emphasis on eternal damnation, the foundation for the Inferno, enforces this verticality: you go up, or you go down, either after death or at the Last Judgment. If the idea of eventual universal salvation (apocatastasis), associated with Origen, had won out, Christian mythology would have gained a horizontal dynamic dimension: all suffering and punishment would be purgatorial and redemptive. It was left to the Protestant epic tradition to revive the radical, potentially revolutionary tradition of typology, and to transcend the limitations, for Protestantism anyway, of the ideological form of the vertical axis that had come to control what became Catholicism. This was the task Milton set himself in Paradise Lost. But because he retained an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfect God, his vision partly bogged down in the intractable paradoxes of theodicy. Still, he became the chief precursor of all the major English Romantic poets who aspired to epic. He did so by combining three elements that grounded Romanticism’s first modern mythology: the potentially revolutionary (and secularizable) horizontal vision of typology that gives Areopagitica’s impassioned rhetoric its eloquence, the vertical Neoplatonic vision of spiritualized matter, and the Protestant Inner Light tradition, which informed the Romantic theory of the creative imagination. In Milton, the hero’s quest becomes largely inward, the heroic act one of achieving vision while resisting the temptation to betray it for false visions born of pride and the will to power. To all of this the Romantics would add Shakespeare’s own version of theodicy in the late romances or tragicomedies, that of redemption through the creative power of time. XV . I N T H E WHI T E G I A N T ’ S T HI G H : RO M A NT I C A N D A N T I - RO M A N T I C In times like ours, we walk, in the words of Dylan Thomas, in the white giant’s thigh: within the body of a cosmic being who is both natural and spiritual, white because he is both the white chalk cliffs of the landscape and a ghost, the ghost of a personality neither present nor absent, what Derrida would call a “trace.” The myth of a celestial figure who in his fall (or her fall, as with the Gnostic Sophia) plunged into immanence appears in many mythologies, Eastern and Western, ancient and modern: Blake’s Albion, Joyce’s Finnegan, both Dylan Thomas’s white giant and his “long world’s gentleman,” William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (with its latent pun on father-son), Wallace Stevens’s Irish cliffs of Moher, of whom the

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speaker says, “This is not landscape … / This is my father,” the Tiresias of T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land. The very length of the list drawn from modern Western literature alone shows that he is a figure who, though unreal and impossible, yet perversely resists the formulas by which we try to exorcise him as the metaphysics of presence, the transcendental signified, the lost phallus, He is the bafflingly paradoxical Jungian Self, in alchemy buried in the tomb of the lapis or Philosopher’s Stone. “It darkles, (tinct tint) all this our funnaminal world,” says Joyce,43 meaning that he appears as a numinous energy sparkling within the darkness of the phenomenal world in strange constellations that shine below and within rather than above. Part 4 will be our descent to find him, the descent towards a downward anagnorisis or recognition. But at this point in part 3 we have arrived at a cultural watershed, the transition from top–down traditional mythology to bottom–up modern mythology, beginning with the Romantic period. That means that we move from a conservative to a potentially revolutionary mythological pattern that plays itself out historically as a series of uprisings, the repeated bursting forth of an energy from below that attempts, and occasionally accomplishes, progressive social change. Mythically, it is the struggle of a buried and imprisoned power to rouse and liberate itself, and by doing so liberate the world. For the Romantics, the crucial uprising was the French Revolution, and its great battle cry was Freedom! In the contemporary world, “freedom” is often diminished to an ideological abstraction, but to the Romantics, who repeated it endlessly in their writing, the word “freedom” at least some of the time is charged with an energy by whose light we begin to make out the dimensions of the myth of primary concern that is the vehicle for its secondary ideological meanings. What the Romantics meant by “freedom,” whether they were always fully aware of it or not, was more than freedom from one irresponsible monarch, or even from monarchy in general, but liberation from the whole top–down structure of traditional mythology. The critic who understands this revolution most clearly is Frye. Other myth critics note a crucial difference between traditional and modern mythology, what Campbell calls “creative mythology,” but do not see a real break here, stressing the Romantics’ continuities both with later mythology and with the earlier religious, philosophical, and artistic traditions they often drew on: for Campbell, Hellenistic syncretism and the medieval Grail stories, for Jung, Gnosticism and alchemy (and Goethe’s Faust), for

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Abrams, Neoplatonism and left-wing visionary Protestantism. All these systems are highly interconnected, indeed intermarried, and formed a kind of shadow syncretism that often shaped, occasionally supplanted, Christian orthodoxy. But Frye is clearest on how Romantic and later writers and thinkers decreate and recreate these older perspectives into something uniquely modern. Frye himself moved towards this insight slowly, even somewhat reluctantly. His student essays of the 1920s and 1930s, including a ninety-page essay on Romanticism, show him accepting the Modernists’ rejection of the Romantics as egocentric and self-conscious, tending in the arts to formal fragmentation, which reflected the social disintegration of a cultural unity strongest in the Middle Ages (for Catholic Modernists) or the Renaissance (for Protestants).44 Even when writing of Blake in Fearful Symmetry (1947), Frye is reluctant to identify his subject as a Romantic, arguing for him as a very late manifestation of the Renaissance, although it is a carefully constructed Renaissance, rather impatiently minimizing his affinity with most of the esoteric shadow tradition and emphasizing his attachment to the more visionary aspects of the Protestant Reformation. But Frye’s 1957 essay “New Directions from Old” recasts the Romantic revolution in a way that we can relate to his own career. His theme is that Romanticism initiates a Heraclitean enantiodromia in mythology, a reversal of opposites to compensate for one-sidedness. In traditional mythology, the typical heroic quest, whether outward or inward, is an ascent towards the source of all Creation at the apex of the vertical axis: descent journeys are correspondingly demonic, or at best purgatorial. That human accomplishment, however, is made possible by the prior descent of a power from above, one of whose forms is grace. In Romantic and post-Romantic mythology, the quest is downward and inward. An unknown power that rises from below inspires artists and thinkers with a mysterious gnosis and galvanizes various attempts at social change. Traditional mythology is conservative: freedom consists in obedience, in accepting one’s place in a higher order: “In His will is our peace,” says one of the characters in Dante’s Paradiso (3.85). Romantic mythology is at least potentially revolutionary: its authentic form is not, despite various accusations, egocentric individualism but an anarchism that is not, despite a range of other charges, merely nihilistic, or at least not necessarily. The second half of Frye’s career, culminating in his two books on the Bible and literature – The Great Code (1982) and Words with Power (1990) – involved his struggle to address a historical crisis: a confrontation

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between two mythologies, ideally to achieve a larger vision rendering them Contraries rather than a Negation. The attempt, as his notebooks show, came at the price of abandoning his scheme for a Third Book based on a cyclical diagram, the Great Doodle, the material he reorganized in Words with Power along a vertical axis to reflect his new sense of conflict and dialectic. In a conciliatory moment, Frye says in “Expanding Eyes” that perhaps he has not understood the wars of myth in time, but Fearful Symmetry was about nothing else, and, coming full circle, Words with Power joins the revolution, in what Blake’s Four Zoas called “the day of Intellectual Battle” (E, 300), although the real battle is quite other than the delusional, power-crazed wars of ideology that threaten to put an end to the human race. The narrative of Romanticism is familiar. Initially, most of the Romantics shared the widespread euphoria in the early years after the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” said Wordsworth looking back.45 Change was afoot, and no one knew what its limits were. Some dared hope that it might drive beyond the toppling of tyrants and the rebirth of democracy after all the authoritarian centuries since ancient Athens to become apocalyptic, leading to a total transformation of the human condition, a new heaven, new earth. When the Revolution collapsed in a series of stages, from the Reign of Terror to Napoleon to the Napoleonic Wars, many Romantics were brought to the brink of despair, and some, like Wordsworth, collapsed with it. So did some of their works: failure to resolve the dilemma of revolutionary failure was the reason Blake abandoned his first attempt at a definitive epic, The Four Zoas. The bitter experience of revolutionary defeat forced the Romantics to grapple with the reason for that defeat, which in turn led to a deeper understanding of the historical process and, out of that, to some of their greatest works, including a whole line of poems that aspired to a new kind of epic. They started by grasping how a seeming break with the past and step forward had ended as an ironic cycle. Moreover, the manic-depressive shape of that cycle was all too familiar. An uprising of energy against oppression, accompanied by a hopeful optimism, led to “the world turned upside down” (historian Christopher Hill’s phrase), when revolutionary energy eventually went over to the dark side and became a nihilistic violence that only a charismatic, authoritarian leader could control and channel. But he in turn became demonically possessed – Jung would say “inflated” – by the same energy: Napoleon fell victim to megalomaniacal hubris, whereupon his fall pushed not just France but all Europe under the tight grip of reaction. To the English Romantics, the pattern was familiar

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because of Milton: Hill’s book The World Turned Upside Down is in fact about the failed Puritan revolution.46 But Milton could already see that the pattern of a revolution in the name of freedom betraying its own ideals to become a new power structure, an empire or authoritarian dictatorship, was as old as human history. Athens defeated the great Persian empire only to shipwreck itself on the rocks of its own imperial ambitions. Revolution in the name of freedom against slavery in Egypt led to the Israelites’ becoming God’s chosen people: their later attempt at a monarchy and an empire led to their demise. And Christianity was not exempt: Jesus, the Messiah prophesied as bringing the fall of princes and new heaven, new earth, was crucified as a revolutionary. The church he founded eventually turned into a worldly power fighting murderous Crusades abroad and torturing and burning dissident heretics at home. Blake saw the pattern, and embodied it as what Frye termed the “Orc cycle”: the fiery-haired Orc, symbol of revolutionary freedom, either succumbs to the authoritarian Urizen or, worse, turns into him. More than two centuries down the line, additional evidence makes the Orc-cycle pattern seem indisputable. The attempts at insurrection across Europe in 1848 that inspired The Communist Manifesto were to no avail. The American Revolution in the name of freedom was seemingly successful, but from a sceptical point of view the new country too eventually became an empire, provoking the failed revolutionary uprising – or at least uproar – known as “the Sixties.” But there are worse things than failure. The French Revolution failed when its heroic spirit turned demonic in the Reign of Terror, with results so terrifying that Wordsworth and Coleridge were driven into a conservatism that could be called “apotropaic,” an anxious attempt to ward off demonic possession. Similarly, some members of my generation became conservative as a backlash against the excesses of the 1960s. The most appalling events of the twentieth century originated in three revolutionary uprisings that did not degenerate but were more or less demonic from the outset: the Russian Revolution and the rise of fascism and of Nazism. Worse, all three uprisings were praised and supported by many artists and intellectuals. Worst of all, fascism and Nazism have been regarded as the offspring of Romanticism, as logical outcomes of a Romantic ideology, even though the line of descent is frequently disguised. In other words, Romanticism is not truly progressive but is secretly, sometimes unconsciously, reactionary. In the early twentieth century, as progressive faith faltered, theories of history as an ironic cycle, includ-

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ing those of Vico and Spengler, became more convincing. Yeats’s Vision, influenced by Spengler and Nietzsche, views history as a gigantic Negation, at one pole the democratic mob, at the other the “antithetical” fascistic aristocrat, heroic and aloof. What causes revolutionary failure, Blake’s Orc cycle, and is there any possibility of transcending it? The first possible answer is the traditional Christian one dramatized by Milton in Paradise Lost. We had freedom once, but we threw it away, and for all of history human aspiration will be dragged down by the gravitational pull of the human will corrupted by the Fall. There is a progressive pattern in history, a Heilsgeschichte (salvation history), invisible behind the ironic cycles of Weltgeschichte (world history), disclosed in Biblical typology. At the end of time, the Fall will be revealed as Fortunate, and God’s ways will be justified to men. But, as I said earlier, if we begin by postulating an all-powerful, all-knowing, allloving deity, no theodicy is possible. No divine purpose could justify the catalogue of hideous suffering, especially innocent suffering, that is human history. The persuasiveness of theodicy is not logical but rhetorical: what commands assent is less a logical argument than a sense of human finitude and helplessness, a sense that our fate is determined by a power beyond our ability to comprehend: all we can do is cling to a blind faith that the power is somehow, despite all evidence, benevolent. Perhaps the same feelings were projected on that power’s earthly representatives, so that for century after century kings kept their thrones not because of theories of divine right but because of the dread and awe inspired by the divinity that hedged the king. It follows that the challenge to the old hierarchies arose because of a new sense of human empowerment. As we saw in part 1, Neoplatonism was attractive to medieval and Renaissance Christianity because it seemed to alleviate intractable theological problems. Instead of a deity who is supposed to be the spirit of love but who condemns his creatures to suffering and, in some cases, eternal damnation, there is a One who emanates the multiplicity of the universe impersonally and necessarily. The One, because unknowable, is not a personality who can be held responsible for his actions like the God of the Bible, but rather a prime emanator in place of a prime mover, producing the universe as a seed produces a plant, without logic or will, at least so far as human experience of him, or it, goes. Neoplatonism solves the problem of nature–spirit dualism by viewing matter as attenuated spirit: spirit so distant from its source that it has concretized, its unity broken into difference and conflict. Yet it is still spirit and therefore not evil.

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In fact, evil is unreal, merely a privatio boni, or deprivation of the good. Thus Neoplatonism solves the problem of evil: suffering is merely the unfortunate byproduct of impersonal process by which spirit necessarily objectifies itself as nature, by which unity necessarily unfolds into multiplicity and difference. There is no Creator or Providence to blame for human misery: it’s nothing personal. One might as well blame the weather. However, the suffering in human life is not random or absurd, much less evil, but justified as part of an inevitable developmental process with a redemptive conclusion, as the Great Circle bends around and matter returns to spirit, multiplicity to unity, in the nostos of time. As Abrams shows by abundant quotations in Natural Supernaturalism, the Romantics’ frequent employment of the Great Circle myth and other aspects of Neoplatonism looks like uncritical acceptance, which may at times be the case.47 As with the imagery of transcendent power in traditional mythology, the imagery of spiritual immanence was more compelling on an emotional than on a philosophical or theological level. When Wordsworth in The Prelude, looking back on the suffering of his past life, exclaims, “Praise to the end! / Thanks likewise for the means,” he is affirming that growing to maturity has been a fortunate fall, all its pain and conflict necessary so that he could become what he is now.48 Suffering thus can be meaningful, purgatorial, creative. Nor is this always wishfulfilment: it is true of some struggle and suffering. But in the end Romanticism could not be satisfied with Neoplatonism either in its original or in its Christianized medieval and Renaissance forms. The cycle of emanation and return could not convey the Romantics’ mythology until they recreated it in several crucial ways. First, Neoplatonic monism achieved unity only by suppressing multiplicity, difference, and individuality. The term “identity-in-difference” sometimes appears in Neoplatonic writing, but usually to strongly privilege identity. Blake’s notion of Contraries is one of any number of Romantic attempts to make it, despite its radical paradox, the basis of a new kind of mythology. It is no accident that he announced this intention in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which grew from his initial enthusiasm over the French Revolution. At least as poets of Romantic persuasion saw it, the goal of both Neoplatonism and Neoplatonic Christianity was an empty fulness rather than a true Vision of Plenitude. The Soul characterizes its sterile vacuity in Yeats’s “Dialogue of Self and Soul” (P, 234). When the divine presence floods the mind, man “is stricken deaf and dumb and blind” and can no longer discern “Is from the Ought, or Knower from the Known – / That is

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to say, ascends to Heaven.” When the Self rejects this version of heaven and plunges downward into life in all its conflict, but also its vital particularity, it finds that, by accepting this, “We are blessed by everything, / Everything we look upon is blessed.” This is the great Romantic affirmation of life that inspires some eloquent passages of Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism and resonates for his great predecessor as a pro-Romantic critic, Jacques Barzun in Classic, Romantic, and Modern.49 The Romantics’ second problem with the Great Circle is that it eliminates free will: it is effectively a predestination in which everybody gets saved. Growing awareness of this dilemma led to Schelling’s partial break, in a work significantly titled Of Human Freedom, with emanation and return, leading him back to the Christian problem of the will’s freedom to choose evil. We return to our initial observation that the Romantic project, which exfoliated from political liberation into various emancipatory projects that would later evolve into such movements as feminism, the sexual revolution, environmentalism, an expressive theory of art, and a class-levelling utopianism, seems to have come about when it did as a result of a new sense of a potentially transformative power latent in both nature and humanity. That power was always there, but traditional mythology allowed it only to respond to, serve, and ultimately ascend towards a transcendent power above. Now, it becomes a reservoir of energy which, when tapped, might enable humanity to build a new world and control its own destiny, indifferent to, or even defying all ruling elites, both human and divine. Part 1 depicted the subject or ego largely as a passive victim, whose underlying mental state is what Heidegger and Kierkegaard call angst, anxiety, sometimes translated “dread.” A new factor enters the picture now with the intuition of a hidden presence within both subject and object that is also a source of energy. This hidden factor is in fact the imagination, binding the subjective to the objective, in the absence of which the subject would be plunged into the state of solipsistic psychosis that Blake calls “Ulro.” But to the alienated subject it appears as an immanent mystery underlying both the conscious ego and the phenomenal world. In the Romantic context it was frequently identified with Kant’s unknowable, noumenal realm; it later becomes identified with the unconscious. A symptom of modern consciousness is an increasing awareness that the cloven fiction extends downward as well as outward. In addition to the split between the conscious self and the external phenomenal world, there is a split between a subjective and objective psyche, between ego and unconscious.

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Psychoanalysis gave the name “libido” to the psychic energy of the unconscious and has insisted adamantly on its sexual and bodily nature, a doctrine that Jung was excommunicated for disputing. Although when Jung was being theoretical he defined it as a general psychic energy that could be channelled to become a number of drives, in practice he most often thought in terms of two “instincts,” or drives, that are at once opposed and yet inextricably interwound, Eros and the will to power, the latter derived from Nietzsche by way of Adler. The mythical figure embodying human power is Prometheus, who, though a Titan, gave humanity fire, symbolizing the energy that builds civilizations, and also destroys them. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, these are the levels of love and a self-esteem defined in terms not just of autonomy and individual power but also of the social power of meaningful work. Eros and Prometheus are twin vehicles of the human imagination, but have been repressed, chained below ground in Prometheus’s case, for all of history. The goal of revolution as Romanticism initially conceived it was simply the liberation of these repressed forces, an apocalyptic act that would renew not only the social system but all of reality, as we see in Act 4 of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and the ninth night of Blake’s Four Zoas. Blake’s first hero, the fire-haired Orc, embodies both forces, and Blake’s early poems advocate and celebrate both sexual and political revolution. To those of my generation in the 1960s, this sounds very familiar. Neither the Romantics nor we hippies were entirely wrong: Eros and Prometheus remain potentially liberating powers, and one of the offshoots of Frye’s Third Book project, the essay “Expanding Eyes,” privileges them, two of the four gods presiding over the quadrants of the Great Doodle: “On the rising side are the forces of Prometheus and Eros, social and individual freedom.”50 And some of us continue to insist that liberating sexuality and the will to power from repression, if properly conceived, could result in immense individual and social benefit, power here meaning the political, economic, and institutional power denied to most of humanity. As instinctual repression often leads to violence, especially in men who are conditioned to excessive renunciation and a fear of the tempting feminine, relaxing it might reduce male violence in all its forms. In other words, the hippie slogan “Make love, not war” might actually have had more to it than we understood at the time. We saw above how two of the most courageously speculative books of the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death, dare to imagine what would happen if we lifted what Marcuse calls the “surplus repression” of Eros. The results far sur-

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pass anything we can readily conceive because most of our “normal” experience is in fact a delusional product of repressive conditioning. Easing repression would alter both subject and object, both human nature and the so-called reality principle. The liberation of Prometheus is, or ought to be, the project of utopia, but the actual genre of the utopia is curiously inhibited. None the less any number of science-fiction novels not called “utopias” conduct an unofficial Promethean meditation on the enormous range of possible modes of intelligent life in a vast universe. Repressing Eros means renouncing the pleasure principle, motivated by a fear that is dangerously regressive. In the psychoanalytic perspective, the isolated ego is born out of the painful separation from the mother: this is the original fall from unity into difference. Though necessary, the separation feels like a “fall” from original unity and bliss, and the pleasure principle is a yearning to return to that “oceanic,” or “nirvana.” The fact that such a condition is achievable only in death led to Freud’s late theory of a death drive complicit with the sexual drive. The theory was controversial, but the poets, as Freud himself always insisted, were there before him: the Liebestod appears in literature everywhere from the Elizabethan pun on “die” meaning orgasm to the story of Tristan and Isolde. It should come as no surprise by this time that the regressive yearning results in two types of behaviour, one seeking the peace of a return to unity, the other the end of isolation by surrender to an ecstatic multiplicity. The former is seen in addiction of all sorts, not merely to drugs, although Romantics such as De Quincey more or less invented the “romance of addiction.” We have been speaking of Eros, but Dionysus is another name for the god of the pleasure principle. Roughly speaking, drugs introvert, but alcohol extraverts, and Dionysus in his guise as Bacchus, the god of wine, offers an escape from the ego’s alienation through a kind of ecstatic psychological sparagmos, at times associated with orgiastic, polymorphous sexuality. Dionysus and Orpheus, closely associated in mythology and sometimes identified, were both torn apart by frenzied mobs of women. The self-destructive lives of rock stars and other celebrities enable their fans to live out their own regressive impulses vicariously. The temptation is universal and not merely Romantic: it is the allure of Milton’s Comus, of Acrasia’s Bower of Bliss destroyed by Sir Guyon, Spenser’s knight of Temperance. Society’s repressive attitude about Eros and the pleasure principle is not rooted merely in ambivalence and fear of regression: as Freud said in Civilization and Its Discontents, society needs to repress libido in order to rechannel, or in Freud’s word to “sublimate,” it. Civilization is built by

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means of sublimated libido. We have been dealing with Eros and the will to power as two forms of psychic energy, but on a deeper level they can be seen as two forms that a single energy can assume. It is Prometheus who is the worker and builder of cities, so by implication libido rechannelled into various power projects has been given over to Prometheus. Although civilized life could not exist without delayed and sometimes renounced gratification, the deeper question – and it is a moral issue – becomes one of balancing equal but opposite demands. The hippies’ rejection of the work ethic enraged their hard-working parents who supported them, but the issue of alienated labour is as pressing now as when Marx first raised it. What is shaping up is another either-or dilemma. Either we immerse ourselves in the destructive sea of Eros or we renounce it and resign ourselves to repression. Of course, the orthodox Freudian position is that repression is an offer we can’t refuse, as refusal is tantamount to neurosis or psychosis. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, repression takes place through the acquisition of language that situates us within the repressive Symbolic Order. To the degree that we do not accept this (which is to accept castration), we remain trapped in the Imaginary, in a kind of solipsistic unreality. So, in other words, we are faced with another Negation, false unity or alienated difference, neither of which is true liberty. Such a no-win choice was rejected by three works of radical Freudian revisionism in the 1960s. Brown’s Life against Death and Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, as we saw, reject the claim that repression is necessary for social control: desire has in fact created the reality principle, which, far from being identical to reality, is Blake’s “Mind-forg’d manacles.” As McMurphy tells his fellow inmates in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, if we lost the conviction of our illnesses, we could walk out of the mental asylum. It was, after all, the 1960s. Later, Lacan, Foucault, Althusser, and other poststructuralists made the counterclaim, that we are constituted by our manacles. Our conditioning by the power structure is what we are. The fiercest resistance to the assertion of necessary repression came from the wildest of all the wild books of the 1960s, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. A good number of writers, including Kesey, Foucault, R.D. Laing, and Thomas Szasz, had raised awareness that accusations of madness, not to mention forced institutionalizations and lobotomies, often reflected social anxieties about order. But Anti-Oedipus is more radical than all of them, even than Brown and Marcuse. It advocates dissolving what we call “civilization”

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back into the oceanic flux of desire, an endless process of becoming in which any form or structure is but a momentary arrest, like Bernini’s Daphne caught in the moment of her metamorphosis, half woman, half tree. It advocates schizophrenia as the freedom of difference without unity. If Nero fiddled while Rome burned, Deleuze and Guattari sing from the towers while Atlantis is drowning. Comparison of Anti-Oedipus with Ovid may be more than superficial: as with the Metamorphoses, the tone seems to be deadpan satire. There is no individual, only processes, not even any consciousness, if by that we mean anything like a structured ego, so that we are (conjoining Eros and Prometheus) “desiring machines.” An individual has a “body without organs” because the latter (as in Brown) are sites of repression: the oral, anal, and genital phases are modes of coercive organization. Anti-Oedipus is an exuberant book, but, as a modest proposal, probably not a big vote-getter. In most people’s eyes, we are still trapped in a choice between the regressive oceanic and alienated repression. Under the rules of the game, a third choice is impossible, which is why we should refuse to play by the rules and ask what it would look like. Any such option would be the negation of a negation, and therefore a bothand. In the present context of depth psychology, the third way begins with the incest taboo. Whether that rule is universal is not the interesting question: given the ambivalence about libido, one can imagine all kinds of social accommodations dealing with it. What matters is that it forbids the reunion with the mother (or with a mother substitute), and thereby symbolizes all erotic repression. The book of Jung’s that cost him his relationship with Freud, The Psychology of the Unconscious, was not very clear, even after he revised it as Symbols of Transformation. But in it, he grasped one crucial idea: any nontragic resolution of the Oedipus complex would have to begin with a symbolic violation of the incest taboo, a transgression into the maternal realm of the unconscious, neither to drown in it blissfully nor to master it like a hero conquering a sea dragon, but to pass through it in order to gain access to an energy beneath the instinctual realm of pleasure and power, an energy capable of uniting unconscious with conscious, libido and symbolic form, so that form would release energy rather than repressing it. Jung named this power, rather abstractly, the “transcendent function”: Blake personified it as Los, the imagination, who replaced Orc as his heroic hope. It is, in other words, a thoroughly Romantic idea, which Jung derived from one of the great Romantic poems, Goethe’s Faust, where it

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appears as Faust’s descent to the mysterious realm of the Mothers. It is latent in Nietzsche’s idea of the union of Apollo and Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy, a union effected by “art” – by the imagination. But Nietzsche succumbed to the will to power, opting instead for a vision of the heroic Overman. For this hubris, he suffered the enantiodromia of Pentheus in The Bacchae: he was turned into Dionysus and psychologically torn apart. The situations of the two drives are not identical. Since the brief moment of the “Sixties,” the last thing anyone fears in our society is an uncontrollable upsurge of Eros or Dionysus. What we have seen instead is a slow unbinding of sexual and gender repression that is one of the few hopeful signs in the United States of the twenty-first century. But the will to power has always been the great danger, ever since the French Revolution degenerated first into mob violence, then into charismatic dictatorship. Charisma is energy, the energy of the charismatic leader’s will that flows into the mob and unites it according to the sinister metaphor of the body and its members, as in the speech of Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Members of the social body should have no will of their own but should be commanded by the head: it would be monstrous if a hand or foot would rebel by making decisions for itself. But the members do not need coercion: they are willingly, excitedly sucked up into the mindless energy of the crowd. It is what they want: it is salvation, to be drawn together into a single body whose head is not only godlike but effectively a god, in a demonic parody of what Frye called the “royal metaphor,” in which his land and his people are the king’s true body. In Christian terms, the megalomaniacal charismatic leader is an Antichrist figure. But in their own eyes, leader and followers are the collective identity of a new kind of epic hero, a warrior hero always ready to do battle with the enemies of the people, whose goal after victory is a new order, a Reich. Luckily, a demonic parody epic of this sort has not yet been created, and one hopes the feat is impossible. The real mythological epic about Nazism and World War II is rather Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, written, like Fearful Symmetry, while the war was still ongoing and its outcome doubtful, its hero an anything-but-heroic hobbit and its theme the heroic renouncing of the will to power. This is not a pacifist or even a non-violent epic: it endorses the unselfish martial and political power of an Aragorn, and the magical power of a Gandalf, although those who try to wield power for the good must constantly struggle to resist temptation. There are two Romantic crises, outward and inward, both of them temptations, and this is the first of them: the temptation of the will to

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power in the world, like Satan’s tempting Christ in the wilderness, especially as expanded by Milton in Paradise Regained. But the real heroic act – renunciation – is inward and is the same for warrior, statesman, wizard, or hobbit. The successful resolution of this first crisis brings with it a progressive Blakean “consolidation of error,” a second phase of partial detachment from the Great Circle of emanation and return. We noted earlier the first phase of detachment, recreating the original Neoplatonic and Neoplatonic Christian movement, from unity and spirit to multiplicity and matter back again to unity and spirit, into the form of the outer circle of our mandala. There, identity and difference do not merely oscillate: they are caught up in a dialectic of decreation and recreation that results not in return to mere identity but to a paradoxical identity-in-difference of Contraries, a return that is also a progression. To translate philosophical abstractions into simple terms, life is change: the process of individuation is one of death and rebirth to a larger identity – a kind of purgatorial or creative suffering. It is this that makes Wordsworth’s ability to affirm the ordeals of his past life authentically moving. But not all suffering is creative. The strife of Contraries is a necessary “evil,” but not all evil is necessary. Some evil is inessential, certainly not part of some redemptive process, and if freedom means anything, it means we are free to choose whether to affirm or oppose such evil, with full allowance for the fact that it is often agonizingly difficult, perhaps sometimes impossible, to tell the difference. But we must always try, even though we may have to ask difficult questions. Would Annette Vallon, the lover Wordsworth left behind in France along with their child, affirm their affair as creative suffering? Is the hardship endured by some of Wordsworth’s lower-class characters inevitable, or could some of it be alleviated by a better social system? One does not have to be a doctrinaire feminist or Marxist to ask such questions. Nor is one quick to judge Wordsworth, not if one is properly mindful of what the Accuser will say in one’s own last judgment. Theodicy goes only so far, beyond which lies inexcusable evil. No theodicy can justify the Holocaust. It is not part of a Fortunate Fall. Nor can one say that the death of a child from cancer serves some greater good, even if one thinks that child is now in heaven. We must oppose unnecessary evil if we can. As ordinary selves, we are not responsible for cancer, a product of a fallen world. But on another level, we are responsible for at least striving to know that we have a larger identity as a larger Self, a Self that, Jung says, is also God. It was God who fell and thereby cre-

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ated the fallen world, but our task is to try to undo the Fall by waking that white giant. And we do that by trying to wake ourselves. What form of education can teach this complex morality? Only one that includes those productions of the human imagination that rise to the level of vision. At nineteen, I read Frye’s Fearful Symmetry and did not understand a great deal of it, and at that age abstractions such as “identity-in-difference” would only have baffled me. It taught me one thing, however: we live in a fallen world, but within us there is a power to fight for freedom, to break the “mind-forg’d manacles” and build Jerusalem. That is all I know, and all I need to know. This was a schooling within the Romantic and post-Romantic tradition, running from Blake to Dylan Thomas, accompanied by the cautionary lesson that there was much else within it that cried out for the clarification of error. But at the same time that I was reading Fearful Symmetry in 1970, the year in which, in my native Ohio, military servants of the state shot and killed unarmed, non-violent university students demonstrating in the name of liberty, the world of literary theory was turning against not only myth criticism in general but Romantic mythology in particular. Although the theory wars are fading into history, the anti-mythological and anti-Romantic attitude remains. It derives from two sources, poststructuralism on one hand and cultural criticism, especially Marxism, on the other. In the United States, the anti-Romantic attitude centred in the so-called Yale school consisting of Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, and Paul de Man, whose work tended to focus on Romanticism and its legacy in the Victorian and Modernist periods. Their attitudes were not identical save in identifying Romanticism as the locus of a good deal of modern mystification and bad faith, both aesthetic and political. Hartman could be described as sceptical yet equivocal. Bloom, once a follower of Frye’s, wrote with the bitter zeal of a deprogrammed cultist. Hillis Miller, especially in his notorious debate with M.H. Abrams, seemed eager to suck not just Natural Supernaturalism but all the productions of time into a bottomless maelstrom of deconstructionist textuality. Paul de Man, especially in his late essays, some of them collected in his last book, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, attempted to deconstruct what he called the “aesthetic ideology,” which he blamed for dangerous aesthetic and political illusions, concluding darkly that the former lead indirectly but inevitably to the political.51 The school was not the only source of anti-Romanticism, of course, and a common charge against the Romantic theory of the imagination is that

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it is a form of “Gnosticism,” lusting after a secret knowledge (gnosis) that is really a disguised will to power.52 Harold Bloom adopts the Gnostic allegation, seeing the British and American poetic traditions from Romanticism to the twentieth century as a war of titans, a struggle of wills contending on a textual battleground. His theory of the anxiety of influence fuses Frye’s theory of Blake’s Orc cycle of failed revolutions with Freud’s fantasy of killing the primal father. The aspiring poet (ephebe) is seeking not truth or beauty but power, and must gain it by symbolically killing his chief influence, or Precursor. gaining his own vision that is a misreading of, and therefore a reduced version of, the Precursor’s. This is not only an ironic reduction of the poetic tradition to an Oedipal version of the Orc cycle but a direct reversal of Blake’s idea of the progressive refinement of vision, his “Seven Eyes of God.” In Bloom’s view, as each poetic successor is reading a prior misreading, error increases, which explains the diminishing quality of the poetic tradition from Romantic through Victorian to Modern and contemporary: imagination as anti-progressive, contracting vision. It may be a bizarre theory, but it has its significance as another attack on the Romantic tradition as a will to power disguised by idealism. There is no Los figure in Bloom’s myth, trying to push beyond the cyclical will to power. Any critic trying to play that role would be guilty of mystification, and Bloom in his late years became steadily more explicit in his attacks on Frye as one more idealist deluding himself and others about the real nature of the literary tradition. Although it is obvious that he regards Frye as his own Precursor, it is perhaps the latter’s “order of words,” the giant he is trying to resurrect from its burial in the literary landscape, that Bloom is really trying to kill, or at least to keep safely dead. This way of explaining Bloom reveals an unexpected point of contact between him and a critic he could hardly seem to resemble less, Paul de Man. The point of contact is what de Man called “aesthetic ideology,” when poets, philosophers, and critics “make the aesthetic a privileged term in their ethical and critical thinking.” Here I am quoting Christopher Norris, who provides an articulate analysis of aesthetic ideology and its consequences: What this amounts to is a dangerous (because immensely seductive) vision of how society might turn out if it could only achieve the state of ordered perfection envisaged by the poets and philosophers. Such an order would exist on the far side of all those hateful antinomies that plague the discourse of mere prosaic understanding. It would

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finally obtain the kind of hypostatic union supposedly vouchsafed to poetic imagination by the language of metaphor and symbol, a language that not only transcends the distinction between subject and object (or mind and nature), but which also marks the point of intersection between word and world, time and eternity, the creaturely realm of causal necessity and the realm of free-willing autonomous spirit.53 Aesthetic ideology is a dangerous illusion that begins by infecting criticism and the arts. Norris says that “De Man finds this version of aesthetic ideology everywhere implicit in the rhetoric of Romanticism, from its starting point in the poets and philosophers (Goethe, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Schiller) to its late continuation in mainstream scholars of Romanticism like M.H. Abrams and Earl Wasserman.”54 But he is especially concerned about what happens when a certain conception of aesthetic form is transposed to become a model for the nation-state. That form is an “ordered perfection” on the far side of the “antinomies” that the quotation catalogues. In short, it is a harmony without conflict or polarity, identity without difference, and as such is not a true Romantic ideal at all, however often Romantic writers may have been tempted into it. Still, de Man is right to show how easy it is for poets and thinkers to be seduced by an ideal of harmonious unity achieved by effacing difference. In the last essay in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, de Man quotes from one of Schiller’s letters: “I know of no better image for the idea of a beautiful society than a well executed English dance, composed of many complicated figures and turns … Everything fits so skillfully, yet so spontaneously, that everyone seems to be following his own lead, without ever getting in anyone’s way. Such a dance is the perfect symbol of one’s own individually asserted freedom as well as of one’s respect for the freedom of the other.”55 De Man juxtaposes this with a piece by Kleist about a marionette theatre, his point being that a society as harmonious as a dance could be lived in only by puppets, who have no “individually asserted freedom,” only the illusion of it: the wires that control the dance are invisible. This is not “organic form”: it is in fact mechanical, a dance of robots. And yet Norris is right to insist on the seductiveness of this reductive version of aesthetic form: For it is indeed the case – as anyone will know who has studied the history of German aesthetic philosophy after Kant – that these ideas exerted considerable influence in realms far beyond the more special-

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ized preserve of literary and art-historical scholarship. Thus there developed a powerful irrationalist mystique whose governing metaphor was precisely that of the state as a principle of organic growth and development, a quasi-natural entity whose evolutionary character could best be grasped by analogy with the work of art. And from here it is no great distance to the idea of politics as a manifestation of authentic national genius, a progress through stages of world-historical spirit or Geist.56 Nor does Norris fail to point to the final irony, the inevitable corroborating circumstance: “And of course there is the evidence of de Man’s early writings, published in a wartime Belgian paper under German occupation, and showing all too clearly how these notions had shaped his own youthful thinking.”57 The point is difficult and demands critique. Schiller’s widely influential discussion of the relationship between the arts and society is the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man. The letter De Man is quoting is in fact not from that collection but is cited in the Commentary to the edition edited by Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby.58 The editors are commenting on the last paragraph of the Twenty-seventh and final letter, in which the image of the dance does not in fact occur but which concerns Schiller’s concept of the Aesthetic State as superior to the Dynamic State that rules by power and to the Ethical State that rules by moral imperative, both of which infringe on human freedom and desire. The dance, although it occurs in another letter, is an image of the Aesthetic State, and a problematic one. The dance is an image of social order out of the older, top–down mythology, its ordered changes reflecting those of a higher order visible in the ordered movements of the stars, as in Sir John Davies’s Orchestra, or A Poem of Dancing (1596). But Schiller lived in an era that was looking for a social order not imposed from without but rather arising from below, which means from within. It would be “organic,” a growth out of nature, out of the deeper natural impulses of human nature, a product thus not of transcendent reason but of the will – Rousseau’s general will, as contrasted with the coercive rules of ordinary society. Freedom is guaranteed, because the individual finds that following the steps of the dance and following his or her own impulses is the same thing. This is not necessarily a bad thing: it means founding social order on the facts of nature and human nature rather than on laws handed down from on high. But the dangers should be evident by now: what is down below are Eros and the

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will to power. A society founded on Eros is going to dance to a different kind of music than the celestial minuet of John Davies and Schiller: it will be, as Nietzsche would affirm later, a Dionysian dance, and the social order more freewheeling and anarchistic than Schiller probably has in mind. But descent to the depths also brings temptation by the demonic form of the will to power, and, if it is succumbed to, heroic violence will impose the parody of an “organic society”: throughout his book, de Man has a sharp eye for images of bodily mutilation, the sparagmos that is inevitable when human nature has to be amputated to fit the demands of an imagined perfection. It is the perfection that is the problem, not the idea of an organic society in itself, because it always signals the betrayal of the genuine form of an organic society, which would be rooted in identity-in-difference, by means of a violence that attempts to achieve a harmonious unity at the expense of difference. De Man does not mention Johann Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, which would have been more useful to him than Schiller for every purpose except blaming as much as possible on the Romantics.59 The real thesis in the Aesthetic Letters is that modern society needs aesthetic education in order to provide a model of identity-in-difference, achieved in art through the detached state of free imagination that Schiller calls Spieltrieb (the play drive or instinct), his most original idea. Without such a model, the only methods of social order are by force, producing Schiller’s Dynamic Society, or by moral stricture, leading to the Ethical Society. Both models suppress individual desire and freedom in the interest of social order. Contrastingly, in Schiller’s Aesthetic State, the energy of human desire is released and gratified by giving it form, a union of Contraries with analogies to the work of Blake’s Los and to Nietzsche’s union of the Apollonian and Dionysian. Huizinga barely mentions Schiller but brilliantly catalogues the myriad ways in which the forms and rituals of the play instinct organized traditional societies – a distinction Schiller grants only to a highly idealized ancient Greece. For Huizinga, the problems of modern society derive largely from the loss of this instinct. Huizinga is relevant to de Man and to others sceptical of Romantic “aesthetic ideology” because he stresses the other side of identity-in-difference, the element of agon, of contest and competition rather than harmonious unity. He shows this everywhere in history, and how it led to the cult of war as a glorious game. It is only the events of September 1939 that show him that modern warfare is no game, and even then he does not define what is really needed, on the lines of William James’s “moral equivalent of war.” And perhaps a de-

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emphasis on the agonistic: Frye, in the Third Book notebooks, says that Huizinga “doesn’t distinguish contest play, like a game of tennis, from construct play.”60 At any rate, de Man’s real target is clearly Hegel, who did glorify war, not Schiller. De Man’s admonitory attitude finds an unexpected, and possibly unwanted, ally in Jung, who buries a detailed analysis of Schiller’s Letters in, of all places, his book Psychological Types. But one takes one’s allies where one finds them: Jung’s condemnation is in fact more anxious and urgent than de Man’s. He quotes Schiller: “Thus in order not to be merely world, he [man] must impart form to matter; he must externalize all within, and shape everything without. Both tasks, in their highest fulfilment, lead back to the concept of divinity from which I started.”61 Jung’s dry response: “It would indeed be a dubious undertaking if every introvert wanted to externalize his limited world of ideas and to shape the external world accordingly.”62 He adds: Schiller’s formula could be carried out only by applying a ruthless power standpoint, with never a scruple about justice for the object nor any conscientious examination of its own competence. Only under conditions, which Schiller certainly never contemplated, could the inferior function participate in life. In this way the archaic elements, naïve and unconscious and decked with the glamour of mighty words and fair gestures, also came bursting through and helped to build our present “civilization,” concerning the nature of which humanity is at this moment in some measure of disagreement.63 Jung’s scathing irony at the end is rooted in his theory that the unconscious provides a compensatory opposite to every conscious one-sidedness. If the conscious mind becomes “inflated” with a sense of godlikeness, there will be an equal but opposite reaction downward towards a primitive power drive: “The archaic power instinct, hitherto hidden behind the façade of civilized being, finally came to the surface in its true colours, and proved beyond question that, in the same measure as the conscious attitude may pride itself on a certain godlikeness by reason of its lofty and absolute standpoint, an unconscious attitude develops with the godlikeness oriented downward to an archaic god whose nature is sensual and brutal.”64 And, Jung concludes, what goes down must come up. The passage that began by looking backward ends in prophecy: “The enantiodromia of Heraclitus ensures that the time will come when this deus absconditus shall rise to the surface and press the God of our ideals to

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the wall. It is as though men at the close of the eighteenth century had not really seen what was taking place in Paris, but lingered on in an aesthetic, enthusiastic, or trifling attitude in order to delude themselves about the real meaning of that glimpse into the abyss of human nature.”65 It comes as a shock to realize that the date of this passage is 1921: Jung is speaking of World War I, eighteen years before the deus absconditus did indeed rear up for a second time like a horror out of H.P. Lovecraft. Is this unfair to Schiller?: that final paragraph of the Aesthetic Letters to which the editors append the dance image explicitly denies that the Aesthetic State could be realized as an actual society. Schiller is playing on the double meaning of “state”: the Aesthetic State is the state of the wise person’s mind, which through internal discipline has achieved the only true freedom, from one’s own impulses. He makes this explicit by echoing Socrates’ remark that while the Republic could never exist, the wise man will live in it wherever he is. But de Man and Jung are worried that Schiller’s work could be appropriated and its meaning twisted as Nietzsche’s was later to be. Jung, unlike de Man, does believe there is a power that unifies the opposites into what Schiller calls “living form”: not the egocentric will lusting for power, but rather the “transcendent function,” which he identifies not with the aesthetic but with the religious impulse. From Blake’s point of view this would be a misstep of its own. If the aesthetic is an individualist’s escapism – Jung is justifiably hard on Schiller’s rhapsodic passages about Beauty’s ability to reconcile everything – the religious is merely collective. What is needed is a power, Blake’s imagination, which unites the two. Though only as Contraries: if the aesthetic kidnaps the spiritual we have “the religion of art” decried by some of the Modernists; the reverse creates the opposite sentimentalism of a cultural unity with art the happy handmaiden of religion, as in T.S. Eliot. The problem with Schiller’s dance image is that identity-in-difference, which remains the only possible model for a democracy, is not harmonious, or not completely so: a society founded on it incorporates the inevitable conflict of individual human wills as part of its structure. In a notable book, aptly named (out of Kant) The Critical Path, Frye outlines such a society, basing it on the dialectical Contraries of a myth of concern and a myth of freedom. The former is the “organic” unifying factor, rooting citizens in common beliefs and values, in the genuine form of Rousseau’s general will, based on empathy or fellow feeling rather than on reasoned principles, including those of rational self-interest. But such a myth is tempted to close itself, creating a bubble of belief that isolates

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citizens from difference of all sorts: de Man is wary of this. Adherents of a closed myth of concern become increasingly delusional and cut off from reality, and their fanatical violence in response to any challenge to their myth indicates secret doubt. De Man was thinking of Nazism and fascism, but with the recent resurgence of right-wing nationalism, this kind of pattern is becoming more familiar not just in the United States but in much of Europe. A myth of concern has to have a Contrary, a myth of freedom that keeps it open through criticism – critical thinking, considering alternative points of view, respecting facts and logic, and defending primary concern against ideological pressures. The tension between the two myths of concern and of freedom is by no means a deadlock, for the latter adds a progressive element both to criticism and to social and political life. The American myth of concern has opened up in my lifetime to include progress for women, people of colour, and people of various gender and sexual persuasions thanks to the American myth of freedom, which is the dynamic decreative-recreative aspect of any culture, as the myth of concern is its genuinely conservative or traditional aspect. Criticism in the Kantian sense of critique is also a product of the Romantic era, part of the functioning of the imagination, not an extrinsic imposition. Thomas Mann’s conception of “erotic irony” captures this interplay of sympathy and detachment, of creation and interpretation, of mythopoetic intuition and sceptical challenge, of primary and secondary process, of idealism and irony, a dialectic that occurs not only within the work of art but externally between literature and literary criticism.66 Criticism is not a parasitic activity but a phase of the imagination, and Romanticism saw the growth to prominence of the writer-critic, of whom Mann himself is an important example. Whatever their limitations, Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education did make one thing clear: both literature and criticism are liberated and endlessly enriched by the spirit of play, a detachment from factual, logical, and ideological demands that allows possibilities otherwise unimaginable. This too is an aspect of the myth of freedom. To return to de Man’s critique of Schiller, Schiller notably chooses as exemplary of aesthetic form a kind of art that stresses harmony and cooperation and minimizes discord, difference, argument, and choice. But Schiller was a dramatist: what if he had selected dramatic form, with its basis in conflict, as his paradigm of aesthetic form? Indeed, that is what Jacques Barzun, in Classic, Romantic and Modern, said that Romantic art typically did: “On the dramatic impact of romanticist art there is little dis-

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agreement. Whatever the medium, the romantic abounds in contrasts, oppositions, antitheses, strife, and color. It is not accident that it was the romantic generation that first found Shakespeare the supreme artist of modern times.”67 Barzun’s definition of Romantic art is “an inclusive kind of realism, lyric in form and dramatic in content.”68 Yeats’s poetry is a remarkable example of this, despite his being one of de Man’s bad examples of aesthetic ideology. In his poetry Yeats argues with himself, usually in moments of dramatic crisis, sets up debates between personas, switches both style and attitude within numbered sections of the same long poem, and writes poems that contradict or argue with each other. He is a poet of “antinomies” if there ever was one: “Between extremities man runs his course,” begins the significantly titled “Vacillation” (P, 249–53). Influenced by Blake, he tried to come up with a symbolic system, but in fact he is the opposite of a systematic poet. That makes him one of the most difficult poets to process critically, to see their total work as a unity, and Yeats is not after unity: it took even Frye three tries to feel he had a handle on this poet. This uncontainable quality comes from his dramatism: it likens him to Shakespeare, who frustrates critics trying to deduce his “belief system.” Wallace Stevens has something of the same quality, in his case linked with a spirit of Schilleresque play. I do not think the body of Yeats’s poetry can be reduced to a unity of the normal sort, and a critic needs to be wary of seizing on one poem or one stanza and deciding it “speaks for the author,” a procedure as risky as picking one character or speech in one of Shakespeare’s plays and using it to anchor a discussion of the playwright’s “philosophy.” This decentralized, perspectival, sometimes agonistic method of writing is one way of capturing identity-in-difference. There are others, such as the use of audacious, sometimes-paradoxical metaphors on the part of the Metaphysical poets, admired by Eliot and the New Critics, taken to a radical extreme by early Dylan Thomas. The New Critics’ irony and seven types of ambiguity also work against easy unity and premature closure, despite their talk of the “organic wholeness” of poetic form. Anyone who has seriously written poetry knows that organic wholeness would be wonderful if any of us could actually achieve it, but no one ever does. We produce instead the ruins of time: organic wholeness belongs to the mansions in eternity. As for societies and poems, so for the individual: “unity of being” can be only a fleeting moment of epiphany, but the rest of the time we are our usual messy, contradictory selves. Writing about the alchemical opus, the production of time, as a paradigm of the process of individuation, Jung

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said, “The alchemist tries to get round this paradox or antinomy with his various procedures and formulae, and to make one out of two. But the very multiplicity of his symbols and symbolic processes proves that success is doubtful. Seldom do we see symbols of the goal whose dual nature is not immediately apparent.”69 Why then even try? Because without such conflict, and such failure, no progression. All this bears upon de Man’s reading, in a long essay titled “Emblem and Image in Yeats,” of “Among School Children,” whose famous final stanza also has its dancer.70 The entire poem is a dramatic monologue of the poet who, looking at school children, is made to reflect on his own ageing body, specifically on how his active mind and decaying body form a Negation. The contrast is not only with the children but with religious sculptures that, in their unchanging stone, represent the ascent to a transcendent world up the vertical axis, away from the cyclical world of a nature that is always ageing and dying. Up or down? Eternity or time? Emblem or image? – “emblem” being de Man’s word for those non-naturalistic images of nature in Yeats that, the poet implies, transcend “the fury and the mire of human veins,” like the golden bird of “Sailing to Byzantium.” The conclusion of de Man’s argument of nearly a hundred pages is that Yeats cannot reconcile the supernatural and / or imaginative realm of the emblem with the natural world of ordinary life, and thus is left with complete, despairing failure – and so are we: “The failure of the emblem amounts to total nihilism. Yeats has burned his bridges and there is no return out of his exploded paradise of emblems back to a wasted earth. Those who look to Yeats for reassurance from the anxieties of our own post-romantic predicament, or for relief from the paralysis of nihilism, will not find it in his conception of the emblem. He cautions instead against the danger of unwarranted hopeful solutions, and thus accomplishes all that the highest forms of language can for the moment accomplish.”71 Nor is Yeats’s catastrophe merely that of a rather extremist poet with some neurotic obsessions. Here is another of de Man’s quietly devastating conclusions, this time from the end of the Schiller / Kleist essay, where he speaks of “the trap which is the ultimate textual model of this and all texts, the trap of an aesthetic education which inevitably confuses dismemberment of language by the power of the letter with the gracefulness of a dance. This dance … is the ultimate trap, as unavoidable as it is deadly.”72 As the conclusion not only of the essay but of the volume, published posthumously, that is Paul de Man’s final pronouncement. Aesthetic ideology and its violence turn out to be an error not just of Romantic texts

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but of all texts, and the error is unavoidable, inherent in every use of language whatsoever. The one good thing language can accomplish is to warn against “unwarranted hopeful solutions.” Jung warned repeatedly against the desire for perfection – for the triumph of one impulse over its necessary opposite. De Man shows eloquently how, when a myth of concern aspires to perfection, it becomes fanatical and eventually violent in the attempt to eliminate all opposition, all criticism, all alternatives. Frye shows, also with eloquence, how a myth of concern needs a counterbalance, to keep it open and flexible and selfcritical, from elements of a myth of freedom. But in philosophy and literary theory in my lifetime the myth of freedom has also become extremist and, to use de Man’s word, nihilistic, if it aspires to abolish any myth of concern. The symptoms have become commonplace. Any retreat from a reductionist position, no matter how radically sceptical, is said to be lacking in rigour, to be irrationalist mystification, to be bourgeois privilege. Derrida says he does not abolish meaning, even truth, but they are always deferred. Any deconstructive reading results in an aporia which itself must be deconstructed, and so on, in an infinite regress. No signifier has a signified because it can be defined only by another signifier, and so on. Hillis Miller’s version of deconstruction only takes the idea of mise en abyme to its inevitable conclusion. I am speaking of what I think deconstruction, like other poststructuralist and postmodern theories, has had a tendency to become. The greatest part of poststructuralism emerged from a Romantic background: from Rousseau, from Hegel and the other German Idealists, and from the second-generation thinkers who responded to Romanticism and Idealism, such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. If it became the Contrary of Romanticism and Idealism instead of merely their Negation, it could become a primary instrument of decreation. There will be more to say about this in part 4. De Man’s thesis is that the transcendent world of the emblem is inhuman, but the world of nature, time, and the body is finally in old age revealed as valueless and disgusting, a rag-and-bone shop, the fury and the mire of human veins, a “wasted earth.” But that leaves Yeats’s tactic of switching perspectives out of account. That is not the view of Crazy Jane, although she is old, like Yeats. Nor is it the view of the Self in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul,” a poem not mentioned in de Man’s Rhetoric of Romanticism. A sudden anagnorisis or dramatic dilation of perspective may occur within a single poem, as it does here, where the Self moves from speaking of “the frog spawn of a blind man’s ditch” to the Blakean “Everything we

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look upon is blessed.” Both perspectives are intended at the same time: they are the visions of the natural self and the spiritual, imaginative self. The last stanza of “Among School Children” is similar. Its syntax is ambiguous: “Labour is blossoming where … ” Where indeed? The answer is in a Blakean (not a national) state that is not “there” but “here,” suddenly confronting us. It is a state of “unity of being,” as Yeats would call it, and not a state we could live in for more than a brief time, much less impose on the world as a utopia. None the less it is not wish-fulfilment. It is the model by which we build Jerusalem – although the Romantics had to learn that Jerusalem first has to be built within, where the real revolution takes place, before we can trust ourselves to remake the external world into anything more than an objective correlative of our pathology, which is where the real violence invariably comes in. De Man does not deal with what Abrams addresses extensively: the inward turn from politics to imagination – even though it was the turn made, in varying ways, by all those who abjured their younger years’ pact with the will to power: de Man himself, Heidegger, and Mircea Eliade, who was a fellow traveller with the Romanian fascists. All three went on to create a later body of work that was, in very different ways, progressive, a refinement of their earlier vision through the consolidation of their own earlier error. XV I . P RO M ET HEU S AG O N I ST ES : G E R M A N I D EA L I S M A N D M A RX I S M Perhaps never in history have philosophy and literature, including literary criticism, been so closely and fruitfully interactive as during the Romantic period, in philosophy the period inaugurated by Kant. We have time only to glance at what German Idealism’s two philosophical giants, Schelling and Hegel, contribute towards our preoccupations here: Schelling to the theory of the imagination and its mythmaking powers, Hegel to the vision of a progressively redemptive power in history. Schelling’s philosophy is introverted: his quest is downward and inward, beneath the phenomenal world into a noumenal realm that ordinary reason can speak about only through paradoxes, which may be one reason that Schelling was constantly revising his system. What he was after is unknowable, and can be experienced only through “intuition,” and represented by its products: symbols, myths, and works of art. His philosophy plumbed the depths, increasingly influenced by such visionaries as Jakob Boehme, and when he did late in

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his career develop a linear theory it was of the progressive evolution of spiritual vision through the clarification of error, comparable in some ways to Blake’s “Seven Eyes of God.” Hegel had no use for intuition, which to him meant “edification” – banal pseudo-profundities. emotional comfort food – rather than rigorous logic developed from the “concept.” Hegel’s logic, however, is not ordinary logic bound by the law of non-contradiction. Its central principle is the unification of opposites by the “negation of a negation,” annulling them while preserving them in a third term that synthesizes them on a higher level, the famous Hegelian Aufhebung or lifting up. As a logical operation, this is merely a sleight of hand. What Hegel is really speaking of is, in structural terms, metaphorical identification, or, in transformational terms, decreation and recreation. Thus the foundational operation for Hegel’s logic is a form of intuition, in other words of imagination. That would make Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit almost fiction, or at least a liminal work on the border between philosophy and fiction, what Frye calls an “anatomy.” The most sympathetic treatment of it that I know of is Abrams’s lively discussion in Natural Supernaturalism, which states that it “is deliberately composed not in the mode of philosophic exposition or demonstration, but in the mode of a literary narrative … The narrative mode is thus one of a progressive self-education towards the stage of maturity, as ‘the spirit that educates itself matures slowly and quietly toward [its] new form.’”73 The work is a Bildungsroman not just of the Absolute Spirit but of its author, because, in a paradoxical tour-de-force reminiscent of Blake’s Milton, Hegel’s dawning consciousness of the Absolute Spirit produces and is identical with the Absolute Spirit’s awakening to its full identity. Yet this coming-of-age narrative is also an epic of the hero’s quest, another internalization-of-quest romance, the hero this time being the thinker or artist. But not him alone, notes Abrams: “The spirit, the protagonist of the story, maintains no one phenomenal identity, but passes through bewildering metamorphoses in the form of outer objects and phenomenal events … as well as multiple human personae … The protagonist, the spirit, is also his own antagonist, who appears in a correlative multitude of altering disguises, so that the one actor plays all the roles in the drama; as Hegel says of one stage of the evolution, ‘the I is We, and the We is I.’”74 Within the same paragraph, Abrams mentions Finnegans Wake without explicitly noting the resemblance: perhaps he thought it was obvious. The Phenomenology is a divine comedy whose quest is horizontal along the timeline of history and, unlike Dante’s vertical comedy, is some-

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times actually funny, at least in Abrams’s reading of it: “He writes it with vigor and high humor, entirely aware of the ironic and sometimes comic aspects of the remarkable story he has undertaken to tell. It is full of private jokes and narrative traps, and in fact constitutes a sustained and serious put-on for the unwary reader.”75 Yet it is at the same time a serious progressive vision of the redemption of time, through time. The Absolute Spirit is an immanent deity, not an underlying substance but a process or activity, and the nature of that activity is decreation and recreation, working towards enlightenment. In The Great Code, Frye remarks of the Phenomenology: It seems to me that the ladder Hegel climbs in that book contains a theory of polysemous meaning as well, and that a new formulation of the old medieval four-level sequence can be discerned in it. The hero of Hegel’s philosophical quest is the concept (Begriff), which, like Ulysses in the Odyssey, appears first in an unrecognized and almost invisible guise as the intermediary between subject and object, and ends by taking over the whole show, undisputed master of the house of being. But this “concept” can hardly exist apart from its own verbal formulation: that is, it is something verbal that expands in this way, so that the Phenomenology is, among other things, a general theory of how verbal meaning takes shape. Even the old metaphor of “levels” is preserved by Hegel’s term Aufhebung.76 Thus the Absolute Spirit is a Logos who is not a transcendent principle of order imposed from above but, in Dylan Thomas’s phrase, a “walking word,” a wanderer on the road. He is the figure in the landscape once again, but seen in motion. “God is alive, magic is afoot,” says Leonard Cohen in Beautiful Losers.77 To all of which we may contrast Jung, who is speaking of the discovery of the unconscious: The latter put certain bounds to human knowledge in general, from which post-Kantian German Idealism struggled to emancipate itself … Philosophy fought against it in the interests of an antiquated pretension of the human mind to be able to pull itself up by its own bootstraps and know things that were right outside the range of human understanding. The victory of Hegel over Kant dealt the gravest blow to reason and to the further development of the human mind, and, ultimately, of the human mind, all the more dangerous as

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Hegel was a psychologist in disguise who projected great truths out of the subjective sphere into a cosmos he himself had created.78 German philosophy “had apparently just got the better of Kantian criticism and had restored, or rather reinstated, the well-nigh godlike sovereignty of the human spirit – Spirit with a capital S,” but the result, Jung tells us, was “in Hegel identification and inflation, the practical equation of philosophical reason with Spirit, thus making possible that horrid brilliance in his philosophy of the State.” Hegel “induced that hybris of reason which led to Nietzsche’s superman and hence to the catastrophe that bears the name of Germany. Not only artists, but philosophers too, are sometimes prophets.”79 Once again Jung here anticipates exactly the criticism by de Man, that German Idealism’s power drive created a reductive understanding of the imagination’s identity-in-difference as early as Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, from whose Eighteenth Letter Hegel took his key term Aufgehoben, the negation that annuls an opposition by lifting it up to a new level on which it is synthesized into a unity. In Schiller, the opposites are Nature, in human terms the senses and the instincts or natural desires, and Reason, source of both natural and moral law: his problem was how to unite these opposites, an urgent process (the book appeared in 1795). In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934– 1939, Jung says of Schiller: He was the first German to become aware of the problem of the opposites in human nature: that psychological split became manifest to him probably under the influence of the impressions of the French Revolution which was a sheer horror to the people of that time … Sensitive, thinking people were tremendously shaken by all those events in France, and it was under the immediate impression of those events that Schiller discovered the problem of the pairs of opposites: the problem that man, on the one side, is a fairly civilized human being, and on the other, quite barbarous.80 But Jung is drily sceptical of Schiller’s proposed solution, unifying the opposites in a vision of beauty, an ideal that the Classical and Renaissance worlds found compelling, and which survives as late as the early poetry of Yeats, but which seems utterly elitist and escapist to the ironic modern sensibility: “He sought a way of overcoming that condition, a way that might lead to a sort of reasonable state; and the only medicine he found

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was in the vision of beauty, the idea that in the contemplation of beauty you can be united with yourself … So that if everybody would do something of the sort – if they could behold beauty – they could unite the pairs of opposites.”81 There is more to Schiller’s theory than that, or it could never have inspired not only Hegel’s dialectical method but also Nietzsche’s idea of the synthesis of the Apollonian and the Dionysian in tragedy. Schiller is explicit that no work of art ever achieves that unity of opposites, which is a model or ideal to strive for but which all particular artistic efforts only approximate. In the Sixteenth Letter, he says, “The highest ideal of beauty is, therefore, to be sought in the most perfect possible union and equilibrium of reality and form. This equilibrium, however, always remains no more than an Idea, which can never be wholly realized in actuality … and the utmost that experience can achieve will consist of an oscillation between the two principles.”82 This essential qualification limits the human imagination as it works in a fallen world. Yes, there is a godlike power within on which humanity may draw: but no human artist, and by extension no society, is identical with that power. Thou art That: but Thou art also not That. Metaphor’s A is B always contains a moment of difference, which the will to power, even if for the very best of motives, is tempted to suppress. That moment brings conflict, which means that Schiller’s image of society as a dance can be only a superhuman, or a subhuman ideal. Thus qualified, it remains a useful model to guide our search for a social order that works out conflicts of ideals and interests creatively and progressively rather than destructively, but the critical impulse Frye calls the “myth of freedom” must always remain vigilant about the attempt to suppress freedom in the name of unity. Schiller is perhaps not so naïvely unaware of this as his critics maintain: his letters are difficult to follow because he keeps restlessly shifting perspectives, almost tormentedly aware that every position has its necessary opposite, always wary of a premature synthesis. Indeed, his style of selfconscious perspectivism, which emerges from the attitude he called “sentimental” rather than “naïve,” may be his chief gift to those influenced by him, including Hegel, Nietzsche, Jung, Derrida, and de Man, and is what is valid about the so-called hermeneutics of suspicion. It is itself an effect of aesthetic education, which models a union of opposites that ordinary consciousness can deal with only through vacillation and paradox. It is Hegel who is insufficiently vigilant. Abrams responds to what is genuine in Hegel’s vision of the Absolute Spirit as a decreative and recreative power moving through time. Jung is looking at its shadow, which is

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Faustian: like Faust, Hegel was an academic who sold his soul to the devil, in his case for the sake of a power to solve all the problems of history and the human condition. The price he paid originates in the one-sidedness of intellectual detachment. Philosophers might object that Abrams’s characterization of the Phenomenology reduces it to the “merely literary,” but a poet’s response might be that Hegel himself has reduced his vision to the “merely philosophical,” to what Blake would call a “Spectre,” a walkingdead abstraction. In fact, Blake did say something of the sort about several of his own influences: “Any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen, produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborgs, and from those of Dante or Shakespear, an infinite number” (E, 43). This is clearly not intended as a compliment to Paracelsus or Jacob Boehme. The texts of these writers are intellectualized and reductionist: their relation to the works of Dante and Shakespeare is analogous to the relation of Yeats’s A Vision to his poetry. The germ of the Absolute Spirit is the “concept,” and the entire system developed from it remains on a conceptual level. Anything can be reconciled with anything else on a conceptual level, so that in the end synthesizing opposites becomes a shuffling of abstractions on paper. What is repressed is human experience, as existentialism, which was basically a backlash to Hegelianism, realized when it founded itself on the defiant insistence that “existence precedes essence.” Hegel called his central book a “phenomenology,” but he has none of the later phenomenological tradition’s interest in actual perception, in the way that the subject–object distinction is grounded in our sensory experience, which is in turn, as Merleau-Ponty emphasized, grounded in our experience of the body. In this he is the opposite of Blake, for whom imagination was an expansion of the senses and the bodily. Emotion has a sensory and bodily basis, and Hegel’s vision lacks feeling and empathy: it has a fatal Olympian detachment from the reality of pain and suffering. True, he refers to the stages of the Absolute Spirit’s development as a “way” that contains an allusion to the stations of the Cross and even a reference to Golgotha, but the agon of the Spirit is never dramatized, so that we may know the price of all those syntheses. Eventually Hegel will be led to praise not only the authoritarian Prussian state, but the salutary, energizing benefits of war, comparable to some of Yeats’s repellent remarks in his fascist moments. But even when he does not go so far, his system falls victim to the Fortunate Fall delusion that evil is a necessary part of the system, regrettable but inevitable. Presumably if your child dies because of a war, you are supposed to comfort yourself with the thought that the death has con-

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tributed to the grand march of history towards the Absolute Spirit. This amounts to a demonic parody of the real working of the vision of identity-in-difference through time. It is small wonder that Marx reacted against Hegel by developing the view that all of what we call “culture” is merely ideology, a superstructure of mystification and self-delusion designed to mask the real nature of social oppression even from the oppressors themselves. What Marx retained from Hegel’s system caused endless theoretical problems in the subsequent history of Marxism, so why the attraction, why not simple repudiation? Marx, like Romanticism, underwent a phoenix death-andrebirth in the aftermath of a failed revolution, in Marx’s case, 1848. The failure of direct political action led once again to an inward turn, to clarify vision by elaborating a theory of a long-term revolutionary process. Marx knew in his own way about Blake’s Orc cycle. Capitalism had begun as a revolutionary movement: the English Civil War was on one level the revolt of the commercial middle class against the old monarchy and aristocracy in the name of liberty. In theory, capitalist competition is dialectical, resulting in a myth of progress. But because of their ability to accumulate “surplus value,” the capitalists eventually became a new top–down elite. Marx was even aware that merely turning the cycle was no final answer: the “dictatorship of the proletariat” could not be the final goal. But Marxism has never had much clue about what really is progressive in history, and in practice itself either succumbed to the will to power to produce more totalitarian states or devolved into a vision of conflict as an end in itself. No matter how many times it is refuted, Marxism will remain a genuine Promethean myth because of the things that Marx’s analysis of the modern situation got triumphantly right. First, what economists may criticize about the theory of surplus value is beside the point: its real function is to give the lie to the laissez-faire ideology of capitalist competition. Once a capitalist accumulates sufficient profit, he has acquired an advantage over his competitors that becomes built in: the playing field is no longer level. This creates larger and larger monopolies, which in turn acquire political power that subverts democracy into plutocracy, and the networking of monopolies and plutocracies becomes more and more global, widening into a gigantic system of oppression. Second, this oppressive system learns to keep itself in power by ideological conditioning that goes far deeper than mere propaganda, a conditioning that becomes part of the socialization process through the vehicles of family, education, and the media.

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Third, the United States is particularly vulnerable to capitalism’s insidious effects because it, being a country born of revolution against the old order, lacks a myth of concern, or perhaps more accurately has only an ungerminated seed of one. It has democracy, but democracy is part of the myth of freedom. Capitalism sometimes moves into the vacuum as a kind of parody myth of concern: the “American way of life” is more or less equated with consumerism. But those who reject that kind of vulgarity may fall back on a pastoral myth of a way of life based on the “traditional values” of family, religion, and hard work, the last, they hope, leading to the “American dream”: that each generation will be more prosperous than the previous one. Such a myth is tribalist in tendency, and produces support for isolationism. However, the capitalist push for new markets and new monopolies breeds a conflicting myth of “American exceptionalism,” imperialism supposedly to protect and spread democracy, although everyone knows what’s really being hawked. Potentially, the American myth of concern is a kind of anarchistic pluralism, originally born of the need to produce a unified country while preserving the autonomy of the individual states. This partly decentralized pluralism is the real meaning of “Out of many, one,” of which the melting pot is the ideological perversion. But Marxism itself is a myth of freedom with exactly the same problem: it has never figured out what myth of concern it might be attached to and, like democracy, has had a bad habit of attaching itself to the wrong ones. Potentially, a Marxist myth of concern would come to focus on the often-repressed third member of the motto of the French Revolution: fraternity. At its best, Marxism is a dream of human solidarity, of genuine community that none the less preserves liberty and equality. In the words of Theodor Adorno: “We become free human beings not by each of us realizing ourselves as individuals, according to the hideous phrase, but rather in that we go out of ourselves, enter into relation with others, and in a certain sense relinquish ourselves to them. Only through this process do we determine ourselves as individuals, not by watering ourselves like plants in order to become well-rounded cultivated personalities.”83 In an essay “On Subject and Object,” Adorno says beautifully, “Were speculation concerning the state of reconciliation allowed, then it would be impossible to conceive that state as either the undifferentiated unity of subject and object or their hostile antithesis: rather it would be the communication of what is differentiated … In its proper place, even epistemologically, the relationship of subject and object would lie in a peace achieved between human beings as well as between them and their Other. Peace is the state

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of differentiation without domination, with the differentiated participating in each other.”84 That last sentence escapes from the usually astringent censor of a highly sceptical thinker to express something, however wistfully, of the ideal of a genuine identity-in-difference. The irony is that the passage proffers a social model for both Marxism and American society, because the only possible model for any democratic free society is precisely identity-indifference. Restraint of capitalism is always in the name of solidarity, of human interdependence working to realize primary concern, by restraining capitalism’s will to power through attacking monopolies, cronyism, and exploitation, by providing a social safety net for the victims of economic competition. Whether this calls itself “democratic socialism” or “capitalism with safeguards” is a matter of political jockeying. If Marxism is a myth of freedom in search of its myth of concern, it does possess the latter implicitly. Although Marxism is imported into literary theory mostly as critique, its creator was one of the great mythmakers, and the Marxist myth, as Frye notes in “Expanding Eyes,” is implicitly Promethean. Contemporary criticism, however, including the Marxist type, is resolutely anti-mythical, hostile to “master narratives” such as Hegel’s that have caused or condoned so much evil in the world. There have been any number of attempts to demythologize Marxism similar to earlier efforts to demythologize the Bible: dump the storyline, keep the message. The narrative of a materialist dialectic working itself out in history, with capitalism eventually collapsing of its own excesses, resulting in the dictatorship of the proletariat, the eventual withering away of the state, and the end of history is now rejected as “vulgar Marxism,” or “historicism,” a fairy tale useful for placating the naïve but unnecessary for a more intellectually sophisticated elite. The Marxist critic most aware that to demythologize Marxism would erase it is Fredric Jameson, who thus retains a vital link to myth criticism, and especially to Frye, whom he praises for, alone among the discipline’s practitioners, stressing its social dimension. Jameson is aware that Marxism needs a “master narrative,” despite its dangers. He writes in The Political Unconscious: “These matters can recover their original urgency for us only if they are retold within the unity of a single great collective story; only if, in however disguised and symbolic a form, they are seen as sharing a single fundamental theme – for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity; only if they are grasped as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot.”85 He begins the essay “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism” by saying: “The Marxian vision of history … has sometimes, as

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we have observed, been described as a ‘comic’ archetype or a ‘romance’ paradigm. What is meant thereby is the salvational or redemptive perspective of some secure future,” agreeing that “Frye is surely not wrong to assimilate the salvational perspective of romance to a reexpression of Utopian longings, a renewed meditation on the Utopian community.”86 Not just romance but “all literature, no matter how weakly, must be informed by what we have called a political unconscious, that all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community.”87 Unlike Frye, Jameson believes that “magical narratives” must be transvalued to be of contemporary use: “A history of romance as a mode becomes possible, in other words, when we explore the substitute codes and raw materials, which, in the increasingly secularized and rationalized world that emerges from the collapse of feudalism, are pressed into service to replace the older magical categories of Otherness which have now become so many dead languages.”88 There are two problems with this stance. First, it sounds a lot like … demythologizing. It is rather stories whose magic has been exorcised that become “dead languages.” Second, in the theory wars of the 1960s–80s, Marxism went up against poststructuralism, and lost. Jameson is aware that Marxist theory’s main challenge to his way of thinking comes from Louis Althusser, who abjures any kind of “hidden master narrative.” Summarizing Althusser, he says, “This kind of allegorical master narrative would then include providential histories (such as those of Hegel or Marx), catastrophic visions of history (such as that of Spengler), and cyclical or Viconian visions of history alike.”89 An Althusserian look at Romanticism is afforded by Forest Pyle’s The Ideology of Romanticism, especially by its treatment of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, a favourite with sceptical critics because its unfinished state allows them to read into it Shelley’s supposed final despair of the Romantic project, despite the undeveloped text, left unfinished at his death in 1822. Pyle begins by taking issue, from an Althusserian perspective, with Adorno: “In the essay ‘Lyric Poetry and Society,’ Theodor Adorno, taking as his notion of ideology ‘untruth, false consciousness, a lie,’ asserts that ‘the greatness of works of art lies solely in their power to let things be heard which ideology conceals: whether intended or not, their success transcends false consciousness.’ By that measure, The Triumph of Life is a failure, for it reveals or gives voice to nothing concealed by ideology.”90 But to Pyle its “greatness” lies in subverting the whole theory of ideology as false consciousness. Instead, “Shelley’s poem delivers us once again to Althusser, to his ‘vision’ of the necessity of ideology: The great revolutionary thinkers, theoreticians and politicians, the great materialist

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thinkers … understood that the freedom of men is not achieved by the complacency of its ideological recognition, but by the knowledge of the laws of their slavery … by the analysis and mastery of the abstract relations that govern men.”91 Here is where the Marxist revolution ends, in freedom defined as knowledge of one’s inevitable slavery. Althusser’s theory tries to extricate Marxism from the impossible demand to explain how Marxists know the truth while everyone else is imprisoned in their ideology. He does so by making ideology a priori, like Kant’s categories, and thereby inescapable. But that applies to Marxists as well – to everyone. “Poet and reader alike” have the “certainty only of our shared delusion, a delusion that cannot be derived from truth.”92 The actual model for Althusser’s version of ideology is in fact Lacan’s version of Kant, in which the Real is in the place of Kant’s thing-in-itself, about which we know and can say nothing because we are constituted by the Symbolic Order in solitary confinement within its prison-house of language. The end of the Althusserian quest is “a materialism that spells the end of the imagination.”93 Poststructuralists tend to think that the nightmare of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries occurred because somebody, Schiller perhaps, misread Kant. But the typical narrative of histories of modern philosophy is the quest to escape the Kantian dead end in which we cannot know reality but have no way of telling whether what we can know, namely the interpretive structures of our minds, has the slightest truth to it. The cloven fiction is not transcended but in fact cloven deeper. Phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, the poststructuralist theories of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault – all ways of confronting the intractable problem. Kant eliminated the cloven fiction only by making the truth of both object and subject inaccessible in different ways. Escaping it is not a Romantic irresponsibility but a modern necessity. The thesis of Terry Eagleton’s After Theory is that not much has happened after theory. “The golden age of cultural theory is long past,” he says in 2003, and “the new generation came up with no comparable body of ideas of its own.”94 By this point, it is easy to see why. Eagleton is saying not that no good work has been done since the end of high theory in – when? the 1980s? – nor that we could or should return to an age of pre-critical innocence. But he is definitely writing in the aftermath of another failed revolution, trying to see a way forward – escaping the poststructuralist impasse, apparently not so much refuting its radical scepticism as simply shrugging it off, as would his former student Christopher Norris.

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For those still looking for a progressive vision leading to social activism, this means first a return to the idea of common values, anathema to most versions of poststructuralism and postmodernism. In the final paragraph of a 1996 Afterword to Literary Theory: An Introduction, Eagleton writes, At the same time, the generosity of the humanist’s faith in common values must be candidly acknowledged. It is just that he or she mistakes a project still to be carried through – that of a world held politically and economically in common – with the “universal” values of a world which has not yet been thus reconstructed. The humanist is thus not wrong to trust to the possibility of such universal values; it is just that nobody can yet say exactly what they would be, since the material conditions which might allow them to flourish have not yet come into being.95 His claim is that Marx himself in his early Paris manuscripts was looking for what he (Eagleton) is now seeking: “He wanted an ethics and politics based on our species-being or shared material nature. But this is a notoriously perilous enterprise. Philosophers have generally placed a ban on such attempts to derive values from facts”96 – which makes Marx oddly resemble Abraham Maslow, whose hierarchy of needs was seeking the same thing, and who was indeed pilloried for trying to fuse facts and values. And where can we ground common materialist values? In the inescapable – not indisputable, for intellectuals can dispute anything – fact of the body: To say that morality is basically a biological affair is to say that, like everything else about us, it is rooted ultimately in the body … It is because of the body, not in the first place because of Enlightenment abstraction, that we can speak of morality as universal … Of course it is true that our needs, desires and sufferings are always culturally specific. But our material bodies are such that they are, indeed must be, in principle capable of feeling compassion for any others of their kind. It is on this capacity for fellow-feeling that moral values are founded; and this is based in turn on our material dependency on each other.97 Eagleton then suggests: “Culturalism is the form of reductionism which sees everything in cultural terms, as economism sees everything in economic terms … Culturalism is of course right that a natural event like

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death can be signified in a myriad cultural styles. But we die anyway. Death represents Nature’s final victory over culture. The fact that it is culturally signified does not stop it from being a non-contingent part of our creaturely nature.”98 He adds that death “sketches an intolerable limit to the omnipotent will.”99 I find it moving that After Theory appeared the year following the death of Eagleton’s mother, to whom he dedicated the book. This line of argument leads him to praise the ethics – not the theology or the ideology – of Judaism and Christianity: “What salvation comes down to is the humdrum material business of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and visiting the sick. In typically Judaic style, salvation is an ethical matter, not a cultic one. It turns on the question of whether you have sought to protect the poor against the violence of the rich, not of how scrupulous you have been in your ritual observances. It is basically a biological affair.”100 What Eagleton proposes is completely admirable, but there are two ironies here. First, none of this was utterable circa 1975, even by a critic of his stature, without generating annihilating attacks on its author’s corrupted morality, which has turned him into a duped propagandist for Western cultural imperialism. Anyone who thinks this is exaggerated was not there at the time. Second, these passages articulate Frye’s idea of primary concern – by the critic who notoriously asked, “Who reads Frye now?” I have one more criticism, not just of Eagleton but of Marxism as a whole. Marxism is one-sidedly extraverted. Much as I appreciate its attempt to speak for the value of true community in a world polarized between mindless, dangerous collectivism and isolated loneliness, that attempt is partly crippled by the extravert’s typical misunderstanding of inwardness, solitude, and the individual as symptoms of neurotic narcissism. Eagleton says of theory, It assumes, in the main, that at the centre of the world is the contemplative individual self, bowed over its book, striving to gain touch with experience, truth, reality, history, or tradition. Other things matter too, of course – this individual is in personal relationship with others, and we are always much more than readers – but it is notable how often such individual consciousness, set in its small circle of relationships, ends up as the touchstone of all else … It is a view equivalent in the literary sphere to what has been called possessive individualism in the social realm.101

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All solitudes are not the same, and some are neurotic: however, this inadequately formulates an anxiety with which the Romantics themselves struggled, as we see in the next section. But looking here merely at its social aspect, we may say a couple of things. First, these words come from a man who has spent all his adult life in the company of not only the hundreds of books he has read and taught but the many he has written. And I think Eagleton bowed over those books for the same reason the Romantics and Marx himself turned from revolutionary activism to reading and writing, as Milton had done before them: the failure of direct external action leads necessarily to a turn inward, in order to break the “mindforg’d manacles” that caused external activism to fail. This is yet another way of characterizing Schiller’s “aesthetic education.” Everything in the university experience pulls students centrifugally away from what should be their central focus, that solitary encounter with texts, including those they write themselves – many such distractions emanating from the university itself. But the threat to Western civilization today, and it is grave, is not the selfishly solitary privileged individual. Poststructuralism has been foolish to revel in the death of the subject, the death of humanism, the death of man. Jung was prescient about this, even before World War II erupted. The modern world has dissolved the old roots and traditions and myths of concern, perhaps appropriately, for they had worn out in their received forms. But this destruction has not led to a happy anarchism. Instead, anxious, hollow-feeling people in free fall are sucked into the vortex of one kind of collectivism or another. We are seeing it all over again right now. Jung never tired of saying that it is only the firmly grounded individual who can resist the temptation of collectivism. That is why he spoke of the process of individuation. It is only the individuated person who is capable of the empathy that would lead to true social solidarity: the collectivized person can at best seek herd-animal gregariousness, at worst the mob. This leads us to the second crisis of Romanticism, the crisis of the turn inward. XV I I . RO MA N T I C I N T ERN A L I Z AT I O N Romantic poetry invented two forms of a new inwardness: one directly subjective, as in Wordsworth and Coleridge’s “conversation poems,” and one mythological and symbolic, usually a new kind of epic where myths and symbols evoke the psychological rather than the supernatural and historical. Parallel to this new type of poetry is the invention of the novel and the beginning of prose realism. Romantic literature was vertical,

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though vertical downward and inward; realistic fiction was horizontal and outward. Romanticism was introverted, realism extraverted in general tendency. The idea that literature, especially lyric poetry, is individual self-expression is at least as old as Sappho and Horace. Yet as the old hierarchies, both religious and political, were weakening in the late eighteenth century, the idea emerged of the autonomous individual, who grows up within the social order but cannot be reduced to being a mere function of it. The epistemologies of Descartes and Locke defined human experience in terms of the subject–object perspective, providing a philosophical rationale for individualism, one that fit readily with the political innovation of democracy, as we see in Locke himself, as well as with the economic innovation of capitalism and its dependence on “rational self-interest.” Those who disapproved of Romanticism – and that included most of the writers and critics between about 1900 and 1950 – blamed its leading figures for infecting modern culture with two things: “Romantic egotism” and cultural fragmentation, as society atomized into a collection of individual egos rather than being rooted in a community of unified “tradition.” But it was the Romantics themselves who were the first to worry about these dangers. The anxiety that subjectivism would result in a sterile, solipsistic isolation lies behind Schiller’s essay on Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, where “sentimental” means self-conscious. The fear that every man really is an island haunts Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who cannot bless other living creatures, and the poet himself in “Dejection: An Ode.” In Shelley’s Alastor, the protagonist is pursued by a demonic figure whom the poem’s subtitle calls “The Spirit of Solitude.” In his letters, Keats yearns to get out of his own consciousness and into that of the sparrow on the grass; he criticizes Wordsworth for his “egotistical sublime” and wishes to model himself on the self-effacing Shakespeare instead. Blake, in Jerusalem, dramatizes the internal, eternal debate between his imagination and his fearful and despairing ordinary self in the dialogue of Los with the Spectre of Urthona. It was the crisis of solipsistic subjectivity that generated the Romantic theory of the creative imagination. Blake called the imagination “the Real Man,” the consciousness that is a part of its object and not apart from it, like the ego. The idea that we have two identities is Christian. Paul distinguishes between the “natural man” and the “spiritual man” – the latter an indwelling form of God: “I, yet not I, but Christ in me” (Galatians 2:20). Milton was the common precursor to all the Romantic poets, and the Romantic imagination is Milton’s God as an immanent Inner Light

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who inspired his poetry, purged of what remained in Paradise Lost of the old, transcendent notion of God as the old man sitting on the throne. Romanticism also spawned a renewed interest in the Neoplatonic tradition that had partly inspired Milton. Every English Romantic poet but Byron wrote or aspired to write an epic in which the heroic act was now defined as the inward creative act of imagination. This act is genuinely creative – as Coleridge says in his Biographia Literaria, it repeats the original creative act of God – and is not mere fancy or fantasy, which is subjective and escapist. It changes the world because, as Blake, never at a loss for an aphorism, says, “The Eye altering alters all” (E, 485). Out of Romanticism emerged a new type of mythological epic or lyric in which the characters represent inward energies and are thus symbols, not objects of belief or worship. Blake invents his own characters, although his work is really a recreation of the Bible; Shelley transvalues Classical mythology in Prometheus Unbound: later, Yeats uses Irish mythology and legend, transfused with various esoteric sources; Goethe, in Faust, and Wagner in the Ring cycle, draw on Germanic sources, leavened in Goethe’s case with Biblical, Classical, and alchemical imagery. But wherever their symbolism is drawn from, these directly mythical poems are set in an inward reality, what in part 4 we will explore as the Otherworld. But since that reality is immanent in ordinary reality, Wordsworth and Coleridge are also able to write ballads and “conversation poems” that see the sacred in the everyday, including in common people such as Wordsworth’s leech gatherer or his Lucy. Wordsworth’s epic, The Prelude, is full of realistic autobiographical details, but he makes clear in his subtitle that its real interest lies not in Wordsworth the man but in the growth of a poet’s imagination. Romanticism thus sketches the features of yet one more of the hero’s thousand faces: the artist. The era’s individualism fertilized the birth not just of confessional lyric but, in the prose of De Quincey, Lamb, and Hazlitt, of imaginative autobiography and personal essay. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism traces the legacy of Wordsworth’s Prelude directly to the achievements of Proust and Joyce; in Germany, a similar line of descent leads from Goethe to Thomas Mann. But how, in this tradition, does the imagination relate to the artist’s ordinary self, along Jung’s ego–Self axis? The artist is the imagination’s incarnation as Christ was God’s, and the imagination is quite capable of sacrificing the artist as the Father did the Son. Blake, for example, was so much the vehicle of the creative process that he hardly seems to have noticed that he was in poverty. The scenario is played out across the arts:

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in literature, by poètes maudits such as Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas; in the visual arts by Michelangelo, van Gogh, and Picasso; in music by Beethoven, Charlie Parker, and too many rock stars dead at twenty-seven. The opposite scenario is when the ego identifies with the imagination and suffers Jungian “inflation,” the temptation of the will to power again, this time in an individual rather than a social form. A rogue’s gallery of titanically wilful, titanically suffering megalomaniacs populates Romantic and post-Romantic literature. Not all of them are artists, but all are visionaries driven mad by the intensity of an inner energy that possesses them: Heathcliff, Ahab, Dracula and the Byronic heroes of which he is a blooddrinking version, Conrad’s Kurtz. Behind all of these stands Milton’s Satan. We know that this perversion of Romantic aspiration is a real danger from one of the greatest Romantic epics (or epic dramas), Goethe’s Faust. Faust was originally a legendary version, sometimes said to be based on Paracelsus, of the Renaissance figure of the Magus, a scholar who is also a magician practising natural magic. Natural magic, from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century, supposedly taps into a reservoir of power latent not only in human beings, where it is known as the will, but also in nature. Because the two sources of power are one, the will of the magician can command the elemental spirits of nature that personify natural energy. White magicians like Shakespeare’s Prospero use this power for good, as do such benevolent descendants as Tolkien’s Gandalf, Rowling’s Dumbledore, and Star Wars’ Obi-Wan Kenobi (despite the pseudo-science fictional trappings). But the good magicians are typically counterpoised against figures who have harnessed the will to power: Sauron and Saruman, Voldemort, Darth Vader. The political implications, Nazi and fascist respectively, are visible in Sauron and Voldemort. Thus magic is not necessarily evil, but may easily become so with people vulnerable to the addictive glamour of power. This is a theme in the novels of Charles Williams, member of the Inklings along with Tolkien and himself an apparent magic dabbler. In the same period, the young Yeats who was a magical initiate aged into the later Yeats who became a fascist: the development is not necessary, but it is precautionary. Those who go over to the dark side suffer what Jung calls “inflation”: the afflux of energy produces a megalomania that sometimes lures the magician to aspire to what amounts to godhood, including a lust for personal immortality. The magician figure modulates into the dictator when the energy possessing him is communicated to his followers, whose individuality is dissolved into a state of collective consciousness that Jung in

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his late writings warned of as the great danger of modern times. And Jung himself had learned this lesson from the Romantic tradition, reading Goethe’s Faust as a prophetic warning and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra as a cautionary tale. Mann’s Faustian Adrian Leverkühn is a composer, but is tempted to seek out a kind of art that would be beyond good and evil. The theme of temptation by the power principle reappears as fantasy darkens into horror. It is visible, for example, in Stephen King’s first three novels. In Carrie, an innocent girl is driven by vicious social persecution into calling on a hidden reservoir of paranormal power that ends by possessing and destroying her. In Salem’s Lot, the leader of the vampire takeover is another megalomaniac aspiring to immortality. In The Shining, the dark power hidden within the significantly named Overlook resort lures Jack Torrance, a writer with autobiographical links to King himself, with promises of power to redress his narcissistic grievances. The imagination works by a kind of preliminary decreative detachment, perhaps similar to the phenomenologists’ “bracketing”: it builds its own reality apart from routine perception and the ordinary ossifications of habit, and also apart from social and ideological demands for commitment. Kant’s Critique of Judgment describes the aesthetic as “purposiveness without purpose,”102 whence Schiller derives his notion of the play drive or instinct. The Symbolist poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to bracket off words from their normal referential meanings, turning them into symbols – outward and visible signs of an inward and invisible state, like the Catholic sacrament. “Art for art’s sake” became a rallying cry for a backlash against realism, especially of the propagandistic type. Conservatives such as T.E. Hulme, who defined Romanticism as “spilt religion,” saw Symbolism as its decadent descendant: to him, its proponents were heretics who tried to supplant traditional revelation with one of their own invention, for which they were prophets and high priests. To Marxists, as described by Edmund Wilson in Axel’s Castle, both Symbolism and Romanticism are attempts to flee from history and the class war: the imagination is one final bourgeois gated community, a last bastion of privilege. The Romantics, at least in their heyday, would have been dismayed to find themselves held responsible for this dualistic impasse. Although Symbolism does seem to owe something to their theory of imagination, the idea of art for art’s sake would have been incomprehensible to them. In their youth, at any rate, they were all radicals with a powerful social vision who wanted to change the world, and the imagination was their instrument for doing so. The bracketing effect of the moment of aesthet-

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ic arrest does not remove one from reality but transfigures it in the here and now. It makes what is ordinarily opaque transparent, so that one may see the world in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour. This contrast of surface and depth becomes the controlling metaphor of part 4. When we look “into the heart of light, the silence,” we realize that that vital power we are calling “imagination” is not sequestered in a poet’s head: that is another illusion of the subjective fallacy. The imagination is immanent everywhere, in all things: it is the wind that sweeps through the heart of the world in Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp”; it is Wordsworth’s “motion and a spirit.” Theologians are horrified by the idea: it is pantheism, panentheism, New Age sentimentalism, something awful. Politicians like it even less, for it unites the world, unlocks the doors of our subjective prisons: it is a democratic ideal that cannot be contained within the ultimatums of ideology, hence very dangerous to both the ideological right and left, who agree on nothing except on the absolute primacy of ideology and the will to power. What originally inspired the English Romantics was the revolutionary crises of their time, embodied in the French and American Revolutions. Although he later decayed into a reactionary, the young Wordsworth actually went over to France to work for the cause. Despite the failure of the French Revolution, Blake and Shelley never renounced their revolutionary sympathies, and Byron died fighting for Greek independence. It was the Romantics, those egotists, those ivory-tower escapists, who supported the rights of the marginalized: Blake, with poems denouncing child labour, and Shelley, with “England in 1819” and “Song to the Men of England”; both wrote poetry advocating what a later generation called “free love,” the liberation of gender relationships from the usual patriarchal assumptions: and Blake’s denunciation of the “dark Satanic mills” of the early industrial revolution is as incisive as anything in Marx. When the French Revolution failed, some lost their nerve: Wordsworth and Coleridge became conservatives. But Blake and Shelley grappled with the nature of that failure, as Milton before them had with the collapse of the Puritan revolution, as the 1960s’ counterculture would with the phenomenon of hippies turning into yuppies. Nothing changes unless people’s heads are changed. It is as simple, and as complicated, as that. The imagination, failing in its attempt at a grand coup, is forced to work slowly, progressively, painstakingly across the cycles of time. The decision to do so involves a turning inward, leading to the second Romantic temptation. Whereas the first temptation is that of a will to power, the second could be called a temptation of powerlessness, the

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temptation to skeptical despair born precisely from the renunciation of the will. Its first phase is that of the loneliness of any individuals, artists or no, whose individuation sets them off from the conventional collectivity around them. For such alienated people, solitude may at first be a welcome refuge, but eventually it gives rise to a yearning for kindred spirits. But solitude seems necessary for the kind of inward focus demanded for creativity. Some artists, like Jane Austen, develop a method of walling out their surroundings and are able to write in a crowded room: at the opposite extreme are the Emily Dickinsons, made recluses by their very nature. Loneliness is a defining human emotion, and would be a commoner literary theme but for its stigma in our neurotically extraverted modern society. Loneliness is so, well, adolescent: we are embarrassed by our adolescent angst and the bad poetry it generated. Loneliness is psychological nakedness, with a similar shame attached. Yet many romantic love poems and songs are perhaps, secretly, more about loneliness than romance. Some loneliness may be mere codependency or failure to find oneself good company. But true loneliness, the more intense when it may not even know what it yearns for, goes to the heart of the human condition. We fear its vulnerability, yet somehow need it. Loneliness may deepen and darken into depression, and the link between creativity and melancholia was already known in the Renaissance, as is shown in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The theme of creative melancholia appears in Romantic literature in Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy,” and in the modern period by any number of works, ranging from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude to Loren Eiseley’s The Night Country and All the Strange Hours. Depression and anxiety may accompany creativity, which depends on relaxing the normal repression that hides the terror of the human condition. But the visionary’s deeper temptation is a crisis of faith that may lead to a sceptical despair. It is easy to say words such as “identity-in-difference,” but not easy to commit to a vision that can be expressed intellectually only in a series of paradoxes, a vision that seems unreal, even dangerously delusional, and not only to other people. A central form of Romantic poetry is the crisis lyric – a dramatic debate of the poet’s imagination with his or her sceptical, reductionistic natural self, Blake’s Idiot Questioner, who is always questioning and never capable of answering. The greatest instance to me is the debate between Los and the Spectre of Urthona in Jerusalem, but see also Prometheus’s wrestling with himself while nailed to his rock in Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. As that crucifixion makes clear, this dark night of the soul, as the mystics call it, does not

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spare even the divine. The dark moments of David in some of his Psalms and of Job are types of Christ’s cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This is a darkness of descent, and leads towards the descent myth of part 4. X VI I I . T HE N OVEL : T H E REA L I ST I C HO RI Z O N TA L The revolutionary upheaval out of which Romanticism was born went on for years and yet seemed to have accomplished nothing. The end of the Napoleonic Wars left Europe with a distrust of any kind of extremism, resembling the Enlightenment’s after the seventeenth-century religious wars. What no one knew, however, was that the French Revolution’s goal of social transformation would happen after all, just in slow motion, and more or less non-violently. It was the beginning of the end for the ancien régime, and for the top–down ideology that propped it up. In Britain, the (First) Reform Bill of 1832, though limited, signalled that the world might become democratic. It was also an early harbinger of liberalism, in the sense of gradual social amelioration through reason, tolerance, moderation, and democratic adjudication of differences. It owes much to Enlightenment principles, adapted for the middle class that was gradually replacing the monarchy and aristocracy as the dominant class of Europe and North America. Liberalism is a genuine myth of concern and, as such, is tempted by its own particular kind of ideological corruption. Liberalism is often called “the myth of progress,” meaning in practice that things are getting better for the middle class. Throughout the nineteenth century, this seemed to be true, because capitalism was making the middle class more affluent and secure, and science and technology were making it more comfortable. For a generation after World War II, it seemed true again, the Cold War notwithstanding. But liberalism can be sustained only by denial of two forces working to undermine it. The first is inequality, both economic and social. While the middle class rose to ascendancy by hitching a ride on capitalism, that tendency of capitalism to rapidly accelerate economic inequality, accurately predicted by Marx, brought down the entire world economy in the Great Depression, nearly did the same again in 2008, and is now driving millions of Americans out of the middle class and out of the social safety net. The second force is the kind of irrationalism that produces a collectivized consciousness of the kind that sucks millions of people into author-

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itarian mass movements. This type of irrational process, a modern form of demonic possession, produced Nazism, fascism, and Communism in the previous century, and is busy generating various “-isms,” as Jung called them, in our own, including nationalism, populism, and, yes, Trumpism. Marxism has no explanation for collectivism: economic injustice and insecurity may help to drive people into mass movements, but fail to account for what is actually mass psychosis. People cling to economic explanations rather than face the fact that there are irrational forces in the human psyche, but the turn inward and downward to the root of the problem, the descent myth pioneered by Romantics confronting the violence and terror of the French Revolution, is once again a present necessity. But as the nineteenth century went on, the visionary impulse partly subsided and partly went underground, to be replaced by realism in the form of the novel. It is a commonplace of literary history that its rise related to the rise of its largely middle-class audience. Audience and characters: rather than chronicling the exceptional deeds of heroes, the novel details the daily life of ordinary people. As such, it has always been the target of class prejudice, from its early days, when novels were sometimes dismissed as trash, to the twentieth century when all forms of realism were attacked, partly in the name of a resurgent Romanticism, but partly out of the class snobbery of would-be aristocrats, such as Yeats. The two poles of his system in A Vision are forms of consciousness. The “primary” is the mass-mindedness of the general population. “Antithetical” to it is the aloof, proud, elitist consciousness of the aristocrat, really of the fascist. When Yeats tried to write plays, he was forced to invent for himself a kind of anti-realistic drama modelled on the aristocratic Japanese Noh plays. Attacks on realism as “bourgeois” come also from the left, which generally prefers avant-garde drama, fiction, and film that subvert the supposedly narcissistic demand for what my students call “relatable” characters and storyline. The death of the subject and the end of “humanism” proclaimed by postmodernism are also implicitly attacks on the realism of the conventional novel and of the middle-class values that it reinforces. Never mind that the novelistic tradition is anything but complacent about the weaknesses of middle-class ideology: it exposes relentlessly its tendency to overvalue stability, security, conformism, and the “normal,” which so often means the average, the mediocre. There is a price for sticking to the middle. Nevertheless, two of the greatest twentieth-century fiction writers quite consciously founded themselves on the realistic tradition, only to shift, in

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their later work, steadily towards reviving the Romantic visionary tradition, without losing their grounding in realism, but clearly attempting to turn the two modes into Contraries. The striking parallel between the careers of Thomas Mann and James Joyce has been remarked on before. Both began as realists, Joyce in Dubliners, Mann in Buddenbrooks, then went on to write an autobiographical coming-of-age story, Portrait of the Artist and “Tonio Kröger” respectively, about a young artist alienated from his middle-class upbringing. But in later years, each writer attempted to fuse realism with the visionary and mythical, until by their late works, Finnegans Wake and Joseph and His Brethren, the mythical predominated. Tonio Kröger explicitly says his work will be dedicated to the common people who, as Dylan Thomas says, “pay no praise nor wages, / Nor heed my craft or art” (cp, 142). Joyce said that he wanted to combine Blake and Defoe. Some critics maintain that Joyce’s portraits of characters such as Leopold Bloom are merely negative, but to me that is a misunderstanding of his artistic stance, which was identical to Mann’s “erotic irony,” a tension of the Contraries of sympathetic identification and ironic detachment. There has always been a tension between form – a more inclusive term than symbolism or myth – and mimesis, ever since Plato rejected mimesis in favour of a realm of transcendent Forms, and the ambivalence has been particularly strong in literature – the impurest art. Instrumental music is non-mimetic: a piece of music has no signified in any ordinary sense. When art is enjoined to aspire to the condition of music, painting can at least become abstract, but there is no non-representational literature, despite the attempt of French symbolisme to approach it. But, like painting, literature fuses form and representation along a spectrum lying between what art critic Wilhelm Worringer called “abstraction and empathy.”103 Myth and symbol are literature’s formal building blocks, but even a poet as visionary as Blake does not reject mimesis, even if he rejects certain passive varieties of realism that merely reflect their content. As Wallace Stevens never tired of saying, imagination and reality should relate in an active and dialectical way – out of that may come some kind of progression. The aesthetic theory of Stephen Dedalus, expounded at the end of Portrait of the Artist, uses vocabulary from the Thomistic–Aristotelian tradition to espouse a theory of form that amounts to identity-in-difference. But he applies it not to a Grecian urn, indeed not to a work of art at all, but to a basket on a butcher boy’s head. The world of the cloven fiction, if passively accepted, is an increasingly dangerous illusion, but it cannot be simply rejected: it is the artist’s material. Joyce understands that Stephen Dedalus needs to become Icarus: he needs to fall down to earth,

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lest his aspiration to flight become another Faustian power trip, an attempted transcendence of the human condition. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus, substitute father, will catch him when he falls. Blake in Milton wrestled with the same problem, dividing the artist into two selves: Rintrah, the uncompromising prophet who guards the integrity of vision, and Palamabron, who knows that the artist is not godlike and that compromise is inevitable, especially when one is in poverty and one’s wife is ill. But what is the appeal – and the real value – for the common reader who does not function on Joyce’s or Mann’s level of aspiration? To start with, the realistic novel deals with common experience, that which is universal to all human beings, at least under the conditions of the modern democratic age. It is perhaps the most experiential genre of literature ever invented, showing people trying to meet their basic needs and fulfil their primary concerns: eating, sleeping, having relationships and making love, raising families, coming to terms with the family in which they grew up, working, losing their jobs, suffering illness and death, coping with the illness and death of others. The novel is the world’s diary, the “one bright book of life,” as D.H. Lawrence called it.104 Who wants to read about the ordinary? When the novel was new, some critics asked that question with some puzzlement. The answer turned out to be, almost everyone. Through the realistic novel’s imaginative empathy, we are able to enter into the lives of other people, coming to care about their lives as we do about our own. Our own life may be tedious at times, but it is not boring. We do not tire of contemplating and trying to preserve it, these days through photographs, films, and social media, in the past through diaries, scrapbooks, and letters. The epistolary novel shows show us how closely akin the early novel was to correspondence, especially that of women, who were shut out of more elite forms of literature and whose marginalized position in society often made them sharp observers. Frye has said that the motto of romance is de te fabula, this story is about you. That is even more directly true of the novel. Yet the form is not necessarily narcissistic, because what novels are most deeply about is connectedness, the way all life is interrelated. This theme comes into the foreground in one of the greatest of all novels, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Dorothea Brooke’s husband, Casaubon, is seeking the “key to all mythologies”; his scientific counterpart, Dr Lydgate, is searching for the “primal tissue” out of which all biological organisms derive. Both are in short looking for a key to the meaning of life – and both fail, because the connectedness of life has to be experienced by empathy, not theorized by the

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intellect. They are failed heroic questers, and Frye has observed how many protagonists of tragic novels are exactly that: Captain Ahab, Lord Jim, Jay Gatsby, even Emma Bovary, whose life becomes a sad parody of Courtly Love romance. The deep influence of Wordsworth on George Eliot indicates how Romanticism and realism are a single vision under two aspects. For empathy is an act of imagination. In ordinary subject–object experience, other people remain – other. Our ego selves can never really know what goes on inside someone else’s head. The paranormal and science-fictional dream of telepathy is not just about communication at a distance: we have Twitter for that. The real yearning is for a deeper sort of connection than the ego self is capable of: in the fiction of D.H. Lawrence, such a desire drives characters either into insanity and violence or downward to an instinctual level on the borders of the unconscious. “Only connect” is an abiding theme in the novels of E.M. Forster, not just in Howards End, where the phrase appears, but most profoundly perhaps in A Passage to India, where Professor Godbole achieves a vision of the unity of all things during a Hindu festival. It has, however, to be a unity-in-diversity: if it swallowed difference it would be not life but death, the empty, meaningless boum of the Marabar Caves that kills Mrs Moore. Interrelationship is not always an overt theme in novels, but it is realism’s fundamental structural principle. Realistic novelists are driven to seek breadth, their own form of the horizontal vision. The model of the “great American novel” is a massive volume with a huge cast of characters, whose lives intertwine over perhaps three generations. On the other side of the Atlantic, the 900-page Victorian triple-decker, with its serial publication, was an effective vehicle. Breadth can be achieved by writing not only huge novels but many novels, as with the Barsetshire and Palliser series of Trollope and the Yoknapatawpha stories of Faulkner. Balzac worked to create a Comédie humaine spanning close to a hundred works, encompassing the total range of human experience. Not every novel is panoramic: novels may focus on the life of a single character, or on life within a self-contained community, such as the Jewish novels of Chaim Potok. Indeed, that may be a way of structuring a kind of narrative whose very nature resists structure. The novel that multiplies connections and interactions resists plot structure, at least of the Aristotelian kind with beginning, middle, and end. It is inherently the loose, baggy monster that Henry James accused it of being. Various rules have been concocted, some of them by James himself, such as sticking to a limited point of view and not switching viewpoints, in order to put order

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into life’s refractory material. Such tactics may have their value, depending on the author’s intentions, but as universal rules they merely re-invent the neo-Classical unities, and many great novels disregard them. Another type of breadth, a gratifyingly progressive one, continues to be built up by the novelistic community as a whole. The novel has become increasingly inclusive over time in almost every possible way – starting with gender, if only because from the beginning so many of the major novelists were women: Edgeworth, Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Gaskell, Sand, Cather, and so on. Gradually, the social-class scope widened in both directions from the gentrified upper middle, to include the upper class (James, Wharton, Fitzgerald) and the lower (Twain, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy). African-American literature came of age after World War II, and AsianAmerican, Native American, Hispanic-American, gay, and lesbian literature in the last several decades. Moreover, the novel is no longer English and American, but truly international, one of the more welcome aspects of globalization. We do not need or want a world government, but Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” has come to pass: everyone now lives, like it or not, in a pluralistic society without borders. It is not to say we live in harmony: there is plenty of post-colonial bitterness to go around. But it is the imagination that both finds common ground and exposes its enemies – racism, sexism, homophobia, class war, imperialism, religious fanaticism – ripping away their cloak of respectability. The imagination is building its intangible yet very real Jerusalem not just in England’s green and pleasant land but wherever human beings read and write, which is now everywhere. It is one of the hopeful aspects of this divisive time. We have seen that novels are not plot-driven, because life is not plot-driven. The first thing students are told in a creative-writing class is to stop writing plot-driven stories. What does make a work of fiction, then, something other than a shapeless slice of life? There are two possible answers: characterization and character interaction, and theme. To oversimplify usefully, the first method is more, ahem, characteristic of the novel and the second of the short story, with immediate allowance for all manner of exceptions. The more a novel focuses on theme, the more its characters, its narrator, or both tend to become walking points of view or ideas, and the story is on its way to becoming what Frye calls an “anatomy” rather than a novel. For a good many novelists, characters come first, sometimes on their own, and the writers watch what they say and do and write it down. Novels may have action – after all, War and Peace has an entire war – but it is not the point of the story, and many older novels strike students, who

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are used to fast-paced entertainment, as verbal glaciers. A short story has less time to develop character, and its goal is often an epiphany (not necessarily a “theme” in the sense of an idea), either by a character or by the reader. The epiphany replaces old-fashioned plot resolution: hence the drop-off-the-cliff quality of some Hemingway short stories, especially for unaccustomed readers. Short stories are capable of some of poetry’s intensity and many-levelled compression, even when not written in any kind of “poetic prose” – especially by authors who specialize in short stories, such as Alice Munro and Raymond Carver. XI X . T HE HI STO RI C A L N OVEL A N D S C I EN C E F I C T I O N Alongside the realistic novel, two other genres of prose fiction embody the linear rhythm of time: the historical novel and science fiction. Each has a popular and a “serious” or literary version – a surprise perhaps to outsiders who know only the popular commercial version and so dismiss both genres as “junk.” The popular forms are simply manifestations of the action story: for historical fiction this means swashbuckling adventures of the Dumas type; for science fiction “space opera,” with ray guns and galactic empires, of which the Star Wars movies are a kind of affectionate half-parody. But the literary historical novel, as more or less invented by Sir Walter Scott, is a meditation on the shape of history as dramatized through crucial historical events. Scott’s first novel, Waverley; or, ’Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), is by his own admission not his best, but it provides in microcosm his vision of a possible historical progress through imaginative clarification. Its protagonist, Edward Waverley, is an imaginative young Englishman who becomes so possessed by Scottish Highland culture, which he sees entirely through the idealizing lens of the old Scottish ballads and tales, that he tries to join the Highland uprising of 1745 on behalf of Charles Edward Stuart – “Bonnie Prince Charlie” – against George II, the Hanoverian king of Britain. Scott called his character “a sneaking piece of imbecility,” though modelled on the author’s younger self, and Waverley has to be shaken out of his illusions the hard way: he is fortunate to survive the catastrophic Battle of Culloden, in which the British smashed not only the Highlanders’ rebellion, but, in its aftermath, most of their culture, and lucky not to be executed by his own country for treason. But, although he comes to see that the Highlanders have clung to an outworn heroic ideal until it has become nihilistic, he also grasps their

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quixotic quest: in effect, fiery Highland energy rising against the rationalism, commercialism, and imperialism of English and Lowland Scottish culture, or, as Blake might have later put it, another turning of the Orc cycle. The uprising is thrilling in its refusal to bow to what the dominant elite says is the reality principle, yet it is doomed. Like so many Romantic works, Waverley is a meditation on the causes of a failed revolution in the name of liberty. The Scottish warrior clans are anachronistic, trying to live out the old heroic ethic in a modern world: yet their passion – romantic love in Waverley’s infatuation with Flora MacIvor and artistic creativity in the old ballads that Scott himself had collected in Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border – is what the pragmatic and basically sterile societies to the south of them basically lack. The imaginative act of clarification is to fuse what is genuine in both opposing sets of values while rejecting what is wrong in them. Scott clearly hoped that such an attitude, if it spread, might transform Lowland and English culture. Realistic novels can be multi-generational up to a point, but a family saga extending beyond a few generations slowly begins turning into historical fiction: the basic focus of the novel is here and now. Literary historical fiction looks back along the horizontal timeline with a double purpose. First, it tries to imagine a bygone age as that age experienced itself: it is an exercise in understanding difference. Second, it attempts as well to understand ourselves as we have been shaped by the past, because we are in reality an outgrowth of the past, the flower attempting to understand the roots and branches from which it both is and is not separate. As we grow older, we become more and more aware of how we have been formed by our own family members and family history, and they by the culture in which they grew up. Historical fiction expands that process further into the past. A word in passing about the American epic vision of progress, the myth of the frontier, and its effect on American literature. We spoke earlier about the tension between the liberal, middle-class myth of civilization and moderation and a restless revolutionary dissatisfaction. American literature manifests this as an ambivalent tension between settlement and frontier, captured in Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking books, which constitute a five-volume epic. Every time civilization encroaches, Natty Bumppo becomes restless and heads west, into wild nature and the unknown, his main companion a Native American. This observation is not new, but, for our purposes, the true sublime and beautiful counterparts should have been, respectively, the myth of the frontier and a myth of civilization, culture, and cities centred in the east.

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Instead, both components were ideologically corrupted, the frontier into a brutal and greedy imperialism. The epic of the eastern, civilized component is of course Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The bard of Long Island’s vision of a nation of immigrant, multicultural, multi-racial, polymorphously sexual, diversely spiritual diversity united on a universal level of primary concern is the genuine myth whose ideological corruption is slavery, xenophobia, misogyny, and homophobia. What is genuinely progressive about American mythology comes out of the dialectical interplay between these Contraries, combined with the endless attempt to liberate their genuine forms from their ideological errors. Literary science fiction is also a meditation on history – it is no accident that Marxist critics have been interested in both, Georg Lukács in historical fiction and Fredric Jameson in science fiction. But it considers history from the standpoint not of original causes but of final causes in the future. It asks whether humanity, indeed the universe itself, has a teleology and a destiny. Increasing awareness since the Romantic era that humanity is now in charge of its own destiny has led to widespread social anxiety. Some years ago, eminent English science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss nominated Frankenstein as the first science-fiction novel. The genealogy is not really correct: science fiction does not descend generically from Frankenstein, which is a modernized Gothic. But Aldiss is thinking thematically rather than conventionally. Victor Frankenstein is the first of many mad scientists whose will to godlike power produces disaster. While his tragedy is merely individual, over the next two centuries the expansion of scientific knowledge led to technologies able to destroy the entire world in any number of ways. Susan Sontag’s well-known 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster” analyzed science-fiction disaster films since 1950, showing how they reflected Cold War fears of the end of civilization.105 But the disaster story is as old as the genre itself, going back to H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds (1897) and M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). Some settings reflect realistic anxieties, as with the spate of post–nuclearholocaust novels of the 1950s and 1960s and of ubiquitous climatechange novels now, and some are merely nightmare anxiety scenarios, but clearly current crises can awaken fears always slumbering on some more deeply buried level. In 2019, the year of Frankenstein’s bicentenary, the popularity of “apocalypse” as a story type in literature, television, and film indicates that many people now view the future with a pessimism whose mood ranges from stoic fatalism to outright terror. The label “apocalypse” is apt, for such sto-

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ries do seem to be a secularized version of the scriptural genre whose appearance marks periods of crisis, upheaval, danger, and the persecution of marginalized groups. The disaster story differs from the dystopia as chaos differs from false order, but their boundary is ambiguous. Octavia Butler’s Parable books chronicle the rise of authoritarian government in the United States, yet the result is not a totalitarian state that monitors every aspect of its citizens’ lives but rather a social collapse into survivalism and vigilante violence.106 The father of English-language science fiction, H.G. Wells, began as a utopian socialist who believed that a better world could be created by science and technology. From the very beginning, however, his imagination moved in the opposite direction from his ideology. His first sciencefiction novel, The Time Machine (1895), shows a decadent far-future humanity playing out a version of the class war that Wells the socialist so much wanted to abolish: the Victorian myth of progress is challenged by a vision of human devolution. Olaf Stapledon expanded Wells’s pessimism about human evolution into a pessimistic vision of the entire universe. Star Maker (1937) is written not as a novel but as a work of fictional historical scholarship.107 The historian-narrator chronicles the rise, decline, and fall not only of the entire human race but, with astonishing inventiveness, of myriad alien cultures and lifeforms, some of them alien indeed, for instance living intelligent galaxies, yet all of them, in the end, victims of cosmic mutability. Only one entity is eternal and unchanging, the Star Maker who created them all, a Nietzschean artist coldly detached from his creations, whose lives and deaths are to him only objects of contemplation. It was for good reason that Leslie Fiedler, in his book on Stapledon, subtitled the chapter on Star Maker “God Is Not Love.”108 Strongly influenced by Stapledon, Arthur C. Clarke, in his central novel, Childhood’s End, concluded that the human race was too physically and mentally limited to survive in the vast, inhuman universe revealed by modern astronomy. The next step in human evolution is to transcend the human altogether, by means of a generation of children capable of uniting into a collective consciousness not limited by the laws of time and space. The book ends elegiacally as the children, now as other and incomprehensible to their parents as any aliens, leave their parents behind for the unknown. The view that humanity in its present form is not viable in the long run, and will have to be superseded by some next evolutionary step, is increasingly prevalent in recent science fiction. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, progenitor of the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s, speculates

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without enthusiasm that the next step may be either the uploading of human consciousness into virtual reality (a term Gibson invented) or the advent of artificial intelligence. Since then, works such as Greg Egan’s Diaspora have explored the possibility of a “post-human” future: none of his characters is human. Extrapolating from the ever-increasing pace of scientific and technological development, Vernor Vinge predicted what he called the “Singularity”: a point at which history disappears as if into a black hole, because future developments will be beyond the understanding of humanity. American science fiction started with a kind of technological utopianism not unlike that of Wells (though without the socialism). The country’s first science-fiction pulp magazine, Amazing Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback and starting in April 1926, published stories by Wells alongside works such as Gernsback’s own crude but exuberant Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2000, a guided tour of a science-created utopia, and also much space opera. American science fiction in the pulp era up to 1939 infused the genre with home-grown optimism, and is thus regarded nostalgically by some readers despite its generally naïve style. A new generation of more talented writers in the stable of John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Stories, created between 1939 and about 1960 a more sophisticated yet still mostly hopeful vision of what the most important of them, Robert Heinlein, named “future history.” Over close to two decades, Heinlein set a series of stories in a common future for which, when he gathered them together in a volume, he provided a timeline, ending in “The First True Human Civilization.” The other most influential writer during this “golden age of science fiction” was Isaac Asimov. His Foundation Trilogy confronted Spengler’s cyclical theory of history and attempted to imagine a progressive way out of its pessimistic determinism.109 That way turned out to be “psychohistory,” a method of analyzing historical trends so scientifically accurate that it is predictive, and thereby able to alter the course of history by awakening humanity to the patterns that it would otherwise blindly live out. Heinlein’s view of human destiny as bound up with space travel was clearly a powerful influence on Star Trek’s vision of space as the “final frontier.” Cold War paranoia unfortunately killed his faith in an affirmative future for humanity. In his late novels, a saving remnant of gifted survivor types finds new hope by discovering that we live in a “multiverse” of possible alternate histories, allowing a few favoured characters not only to escape from a grim version of history to a better one but to go back and alter time to eliminate the grim future before it happens. Although there

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is some theoretical basis for a “multiverse,” what Heinlein’s characters really escape into is the imagination itself, as becomes obvious when the worlds created by exceptionally powerful literary imaginations turn out to be real in the multiverse, including Oz and the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars stories. If anyone can be said to have inherited the task of imagining a flawed yet better future through the use of science by flawed yet well-intentioned people, it is Kim Stanley Robinson: almost every one of his numerous books is a meditation on history and a humanity now in charge of its own destiny. In the 1980s, he was said to represent a “New Humanism” opposing the ironic cynicism of cyberpunk, but this was a media fabrication. At any rate, Robinson is indeed humanistic in the best sense (including combining a strong scientific background with a PhD in English, his dissertation supervisor being Fredric Jameson). His Pacific Edge presents one of the most attractive and plausible utopias ever created. Also creating a future history through a long series of stories is Ursula LeGuin: in The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home she has not been afraid to imagine a utopian community that might actually be possible, even though, like Robinson, she is intensely aware of the opposition to utopia by elites, whose continued control it threatens. Like every other production of the imagination, science fiction progresses through a dialectic between contrary poles of vision: the horizontal axis of time as it drives towards the future passes at any given moment through the vertical axis of recreation and possibility. In traditional mythology, the poles of the vertical axis are the ideal and the demonic, whose psychological equivalents are wish and nightmare. In so far as science fiction was an English invention (its precursor Jules Verne notwithstanding), the sceptical, pessimistic vision descending from Wells dominated. The other pole of vision, amounting to a counter-voice, found its centre of gravity in the American tradition. Despite the crudity of much of its pulp-magazine writing, its faith that science and technology could be used to improve the human condition has to be taken seriously, if only because, in modernized countries, at least for the more privileged, they have improved life in an almost-miraculous fashion. But the positive pole of science fiction’s historical progressivism consists of more than technological optimism. Its touchstone phrase “sense of wonder” indicates that its historical vision, when it passes through the vertical axis, is recreated according to the categories of romance. Within two centuries, science has not only revolutionized human life but has given us a vision of a sublime universe of limitless possibility. The more imagina-

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tively intense it becomes, the more science fiction leaps from extrapolation and social commentary into the undisplaced possibilities symbolized in myth and romance. But it is not just a modern version of the Vision of Transcendence: coming on the other side of the Romantic revolution, it recognizes the claims of the descent journey and the Vision of Immanence. Journeys into outer and inner space mirror one another, as the way up and the way down turn out to be mysteriously identified. It is this complex interplay of historical-progressive, transcendent, and immanent tendencies that gives science fiction its complex recreative dynamism. XX . T HE N OVEL A S EP I C There are no more celebrated and canonical novelists in the twentieth century than Joyce, Mann, and Proust. Each began with the Kunstlerroman and expanded it from the novelistic into the “epic,” broadly conceived. To call Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brethren, or Remembrance of Things Past “epics” would be strained. To say that they have inherited and taken up the epic project of the progressive clarification of vision in time might be the beginning of insight. How do these works differ from conventional realistic novels? In having a “vertical” apparatus of symbolism, repeated motifs, mythical parallels that opens up another dimension to the “horizontal” presentation of realistic details of setting, plot, and characters. The relationship in them of the vertical to the horizontal, of the symbolic and mythical to the realistic, varies. In Finnegans Wake the former so much swallows the latter that some critics are sceptical whether the proposed realistic substrate about a Dublin tavern keeper and his family exists at all. Remembrance of Things Past adheres most closely to the novelistic, yet the title of its final volume, The Past Recaptured, indicates how naturally it fits into the epic context: the French title of the whole work would be more accurately rendered as In Search of Lost Time. Certain nineteenth-century novels adumbrate the expansion of the horizontal realistic dimension into the vertical dimension of the symbolic, such as Moby-Dick and the late novels of Dickens, especially Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. This was not lost on T.S. Eliot, who incorporated imagery from Our Mutual Friend into The Waste Land, including the contrast of the sterile “dust heap” with the imagery of flooding and drowning, linked with death but also with the rebirth symbolized by the rainbow. In fact, the original title of The Waste Land, namely, He Do the Police in Different Voices, was drawn from Our Mutual Friend, and signified how its nar-

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rator, Tiresias, embodied all of the poem’s characters just as Finnegan does all the figures in that work’s ever-shifting texture. Yet the symbolic richness of these works has another side: a negative, decreative side. At the end of a long argument about clarifying and expanding vision over time, we arrive at a curious paradox. Joyce’s Ulysses is probably the most elaborately organized novel ever written: the symbolic parallels of its eighteen chapters are so subtle and intricate that Joyce had to draw up two somewhat differing charts to elucidate them. The central ongoing debate about Ulysses is over whether these parallels are intended seriously or satirically. Is Leopold Bloom a modern Ulysses, or does the parallel merely highlight his pathetically unheroic personality? When Stephen smashes the gaslight in the whorehouse in the “Circe” episode, and the “stage directions” announce the “ruin of all time and space,” is that announcement serious or sardonic? Finnegans Wake tells us on practically every page that we do not know anything about what “really happened” in history: history is a mélange of conflicting testimonies and texts, rumours, folklore, gossip, ideological prevarications, delusional notions, wish-fulfilment fantasies, anxiety nightmares, misunderstood transmissions, and outright lies. The Prologue to Mann’s Joseph tetralogy says the same thing: “Very deep is the well of the past” – so deep that the truth drowns in it. The idea that we may never know anything except ambiguity is the central theme of Borges, of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle, of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Against the Day. The vision of progressive understanding seems to have ended in complete, ignominious subversion, although it seems clear that that is not the entire story. XXI . T HE LYRI C A S EP I C We have been looking at the re-emergence of epic lineaments out of the prose genre of the novel. We arrive at a similar conclusion if we trace the disappearance of epic from the genre of lyric poetry. The Romantic reinvention of the epic was a false dawn. The two most ambitious poets of the Victorian age attempted projects of epic dimensions: of these, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is unfortunately pastiche. Browning’s The Ring and the Book is a major achievement, but one that assures us that, after twelve exhausting monologues about the facts of a woman’s murder, we do not possess anything we could call “the truth.” T.S. Eliot derived far more from Browning than from any other poet when he composed such masterpieces of dramatic monological ambiguity as Prufrock and Gerontion.

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Browning’s was the last epic project to attempt actual epic continuity. Next came the fragmented epic – most notably Pound’s Cantos. He developed the technique of discontinuous lyric fragments which may or may not suggest a larger unity, not only to us but to the poet himself: within the same late Canto CXVI, he says, “And I am not a demigod, / I cannot make it cohere,” 110 yet, on the next page, “ it coheres all right / even if my notes do not cohere.” Pound’s technique of equivocal fragmentation was imitated by Williams Carlos Williams in Paterson, and by the Black Mountain poets Louis Zukofsky in A and Charles Olsen in The Maximus Poems. Such works are of epic scope, but keep the question of unified vison in ironic suspension. In a subsequent generation, four volumes by Charles Wright (Country Music, The World of the Ten Thousand Things, Negative Blue, and Bye-and-Bye) use lyric as a via negativa quest epic. Frye adopts a very useful distinction from Milton, between the “diffuse” epic of twelve or twenty-four books, and the “brief epic,” a sort of microcosmic version. Much of the most ambitious twentieth-century poetry was brief epic, though in radically different forms. The Waste Land is a microcosmic version of Pound’s type of fragmented epic; Four Quartets consists of four poems, each of which, like The Waste Land, has five parts, in varying poetic styles, the result being a perspectival revolving around the theme of time. Yeats learned to organize volumes of shorter poems thematically into wholes that were more than the sum of their parts. In doing so, he learned the value of contradicting himself, through various strategies: through allowing one poem to argue with the conclusions of another poem in a different mood; through creating poems of direct debate, such as “Dialogue of Self and Soul”; and through writing (like Eliot and Stevens) poems in numbered sections that create a mosaic effect: the title of one of these, “Vacillation,” is indicative. Rilke wrote sequences that dynamically redeveloped themselves, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Dylan Thomas, following the example of Finnegans Wake, created a polysemous language capable of saying several, often mutually contradictory things at once. Stevens began with delineating thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird and ended with poems whose numbered sections spoke of multiple ways of looking at everything. Despite moments of radiance and epiphany, the overall effect of these techniques is that of a via negativa. Our time is characterized by what critical theory calls a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” We do not know the truth of history; we do not know the true interpretation of a text; we do not

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and cannot know ourselves. What has been left out of the progressive vision is a quest into the valley of the shadow. There is something missing from the progressive vision: a decreative descent into an Otherworld that is a “cloud of unknowing.” This is the subject of the last part of the present book.

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PA RT FOU R

You Want It Darker: The Vertical Axis Descending You want it darker We kill the flame. Leonard Cohen

I . D E C R E AT I O N A N D T HE D ES C EN T Q U EST Previously, we treated realism as a mimesis of surfaces, as in seventeenthcentury Dutch painting, capturing the textures of lived experience: elaborate descriptions of rooms or characters’ appearance and dress occupy many pages of some nineteenth-century novels, often supplemented by engraved illustrations. Naturalistic novelists like Zola compared their technique to the objective gathering of scientific data. After the invention of photography, this was sometimes called “photographic realism,” its extreme being reached in the novels of Robbe-Grillet, in which the interiority of characters has to be inferred from description of objects in the environment. But most novelists are not content with stopping there: life has depth as well as surface, and in this part we return to the vertical axis, but this time to the part that descends from the horizontal surface into the depths. Plumbing the depths has demanded new stylistic strategies. A previous age, dominated by Christianity and Neoplatonism, had subordinated the experiential aspect of narrative to the thematic element that gives experience meaning: hence allegory, a technique belonging to the upper part of the vertical axis. In thoroughgoing allegory, characters are walking concepts; events have labels: these attached meanings point upward, towards a transcendent realm. Quests were quests upward, even if, as Dante discovered, you may have to go downward first because other people on the

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elevator are getting off on a lower floor. But the situation became complex beginning in the Romantic era. Part 1 of this book made a case for the survival and enduring value of the traditional Vision of Transcendence, with its descending grace and ascending quest, a case resting partly on Frye’s call for a vision of spiritual otherness, of a power, wisdom, and love beyond our most distant imaginings – a counterbalance to the inflated godlikeness that tempts the Romantic imagination, the will to power that is its Jungian shadow. But it was also Frye who showed us that the Romantics began to displace traditional mythology with a Vision of Immanence, a descending quest, which transvalues the Vision of Transcendence, or heaven, as otherness becomes alienation. The higher the ascent, the more inhuman the condition, and also the more inconceivable: it is unclear whether the transcendent power is outright malicious or merely inscrutable and indifferent. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; / They use us for their sport” (4.1.36–7): King Lear is a prophetic play in this regard. Frye points to tyrannical sky-gods like Blake’s Urizen and Shelley’s Jupiter. A pessimistic strain in science fiction, especially British, gives us Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker and the Martians of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, although many of H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares, even if now buried under earth or ocean, originally came from outer space or another dimension of “alien geometries.” Of course all these may be projections. But the vast and incomprehensible universe revealed once the projector is switched off, so to speak, was felt as terrifying as early as Pascal. Another strand of British pessimism in science fiction, exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End, sees the universe revealed by modern astronomy as so inimical that all humanity can do is escape it into some posthuman condition. Symbolism, or at least the type whose chief representative is Mallarmé, still longed for the transcendence represented by the vertical ascent, symbolized in “L’Azur” by the blue sky. But the poem’s ending, rending cry – “L’Azur! L’Azur! “L’Azur!” – combines intense yearning with despair. The transcendent state is not only unattainable but incomprehensible because superhuman. The descent journey certainly occurs in Mallarmé: at the end of Igitur, the protagonist lies down on “the ashes of stars,” drinks a “drop of nothingness,” and dies or departs.1 The last line is “Nothingness having departed, there remains the castle of purity.” This seems to mean that nothingness departs and thus leaves pure Being to shine forth – but without a human subject to perceive or embody it. Similarly, in Mallarmé’s poem sometimes called “Sonnet in yx,”2 a “Master” has descended towards Nothingness, to the Styx – but the description

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is of an empty room: the female figure of the poem is a reflection in a mirror of the seven stars of the Big Dipper, and is described as “defunct.” Although starward transcendence through paradoxically travelling downward is still achievable, it is bought at the price not only of everything earthly but of everything human. The transcendent state is wholly Other, and is thus comparable to the Real in Lacan, that which the Symbolic order cannot embody or express. All that a poem can do is to decreate itself – to “abolish” itself, a favorite word of Mallarmé’s – so that the Other may appear in its absence, as the Son sacrifices or abolishes himself for the sake of the transcendent Father. In such Symbolist poetry, language reaches towards the transcendent by suspending the earthly references of signifiers. In this way it “aspires to the condition of music,” in Walter Pater’s phrase. Music is deeply significant without our ever being able to say what it is significant of. But the signifiers of poetry cannot reach the transcendental signified: they form a kind of allegory with the conceptual labels removed. Mallarmé was a powerful influence on the poststructuralism of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, which asserts that all language, not just poetic, fails to achieve the signified it seeks: rather, in a parody of the horizontal quest, we can only slide along an endless chain of signifiers, each one explainable only by another, ad infinitum. To put it another way, the theme of Geoffrey Hartman’s The Unmediated Vision is that there is none. This goes some way towards answering the question at the end of part 3. An epic poet tries to achieve a definitive vision, and so writes typically only a single, all-encompassing work – including even the apparent exception, Homer, as some critics believe the Odyssey may be by a different poet. As no poet achieves definitive vision single-handed, the epic line has attempted to be progressively self-refining. But we saw that in modern times those works, whether in poetry or prose, with epic aspirations have been afflicted with a new curse of Babel, a curse of equivocation marked by seemingly intractable ambiguity. Vision still glitters, unpredictably, in uncomprehending dark: it would be wrong to underestimate the moments of visionary breakthrough in post-Romantic poetry. But Yeats was right: a rough beast slouches towards us, eager to be born (P, 187). Not honest doubt, which is the chiaroscuro complement of any vision not merely naïve, but radical, thoroughgoing doubt is loose on the world, a state of unlimited negation that Blake called the “Selfhood.” Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett: the artists who wrestle with the angel of Negation have achieved a special status as spokesmen of our time. In the philosophical and critical realm, existentialism, and later post-

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structuralism, have produced a series of prophetic voices whose Everlasting Nay seems to many people far more honest and authentic than any attempt at an Everlasting Yea. Jacques Barzun, in The Use and Abuse of Art, spoke of a universal mood of “abolitionism,” a reflexive need to scrap the achievements of the whole history of Western culture.3 At its furthest extremity, the negative chorus moves beyond scepticism, which remains a kind of positive knowledge – I know for certain that I know nothing – into a kind of intellectual free fall, negating even negation without thereby returning to something positive. The cosmic process of Creation, traced earlier, in part 1, as a vertical unfolding from a Monad and subsequent enfolding, became, with the Fall, the cyclical vision explored in part 2 of rise, decline, and fall that is its parody. There is a widespread suspicion that the darkness deepens in our time because the hour is late, perhaps approaching midnight, zero hour, the end of another cycle. But something works within the fallen cycles of time, striving to make each cyclic repetition at the same time a forward progression: part 3 tried to show this as the work of Blake’s Los, the imagination itself, struggling for a larger and clearer vision. But it has become increasingly clear that, in order to move forward, the imagination needs to descend – into what we have been calling “decreation,” die, and then rise again, from its own ashes, the bird of fire reborn out of Yeats’s “fabulous, formless darkness.” In other words, the imagination has to integrate the vertical within the horizontal, unite the opposites, and thus square the circle. And this must begin, as Frye saw in “New Directions from Old,” with descent. In the cyclical pattern clearest in Spengler’s Decline of the West, but also evident in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Vico’s New Science, every society harnesses the energy of its youth to build a culture that reaches an apex of achievement and then begins to decline into “decadence.” This assessment seems to devalue the entire second half of a culture’s existence: the culture is increasingly inferior, and heading relentlessly towards death. Such an assessment feels wrong, trapped in the perspective of the anxious and neurotic ego-self, the perspective of fallen time. It is not that it is untrue – it is an accurate rendition of historical experience from the fallen point of view. What it leaves out, however, is the presence of the imagination not only working within the cycle of time but using it, taking it over for its own purposes, alchemically transforming its vision of the triumph of fallen temporality into the rhythm of the imagination itself, the process that we have been calling “decreation and recreation.”

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The ascending phase of a culture tends to be idealized while its descending phase is denigrated: from the imaginative perspective, neither is the complete truth. For example, the traditional narrative of U.S. history shows the archetypal American as the vital “New Adam” rising up and throwing off the chains of corrupt old Europe, pushing across the frontier, carrying civilization from east to west, then in its later years assuming the mission of spreading democracy, capitalism, and the internet around the world. In contrast, revisionist American history shows a civilization established through the genocide of Native peoples and the enslavement of African Americans; a society built by robber-baron capitalists who bought their later reputation as benefactors; a world power sustained by imperialism disguised, as it always is, as a noble task of serving and protecting the world. Is the revisionist version the truth and the traditional one only an ideological prevarication? It depends on what one means by “true.” The revisionist view, in one way, is always true, and not just of the United States: the building of any civilization is a ruthless business. But the ideal version, shorn of its ideological rationalizing, is not just a lie: it is a model of what the country could be, and, despite all cynicism, sometimes actually has been. It is the true American dream, which has nothing to do with a competition to get rich. What is that true American dream? It is a utopia – the same anew, the dream of a truly human world, and it leaps out of the nation’s history, leaps out of its literature, capable of inspiring no matter how many times it betrays its dream, making its citizens love their country without denying for a moment how tragically often it has sold its soul to the first available devil for the sake of power and wealth. Out of the ascending phase of any culture, then, the imagination refines, and tries to realize, a vision of what on the unfallen level is unfolding: the miraculous growth from some hidden, mysterious seed, the leaping upward of what Philip Wheelwright called “the burning fountain.”4 Our nostalgia for the cultural products of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance is not merely sentimental. Out of them, we intuit what we called a “Vision of Plenitude,” a vision that survives – although it does not in any way excuse – the historical brutality of the actual society. Thus, out of the descending phase of a culture, which on the surface is decline and decadence, the imagination refines a vision of decreation. Decreation seems to have a double reference, although in the end its two meanings fuse, distinguishable but not divisible. First, it is the power of the imagination to dissolve, to deconstruct, to dispel the illusion of the subject–object perspective that we call “ordinary reality.” Having done so,

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however, it assumes its place as the enfolding aspect of the genuine imaginative vision. No creative vision is definitive: other versions are always possible. A work of art, perhaps even a single metaphor, achieves a vision: yet it is only one of endless variations, the same anew. Creativity depends on what Picasso called “creative destruction,” destruction first of the sterile subject–object point of view, but, beyond that, a refusal to cling to any one vision as final. To write a new poem, you have to turn your back on what you wrote in the previous poem. If you hold on to one rendition, because it seems “definitive” or popular, you have either burned out or sold out, with great cultural implications. The second half of the cycle, while appearing decadent and declining, is imaginatively a phase of decreation. The decay may be all too real, yet the era’s imaginative works may be as valuable as those of the positive period. Phases of culture have characteristic types of art, and in our time artists seem drawn towards the decreative aspect of the imaginative process, whether or not they and their audience might wish for something more “positive.” That is not to deny that the decreative impulse finds its chief temptation, its Jungian shadow, in a nihilism that is despairing or exultant, depending on whether or not the ego identifies with the destructive power it senses rising from the depths. Jung speaks of individualism (not individuation) “representing a new form of detachment from the world, the immediate danger of which is re-submersion in the unconscious dynamis. The cult of the ‘blond beast’ stems from this development, besides much else that distinguishes our age from others.”5 But Jung never abandoned hope for a counterforce to the nihilistic mass movements that throughout his lifetime he had seen sucking unanchored individuals into their psychic vortex like maelstroms scuttling ships, individuals with nothing more than the cloven fiction to ground them. The passage continues: “But whenever this submersion in instinct occurs, it is compensated by a growing resistance to the chaos of sheer dynamism, by a need for form and order. Diving down into the maelstrom, the soul must create the symbol that captures and expresses this dynamism. It is this process in the collective psyche that is felt or intuited by poets and artists whose main source of creativity is their perception of unconscious contents, and whose intellectual horizon is wide enough to discern the crucial problems of the age, or at least their outward aspects.”6 Jung says “soul” here because the passage has a religious context, but he really means the imagination, the symbol-creating power, uniting the opposites as Contraries into an identity-in-difference. He speaks of

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“poets and artists,” but the point of aesthetic education is that the arts provide a model for a universal human process of individuation whose goal, however imperfectly achieved, is a realized vision of identity-in-difference, the progressive expansion of perception from the ego’s cloven fiction to the differentiated wholeness of the Self. As Frye says in the context of his relation to Jung: Even granting the human tendency to look in every direction except the obviously right one, it seems strange to overlook the possibility that the arts, including literature, might just conceivably be what they have always been taken to be, possible techniques of meditation, in the strictest sense of the word, ways of cultivating, focusing and ordering one’s mental processes, on a basis of symbol rather than concept. Certainly that was what Blake thought they were: his own art was a product of his power of meditation, and he addresses his readers in terms which indicate that he was presenting his illuminated works to them also, not as icons, but as mandalas, things to contemplate to the point at which they might reflect “yes, we too could see things that way.”7 In part 1, we noted the rise during the Hellenistic and Roman periods of what Joseph Campbell calls “syncretistic monotheism,” in which the world’s mythologies are deliteralized in order to show that, beneath their surface differences, “All Religions are One,” as Blake said (E, 2). Campbell made such syncretism the basis of his whole approach to mythology: others are repelled by it. Some critics charge that it melts down the particular features of individual religions in favour of a big, fuzzy vision of Oneness. But it need not sacrifice spiritual individuality: it allows it, as orthodoxy, always vigilant of “heresy,” often does not. Syncretism says, with Blake, that everything possible to be believed is an image of truth. But no one believes in everything: certain myths and metaphors are imprinted on our imaginations, through either early upbringing or reading and education. Comparative mythology and literary history present us with the whole spectrum of human imaginative and spiritual effort, all the productions of time, Campbell’s “myths to live by,” and we must choose which we shall commit ourselves to. Sometimes the images choose us: they “speak to us,” as we say, and we have no choice but to follow. In Biblical commentary, this is called kerygma, or “proclamation,” the compelling power of the Word of God. However, Frye makes a case that texts other than Scripture, including literary texts, can be kerygmatic.8 In our age, reading is one form of the heroic quest. Campbell, once asked how he

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meditated, replied, “I underline sentences.”9 Certain books, read at certain ages, can transform our lives. This is Campbell’s “creative mythology,” which applies both to writers and to readers. The task of individuals today, whether artists or not, is to create their own mythology, using the heritage of human imaginative effort as source and inspiration. We may of course accept a traditional religion or belief system, but its adherents decreate it out of its collective form and recreate it in an individualized form meaningful to them. This is not self-indulgence but necessity: there is no “Catholicism” or “Islam” – there are instead myriad ways that believers have interpreted, understood, and lived out their religion. Those who insist there is only one truth and no plethora of relativistic “interpretations” are simply trying to impose their version on others as truth. Such insistence is widespread, usually taking the form of some kind of “orthodoxy” in the mainline churches or “fundamentalism” in the evangelical ones, or what Spengler called “second religiousness” – hysterically rejecting the decreative necessity in order to cling to some simple and secure belief or tradition. But in our time, no such simple certainty remains. In Finnegans Wake, one image for modern culture is the rubbish or compost heap, the rotting remains of human history. But, out of death and decay, fermentation produces new growth. In the Wake’s chapter 4, out of the compost heap, a hen extracts a letter that proclaims something important, although it is damaged and hard to read, its language cryptic and variously interpreted. Modern humanity is scratching around in the remnants of its own history, looking for a lost and forgotten message that will renew the world – a text we have written to ourselves: on one level, Finnegans Wake itself. Decreation also plays a role in ordinary life, with its transitional moments marked by rites of passage. We can at this point see that decreation and recreation are the unseen power driving the process of death and rebirth to a new identity we explored earlier in part 2. Decreation also suggests an answer to Jung’s question in “The Stages of Life” – namely, what is the purpose of the second half of life? This is the individual-level parallel to the same query about the second half of a cultural cycle. What if the second half of life might be somehow decreative? Old age is increasingly aware of transience, of the inevitable disappearance not just of ourselves but of everything and everyone we have loved, yea, the great globe itself. The awareness has made Shakespeare’s Prospero … melancholy. Yet decreation is always followed by recreation. The descent quest aims to find out how.

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I I . D EC REAT I VE REA L I S M Let us return to our original question of how literature moves from surface mimesis into a depth dimension through what we now call “decreation.” After using the term to illuminate patterns of great swaths of cultural history, we can now explore how the ability to see through life’s deceptive surfaces is a life-saving skill for everyday people. This theme is at least as old as the Odyssey, but underlies a remarkable story by Alice Munro, “Pictures of the Ice.”10 Munro writes in the realistic tradition, and has affinities with George Eliot, but as her art matured, her stories focused increasingly on the depths that lie below the superficial level of ordinary experience. Her story has two protagonists. Austin is a recently retired minister, whom we see in the opening scene looking into a mirror in a clothing store. He has passively allowed the clerk to dress him in tacky clothes that the clerk considers stylish for old people. Austin’s cover story, to use a significant phrase, is that he is heading after retirement for a second marriage with a woman named Sheila, whom we see only as a picture on a postcard, in sunny Hawaii – never too late to start a new life. With one exception, the people in Austin’s life, including his two hopelessly self-absorbed children, are determined to impose this story on him, and he seems to accept his role as dear old dad, about to retire into safe futility. The story’s other protagonist is Karin, whom Austin has been employing to help him inventory and dispose of his household possessions. She discovers that he is escaping: not to sunny Hawaii, but to Thunder Bay in northwestern Ontario, to be minister to a small, precarious congregation perhaps, we imagine, more open to his message because its members’ poverty has spared them the superficial, status-obsessed materialism of his children and his deceased wife. Karin too has been ensnared by the same materialism: out of envy, she has been stealing things from Austin’s household, even as he has himself been discarding them, decreating the substantiality of his previous life. Austin has allowed himself to be divested also of his ministry. A former alcoholic rehabilitated by Austin, Brent, Karin’s former husband, had initiated a coup in which the congregation chose his simplistic fundamentalism over Austin’s revisionist and ambiguous Christianity. Brent had decided that he would not drink anymore because, he reported, “he had been put in touch with God. Austin said that Brent meant by that that he had been put in touch with the fullness of his own life and the power of his innermost self. Brent said it was not for one minute himself, it was God” (144).

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At that moment, the reader sympathizes at least somewhat with Brent, whose narcissism is throughout the story balanced finely against Austin’s martyr complex. Brent craves something real, and Austin’s language sounds to him, it seems, like self-help babble. Yet in the end Brent’s fundamentalism is shown to be little more than a new kind of addiction, a substitute for alcohol, whereas Austin’s view of God is revealed more fully in something he sees by the lake. After a winter storm, Karin helps Austin go down to the shore and take pictures of the shapes of the ice that have piled up there: “And all the playground equipment, the children’s swings and climbing bars, has been transformed by ice, hung with organ pipes or buried in what looks like half-carved statues, shapes of ice that might be people, animals, angels, left unfinished” (151). Life presents us with surfaces: we infer a hidden reality beneath them. We do not know the inward reality of other people directly, and must therefore infer it, Munro implies, from the appearances they present to us. The people we consider superficial are those oblivious to the possibility either that they are simply projecting notions of their own onto others – as people project images onto, or into, the ice – or that other individuals may deliberately present false appearances. Both these possibilities are true in Austin’s case. He remains a mystery at the story’s end, even to Karin, after he has drowned in the lake in an unexplained way that may have been either suicide or an accident. Yet Karin feels that Austin still somehow lurks in the pictures of the ice: he has been decreated to a ghostly, invisible presence, much like his God, who is not a solid fact like Brent’s God, but an elusive mystery – possibly in the end only a projection of our “innermost self.” But Austin’s ability to decreate himself seems to liberate Karin: she apparently realizes she is not trapped, that one can sometimes decreate and recreate one’s circumstances. On the final page, she cuts ties and leaves town after sending pictures of the ice to Brent and to Austin’s children. She attaches no explanation: “She just wants to make them wonder.” In part 3, we characterized the realistic novel as seeking breadth, reaching towards encompassing the broad span of human experience from horizon to horizon. Realism is a matter of surfaces: it is what is shown when art holds the mirror up to nature, or, more recently, what can be captured by a movie camera. But novelists are not unaware that life has depth as well as extension, and they may capture it by embedding significant images, symbols, and motifs within an otherwise realistic texture, like the pictures of the ice in Munro’s story, along with the eruption of a sudden

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lyricism in her passage about what images, from animals to angels, those shapes evoke. But we have so far ignored a much more direct way in which fiction writers may achieve depth, one that distinguishes fiction from drama, film, or even epic: point of view, the ability to enter into a character’s consciousness and experience what he or she experiences from the inside. Drama and film can do this only with the special conventions of soliloquy and voiceover, which, if overused, can become self-conscious and distracting. Epic has a narrator who theoretically could enter his characters’ consciousness, but epic is an older and objective form, and when Hector deliberates whether to come back inside the walls of Troy or face Achilles, or when Milton’s Satan ponders his alienation from God, they soliloquize, make speeches to themselves. For all its camera-eye expansiveness, the novel enables interiority better than any prior brand of storytelling. Yet the more it looks inward for depth of characterization, the further away it moves from a kind of novelistic norm towards becoming something else. Tolstoy is the novelistic norm; Dostoyevsky may be as great a writer, but his subjective intensity begins to leave the realm of realism, as in the Grand Inquisitor episode of The Brothers Karamazov. Joyce’s Dubliners is realism; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is so inward that the world outside the consciousness of Stephen Dedalus is dimmed and indirect, as when an extreme close-up of a character in a film causes the background to go slightly out of focus. Some novels achieve interiority not just through depth of characterization but through a device not nearly so often discussed: narrative voice. In Portrait of the Artist, we learn Stephen’s thoughts, feelings, and sensory experiences, but even they are partly indirect, filtered through a narrative voice that, although it changes as Stephen grows and matures, is far too rhetorical, periodic, and meditative to be the mimesis of the consciousness of a young man, even one who will become an artist like James Joyce. Aspiring writers today are told to show, not tell; in order for this to happen,“style” has to vanish, because it calls attention to itself and not to what the story is trying to show. The ideal is a transparent, windowpane prose. But the most conspicuous aspect of some very great novels is a narrative voice so dominant that it seems to suspend the characters and action inside itself: at most, they only partially emerge from a wall of language, like early medieval sculptures not yet fully in the round. In very different ways, Remembrance of Things Past, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Virginia Woolf’s The

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Waves, Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, The Wings of the Dove, Absalom, Absalom, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Against the Day are what we might call “meditative novels.” It is not that they lack vivid characterization, action, and description, but all is subsumed within a powerful narrative voice. Whose voice? If style is the person, that person is the author – but not the author as ordinary self, for the style is highly rhetorical, the opposite of natural or conversational. Perhaps it is the voice of the Jungian Self if that self would choose to speak: look at the frequent use of the omniscient point of view, despite more realistic quarters’ disapproval. The voice may mock its own pretensions to knowledge: the narrator of Mann’s Joseph tetralogy begins by telling us that nothing certain can be known about the story he is about to meditate upon for twenty-five hundred pages. None the less there is something sub specie aeternitatis about the books: sentences may go on for pages, developed as much musically as syntactically through devices of alliteration and assonance, leitmotif, hypnotic and incantatory rhythms, and so on. And it is not necessarily monolithic, may shift from lyric to satiric, adopt multiple perspectives, incorporate other voices. But in the end it is one Vehicular Form, to borrow Blake’s term for his mythological characters. The meditative novel has a counterpart in poems like The Ring and the Book and The Waste Land, in which one voice endlessly broods, even if broken up into multiple monologues. (A highly ironic prose counterpart is that of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground.) Indeed, the meditative novel can begin to merge with two thematic rather than fictional genres that arose alongside the novel in the decades around 1800: the personal essay / autobiography and the modern subjective lyric. I I I . C REAT I VE N O N - F I C T I O N : SU RFAC E A N D D EP T H Both the personal essay and the autobiography had progenitors, Montaigne and St Augustine, respectively, who were ahead of their time. On their objective side, both modes merge with the intellectual form Frye calls the “anatomy.” What is memorable and “modern” about Montaigne to readers today: his directly personal moments; less interesting: the many-pages he spends doing what graduate students know as a “review of the literature,” digesting libraries of ancient authors on various subjects. That is an anatomy technique, on display in Bacon’s Essays, Browne’s Religio Medici and The Gardens of Cyrus, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.

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In Augustine too the confessional material is not an end in itself but the means to a Christian apology, which is why the Confessions can start with an account of the writer’s earlier life and finish by retelling the Creation story in terms of imposing form on matter. This yin–yang fusion of personal experience and intellectual meditation has a modern counterpart in the essays of Annie Dillard and Loren Eiseley, as well as in Eiseley’s autobiography, All the Strange Hours. In De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Suspiria de profundis, personal essay and autobiography fuse not with the anatomy but with a form we approach later: the modern quest romance, which I call “dark romance.” This kind of hybrid appears in France in Nerval’s Aurelia. The purely personal or familiar essay, which recounts the writer’s experience for its own sake, has two main types, conventional and radical. In the first, the writer dwells on the joys and sorrows of the ordinary. In older times, it was a poetic rather than a prose form, as in the epistles and satires of Horace; it was revived in prose form by Lamb and Hazlitt, and has modern poetic equivalents in the later, conversational ruminations of W.H. Auden and the genial lyrics of James Merrill. The radical form came into being with Rousseau’s Confessions, ultimate source of the “confessional” writing of our time in both poetry and prose. In Rousseau, as later in writers such as Allan Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, and Mary Karr, the very idea of the normal person and the normal upbringing is called into question. Rousseau sounds for the first time the theme that no one is normal: “normal” is a repressive fiction imposed by society, at great cost to the individual. He insists that his quirks, his fantasies and “perversions,” his obsessions and anxieties are not defects: they are who he is, and the same is true of all of us. While the conventional familiar essay, like realistic fiction, sticks close to the surface of experience, the essay-anatomy and essay-romance hybrids and the radical familiar essay are decreative: through varying means – intellectual, archetypal, confessional – they strip away phenomenal appearances to reveal a naked reality hidden beneath them, a deeper reality of which ordinary consciousness is ignorant, afraid, or ashamed. The metaphor of clothing and body comes from Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, a book-length essayanatomy combined with a fictional autobiography. Nowadays, the word “essay” includes almost any variety of short nonfictional prose, and “creative non-fiction” singles out that subset that is more than just informational, analytical, or argumentative. Creative nonfiction, which can also be book-length, has become a major genre in our time and is hugely various. What makes non-fiction “creative,” however, is

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typically, as implied by the typology above, some element of the personal or the lyrical-symbolic that opens an essay into depths below the expository surface. This is what distinguishes, say, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air from an informational account of the ascent of Mt Everest, or Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon from a journalistic account of clinical depression. Solomon’s attempt to write about his own depression from the inside leads him into darkly, densely metaphorical passages that would not be out of place in De Quincey. I V . T H E LYRI C : S U RFAC E A N D D EP T H Novels may render a character’s inner experience on varying levels of depth. Closest to the surface is mere narrative description: he thought this; she felt that; they sensed something (“the desert heat seared their lungs”). Somewhat more internalized is interior monologue, not describing inner experience from the outside but evoking it from within. The last chapter of Joyce’s Ulysses is an unusually extended example, often called “Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.” We do hold conversations with ourselves at times, particularly when we are debating with ourselves about something. But much of the time we drift along on a lower, less focused level of consciousness, on which half-thoughts, wordless intuitions, sensory impressions, and associations welling up from the unconscious intermingle in what William James called a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Twentieth-century fiction developed the technique of stream of consciousness as a mimesis of this deeper level of experience, as in the “Proteus” chapter of Ulysses. What emerges from underneath the syntactical level of language in stream-of-consciousness writing is what Frye in Anatomy of Criticism called the “rhythm of association,”11 which he locates most prominently in lyric poetry. Stream of consciousness is a specialized fictional technique: most fiction, we noted, resides closer to the surface of life. But modern lyric poetry is perhaps the most interiorized of all genres of literature. We dealt with it in part 3 in so far as the lyric has inherited since the Romantics some of the ambitions of the epic. But in lyric, the progressive drive of the epic towards expanded vision intersects with a very different tendency, a pull downward rather than forward, into mysterious depths. And what first of all beckons lyrical language depthward is the most primal aspect of language, rhythm. Adapting Frye’s discussion for our purposes, we may say that a line of traditional metrical poetry has three rhythmic levels in a vertical relationship.

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On top is the syntactic level of ordinary, utilitarian expression. It is possible to write poetry in which this rhythm dominates: indeed, a vignette about real-life experience in real-life language indistinguishable from prose except for its arrangement on the page is probably the commonest style of poetry currently being published. It avoids the self-conscious pretentiousness of “poetic language,” but it invites triviality, what a friend called the “leaffalling-off-the-tree poem,” expressed in a flat, chopped-up prose. But it deals well with the everyday surface of life, the horizontal. In traditional metrical poetry, the metrical rhythm lies beneath and interplays with the syntactical rhythm. Meter is not horizontal but cyclical: it completes its pattern and returns to start again, which is why another name for poetry is “verse,” which means “turn.” Meter and rhyme impose order on language, and thereby on the human experience that is that language’s content. The passage from traditional to modern mythology is simultaneous with and related to the passage from metrical to free verse. The passage was gradual: among the Romantics, only Blake moved to loosen the grip of strict meter. The less-tradition-bound United States produced Emily Dickinson’s rough-metered, slant-rhymed poems analogous to Blake’s shorter lyrics, and the rolling, long-lined free verse of Whitman, corresponding to the seven-stress line of Blake’s Prophecies. In Modernism, the free-verse revolution was rooted in the innovations of Pound and Williams, but Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, Frost, Auden, and Thomas were still possessed by the “rage for order” that Stevens speaks of in “The Idea of Order at Key West.” The interplay between the irregularity of natural speech rhythm and the order of the metrical pattern is the musical pleasure of metrical verse for the diminishing number of readers who know how to scan, a pleasure whose source is the experience of a form of identity-in-difference. However, beneath both the metrical and the semantic rhythms of speech lies the deeper rhythm that Frye calls “associative.” Older poetry kept it subordinated, haunting the verse like a ghost, a Derridean trace. But the Romantic turn downward and inward saw various attempts to liberate it by partially decreating both the metrical and syntactical rhythms. One way to retain meter but not as a Procrustean bed is to employ stanzas of varying line lengths, imitating two forms of the Classical ode, the Pindaric and Greek tragedy’s choral: Milton adapts the latter in Samson Agonistes, and many Metaphysical poems, though not necessarily odes, experiment as well with stanzas of varying line lengths. Wordsworth harnesses the irregular ode form in the Immortality Ode; Shelley uses something similar in his Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.

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Several poets in the twentieth century, including James Dickey, at times try a free-verse form that produces something of an ode-like or dithyrambic effect, aided by the advent of the word processor, with its “Centre” function: instead of beginning from a justified left margin, the verse spreads out from the centre in both directions, moving down the page in lines of irregular length, giving a kind of organic effect like the branches of a tree, producing an experience of free-flowing meditation like running water – or like the correspondent breeze within the boughs of the tree. Other poets retain a fairly regular line length but loosen the meter, either by counting only the stressed syllables and allowing any number of unstressed, like Blake in his Prophecies – Hopkins’s “sprung rhythm” is an experiment in the same direction – or by letting the syntactic rhythm override the metrical: Eliot picked up the latter trick from the Jacobean dramatists: when he says that the ghost of some traditional meter should lurk behind even free verse, he indicates that it is now the metrical rhythm that has become a trace. Yet other poets have other designs, in both senses. Some attempt to expel the ghosts of both metrical and syntactical rhythms by “getting away from the left margin,” as the writing workshops put it, and strewing the poem across the page. A.R. Ammons’s “Corson’s Inlet” creates the effect of serendipitous discovery during a walk in the wild through such means. Ammons, trained as a biologist, is preoccupied in many of his poems with the conflict between the maker’s “rage for order” and spontaneous impulse: he will, for example, sometimes organize free verse to mimic the regular effect of stanzas like those in the poetry of his precursor Wallace Stevens. Some poets, including Auden, Dylan Thomas, Marianne Moore, and Charles Wright, have found in syllabic verse a freedom from metrical monotony without loss of formal control. Finally, certain poets liberate themselves from the regimenting expectations of lines altogether by writing prose poems, Rimbaud’s Illuminations being a pioneering instance. Attenuation of the syntactic and metrical rhythms leaves contemporary lyric poetry with little linear drive. The horizontal aspects of music are rhythm and melody. However, music also has a vertical aspect of harmony: when three notes are sounded simultaneously instead of successively, they form a chord, written vertically on a musical staff. The equivalent in language, according to Frye, is what he calls opsis, or imitative harmony, the use of alliteration, assonance, and other effects to make the sound imitate the sense. The result is incantatory, what Frye calls charm, in the sense both of song (carmen) and a magical spell. Earlier, we noted James Dick-

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ey’s distinction between ordinary-language and “magic language,” oracular poets: it is as if they have listened intently to hear a dim underground voice speaking an unknown tongue that yet seems hauntingly meaningful. The way that certain poets read their work aloud brings out this oracular quality: Tennyson, Pound, Yeats, and Dylan Thomas did not recite or declaim their poetry – although there was, depending on the poem, at times an added declamatory quality to Thomas’s voice, derived from the influence of Milton and Shakespeare – rather, they read in a kind of uncanny chant. As such poetry descends to deeper levels, approaching the threshold of the unconscious, the meaning of meaning changes, so to speak, and it becomes less possible to speak of a poem’s theme or message. What, when unfolded along the vertical axis, we know as polysemy, becomes, when enfolded again, a fusion of multiple meanings into a single sentence or even word. Freud’s boldly speculative essay “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” asserts that words in the unconscious mean both themselves and their opposites at the same time, a linguistic counterpart to the mechanism of condensation in the dream.12 Finnegans Wake, which condenses entire genres and is novel, epic, and lyric all at once, decreates language back into this primal, polymorphous state, followed by Dylan Thomas in such earlier poems as “Altarwise by Owl-light”: Thomas brings the archaic word “owl-light” out of retirement because he wants its secondary connotation of twi-light, both light and darkness at the same time; similar connotations surround Eiseley’s phrase “the night country.” Frye distinguishes between “riddle” and “charm”:13 yet such works are at once charms and riddles, even if the answers to the riddles can be expressed only as paradoxes. Other works follow the lure of “charm” into depths so great that they cannot be said to mean anything at all, though not “meaningless.” While Symbolism of Mallarmé’s type reaches upward towards some kind of transcendence, however out of reach, it may be that not all Symbolism is alike: Mallarmé aspires towards “L’Azur”: Rimbaud spends a season in hell.“The Drunken Boat” is a first-person account of a shipwreck in the words of the boat itself: in other words, the direction of its voyage is sub-marine: downwards. Surrealist poetry attempts to cross the threshold into the unconscious itself. Finally, if we decreate the signified, we are left with the signifiers: certain types of “found poetry” and “concrete language poetry” renounce the will to meaning and, turning from choice to chance, are content to witness what arises by the chance discovery or juxtaposition of words.

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V . T H E D E C R EAT I O N M Y T H O F L A N G UAG E In part 1, many Creation myths were seen to fall into a pattern whose formula is 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10, a formula, originally Pythagorean, that Jung found in alchemy (parodied as the “witches’ arithmetic” in a bit of doggerel in Goethe’s Faust). But the formula was not invented by the alchemists. or even by the Pythagoreans, for it is evident in many Creation myths, as out of one (a Chaos, primeval ocean, pre-existing divinity, and so on) comes two (a pair of opposites) who interact (by love, by war, by the form-impressing power of the word) in the act of Creation proper to form a third (a child, the world), with the number four standing for the multiplicity generated from that point onward. The total of ten symbolizes the end of a full cycle and beginning again. The pattern is in alchemy, which repeats the Creation – but backward: it is one of many Decreation myths, if we can speak in such a way. Jung spoke of it as an opus contra naturam. A Decreation myth would begin with multiplicity and move backward through the process. Instead of 10, the number of fulness, it would arrive at 0, in other words at Nothing. The time has come for us to attempt a deeper understanding of decreation, using such a pattern of reversal of Creation as a guide. Part 1 sketched two versions of Creation, cosmological and textual, the latter being the fourfold ladder of medieval polysemy applicable to Scripture but also, as Dante claimed of his own commedia, to works of literature. We may begin by seeking a fourfold pattern of decreation in language, applicable to all texts but perhaps particularly relevant to works in the modern period, which is, as we observed earlier, a decreative period of culture. This decreative pattern moves from the surface multiplicity of language (symbolized by “4”) to the sense of a common underlying structure (symbolically “3”) that quickly reveals itself as a conflict of linguistic opposites (symbolically “2”) that implode, so to speak, into a singularity (symbolically “1,” the Monad as it appears when one is moving in the opposite direction), which disappears into a mystery, a Nothing (symbolically “0”). The whole process is an enfolding that reverses the unfolding of Creation. I hope the full significance of this cryptic formulation will emerge in the course of the descent. The realm of multiplicity symbolized by the number 4 (really meaning 4+) is the ordinary world of the subject–object division expressed by the subject-verb-object structure of a sentence in what Frye in Words with Power calls the “descriptive,” “conceptual,” and “rhetorical” or “ideological” phases of language. A structuralist analysis decreates the variety of

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language in order to discover within it a common pattern. For example, it may map sentences onto the grid of Roman Jakobsen’s crossed axes, the horizontal axis of combination or syntax and the vertical axis of selection or word choice. The descriptive and conceptual, in other words referentiality and semantics, the signifieds, are outside the structure. A sentence such as “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously” has structure but no reference or meaning in any mundane sense. Reference and meaning are determined conventionally – that is, they are imposed, and are therefore acts of power, designating certain things as factual or meaningful and others outlawed. Deconstruction does not destroy the structure, but it does unmask the hidden fixing of descriptive and conceptual meaning: in other words, unmasks the “excluded initiative,” as Frye calls it, of ideology. There is a double decreation going on here. First, a structuralist perspective decreates the surface variety to discover the binary structure. Second, a deconstructionist perspective reveals that when we ask how this revelation of deep structure affects the story’s meaning and relation to reality, the move from structure to semantics and reference involves a hidden moment of ideological choice. To explain this, Terry Eagleton makes up his own sample narrative, one whose plot turns on falling and rising movements along a vertical axis: “Suppose we are analyzing a story in which a boy leaves home after quarreling with his father, sets out on a walk through the forest in the heat of the day and falls down a deep pit. The father comes out in search of his son, peers down the pit, but is unable to see him because of the darkness. At that moment the sun has risen to a point directly overhead, illuminates the pit’s depths with its rays and allows the father to rescue his child. After a joyous reconciliation, they return home together.”14 Eagleton’s purpose is to show that structuralism moves to suppress semantic and referential differences in order to arrive at pure structure: What a structuralist critic would do would be to schematize the story in diagrammatic form. The first unit of signification, “boy quarrels with father,” might be rewritten as “low rebels against high.” The boy’s walk through the forest is a movement along a horizontal axis, in contrast to the vertical axis “low / high,” and could be indexed as “middle.” The fall into the pit, a place below ground, signifies “low” again, and the zenith of the sun “high.” The reconciliation of father and son restores an equilibrium between “low” and “high,” and the walk back home together, signifying “middle,” marks this achievement of a suit-

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ably intermediate state. Flushed with triumph, the structuralist rearranges his rulers and reaches for the next story.”15 What Eagleton is pointing to is the structuralist claim that content does not matter: the structure is the story: “You could replace father and son, pit and sun, with entirely different elements – mother and daughter, bird and mole – and still have the same story.”16 But what are we supposed to say? That the obvious structural resemblances among some stories are not there? That their equally apparent differences do not exist? While deconstructionists may declare a structural / semantic aporia and begin to rearrange their rulers, we are allowed to ask what happens when we pass an aporia through a Blakean Vortex and turn it inside out. The true relation of structure and meaning is one of dialectical tension. In other words, they decreate and recreate each other. In still other words, they are Contraries. A gender-studies scholar would be likely to say that when father–son conflict is replaced with mother–daughter conflict, it is very much not the same story. Nor if the son is Universal Man falling away from the Eternal Father into the abyss of matter, to be resurrected with the help of the Transcendent One whose spiritual character is symbolized by the sun. We have been here before: resting content with obvious differences is passive and banal; reducing the differences to an abstract unity is reductive. Fredric Jameson assumes, as do many, that the latter is Frye’s practice, comparing it to Vladimir Propp’s reduction of all folktales to a limited number of motifs: “Paradoxically, in this Propp rejoins Frye, whose ‘method’ also amounts to the rewriting of a body of varied texts in the form of a single master narrative.”17 But in so far as Frye does isolate a common “hero with a thousand faces” kind of pattern, it is only an initial move and not the entire game. The next move, and the beginning of insight, is to play identity and difference off against each other. Frye has been called a kind of “structuralist,” and the original title of his Anatomy of Criticism was Structural Poetics. Structuralism began as a kind of linguistics and broadened its horizons by applying linguistic structural principles to literature, myth, and other cultural productions. I suspect that the linguistic analogies were more suggestive than definitive, but structuralism founded itself on Saussurean linguistics because it wanted to claim scientific status, a claim that seems to irritate certain poststructuralists inordinately. In On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Jonathan Culler cites (in a footnote) a typically snippety comment by Hillis Miller about what he calls “uncanny critics”: “The ‘feel’ or ‘atmos-

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phere’ of their writing is quite different from that of a critic like Culler, with his brisk common sense and his reassuring notions of ‘literary competence’ and the acquisition of ‘conventions,’ his hope that all right-thinking people might agree on the meaning of a lyric or novel, or at any rate share a ‘universe of discourse’ in which they could talk about it.”18 Miller is within his rights to challenge structuralism’s claim to be a science like linguistics: the relationship between two phonemes united as a binary due to “distinctive features” is empirical, whereas “conventions” and “the meaning of a lyric” are interpretive. When Frye in the “Polemical Introduction” to the Anatomy says that criticism is something of a science, he does not mean that its data are experimentally demonstrable like the phonemic patterns of language acquisition, although he might insist that even in the physical sciences all “hard facts” are interpretations that can be, and often are, contested. But he does agree with structuralism that there are patterns in literature, mythology, and society: he is pushing back against impressionistic, evaluative, and various other critics – biographical, documentary, religious, political – who reduce texts to allegories of some outside subject matter, who treat the text in an arbitrary and coercive way. All of the genuine schools of criticism that the Anatomy unites into its synoptic “Theory of Symbols” in Essay 2 agree that criticism has to begin with textual patterns, even if they disagree about which ones, what they mean, and what to do with them: that includes the New Critics with their textural criticism, stylistic critics of mimetic realism such as Erich Auerbach, and the Chicago critics with their genre criticism. It would also include structuralism – and poststructuralism of any rigorous variety. No one pays closer attention to textual patterns than Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, whatever one thinks of how they then go on to subvert those very patterns. All these critics are “structuralist” in this basic sense. Culler goes on to defend himself against Miller by saying exactly that. Deconstruction does not reduce structures to ideological allegories or deny their existence in the name of some kind of common sense: it begins with them. As for what structures consist of, structuralism has its binaries, supposedly based on Saussure’s contention that individual phonemes do not exist, only a relationship of differences. This way of putting it has been popular because it privileges difference, which fits the prejudices of the times, but difference without identity is no more tenable than vice versa: what Saussure really means is identity-in-difference. It seems arguable that Saussure was attractive to structuralists and poststructuralists alike because he allowed critics to deal with issues such as identity and differ-

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ence seemingly without contamination by Romantic and German Idealist influence. On the level of macro- rather than micro-structure, Saussure’s theory of langue (language as a rule system) and parole (language as individual utterance following those rules) seems somewhat similar to Noam Chomsky’s theory of deep structures exemplified in any individual utterance. Frye’s idea that literature is an order of words, a set of common patterns that each specific work creates anew, is again analogous – which is not the same thing as “based upon,” however suggestive the resemblance, although Frye will occasionally speak of the ideal of a “grammar of symbols.” Frye’s own analogy is not with linguistic but with musical pattern: in this he resembles Lévi-Strauss, but Frye’s structural analyses move in the opposite direction from those of Lévi-Strauss or Propp. Where their patterns withdraw from a work’s content into a quasi-mathematical abstraction, Frye’s myths and metaphors act upon their content, a point that returns us to the Eagleton narrative we saw earlier. By the time of Words with Power (1990) Frye is speaking of “ecstatic metaphor” – an identification that is not merely a “hypothetical” linguistic structure but, as the book’s title indicates, a power. Here he belongs to the Romantic tradition. Finding a deep structure in a sentence or a story is a decreative move, but deconstruction is right that the deep structure haunts the surface narrative like a ghost, challenging it, transforming our perception of it in the process. Deconstruction can operate on a semantic level as well, to similar effect, again leading to what could be called “decreation of a decreation.” In structuralism, signifiers occur as binary opposites, supposedly reflecting the brain’s a priori binary categories. Be that as it may, the categories are ideologically conditioned if not determined. Because an ideology consists of values that always have their opposites, one member of the binary is always subordinated or suppressed. Deconstruction on this level operates by revealing the suppressed or excluded binary, or else by showing that the privileged value is always secretly dependent on the excluded opposite: “nature” and “culture” for example in Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss. What deconstruction does on this second level, which is semantic rather than purely structural, is reveal a second, oppositional meaning haunting the supposedly univocal signifier like a ghost, either as a “trace” – an absence that is none the less somehow present – or as a “supplement” – a suppressed but necessary addition. What is generated is an aporia, not one but two meanings: meaning is thus “undecidable,” and devolves into a series of endless paradoxes. Structuralist binaries are the cloven fiction in its top–down hierarchical form, so that when deconstruction discloses

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the immanent presence of another meaning subversive of the ordinary surface meaning, the resemblance to what happens in realistic fiction, creative non-fiction, and the modern lyric is by no means coincidental. If the sense of uncanny intrusion intensifies, it may expand into the intuition of a hidden world that is the other side of the realistic world, a noumenal realm beneath or within the phenomenal realm, whose literary manifestation, what I call the “Otherworld,” is examined presently. In Creation myths, two opposites interact to create something between them in the field of their interaction: in our alchemical paradigm of decreative reversal, the ordinary appearance of the text has been decreated back into the polarity that produced it. Of the binaries that Derrida deconstructed, the one that made him famous was that of speech and writing, of orality and literacy. We dealt with this issue in part 1, but resume it briefly here because a theory of linguistic decreation, especially one revolving around myth, needs to pause here, first, because the speech / writing binary is a modulation of the spirit / nature conflict that is the form of the cloven fiction with which so much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contended, and second, because a great deal of confusion surrounds the relationship between these terms. In A Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock showed that when Plato, via Socrates, attacked the poets in the Republic and the Sophists elsewhere, he was attacking orality in the name of a newly invented literacy.19 What was at stake was truth: the mythical truth of the oral poets and the ideological truth of the Sophists, with their rhetorical training in speechmaking, contending against the new truth of dialectic, whose natural vehicle was writing. In the terms of Frye’s Words with Power, the conceptual mode, with its basis in writing, was defending its newfound authority against the older poetic and rhetorical modes, both of them oral. In the same period in Greece, history arose alongside dialectic as the first form of the factual or descriptive mode, and, unlike legend or saga, real history needs writing to develop fully. Poetic or mythical truth and rhetorical or ideological truth are both expressions of concern and both at least originally rooted in orality. Descriptive truth and conceptual truth belong to the myth of freedom: fact and logical argument offer a critique of concern, and develop out of orality but towards literacy. Derrida’s critique of speech as a dangerous power goes beyond Plato’s statement that the poets and rhetoricians lie. Speech has a visceral impact that writing cannot have. It is physical and direct, generated out of a human body and received by human bodies, whereas writing is removed and

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abstract. Speech is performative, whether as epic or dramatic performance or as oratory, and thereby brings its content to life, whereas writing is words on a page dependent on an active reader. Because speech is physical, direct, and dramatic, it can generate an immediate emotional response, one that easily bypasses the critical censor that looks for logic and evidence. This is especially true if it is combined, as it is in ritual, with musical and visual elements making up a total dramatic performance, whether or not drama actually developed out of ritual. By Homer’s time, the oral poet, if the performance of Demodokos in the Odyssey is any indication, had begun to devolve into an entertainer at parties, although he was still the repository of myth and of heroic roles models, so that Eric Havelock is able to speak of “the Homeric encyclopedia.”20 But the performance of Pindar’s odes at athletic contests is perhaps a better illustration of the power of orality to bind a society together by not only delivering but dramatizing and vivifying a myth of concern. The masque performed a similar function in the court of Jacobean England. As for the Sophists, they trained orators in a society where the leader commanded by the hypnotic, spellbinding, excitement-generating power of the human voice – for better or worse. The United States was such a society in the nineteenth century, and World War II witnessed a duel of contending orators, Churchill and Hitler, battling for the fate of England. Working from the theories of Marshall McLuhan about the social impact of the new electronic mass-communications media, Walter Ong speculated, before the internet, that the electronic media were creating a social environment characterized by a “secondary orality.”21 Like McLuhan, he was thinking mostly of television, with its immediate visual impact and its ability to bind together a mass audience into one large herd animal. Nowadays we see the same thing happening with social media – but with a twist that points to a certain reductiveness in Derrida’s treatment of the speech / writing binary. When Donald Trump rouses the rabble on Twitter, he is appealing rhetorically to a myth of concern so closed that it is cut off from reality altogether – but he is doing it entirely in writing. What this points to is the error in thinking that the problem lies in the medium of communication rather than in how that medium is used. In this way, McLuhan’s most famous aphorism is wrong: the medium is not the message, at least not necessarily. Speech can be used to reinforce a “metaphysics of presence,” but it can also serve the cause of the myth of freedom, and that most definitely includes, at their best, both lecture and discussion in a classroom. After all, philosophy began as lecture and discussion in an academic setting.

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The converse is also true. Derrida thinks of writing as difference, as rigorous critique, because he is an academic and a philosopher. But writing is easily kidnapped into supporting various ideologies and systems of power. As a matter of fact, as Frye has shown at length in The Critical Path, that has been its basic job for the greater part of both cycles of Western culture, Classical and Christian. In Greece, a myth of concern with an originally oral basis was superseded by new modes of inquiry based on the habits of a writing culture. Judaism and Christianity created written Scripture out of oral teachings and stories, then evolved a writing culture to interpret the Scripture, which conscripted the descriptive, conceptual, and ideological modes of language into serving the myth of concern, as in medieval Scholasticism and Renaissance humanism. The culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance was mixed: it retained many features of orality, but at the same time was an elitist writing culture whose medium was a dead language in mostly written form. It is hard to see a case for the deconstructive claim of a systematic suppression of writing when people were burned at the stake for translating the Bible into the speech-based vernaculars. Nor was it any different for the People of the Book: Talmudic interpretation, elaboration, and application of the Torah formed an intertextual webwork of writing interacting with writing. That is precisely why it was a revolutionary act for Romantics such as Blake and Shelley to reclaim, on a new basis, the old role of poet as prophet or bard, vehicle once again of a myth of concern, though this time on a very different basis from the old authoritarian concern. In modern times, writing has the mystique of being the impersonal voice of authority, of truth itself, especially if it wraps itself in the mantle of an impenetrable prose of over-complicated syntax and abstract jargon that claims to be “rigorous” or “scientific.” Out of this grows the cult of the supposedly scientific “expert” in various fields, critiqued by Jacques Barzun in Science: The Glorious Entertainment.22 On the theoretical level, philosophy and literary theory from German Idealism to poststructuralism have at times used a sometimes absurdly over-complicated style both to intimidate and to hide from criticism. As George Orwell showed in “Politics and the English Language,” bureaucracies – civil, political, and military – hide what they do behind a smokescreen of jargon and euphemisms. As for the law, the devious uses of incomprehensible legalese provided one of the earliest models of how to use distanced, impersonal writing to reinforce the kind of power structures that Foucault sees structuring modern life. Speech can further freedom and difference: writing

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can serve as an instrument of power systems. A better aphorism than McLuhan’s would be: A medium is what you make of it. What Derrida is really after is a theory that sees speech and writing as Contraries. His idea that writing precedes speech sounds ridiculous at first, but he means writing as a system of differences, from the phonological to the semantic level, without which speech cannot be articulate in any sense of the word. From that system of differences, with its power of discrimination, arises the capacity for rigorous critique that is what Derrida really means by writing, and what Plato and Aristotle really mean by the dialectic that they feel is necessary to rein in orality and its metaphysic of presence. And if writing is a ghostly presence within speech, speech is and should be a ghostly presence in writing. Writing becomes dead and unreadable to the degree that it eliminates the sense of an authorial voice. Despite Derrida’s insistence that the “spirit” immanent within the “letter” of texts is merely an illusory transcendental signified, he admits that such illusions are inescapable. He might add that in certain ways we do not want to escape them. Within the area of the law, for example, the triumph of the letter over the spirit would hardly entail the triumph of difference, diversity, free play, and materialism that certain poststructuralists and postmodernists seem to envision. No doubt such a perspective would generate, as a system of Contraries always does, a set of tensions and paradoxes that we would have to learn to live with. But it would also enable the discussion to play past a sand trap of absurdities. If speech is a tyranny, betraying us into the power of the “metaphysics of presence,” that is, into the power of a closed system, an ideology reinforced and rationalized by bad metaphysics, then the historical development of language as speech was a fall. Christopher Norris, from Derrida’s point of view, argues, “Quite simply, it might have been otherwise, since of course there exist other languages – pictographic or hieroglyphic languages – where there is no question of this privileged bond between sound and sense, such that meaning is thought of as directly embodied in the forms of spoken utterance.” Yet philosophers and linguists have largely been “phonocentric.”23 But there seem to have been no such languages, at least not of any complexity. Pictographic and ideographic scripts can communicate only on a simple level, and Egyptian hieroglyphics were a mixed system of logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements, even if they might have developed out of an originally pictographic or ideographic precursor. Norris continues: “Other kinds of writing – for instance, the ancient Egyptian or Chinese – operate according to a wholly different logic, one that goes

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straight from the idea itself to a graphic inscription on the page.”24 This is largely not true: Chinese has one of the most complicated writing systems in the world, but its basis is mainly if not entirely logographic: most of its characters stand for words, in other words, for an aspect of speech, even if a few of its more than fifty thousand characters are in fact pictograms or ideograms. It seems likely that all writing systems capable of expression beyond a relatively rudimentary level, including sign language, are phonocentric, grounded in speech at some point, if only as the product of a phonocentric environment. The two language centres of the brain, Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, interpret and produce oral language. That said, phonetic alphabets are “better” only in being more efficient: against the twenty-six characters signifying about forty phonemes in English, Chinese has tens of thousands of characters, one for each word in the language. But the idea that Chinese writing is therefore “primitive” and cannot compete with phonetic scripts is rampant ethnocentrism. The viewpoint expressed here, whether Norris’s or Derrida’s, is unsatisfactory as stated, yet I think it is groping intuitively towards real insight, in two ways. First, in the modern world, various writing systems have been developed to indicate purely formal relations: these include the notations of mathematics, symbolic logic, and computer programming. The basis of these systems is almost entirely visual, as far from vocal language as it is possible to move, almost entirely abstract, and closely related to mathematics. The idea of an abstract, quasi-mathematical truth-language free of the vagaries of both speech and phonocentric writing has been the dream of a certain kind of intellectual since Plato himself. Perhaps there is a modern kind of Vision of Transcendence lurking in such an assumption, something that longs for freedom from the limitations of materiality.25 But such systems are specialized developments, not, to quote the title of a late Frye essay, language as the home of human life. More central to the present argument is a different kind of visual tendency evident in Blake’s later artistic development. Frye says that Blake “seems to be striving for an ‘alphabet of forms,’ a Tarot pack of pictorial visions which box the entire compass of the imagination in an orderly sequence. The alphabet itself, if we may do some illustrative guessing, may be a fossil of some such work of art, the Zodiacal signs another, and the Tarot pack (with which the Job series has been associated) a third.” This passage cautiously approaches the type of numerical symbolism that fascinates Frye in his notebooks, and the kind of visual symbolism that fills his work with charts and diagrams, including, of course, the Great

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Doodle: “[Blake’s] Vision of the Book of Job has twenty-two plates, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, just as the Homeric epic, according to the Alexandrian editors, has a book for every letter in the Greek alphabet [i.e., twenty-four]. Here we have gone from a dramatic medium into a new kind of epic. For the equivalent of epic in the plastic arts is evidently the kind of imaginative alphabet seen in its ‘brief’ form in Blake’s Job and in its ‘diffuse’ form in the encyclopedic symbolism of the medieval cathedrals.”26 This kind of alphabet of forms does not free writing from speech and end its phonocentricity, but precisely the reverse, makes words and pictures Contraries: “After Jerusalem we can see in [Blake’s] work a development toward the pictograph, and in the Job engravings we are getting down to the very bedrock of imaginative communication … in which the common basis of writing and drawing, that is, of poetry and painting, has been re-established.”27 On the previous page, Frye characterized pictographs as “units at once of sound and of imagery.” To the above-listed alphabets of forms we can add the I Ching, which drew Frye’s interest in the Third Book notebooks – especially two diagrams in the Wilhelm–Baynes edition mapping the I Ching’s trigrams as two mandalas, the Sequence of Earlier Heaven, or Primal Arrangement, and the Sequence of Later Heaven, or Inner-World Arrangement. These represent the same trigrams or primal forces as they appear in eternity and as they manifest themselves in time, respectively. They thus constitute a single mandala with a double circle with analogies to the double mandala of the present book.28 We have now established that there are various methods of decreating the ordinary surface of language to reveal something hidden within it that contradicts and yet completes it, a linguistic Otherworld with a mysterious resemblance to the fictional Otherworld of romance that we shall be examining soon. In Creation, two polarities – of deities, or places, or principles – interact to produce a world between them. But Decreation moves in the reverse direction, so the polarities, instead of separating and differentiating, begin to coalesce: alchemically, two reverse themselves into one. They do so by shifting from being to becoming, from stable substances to energy processes. What we are looking for, then, is the linguistic equivalent of the realm of energy, libido, or will that we saw in part 3 generating both the ordinary world and the Otherworld like the two poles of a magnet. We begin to see this in some Romantic poetry, especially in Blake’s. Blake called the titanic figures of his Prophecies “Vehicular Forms”: contending energies at once psychological and natural, belonging at once to

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two underworlds: that of the human mind and the equal but opposite one underlying phenomenal nature. The two realms are the same, as Loren Eiseley recognizes in “The Mind as Nature.”29 Both Frye and Jung have called such Vehicular Forms “archetypes,” but that term’s Platonic or Neoplatonic origins troubled them, and both sometimes used the more general Romantic “symbols.” Such figures are not Forms that descend from a purely spiritual or intellectual realm and then ascend from the world of matter: they do not, that is, belong to the Vision of Transcendence. Blake’s “Mighty Forms,” for instance, belong to the Vision of Immanence. They embody the forces within, which often appear in the human context as the duality of Eros, or Dionysus, and Prometheus, the pleasure principle and the will to power, respectively. Blake’s early poems combine these as Orc, smouldering like a volcano under various repressions, both psychological and political, while Urizen tries to restrain him in order to preserve the world of the cloven fiction. But in addition to being both psychological and natural, both subjective and objective, such archetypes are linguistic: they are forms of language. This is true when they occur, as Jung’s archetypes of shadow, anima, animus, and Self do, in dreams. Dreams are one of various oracular kinds of intuition rising from the unknown depths beckoning us downward: as such, they are what Freud called them, the “royal road” to the unconscious. Their symbols are Jung’s “archetypes,” the Kantian a priori forms of the instincts. Freud has his own archetypes, slightly less personified: the superego, the id, the primal Father, and so on. But we can interact with dreams only by turning them into language. Dream analysis explores the analysand’s verbal description of the dream, which is a text. Analysis in depth psychology is exactly what it has been called, a “talking cure.” Before they moved to dream analysis (and, in Jung’s case, also to “active imagination”), both Freud and Jung had tried to encounter the unconscious on a level below the more organized level of symbol formation, Freud through free association and Jung through his early word-association tests. Whatever their therapeutic limitations, such methods represent a lower level of verbal decreation, down to the level of language formation. If condensation and displacement shape the dream’s imagery and narrative closer to the surface of consciousness, what Freud called the “antithetical sense of primal words” is what makes them possible, operating deeper in the unconscious – the mechanism of the mechanism, so to speak. We have already glanced at the literary equivalents of such explorations. Fiction developed stream of consciousness, and modern lyric poetry has

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tapped into the “associative rhythm” that rises up from unconscious depths underneath the metrical and speech rhythms of lyric poems or lyrical prose. Frye identified the two verbal initiatives or impulses generating language as “babble” and “doodle.”30 Yes, he dignified them with Aristotelian names, melos and opsis, but the originals capture something of how children acquire language. Phonemes are discrete units differentiated from other units, but children have to learn to recognize them and then to produce them, which they do by practice: they go through stages called “cooing” and “babbling,” which are practice in forming vowel and consonant sounds, respectively. Thus decreation, swimming upstream towards the source in the flow of language, begins to dissolve the cultural units of words and even phonemes back towards the prima materia of pure vocal energy. One obvious result is the pun. Puns are a type of wit, but we know from Freud that laughter is the sound of a taboo being broken, and a pun is a category violation, transgressing the clear and distinct boundaries conventionally restricting words. The spook-world effect appears again: in a pun, one word is inhabited by the ghostly presence of another. In literature, as we noted earlier, the most thoroughgoing experiments in this direction are Finnegans Wake and the early poems of Dylan Thomas, which were influenced by those parts of the Wake that appeared piecemeal as Joyce’s Work in Progress, starting in 1924. Puns and other forms of multiple meaning are liminal phenomena, appearing at a nexus of realities, the threshold between the conscious and the unconscious. The Wake is dream language, but madness as well as dream may generate oracular verbal associativeness, as it does with Poor Tom in King Lear. Lacan says that the unconscious is structured like a language, and identifies the Freudian dream mechanisms of condensation and displacement with Jakobsen’s metaphor and metonymy. This observation shows us that dreams’ visual imagery is also a dimension of language, the “doodle” aspect, as it were. “It was our family home, but it was also somehow a shopping mall” amounts to a visual pun. Derrida’s fascination with language, and with Finnegans Wake in particular, led him to produce his own liminal work, Glas. In that text two realities again mirror each other, as suggested not only by the title but by double columns of text facing each other on the same page. Derrida’s theme is the elusiveness of identity, including the author’s own: we are, in effect, walking aporias, haunted by ourselves. In Theodore Sturgeon’s fantasy story “To Here and the Easel,” about a creatively blocked painter suffering episodes of mental breakdown in

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which he has delusions (if they are delusions) of passing into the Otherworld of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the moment of passage is signalled by an onset of puns and double meanings. One of them, “We are desiccated to the preposition that all men are created sequels,” seems, like the Declaration that is its model, to be declaring something humanly universal. In “The Critic as Host,” Hillis Miller says that all linguistic structures are haunted houses. The Otherworld dwells as guest or host (Miller notes that the words are etymologically related) within all language. Supposedly literal language is haunted by the ghost of a deconstructive reading – but also vice versa. His conclusion: “There is no escape. It [deconstruction] does, however, move back and forth within this inherence. It makes the inherence oscillate in such a way that one enters a strange borderland, a frontier region which seems to give the widest glimpse into the other land (‘beyond metaphysics’), though this land may not by any means be entered and does not in fact exist for Western man.”31 The allusion to an impossible Promised Land suggests an inherent deconstructive rejection of progress or moving forward: the best we can manage, Miller says, is Nietzsche’s “joyful wisdom,” recognizing our fated eternal recurrence, “the greatest joy in the midst of the greatest suffering, an inhabitation of the gaiety of language which is our seigneur.”32 Of course within that reading lies the ghost of an excluded horizontal perspective: perhaps the joyful recognition has arrived progressively at an immanent Promised Land, “happier far” than any projected transcendent Promised Land might be. Miller’s essay glances at another method of verbal decreation, used by poets such as Milton, employing words in their root etymological sense: Owen Barfield analyzes this technique in Poetic Diction because it often reveals metaphor in words that have become literal over time. The idea is that the original meaning remains hidden, immanent, in what appears a mere signifier. Frye makes a case for “poetic etymology, or the tendency to associate words similar in sound and sense” even when the associations are proved false.33 Heidegger scandalized conventional philosophers with this technique in his late writings. But he summed up his intention in his famous statement: “Language is the house of Being.”34 Being dwells within language. It cannot be forced to reveal itself, as a magician summons an elemental – late Heidegger has dropped the Nietzschean voluntarism that led him so deeply astray in his Nazi period – in fact, renunciation of the will and cultivation of a Taoistic-style receptiveness are what is necessary. But if someone invites, makes a “clearing,” usually a visionary poet such as Hölderlin

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because it is poetic language in which Being dwells, Being may manifest itself, and when it does so it takes on the form of “gods.” Perhaps the philosopher’s language may betray such a receptive stance and build a metaphorical house for Being in the same way. When Heidegger insists that Being is not “a being,” is not God, he is trying to stress its complete immanence: calling it “God” instantly makes it into an object in the subject–object perspective. Clearly the riddle posed by any particular image or idea along the journey is the same riddle, with the future of all illusions at stake. Do we accept the verdict of the ordinary perspective, or do we plunge deeper into the dark forest of paradox to see where we may arrive? We may choose to descend yet lower, in the words of Eliot’s Four Quartets, into a state of complete dispossession. Sometimes language may be decreated of its signified, yet the signifiers, although they cannot be said to make sense, resonate with a mysterious and unforgettable power. We are here in the area of the sublime as evoked by the famous essay of Longinus, domesticated to some extent as Matthew Arnold’s idea of “touchstone” lines or passages. Moving downward and in reverse, we have also reached the polar opposite of the anagogic level of language at the top of the ladder of medieval polysemy. To say that these opposites are identified explains nothing, no pun intended, because the identification is beyond ordinary conception, yet is not mere irrationalism either, as evidenced by Frye’s noting the sublime in literature as possibly manifesting the kerygmatic within secular as well as sacred texts. One does not have to “understand” the sublime to respond to it. Edgar as Poor Tom in King Lear throws off the line “Childe Roland to the dark tower came” and haunts later writers from Browning to Stephen King. But we must not limit examples to the portentous. Out of the mouths of babes: another source of signification whose signified seems totally enfolded and immanent is some – not all – nonsense verse and nursery rhymes, for example this verse of an African-American children’s song: “When I go by Baltimore, / Ain’t no carpet on the floor. / Come along and follow me. / Must go down to Galilee / Singin’ green, green rocky road / Promenade in green / Tell me who ya love, Tell me who ya love.” The sense of tantalizing mystery remains even if a folklorist comes up with a reductive explanation. In an extraordinary series of long poems, Theodore Roethke lets us feel the decreative descent quest: one of them says early on, “Father of tensions, I’m down to my skin at last.” Jung sometimes speaks of an abaissement du niveau mental (lowering of psychic energy) necessary to descend into the unconscious, and for Roethke, sometimes slipping back into the language of childhood, including nursery rhymes, submerged in the

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unconscious: “Your father tossed a cat in air, / Though neither you nor I was there.” In the poem’s last section, the speaker says, “I lost my identity to a pebble,” but “The dark showed me a face … The light becomes me.” The poem is titled “Praise to the End!,” echoing Wordsworth’s famous line that continues, “Thanks likewise for the means.”35 Roethke’s essay about these poems names “their ancestors: German and English folk literature, particularly Mother Goose; Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, especially the songs and rants; the Bible; Blake and Traherne; Dürer.” Their theme is the “struggle for spiritual identity,” in which “Disassociation often precedes a new state of clarity … Rhythmically, it’s the spring and rush of the child I’m after – and Gammer Gurton’s concision: mütterkin’s wisdom.” (Gammer Gurton’s Needle was an Elizabethan comedy.) And Roethke finishes, “It’s a dark world in which to work.”36 As the ascent quest towards the transcendent leads to the All, so the descent quest into immanence goes towards the Nothing, modern discussion of which starts with Heidegger’s brief What Is Metaphysics? (1929).37 The attack on this essay by analytical philosopher Rudolf Carnap indicates a parting of the ways in modern philosophy. Analytical philosophy seeks a modern Vision of Transcendence beginning with analysis of statements for truth value and climbing a ladder that culminates, as Wittgenstein says at the close of his Tractatus, in a silence beyond language, contemplating a vision of order. Heidegger is heading in the other direction. As with so much else in his work, his concept of “the Nothing” remains imaginatively compelling whether or not conventional philosophers can take it seriously or poststructuralist philosophers have disproved it as merely the metaphysics of presence (again). The idea that Being springs from a negation of the Nothing is not only his version of Hegel’s negation of a negation but derives ultimately from the same sources, including alchemy, Boehme, and Schelling. What is it that compels us about a concept that has been dismissed as more or less nonsense, as much ado about nothing? The complete decreation of the cloven fiction is the goal of the descent quest: what happens when that goal is approached? I will speak more experientially below: but in terms of language, the Nothing is silence, the failure of language. The link of depression, or, more traditionally, melancholia, with intellectual and artistic creativity goes back at least as far as Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514).38 While it can paralyze non-artists such as Hamlet, preventing them from acting, in its severe forms from even climbing out of bed, for artists and thinkers it may dry up creativity, blocking the creative process – a kind of living death, sometimes for years at a time, sometimes forever.

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V I . T HE OT HERWO RL D : T R AD I T I O N A L A N D DA RK RO M A N C E In treating of the four phases of the decreative descent in terms of language that we saw earlier, in section V, emphasis naturally fell on thematic rather than fictional textual examples. We turn now to the way that decreation operates in narrative forms, particularly that of romance. Again we have levels of descent – the same ones, seen from a different perspective. As a result of decreation, what grows beneath or within the phenomenal world is the sense of either another world or a hidden aspect of this one. We need a name for this world, and may borrow one from the scholarship of Celtic mythology: the Otherworld. In Irish myth and legend this is the realm of Faerie. But the sense of a hidden second realm is almost universal and accounts for many literary and mythological patterns, both traditional and modern. The Otherworld is a defining feature of the genre of romance. In a literary critical sense, a romance is not just a love story or an adventure story, although it is usually both. Rather, it is a story rich with what science-fiction readers call the “sense of wonder” – a magical mystery tour, a tale of marvels irradiated by something numinous and therefore enchanting. The Otherworld is the place of wonder and enchantment, in contrast to the mundane, all-too-mundane world we normally live in. At least three plot possibilities grow out of that contrast. First, the characters may travel from the everyday world to the Otherworld, either temporarily or permanently, often through some kind of nexus of realities – a looking glass, the back of a wardrobe, a wall in a train station. There is a mysterious passage in the Odyssey that haunted later tradition about a cave that has “two entrances, / one on the north allows descent of mortals, / but beings out of light alone, the undying, / can pass by the south slit, no men come there.”39 The lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream leave Athens for the “green world” of the fairies. Second, the entire action may take place only in the Otherworld, as in The Fairie Queene, the Divine Comedy, and Lord of the Rings; in the first two of these, a series of references back to the ordinary world is set up by means of allegory. Third, some aspect of the Otherworld may enter and transform ordinary reality, for better or worse: for better in superhero origin stories, when something from another realm charges the hero or heroine with some kind of super-power; for worse in alien-invasion stories and the type of horror story in which “They’re here” is not a good message.

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Romance exists in two manifestations, traditional and modern, modern in this context meaning from the eighteenth century forward. The names are not wholly adequate, for romance seems somehow less historically determined than other forms of literature. While modern romance – which I shall call “dark romance” – is a more recent phenomenon, traditional romance is also alive and well. Traditional romance contrasts with dark romance in that its Otherworld, while fallen and thus filled with danger and evil, yet often remains somewhat paradisal, so was featured, along with its close relation the pastoral, in the analysis of paradise in part 2. Dickens was notoriously omitted from the first edition of F.R. Leavis’s The Great Tradition because he is not a realist, and, from Leavis’s point of view, therefore not a serious novelist, except for the didactic Hard Times. What Leavis failed to see was that Dickens was not really a novelist at all: his “novels” illustrate perfectly the romance–satire relationship. In “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” Frye points to the presence of the Otherworld in the action of a Dickens narrative: “There is a hidden and private world of dream and death, out of which all the energy of human life comes … It is not so much better or worse than the ordinary world of experience, as a world in which good and evil appear as much stronger and less disguised forces.”40 As well, the heroes and heroines, “along with some of the more amiable humours, have the power to plunge into the hidden world of dreams and death, and, though narrowly escaping death in the process, gain from it a renewed life and energy.”41 Unsurprisingly, the theme of the innocent child surrounded and threatened by adult evil pervades many of Dickens’s plots. We think of paradise as the land of innocence – yet there were never any children in paradise: Cain, Abel, and Seth were born in the harsh wilderness after the Fall. The early films of Steven Spielberg are marked by the child’s-eye view or by the view of an adult who refuses to grow up: it was probably inevitable that he would rework Peter Pan. From Alice to Leila in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials to Merida in Pixar’s Brave, a number of romance protagonists are plucky, resourceful girls of the age before social conditioning turns many of them into passive objects of male attention. The unheroic hero is also a recurrent motif: for instance, a holy fool such as Parsifal, or, for that matter, the unprepossessing boy known as Wart in The Once and Future King who will grow up to be King Arthur. The same is, if anything, even more true in folktale, where ugly ducklings regularly turn into swans, and Cinderellas into once and future princesses. Animals are also innocent, and the ability to communicate with animals is a frequent gift of the hero or heroine in the romance tradition. In the

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Grimm Brothers’ version of “Snow White,” it is not a fairy godmother but magical birds who intervene in the heroine’s life with the transforming power of the Otherworld. Calvin has Hobbes, in Bill Watterson’s comic strip. In Disney and Pixar films, talking animals inhabiting an animated Otherworld often become the actual protagonists. Loren Eiseley’s creative non-fiction has a strong romance element, and he finds animals more human than people: in the significantly titled “The Places Below,” his introduction to evil is a band of boys stoning a turtle. Calling himself a “fugitive,” he identifies especially with hunted animals. “The Innocent Fox” – another significant title – contains an anecdote of his playing a game of shaking a bone with a baby fox too young to be afraid of him.42 Tarzan prefers the company of his apes to that of the English aristocracy of his alter ego, Lord Greystoke. In the 1950s and 1960s, borrowing from H.G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau, an important writer of “scientific romance,” Cordwainer Smith, wrote a whole series of stories in which the intelligence of animals is genetically enhanced by a far future society so that they may be servants and slaves: the Underpeople, as they are called, become a genuine proletariat, led into revolution by an intelligent cat named C’Mell. The plot of traditional romance moves upward on the vertical axis. While modern traditional romance (an unavoidable oxymoron) no longer believes in a Chain of Being, its plots move towards recreation, restoration, some vision of Plentitude: “And they lived happily ever after.” We have seen that early American science fiction from the pulp magazine days is not science fiction proper but “scientific romance,” one form of which is “space opera,” of which Star Wars is a fond pastiche. Here, the Otherworld is outer space, dangerous yet full of strange marvels, and the good guys win, even if they have to destroy a few galaxies to do it. Yet by no means is all traditional romance naïve, in Schiller’s famous distinction between naïve and “sentimental” literature. Although the Romantic poets had epic ambitions, they also revived romance, both traditional and modern, on a new basis. Keats hoped to be another Milton, yet, had he lived, he more likely would have turned into another Spenser. His first major poem, Endymion, was very much in Spenser’s mode, and, while its immaturity frustrated him, he went on to create masterpieces of traditional romance in The Eve of St. Agnes and of dark romance, Lamia. Dylan Thomas contributes two long narrative poems to the traditionalromance canon, “A Winter’s Tale” (cp, 131) and “Ballad of the Long Legged Bait” (cp, 166). As its affinity with childhood and innocence connotes, traditional romance is perhaps literature’s most direct manifestation of the play instinct,

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and consequently is regarded as immature by serious critics. Shelley could not convince even his own wife to take The Witch of Atlas seriously, yet it is probably a more controlled artistic success than Prometheus Unbound. The playfulness of traditional romance has a direct analogue in the playfulness of certain visual artists, such as Joan Miró and Paul Klee in painting, and Lynda Barry in a graphic novel like What It Is. One of the most ambitious dark romances of our time, John Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy, has as its motto, “There is more than one history of the world.”43 The premise of Aegypt is that, at certain moments of historical crisis, a great wind of change blows through the world. If this referred merely to the eruption of world-altering events, it would not be a highly original thesis. But it means that the fabric of reality itself alters, so that humanity goes through what Blake called a “Vortex” and is living in a new reality – with a different past. This resembles Michel Foucault’s idea of history as discontinuous “epistemes,” so that we cannot know the past, only interpret it, creating just an intellectual extension of our present.44 Hans Georg Gadamer’s idea that no culture can transcend its historical “horizon” is similar,45 as is the concept of certain science-fiction writers, notably Robert Heinlein, of a “multiverse,” where each event produces multiple outcomes that become alternate timelines. Most of Crowley’s Aegypt series takes place in 1978, but part is set in the 1580s. Characters who live in 1978 are puzzled by a previous era’s widespread belief in magic, alchemy, witchcraft, scrying, and other practices, even by brilliant scholars such as John Dee and Giordano Bruno, both characters in the book. How could they have been so credulous? But perhaps Dee and Bruno lived in a different history in which magic, alchemy, and the like actually worked? It is the epitome of the “reality principle” that once things have happened, they are unchangeable: therefore, magic and alchemy have never worked, and many people of genius were guilty of magical thinking, despite their common sense and the complete lack of evidence. The silent assumption of our superiority to even the greatest minds of the past seems, however, intolerably arrogant. Not only that, but, Crowley says, those who have lived through a period of change and upheaval such as the 1960s are less complacent about the abiding nature of the world. If the imagination alters, the world changes: an imaginative revolution, if sufficiently powerful and widespread, may transform the very fabric of reality, including the nature of time, space, and causality. The winds of change blew again in the late eighteenth century, and traditional mythology gave way to modern. Within literature, traditional romance was partnered by a modern sibling that I call “dark romance,”

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although some versions of it are darker than others. The genre is downward and decreative: it seems to be the Jungian shadow of traditional romance, which it does not replace but forms what Derrida would call a “supplement.” Dark romance first appeared in the English-speaking world as “the Gothic.” The title of Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), incisively distinguishes her type of realistic novel from the Gothic romance and decisively chooses the values of the former. But “sensibility” is not so easily dismissed: Frye defined the pre-Romantic late eighteenth century as the “age of sensibility,”46 exalting the values of feeling and imagination over those of practical sense. “Gothic” is as much a mood as a plot, or perhaps more accurately a range of moods, ranging from somber brooding to melodramatic terror, fifty shades of dark. Crumbling castles and tombs, ghosts, madness, murder, ancient curses: all these are the objective correlatives of the Gothic mood, which an earlier age had a name for – melancholia, product of black bile, already associated in Shakespeare’s time with creativity and hyperactive imagination. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with its melancholic and possibly mad hero dressed in black and its ghost-haunted castle is a direct precursor of Gothic, as is its whole sub-genre of Jacobean revenge drama. Dark fantasy does not always wrap its gloom around it like a cloak, but even traditional romance tends to darken over time: compare Dickens’s Pickwick Papers with his later Little Dorrit. The change in mood from The Hobbit to the end of The Lord of the Rings is dramatic, and something similar is true through the seven volumes of Harry Potter. John Crowley’s two fantasy masterpieces, Little, Big and Aegypt, start almost pastoral and then slowly, with the rhythm of fingers gradually losing their grip on a cliff, slide into nightmare. As it was growing up, Romanticism, the younger sibling of the Age of Sensibility, used its older brother as a role model. The teenaged Shelley wrote Gothic pastiche; the melodramatic rhetoric of Blake’s Prophecies, especially perhaps The Four Zoas, comes directly from Gothic, complete with its plethora of exclamation marks. Dark romance is a mode rather than a genre, and occurs in both prose and poetic forms. Coleridge’s three haunted poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan; Keats’s Lamia; Shelley’s Alastor and The Triumph of Life; Byron’s Cain and Manfred; and Browning’s Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came are Romantic and Victorian contributions to the poetic side. Much early Yeats is dark romance, both in lyrics such as “Song of Wandering Aengus,” “The Stolen Child,” “The Man Who Dreamed of Faery-

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land,” and “The Host of the Air” and in his long poems The Wanderings of Oisin and The Shadowy Waters (P, 59, 18, 43, 56, 355, 409). Convenient for the Irish Yeats, Celtic myth and legend provided one of the most famous versions of the Otherworld, the land of Faerie. He modelled some of his later poetic dramas on the Japanese Noh plays, setting their action directly in the Buddhist Otherworld of Bardo, as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Dark romance appears in France in Nerval’s “El Desdichado” and in the United States in Hart Crane’s “The Tower.” Harold Bloom has pointed to the recurrence of the image of the tower in Shelley, Yeats, Browning, and Crane, to which we may add Nerval, and has identified its antecedent in traditional romance as the “midnight tower” of Milton’s Il Penseroso. The tower is the place of the solitary visionary, and poetic versions of dark romance stress the blessing and curse of solitary creativity. Dark-romance prose includes, in addition to the Gothic novels themselves, Melmoth the Wanderer, Wuthering Heights, Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, and the short tales of Hawthorne. Not all of Scott’s Waverley novels are novels: Guy Mannering is a traditional romance heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s late tragicomedies; The Bride of Lammermoor is dark romance: neither has much to do with actual history. Frankenstein is a Gothic-tinged dark romance using a scientist instead of a magician to exemplify the old theme of forbidden knowledge, just as happens in Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” and “The Artist of the Beautiful.” Moby-Dick is a prose epic with a dark-romance transfusion: compare The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The moral is apparently that you are cursed whether or not you kill the mysterious white animal of your obsession. Conversely, two of the greatest twentieth-century fantasies, E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros and Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, could be called “dark romances with an epic transfusion.” A third early-twentiethcentury genius of dark romance, Lord Dunsany, wrote a series of tales of the gods that could be called “dark myth,” which later modulated into more conventional dark-romance tales with human protagonists. The Victorian George MacDonald penned traditional romances for young people but also two dark romances, Phantastes and Lilith, that powerfully influenced C.S. Lewis. Philip Pullman’s trilogy His Dark Materials is in turn a revisionist reading of both Lewis’s Narnia romances for children and his “science fiction trilogy” for adults – the latter is again, as with Mary Shelley and Hawthorne, dark romance with scientific trappings. Another Victorian, William Morris, wrote traditional romances at the end of his life, such as The Well at the World’s End, but in his youth wrote pessimistic tales of dark romance.

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In the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, dark fantasy or romance is so thriving that unfortunately there is no space to list its talented practitioners. When dark romance darkens sufficiently, we call it “horror.” At this point, we return to the theme of decreation, which renders the opaque surface of ordinary reality transparent, so that an Otherworld is seen lurking in its depths. A transitional type is the ghost story, both in the conventional variety exemplified by M.R. James and the psychological variety of another James, as Frye has demonstrated in “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult.”47 Ghosts are liminal phenomena, but are they actual visitants from an Otherworld or merely hallucinations of mentally disturbed people? Edmund Wilson’s famous interpretation of The Turn of the Screw votes for the latter, but Frye says that in such stories “either there is some hidden reality that the narrator’s fantasies point to, however vaguely and inaccurately, or there is no discernible reason for setting them forth at all. The principle, which runs through all James’s work, gives the occult stories a particular significance. A ghostly world challenges us with the existence of a reality beyond realism which still may not be identifiable as real” (121–2, cw, 363). We have moved here one step beyond Munro’s “Pictures of the Ice,” in which Austin’s “ghostly” presence seems somehow to haunt the photos of the shapes of ice, but is nevertheless not visible. The stronger the sense of the Otherworld, the greater the suspicion that the narrator or lead character who senses it might be mad: in this, The Turn of the Screw is hardly unique. The narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” belongs to a lineage of undeniably insane unreliable narrators stretching back to Poe. She sees the image of a woman trapped in the Otherworld behind the design of the hideous wallpaper in the room in which John, her doctor husband, has isolated her as a treatment for her post-partum depression. The woman is clearly a projection, the woman’s own alter ego: freeing her at the story’s end by ripping off the wallpaper is equivalent to an outbreak of psychosis, with the woman crawling on her hands and knees around the outskirts of the imprisoning room at the story’s climax. To that extent, the story obeys the tenets of realism. Yet early commentary treated it as a horror story, most notably that of H.P. Lovecraft in Supernatural Horror in Literature. Doctor husband John is a rationalistic materialist who is terrified of emotion and imagination, both identified with the feminine. He desperately tries to put both down as feminine weaknesses, confining his wife to a stimulus-free environment and forbidding her to write, even though the story is her own surreptitiously written account. At the end of the story,

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this rational, strong male, confronted by an outbreak of what he can neither explain nor control, faints: a stereotypically female response. His worst fear has been realized, the fear that the imagination is a real power that can break into his safely rational world as if it were a supernatural visitation. As we have seen, everything that John, the husband, represents has extended its dominion in the century since Gilman’s story was published. The current view of scientific psychology denies that not only imagination and emotion but even consciousness itself exist: the last is the “ghost in the machine,” in the philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s phrase. For some, this strong version of materialism is a comfort: it rids us not only of Cartesian dualism but of the biggest spook of all, the one projected into the sky, God himself. In this view, there are no depths lower than six feet. Hamlet is half bemused, half revolted by Yorick’s skull and the smell of rot that surrounds it, but contemplating “dust to dust” may be curiously reassuring in the face of the “dread of something after death” that haunts, to use the appropriate word, his famous soliloquy. And yet – Hamlet has seen a ghost, an undeniably “real” one in the sense that others have seen it too. The ghost may be the cause of his later madness, but his madness cannot be the cause of the ghost: there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by Horatio’s philosophy. When the Otherworld manifests itself, the feeling is that which Freud called “the uncanny,” in German unheimlich, “un-homelike.”48 Something manifests itself within the walls of the safe, secure, and familiar: Elsinore castle represents the rotten state of Denmark, but it is also Hamlet’s home, a haunted house. A haunted house is a nexus, a threshold through which the Otherworld enters this one: some dark romances are set entirely within some haunted dwelling place, including Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books and William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland. Even an ordinary imagination may have a dim sense of the vestigial presence of previous occupants in the rooms of hotels and other temporary dwelling places: in dark romance, the presence actively invades, as it does the Overlook Manor of Stephen King’s The Shining. A frequent plot pattern of horror stories and films is that something breaks in from below the horizontal line of quotidian reality: the first forty minutes of many horror films is banal to the point of boring, until the dark force invades, in order to dramatize the pathetic vulnerability of the characters’ lives and their false sense of security. In slasher films, whose motto is “You can’t keep a bad man down,” “below” may simply be the grave, or perhaps an infernal realm to which the grave is a revolving door. The demons in Poltergeist enter from a cemetery on top of which a hous-

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ing development had been built. In The Exorcist, an amulet is unearthed from an archeological dig in the Middle East, and demonic evil possesses a girl. An expansion of the haunted house is the haunted town. A visiting outsider may find that strange things may go on in small, isolated, inbred rural communities: a classic of this type of story, H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” was undoubtedly an influence on some of Stephen King’s stories of weird happenings in the small towns of Maine. The small rural town borders closely on nature. Whereas in traditional romance, such as Shakespeare’s “green world” plays, the characters may move from civilization to a natural setting that, though fallen and even dangerous at times, still retains paradisal associations, in some dark romances, notably those of Arthur Machen, Christian civilization is a veneer beneath which lurk the ancient pagan forces of nature. These are, however, demonic: in his “Great God Pan” they are shown as decreative in a regressive way, devolving human life first back to a savagery characterized by “unspeakable” practices, some of them sexual, finally back to a primal tissue that is the original form, or rather formlessness, of organic life. In Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood and its successor volumes, the Otherworld is an age-old English wood imagined as something like Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious: the further in one penetrates, the more archetypal the “mythagos,” the wood’s inhabitants, are in their manifestation. Jung is indeed a valuable guide through the territory of dark romance, which he knew well, as his references to Pierre Benoît, H. Rider Haggard, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Gustav Meyrink, Gérard de Nerval, and others make clear. In Jung’s version of “depth psychology,” the Otherworld is the unconscious itself, its shallower personal layers deepening into an unfathomable collective unconscious. Jung sometimes uses a scientific vocabulary, borrowed partly from Freud, to describe the unconscious in terms of “libido,” or psychic energy, that ultimately has its origin in the physical processes of the body. But Jung’s collective unconscious cannot be reduced entirely to materialistic terms: his roots are in German Romanticism, especially Goethe, and he never tires of saying that the unconscious is an experience, not reducible to a concept, which is why he chose concrete names such as “shadow” and “anima” for its archetypes rather than more abstract scientific terms. It is a genuine Otherworld that is “real” in a way that exceeds all “realism” – which may account for some of the fierce resistance he raises.

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All major thinkers have their sceptics and detractors, but many of Jung’s critics are not content merely to say that he is wrong. The first person to declare his ideas not just mistaken but delusional was Freud himself: their break occurred because Jung took “occult” phenomena seriously and would not reduce them to Freud’s sexual explanations. Jung himself underwent what he called an “encounter with the unconscious,” a period of detailed and powerful dreams and visions lasting several years. His refusal to dismiss them as a “psychotic episode,” something pathological, to be cured or medicated, but rather as a communication from a deep level, confirms to some his unscientific status. Late in life, Jung referred to the archetypes as “Kantian a priori forms of the imagination,” in contrast to the a priori forms of time and space that organize ego consciousness. In Kant’s own writing, what lies beneath the phenomenal world of time and space is the “noumenal,” the “thing in itself,” which to the reason remains inconceivable. In his early writing, Frye defined Romanticism as Kantian in the sense that, if the noumenal remained unknowable to reason, it could be experienced through the symbolic images of the imagination; he revived this idea in his later essay on Thomas Lovell Beddoes.49 This is close to Jung’s view in “Psychology and Literature,” which divides literature into two kinds, exemplified by the two parts of Goethe’s Faust, which he calls the “psychological” and the “visionary,”50 respectively. “The psychological mode,” he offers, “works with materials drawn from man’s conscious life – with crucial experiences, powerful emotions, suffering, passion, the stuff of human fate in general” (89). But visionary art – and Jung captures the essence of dark romance, especially on its lower levels, in “dark myth” – reveals the “disturbing spectacle of some tremendous process that in every way transcends our human feeling and understanding” (91), deriving from “the hinterland of man’s mind”: It is a primordial experience which surpasses man’s understanding and to which in his weakness he may easily succumb … [I]t arises from timeless depths; glamorous, daemonic, and grotesque, it bursts asunder our human standards of value and aesthetic form … On the other hand, it can be a revelation whose heights and depths are beyond our fathoming, or a vision of beauty which we can never put into words … Is it a vision of other worlds, or of the darknesses of the spirit, or of the primal beginnings of the human psyche? We cannot say for sure that it is any or none of these. (90–1)

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As examples, Jung cites Faust, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Wagner’s Ring, Parsifal, and Tristan, Blake’s poetry and paintings, Francesca Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Polyphili, and Boehme’s “poetic philosophic stammerings,” as well as works of popular romance. “The public for the most part repudiates this kind of literature,” he goes on to say, because it is “reminded of nothing in everyday life, but rather of dreams, night-time fears, and the dark, uncanny recesses of the human mind” (91). Jung understood his critics’ objections to the “visionary” mode, not just in art but in his own psychology: “It has about it a fatal suggestion of vague metaphysics, so that we feel obliged to intervene in the name of well-intentioned reasonableness. We are driven to the conclusion that such things simply cannot be taken seriously, or else the world would sink back into benighted superstition” (93). V I I . T HE S U BL I M E Is there a counterpart in dark romance to the “sense of wonder” in traditional romance? One answer is “the sublime.” The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were preoccupied with a contrast between the beautiful and the sublime in nature (different from, though related to, Longinus’s sublime discussed earlier, which is linguistic, though perhaps requiring sublime words to evoke nature’s sublime). The paradisal vestiges of traditional romance link it to the beautiful: the concept of the sublime may help explain some readers’ strange attraction to a type of literature that ranges from melancholy to terrifying. Eighteenth-century treatises on the sublime spoke not of nature’s beauty but of its power, inhuman, yet awe-inspiring. For the English Romantics, the default example was the Vale of Chamonix in the Swiss Alps, which inspired Coleridge’s “Hymn before Sunrise,” Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” and a key scene in Frankenstein; a notable episode of Wordsworth’s Prelude deals with passing through the Simplon Pass in the Alps, and another concerns the ascent of Mount Snowdon, highest peak in Wales.51 Mont Blanc itself belongs to the phenomenal world (it is the highest mountain in the Alps): Shelley’s poem asks what is the nature of the power that lies behind or beneath that image – and gets no answer. All this hints at a lurking ambiguity in the term “sublime.” It is usually said to mean “elevated,” possibly in the sense of “rising up to a threshold.” That would make it more like Maslow’s “peak” experiences, complete with the mountain metaphor. But the downward direction in modern quest myths has perhaps reversed the connotations of “sublime”: since the

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eighteenth century, however grand and exalted its manifestations in nature, those images correlate with something sub-liminal, under the threshold, a mystery whose true source is downward and inward. In The Critique of Judgment and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, Kant begins with Edmund Burke’s idea that the beautiful is a quality of form, whereas the sublime begins with a sense of something formless or limitless in time or space. The Understanding (Verstand) grasps the beautiful from sense evidence, he proposes, while the Reason (Vernunft) intuits a reality beneath both the senses and ordinary consciousness and thereby the sublime, which overwhelms the Understanding. Coleridge was quick to see the kinship of Kant’s Reason with the Romantic theory of the imagination, residing in Blake’s dens of Urthona. Each of the four traditional elements manifests its variety of the sublime. Earth has its mountains: outside of Europe and its Alps, Everest represents the lure of the sublime of ice and inhuman cold, a demonic version of which appears in the Antarctica of H.P. Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness.” But there are also fire-mountains, volcanoes: Yahweh may have revealed himself to Moses atop one of them, and there are contemporary people whose obsession is to descend into live volcanoes. As for air, storms, especially super-storms, are also traditionally sublime. To someone who lives in the American midwest, this means tornadoes. Anyone who has seen the eerie shape of a funnel cloud, even at a distance, knows that it seems the hierophany of a terrible god, incomprehensibly powerful, who can drive a straw into a solid oak. The western states, neighbouring Alberta and British Columbia, and above all Australia have lived with the sublimity of fire, of vast walls of flame that devour thousands of acres and homes. And of course the marine image of the sublime is the sea: the liminal space of the shoreline, where the sea meets the land, is a place of vision. As for the depths, in their darkness and terrible pressure dwell vast leviathans amid lifeforms almost inconceivably strange. Above the sublunary realm of the four elements, modern astronomy has replaced the cosmos of quintessential beauty with a cosmos that is perhaps the ultimate Otherworld. Its awesome yet utterly inhuman magnitude, its inscrutable mysteries of black holes and dark matter, are a new type of the sublime: perhaps it was this sublimity, which so terrified Pascal, that so enraptured Giordano Bruno that he was willing to go to the stake rather than renounce its dark magnificence. Although Shelley’s Mont Blanc maintains its enigmatic silence, if the power behind a natural phenomenon were to reveal itself, it would be, as

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I have already intimated, a god. Not in the conceptual theological sense: not in the ideological role of enforcing a moral order: no, this is the God of the Book of Job, at least of the poetic part, as distinct from the prose folktale at the end, where he restores to Job all he has lost, as if to say, “Just a test, and you passed.” His speech to Job in chapter 42 of the poetic section is neither Jewish nor Christian. He cares nothing for the Law, nor for justifying his ways to men. The God who comes out of the whirlwind is a manifestation of the Otherworld: he is the Other itself, the noumenal. Rudolf Otto would call him an epiphany of “the holy,” but he is holy in the manner of a twelve-thousand-volt line: to come in contact with him is to be incinerated, like the man who tried to steady the Ark of the Covenant in II Samuel 6:6–7, like Semele, who asked to see Zeus in his twelve-thousand-volt form. It is this kind of sublime deity that the genius of Jane Ellen Harrison intuited beneath the two-dimensional anthropomorphized shapes of the Olympians, the eniautos daimon whose voltage is the energy of time itself. When human beings are invested with a fraction of this energy, we call it “charisma” (mana), and they become the gods’ incarnations or avatars, like Michelangelo’s Moses with his horns of power, like the anonymous twelfth-century sculpture of Isaiah at Souillac. V I I I . T H E U RBA N OT HERWO RL D Samuel R. Delany has asserted that science fiction should be considered not as sub- or non-literary but as “para-”: it is a counter-literature that challenges widespread assumptions not only about “literary” versus “non-literary” writing, but also about what science-fiction people sometimes call “mundane fiction.”52 Whatever is true of science fiction, dark romance is definitely paraliterary, an Otherworld of storytelling that deals with the underside of reality as realistic fiction does its surface. Much if not most of Delany’s own science fiction has been “scientific romance,” and in his monumental Dhalgren he turned from space opera to dark romance. The amnesiac protagonist cannot remember his identity, so is known only as “Kid.” In the story’s opening he enters a city named Bellona, in which various dreamlike and uncanny events take place. The story’s last sentence is completed by the book’s opening line in a direct imitation of Finnegans Wake, so that Kid will never leave the Otherworld of Bellona but always return full circle. He is a poet, and thus a portrait of the artist, and some of his experiences are based on Delany’s own “psychotic episode,” but, like the Wake, Dhalgren also represents human life, with a novelistic attempt to span its races, genders, social

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classes, and ways of life. Yet it is not a novel: it says that ordinary reality and the Otherworld are coterminous. We are in the Otherworld without knowing it, except through various “marginal” experiences whose truth we can never demonstrate. Dhalgren has two protagonists: Kid and Bellona, named after the Roman goddess of war, presumably because it represents Spengler’s megalopolis, the decadent last manifestation of a collapsing empire. In the urban phase, life becomes identified with or as the city as microcosm, and the Otherworld becomes what is beneath or behind its phenomenal aspect. Frye speaks of the powerful effect the 1925 silent-film version of The Phantom of the Opera had on him when he saw it at thirteen with his older sister, particularly the scenes in the Otherworld of the sewers of Paris. In Dickens’s novels – more accurately satiric dark romances – London’s “underworld” is that of its criminal and otherwise-marginalized elements, but is no less uncanny for that. The same is true of Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis, from which her husband Fritz Lang’s film was derived: we see the megalopolis from the viewpoint of its proletarian victims. In these works, the city is decadent, corrupt, evil – yet numinous. From these antecedents was born the genre of “urban fantasy,” launched by the fantasist Fritz Leiber, and whose chief modern descendant is perhaps Harlan Ellison. Ellison’s short-story collection Deathbird Stories delineates a pantheon of modern gods, including, in “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” the god of street violence, a story inspired by the death of Kitty Genovese in New York City with onlookers doing nothing to prevent her murder. Ellison has another story, “Croatoan,” about a man who makes a descent journey into a sewer to discover “where the lost things go.” The city as Otherworld modulates into the archaeological image of ruins, the strata of the past: closely related is the imagery of catacombs and caves. These are objective correlatives for the Otherworld as the unconscious, the underworld of lost memories. But the unconscious is more than a repository of memories: within it, coiled like dragons on a hoard, lie the twin drives of the Freudian unconscious, sexuality and aggression. These drives are not evil in themselves, but it is their repressed aspect that lurks below, and anything repressed becomes ambiguous, even dangerous, whether it is intrinsically so or not. The descent quest therefore passes through a level of dark eroticism and violence, and of eroticism intertwined with violence. Until very recent times, literature had to suggest rather than reveal this level. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example, observes the Victorian proprieties, yet reeks of re-

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pressed eroticism as of a heavy perfume. In traditional romance, the protagonist’s task is to keep his or her (usually her) purity intact, like Marina in the brothel in Shakespeare’s Pericles. But the closer a narrative verges on dark romance, the nearer the protagonist moves towards tabooed or equivocal practices. This is true of Leopold Bloom in the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, set in a whorehouse in Nighttown. Ulysses is novel, however experimental, but the Odyssey apparatus indicates its affinity with romance. In Finnegans Wake, the character hce is accused of voyeurism, of having spied on two women urinating in Phoenix Park. The protagonists of Aegypt, Dhalgren, and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood participate in sexual practices that are not evil but would be condemned by conventional society. If the protagonist is a heterosexual male, he may become involved with a Dark Lady or femme fatale, a Jungian anima figure in seductress mode. If female, she may be drawn to a dark animus figure. In so far as they are literature and not pornography, the line of stories descending from de Sade offers extreme instances of this sort. The typical plot is that of a young woman, naïve if not innocent, drawn into an Otherworld that is a whole secret world of bdsm fantasy, often while retaining a respectable façade in her daily life. As polymorphous perverse eroticism is embodied in anima and animus figures, so is repressed aggression in the Jungian shadow. Frye has catalogued the figure of the double or alter ego in such works as Poe’s “William Wilson,” Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Conrad’s “Secret Sharer” and Heart of Darkness.53 While such characters need not be always physically violent, they are amoral transgressors. The shadow figure’s violence may be intellectual or emotional rather than physical: especially the philosophical nihilist or cynic, such as the Underground Man and Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky, and Naphta in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. Here we treat ironic fiction, which Anatomy of Criticism relates to satire, as the lower boundary of dark romance – the limit, perhaps, of the “romantic.” In ironic fiction, however we categorize it, the shadow figure may become the protagonist rather than his or her double: thus the anti-heroes and -heroines of film noir. There are two aspects to the descent quest, objective and subjective. Objectively, the imagination’s decreating gaze sees through the phenomenal world to reveal mysterious depths. Subjectively, however, those depths are the quester’s unconscious: as usual with the imagination, it is a matter of bothand rather than either-or. Thus the seeker is decreating himself or herself, level by level. An ancient mythic analogue is the Sumerian Descent of Inanna, in which the female protagonist must perform a mythical striptease,

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divesting herself of an item of clothing for each level she descends, arriving finally in the Underworld naked and dead. Such a quest is purgatorial, even though Dante uniquely makes his Purgatory a mountain rather than the traditional pit below ground. The journey is still personally decreative. At the bottom of the mountain, Dante’s forehead is inscribed with seven Ps, standing for peccata (sin), representing the Seven Deadly Sins being purged on the seven stories of the mountain. At each stage of the climb, one of the letters disappears, making him feel lighter: while his ascent is a rebirth of his spiritual self, it entails the symbolic death, by degrees, of his sinful natural self. In The Great Code, Frye treats the decreation of the ordinary self in terms of the theme of “property.” We think of property, he says, as what we have, but how much of that must be taken away before it starts diminishing our identity?54 His example is Job, but it is hard not to think of King Lear as a literary analogue. Lear belongs to tragedy, but Shakespeare was drawing on legendary materials that were themselves half folktale and foreshadow dark romance. A step at a time, Lear loses everything – his kingship, his lands, his knights, his daughters – by the time he is almost alone on the heath in act 3, he feels he has lost “all” and has become “nothing” – the words echo repeatedly throughout the play. His reaction is to strip off his clothes and stand in the storm as naked as the day he was born. His ordeal is “purgatorial,” ridding him of his pride and recovering his humanity: but, as with Inanna, that ordeal kills him. As it kills all of us, sooner or later. From this perspective, life is decreation, and we begin losing it the moment we are born. “I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail / Wearing the quick away,” Dylan Thomas says (cp, 14). Yeats in “Byzantium” uses the image of unwinding a mummy cloth (P, 248), like Claude Rains in the film version of The Invisible Man unwrapping his bandages to reveal nothing inside. Yeats’s Byzantium is another city as Otherworld, a night-world into which the “unpurged” images of day pour and are decreated, “broken” by the emperor’s golden smithies, which are inspired probably by Blake’s image of Los, the creative imagination as smith, by way of the Xanadu of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. Does Byzantium represent an Otherworld beyond death or the poet’s mental process as it takes in “images” of mortal life and transforms them? Yeats identifies both. As “above” in the phenomenal world, so “below,” in the psyche’s. As we noted earlier, a major influence on Dylan Thomas’s early writing was Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s Death’s Jest Book, itself a kind of darkromance reprise of the memento mori theme of death-haunted Jacobean

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dramatists such as Webster and Tourneur. Thomas’s decreative insight was unusually intense, perhaps hastening his departure for the land of death. But the elderly can hardly help being aware that the world of their earlier lives has almost entirely disappeared, except for their memories, which may themselves seem increasingly fleeting and unreliable. I X . T H E D E M O NI C : T H E P R I N C I P L E O F N E G AT I O N Death marks the limit of the Otherworld, and of dark romance, but not of the descent quest. As rendered by the present book’s mandala schematic, the lower part of the vertical axis, from the Otherworld to the nadir point that is the true limit of the way of vacancy, is a realm below death, which ordinary consciousness thinks of as after death. In Christianity, this is hell, locus of the demonic. With Frye, we may dismiss certain popular characteristics of hell as ideological projection, in particular that of a revenge tragedy in an endless number of acts. Although Jesus does speak of hell in the Gospels, the idea of eternal damnation was not inevitable: a few early Church Fathers believed in possible universal salvation in the long run, even perhaps for Satan. While this fitted the image of a God of infinite love, it was declared erroneous by the sin-obsessed, as well as by those threatening hellfire and damnation as a means of social control. Thus the standard interpretation of the Atonement continues the old pagan heroic ethic: the Father determined to have revenge, in the name of justice, even if, in order to obtain it, he has to sacrifice the Son who forgave his enemies on the cross. The doctrine of eternal damnation is of course not just Catholic: hellfire still burns whitehot in Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God,” a hellfire over which God suspends the sinner like a spider. Technically, a Calvinist God is not necessarily even angry – merely, according to the doctrine of predestination, inscrutable. Yet the demonic cannot be exorcised entirely as an ideological projection. We must grant to people such as Jung and C.S. Lewis “the reality of evil.” The Christian argument for it runs as follows: the Socratic assertion that evil is only error is itself an error. Human beings do not fall into evil out of ignorance: rather, knowingly, they choose it, they will it. Paul says, “The evil that I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19). The corrupted will is the true source of evil. Whence, however, came this corruption? Here, we must briefly reiterate what was said in part 1. “Motiveless malignity” is the only rational answer. By logic, if that exists, for no reason, it can be defined only as a spirit of pure Negation, an Everlasting Nay.

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We are returned to the origin, to the Creation-Fall where subject and object split, the cloven fiction. The spirit of Negation is the cleft in the fiction. In moral terms, as laid out in part 3, it is the temptation to let the will to power take one over. The great philosopher other than Hegel in the Romantic period, Schelling, was drawn into the decreative depths, keen to include in his philosophical mythology the free choice for or against the demonic. He would not be the last to be attracted to the version of the Creation-Fall in Jakob Boehme. In Boehme’s account of the emanative process that preceded Creation proper, the divine nature has to split itself, objectifying an aspect of itself, turning one into two in order to become conscious. The part that sprang forth was good, but the original principle remained an uncreated void, a raging fire that is at once Lucifer and hell – “Myself am hell,” a pent-up furnace of iron. Boehme seems to be trying to have it both ways: the demonic is active malice yet a kind of necessary design flaw. Jung in his late writings never tired of arguing against the doctrine of privatio boni, that evil is not a thing in itself but merely the absence of good. In his view, evil is an aspect of the nature of God, and Satan is therefore God’s shadow. He accused orthodox Christianity of reaching after an unhealthy and impossible ideal of perfection, a denial of the shadow. Jung understood what is at stake here: while the idea of a privatio boni avoids postulating a principle of evil co-eternal with God, as in Manichaean dualism, or actually part of God, as in some varieties of Gnosticism, it thereupon reverts to making God responsible for evil for reasons that no one can understand. In the face of absolute evil, this position is unmasked as itself complicit with evil: as Jung says, “One could hardly call the things that have happened, and still happen, in the concentration camps of the dictator states an ‘accidental lack of perfection’ – it would sound like mockery.”55 But asserting that evil is simply a part of the nature of reality or of God risks the equal but opposite danger of moral relativism. Good and evil are not yin and yang, equal and necessary opposites: Blake’s distinction between Contraries and a Negation is the only possible basis for morality. Energy and form are Contraries: both are good and necessary, their conflict fruitful and creative. True evil is a Negation – and ultimately illusion after all, not a final reality to be accepted. The last thing decreation has to decreate is Negation itself. Socrates was both right and wrong: right that evil is not inherent or essential but a result of “ignorance,” wrong in that this kind of ignorance is on a level of primary perception, not mere rational choice. We cannot reason ourselves into doing good, but we can change by deeper transformation.

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And the chief transformative act is precisely the opposite of an act of will: it is an act of renunciation, like Shelley’s Prometheus of his curse, like that of the ring of power in Tolkien, and the corrupt will is exactly what it renounces. Such also must be true on the divine level: God must somehow decreate and thus negate the Negation within his own nature, letting it fall from him to become a demonic principle conspicuous by its absence. Is this a God in denial about his own shadow? Or is it a God who is finally ready to step forth from the shadows, naked and unashamed? What, then, of the reality of evil, if evil is an illusion? Evil is real in another sense, in its effects, in its grip on people: as anyone who has tried to argue with a psychotic knows, illusion has a far stronger hold than reality, which can always be doubted. Evil is what the Book of Revelation calls it, “the beast that was, and is not, and yet is” (17:8). H.P. Lovecraft is frequently derided for his refusal – taken as inability – to describe some of the cosmic terrors he imagined lurking beneath the threshold of reality, but the type of ultimate evil he was trying to evoke is literally unspeakable. So too with Satan: like his opposite number, God the Father, he is technically a person but really a principle, and, again like the Father, better kept off stage, like Tolkien’s Sauron. Milton attempted to portray both God and Satan, but achieved instead a pompous authoritarian and what would later be called a “Byronic hero,” respectively, not a principle of absolute evil at all. Dante’s Satan, with his bat wings and three, coloured faces, chewing on Brutus, Cassius, and Judas, seems to be a robot borrowed from some supernatural theme park. Dante does better at evoking a final vision of the divine precisely because he does not try to describe God but rather evokes his presence through the mystically abstract symbol of three circles. The same is true of the unseen presence in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” Illusion or no, until the principle of Negation is itself negated it is a reservoir of power that some people long to tap into, even to become the instruments of, as the witches are called the “instruments of darkness” in Macbeth. People really do sell their souls to the devil, go over to the dark side of the Force, and are temporarily charged with a demonic energy of the sort that turned Hitler from a runty crank into a force that nearly conquered the world. Even when no claims of supernormal powers are alleged, such people acquire a charisma that has a mesmerizing effect on people who themselves lack vitality and are unconsciously looking to charge themselves with someone else’s battery. The main characters in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers sell themselves to something or other in some sort of ritual, but mostly such peo-

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ple seem powerful because they exude megalomaniacal confidence and ignore the social and moral taboos that restrain normal people. Comic books and space opera are full of villains who really do acquire more than human power, but it dehumanizes them – not that they care, as they see themselves as infinitely superior to humanity, which they often feel deserves to be exterminated. Absolute power really does corrupt absolutely, and the Neroes and Caligulas of history came as close to becoming Darth Vader as they could manage. X . T H E P LU RA L I ST I C A F T ERL I F E What of human beings who have not given themselves over to the demonic? What, if anything, happens after or beyond death? The intuitions of the imagination are not facts, and so cannot be “believed in.” Still, if all that exists is objective facts and subjective illusions, there is not much point in reading, or writing, a book like the present one. The imagination perceives beyond the limitations of the subject–object mode: how much of its perception is of genuine possibility (even if not possible in the ordinary sense), and how much is compounded of wish-fulfilment, anxiety, and ideological conditioning, are difficult questions in any given instance, and the answers must invariably be personal. As we saw earlier, all we have to guide us is the double warning: be careful what stories you believe, but be careful as well what stories you disbelieve. Christianity tells us that we have two selves, the natural self and the spiritual self. The natural self, both body and ego, dies. The spiritual self resurrects into heaven, which, because it is transcendent, must remain a mystery. We see now through a glass darkly, said Paul, and all that we know is that “we shall be changed.” But since what we shall be changed into transcends the limits of time and space, the nature of an “afterlife” becomes yet another paradox from the ego-centred point of view. For one thing, it is not necessarily “after,” or “yonder”: spirit is immanent as well as transcendent. We may not understand this intellectually, but we respond to it emotionally, and it is not necessarily escapist for all that. It is a common feeling that the dead are in another place, and yet somehow are still here with us. Frye’s essay on Milton’s Lycidas shows that Lycidas can be located on four different levels of the vertical axis: on the demonic level he is a set of bones under the sea; in the fallen world he is a dead human being, mourned in his absence, represented by a hearse that is decked with a whole catalogue of flowers and yet is empty; in paradise he is “Genius of the shore”; in the

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spiritual realm he is a redeemed spirit in heaven.56 But he is exceptional only in dying young: his fate represents human fate in general. No one doubts the truth of the two lower levels: the ordinary subject / object, ego / body unit dies, the subjective part disappearing, the objective part returning to the material world. The question of a double spiritual state, however, returns us to the insight of part 2, that paradise is “heaven immanent” as heaven is “heaven transcendent.” Moreover, because we already have spiritual selves, we are already on some level living in heaven and paradise, although ordinary consciousness knows this only through brief epiphanies. This makes communication between the realms possible: the dead are often shown returning or manifesting themselves within the realm of the living. The ancestors communicate in a number of ways, including visions, dreams, omens, and various forms of divination. Sometimes there is simply a sense of their silent presence. It is of course possible to dismiss the Victorian obsession with communicating with the dead through séances as group hysteria, a traumatized response to the new materialism abroad in the world. But it is also possible to see séances as a modern form of divination. Much of James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover consists of conversations with departed friends through the medium of a Ouija board. Sometimes the veil is nearly opaque, with the messages enigmatic; at times it becomes more transparent, and may even momentarily disappear. Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel I Will Fear No Evil, written in the valley of the shadow of its author’s life-threatening illness, imagines a brain transplant that results in three personalities inhabiting the body of one of them, a young woman. The long, bantering three-way conversations that occupy much of a long novel come to seem tedious to some readers: but the shock of the ending is that the body had in fact rejected the transplant, so that all the conversations took place during a few minutes in the brain of a dying old man comforting himself. Yet if time is not a final category, were the conversations merely illusory and the comfort false? Such “evidence,” however equivocal, is what is available to an ego-centred point of view. However, it is becoming clear by this point that the total form of spiritual identity is the entire mandala, taking the form of the cosmic figure Jung called the “Self.” The Self is the most paradoxical concept of them all, but by inference it contains all locations, all states within the mandala. It is a “mystical body” that is at once individual and collective. It is transcendent yet immanent, and so may be indwelling in the natural world as well as with us and among us in the human world.

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It is not static, and includes the process of decreation and recreation, which means that it includes also the purgatorial process of death and rebirth to new forms. To employ once again the phrase from Milton’s Nativity Ode, it exists now, but “not yet,” leaving a question for individual mythologies to wrestle with. Milton himself was a “mortalist”: because of the Fall, no one will be resurrected until the last day. Dante shows the dead in heaven, and yet the souls he speaks to do “not yet” have spiritual bodies (at least not usually: he is inconsistent). Blake shows Milton in “Eternity,” apparently the part of unfallen existence that survives the Fall, a notion influenced probably by the Gnostic idea of the Pleroma. There is, as always, yet one more paradox. Heaven must come by grace – yet heaven may come by striving. The Catholic–Protestant controversy over faith versus works arrived at the inevitable inconclusive conclusion. In terms of the theme of this book, we may say, for want of a better summation, that the productions of time can be considered one form of the purgatorial process. All acts of the imagination are productions of time, helping to build mansions in eternity: that includes every act of love and kindness, every form of human work and action, every attempt to individuate oneself and also make the world a better place. All of these are purgatorial, redemptive, and progressive, and in so far as we are involved in them, we are to that extent in heaven, even if we are also at times in the midst of hell. X I . N OT HI N G As there is a contrast between paradise and the transcendence of heaven at the top of the vertical axis, at the bottom there is a vision of transcendence downward contrasting with the vision of immanent existence within an Otherworld, though again maybe a matter not of either-or but, somehow, of both-and. The goal of Buddhism is release, transcendence: its attitude is “stop the world, I want to get off.” But transcendence of desire and fear is the opposite of detachment or indifference, which merely numb the feelings. Real transcendence is achieved only by driving into the heart of darkness and through it. It is an experience, not an idea, and, if we had to put a name to this experience, it would be that of “loss,” total, utter, inconsolable loss, the wound we really die of, whatever physical breakdown polishes us off. We may lose this or that person or object, but to lose everything is to cease to be a subject, to become “nothing.” This is what happened to King Lear, with more than usual ferocity: but if we wait long enough, the end result will be the same.

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The experience of final loss decreates the vision of order: no value system can stand against it, no doctrine of Fortunate Fall can make the slightest inroad against its grief. The Gloucester subplot of Lear, whose moral is that redemption may come out of suffering, is not disproved by Lear’s unbearable loss of Cordelia: it is simply irrelevant. The mood is not always as extraverted as Lear’s anguish: there is also the introverted zero cold of Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” in which, if you are cold enough, long enough, you will see “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” (cp, 9). This is what existentialism means by absurdity, Sartre by nausea. Those decreative poems, Eliot’s Four Quartets, capture this mood in those moments that “Descend lower.” So does Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day,” which is full of the alchemical imagery of the symbolic love-death that reduces life back to the prima materia of chaos before Creation. We may call this loss of the vision of order a via negativa, a way of escaping the inadequacy of categories by saying “not this, not that,” so long as the loss is real and not an intellectual game. It is easy enough to speak of shunyata, the void, but no one can stare for long into the abyss. Even Jesus despaired: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Absolute loss decreates the vision of love as well. In both Lear and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, the protagonists in their dying moments think they have a vision of something beyond their loss, in Lear’s case of Cordelia as still alive. But then they die, and the vision disappears beyond the barrier. The lost love may at times be spiritual, as in St John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul” and the “Terrible Sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins, an agony in the garden. In speaking of the Nothing as the death of language, we indicated its close relationship to depression. But depression has a twin, anxiety, that also has a venerable lineage, in addition to being one of the default dysfunctions of our contemporary moment. It is the Angst of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, sometimes translated “dread” to indicate that existential differs from situational anxiety such as anxiety before an exam or when facing a dangerous situation. Paradoxically, where depression is secretly motivated by a death wish, anxiety is a disguised form of a terror of death, a sense of insecurity and threat, resulting in what Pynchon calls “paranoia” – the feeling that, beneath the surface, the universe is a hostile place, possibly even demonic. The pre-eminence of H.P. Lovecraft as a horror writer, for all his artistic limitations and racism, lies in his ability to evoke this feeling of what he called “cosmic horror.” As Becker demonstrates in The Denial of Death, we spend much of our time suppressing and denying

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this deeper kind of anxiety, resulting in what Heidegger calls an “inauthentic” existence. But what happens when we stop denying? It is a tenet of Derrida’s deconstruction that every structure whatsoever has a point, however carefully hidden, where it breaks down. Derrida is right: at the nadir is the point of zero, of nothing, a Ginnungagap, or yawning gulf, at the bottom of the mandala, that keeps the structure from ever being closed. Every production of time is thus a ruin, whatever it builds in eternity. The gap is a flaw, an imperfection – but it is also an opening. The point is to go through it, and see where you come out on the other side. X I I . REVERS A L One of the sources of excitement in sports is the possibility of a sudden, unexpected reversal that changes the outcome of the game: at the bottom of the ninth, a home run can change the score from loss to win. Something similar is true of gambling, which is no doubt why some people become addicted to it. The secret hope is that such unpredictable reversals might be true in life: hence the peripeteia in comedy that twists the plot towards a happy ending, often with a blithe disregard for plausibility. Sometimes life’s outward reversals have been brought about by an inward reversal: in comedy, this may be some kind of anagnorisis, or revelation, that transforms characters’ perspectives and thereby reverses the former course of their lives. In romantic comedy, this is when the romantic leads finally realize, two hours after the audience has, that they love each other, even when they thought they hated each other. Romantic, social, and ordinary psychological reversals are contained within the assumptions of common life within the natural cycle, which is why comic happy endings are naturally associated with the reversal we call “spring,” when new life appears, having passed through the dead zero of winter. Yet to say that there seems something miraculous about that reversal, something that has broken in from beyond the merely natural, is more than sentimentalism. The mouse who shows up in the garage, alive and well despite weeks of sub-zero weather, is the small messenger of a mad hope. The reversals of the natural cycle, its deaths and rebirths, are types whose antitype may be found in a reversal beneath the level of the cycle of ordinary fallen time represented by the inner circle of the mandala. This deeper reversal occurs at the nadir point of the outer circle. The Divine Comedy can be viewed as an antitype of secular comedy, and in the lowest circle of hell – the bottom of the ninth – Dante learns that if you

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descend long enough you will find yourself ascending again. When Dante and Virgil pass through the centre of the earth, Virgil, with Dante on his back, has to turn them around because, by continuing in the same direction, they have begun climbing upwards towards earth’s surface again. The image is clearly meant to be read allegorically. The metaphor of turning around or reversal is present in the word “conversion,” also in metanoia, traditionally translated “repentance” but literally a turning of the mind. Frye was intrigued by the word paravritti in the Buddhist Lankavatara Sutra, also designating some kind of inner reversal of direction, probably because it seemed to resemble Blake’s idea that imagination transforms subject–object perception by passing it through a “Vortex” and thus turning it inside out.57 Although we have been concentrating mostly on the decreative counter-movement within it, the darkness of the descent quest in dark romance (the more undisplaced versions of which could as easily be termed “dark myth”) represents the Fall’s intensifying effects as the quest moves deeper and deeper into it. One of these effects is loss of freedom: at the lowest level of the Inferno, the damned are frozen in ice, the very worst sinners so completely encased that they cannot move. As usual, such physical images are objective correlatives with psychological counterparts: in the stories of Dubliners, Joyce depicts Dublin as a city of the damned, whose condition is one of mental “paralysis.” But there is more than one way of being paralyzed. Hamlet is unable to act because (at least in Coleridge’s view) he thinks too much. Macbeth does not have that problem: after his murder of Duncan, he does not seem to be able to keep from acting until half of Scotland is dead. His frenzied activity ceases after a point to be an effort to cover up the initial murder: from the beginning, everyone pretty much knows that he is guilty. It is instead an attempt to break out of a feeling of predestined fatality, of having become what he calls both the witches and the thugs he hires to kill Banquo: an “instrument.” In our time, positivistic science tells us that we are all instruments, that everything we do, think, and feel is the effect of some biochemical cause. There is no such thing as free will. On the other side of the intellectual fence, poststructuralism insists that we are the instruments of culture in its largest sense as a Symbolic Order. The feeling of being helpless inside the leviathan of some sort of larger system is a theme in modern literature from Dickens’s Bleak House to the novels of Kafka and Thomas Pynchon. Consequently, in the early twentieth century, writers brooded over the possibility of an acte gratuite, an entirely unmotivated act that is not the

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effect of some prior cause, and which would therefore represent the possibility of human freedom. In traditional Christianity, what releases us, reverses the paralysis and sets us free, is grace. God is loving – but most of all, God is “gracious” (I Peter 2:3, av / kjv). In post-Romantic modern mythology, it is the human creative imagination that reverses and releases, by decreating, then recreating fallen perception. Frye’s late work, as we saw, marks an attempt to align traditional and modern mythology in a creative tension through what Words with Power calls a “dialectic” of Word and Spirit, in which the Spirit is the indwelling creative power of humanity, the imagination. The nadir, the Nothing, is an abyss that could be imagined plunging ever more into itself, without bottom, without end, a more terrifying image of hell than all the images of vindictive punishment for sin: Milton’s Satan says as much in his “myself am hell” soliloquy (4.75–8), feeling the limitless vertigo within him dragging him ever deeper. But for those who are not damned, there is a reversal, a moment of grace. At that moment, a point of light appears in the darkness (matching the imagery of reported near-death experiences), although the darkness comprehends it not. That point both is and is not the reappearance of the Monad, for the Monad is the germ of unfallen Creation, whereas the nadir point is after the Fall, and will undo the Fall. What will leap out of it is therefore not Creation but recreation. Frye has made this word his own, but the mark of a truly central concept is not that it is definitive but that it inspires endless recreations of itself, in this case a recreation of recreation. XI I I . S AT I RE A N D A P O C A LYP S E The narrative pattern we are concerned with here is a rising on the vertical axis from the nadir point, reversing the descent movement of dark romance and myth. We have already seen that dark romance and satire, seemingly so opposite, are strangely akin, are both Blakean and Heraclitean contraries, the way down and the way up that are paradoxically the same. Jung’s term enantiodromia signifies the tendency of opposites to turn into each other, and there are a number of ways in which dark romance and satire mirror each other. Dark romance decreates the appearances of the “real world” as a means of achieving an epiphany of the Otherworld. The energies of satire emerge from that Otherworld, through the nadir point, but are moving in the opposite direction, towards a recreation of this world according to the model provided by all the visions kept in the repository of the Otherworld, although it may have to smash the

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hollow forms of ordinary reality in the process. The smashing seems to be a kind of decreation moving in the opposite direction. Satire is usually taken to be the form that mocks, parodies, attacks, but the critical is only the negative pole of the satiric. Equally important, though often minimized, is the ridiculous, equal opposite to the sublime of dark romance. There is plenty of silliness in satire, some of it making no thematic point and apparently there for its own sake, but the root of “silly” is selig (blessed). What is blessed is spiritual, and satire exists to release high spirits – energy – whose first expression is laughter. We noted above dark romance’s connection with melancholia, the kind of depression so often linked with creativity. The introversion of dark romance finds its vehicle in a prose that is often meditative, somber, slowmoving. Some of the great dark fantasies, such as E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, and the tales of Lord Dunsany and H.P. Lovecraft, come close to creating their own language, incantatory, dreamlike, lapidary, full of archaic words and exotic names: the Otherworld is evoked out of the hypnotic suggestiveness of such language more than by any description. In a way, it is the Otherworld of such stories. Satire, in contrast, is exuberant, its rhythm speedy and dynamic. As Joyce became more of a satirist, his prose moved from the Portrait’s elaborate periodic prose, influenced by Pater and Newman (despite its ironic tone), to the sentences of Finnegans Wake, which can run on full tilt for pages. The prose of Tristram Shandy never goes anywhere, but it spins its wheels with tireless exuberance. Their yin–yang relationship always makes it dangerous to contrast dark romance and satire too readily. Writers from Dickens to Pynchon adroitly counterpoint their light and dark, romantic and satiric moods. Finnegans Wake plays repeatedly on Giordano Bruno’s motto, “In tristitia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis” (In sadness gaiety, in gaiety sadness). Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is a very funny book about depression. The humour of many comedians seems to emerge out of a well of darkness, from Falstaff to the narrator’s daughter in Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing,” who makes audiences roar but says to her mother, “It doesn’t matter, since we’ll all be atom-dead pretty soon anyway.” This duplicity of mood holds true all the way back to the mutual beginnings of romance and satire in folktale. In relatively modern times, folktale turned to the literary “fairy tale,” in a steady movement towards dark romance. But, while the Grimm brothers’ more famous tales may at times seem incipient dark romance, other stories in their Household Tales are totally satiric – quarrelling spouses wishing sausages on each other’s noses

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and the like. Mythology itself has its Trickster stories, which often parody the solemnity of sacred myth. A common narrative mode of satire is in fact parody romance, or, in more undisplaced examples, parody myth, as we see in Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Lucian of Samosota’s True History, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (especially the quest for the Holy Bottle in Book 5), Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity’s Rainbow (both parodies of the quest pattern). Joyce’s Ulysses, as we noted earlier, is related to the parody romance form through its Odyssey framework, and Finnegans Wake is probably the most thoroughgoing parody of myth in the history of literature. The “plots” of such works, however, being parodic, cast doubt on the very sense of order and coherence latent in the idea of “plot.” The real plot of satire may be summarized as “All hell breaks loose.” We see this in slapstick, where what passes for plot is merely an excuse for purely physical, often wordless humour: it is no accident that its modern heyday was the silent-film era that gave us Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and the Keystone Kops; the slightly later antics of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers add dialogue to what is essentially the same form, if that is the right word. The delight of slapstick is the delight of released physical energy that social decorum demands we repress: Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are understands how painful the demand on children to “settle down” and restrain their boundless energy and restlessness can be. We note that satire is often incorporated as a kind of underside of comedy: there is a good deal of slapstick in Plautus and Terence. The low-life subplots of Shakespeare’s comedies are satiric, counterpointed against the romantic main plot, and as for whether the “problem comedies” are “really” comedies or satires, they are like the pictures that represent a goblet from one perspective or two profiles from another. On the thematic side of satire, counterpoised against a purely physical form, is a purely verbal type, at its simplest in the associative monologue of stand-up comedy. Anyone who wonders how a one-person performance that consists of nothing but talk can embody satire’s release of energy has never seen a great stand-up comic like the late Robin Williams, who frequently ended shows as soaked and exhausted as any athlete. A good deal of stand-up is “improv,” for which the performer must reach down into a deep well of energy to invent something new rather than deliver something canned. Satire builds up rather as Greek drama is said to have done, by adding characters. A second actor allows back-and-forth dialogue, in which one

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person usually acts as straight man or woman, representing a norm of common-sense realism. Abbott and Costello, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, the Smothers Brothers, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin, Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon, and various ventriloquists and their dummies are to varying degrees light-entertainment versions of energy-versus-restraint Contraries, whose more archetypal possibilities are realized in the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and between the squabbling brothers Shem and Shaun in Finnegans Wake. Adding further actors produces the skit, again often improvisational: the famous early exemplar is the commedia dell arte, with its stock characters around which actors would improvise dialogue and action. The comedies, or satires – again, as often, a distinction without a difference – of Shaw, with their dazzling witty repartee and their parodies of the formulas of “serious” drama, are really skits on steroids, preceded by a long preface which is the author’s own solo comic monologue, sometimes longer and more substantial than the play itself, a device that harks back to the parabasis in Aristophanic Old Comedy, in which the action stops and the Chorus or choral leader addresses the audience, often as a mouthpiece for the author. Contemporary manifestations of the satiric skit include Monty Python, Firesign Theatre, Laugh In, Saturday Night Live, and Whose Line Is It Anyway? Many TV sitcoms are really skit-coms, the “plot” once again being a mere excuse for hell breaking loose, and often containing a strong improv element: examples, chosen fittingly at random, range from I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and The Dick Van Dyke Show to Seinfeld. Finally, skits may develop into full-fledged parody-romances, as in the Monty Python movies, some of Firesign Theatre’s labyrinthine album-length excursions, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Doctor Who. To the complaint that some of the above examples are not art but just ephemeral, vulgar entertainment, it is part of satire’s rebellious nature to thumb its nose or make some less socially acceptable gesture at the demand for Matthew Arnold’s “high seriousness.” It would be easy enough to point to passages in Rabelais, Apuleius, or Petronius and ask what differentiates their frivolity and vulgarity from examples out of popular culture. That is not to deny that satire has often been recruited for purposes of social order. In conservative satire, such as we see in Jonson and Pope, the disorder figures entertain us, but we are supposed to approve of their downfall. Sometimes we do. Sometimes we do, while still finding ourselves admiring, almost against our will, the energy, wit, and zest with

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which certain social predators stalk their prey. Sometimes we do with discomfort. In the case of Falstaff, we feel such discomfort that we may end by siding with him against Prince Hal’s vision of state order and empire. Critical studies have speculated about how far Falstaff is modelled on native folk figures such as the Lord of Misrule. Going back at least to the Roman Saturnalia, state power has permitted licensed revelry for limited periods, as a mechanism for dissipating repressed energy lest it turn revolutionary, but if the fool persists in his folly after the period of licence, he must be put down, lest he teach others to become wise. A play like Twelfth Night is groping for a moderate balance between the release of energy and the maintenance of social order. But not all satire enforces social norms. Radical satire sees established society as itself a false order. The question of what is radical and what is conservative can sometimes become rather complicated, perhaps even for the authors themselves. Aristophanes saw himself as an aristocratic conservative because he regarded the progressive tendencies of Cleon, Socrates, and Euripides as decadent. Yet the effect of his Old Comedy is radical. His greatest play, The Birds, is full-fledged (so to speak) parody myth, in which Trickster birds outsmart both the human race and the gods, making us wonder if he was not of the devil’s party without knowing it. The late science-fiction satires of Robert Heinlein throw readers off balance by combining right-wing libertarian militarism with free love, religious universalism, and epistemological anarchism. When it confronts social injustice, the upsurging energy of satire may turn from gaiety to anger, and from anger to possible rebellion and revolution. On the level of satiric monologue, this produces the stand-up comic turned social critic, at risk of being arrested for saying what no one wants to hear. The 1960s, for obvious reasons, are rich with examples such as Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, and George Carlin. Tom Lehrer added satiric song to the monologue. Some of the next generation of social satirists turned from monologue to song exclusively, and out of the folk revival of the Sixties emerged the “protest songs” of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, and Arlo Guthrie, who combined song with monologue again in “Alice’s Restaurant,” about a hilarious encounter between naïve hippies and law-and-order cops. Alongside the largely white folk-song genre was the largely AfricanAmerican genre of the blues. Only a few blues songs are socially critical in the way that some of their rap descendants are: speaking against the white establishment, at least in any direct way, would have been too dangerous. But we learn much about the blues form by relating it to satire. “The

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blues” is a psychological state produced by recognition of how unbearably hard life often is: the blues song consists of a response to this, along a spectrum ranging from the dark-romance imagery of Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” and “Me and the Devil” or Skip James’s “Cypress Grove” and “Devil Got My Woman” to the exuberant Tricksterism of Blind Blake’s “That’ll Never Happen No More” or Blind Lemon Jefferson’s version of “Matchbox Blues.” Many of the most distinctive characteristics of the blues make sense within the context of satire’s rebellion against social convention: aesthetically, the preference for discordant or “blue notes” and the frequently anarchic lyrics, often with no obvious continuity from verse to verse; in content, the refusal of self-pity and the brash expression of politically incorrect attitudes about violence and sex – the latter just as true of the woman blues artists as the males. Like all satire, the blues is an expression of the indomitable energy of life itself in the face of impossible hardship and heartbreak. The theme of social justice is prominent at more extended lengths in Blake, Dickens, and Shaw. Directly influenced by Blake, Shaw in The Devil’s Disciple gives us an example of a central figure in radical satire, the rebel. Its protagonist, an American revolutionary appropriately named Dick Dudgeon, in typical Shaw fashion constantly satirizes himself in the role, aware of the danger of falling into heroic posturing. But the rebel is an archetypal figure whose Greek example is Prometheus, greatest of the Titans: Frye’s Words with Power discusses “the titanic,” a rebellion against order where we sympathize with the rebel figure.58 At least in the view of Blake and Shelley, Milton unwittingly provided a Christian parallel in the Satan of Paradise Lost. The dudgeon of rebel figures arises from a sense that justice in this world seems impossible: the elite have rigged the game in their favour, dismissing the outcries of the oppressed as the whining of parasites, denying the reality of the suffering that the social system makes inevitable for so many, regarding any suggestion of socially mitigating change as threatening, potentially criminal. When the “rage against the machine” becomes politically engaged, it may not have enough faith in the better part of human nature to keep to the non-violent methods of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Several of Shaw’s characters are quite willing to contemplate dynamite as necessary to decreate unjust power systems, and of course the United States brought itself into existence through armed rebellion. This outrage at injustice points to a curious affinity between militant satire and the Scriptural genres of prophecy and apocalypse. Justice is

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impossible given the conditions of this world: therefore, the structures of this world must be shattered from below by the eruption of an energy that is not merely revolutionary but world-breaking. The prophets in the Old Testament, the Book of Revelation in the New, and much of the Qu’ran are given over to wearisome screaming about what is going to happen to evil empires, sinners, and unbelievers in the not-so-sweet by-andby. Worse, some verses may be sufficiently twisted to provide a rationale not to wait for Judgment Day but to embark on crusades, campaigns against heretics, holy wars, in short terrorism, right now. Sickening as this is, after subtracting the portion of it that is only an expression of human vindictiveness or ideological manipulativeness, we are forced to sympathize with the anger over the plight of the world’s countless victims: “How long, O Lord, how long?” If there is no justice in this world, then there must be in the next, or the whole system is a lie. Outside the Biblical context, the theme occurs in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, in which there is a last judgment for souls after death. At the furthest extreme, satire’s anger may become outright misanthropy. In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift, known for his righteous indignation, concludes that human beings left to themselves, without grace, are utterly vile, mere Yahoos. Man is not only not human but is infinitely lower than the animals. XI V . S AT I RE , L AU G HT ER , A ND T HE RED EM P T I O N O F T I M E But Swift ended in madness, which is where it seems some prophetic and apocalyptic writing ends too. What is wrong with such writing is that it has lost its sense of humour: it has forgotten how to laugh. Laughter is a kind of detachment: to the extent that you can laugh at something, or after some bad experience, you have transcended it. Anger is involved and committed – admirable up to a point, but needing, as everything needs, a counterbalance. Otherwise it turns into fanaticism, as with Strelnikov in David Lean’s film of Dr. Zhivago, who is baffled and infuriated when Zhivago refuses to join the revolutionary army, saying that all he wants is just to live. But living with Lara and writing his poetry is not merely bourgeois self-indulgence. What the ideologues forget is that life cannot just be decreated: it must also be recreated. We may have to smash through the dead and unjust structures, but we must rebuild, or the class war becomes merely a scorched-earth policy. We must create a new mode of life. The Sixties saw plenty of satire against the establishment: Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which the power players are driven by

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a sick need to control, ironically through telling others that they are the ones who are sick and thus in need of being controlled; Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, in which the power players are utterly, psychotically out of control, with their fingers terrifyingly on the red button. But the era also saw attempts, however inadequate, at finding a new, unrepressive way of life, which could be described only as a kind of spontaneous, desire-driven, as opposed to philosophical or theoretical, anarchism. The failure of most of the endeavours does not matter: what was hopeful was that they occurred at all, as is so much clearer now, when such efforts have long since disappeared, victims either of “the system” without or fallen human nature within. The revolution of the 1960s failed for the reason that all uprisings fail, an insufficient shattering of “mind-forg’d manacles.” A handicap of the literary and cultural criticism that spans the period since then has been its kind of crisis mentality. In a review of books by Mircea Eliade, Frye once wrote, “Mr. Eliade is very far from being a Jungian disciple, but he shows a similar desire to oversimplify our present situation into a dilemma, and a similar impatience with the effort of literature to turn away from crisis and commitment and devote itself to purifying the imaginative dialect of the tribe.”59 It is a passing remark, yet it captures something important about Frye himself, a kind of balanced detachment that drives critics of crisis and commitment, such as Terry Eagleton, into fits of annoyed impatience. There may be an element of native temperament to such serenity, but in 1951 Frye had a visionary experience that he referred to in his notebooks as his “Seattle revelation.” The accounts are cryptic, but it had to do with the reversal at the bottom of a descent quest, at the point of the Nothing: a passage “from oracle to wit” and consequently a release and the recovery of the power of laughter. Robert Denham’s account notes how the experience informs descriptions of the bottom of the descent quest in various of Frye’s writings.60 However he acquired it, Frye’s freedom – the word is significant – from the hysterical anxieties of crisis transformed his style, imparting its enviable lightness, wit, and grace. Edgar Wind concludes his study of Renaissance Neoplatonism, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, with a “Conclusion: An Observation on Method,” in which he says that the motto of the visionary Renaissance humanists treated by his study was “serio ludere” (play seriously), clearly intending it to be taken as the method of his own work as well.61 It could also serve as Frye’s motto: Denham’s Architect of the Spiritual World is an anatomy of what Frye found in his remarkably extensive reading of what the notebooks call “kook books,” unscholarly speculative

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works about myth, religion, and symbolism, as well as sources such as Mahayana Buddhist Sutras that are not kook books but which attract a good deal of attention from kooks. What Frye found there was serious play, the sense of gaya scienza that we see in poetry most perhaps in Wallace Stevens, the play spirit celebrated by Schiller and Huizinga. It is true that Eliade and Jung are crisis critics, and their tone is sometimes dark and urgent – but then, so was Blake’s, and Blake understood himself well enough to see that the prophetic and the detached sides of his personality, Rintrah and Palamabron, respectively, were Contraries. In our time, however, it seems to me that in criticism we have many Rintrahs, but could use a few more Palamabrons for balance.62 “More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul. Less than All cannot satisfy Man” (E, 2). It is that kind of aphorism that led the 1960s to feel, “Blake, thou shouldst be living at this hour.” Because genuine human desire (we are not speaking of neurotic compulsion) cannot be gratified within fallen reality, the imagination cannot stop after blowing down unjust social structures like houses of cards. It must go on to recreate the limits of time and space themselves, for these are the structures that undergird the subject–object perspective. The ordinary mode of perception must be passed through a Blakean Vortex and turned inside out. Frye briefly wonders in Fearful Symmetry whether visionary satire was not Blake’s real mode:63 at any rate, satire unbound, rising like the serpent of energy in Kundalini yoga vertically through the spinal cord, lighting up or awakening the seven chakras or vital centres of the human body, at its uttermost reach becomes what Blake and Frye mean by “apocalyptic,” something much different from the ideological meaning spoken of previously. It may at first seem curious that both romance and satire are so often captivated by fantasies of giants and diminutive creatures. Rabelais has his giants, Swift his Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, Celtic mythology its fairies who may alter their size at will, Wonderland its growing and shrinking Alice. What fascinates us is the shifting of perspective, because a new perspective is a new world. The remarkable film Powers of Ten (1968, 1977), by Charles and Ray Eames, dramatizes this by starting from the perspective of a couple on a picnic blanket and first expanding outward every ten seconds by a factor of ten, so that by the final expansion our galaxy is only one dot among many in the sky; then returning and shrinking every ten seconds by a factor of ten, finally ending up inside an atom. It is as if the directors had known the line near the end of Blake’s Four Zoas telling how, after the apocalypse, “The Expanding Eyes of Man behold the depth of wondrous worlds” (E, 406, line 25).

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What is most significant is that the smaller worlds are present inside of, contained within the larger. In the Last Judgment, we are supposed to reclaim our bodies: the apocalyptic or revealed truth of this is that ego consciousness expands from a dot inside the body to become coterminous with it. That body in turn expands to become coterminous with the body of the cosmos, so that all reality is inside the mind – the mind meaning the imagination, not ordinary consciousness. Still, ordinary consciousness has an intimation of what it would mean: there are moments in which we feel, however briefly, that the normal relation of self to reality is reversed, and that our imaginations contain worlds within worlds, a whole multiverse. As John Crowley says in his classic fantasy Little, Big, one answer to the riddle, “What is bigger on the inside than on the outside?” is “A book.” Several of Crowley’s protagonists wonder whether they themselves are characters inside a story. The cosmic expansion of human identity is the apotheosis of the vision of love, as desire reverses the total loss at the nadir point, recovering all that was lost in a total reunion that Frye calls “interpenetration.” His inspirations for this intuition range from the passage in Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, quoted in part 1, that asserts that, in a world viewed as a total process, everything is present within everything else, to the image of reality as a “net of jewels” in the Avatamsaka Sutra, each gem reflecting all the others, each reflection containing all the other reflections, to infinity. Such metaphors should not be taken to mean that the vision of love ends in some kind of ethereal mysticism. As the body expands, so do the senses: Blake says that the apocalypse begins in an improvement of sensual delight, and some satirists have been bold enough to imagine what that might mean. It means, in a word, what social convention calls the obscene. The more radical the satire, the more it is likely to contain something you don’t show your grandmother. Social propriety means the proper maintaining of distances, and one meaning of apocalypse is the orgasmic melting of distances. The possible sexual connotations of “interpenetration” are quite real. Milton’s angels not only have spiritual bodies, but they have sex: they not only have sex, but they have better sex than we can, because their entire bodies merge in a total union. Or, as Blake bawdily puts it, in eternity “Embraces are Cominglings: from the Head even to the feet; / And not a pompous High Priest entering by a Secret Place” (E, 221). That less than all cannot satisfy implies that total satisfaction of desire is utterly polymorphous, the opposite of heteronormative: no combina-

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tion of genders, races, ages, numbers is alien to it. Nor does it stop with other people: the endless catalogue of “fetishes” shows that absolutely anything can be “cathected,” can be charged with the energy that makes it an object of desire. What is “perverted” is when an object of desire or the person desiring is coerced or harmed, whether physically or psychologically, by the gratification of the desire. What is meant here is the opposite of such an alienated relationship. That this is so difficult to grasp is due to humanity’s rejection of its own physical nature, which accounts for a large part of its neuroses. That rejection has many causes: ideological conditioning, of course, for one controls people by controlling the expression of their desires, but also fear of the potentially overwhelming power of desire, and fear of the intimations of mortality that always cling to the body, the part of us that ages and dies. Strephon, the lover-voyeur of Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” cries in “disgust,” “O Celia, Celia, Celia shits!,” but satire reclaims the delight that children have, until morality robs them of it, in the body, bodily functions, and the senses. Rabelais’s giants have giant appetites, not just for sex but for food, drink, and every kind of pleasure: so do the characters in Petronius’s Satyricon and, in our time, in the works of Samuel R. Delany. From Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale to the farting-round-the-campfire episode of Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, satire revels in everything that is in poor taste. Many things are disapproved of because they are undignified, including sex itself: it is part of satire’s silliness not to care about dignity. As W.H. Auden’s “In Praise of Limestone” says, “The blessed do not care what angle they are regarded from” (cp, 415). The apocalypse, regarded from one angle, is one big riotous, joyous party, for parties (good ones, anyway) are a release of festive energy from social inhibitions. Like Shakespeare’s comedies, Finnegans Wake, and the satires of Thomas Pynchon, they are full of music and dancing, and at any moment some character is likely to break into song. They are also full of laughter. We saw in part 2 that laughter is the form catharsis takes in comedy: it is a release, resulting in detachment or liberation. But it leads, or may lead, to anagnorisis, to a reversal of perspective. In one of his notebooks, Frye says, “The revolutionary leap of sudden deliverance is conversion in religion or Paravritti; in comedy it’s the laugh.”64 That time is redeemed when past and future are gathered into an Eternal Now is the theme of Eliot’s Four Quartets. The entire argument of this book about the productions of time has been devoted to exploring how this comes about. The imagination, working progressively to redeem time along its horizontal line, is constrained to work through the repetitions of

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the death-and-rebirth natural cycle. While doing so, however, its decreative and recreative power works to redeem time progressively from within, cycle after cycle. When an end point is reached, in Blake’s symbolism when a Seventh Eye of God is opened, the apocalypse occurs and the entire mandala is recreated out of the Nothing of the nadir point. The restoration of the mandala amounts to a recreation of the vision of order: what seems rather complicated in the above paragraph can be seen in an epiphanic glance. But the redemption of time cannot be reduced to a diagram, however useful such blueprints may be. There is one absolutely crucial human implication on which all Christianity, perhaps even all mythology, must depend, and that is that time must be redeemed retroactively, so to speak. No merely future reward can justify and console us for the unspeakable amount of pain, misery, and despair that is the past. Even the Fortunate Fall is not enough. The real apocalypse will occur when, and only when, the fallen aspect of the past is decreated so that it never happened. Blake understands this in the Ninth Night of The Four Zoas: the best analogy we have is that of waking from a nightmare to find, thank God, that it was never real, even though we thought it was. C.S. Lewis, whose imagination always understands far more things in heaven and earth than his polemics ever dreamed of, dramatizes this retroactive redemption in the astonishing conclusion of The Great Divorce. Robert Heinlein in his last novels, which are really satires influenced by the satires of James Branch Cabell, is preoccupied with the theme of time travelling in order to change the past to make sure that any number of possible bad futures never happen. In the perspective of tragedy, the limits of reality are unalterable, and Cordelia can never, never, never, never, never be alive again. Even in the tragicomic Winter’s Tale, in which Hermione seems to come back to life again, the “resurrection” is a ruse, and the years of exile and heartache that lead to the happy ending are not cancelled: they are a price that must be paid. We are taught that the stages of grieving necessarily must end in acceptance and resignation. There is a heroic dignity in such acceptance, and perhaps that is the best that the ego is able to achieve. Logically speaking, this would be true even if the Fall, and thereby all the suffering of history, were decreated retroactively into illusion or dream. The ego could say only, “Yes, but the experience of the suffering was real, even if I wake and say it was only a dream.” But what if even the dream or illusion never took place? The imagination is a Trickster. It refuses to play by the house rules, which are rigged, and denies the finality of time and space, the final sym-

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bol of which is death. The imagination continues to insist that anything is possible, and its refusal to surrender is the very definition of hope. We do not of course want to annihilate the entire past. Quite the contrary: the imagination is the power that works to conserve what is precious in it from the transience that would otherwise overtake, sooner or later, everything we have ever loved. “And death shall have no dominion,” says Dylan Thomas: “Though they be mad, and dead as nails, / Heads of the characters hammer through daisies, / Break in the sun till the sun break down” (cp, 77). As I have shown earlier, the mandala is one of the most frequent images in Thomas’s poetry. A vision of order, it symbolizes the mansions of eternity that we build out of the ruins of time. The present book is a verbal mandala, member of a sub-genre of satire that Frye did so much to define, the anatomy. An anatomy is an attempt to sketch the outlines of what Wallace Stevens called the “supreme fiction.” But there is one last thing to be understood. The imagination does more than redeem the fallen world: it acts on the supreme fiction itself, decreating and recreating it in infinite and inexhaustible variety, of which any particular vision is but one variation. We create, rest, see that it is good – and then are ready to begin again.

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Introduction

405

Notes

overture 1 See The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972, ed. Michael Dolzani, in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, 30 vols., various editors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996–2012) (hereafter cw), vol. 9 (2002). 2 Joseph Campbell, “The Symbol without Meaning,” in Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension: Selected Essays, 1944–1968 (New York: Viking Press, 1969), chap. 5, 93–155. Presented originally at the Eranos Conference in Ascona in 1957.

introduction 1 Marc Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye, and Campbell (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1992). 2 Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By, first pub. 1972 (New York: Arkana / Penguin Group, 1993). 3 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). 4 Abraham Maslow, “Toward a Humanistic Biology,” in Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1976), 16–17. 5 Imre Salusinszky, Criticism in Society (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 22–3. 6 See Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (New York: Norton, 1969), and Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

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Notes to pages 14–32

7 See Jean Aitchison, “Bad Birds and Better Birds: Prototype Theories,” in Virginia Clark, Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Beth Lee Simon, eds., Language: Introductory Readings (Boston and New York: Bedford / St Martin’s), 267–75. 8 René Wellek and Austin Warren, “The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art,” in Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956), 156. 9 Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974–1977 (New York: Norton, 1978). 10 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction after All: Reflections and Conversations, ed. David Jonathan Y. Bayot (Brighton, England: Sussex Academic Press, 2015), 239. 11 Ibid. 113–14. 12 Ibid., 229. The interviewer is Alison Scott-Baumann. 13 Ibid., 115. 14 Loren Eiseley, The Night Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 148.

part one 1 Snorri Sturluson, “Gylfaginning,” in Edda [The Prose Edda], trans. Anthony Faulkes (London: Everyman, 1987), 43–4. 2 Studies of the Trickster figure include Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology, first pub. 1956 (New York: Schocken Books, 1972), and Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). For the Yao-Bantu myth, see Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford, eds., Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, 8th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2012), 167–8. 3 While the original twelve-volume edition of Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1906–15) is fascinating to wander around in, various one-volume abridgments provide all that most readers need without the cataract of examples. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, a new abridgd edition, ed. Robert Fraser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), restores controversial passages comparing the dying-god figures to Christ. 4 Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher (New York: Dover, 1957), 4–5. 5 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston and New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2008). 6 Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, vol. 4 of Campbell, The Masks of God (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1968). 7 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1985). The original French title embodies all that

Notes to pages 33–49

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is wrong with the book: Les fonctiones mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. 8 See Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999). 9 See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. J.W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), and Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: New American Library, 1958). 10 Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in John Pick, ed., A Hopkins Reader, rev. and enlarged ed. (Garden City, ny: Image, 1966), 47–8. 11 Northrop Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990) / [same title], ed. Michael Dolzani, cw, vol. 26 (2008). 12 See, for example, Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1–7. 13 James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 20. 14 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979). 15 In Blake, The Gates of Paradise (E, 268). 16 Loren Eiseley, “The Instruments of Darkness,” in Eiseley, The Night Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 51. 17 Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self (New York: Norton, 1984). 18 Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: Norton, 1986). 19 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, first pub. 1976, new ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 270–1. 20 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, New York, London: Little, Brown, 1991), part 3, chap. 14, sec. 4. 21 John Brockman, The Third Culture (New York: Touchstone, 1995). 22 Nicholas Humphrey, Consciousness Regained: Chapters in the Development of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 23 Raymond Tallis, Why the Mind Is Not a Computer: A Popular Lexicon of Neuromythology (Exeter, England: Imprint Academic, 1994, 2004), and Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham, England: Acumen Publishing, 2011). Tallis was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences for his research in clinical neuroscience. Thanks to Graham Forst for recommending him to me. 24 Fredric Jameson, The Prisonhouse of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1975). 25 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (New York and London: Methuen, 1982), 128.

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Notes to pages 49–65

26 Ibid., 106. 27 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” in Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292: The full passage speaks of “the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.” 28 In the preface to the Phenomenology of the Spirit. See Hegel: Texts and Commentary, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (Garden City, ny: Anchor, 1966), 26. 29 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Principles of Genial Criticism: Essay Third,” in David Perkins, ed., English Romantic Writers (San Diego, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 443. 30 See Abraham Maslow, “Preface,” to Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences (New York: Penguin, 1970), xiv. The book was first published in 1966, but the Preface was added posthumously in 1970. 31 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1965): “Simone Weil, in La Pesanteur et la Grâce, has a chapter on what she calls decreation. She says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness. Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers” (175). 32 See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson, University of Texas Press Slavic Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 33 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 45–6: “A camera once recorded the work of Matisse in slow motion … That same brush which, seen with the naked eye, leaped from one act to another, was seen to meditate in a solemn and expanding time – in the immanence of a world’s creation – to try ten possible movements, dance in front of the canvas, brush it lightly several times, and crash down finally like a lightning stroke upon the one line necessary … Consequently, there was a choice, and the chosen line was chosen in such a way as to observe, scattered out over the painting, twenty conditions which were unformulated and even informulable for any one but Matisse, since they were only defined and imposed by the intention of executing this painting which did not yet exist.” 34 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, first pub. 1925 (New York: Free Press, 1953), 91. 35 See William James, The Principles of Psychology, two vols. (New York: Dover,

Notes to pages 66–74

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

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1918), vol. 1, chap. 4, “Habit,” 104–27, and Samuel Butler, Life and Habit, first pub. 1879 (London: Wildwood House, 1981). Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), I.3, 98. Ibid. Ibid., I.3, 99. Lawrence Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 36. Ibid., 55. Quoted in ibid., 139. Joseph Campbell, with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 138. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1984), Book 14, chap. 26, 591. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, first pub. 1938 (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953). Milton defines the goal of education in Of Education (1644), in Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, Odyssey Press, 1957), 631. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction after All: Reflections and Conversations, ed. David Jonathan Y. Bayot (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2015), 228. Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy, 108. Ibid., 129. Jacques Barzun explains William James’s rejection of Idealism in language in a way remarkably close to Merleau-Ponty’s, even down to the example of the experience of one’s own hand: “‘Nature’ and ‘the mind’ thereby possess, in Whitehead’s phrase – ‘mutual immanence’ … Such relations of feeling to object seem ‘not quite inner nor quite outer, as if a diremption had begun but had not made itself complete’ … The seamless web of experience is even more apparent if we look at our hand resting flat on top of the table. Is there any way to distinguish the physical hand ‘out there,’ an object like the teapot, from the ‘inner’ feelings which make it ‘our hand’ – its warmth and pressure on the cool surface? Whichever detail we single out by attention is of the same texture as every other; no line separates thought and object as if we were looking through bifocals. ‘Sometimes I treat my body purely as part of outer nature. Sometimes I think of it as ‘mine’ … About the body, in short we literally do a ‘double take’ that shows the experiential identity of subject and object.” See Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 116–17. The quotations from James are from his Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912).

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Notes to pages 74–82

50 Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, first pub. 1912, rev. 1927 (Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Company, 1962). 51 Frye, Words with Power, 1st ed. (1990), 126 / cw ed., vol. 26 (2008), 118. 52 C.G. Jung, “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle,” first pub. 1960, trans. R.F.C. Hull, in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, vol. 8, 2nd ed., of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1969), 417–519. 53 See Donna Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” (1985), in Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, first pub. 1991 (London: Free Association Books, 1996), 149–82; and N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). For posthumanism in science fiction, see Kristen Lillvis, Posthuman Blackness and the Black Female Imagination (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). 54 See Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas: Volume 1, From the Stone Age to the Eleusinian Mysteries, trans. Willard R. Trask (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 227–32. The Brahmanas are a development of the older Vedic horse sacrifice. Of the cosmic being Prajapati, Eliade says, “The reconstitution and rearticulation of Prajapati’s cosmic body are effected by sacrifice, that is by building a sacrificial altar … Yet a new idea very soon appears: sacrifice not only restores Prajapati and insures [sic] the perpetuation of the world but is capable of creating a spiritual and indestructible being, the ‘person,’ the atman. Sacrifice has not only a cosmogonic intent and an eschatological function but makes it possible to obtain a new mode of being” (229–30). Although Eliade does not say so, there is a parallel with Western alchemy and its relationship to a psychological process of individuation as interpreted by Jung. 55 Quoted in Campbell, Creative Mythology, 610. 56 Hopkins, “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection,” in John Pick, ed., A Hopkins Reader, rev. and enlarged ed. (Garden City, ny: Image, 1966), 80–1. 57 Hopkins, “As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” ibid., 67. 58 Northrop Frye, The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991) / in Northrop Frye on Religion: Excluding “The Great Code” and “Words with Power”, ed. Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady, cw, vol. 4 (1999), 235. 59 George Bernard Shaw, St Joan: A Chronicle Play in Six Scenes and an Epilogue (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 2003).

Notes to pages 83–90

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60 Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology, vol. 1 of The Masks of God, first pub. 1959 (New York: Penguin, 1976), part I, “Introduction: The Lesson of the Mask,” 21–9. Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, 3rd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). 61 The preceding paragraph draws on Robert Denham, “Frye and Longinus,” in Northrop Frye: Twelve Writers Who Helped Shape His Thinking (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2015), chap. 2, 63–83. 62 As for example Paul Tillich in The Courage to Be (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1952). Tillich was influenced in this regard by Jakob Boehme, probably by way of Heidegger. 63 Martin Heidegger, What Is Metaphysics?, trans. David Farrell Krell, in Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 112. Although Heidegger’s is the famous instance of the question, it was asked before him by Schelling, about whom he lectured in 1936. 64 Quoted in Campbell, Creative Mythology, 610. 65 C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, vol. 9, part 1, 2nd ed., of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1959), 95. 66 Loren Eiseley, “The Mind as Nature,” in Eiseley, The Night Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 195–6. 67 Quoted in Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, first pub. 1954, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series XLII (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1973), 21. 68 For the Egyptian example, see ibid., 19. 69 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973). 70 See R.T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1959), chap. 4, “Osiris Universalized,” 124ff.: “The passion of Osiris was, originally, a king’s fate and not that of everyone” (124). After a period of social upheaval and civil war, “The scribal and military classes clamoured to share in the Osiris fate after death but without the materialist trappings of tomb endowments and funeral estates” (124). Eventually the Osiris cult became popular religion: “Osiris was in fact the main god for the great majority of the people” (133). 71 Franz Kafka, “Paradise,” in Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes, no translator listed (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 29. 72 “The Gospel of Thomas,” trans. Helmut Koester, in James M. Robinson, gen. ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row), 28. 73 Campbell, “The Symbol without Meaning,” in Campbell, The Flight of the

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75 76

77

78 79

Notes to pages 90–4

Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension: Selected Essays, 1944–1968 (New York: Viking Press, 1969), 120–1. Originally presented at the Eranos Conference in Ascona in 1957. See Mircea Eliade, “Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred,” in Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, 1959), chap. 1, 20–65. Eliade’s theme is that the principle of mythological order spatially is one of centring. One of Derrida’s early deconstructions, in “Structure, Sign, and Play,” was of the idea of a centre. Eliade’s pre-emptive reply is that mandala patterns are non-Euclidean: “The multiplicity, or even the infinity, of centers of the world raises no difficulty for religious thought. For it is not a matter of geometrical space, but of an existential and sacred space that has an entirely different structure, that admits of an infinite number of breaks and hence is capable of an infinite number of communications with the transcendent” (57). Symbols exist in what Wallace Stevens calls “description without place.” The “breaks” that Eliade speaks of are openings from the world of ordinary space and time into that imaginative or spiritual mode of being. In The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, no translator listed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 69, Eliade speaks even more bluntly: “There is no sense in trying to ‘demystify’ such a belief by drawing the attention of the reader to the fact that there exists no Center of the World and that, in any case, the multiplicity of such centers is an absurd notion because it is self-contradictory. On the contrary, it is only by taking this belief seriously, by trying to clarify all its cosmological, ritual, and social implications, that one succeeds in comprehending the existential situation of a man who believes that he is at the Center of the World.” Paul Ferris, Dylan Thomas (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1977), 251. Ferris remarks, “This seems to have stopped the conversation.” The contrast is discussed at various points in Jung’s work. But see his Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R.F.C. Hull. vol. 9, part 2, 2nd ed., of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1959), 224, 252. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), 30–1 / in “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991, ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson, cw, vol. 18 (2006), 25. Adaline Glasheen, Third Census of “Finnegans Wake”: An Index of the Characters and Their Roles (Oakland: University of California Press, 1977), lxxiiff. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (London and New York: Ark Paperbacks, 1983).

Notes to pages 94–8

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80 C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R.F.C. Hull, vol. 12, 2nd ed., of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1968), 23. 81 See Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mythologiques, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969–81). 82 Wallace Stevens, “Of Mere Being,” in Stevens, Opus Posthumous, rev., enlarged, and corrected ed., ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 141. 83 Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol, 238. 84 The Rig Veda: An Anthology, trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1981), 25–6. In her introduction, Doniger O’Flaherty speaks of the Rig Veda’s defiance of all normal unity: “Not only is each hymn a separate statement … but each verse stands on its own and often bears no obvious relationship with the verses immediately preceding and following it,” adding, “it is written out of a mythology that we can only try to reconstruct from the Rig Vedic jumble of paradoxes heaped on paradoxes, tropes heaped on tropes” (18). Some of this complexity may be due to the vagaries of transmission, but “defiance of all normal unity” is also true of the Bible. Pound’s Cantos are modelled on Dante’s, but instead of the latter’s architectonic mode of organization, the Cantos imitate this kind of Scriptural bricolage. Does decreation of ordinary structures reveal a different form of unity beneath them? 85 Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas, vol. 1, 70. The information appears in the Akkadian cosmogonic poem Enuma elish (“When on high”). Eliade repeats (74–5) what he points out in a number of his works about the reciting of the Enuma elish during the New Year’s festival called (in Akkadian) the akitu: “The akitu represents the Mesopotamian version of a quite widespread mythico-ritual scenario, specifically the New Year festival considered as a repetition of the cosmogony. Since the periodic regeneration of the cosmos constitutes the great hope of traditional societies, we shall often refer to New Year festivals.” 86 Campbell, Oriental Mythology, vol. 2 of The Masks of God (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1962), 468. Campbell translates the original source – the Kojiki, “Record of Ancient Matters” (712 ce) – which transcribes oral sources. 87 G.R. Levy, The Sword from the Rock: An Investigation into the Origins of Epic Literature and the Development of the Hero (London: Faber and Faber, 1953). 88 Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 146 / [same title], ed. Alvin A. Lee, cw, vol. 19 (2006), 166.

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Notes to pages 99–103

89 Erich Neumann, “The Slaying of the Mother,” in Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, first pub. 1954, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series XLII (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1973), part I, sec. B, chap. 2, 152–69. 90 See J.J. Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J.J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen Series LXXXIV (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1967). 91 For a contemporary examination of the Goddess cultures, based on archaeological evidence, see Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization (San Francisco: Harper, 1989) and The Civilization of the Goddess: The World of Old Europe (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992). Despite her recognized command of the evidence, Gimbutas’s conclusions have been challenged by other scholars, whether legitimately or because of a backlash against her work because it was taken up by the neopagan movement – or both. 92 Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1976), 85. 93 Eliade, “Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred,” 20–65 94 James Dickey, “The G.I. Can of Beets, the Fox in the Wave, and the Hammers over Open Ground,” in Dickey, Nighthurdling: Poems, Essays, Conversations, Commencements, and Afterwords (Columbia, sc, and Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: Bruccoli Clark, 1983), 124–40. 95 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 240, 305. 96 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, first pub. 1929, corrected ed. (New York: Free Press, 1978). The term is used throughout the book but is defined on p. 61. 97 Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante (New York: Noonday, 1961), 92. Williams borrows the term from Patristic theology, in which, he says, it refers to the relationship of the persons of the Trinity, and to “an analogical unity of men with each other.” 98 Campbell, Oriental Mythology, 87. 99 Ibid., 88. 100 Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol, 266. 101 Ibid., 266. 102 Ibid., 267. 103 Henri Frankfort, Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Interpretation (New York: Harper & Row, 1948), 124, 135–6. 104 Campbell, Creative Mythology, 647ff. Campbell is drawing on Heinrich

Notes to pages 103–25

105 106 107

108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

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Zimmer, The Philosophies of India, ed. Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series XXV (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1951), 372–8. Campbell, Primitive Mythology, 85. Frye, Words with Power, 1st ed. (1990), 100–19 / cw ed., vol. 26 (2008), 97–112. Michael Dolzani, “The Infernal Method: Northrop Frye and Contemporary Criticism,” in Eleanor Cook, Chaviva Hošek, Jay Macpherson, Patricia Parker, and Julian Patrick, eds., Centre and Labyrinth: Essays in Honour of Northrop Frye (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 59–68. Frye, The Double Vision, 1st ed. (1991), 74–5 / cw ed., vol. 4 (1999), 226–7. Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood: A Play for Voices (New York: New Directions, 1954), 34. Frye, The Great Code, 1st ed. (1982), 49–50 / cw ed., vol. 19 (2006), 67–8. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, nj: Bollingen, 1949, 1968), 381. Ibid., 390. Wilhelm Windelband, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Modern, first pub. 1901, vol. 2 of Windelband, A History of Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 367. Ibid., 368. Ibid., 368. Campbell, Occidental Mythology, vol. 3 of The Masks of God (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1964), 240. Ibid., 242. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, from chapters 1 and 2, quoted in Campbell, Occidental Mythology, 370–1. See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 146–63. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 28. Ibid., 147. Campbell, Occidental Mythology, 250–1. “Wilfred Owen’s Preface,” The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, rev. ed., ed. C. Day Lewis (New York: New Directions, 1965), 31. Quoted in Campbell, Creative Mythology, 308, citing Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Compass, 1959), 92. “Preface,” in Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington and London: University of Indiana Press, 1976), xii–xiii. To my mind, the Frye scholar who understands the concept of spiritual otherness most deeply is Sára Tóth, and I have learned much about its meaning both from her writings and from our conversations. Frye, Words with Power, 1st ed. (1990), 286 / cw ed., vol. 26 (2008), 26, 265.

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Notes to pages 129–43

part two 1 John Donne, “Hymne to God my God, in my Sicknesse,” in Herbert J.C. Grierson, ed., The Poems of John Donne, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1912), vol. 2, 368, spelling and punctuation modernized. 2 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1957), 203–6 / Anatomy of Criticism, ed. Robert D. Denham, vol. 22 (2006), 189–92. 3 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1954), 91. He also says, “The need these societies also feel for a periodic regeneration is a proof that they too cannot perpetually maintain their position in what we have just called the paradise of archetypes, and that their memory is capable (though doubtless far less intensely than that of a modern man) of revealing the irreversibility of events, that is, of recording history. Thus, among these primitive peoples too, the existence of man in the cosmos is regarded as a fall” (75). 4 Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, first pub. 1961 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), Book 5, line 233. 5 Friedrich von Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime: Two Essays, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 153. 6 James Dickey, “The Heaven of Animals,” in The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945–1992 (Hanover, nh, and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 78. 7 C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R.F.C. Hull, vol. 5, 2nd ed., of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1956), xxiv–xxv. 8 See Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, no translator listed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 82–6. See also his Australian Religion: An Introduction (Ithaca, ny, and London: Cornell University Press, 1973), 44–50. In both cases Eliade’s account is based on the work of T.G.H. Strehlow. 9 Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 292. 10 Derrida, “Différance,” in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 27. 11 As “(Discourse) of Hermes Trismegistus: Poimandres,” in Anon., Hermetica, ed. and trans. Brian P. Copenhaven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–7. 12 Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1961), Book I, sec. 7, 28.

Notes to pages 144–73

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13 Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, Bollingen Series C (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1974), part 1. 14 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, in The Portable Dante, trans. Mark Musa (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1995), Paradiso, 31.39. 15 Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex (New York: Random House, 1953), xix: “She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidential, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.” 16 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 2nd ed., ed. A.C. Hamilton (Harlow, England: Pearson, 2001), Book III, Canto vi, stanza 47, lines 5–6. 17 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1955), 376 (no line numbers). 18 Ibid., 371. 19 Ibid., 372. 20 Thanks to Graham Forst for this example. 21 In The Third Culture, ed. John Brockman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 141. 22 Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion: An Introductory Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 296. The quotation appears in the section “Modes of Thought,” 291–312. 23 Joseph Campbell, “The Symbol without Meaning,” in Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Selected Essays 1944–1968 (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2002), 123. 24 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, nj: Bollingen, 1949, 1968), 130, 237. The redefinition of “atonement” as at-one-ment rather than propitiation is sometimes dismissed in theological circles as a naïve New Age-ism, but in fact Coleridge is aware of it in Lay Sermons, ed. R.J. White, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Bollingen Series LXXV (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1972), vol. 6, 55, though sceptical of it as a doubtful etymology. Thanks to Adam Carter for this reference. 25 Thanks to Graham Forst for this reference. 26 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, first pub. 1966 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). 27 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). See also Girard, The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). 28 The most prominent members were Gilbert Murray, Frances Cornford, and Jane Ellen Harrison. 29 Northrop Frye, “Sir James Frazer,” in Architects of Modern Thought, 3rd and 4th series (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corp., 1959), republished as

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Notes to pages 173–90

“Symbolism of the Unconscious,” in Robert D. Denham, ed., Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 84–94 / “Sir James Frazer,’ in “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963, ed. Germaine Warkentin, cw, vol. 21 (2006), 267–75. Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, first pub. 1912 (Cleveland, Ohio, and New York: Meridian Books, 1962). Northrop Frye, “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas,” in Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 119–29 / [same title] in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, ed. Angela Esterhammer, cw, vol. 16 (2005), 31. See Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, first pub. 1909, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). Otto Rank, The Trauma of Birth, first pub. 1924 (Mineola, ny: Dover, 1994). C.G. Jung, “The Stages of Life,” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, trans. R.F.C. Hull, vol. 8, 2nd ed., of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1956), 387–403. Campbell, Occidental Mythology, vol. 3 of The Masks of God (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1964), 157–77. No subject in prehistory seems as controversial as that of the Neanderthals, in part because the prejudice that they were sub-human savages was irresistibly convenient for the myth of human evolutionary progress that dominated the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the point where “Neanderthal” became a popular synonym for stupid – compared to us modern humans, of course. Dispute over the evidence is summed up thus by Robert J. Wenke, in Patterns in Prehistory: Humankind’s First Three Million Years, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 163: “Thus some scholars see no evidence that any Neandertal were intentionally buried, while others believe that the Neandertal invested death with human-like emotion and ritual.” Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello, sj (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 240–56. “Overture,” 16. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 10, 245: “All names, all titles, vanish in confusion: / A mother’s rival, and a father’s mistress, / Sister of sons, and mother of your brothers!” Myrrha is aware that there is no incest taboo in nature, and, like some modern theorists, she doubts that it is culturally universal. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, first pub. 1915, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, 1965).

Notes to pages 191–216

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41 Northrop Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” in D.A. Robertson, Jr, ed., English Institute Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 58–73 / [same title] in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance, ed. Troni Y. Grande and Garry Sherbert, cw, vol. 28 (2010), 3–13. 42 See Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), chap. 3, “The Triumph of Time,” 78 / [same title] in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance, cw, vol. 28 (2010), chap. 3, “The Triumph of Time,” 176. 43 I am borrowing the terms eiron and alazon from Frye in Anatomy of Criticism, 1st ed. (1957), 39–40 / cw ed., vol. 22 (2007), 37–8. Frye borrowed them from the pamphlet, which borrowed them from Aristotle. 44 Ibid., 1st ed. (1957), 177–86 / cw ed., vol. 22 (2007), 165–73. 45 Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is very much in the Jonsonian tradition and displays exactly the sense of moral ambiguity and ambivalence typical of it. 46 Northrop Frye, The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare’s Problem Comedies (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 23 / [same title] in Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance, ed. Troni Y. Grande and Garry Sherbert, cw, vol. 28 (2010), 377. 47 C.L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form in Relation to Social Custom, first pub. 1961, 2nd ed. (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1972). 48 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1st ed. (1957), 182–4 / cw ed., vol. 22 (2007), 169–70. 49 W.H. Auden, in his poem “As I Walked Out One Evening,” cp, 114–15. 50 With exceptions born of close collaboration of a director with a composer, such as Sergei Eisenstein with Prokofiev, Alfred Hitchcock with Bernard Hermann, Sergio Leone with Ennio Morricone. Thanks to John Parry for this suggestion.

part three 1 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series XLVI (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1954), 106ff. 2 See J. Edward Chamberlin, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2001), 1, 11. 3 “The Gospel of Thomas,” trans. Thomas O. Lambdin, in James M. Robinson, gen. ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row), 138.

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Notes to pages 217–29

4 The distinction is explained in Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1947), 56 / [same title], ed. Nicholas Halmi, cw, vol. 14 (2004), 50. 5 The Stevens poem is “A Quiet Normal Life,” cp, 523. The Hölderlin is “To the Parcae,” trans. Walter Kaufmann, in his book Existentialism, Religion, and Death: Thirteen Essays (New York: New American Library, 1976), 231. 6 Joseph Campbell, “Bios and Mythos,” in Campbell, Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological Dimension, first pub. 1969 (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2002), 35–6. 7 Eiseley, “Instruments of Darkness,” in Eiseley, The Night Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 54. 8 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, London: Norton, 1981). 9 James Joyce, Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 481. 10 Nikos Kazantzakis, The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises, trans. Kimon Friar (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960). 11 Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 105–10 / [same title], ed. Michael Dolzani, cw, vol. 26 (2008), 111–17; Frye deals with Longinus’s On the Sublime in ibid., 106/111. 12 Ernst Cassirer’s central work is the encyclopaedic Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1923–27), but for an accessible introduction to his theories, see Suzanne Lander, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study of the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Harmondsworth, England, and New York: Penguin, 1948). 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral Sense,” in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Maximilian A. Mugge (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 173–92. 14 Fredric Jameson, The Prisonhouse of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1975). 15 See Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana, Ill., and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986), chap. 3, for a discussion of Lacan’s three orders: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real. 16 For an examination of Frye, Eliade, Jung, and Campbell from the standpoint of a visionary phenomenology, see Glen Robert Gill, Northrop Frye and the Phenomenology of Myth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). 17 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 18 For the more positive side of Vico that influenced Frye, see Caterina Nella

Notes to pages 230–3

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Cotrupi, Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). Topics relevant here include the sublime, the philosophy of process, and Vico’s premonition of the theory of imagination – “Verum factum” (What is true for us is what we have made) – which Frye liked to quote. Frye observes, in the Introduction to his Words with Power (1990), “The Great Code [1982] owed a good deal to Vico, the first modern thinker to understand that all major verbal structures have descended historically from poetic and verbal ones. But even Vico had a limited interest in the continuous social function of literature, and he paid little attention to the principle that makes it insistent. The same is true of Schelling, who began with similar postulates”; Frye, Words with Power, 1st ed. (1990), xii— xiii / cw, vol. 26 (2008), 8. Schelling, in the posthumous Philosophy of Art (1859), based on lectures he gave 1802–03, presented art as the highest form of human expression because it unites all opposites, including subject and object. Frye is perhaps thinking of Schelling’s turn in late career towards mythology and religion. 19 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in David Lee Clark, ed., Shelley’s Prose (New York: New Amsterdam, 1988), 287. 20 Loren Eiseley, “We Are the Scriveners,” in Eiseley, Another Kind of Autumn (New York: Scribners, 1977), 16. 21 So far as I am aware, the jury is still out on a genetic component for homosexuality. For every scientific study suggesting one, a sceptical response seems to insist that any evidence is so indirect and interpretable as to prevent any firm conclusions. Moreover, the jury has not even begun to deliberate on the much wider perspective into which the question of homosexuality has emerged during the years when I was writing the present book, for which the traditional term has been “androgyny.” The distinction heterosexual / homosexual now seems perhaps another inadequate binary. The challenge is far from merely theoretical: there actually exist among us, we now realize, fellow human beings whose sense of identity eludes binary identifications of all sorts and our best attempts at a stable terminology, even our use of pronouns. Bisexual, trans, gender fluid, asexual (which may not always be the same as non-sexual) – the existence of a polymorphous human identity is no longer in question, only how to accommodate it. Society must explore genetic components of sexuality, launch new research in the social sciences, and revisit the experiential investigations of Kinsey and of Masters and Johnson with greater sophistication. But it should also rethink how myth criticism and Jungian psychology can address sexual identity and desire, lest the conversation remain fashionably shallow. In Mircea Eliade’s The Two and the One, trans. J.M. Cohen

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(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), his essay “Mephistopheles and the Androgyne or The Mystery of the Whole,” 78–124, catalogues, with his usual encyclopaedic thoroughness, the myth of androgyny in myth and ritual, in philosophy (Plato), in Romanticism and the Decadence, indeed nearly everywhere, “androgyny” becoming a catch-all for any attempt to imagine beyond the heterosexual binary. Jung, who came upon the problem via the image of the hermaphrodite in alchemy, could toss off unenlightened remarks, but Jungian psychology seems to me theoretically emancipated from biological essentialism and heteronormativity, or could become so with moderate revision. To sum up a very complicated argument, the androgyne or hermaphrodite is an age-old symbol of the coincidence of opposites. Such a coincidence transcends the human condition: it is the condition of Milton’s angels, who can assume either gender, and of unfallen spirits in some Gnostic cosmologies, who sport such startling designations as “the Mother-Father.” But the spectrum of human gender and sexual identity comes into being as a range of ways for human desire to approximate that union. From this perspective, terms such as “bisexual” and “non-binary” could be considered types – figures, foreshadowings – of which androgyny is the antitype, fully realized perhaps only on the level of imaginative vision, though at least intermittently or approximately in ordinary experience. It is in this sense that Virginia Woolf could contend that the artist, as artist, is androgynous. However, Jung would insist that renouncing reductive and deterministic binary categories, while both admirable and necessary, cannot liberate us from the play of opposites that is the very essence of desire. We may define ourselves in ways that elude the masculine / feminine either / or, but desire is desire. Desire is attraction to an Other, with all the ambivalences and complexities thereof. The allure of otherness is one rationale for polyamory and affairs: people may seek someone different simply because of the positive value of the difference, not because there is a deficiency in the present partner or the relationship. Non-monogamy can be a desire for a richer identityin-difference and not for mere novelty. Moreover, the allure goes far beyond the categories of gender: just about anything can be “cathected,” accounting for the many varieties of “fetishism.” And the otherness of desire also brings with it bdsm’s fantasies of power, of mastery and surrender. In short, the revolt against the heteronormative and its biological essentialism ends in the thousand exfoliating forms of human sexual fantasy – for some exactly the fear. Value judgments notwithstanding, it is a revolt of the imagination: the Promethean blaze of libido defies the ascetic limits posed by the gods, including that idol more powerful than any

Notes to pages 236–43

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Zeus, the “reality principle.” Once again imagination manifests its duplicity: Prometheus, the lawless, consuming, libidinous fire, decreates old forms, working together with Eros, the consummating power that recreates by marrying the broken, lonely shards of the universe into a newly differentiated whole. Lynn Margulis has written many books, both scholarly and popularizing, but see her Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 1999). For an impressively ambitious, fascinating, and original imaginative recreation of evolution, see Jeffery Donaldson, Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2015). See the well-known essay by Leslie Fiedler, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” in Fiedler, An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 142–51. Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004). Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1960). Graves’s well-known The White Goddess (1948) attempts to revive Goddess worship in a modern post-Romantic form, as do some of his poems, such as “To Juan at the Winter Solstice,” in Graves, New Collected Poems (Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1977), 105–6. Campbell, Primitive Mythology, vol. 1 of The Masks of God, first pub. 1959 (New York: Penguin, 1976), 144–50. There is a similar discussion in “The Symbol without Meaning,” In Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander: Selected Essays 1944–1968 (Novato, Calif.: New World Library, 2002), 119–23. Campbell, “The Symbol without Meaning,” 153. Ibid., 154. Ibid., 135. Ibid., 154. Eliade’s Cosmos and History (the second part of the English title, after The Myth of the Eternal Return [1954]) appeared first in French in 1949. In that same year, Northrop Frye, in Canadian Forum, reviewed two works by Christian theologians that also related the Bible to a linear, progressive theory of history, Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History and Reinhold Niebuhr’s Faith and History. Frye’s review concludes: “In all human institutions, then, there is a rotary movement of rise and fall which goes back to the original fall of man. The affinity of this rhythm of growth and decay to that of the natural world, with its yearly vegetable cycle of death and revival, is the basis for the Vico–Spengler conception of history as showing a series of ‘civilizations’ or

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Notes to pages 244–64

‘cultures’ which behave more or less like natural organisms and go through much the same phases of growth, maturation, and decline. It is also possible that behind this organic rhythm, which it seems to me certainly does exist in history, there may be an evolutionary one, and, without vulgarizing this into a theory of progress, we may perhaps see in the Industrial Revolution the beginning of something that makes us, in the words of Wyndham Lewis, the cavemen of a new mental era.” Review collected as “The Rhythm of Growth and Decay,” in Robert D. Denham, ed., Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 141–6 / “Two Books on Christianity and History,” in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, ed. Jan Gorak, cw, vol. 11 (2003), 230. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1991). In Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” in O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1955), 1–24. Alvin Lee, in his Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon: “Beowulf” as Metaphor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), argues that the real genre of Beowulf is heroic romance rather than epic. This suggestive intuition connects Beowulf with these earlier Greek heroes. Campbell, Occidental Mythology, vol. 3 of The Masks of God (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1964), 157–76. My discussion here is indebted to Campbell at many points. The Ulysses whom Dante (in Inferno, Canto 26) and Tennyson (in his poem “Ulysses”) portray as setting out on a final adventure in old age rounds out the pattern. Northrop Frye, “Spengler Revisited,” originally in Daedalus (1974), collected as same in Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington, Ind., and London: University of Indiana Press, 1976), 179–99 / [same title] in Northrop Frye on Modern Culture, ed. Jan Gorak, cw, vol. 11 (2003), 311–14. Harold Bloom, “The Internalization of Quest Romance,” in Harold Bloom, ed., Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism (New York: Norton, 1970), 3–21. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1957), 186 / Anatomy of Criticism, ed. Robert D. Denham, cw, vol. 22 (2007), 173. John Milton, Areopagitica, in Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, Odyssey Press, 1957), 731: Milton says that Plato, in his Laws, “fed his fancy with making many edicts to his airy burgomasters, which they who otherwise admire him, wish

Notes to pages 264–87

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51 52

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had been rather buried and excused in the genial cups of an Academic night-sitting.” Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (New York: Vintage, 1955); Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (New York: Vintage, 1959). James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Compass, 1959), 245. See Northrop Frye’s Student Essays, 1932–1938, ed. Robert D. Denham, cw, vol. 3 (1997). William Wordsworth, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. J.C. Maxwell (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1971), line 694 (1805 ed.), line 108 (1850 ed.). Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the Puritan Revolution (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972). See M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1973), chap. 3, sec. 1, “The Great Circle: Pagan and Christian Neoplatonism,” 146–54, although examples also occur elsewhere in the book. Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 1, lines 361–2 (1805 ed.); lines 350–1 (1850 ed.). Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern, first pub. 1943 (Garden City, ny: Doubleday Anchor, 1961). Northrop Frye, “Expanding Eyes,” originally published in Critical Inquiry (1975), collected in Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington, Ind., and London: University of Indiana Press, 1976), 114 / [same title] in The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975, ed. Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner, cw, vol. 27 (2009). 403. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). A word about this pejorative use of “Gnostic” in discussions of the conception, within Romantic and post-Romantic tradition, of a potentially available power immanent in humanity and nature. In the first three centuries of the Common Era, the church condemned and eventually suppressed as heretical a variety of texts basing redemption on a direct spiritual experience (gnosis), rather than on adherence to the church’s teachings and authority. Two allegations were recurrent: first, that Gnosticism was motivated by an elitist, megalomaniacal quest for power, and, second, that it was ultimately nihilistic, rejecting nature, the cosmos, and the human body with its physical desires in favour of a transcendent, immaterial existence. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the idea of a power within that could transform the world has unnerved those who fear – not unrea-

426

53

54 55

56 57 58 59

60

61

62

Notes to pages 288–91

sonably – that it may inspire the kind of nihilistic power trip that Jung calls “inflation” – hence the label “Gnostic” applied at some point to almost every Romantic or post-Romantic writer or theory. Gnosticism was an extremely complex and heterogeneous phenomenon that we have only begun to process, and modern writers influenced by it have tended to extract what they found valuable while rejecting, or at least side-stepping, the rest. This is true of Blake, Jung, and the Gnostic scholar Elaine Pagels. In short, while certain aspects of Gnosticism may turn out to be problematic, others may be rewarding, even redemptive. In any case, the blanket use of “Gnostic” as a scare term is unacceptable. Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism? Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 17–18. Ibid., 18. Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 263. This is not from Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man but quoted from another of his letters in the editor’s Commentary in Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, ed. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 300. Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism?, 21. Ibid., 21. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 300. Johann Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, pub. in German in 1944, pub. in English by Beacon Press, Boston, in 1955, 3rd ed., no translator listed (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). See Graham Forst, “Frye Spiel: Frye and ‘Homo Ludens,’” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36, no. 3 (Sept. 2003), 73–86, for an incisive discussion of Frye and Huizinga. Also Robert D. Denham, “Northrop Frye and Johan Huizinga,” University of Toronto Quarterly 8, no. 4 (fall 2019), 307–22. Although the Foreword to Homo Ludens is dated June 1938, a reference to “the events of September 1939” in the final chapter (English translation, 210) indicates that the book was not in final form until its first publication in 1944. The ongoing world war has clearly made Huizinga ambivalent in his closing pages about how far “modern war” is informed by the spirit of play. Quoted in C.G. Jung, Psychological Types, first pub. in German in 1921, trans. R.F.C. Hull, vol. 6 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1971), 94. Ibid.

Notes to pages 291–305

63 64 65 66

67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80

81 82 83

84 85

427

Ibid., 96. Ibid. Ibid. Thomas Mann, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, trans. Walter D. Morris (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983), 63–4. A discussion by Joseph Campbell appears in Creative Mythology, vol. 4 of Campbell, The Masks of God (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1968), 327–30. Barzun, Classic, Romantic and Modern, 70. Ibid., 71. C.G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Transference,” in Jung, The Practice of Psychotherapy, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton, nj: Bollingen, 1954), 163–323, later republished as vol. 16, 2nd ed., of The Collected Works of C.J. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1966), 198. See de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 145–238. Ibid., 238. Ibid., 290. Ibid., 227–8. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 230–1. Ibid., 230. Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982) / [same title], ed. Alvin A. Lee, cw, vol. 19 (2006), 222. Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (New York: Bantam, 1966), 198–9: this long, rhapsodic prose poem was later performed to musical accompaniment on an album by Buffy Sainte-Marie. C.G. Jung, “On the Nature of the Psyche,” in Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 2nd ed., trans. R.F.C. Hull, vol. 8 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1969), 169. Ibid., 170. C.G. Jung, C.G. Jung: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, ed. James L. Jarrett, 2 vols., Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1988), 118–19. There is a detailed discussion of Schiller in Jung’s Psychological Types, 67–135. C.G. Jung, C.G. Jung: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 118. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 111. Theodor W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” in Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, first pub. 1998, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 240. Ibid., 247. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1981), 19–20.

428

86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103

104 105 106

107 108

109 110

Notes to pages 306–31

Ibid., 103, 104–5. Ibid, 70. Ibid., 131. Ibid., 28–9. Forest Pyle, The Ideology of the Imagination: Subject and Society in the Discourse of Romanticism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 120–1. Ibid., 121. Ibid., 123. Ibid., 128. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 1, 2. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 208. Eagleton, After Theory, 171. Ibid., 155–6. Ibid., 162–3. Ibid, 163. Ibid., 154. Eagleton, Literary Theory, 171. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J.H. Barnard (New York: Hafner, 1966), 192–6. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, first pub. 1908, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities Press, 1953). Jung identifies Worringer’s abstraction with introversion and empathy with extraversion in Psychological Types, chap. 7, “The Type Problem in Aesthetics,” 289–99. D.H. Lawrence, “Why the Novel Matters,” in Edward D. McDonald, ed., Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975), 535. Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), 209–25. See Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower, first pub. 1993 (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2019), and The Parable of the Talents, first pub. 1998 (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2000). Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, first pub. 1937 (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1987). Leslie Fiedler, “The Macrocosmic Myth, or God Is Not Love,” in Fiedler, Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), chap. 7, 120–46. Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Trilogy (Garden City, ny: Doubleday Book Club, 1951). Ezra Pound, Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1979), 796–7.

Notes to pages 334–52

429

part four 1 Stéphane Mallarmé, Igitur, trans. Robert Greer Cohn, in Mary Ann Caws, ed., Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: New Directions, 1981), 91–102. 2 Mallarmé, “Sonnet in yx,” trans. Patricia Terry and Maurice Z. Shroder, in Mary Ann Caws, ed., Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poetry and Prose (New York: New Directions, 1981), 49. 3 Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1973). 4 Philip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism, first pub. 1954 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968). 5 Jung, Psychological Types, first pub. 1921, trans. R.F.C. Hull, vol. 6 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1971), 258. 6 Ibid. 7 Northrop Frye, “Expanding Eyes,” originally published in Critical Inquiry (1975), collected in Frye, Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society (Bloomington, Ind., and London: University of Indiana Press, 1976), 99–122 / [same title] in The Critical Path and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963–1975, ed. Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner, cw, vol. 27 (2009), 407. 8 Frye, Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 111–17 / [same title], ed. Michael Dolzani, cw, vol. 26 (2008), 105–10. 9 In Phil Cousineau ed., The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work (Garden City, ny: Image, 1966), 47–8. 10 Alice Munro, “Pictures of the Ice,” in Munro, Friend of My Youth (New York: Vintage, 1990), 137–55. 11 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1957). 270ff. / Anatomy of Criticism, ed. Robert D. Denham, cw, vol. 22 (2007), 253ff. 12 Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,” in vol. 11 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, gen. ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 153–61. 13 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1st ed. (1957), 278, 280 / cw ed., vol. 22 (2007), 260, 262. 14 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 82. 15 Ibid., 83. 16 Ibid., 83.

430

Notes to pages 352–60

17 Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1981), 122. 18 Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1982), 27. The Miller passage is quoted from J. Hillis Miller, “Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure,” Georgia Review 30, no. 2 (1976), 336. The Yale critics write from a perspective of disillusionment, their later work a repudiation of an earlier viewpoint. In Bloom’s early books, that perspective was Frye’s. Miller began as a phenomenologist seeking rapport with an author’s vision. De Man’s early writing was, of course, Nazi propaganda. I do not intend this as debunking but rather as a way of thinking through the issue of critical Contraries and Negations. 19 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1963). 20 “The Homeric Encyclopedia” is the title of chap. 4 of ibid. 21 In Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1977), Ong says (9) that Interfaces “carries forward work in two earlier volumes by the same author [Ong], The Presence of the Word (1967) and Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (1971).” Their theme is “the evolution from primary orality through writing and print to an electronic culture, which produces secondary orality.” 22 Jacques Barzun, Science: The Glorious Entertainment (New York: Harper & Row, 1964). 23 Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 68. 24 Ibid., 69. 25 A remarkable science-fiction example is Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” – in both Starlight 2 (1998) and Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others (New York: Tor Books, 2002) – the basis of the film Arrival (2016). Humans figure out how to communicate with alien arrivals through their writing system, which is visually based rather than phonocentric. Chiang’s background is in computer science. My hunch about the link to a Vision of Transcendence is borne out by the fact that learning the visually based language enables the human protagonist to transcend the limits of time. 26 Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1947), 417–18 / [same title], ed. Nicholas Halmi, cw, vol. 14 (2004), 404–5. 27 Ibid., 1st ed. (1947), 417 / cw ed., vol. 14 (2004), 404. 28 The “Third Book” Notebooks of Northrop Frye, 1964–1972, ed. Michael Dolzani, cw, vol. 9 (2002), 209–15. Diagrams of the two arrangements appear in the endnotes, on 403 and 404.

Notes to pages 361–9

431

29 Loren Eiseley, “The Mind as Nature,” in Eiseley, The Night Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 195–224. 30 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1st ed. (1957), 275–81 / cw ed., vol. 22 (2007), 257–63. 31 Theodore Sturgeon, “To Here and the Easel,” in Frederik Pohl, ed., Star Short Novels, Ballantine 89 (Oct. 1954), 110–66, collected in Paul Williams, ed., The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon, vol. 8, Bright Segment (1953–55) (Berkeley, Calif.: North Atlantic Books, 2002), 184. In its time, the linguistic inventiveness of his best work was a revelation. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” in Deconstructive Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 231. 32 Ibid., 230–1. 33 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 1st ed. (1957), 334 / cw ed., vol. 22 (2007), 313. 34 Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. David Farrell Krell, in Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 193. 35 Theodore Roethke, “Praise to the End!,” in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (New York: Anchor Press, 1975), 81–4. 36 Theodore Roethke, “Open Letter,” in Ralph Mills, ed., On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose of Theodore Roethke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), 36–43. 37 Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” trans. David Farrell Krell, in Krell, ed., Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 91–112. 38 See Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Frans Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art, first pub. 1964 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). 39 Homer, Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, first pub. 1961 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), Book 13, 134–6. 40 Frye, “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” in Frye, The Stubborn Structure: Essays on Criticism and Society (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1970), 236–7 / [same title] in Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Imre Salusinszky, cw, vol. 17 (2005), 304–5. 41 Ibid., 1st ed. (1970), 238 / cw ed., vol. 17 (2005), 306. 42 Eiseley, “The Places Below,” is in Eiseley, The Night Country (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 15–27. “The Innocent Fox” appears in Eiseley, The Unexpected Universe (New York: Harcourt, 1969), 194–212. 43 John Crowley’s four volumes are The Solitudes, Love and Sleep, Daemonomania, and Endless Things, first published 1987–2007, reissued as “The Aegypt Cycle” (New York: Overlook Press, 2007), 4 vols. 44 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper, 1976).

432

Notes to pages 369–80

45 Hans-George Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. rev. by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroads, 1989). 46 Northrop Frye, “Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility,” in Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 130–7 / [same title] in Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Imre Salusinszky, cw, vol. 17 (2005), 7–15. 47 Northrop Frye, “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult,” in Frye, The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979–1990, ed. Robert D. Denham (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), 121–2 / [same title] in Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature, ed. Glen Robert Gill, cw, vol. 29 (2010), 363. 48 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, ed. Joan Rivière (New York: Basic Books, 1959), vol. 4, 368–407 / in The Standard Edition of the Collected Works of Sigmund Freud, gen. ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–74), vol. 4, 184–91. 49 For an early instance, see Frye, “Yeats and the Language of Symbolism,” in Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 218–37 / in Northrop Frye on Twentieth-Century Literature, ed. Glen Robert Gill, cw, vol. 29 (2010), 54–73. The Kant discussion is presented on 227–8 in the original work. Frye’s study of Beddoes is “Yorick: The Romantic Macabre,” in Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 51–85 / in Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Imre Salusinszky, cw, vol. 17 (2005), 92–205, the Kant references occurring 149–50. The “Kantian riddle” is referred to again in A Study of English Romanticism, 84–5, 111–12 / cw, vol. 17 (2005), 149–50, 167–8. 50 C.G. Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, vol. 15 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1969), 84–108. 51 In Books 6 and 14 (13 in 1805 ed.) of The Prelude. 52 Samuel R. Delany, Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics (Hanover, nh, and London: Wesleyan University Press), 1994. 32. See also Delany, Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary (Hanover, nh, and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). 53 See Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1976), 30–1 / in “The Secular Scripture” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976–1991, ed. Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson, cw, vol. 18 (2006), 70–4. Also Frye, Words with Power, 1st ed. (1990), 266–71 / cw ed., vol. 26 (2008), 228–32.

Notes to pages 381–99

433

54 Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 195 / [same title], ed. Alvin A. Lee, cw, vol. 19 (2006), 217. 55 C.G. Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R.F.C. Hull, vol. 9, part 2, 2nd ed., of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1959), 53. 56 Frye, “Literature as Context: Milton’s Lycidas,” in Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 122 / in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, ed. Angela Esterhammer, cw, vol. 16 (2005), 27–8. 57 See Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), chap. 4, “The East,” 126–52; the term is defined on 127. 58 Frye, Words with Power, 1st ed. (1990), 276 / cw ed., vol. 26 (2008), 236. 59 Northrop Frye, “World Enough without Time,” originally appeared in Hudson Review (1959), then in Frye, Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature: A Collection of Review Essays, ed. Robert D. Denham (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 106 / in “The Educated Imagination” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1933–1963, ed. Germaine Warkentin, cw, vol. 21 (2006), 293–4. 50 Robert D. Denham, Northrop Frye: Religious Visionary and Architect of the Spiritual World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004). See the section “Insight,” 90–6. 61 Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. and enlarged ed. (New York: Norton, 1968). 62 Jacques Barzun finds a kindred temperament in William James: “To be free of self-consciousness while going about one’s business among those afflicted with it presupposes a kind of innocence very rare in adults. When found, it usually goes with the virtue that Nietzsche preached without achieving – gaiety, the Italian sprezzatura or courteous veiling of seriousness. Since James’s time the social grace of poise has been replaced by the greater obligation to journey into one’s interior, where the darkness, more often than not, adds to the outer gloom. For this and other reasons, our models act as if they were spiritually allergic to themselves. One sometimes suspects a confusion between ‘Know thyself’ and the rumination about oneself which, in all but the incurably vain, breeds perpetual self-consciousness and self-contempt.” A Stroll with William James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 275–6. It was the Romantics who established self-consciousness as a hallmark of modernity – a kind of psychological version of the Fortunate Fall, a developmentally necessary

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Notes to pages 399–401

affliction. What has dwindled since is the faith that there is anything beyond it. 63 Frye, Fearful Symmetry, 1st ed. (1947), 193 / cw ed., vol. 14 (2004), 195. 64 Northrop Frye’s Notebooks for “Anatomy of Criticism”, ed. Robert D. Denham, cw, vol. 23 (2007), 28. Thanks to Robert Denham for providing this quotation.

Introduction

435

Index

Note: An index to a book of the present sort presents special problems, not merely because of its unusually dense allusiveness but because of the difficulty of deciding what is merely a passing reference: the book’s whole point is interconnectedness, the sense that everything is part of a total pattern. I have tried, therefore, to be highly inclusive, and have been amused at some of the juxtapositions: Three Stooges and Paul Tillich, for instance, Keystone Kops and Kierkegaard. However, certain terms are so ubiquitous that including them would have expanded the index beyond usefulness: thus the only entries for “Bible,” “Christianity,” “myth,” and “mythology” are those in which the meaning of the term is itself the subject. Specific Biblical references are too numerous to index, with the significant exceptions of Job and Paul; Biblical patterns such as Creation, paradise, Fall, and so on can be located through the section titles. The same is true of specific Classical myths, with the significant exceptions of Eros and Prometheus; references to Classical myths can be searched through looking under “Hesiod,” “Homer,” and the like. Abramovic, Marina, 210 Abrams, M.H., 273, 288, 297; Natural Supernaturalism, xv, 88, 94, 120, 137, 278, 279, 286, 298–9, 301, 312 Adorno, Theodor: “On Subject and Object,” 304, 306 Aeschylus, 165, 270; Agamemnon, 179; Oresteia, 186, 249; The Persians, 179; Prometheus Bound, 249 Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 148

Aldiss, Brian, 325 allegory, 333–4 Allen, Woody, 205 Althusser, Louis, 282, 306–7 Ammons, A.R., 111, 348 Anderson, Wes, 206 Apocalypse Now (film), 170 Apuleius: The Golden Ass, 393, 394 Ardrey, Robert: The Territorial Imperative, 164 Aristophanes, 243; The Birds, 264, 396

436

Index

Aristotle: Poetics, 179–82, 185, 187–90, 191, 209, 358 Arnold, Matthew, 135, 364, 394 Aquinas, Thomas, 33 Asimov, Isaac: The Foundation Trilogy, 327 Atonement, 159–60, 169–70, 243, 382 Aucassin and Nicolette, 259 Auden, W.H., 205, 230, 345, 348; “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” 84; “In Praise of Limestone,” 216, 401 Auerbach, Erich, 353 Augustine, 68–9, 220, 271–2, 344; Confessions, 43, 345 Austen, Jane: Sense and Sensibility, 370 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 207 Bachofen, J.J., 100–1 Bacon, Francis: Essays, 344; The New Atlantis, 78 Balzac, Honoré de, 321 Barfield, Owen: Poetic Diction, 363 Barnes, Djuna: Nightwood, 380 Barzun, Jacques: Classic, Romantic, and Modern, 279, 293–4; Science: The Glorious Entertainment, 357; The Use and Abuse of Art, 336 Batman Returns (film), Christopher Nolan, 187 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 62 Barber, C.L., 202 Barry, Lynda: Picture This, 22; What It Is, 22, 369 Bechdel, Alison: Are You My Mother?, 22; Fun Home, 22 Becker, Ernest: The Denial of Death, 45, 388 Beckett, Samuel, 335 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 375; Death’s Jest Book, 45, 155, 381

Benedict, Ruth, 66 Benôit, Pierre, 374 Beowulf, 259 Bergman, Ingmar, 207; Scenes from a Marriage, 148; The Seventh Seal, 136 Bergson, Henri, 76, 119, 173, 219 Berkley, Busby, 210 Berlin, Isaiah, 244 Bible, 9–10, 28, 53–4, 92, 98, 104–15, 125, 127, 140, 204–5, 242–9, 271–2 Blake, William, xiv, xviii, 3, 5, 6, 10–11, 13, 16, 31, 34, 37, 38, 43, 50, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 67, 76, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89, 102, 106, 123, 125, 127, 128, 132, 136, 141, 152, 158, 170, 192, 213, 217, 221, 223, 224, 226, 229–30, 235, 247, 248, 251, 264, 268, 272, 276, 277, 279, 282, 283, 292, 294, 302, 311, 312, 315, 319, 335, 336, 338, 339, 347, 348, 357, 381, 396, 399, 400; cloven fiction, 38, 45, 48, 223, 307, 359–61, 369, 390; Contraries, 55, 65, 81, 89, 115, 127–8, 139, 143, 164, 217, 275, 278, 285, 290, 292, 293, 296, 338, 351, 358, 360, 383, 391, 399; Fearful Symmetry (Frye), x, xvi, 122, 229, 274–5, 284, 286, 399; The Four Zoas, 82, 93, 142, 144, 156, 275, 280, 370, 402; Jerusalem, 90, 316; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 69, 91, 108, 115, 116, 255, 278; “The Mental Traveller,” 149, 172; Milton, 137, 298, 320; “My Spectre around me night & day,” 99; Negation, 38, 115, 142, 164, 214, 294, 296, 382–5; Vision of the Book of Job, 360; Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 69

Index

Bloom, Harold, 226, 261, 286, 371 Boehme, Jakob, 10, 106, 119, 120, 297, 302, 365, 376, 383 Bohm, David, 94 Borges, Jorge Luis, 330 Brave (Pixar film), 367 Broch, Hermann: The Death of Virgil, 344 Brockman, John, ed.: The Third Culture, 41 Brown, Norman O.: Life against Death, 264, 280, 282 Browne, Sir Thomas: The Gardens of Cyrus, 344; Religio Medici, 344 Browning, Robert, 364, 371; The Ring and the Book, 330, 344 Bruno, Giordano, 118–19, 120, 376, 392 Buber, Martin, 62, 244 Buddha, 201. See also Buddhism Buddhism, 68, 82, 85, 141, 175, 215, 249, 387; Avatamsaka Sutra, 400; Lankavatara Sutra, 390. See also Buddha Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 76–7, 328 Burton, Robert: Anatomy of Melancholy, 107, 138, 316, 344, 392 Butler, Octavia, 326 Butler, Samuel, 65, 76, 219 Byron, Lord, 312, 315; Cain, 370; Manfred, 370 Cabell, James Branch, 402 Calvin, John, 106, 220 Cambridge school of myth and ritual, 27, 172–3, 188 Campbell, John W., 327 Campbell, Joseph, 8, 11, 30, 53, 59, 102, 116, 121, 159, 160, 219, 231–2, 235, 252–3, 269, 270, 273,

437

339–40; The Hero with a Thousand Faces, xv, 115, 117, 121–2, 217; Historical Atlas of World Mythology, 117, 173, 224, 239; The Masks of God, 83, 90, 224; The Mythic Image, 144; Occidental Mythology, 119, 122, 176; The Power of Myth, 68; “The Symbol without Meaning,” xvi, 241–2 Carlyle, Thomas, 121; Sartor Resartus, 76, 107, 345 Carmichael, Hoagy, 131 Carnap, Rudolf, 365 Carroll, Lewis, 38, 81, 221 Carver, Raymond, 323 Cassirer, Ernst, 223 Chanson de Roland, 259 Chaplin, Charlie, 205 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 145; The House of Fame, 34; The Knight’s Tale, 259; The Miller’s Tale, 401; Troilus and Cryseide, 260 Chomsky, Noam, 46, 354; Hegemony or Survival, 238 Christianity, 9–10, 54, 75, 79–80, 120, 139–41, 160–8, 175, 258, 277 Clarke, Arthur C.: Childhood’s End, 326, 334 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 135 Cohen, Leonard: Beautiful Losers, 299; “You Want It Darker,” 333 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, xv, 10, 13, 55, 83, 140, 157, 181, 276, 288, 310, 312, 377, 390; Biographia Literaria, 312; Christabel, 370; “Dejection: An Ode,” 311; “The Eolian Harp,” 75, 315; Hints towards a More Comprehensive Theory of Life, 76; “Hymn before Sunrise,” 376; Kubla Khan, 129, 370, 381; Lyrical Ballads, 134;

438

Index

Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 370, 371 Colonna, Francesca: Hypnerotomachia Polyphili, 376 Conrad, Joseph: Heart of Darkness, 32, 151, 170, 380; “The Secret Sharer,” 380 Cooper, James Fenimore, 237, 324 Crane, Hart: “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge,” 77–8; “The Tower,” 371 Crowley, John: Aegypt, 369, 370, 380; Little, Big, 370, 400 Culler, Jonathan: On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, 352–3 Cunningham, Merce, 210 Dante Alighieri, 71, 87, 104, 112, 129, 136, 144, 176, 230, 240, 259, 270–1, 302, 380, 384, 387; The Divine Comedy, 34, 54, 91, 92, 176, 226, 257, 258, 260–2, 264, 298, 366, 389–90; Inferno, 54, 114, 156, 170, 181, 263, 390; Paradiso, 56, 89, 90, 91–2, 118, 142, 243, 274; La Vita Nuova, 259; Purgatorio, 271 Davies, Sir John: Orchestra, or A Poem of Dancing, 289 Dawkins, Richard, 219; The God Delusion, 30; The Selfish Gene, 40, 46, 164 de Chardin, Teilhard, 219 deconstruction, 4, 48, 50, 61, 63, 85–6, 107, 110, 115–16, 296, 351, 354–9, 363, 389. See also Derrida, Jacques decreation, xv, 57, 80, 82, 108, 110, 125, 267, 299, 332, 336–8, 340, 342, 345, 350–1, 354–5, 360–1, 363, 365, 380, 383, 384, 387–8, 392, 397, 402–3 Delany, Samuel R., 22, 401; Dhalgren,

378–9, 380; “Driftglass,” 78; Nova, 78 Deleuze, Jacques, and Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 282–3 De Man, Paul, 49, 124, 287–8, 300, 301, 335, 353; “Emblem and Image in Yeats,” 294; The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 286, 288 Denham, Robert D.: Northrop Frye: Architect of the Spiritual World, 398 Dennett, Daniel, 40–2 Derrida, Jacques, 8, 38, 48–9, 58, 138, 267, 272, 296, 301, 307, 335, 353, 354–9, 370, 389; “Différance,” 138; Glas, 362; Of Grammatology, 47; “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences,” 49, 116, 137; Writing and Difference, 47. See also deconstruction DeQuincey, Thomas, 312; Confessions of an English Opium Eater, 345; Suspiria de profundis, 345 Descartes, René, 36, 38, 39, 76, 311 Descent of Inana, 380–1 Dickens, Charles, 135, 172, 194, 379, 392, 396; Bleak House, 165, 390; Great Expectations, 58; Hard Times, 367; Little Dorrit, 329, 370; Our Mutual Friend, 329; Pickwick Papers, 370 Dickey, James, 101, 348–9; “The Heaven of Animals,” 135 Dickinson, Emily, 134, 347 Dillard, Annie, 345 Dr. Strangelove (film), Stanley Kubrick, 398 Dr. Zhivago (film), David Lean, 396 Donne, John, 10; “The Canonization,” 71; “The Extasie,” 71; “Hymne to

Index

God my God, in My Sicknesse,” 129; Metempsychosis, 154, 155; “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day,” 388 Don Quixote, 260 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 49, 220, 335, 380; The Brothers Karamazov, 343; Notes from Underground, 344 Douglas, Mary, 158; Purity and Danger, 161 Dunsany, Lord, 371, 392; “Two Bottles of Relish,” 156 Dürer, Albrecht: Melencolia I, 365 Durkheim, Émile: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 190 Dylan, Bob, 22, 395 Eagleton, Terry, 307–9, 351–2, 398; After Theory, 21, 307; Literary Theory: An Introduction, 308 Eastwood, Clint, 187; American Sniper, 235; Million Dollar Baby, 181 Eddison, E.R.: The Worm Ouroboros, 371, 392 Edwards, Jonathan: “Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God,” 53, 382 Egan, Greg: Diaspora, 327 Egyptian mythology, 86, 102–3, 173, 176 Einstein, Albert, 40, 90 Eiseley, Loren, 10, 21, 86, 137, 231; All the Strange Hours, 316, 345; “The Innocent Fox,” 368; “The Instruments of Darkness,” 39–40; “The Mind as Nature,” 361; The Night Country, 219, 316; “The Places Below,” 368 Eliade, Mircea, 55, 90, 100, 175, 297, 398–9; The Myth of the Eternal Return, 131, 214, 242; Patterns in Comparative Religion, 34

439

Eliot, George, 341; Middlemarch, 320–1; Silas Marner, 15 Eliot, T.S., 30, 208, 230, 292, 294, 347, 348; Burnt Norton, 91; Four Quartets, 216, 218, 258, 331, 364, 388, 402; Gerontion, 330; Prufrock, 330; The Waste Land, 273, 329, 331, 344 Ellison, Harlan: “Croatoan,” 379; Deathbird Stories, 379; “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” 379 Enuma elish, 97 Erasmus: In Praise of Folly, 107 Erdman, Jean, 210 Eros, xiv, 69, 117, 146, 251, 280–1, 289, 361, 423n21 Euripides, 139, 180, 181, 192, 237, 265, 270; Alcestis, 254; The Bacchae, 254, 284; The Frogs, 179; Herakles, 187; Helen, 187, 255; Hippolytus, 182; Ion, 193, 255; Iphigenia in Aulis, 171; The Trojan Women, 179, 254 Exorcist, The (film), 374 Fall, the, 129, 139–77 Faulkner, William, 163, 321; Absalom, Absalom, 330, 344 Fiedler, Leslie, 326 Fish, Stanley: Is There a Text in This Class?, 15, 63 folktale, 26, 35, 367, 392–3 Forster, E.M., 146; Howards End, 321; A Passage to India, 321 Foster, Stephen, 131 Foucault, Michel, 19, 50, 157, 165, 282, 307, 357, 369 Frankfort, Henri: Ancient Egyptian Religion, 103 Frazer, Sir James, 162; The Golden Bough, 14, 26–7, 74, 172–4, 237 Freud, Sigmund, 27, 32, 43, 57, 70, 91,

440

Index

132, 147, 155, 215, 244, 287, 361, 372, 374–5; “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words,” 349; Civilization and Its Discontents, 11, 146, 185, 190, 228, 257, 265, 281, 336; The Interpretation of Dreams, 257; Totem and Taboo, 161 Frobenius, Leo, 232, 269 Frost, Robert, 347; “Mending Wall,” 44 Fry, Christopher, 208 Frye, Northrop, 8, 10–11, 17, 19, 22, 31, 64, 67, 72, 75, 81, 82, 83, 101, 112, 113, 135, 137, 144, 165, 179, 191, 192, 201, 203, 215, 223, 230, 231, 255, 273–6, 284, 287, 291, 294, 296, 298, 301, 309, 320, 322, 331, 333, 338, 348, 359, 362, 363, 364, 370, 375, 378, 380, 390, 391, 398–9, 401, 403; Anatomy of Criticism, xvi, 12, 73, 90, 91, 125, 130, 191, 209, 262, 346, 352–3, 380; “The Archetypes of Literature,” 115; “The Argument of Comedy,” 191; The Critical Path, 164, 292, 357; “Dickens and the Comedy of Humours,” 367; The Double Vision, 112, 217; The Educated Imagination, 80; “Expanding Eyes,” 275, 305; Fearful Symmetry, xvi, 122, 229, 274, 284, 285; The Great Code, 245–6, 274, 299, 381; “Henry James and the Comedy of the Occult,” 372; A Natural Perspective, 206; “New Directions from Old,” 274, 336; The Secular Scripture, 93; Spiritus Mundi, 123; Third Book Notebooks, xiv, 114; Words with Power, xiv, 56, 106, 107, 111, 120–1, 123–4, 125, 128, 162, 274–5, 350–1, 354, 355, 391, 396

Gadamer, Hans Georg, 369 Gandhi, Mahatma, 238, 396 Gernsback, Hugo: Ralph 124C41+: A Romance of the Year 2000, 78, 327 Gibbon, Edward, 120; Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 240 Gibson, William: Neuromancer, 326–7 Gilgamesh Epic, 251 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins: “The Yellow Wallpaper,” 372 Ginsberg, Allan, 345 Girard, René: Violence and the Sacred, 166 Gnosticism, 30, 44, 80, 85, 87, 89, 94, 108, 123, 141, 216, 221, 272, 273, 287, 383, 387, 425–6n52 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 11, 157, 288, 374; Faust, 31, 66, 70, 124, 132, 217, 273, 283, 312, 313, 314, 350, 375–6 Goodall, Jane, 77 Gould, Stephen Jay, 33; The Mismeasure of Man, 220 Graves, Robert, 239 Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm: Household Tales, 392 Guthrie, Woody, 235, 395 Haggard, H. Rider, 374; She, 100 Hardy, Thomas, 244 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 173, 378; Themis, 74 Harry Potter: J.K. Rowling, 77, 136, 313, 370 Hartman, Geoffrey, 286; The Unmediated Vision, 335 Hass, Lawrence, 66, 67, 73–4 Havelock, Eric: A Preface to Plato, 355–6 Hawking, Stephen, 79

Index

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 247; “The Artist of the Beautiful,” 371; “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” 371 Hazlitt, William, 312, 345 Hegel, G.W.F., 55, 181, 217, 247, 267, 291, 296, 297–302, 383; Phenomenology of the Spirit, 298, 299, 302, 305, 306, 365 Heidegger, Martin, 65–6, 75, 81, 163, 164, 279, 297, 363–4, 388–9; What Is Metaphysics?, 85, 365 Heinlein, Robert, 327–8, 369, 396, 402; I Will Fear No Evil, 386 Hemingway, Ernest, 323 Henley, William, “Invictus,” 154 Heraclitus, 95, 103 Hesiod: Theogony, 96, 97, 131, 140, 144, 145, 214, 222, 249 Hill, Christopher: The World Turned Upside Down, 275–6 Hinduism, 38, 60, 80, 131, 144, 221, 248–9; Bhagavad Gita, 248–9; Mandukya Upanishad, 103 Hobbes, Thomas, 151 Hodgson, William Hope: The House on the Borderland, 373 Hoffman, E.T.A., 374 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 218, 363 Holdstock, Robert: Mythago Wood, 374 Homer, 227; Iliad, 13, 74, 97, 166, 189, 192, 230, 234, 235, 249–51, 253, 256, 260, 261; Odyssey, 26, 59, 97, 132, 133, 171, 176, 180, 184, 191–2, 193, 249–54, 256, 260, 261, 270, 335, 341, 356, 366, 380, 393 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 34, 80, 101, 348, 388; “God’s Grandeur,” 75; “That kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame,” 75; “That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire,” 75

441

Horace, 345 Huizinga, Johan, 399; Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Elements in Culture, 83, 290–1 Hulme, T.E., 314 Humphrey, Nicholas: Consciousness Regained, 41–2 Husserl, Edmund, 64, 66 Huxley, Aldous: The Doors of Perception, 64 I Ching, 360 identity-in-difference, 13, 16, 55, 57, 72, 74, 81, 82, 103, 104, 107, 125, 163, 226, 241, 268, 278, 290, 292, 294, 305, 319, 338, 353 ideology, xvi, 5, 8, 28–30, 50, 157–69. See also law imagination, 11, 14, 21, 35, 60–1, 69, 70, 78, 79, 82–4, 93, 123, 125, 136–7, 222, 225, 229, 242, 253, 268, 279, 283, 292, 307, 311–12, 314, 315, 322, 334, 336, 338, 377, 391, 400, 401–3 Invisible Man, The (film), 381 Isherwood, Christopher, 208 Jakobsen, Roman, 351, 362 James, Henry, 321, 372; Portrait of a Lady, 15; The Turn of the Screw, 372; The Wings of the Dove, 344 James, M.R., 372 James, William, 42, 65, 235, 290, 346, 409n49, 433–4n62 Jameson, Fredric, 47, 224, 325, 328, 352; “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism,” 305–6; The Political Unconscious, 305 Jeffers, Robinson, 208, 242 Joachim of Floris, 108, 258, 271

442

Index

Job, 53, 81, 82, 105, 110, 111, 122, 124–5, 143, 260, 378, 381 Jonson, Ben, 210, 395 Jonze, Spike, Her, 41 Joyce, James, 10, 11, 30, 137, 144, 163, 230, 312; Dubliners, 319, 343, 390; Finnegans Wake, xviii, 31, 38, 50, 80, 90, 93, 96, 103, 110, 123, 128, 131, 141, 144, 216, 221, 224, 272, 273, 298, 319, 329, 330, 331, 340, 343, 349, 362, 378, 380, 392, 393, 394, 402; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 54, 319, 343, 392; Ulysses, 37, 71, 91, 153, 173, 206, 216, 221, 320, 329, 330, 343, 346, 380, 393 Judaism, 245–8 Jung, C.G., 5, 32, 43, 57, 61, 62–3, 67, 71, 74, 76, 80, 81, 85, 90, 91, 94, 97, 123, 137, 149–50, 152, 173, 216, 219, 221, 224, 233, 273, 280, 285, 294–5, 296, 299–300, 310, 312, 313–14, 338, 350, 361, 364, 374, 380, 382, 383, 399; Answer to Job, 53, 111, 140–1, 169, 244, 270; Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1934–1939, 300; “On Mandala Symbolism,” xiii; Psychological Types, 291–2; “Psychology and Literature,” 375; Psychology of the Unconscious (Symbols of Transformation), 99, 283; The Red Book, 63; “The Stages of Life,” 176, 340 Kabbalah, 80, 103, 144, 247 Kafka, Franz: The Castle, 165, 330, 335, 390; “The Metamorphosis,” 49, 88–9, 156; The Trial, 165, 182, 330 Kant, Immanuel, 6, 19–20, 34, 76, 244, 268, 279, 288, 292, 297, 299–300, 307, 375; Critique of Judgment, 314,

377; Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, 377 Karr, Mary, 137, 345 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 144, 222 Keaton, Buster, 393 Keats, John, 75, 81, 91, 101, 135, 208, 311; Endymion, 368; Eve of St. Agnes, 368; Lamia, 368; “Ode on Melancholy,” 316 Kesey, Ken: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 194, 282, 397–8 Keystone Kops, 393 Kierkegaard, Sören, 31, 53, 194, 279, 296, 388 King, Martin Luther, 221, 238, 396 King, Stephen, 364; Carrie, 314; Salem’s Lot, 314; The Shining, 314, 373 Kipling, Rudyard, 60 Klee, Paul, 6, 134, 369 Krakauer, Jon: Into Thin Air, 346 Kushner, Tony: Millennium Approaches, 101 Kyd, Thomas: The Spanish Tragedy, 187 Lacan, Jacques, 36–7, 48, 58, 61, 73, 95, 146, 224, 282, 307, 335, 362 Lamb, Charles, 312, 345 Lang, Fritz: Metropolis, 77 Lasch, Christopher: The Culture of Narcissism, 37; The Minimal Self, 40 law, xvi, 28–9, 157–69. See also ideology Lawrence, D.H., 230, 320, 321 Leavis, F.R.: The Great Tradition, 367 LeGuin, Ursula: Always Coming Home, 328; The Dispossessed, 165 Lehrer, Tom, 230, 395 Leiber, Fritz, 379

Index

Leitch, Vincent: Literary Criticism in the Twenty-first Century, 21 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 95, 137, 158, 171, 354; Mythologiqes, 182–3; “The Structural Study of Myth,” 183–5; Tristes tropiques, 182 Levy, G. Rachel: The Sword from the Rock, 97 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien: How Natives Think, 32 Lewis, C.S., 371, 382; The Discarded Image, 159; The Great Divorce, 402. See also Narnia books Lloyd, Harold, 393 Locke, John, 36, 311 Lofting, Hugh, 76 Longinus, 364; On the Sublime, 83, 223 Lord of the Flies: William Golding, 151 Lovecraft, H.P., 292, 384, 388, 392; “At the Mountains of Madness,” 376; “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” 374; Supernatural Horror in Literature, 372 Lucien of Samosota: True History, 393 Lucretius: De rerum natura, 146 Lukács, George, 325 Luther, Martin, 220 Lynch, David: Blue Velvet, 156 MacDonald, George: Lilith, 371; Phantastes, 371 Machen, Arthur: “The Great God Pan,” 374 McLuhan, Marshall, 322, 356; Understanding Media, 78 Mahabharata, 192 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 349; “L’Azur,” 334; Igitur, 334; “Sonnet in yx,” 334 mandala, xiii–xviii, 5, 57, 81, 90, 91, 106, 115, 122, 128–9, 163, 240, 241–2, 360, 386, 389, 402

443

Mann, Thomas, 71, 293, 312, 314, 318–19; Buddenbrooks, 319; Death in Venice, 149; Joseph and His Brethren, 204, 319, 329, 343, The Magic Mountain, 329, 343, 380; “Tonio Kröger,” 319 Marcuse, Herbert: Eros and Civilization, 264, 280, 282 Margulis, Lynn, 157, 236 Marlowe, Christopher, 181, 187; Tamburlaine, 209 Marx, Karl, 247, 282, 308; The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels), 276. See also Marxism Marx Brothers, 393 Marxism, 18, 121, 152, 221, 286, 303–10, 314. See also Marx, Karl Maslow, Abraham, 8, 56–8, 66, 72, 100, 215, 219, 233, 235, 264, 280, 308, 376 Melmoth the Wanderer, Charles Maturin, 371 Melville, Herman, 247; Moby-Dick, 15, 194, 237, 329, 371 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 63, 64–5, 73–4, 302; The Philosophy of Perception, 66; The Visible and the Invisible, 66, 67 Merrill, James, 62, 345; The Changing Light at Sandover, 34, 104, 386 Metropolis (novel by Thea von Harbou, film by Fritz Lang), 172, 379 Miller, Arthur: Death of a Salesman, 14 Miller, J. Hillis, 286, 296, 352–3; “The Critic as Host,” 363 Milton, John, xvi, 43, 62, 67, 79, 80, 88, 101, 102, 106, 123, 131, 145, 162, 187, 226, 264, 270, 281, 310, 311–12, 315, 331, 384, 391, 400; L’Allegro, 134; Areopagitica, 4, 10, 105, 262,

444

Index

272; Comus, 75, 135, 149, 262, 263, 264; Lycidas, 14, 135, 174, 385–6; On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity (Nativity Ode), 57, 248, 258, 387; Paradise Lost, 69, 73, 75, 78, 81, 87, 89, 95, 99, 105, 117, 129, 133, 180, 262, 266, 272, 277, 312, 396; Paradise Regained, 201, 262, 284; Il Penseroso, 134, 371; Samson Agonistes, 176, 189–91, 205, 262–3, 347 Miracle Worker, The (film), 47 Miró, Joan, 6, 134, 369 Modern Times (film), Charlie Chaplin, 201 Monad, xiv, 84, 86, 94, 104, 106–7, 116, 117, 141, 143–4, 350, 391 Montaigne, Michel de, 344 Monty Python, 394; Life of Brian (film), 109 Moore, Alan: From Hell, 171–2 Moore, Catherine L.: “No Woman Born,” 46 Moore, Marianne, 348 More, Thomas, 165, 263 Morris, Brian: Anthropological Studies of Religion, 158–9 Morris, William: The Well at the World’s End, 371 Munro, Alice, 163, 323; “Pictures of the Ice,” 341–2, 372 Narnia books, 136, 371. See also Lewis, C.S. Natural Born Killers (film), Oliver Stone, 384–5 Neoplatonism, 10, 30, 75, 87, 94, 108, 118, 119, 120, 121, 264, 272, 273, 277–8, 333 Nerval, Gérard de, 374; Aurelia, 345; “El Desdichado,” 371

Neumann, Erich, 86, 97; Origins and History of Consciousness, 99 Nicholas of Cusa, 10, 120, 131 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 30, 49, 50, 90, 121, 124, 138, 157, 167, 218, 224, 267, 277, 280, 289, 290, 292, 296, 300, 301, 335, 363; The Birth of Tragedy, 284; Thus Spake Zarathustra, 122, 314, 376 Norris, Christopher, 19–20, 49, 287–8, 307, 358–9; Deconstruction after All, 73 Nothing, xiv, xvi, 81, 85–7, 94, 107, 126, 128–9, 141, 334, 350, 365, 387–9, 391, 398, 402 Nygren, Anders: Agape and Eros, 69 Olsen, Tillie: “I Stand Here Ironing,” 392 Once and Future King, The, T.H. White, 260, 367 O’Neill, Eugene: Long Day’s Journey into Night, 58 Ong, Walter, 356 Origen, 272 Orwell, George: “Politics and the English Language,” 357 Otherworld, xvi Otto, Rudolf, 34, 378 Ovid, 31, 49, 214, 259, 283; Metamorphoses, 130, 145–8, 154, 185 Owen, Wilfred, 123 paradise, 88–9, 127–39, 386 Pascal, René, 40, 334, 376 Pater, Walter, 335 Paul, St, 34–5, 67, 68, 80, 81, 88, 114, 175, 190, 247, 271, 311, 385 Peacock, Thomas Love, 201

Index

Peake, Mervyn: The Gormenghast Trilogy, 371, 373, 392 Peckinpah, Sam, 187 Petrarch, 260 Petronius, 394; Satyricon, 401 Phantom of the Opera (film), 379 Philo Judaeus, 103 Picasso, Pablo, 225, 313, 338 Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 260 Pilobolus Dance Theatre, 210 Pindar, 356 Plato, 118, 210, 223, 264, 318, 358, 359; Republic, 355; Symposium, 146, 260; Timaeus, 102 Plautus, 194, 196, 198–9, 255, 393 Plotinus, 118, 120 Poe, Edgar Allan: Eureka, 94; “William Wilson,” 380 Poimanderes (Corpus Hermeticum), 142 Point of Transcendence, xiv, 117, 121, 124 Polanyi, Michael, Personal Knowledge, 8 Poltergeist (film), 373 Pope, Alexander, 395 Potok, Chaim, 321 Pound, Ezra, 230, 347, 349; Cantos, 331 Powers of Ten (film), Charles and Ray Eames, 399 Prometheus, 124, 189, 249, 280–1, 303, 305, 361, 396, 422–3n21 Propp, Vladimir, 352, 354 Prospero’s Books (film), Peter Greenaway, 218–19 prototype theory, 14 Proust, Marcel, 312; In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past), 58, 329; The Past Recaptured, 136, 329 Pullman, Philips: His Dark Materials, 77, 367, 371

445

Pyle, Forest: The Ideology of Romanticism, 306–7 Pynchon, Thomas, 130, 139, 206, 390, 392, 402; Against the Day, 330, 344; The Crying of Lot 49, 155, 165, 393; Gravity’s Rainbow, 153, 165, 330, 344, 393 Rabelais, François, 399, 401; Gargantua and Pantagruel, 393, 394 Radin, Paul: Primitive Man as Philosopher, 27 Ramayana, 192 Rand, Ayn, 220 Rank, Otto, 175 recreation, xv–xvi, 7, 80, 128–9, 179, 218, 229, 245–6, 249, 254, 264, 267, 285, 298–9, 328, 336, 340, 368, 387, 391, 397, 402–3 Rich, Adrienne, 17 Ricoeur, Paul, 101, 179 Rig Veda, 96—7 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 101; Duino Elegies, 331; Sonnets to Orpheus, 331 Rimbaud: “The Drunken Boat,” 349; Illuminations, 348 Riverdance, 210 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 333 Robinson, Kim Stanley: Pacific Edge, 328 Roethke, Theodore, 101, “Praise to the End!,” 364–5 Roheim, Géza, 219 Romanticism, xvi, 11–12, 60, 79, 123, 124, 134, 221, 267–97, 310–17, 333, 354, 357, 361, 375 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 67, 73, 137, 289, 292, 296, 354; Confessions, 345 Rundle Clark, R.T., 95, 102–3 Ryle, Gilbert, 373

446

Index

Sagan, Carl, 40 St John of the Cross, 388 Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, 225 Sappho, 259 Saroyan, William: The Human Comedy, 206 Sarton, May: Journal of a Solitude, 316 Sartre, Jean-Paul: Nausea, 6 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 353 Schelling, Friedrich, xv, 55, 76, 85, 116, 157, 297, 365, 383; Of Human Freedom, 279; Philosophy of Art, 421n18 Schiller, Friedrich, 25, 132, 226, 288–93, 307, 310, 399; Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, 289, 300–1, 314; Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 311 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 244, 296 Schroedinger, Erwin, 80 science fiction, 22, 30, 46, 47, 55, 78, 325–9 Scorsese, Martin: Raging Bull, 15, 181 Scott, Sir Walter, 134; The Bride of Lammermoor, 371; Guy Mannering, 371; Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 324; Waverley, 323–4 Sendak, Maurice: Where the Wild Things Are, 393 Sexton, Anne, 345 Shaffer, Peter, Equus, 149 Shakespeare, William, 5, 59, 71, 74, 131, 139, 145, 173, 187, 192, 207, 208, 226, 255, 257, 265–7, 270, 294, 302, 311, 340, 393; Antony and Cleopatra, 182; As You Like It, 133, 203; The Comedy of Errors, 203; Coriolanus, 209; Cymbeline, 134, 171, 266; Hamlet, 154–5, 171, 187, 202, 370; Henry IV, Part 1, 60; King Lear, 14, 52, 145, 152, 156, 180, 187,

333, 362, 364, 388; Macbeth, 384; Measure for Measure, 124, 151, 160–1, 171, 202, 244, 266; The Merchant of Venice, 160, 170, 171, 245; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 11, 38, 70, 125, 148, 174, 202, 203, 209, 366; Much Ado about Nothing, 59, 171; Othello, 145, 171, 202; Pericles, 135, 204, 380; “The Phoenix and Turtle,” 71, 92; Romeo and Juliet, 14, 182, 202; sonnets, 148; The Tempest, 38, 52, 61, 75, 144, 145, 178, 202, 204, 244, 265, 266; Titus Andronicus, 156; Troilus and Cressida, 182, 284; Twelfth Night, 149, 203, 395; Two Gentlemen of Verona, 203; The Winter’s Tale, 134, 171, 203, 265–6, 402 Shaw, George Bernard, 31, 76, 119, 173, 201, 219, 220, 221, 394; The Devil’s Disciple, 255, 396; Major Barbara, 193, 255; St. Joan, 82–3, 181 Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 325, 371, 376 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 10, 75, 76, 84, 135, 226, 230, 240, 315, 357, 370, 371, 384, 396; Alastor, 311, 370; “England in 1819,” 315; Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, 347; “Mont Blanc,” 376, 384; Prometheus Unbound, 280, 312, 316, 369; “Song to the Men of England,” 315; The Triumph of Life, 306–7, 370; The Witch of Atlas, 369 Shiel, M.P., The Purple Cloud, 325 Sidney, Sir Philip: Arcadia, 134 Smith, Cordwainer, 368 “Snow White” (Grimm version), 368 Solomon, Andrew: The Noonday Demon, 346

Index

Sondheim, Stephen, 156; Into the Woods, 228 Sontag, Susan: “The Imagination of Disaster,” 325 Sophocles: Antigone, 181; Oedipus at Colonus, 186, 254; Oedipus Tyrannus, 179, 183–5; Philoctetes, 186, 254 Spengler, Oswald, 132, 164, 214, 217, 255, 277, 306, 378; Decline of the West, 146, 185, 207, 227–9, 240, 327, 336, 423–4n32 Spenser, Edmund, 10, 74, 101, 145, 173, 260, 262, 281, 368; The Faerie Queene, 92, 132, 260–1, 366; Mutabilitie Cantoes, 107, 153, 155; The Shepherd’s Calendar, 133, 134 Spielberg, Steven, 135; Peter Pan (film version), 367 Stapledon, Olaf, 40; Star Maker, 326, 334 Star Trek, 241, 327 Star Wars (films), George Lucas, 77, 193–4, 313, 323, 368 Stevens, Wallace, xv, 6, 57, 79–80, 104, 123, 217, 223, 226, 272–3, 294, 319, 331, 348, 403; “Credences of Summer,” 129; “The Idea of Order at Key West,” 347; Notes towards a Supreme Fiction, 12, 93; “Of Mere Being,” 95; “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” 29; “The Pleasure of Merely Circulating,” 93, 215; “The Poems of Our Climate,” “The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts,” 37; “The Rock,” 211; “The Snow Man,” 387; “Sunday Morning,” 216 Stevenson, Robert Louis: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 380 Stoker, Bram: Dracula, 379–80 Sturgeon, Theodore, 30; More than

447

Human, 47, 231; “To Here and the Easel,” 362–3 sublime, the, 81, 83, 223, 324, 364, 376 Swift, Jonathan, 399; Gulliver’s Travels, 393, 396; “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” 401 Tallis, Raymond, 42 Tartuffe, Molière, 200–1 Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 368 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 157, 236, 349; Idylls of the King, 330; “Ulysses,” 129, 144, 176 Terence, 196, 198, 255, 393 Theocritus, 134, 135 Thomas, Dylan, xviii, 10, 30, 45, 86, 91, 101, 104, 129, 155, 272, 285, 294, 299, 312, 319, 331, 347, 348, 349, 362, 381; “Altarwise by owl-light,” 80, 349; “And death shall have no dominion,” 403; “Author’s Prologue,” 89; “Ballad of the Long Legged Bait,” 92, 368; “Ceremony after a Fire Raid,” 122; “The Conversation of Prayer,” 62; “Fern Hill,” 85, 131; “How shall my animal,” 98–9; “In Country Heaven,” 89; “Poem on His Birthday,” 89; “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London,” 122; Under Milk Wood, 111, 153, 206, 210, 216; “A Winter’s Tale,” 92, 368 Thoreau, Henry David, 132, 134, 165 Three Stooges, 393 Tillich, Paul, 81 Tolkien, J.R.R., 34, 142, 313, 384; The Hobbit, 136, 201, 370; Lord of the Rings, 77, 194, 284, 366, 370 Tolstoy, Leo: The Death of Ivan Ilych, 35, 388; War and Peace, 322

448

Index

Tourneur, Cyril, 381 Tractatus Coislinianus, 193 tragedy, xvi Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Sterne, 392 Trollope, Anthony, 321 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), Stanley Kubrick, 219 utopia, 72 Verne, Jules, 328 Vico, Giambattista, 214, 229, 277, 423–4n32; The New Science, 336 Vinge, Vernor, 327 Virgil, 135, 226, 227, 230, 259; Aeneid, 144–6, 256–8, 270; Eclogues, 134, 258, 270 Vision of Immanence, 329, 334, 361 Vision of Transcendence, 329, 334, 359, 361, 365 Von Eschenbach, Wolfram: Parzival, 261 Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse-Five, 15 Wagner, Richard, 208, 312; Parsifal, 376; Ring of the Nibelungenlied, 376; Tristan and Isolde, 376 Wasserman, Earl, 288 Watterson, Bill: Calvin and Hobbes, 368 Webster, John, 381 Weil, Simone, 57 Wellek, René, and Austin Warren: “The Mode of Existence of a Literary Work of Art,” 15 Wells, H.G., 78, 328; The Island of Dr. Moreau, 368; The Time Machine, 326; War of the Worlds, 46, 325, 334 Wheelwright, Philip, 337 Whitehead, Alfred North, 64, 76, 101,

119, 236; Science and the Modern World, 400 Whitman, Walt, 16–17; Leaves of Grass, 325; “To a Locomotive in Winter,” 77–8; When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, 173 Wilde, Oscar, 230 Williams, Charles, 101, 313 Williams, George C., 157 Williams, Robin, 393 Williams, Tennessee: The Glass Menagerie, 58 Williams, William Carlos, 272, 347; Paterson, 331 Wilson, E.O., 232 Wilson, Edmund, 372; Axel’s Castle, 314 Wind, Edgar, 10; Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, 120, 398 Windelband, Wilhelm: History of Philosophy, 118–19 Winstanley, Gerard, 106 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 85; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 365 Wizard of Oz, The (film), 205 Woolf, Virginia, 16; The Waves, 343–4 Wordsworth, William, 76, 89, 137, 275, 276, 288, 310, 311, 312, 315, 321; Lyrical Ballads, 77, 134; Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (Immortality Ode), 347; The Prelude, 58, 131, 278, 312, 376 Worringer, Wilhelm: Abstraction and Empathy, 319 Wright, Charles, 348; Bye-and-Bye, 331; Country Music, 331; Negative Blue, 331; The World of the Ten Thousand Things, 331 Wuthering Heights: Emily Bronte, 371

Index

Yeats, William Butler, 10, 20, 23, 30, 71, 108, 123, 126, 147–8, 202, 208, 218, 228, 294–5, 300, 302, 312, 313, 335, 336, 347, 349, 371; “Among School Children,” 44–5, 294, 297; “Byzantium,” 381; “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” 216, 278–9, 296–7, 331; “The Host of the Air,” 371; “Lapis Lazuli,” 216, 217; “Leda and the Swan,” 96, 238; “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” 370–1; “Sailing to Byzantium,” 294; “The

449

Second Coming,” 241; The Shadowy Waters, 371; “Song of Wandering Aengus,” 370; “The Stolen Child,” 370; “Vacillation,” 56, 294, 331; A Vision, 34, 130, 216, 229, 277, 302, 318; The Wanderings of Oisin, 371 Zevon, Warren: “Life’ll Kill Ya,” 182 Zola, Emile, 333; Germinal, 172 Zorba the Greek (film), 242 Zukofsky, Louis: A, 331

450

Index