READING MYTH

1: PIONEERS

 First published as part of ‘MYTH’, ABES 2000

 The Annotated Bibliography for English Studies, or ABES, was launched in 1997 by Robert Clark at the University of East Anglia, UK.  I contributed between 1997 and 2000. Here I offer an initial selection of my commentaries on books about – or relevant to – the study of mythology.

Please note: When writing these entries, I deliberately made them as substantial as possible: I wanted to avoid perfunctory summaries.

If citing this selection, please use the following details: Laurence Coupe, ‘Myth’, Annotated Bibliography for English Studies, ed. Robert Clark (Lisse & Abingdon: Swets & Zeitlinger, 2000).

 

#Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Ware: Wordsworth Reference, 1922, repr.1993)

This abridged version of Frazer’s magnum opus is the best way for the busy research student to grasp the overall structure of Frazer’s argument, which is essentially a simple one. His original volumes, published between 1895 and 1915, are so full of incidental details and speculative diversions that one can easily lose one’s way.

The key to The Golden Bough is the idea of the relation between myth and ritual. Frazer begins with the ‘King of the Wood’, whom he supposes was a ‘priestly’ king privileged to guard the oak at the centre of a ‘sacred grove’ in ancient Italy. For the oak was the embodiment of the goddess Diana, and the king’s relation to it was that of fertility god to fertility goddess. By means of ‘sympathetic magic’, the violent death and dramatic revival of the king or god ensured the vegetative cycle. Complementing this ritual
sacrificial pattern there arose those narratives we call myths.

Frazer wishes to go further than this, though, and uses this ‘myth and ritual’ basis to explain the very origins of religion and of civilisation, noting parallels with the pattern of the ‘dying and reviving god’ in, for example, Mesopotamia (Tammuz), Egypt (Osiris) and Syria (Adonis).

Subsequent anthropology may have questioned the grounds of this elegant argument, made by a classics scholar who never engaged in field research. But the idea of a primitive fertility ritual – the source of all religion, and still surviving in modern ‘folk’ customs – was too attractive for many modernist writers, most notably T. S. Eliot, to resist.

#Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920, repr. 1980)

Chiefly known as one of one of the two main sources for Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (the other being Frazer’s The Golden Bough), this study of the Grail legend has its own intrinsic merits and should be read by anyone interested in the connection between myth (‘Ritual’) and literature (‘Romance’). It will be clear that the approach taken to the former is that of the Cambridge ‘myth and ritual’ school of interpretation. However, Weston goes beyond Frazer in analysing how the vegetation ceremony associated with the death and revival of the god acquired in time a more specialised interest. That is, she traces the move from the exoteric ‘Life Cult’ to the esoteric ‘Mystery Cult’: where the earlier ritual, with its attendant myth, concerned the maintenance of the crops and the survival of the community, the
later one concerned the initiation of the individual into cosmic wisdom.

Those Arthurian romances which narrate the quest for the lost chalice, reputedly containing the blood of the Messiah, are variations upon the ‘Mystery Cult’ and are rooted in the ‘Life Cult’. Weston insists that they are not primarily Christian in meaning. Not only does this thesis elucidate the main characters and episodes of the Grail legend, but it indicates how one might approach later, more secular quest-narratives. Eliot certainly thought so, and his own work of modernist mythopoeia draws freely not only on Arthurian romance but also on texts which he took to be complementary, such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

#Robert A. Segal (ed), The Myth and Ritual Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)

Robert Segal’s ambitious collection of material takes us from the original formulation of ‘myth-ritualism’, whereby myths derive from rituals, made by William Robertson Smith in 1889, to the structuralist account of myth and ritual as complementary opposites, made by Claude Levi-Strauss in 1963. That is, it demonstrates the extreme variety of the ways of understanding the relation between myth and ritual, between narrative and ceremony. The most famous exponent of ‘myth and ritual theory’, Sir James Frazer, went further than Smith by positing a magical relationship between the death and rebirth of the fertility god and the cycle of vegetation, which ensured the flourishing of the crops. In making this agricultural emphasis, Frazer equivocated between the assumption that the god’s progress was merely imitated and the assumption that he was identified with a royal incarnation  who has actually to be killed.

We are offered not only an extract from Frazer’s The Golden Bough, but also extracts from the various books it influenced, notably Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (a study of the ‘Life Cult’ underlying the legend of the Holy Grail), Jane Harrison’s Themis (an application of Frazerian theory to Greek religion), S. H. Hooke’s Myth and Ritual (which argues that the pattern of the dying and reviving god of vegetation originated in the Ancient East, and then spread elsewhere according to the principle of ‘diffusion’), and Lord Raglan’s The Hero (which treats hero myth as a variation upon fertility myth).

All this is valuable material, which students of myth and literature will benefit from. However, the scope of the anthology extends also to cover literary applications of ‘myth-ritualism’, particularly in the study of drama, but also in the perspective of the development of Western literature as a whole (as provided most impressively by Northrop Frye).

Moreover, the editor interprets ‘myth and ritual theory’ widely enough to include the ideas of several important theorists of myth: apart from Levi-Strauss, we also find Mircea Eliade (who sees ritual as an enactment of myth’s ‘eternal return’ to the moment of origin) and Rene Girard (who agrees with Frazer that myths derive from sacrificial rituals, but who proposes that their function is to disguise the violence which is their source). All in all, this substantial anthology serves to illuminate the complexity of the myth-ritual connection without encouraging complication. The editor’s introduction is a model of clarity.

#Robert  Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York and London: Garland Press, 1991)

Ackerman, author of a critical biography of Frazer (J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work, Cambridge University Press, 1987), here puts his ‘comparative method’ of anthropology in its context. Frazer’s immediate debt was to the Biblical scholar, William Robertson Smith, who had associated primitive or tribal myth with ritual, and who had suggested that the ritual involved the killing of the totem or god. Frazer’s innovation was to associate the ritual with vegetation and to identify the god as a god of fertility. However, in claiming to have found the key to all mythologies in a religion based on magic – that is, on the assumption of an intimate bond between human action (killing the king, or representative of the god) and the processes of nature (the renewal of vegetation) – Frazer’s ‘universalism’ owed a great deal to the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

Ackerman traces this background, as he does also the Romantic mythography which reacted against it. In doing so, he implies that Frazer’s work was informed, paradoxically, by the latter perspective simultaneously, in so far as he was seeking to get back to the roots of a humanity that was organically in process, and so could not quite be explained away. This dual tradition illuminates the tension in The Golden Bough: high-handedly ‘intellectualist’, it yet conveys a fascination with the ‘savage’ and remote past it documents.

As for Frazer’s own influence: according to Ackerman, the Cambridge Ritualists, of whom the main representative was Jane Harrison, benefited from his dramatic evocation of ceremonial murder – the agon of dying and reviving god – and they approved of his ‘comparative’ idea of the affinity between ancient Greek culture and primitive custom (which they applied much more systematically than he ever did). But they were dissatisfied with the ‘universalism’ which accompanied his method, his impoverished view of collective psychology, and with his mechanical model (derived from the Enlightenment and from positivism) of a triadic historical development of humanity from magic, through religion, to science. Ackerman elucidates these connections and contrasts thoroughly. The only quibble that a literary student might make is about the scant treatment afforded to Jessie L. Weston: she, of course, was the Ritualist who was given equal credit with Frazer in Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land.

#Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ (Doncaster: Brinmyll Press, 1979)

This parallel text pamphlet offers Wittgenstein’s original ‘Remarks’ in German together with an English translation by Rush Rhees. Written during the philosopher’s later years, after he had moved from a mimetic to a pragmatic view of language, from the notion that words represent things to the notion that words occur as collective practices or ‘language games’, it remorselessly exposes the fallacies in Frazer’s reconstruction of primitive fertility myth.

For instead of acknowledging that early humans would have recited myths and re-enacted rituals without intellectual reflection, as indeed people still engage in collective practice today, he insists on treating the story of the dying god of vegetation as a ‘theory’ based on an ‘error’. Wittgenstein proposes that this is just as absurd as regarding Christian baptism as ‘an inefficient form of washing’. Wittgenstein castigates Frazer for his ‘narrowness of spiritual Iife’, for his inability to get beyond an arid intellectualism. Though something of a curiosity, this is an important document, in that it juxtaposes one of the most influential philosophers of the century with one of the most influential mythographers.

#Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Religion: Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism and Other Works, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)

The student of mythology may safely ignore the ‘other works’ indicated on the title page. Here, in Totem and Taboo (1913) and in Moses and Monotheism (1934-8), we have Freud’s two most important accounts of myth apart from the analysis of the Oedipus story given in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). As in that work, interpretation turns out to be radical rewriting; mythography turns out to be mythopoeia. Having translated Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex from a tragedy of truth into a tragedy of sexual conflict, in Totem and Taboo he proceeds to apply his own, highly fanciful hypothesis of the ‘Oedipus complex’ to history itself. Just as the individual male seeks to repress the memory of his childhood wish to kill his father, so humanity has repressed the memory of the ‘primal crime’, that moment when the tribal patriarch was killed in an act of sexual jealousy (the younger men wanting access to the women of the tribe, hitherto appropriated by the father figure).

This ‘scientific’ speculation, tenuously supported by references to Charles Darwin and James Frazer, provides Freud with his explanation of ‘the beginnings of so many things – of social organisation, of moral restrictions and of religion’ (p. 203). The totem represents the murdered, primal father; the taboo is that against patricide (and, by association, incest). Twenty years later, Freud begins to apply the same narrative pattern to the Bible, and in Moses and Monotheism he constructs an original explanation of the beginnings of both Judaic and Christian religion: both are about atoning to the father (Yahweh); but the latter goes much further and, in commemorating the sacrificial death of the son (Christ), proves to be more thoroughly Oedipal than the faith from which it sprang.

No one can fault the originality and ingenuity of Freud’s interpretation in either Totem and Taboo or in Moses and Monotheism, nor its immense influence on literary criticism, but the reader should, of course, bear in mind the question he posed in his famous dialogue with Einstein: ‘Does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology?’

#Carl Jung (with M.L. von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi & Aniela Jaffe), Man and his Symbols (London and New York: Arkana, 1964, repr. 1990)

This is not just a volume of selected essays: the title page indicates clearly that it is Jung who is here offering his definitive account of the subject, with four other Jungians adding supplementary arguments. Everything hinges on the main author’s opening essay, nearly one hundred pages long. In it Jung repudiates Freud’s notion that the unconscious is primarily driven by sexual desire and repressed memory, and insists that dreams and symptoms are indices of spiritual need and an orientation towards future healing. He further rejects Freud’s characterisation of dream motifs as ‘archaic remnants’, which implies an historically motivated psyche. For Jung, symbolism is natural, neutral and normative: ‘archetypal images’ come from a ‘collective unconscious’ which is universal and eternal. Individual dreams provide access to it, but the best way of talking about it is through mythology. Indeed, all myths turn out to be stories of an archetypal encounter: that of the ‘ego’ with its ‘shadow’ and its ‘anima’ / ‘animus’, on the way to the psychic harmony which is the ‘Self’.

This circuitous journey is, we understand, the stuff of most narrative that is primitive, or which maintains a healthy proximity to the primitive mind, as further revealed in the other contributors’ essays. These apply Jung’s ideas to (a) the Bible, (b) the myths of Theseus, Perseus, Orpheus and Dionysus, (c) the legends of Saint George and the Dragon plus Beauty and the Beast, and (d) literary works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The whole book is richly illustrated, and makes an attractive introduction to Jungian psychology in general and to psychological mythography in particular.

#Carl Jung, Jung on Mythology, ed. Robert A. Segal (London: Routledge, 1998)

lt is surprising that it has taken so long for a selection of Jung’s writings on mythology to appear, but this volume is worth the wait. Complementing Segal’s earlier selection, The Gnostic Jung (see below), it benefits from an editorial introduction which is just as lucid as the one to that volume. Most of its divisions correspond to sections of the anthology, and the whole thing is organised logically and coherently.

Segal first explains that, for Jung, the subject-matter of myth is the projection of the inner onto the outer world, of psyche onto nature. He then proceeds to distinguish Jung’s perspective from Freud’s: in particular, he repudiates the latter’s impoverished interpretation of mythic material as expressive of sexual problems rather than spiritual promises. Proceeding further still, we come to Jung’s approach to the origin of mythology: rejecting experience or acquisition as adequate explanations, he argues for independent invention, arising from the collective unconscious, with myths giving narrative shape to inherited archetypes.

Next come those writings of Jung’s on the function of myth, which he sees as the revelation, experience, and understanding of the unconscious. Other important sections cover the following: myth and dream; myth as a way of thinking; kinds of myths; primitive myths; myths and moderns; myth and religion. These sections comprise the first (and longer) of two parts. Overall, we get a strong sense of the audacity of Jung in taking on the challenge posed by science to the viability of myth: far from seeing mythic material as residing in the past, offering only a nostalgic appeal, Jung is one of the most important advocates of the living power of myth, of its absolute necessity, once we have agreed to interpret it symbolically rather than literally, psychologically rather than referentially.

To complete the volume, the second (and shorter) part of the anthology demonstrates Jung’s influence, as represented by Erich Neumann, Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman. Perhaps the last of these is the most interesting, in that he develops ‘archetypal psychology’ away from Jung’s own ideal of the unified, individuated self (a legacy from his Christian background) and towards a pluralistic psychology and a polytheistic mythology. The volume as a whole may remind us how much richer is the potential of Jung’s work than Freud’s, once we have decided that myth really matters.

#Carl Jung, The Gnostic Jung, ed. Robert E. Segal (London: Routledge, 1992)

The special attraction of this collection will be the inclusion of Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead, previously unavailable. This complements a generous selection of more familiar material in which Jung addresses the relevance of Gnosticism, alchemy, and hermeticism to his own ‘analytical psychology’. Useful as these contents are, they assume a proper shape and significance thanks to Segal’s lucid introduction. He not only explains the connection between ancient Gnosticism and modern existentialism, but he also weighs up the evidence carefully before deciding whether Jung adheres to the details of Gnosticism or adapts it to his own ends in a parallel manner to the existentialists.

What he argues finally is that, though the Gnostic and Jungian myths have a great deal in common, both being creation narratives which permit the identification of cosmos and psyche, of outer and inner worlds, they differ in that the former is finally regressive, involving a return to the primordial godhead and a refusal of the material world, while the latter is finally progressive, involving a sense of the expanding potential proceeding from the ‘collective unconscious’ – the archetype of the ‘Self’ representing inclusiveness and balance rather than negation).

There is an alternative reading of the Gnostic myth, that it is all about the sanctification of matter, of the discovery of the invisible within the visible: a reading which relates it to  hermeticism (as implicit in the hermetic motto, ‘as above, so below’). But Segal does not regard this as the dominant one, and leaves it aside.

#Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (London: Paladin, 1949, repr. 1988)

Joseph Campbell’s title indicates that he is far more concerned with the similarities between myths than the differences: there is only one ‘hero’ or story, even though there may be many ‘faces’ or versions. This story he calls ‘the monomyth’, borrowing a neologism from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Its ‘nuclear unit’ is the pattern of the rite of passage: ‘separation -initiation -return’ (p. 30): that is, ‘a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return’ (p. 35).

But Campbell’s aim is to translate this anthropological model into psychological terms, mainly after the manner of Carl Jung (though with passing concessions to Freud). Thus, in the section which forms the centre of the book, entitled ‘The Keys’ (pp. 245-51 ), the narrative pattern now approximates to the circular journey of the individual psyche from ‘ego’ to ‘self’ by way of descent into the realm of the ‘shadow’. Campbell elaborates on this by charting the various mythic motifs that he gleans from around the world: for example, ‘call to adventure’, ‘crossing the threshold’, ‘dragon battle’, ‘crucifixion’, ‘sacred
marriage’, ‘apotheosis’, ‘flight’, ‘resurrection’, ‘elixir’. The aim of this journey, this universal hero quest, seems to be the reconciliaton of the conscious with the unconscious mind. This being achieved, other oppositions fall into place: male and female, human and divine, natural and supernatural, individual and cosmic. In other words, the ‘monomyth’ reveals that all is one: it is an essentially mystical narrative.

Campbell’s application of a quasi-Jungian psychology to myth and literature has proved immensely popular, and has even been used by film directors in the creation of mythic entertainments (eg., Star Wars). However, the discerning reader may note that he makes larger claims for mythology than Jung ever did, and that his search for unification results in a Procrustean approach to particular myths.

#Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1944, repr. 1959)

The authors, the first being a celebrated mythographer in his own right, claim that the ‘key’ to Joyce’s ‘dream saga’ is mythology, and that ‘the fundamental narrative’ it recounts is the ‘mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind’. Campbell was soon to produce his own ‘key’ to world mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and one can see him rehearsing the principle of the ‘monomyth’ in this detailed study of a text which he and Robinson take to be not only literary, but also profoundly mythopoeic.

Campbell and Robinson start from the book’s origin in the old Irish song of the same title, in which the labourer Tim Finnegan, who has fallen from his ladder while drunk, is brought back to life at his own wake when someone splashes the corpse with whisky. From there, they  trace the transformation of this unlikely hero into a figure of mythic proportions. Indeed, Joyce’s Finnegan embodies all heroes, including Thor, Prometheus, Osiris, Christ, and Finn MacCool: it is by his ‘coming again’ (‘Finn-again’) that ‘strength and hope are provided for mankind’. Indeed: ‘By his death and resurrection, hod-carrier Finnegan comically refigures the solemn mystery of the hero-god whose flesh and blood furnish the race with spirit-fructifying meat and drink.’

This ‘monomyth’ becomes more complex still when we realise that the labourer’s fall from his ladder symbolises Lucifer’s fall, Adam and Eve’s fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash, and Humpty Dumpty’s ‘great fall’. Moreover, the descent sets in motion an historical process, which Joyce depicts along the lines of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Vico’s four-part cycle. That is, humanity passes through four phases: theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic.

This last phase is the setting for Joyce’s central tale, which takes place in and around Dublin, and which features Henry Chadwick Earwicker, a mythic successor to Finnegan’s role. Himself seeking redemption from his own ‘original sin’ (a drunken act of exposure in the ‘Eden’ of Phoenix Park), his and all humanity’s redemption may not be understood apart from the regenerative cycle of fertility which is symbolised by his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle. Again, if HCE and ALP ‘represent a primordial male-female polarity, which is basic to all life’, then their sons Shem the Penman (introvert writer) and Shaun the Postman (extrovert politician and bearer of messages) ‘represent a subordinate, exclusively masculine polarity which is basic to all history’.

Campbell and Robinson are explicit that they have not attempted to offer a critical interpretation of the literary text, but they show considerable flair in tracing a mythic structure within a work which, at the time of writing, was regarded as impossibly obscure.

#Alan Watts, ‘Return to the Forest’, Zen and the Beat Way (Boston, MA, and Enfield: Eden Grove, 1997)

This is the text of a talk which the philosopher Alan Watts gave in 1960: a celebration of his friend Joseph Campbell’s ideas on the development of religion. According to Campbell, and as confirmed by Watts, two main phases in humankind’s religious history may be traced; these may be associated with two kinds of culture which predate our own technological kind.

Firstly, there was the nomadic, hunting culture: this was characterised by shamanism, the shaman being a solitary medicine man or ‘man of power’ who was thought to have undergone a rite of initiation into the world of spirits; this rite would have taken place in the dark forest or some other mysterious realm.

Secondly, there was the settled, agrarian culture: this was characterised by a more hierarchical religious system based on the division of labour; instead of the solitary, adventurous shaman, there was the traditional order of priests, which dictated the terms of the social order itself.

But neither Campbell’s nor Watts’s concern is with celebrating this second stage of religious history: there must come a point when human beings begin to grow dissatisfied with hierarchy and office – in short, with being told what to believe – and they yearn for a third stage, a ‘return to the forest’. This mythic quest pattern is celebrated in Campbell’s most famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Finally Watts offers his own version, in keeping with his particular erudition in the field of Asian religion: if the second stage may be paralleled by Confucianism, with its appeal to tradition and authority, then the third stage, the urge to recover what has been lost, namely direct encounter with the spirit, may be discerned in Taoism and Zen Buddhism

#Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
(London and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1948, repr. 1990)

Long before Graves wrote this treatise, or poetic manifesto, scholars had discerned similarities between the various fertility goddesses of early civilisations and had inferred that they might have a common origin in a female agricultural deity of the neolithic period, this in turn being a development from the palaeolithic earth mother or moon goddess. Graves’s initiative is to insist that all these figures are essentially one, and that this unity indicates that the roots of civilisation are matriarchal.

The story he goes on to tell is of the violent replacement of matriarchy by patriarchy: in the second millennium BC, the cult of the goddess of fertility and seasonal cycle was overthrown by the cult of the sky god, dedicated to war, order, and reason. For Graves, this cataclysmic event brought about a rupture in the collective psyche: this was, in effect, the beginning of alienation. Only the poets kept the earlier vision alive: they remained faithful to the Muse, the triple ‘White Goddess’. In doing so, they themselves adopted the role of her male mate, the dying and reviving god of vegetation documented elsewhere by Sir James Frazer. There is, then, only one poetic theme: ‘the antique story … of the birth, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year’ [sic]. This god fights a losing battle with that of the ‘Waning Year’ for love of ‘the capricious, all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out’. The poet identifies ‘himself with the God of the Waxing Year [sic] and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird’. Indeed: ‘All true poetry … celebrates some incident or scene in this very ancient story.’

Thus as well as being a historical record, Graves’s book is a didactic defence of poetry as an expression of fundamental concerns and as an invocation of a residual imaginative structure,. As such, it works extremely well (even if such details as the hidden ‘tree language’ of the Druids are hard to follow at times). Advisory reading for students of myth and literature, its eccentricity is inseparable from its insights.

#Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: or, Cosmos and History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954, repr. 1971)

Mircea Eliade was the founder of the modern discipline of the history of religions, and was particularly interested in understanding archaic religion phenomenologically. This book is his clearest statement of this interest. In it he argues that the archaic mind divides everything it experiences into the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’. Its overriding aim is to transcend ‘history’, or ‘profane time’, by abolishing it: this it does through myth and ritual, which offer an ‘eternal return’ to ‘cosmos’, ie, ‘sacred time’.

For Eliade, the modern mind, dominated by the Judaeo-Christian model of progress, as secularised by the Enlightenment, seems to have lost this possibility. True, he does indicate, if only in passing, a new interest in ‘eternal return’ among modern writers; but it will need Thomas Altizer to spell out how this recovery of the sacred in the profane is achieved.

#Thomas J. J Altizer, Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1963)

Mircea Eliade was the founder of the discipline of the history of religion, and was a leading interpreter of myth. Altizer starts from Eliade’s account of the ‘archaic mind’, which made sense of the world by distinguishing between ‘sacred time’ and ‘profane time’. It felt itself to have ‘fallen’ from the one to the other, and used myth and ritual to regain its sense of ‘cosmos’ – which was felt to be the opposite of ‘history’. Altizer’s innovation is to argue for a ‘dialectic’ of the sacred and profane dimensions. He proposes that our ‘fallen’ world is still open to a ‘coincidence of opposites’ whereby ‘cosmos’ and ‘history’ can be known as aspects of each other. He draws on Christian theology to do so, and illustrates his argument by reference to many important modern authors. This dialectic is evident in, for example,
Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘illumination’, in James Joyce’s ‘epiphany’ and in Marcel Proust’s ‘memory’.

#Claude Levi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, Structural Anthropology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, repr. 1972) pp. 202-31

This is an essay which nobody seriously engaged in the study of modern mythography has thought it possible to ignore. Unfortunately, though it begins as a broad invitation to the interpretation of myth along the model of Saussure’s linguistics, it becomes highly condensed and difficult when it offers an example of a specific analysis of a myth. Regarding the broad invitation: the anthropologist Levi-Strauss objects to the ‘chaotic’ state of mythography and points out that the trend is to treat myth as either ‘idle play’ or ‘a crude kind of philosophical speculation’. He wishes to replace this muddle with the following principles: that the meaning of a myth resides not in isolated elements, but in their combination; that myth is a special kind of language; and that, as such, it is more about the inner mind than the outer world  — the relation between the sign (i.e., the signifier and signified combined) and the referent (the thing itself) being arbitrary and conventional.

As for the analysis itself: Levi-Strauss takes the myth of Oedipus, not in any particular version, but on the basis of all the elements that have accrued to the story, then proceeds to demonstrate that its purpose is to mediate between binary oppositions, the most fundamental of which are the categories of culture and nature. The logic of myth takes two opposed terms which seem incapable of resolution, and resolves them by substituting a pair of equivalent opposites. In the Oedipus myth, the original contradiction is between the traditional understanding of humanity as deriving from the earth, and the experiential evidence that human beings are born as a result of sexual reproduction. The contradiction substituted for this is that between the ‘overvaluing of blood relations’ and the ‘undervaluing of blood relations’. The figure who mediates between these is Oedipus himself, who commits both incest and patricide. Ingenious as this interpretation is, it has struck many other anthropologists as far too arid and intellectualist. But it has been so influential and is so frequently cited that its challenge has to be confronted.

#Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge, 1978)

Literary students seeking access to the mysteries of structuralism are often advised to start with Levi-Strauss’s famous essay, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ (see above). But the complex interpretation of the Oedipus legend given there is perhaps better left until after one has read this short and accessible account of myth.

Arguing that since the seventeenth century there has been a sharp divide between scientific and mythic thinking, with the former regarding the latter as superstitious and retrogressive, Levi-Strauss puts the case for rediscovering ‘primitive thinking’ as opposed to the ‘civilised mind’, the ‘logic of the concrete’ as opposed to the abstractions of the Enlightenment. In doing so, he gives some useful definitions and characterisations. For example: ‘Myths get thought in man unbeknownst to him’ (p. 3); ‘the structuralist approach … is the quest for the invariant, or for the invariant among superficial differences’ (p. 8); ‘To speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing’ (p.12). Furthermore, he offers a fascinating interpretation, based on the above dicta, of a Native American story, before going on to reflect on the continuties between mythology and history, and on the parallels between mythology and music.

#Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin/Granada, 1957, repr. 1973)

This selection of magazine articles has proved hugely influential in the field of cultural studies, and it still stands as a searching enquiry into the world we take for granted. However, students of mythology should be forewarned that the volume has created some confusion by virtue of Barthes’s use of the word ‘myth’ as virtually synonymous with ‘ideology’ – though he purports not to be doing so.

Thus, when he addresses the ‘mythology’ of, for example, ‘The World of Wrestling’, ‘The Face of Garbo’, ‘Wine and Milk’ or ‘Romans in Films’, he is chiefly interested in exposing the ‘depoliticised speech’ of the status quo. For Barthes such speech presents particular, historical images and ideas as if they were eternal: it translates ‘culture’ into ‘nature’.

Students might like to take into account that Barthes’s structuralist approach, loosely informed by Marxism, overlooks those aspects of myth which many other interpreters have found interesting: firstly, that it is a narrative; secondly, that if it is ‘ideological’ it is also ‘utopian’. That said, the book is certainly stimulating.

 

READING MYTH 2: DEVELOPMENTS

 First published as part of ‘MYTH’, ABES 2000

Jack Lindsay, John Bunyan: Maker of Myths (London: Methuen, 1937)

Lindsay’s pioneering study of Bunyan is remarkable for attempting to fuse Marxist and Freudian approaches, while offering a critical biography that might make his subject accessible to non-academic readers. He sees Bunyan as a transitional writer, struggling to reconcile historical contradictions within himself, but forced to endure the experience of being a divided soul within a divided society.

If the Restoration seemed to offer a balance of classes after what was then seen as the chaos and anarchy of the bourgeois English Revolution, Bunyan wanted a third way of solidarity and true equality, but could not see the means for its achievement. Hence he pursued a radically religious vision; but the spirit of the Reformation had been increasingly compromised, and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to which he subscribed could be interpreted all too easily as a vindication of bourgeois individualism. Devoting himself to the attainment of grace, he could not relate it to what Lindsay calls ‘the social core’, except intermittently through the ‘fellowship’ experienced with his fellow-Congregationalists; he was increasingly tormented in isolation by a ‘battle’ between God and the Devil, which was in effect ‘a profound inner conflict, the refraction of social issues’. If the projected unity was to be achieved at all, it could only be on the level of the transcendent abstraction of theology: feeling himself thoroughly sinful, Bunyan could yet find assurance of grace in the very fact of his suffering and his dispossession.

On the basis of this summary, it may seem that ‘myth’ is being used here, reductively, to mean ‘ideology’; but the chapters relating to The Pilgrim’s Progress demonstrate Lindsay’s appreciation of the shaping power of the narrative imagination. His psychoanalytic understanding of traditional myth is that it concerns the trauma of being born and the need to overcome parental authority figures (often figured as giants or ogres) in pursuit of one’s ‘real self’ or ‘external soul’, believed to have been lost at birth. The fundamental impulse is the desire to live; but Bunyan, as ‘maker’ of modern myths, can only express this negatively, as the desire to die. On the other hand, if the dream format of his allegory foregrounds the isolated individual dealing with obstacles and horrors as the projection of his own inner division, what it constantly gestures towards is the need for ‘fellowship’ and social justice.

Lindsay has a good eye for such paradoxes, and his book is an audacious experiment in a period when both Marx and Freud were being applied rather too literally and heavy-handedly.

#Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1953, repr. 1968)

ln his ‘Prologue’ Alan Watts repudiates those interpretations of mythology which he regards as reductive: for example, Frazer’s, which patronises the ancient from the point of view of the modern. He prefers the insights of Jung, who sees myths as collective dreams which represent the healing process of the psyche. He finds such insights to be complemented by the work of Ananda Coomaraswamy, who assumes that modern Western society is abnormal in that, in its blind march of progress, it has forgotten the wisdom of the ‘perennial philosophy’. This wisdom may be understood either through mystical experience or through mythology.

Watts knows that Christian myth may be explained historically: that is, as dependent on an historical event, namely the incarnation, and as a narrative which presents redemption as the fulfilment of an historical process. But he still insists that the mythic power of Christianity is best grasped under the aspect of liturgy rather than that of history: he is interested in the apprehension of the Christ of faith through recurrent ritual and recitation.

The body of his book consists of a fascinating account of how Christian myth takes effect in the context of seasonal Christian ceremony: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Whitsun, Trinity, and Michaelmas.

This is an erudite work from the philosopher whom we remember as a specialist in Zen, but who knew his Christianity as thoroughly as he knew his Buddhism.

#Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967)

This original and comprehensive work cannot be ignored by anyone interested in the relation between mythology, on the one hand, and philosophy, theology, or hermeneutics on the other. Culminating in the asssertion that ‘The symbol gives rise to thought’, this is less a study of evil than a study of the way evil is mediated through image and narrative.

Part I deals with the ‘primal’ symbols of ‘defilement, sin and guilt’, as found in the Bible and other founding texts of Western culture. Each of them highlights the paradoxical human situation, both free and unfree, which Ricoeur calls ‘the servile will’.

Part II develops these insights by outlining the speculative possibilities of myth. Repudiating the tradition of interpretation which sees myth as ‘false explanation’, Ricoeur insists on its exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding. He distinguishes four kinds of myth which have addressed the problem of evil: ‘The Drama of Creation’, ‘The Wicked God and the “Tragic” Vision of Existence’, ‘The Adamic Myth and the “Eschatological” Vision of History’, and ‘The Myth of the Exiled Soul and Salvation through Knowledge’. As a theologian as well as a philosopher, Ricoeur argues that all four of these are contained, or at least implied, by the third, the distinctly Biblical. Invoking the tradition of Judaeo-Christian hermeneutics, he argues that symbol and myth can only become alive again in our day

if we start negatively from our sense of having fallen and positively from the fullness of language and the challenge of interpretation.

#Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (New York: Greenwood Press, 1949, repr. 1969)

 ‘The central premise of this book is that myth is literature and therefore a matter of aesthetic experience and the imagination, a truth that literary critics should have affirmed long ago.’ Richard Chase’s words, written in 1949, anticipate the more recent work done on myth within the sphere of literary criticism. At a time when the relation of the literary to the mythic was thought to be simply one of derivation, it was certainly adventurous to refer to the two spheres as synonymous. Moreover, Chase’s book aims ‘to rescue myth from those who see it only as the means and end of philosophy, religious dogma, psychoanalysis, or semantics’. Myth, as a matter of delight more than of instruction, is not to be explained away, but should be celebrated without apology on aesthetic terms.

The thesis becomes no more specific than that, and the reader may be forgiven for forming the impression that all literature is equally mythic. Perhaps the most interesting chapters of the book are those giving an historical survey of the development of modern mythography, focusing on the Enlightenment and the Romantic rebellion against its premises.

#M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971)

 According to Abrams, the Romantic poets not only thought of themselves as prophets and visionaries in a generalised way, but specifically and consciously adopted a secularised version of the Biblical ‘circuitous quest’. That narrative concerns an initial harmony known as Eden, a fall from that harmony and a long journey through the wilderness towards a higher, more`complex harmony known as Jerusalem. Romantic poetry, according to Abrams, follows this pattern exactly, but dispenses with the notion of an external and conventional God who is responsible for the redemption of humankind.

For William Wordsworth and William Blake alike, salvation is a psychological or imaginative process, by which divisions are healed and alienation overcome. The apocalypse is symbolised by the marriage of the male mind and its female ‘contrary’ and not by that of the Messiah and his church. Abrams carefully relates this revolution in thought to philosophy, particularly that of Hegel. Natural Supernaturalism is a vast, stimulating work which crosses many boundaries. As such it may be categorised under not only ‘Myth’ but also ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Ecocriticism’.

 #Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972, repr. 1977)

Girard’s argument is best indicated by contrast. Firstly, he rejects the model of the Oedipus complex propounded by Freud in favour of a theory of ‘mimetic desire’: violence originates not in sex but in status. One person wants to imitate another person: to have what they have, to be what they are. If this urge is not channelled, society is polluted by ‘impure’ violence: hence the need for the ‘pure’ and decisive violence of the sacrifice of a ‘surrogate victim’ or ‘scapegoat’. Thus, violence explains the emergence of religion.

Secondly, unlike Frazer (The Golden Bough) Girard sees the choice of the sacrificial victim as arbitrary: it is after the sacrifice, not before, that he is granted the status of divinity.

Thirdly, though this book assumes a collective logic, which moves instinctively towards the imposition of order on disorder, culture on nature, he repudiates the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, which treats myth as a permanent kind of ‘language’ encoded in the brain.

The implicit point of Girard’s thesis – made explicit in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1987) – is that humanity has to learn to ‘desacralise’ violence and to transcend what we have known as myth. Indeed, as a Christian, he believes in a sacrificial victim whose own death signifies the end of sacrifice and atonement by blood, and so a rejection of stories which glorify them. Of all Girard’s fascinating books, Violence and the Sacred is probably the most accessible to literary students, since it contains a detailed reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.

#David Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1974, repr. 1981)

Nietzsche may have announced the death of God, and so of monotheism, but he thereby also announced the rebirth of the gods, and so of polytheism. David Miller sees the problem with Western culture over the past 2,000 years as being the fixation on one Truth, one Law, and one God; its liberation can only come about through the rediscovery of the pleasures and challenges of mythological diversity.

On the one hand, he demonstrates the disastrous consequences of privileging being over becoming, abstract ideas over storytelling, space over time, and science (or at least, a certain restricted view of science) over mysticism. On the other hand, he ingeniously argues that Christian theology, try as it might to privilege uniformity over diversity, orthodoxy over pluralism, nevertheless has its roots in polytheism. It is, for instance, no coincidence that Jesus Christ’s story is reminiscent of the dying and reviving gods of the Ancient Near East; nor should we overlook the polytheistic implications of a free-floating Holy Spirit.

For signs that we have begun to find our way back to the wisdom of the gods after so long in thrall to monotheistic dogma, he points to the more exciting (if eccentric) thinkers of this century: Martin Heidegger, Carl Jung, Norman O. Brown, and James Hillman, for example. Though not a literary-critical work, The New Polytheism is a pioneering approach to cultural history which reminds us how intimately religion is related to mythology, and how both are essentially narrative in origin. Also, it is a highly enjoyable read.

#William Righter, Myth and Literature (London and Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975)

This short but comprehensive book tries to identify what is characteristic about the modern approach to myth, and in particular the creative and critical uses to which it has been put. The first chapter, ‘The Consciousness of Myth’, distinguishes between three different questions that might be asked concerning myth. That asked by the ancients is ‘is it literally true?’; that asked by the Renaissance is ‘what kind of hidden, or allegorical, truth does it contain?’; and that asked by the moderns is ‘what place does the phenomenon of myth occupy among the languages of mankind?’. This last approach – broad and non-dogmatic, alert to the possibility of infinite contextualisation – is broken down into four ‘theories of myth’: the functionalist, the psychological, the religious, and the symbolic. In all four cases, what is striking is the rise of the self-conscious reception of material that was received as given in earlier times.

The second chapter, ‘Myth and lnterpretation’, deals with what is normally called ‘myth criticism’, demonstrating that this methodology can range from the simple identification of archetypes to the complex construction of ‘a mythical structure devised for the explication of other mythical structures’, as in Northrop Frye’s complex Anatomy of Criticism.

 

This suggestion of the affinity between interpreting myth and making myth is expanded upon in the third chapter, ‘The Myth of Myth’. Though mythology may have had its day as a body of narratives in which we might believe, the notion of ‘significant story’ shows no sign of abating. Indeed, the more critics recognise the ‘rage for order’, the more the question of myth overlaps with that of fiction itself. Righter draws on the work of Frank Kermode here, with its account of human life as inevitably involved in narrative constructions, seeking as it does coherence and concordance amidst the chaos of temporal experience. Righter seems to agree: his final emphasis is on the sense-making function of myth, understood to find fulfilment in the discovery of ‘an’ order rather than ‘the’ order. All students of myth and of literature will find this book useful and, to use its own recurrent term, ‘significant’.

#Marina Warner, Alone Of All Her Sex: The Myth And The Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1976, repr. 1990)

Marina Warner here considers the four dogmas of ‘Mariology’: the virgin birth of Mary’s son Jesus; the immaculate conception of Mary herself; her divine motherhood; her assumption, body and soul, into heaven. Warner’s main interest is in the historical nature of the myth of Mary, and in particular, how men have constructed the ideal of the feminine. She has a keen eye for contradiction, the central one being that of Christianity itself. For in its doctrine of Christ’s incarnation it validates the flesh; but in its reverence for Mary as possessing a perfection beyond humanity, which is a riposte to the sexual nature of all other women, it castigates the flesh.

In her emphasis on history she consciously invokes the work of Roland Barthes and rejects the notion of the eternally feminine advocated by Carl Jung. But her own findings are perhaps richer than Barthes’; and her fascination with Catholic iconography and narrative suggests an openness to spirituality that would not offend many Jungians.

She is especially interesting when she compares and contrasts ‘Mariology’ with ‘pagan’ mythology. For example, Mary is a virgin like Diana, but now virginity connotes asceticism rather than joyous freedom from male constraints. She is ‘queen of heaven’ like lnanna, but cannot officially be envisaged as descending into hell to wrestle with death (except in non-doctrinal folklore). She is associated with the moon, like Diana, Ishtar, and lsis, but may only be depicted in proximity to the serpent (in other cases, identified with fertility and wisdom) if she is shown to be crushing it underfoot.

As for Biblical mythology itself, Warner is illuminating on the relation between the compelling narrative power of Mary’s role as ‘second Eve’ and the otherwise arid-sounding doctrines of original sin and fortunate fall. Again, she traces carefully the transition from the ‘beloved’ of the Song of Songs (itself rooted in fertility myth), via the apocalyptic wedding feast of Revelation, to the idea of Mary as being not only the mother of Christ but also his bride. Such paradoxes are handled in a shrewd and scholarly manner, as is the function of Mary in secular writing.

Warner is especially interesting on the way the religion of adulterous love promulgated by the Troubadour poets of the twelfth century was radically revised the following century in the service of ‘Mariolatory’ and the ideal of married love. Nor should one overlook her useful account of Dante’s Comedy, which she regards as exceptional for its time in the balance it maintains between divine love (Mary) and human love (Beatrice), and in its non-dualistic approval of humanity. All in all, this is a book which is required reading for students of myth, of the Bible, and of literary and cultural history.

#Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977)

The definition of ‘American monomyth’ provided by Jewett and Shelton is ‘an archetypal plot pattern emerging in American popular culture in which a community threatened by evil is redeemed through superheroism’. The historical context is the ‘axial decade’: that is, it was in the period of the Great Depression,between 1929 and 1941, that ‘traditional dramatic motifs coalesced to create the American monomyth’.

The theoretical context is Joseph Campbell’s formulation of the ‘classical monomyth’: ‘an archetypal plot pattern in folktales and classical myths, deriving from pagan rites of initiation in which a hero leaves home, undergoes trials, and returns as an adult’. But whereas Campbell un-problematically celebrates American individualism, Jewett and Lawrence address the function of myth in popular culture: they write, for instance, about ‘mythic massage’ and ‘pop religion’. However, the fact that they perceive the desire to affirm an idealised American community as ‘monomythic Eden’ as resulting from economic factors between the wars does not mean that they belong to the ‘demythologising’ school. Indeed, one of the most useful contributions of the book is the theory of the ‘myth of mythlessness’: ‘the unexamined belief that scientific culture has transcended mythical forms of thought’. Those who patronise popular culture are accused of committing the ‘bubble-gum fallacy’: ‘the ascription of trivial, diversionary qualities to popular entertainments while denying their mythical aspects and formative influences’.

The authors are so keen to avoid committing this fallacy that they might appear to be excessively attentive to the minutiae of television and cinema: they even include ‘Trekkie’ in their glossary (‘a devoted follower of the Star Trek series’). At the same time, they provide the means to criticise the reactionary aspect of modern myth making, as evident from the United States: stories in which the ‘American Dream’ is saved by the intervention of a solitary superhero are demonstrated to be distortions of the traditional role of mythology. The overall achievement of their researches is both fascinating and provocative.

#Frank McConnell, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)

This book is an extended corrective to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. While agreeing with Frye that we can relate all literary and cinematic plots to a certain limited number of literary modes or ‘mythoi’, he disagrees that the seasonal model (romance complementing summer, tragedy autumn, satire winter, and comedy spring) is the best to use. It suggests temporal succession, whereas McConnell wants to stress the simultaneity of narrative structures: ‘the way in which – however temporal they may seem – they are always all present in the mind as potential forms of human life, potential levels of social organization’.

The four kinds of story he posits relate to the four types of law distinguished by Rousseau
in The Social Contract: epic, which concerns the founding of civilisation, and whose hero is a king, complements political law; romance, which concerns the maintenance of civilisations, and whose hero is a knight or equivalent, complements civil law; melodrama, which concerns the conflict between public and private duty, and whose hero is a pursuer of wrongdoers, complements criminal law; satire, which concerns the loss of value and the experience of guilt, and whose hero is the satirist himself, complements the law of public opinion. Just as Frye adds a fifth mode, that of ‘the return of irony to myth’, so McConnell adds the story of ‘recognition and rebirth’, which addresses the question of self-consciousness (Rousseau’s underlying concern), and whose hero is the madman who may turn out to be the messiah.

Thus, McConnell’s ingenious categorisation owes a great deal to the Anatomy; but,given this, its independence of thought and its range of original illustrations should be acknowledged. In keeping with his notion of the simultaneity of the above paradigms, he shows how we can trace the key figures of each story throughout whole narrative cycles. For example, Arthurian legend gives us the following characters: Arthur (epic), Gawain (romance), Lancelot (melodrama), Mordred (satire) and Perceval (recognition).

Again, George Lucas’s film Star Wars gives us Kenobi (epic), Luke Skywalker (romance), Hans Solo (melodrama), the droids (satire), and ‘the Force’ itself (recognition). Lastly, the western film genre gives us: the frontiersman or cattle baron, such as John Wayne in Red River (epic); the federal marshal, such as Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine (romance); the town marshal, such as Gary Cooper in High Noon (melodrama); the principled outlaw whose existence implies judgement of the community, such as Alan Ladd in Shane or Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter (satire); and the new founder, who suggests the possibility of a different way of life, such as John Wayne in The Shootist (recognition). All in all, this is a book full of brilliant ideas, which should benefit those engaged in literary and cultural studies.

#Eric Gould, Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981)

Instead of thinking of a set body of ‘mythology’, Gould proposes that we ponder the very  process of ‘mythicity’. This is not the same thing as ‘mythopoeia’, which suggests a deliberate, almost programmatic, endeavour. Gould refers rather to the idea that myth exists mainly as an intention implicit in a literary text. It is a linguistic movement, a ‘play’ of words which presupposes the experience of metaphysical ‘lack’. It is an ongoing human expression, an open-ended discourse which involves continual interpretation and reinterpretation. Indeed, myth itself is inseparable from hermeneutics. Hence we are advised to think of mythic images not as archetypes but as signs.

As narrative and as interpretive act, myth seeks to close the gap between signifier and signified: this is impossible, but then myth centres on that very impossibility. Thus it is not about origins, about the sacred as pure, pre-linguistic phenomenon, but about an endlessly deferred goal of competed understanding. In Gould’s words: ‘there can be no
myth without an ontological gap between event and meaning.’

His argument is close in spirit to deconstruction, and stands opposed to all essentialism. Negative as it may sound in paraphrase, it yet provides the occasion for a celebration of modern writing: not only Joyce, whom one would expect, but also Eliot and Lawrence, all three being seen as negotiating, with varying degrees of conviction, the mythic dialectic between intention and impossibility.

#Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982)

This detailed and demanding book is worth persevering with, for its thesis is clear enough: ‘myth redeems history.’ Frye assumes that the Bible is a ‘unified structure of imagery and narrative’ which follows the pattern known by theologians as ‘salvation history’. In keeping with the account of literature, as an ‘order of words’ which forms the extension of a mythic paradigm, given in his earlier Anatomy of Criticism, Frye identifies the Biblical narrative as a ‘myth of deliverance’ involving seven phases: creation, revolution, law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel and apocalypse.

Lest we conceive of this as a simple, linear pattern, Frye explains that the overall scheme moves between the poles of the divine world (symbolised by the Garden of Eden, the Promised Land and Jersualem) and the demonic world (symbolised by Egypt, Babylon and Rome). This dialectical pattern of imagery is the ‘U-shaped standard shape of comedy’. Thus the Bible is not only a ‘myth of deliverance’ but a ‘divine comedy’: one in which ‘man loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.’

The Great Code, though a work of sophisticated scholarship, is radically and powerfully simple.

#Paul A. Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)

An interesting complement to M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism, which concerns the Romantic rewriting of the last book of the Bible, this book concerns the Romantic rewriting of the first book. In the poetry of William BIake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, creation myth becomes a Gnostic narrative, in which the traditional ‘creator’ is exposed as a ‘demiurge’ or inferior deity, against whom his ‘creature’ is right to rebel. In doing so, he realises his own divine potential and so becomes both ‘creature and creator’. Cantor celebrates the radical shift in sensibility involved in this ‘myth-making’, but also traces the growing disillusionment with human powers of creation which becomes evident in, for example, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.

# Robert Clark, History, Ideology and Myth in American Fiction,1823-52 (London: Macmillan, 1984)

 The terms of Clark’s title convey the direction of his argument. In order to explain the complex nature of the novels of Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville, he analyses how the American pioneer experience of settling a new-found land produced a contradictory belief in both the necessary extension of civilisation and the ideal innocence of the natural life. It is in the fiction that the contradictions are resolved in mythical terms, the recurrent plot following one basic formula: ‘Civilisation threatens Adamic Innocent living in harmony with Edenic Nature’. That is, ideological contradictions are dealt with by representing them ‘the other way around’ in order to provide ‘a wish-fulfilling dream’ which inverts cause and effect, leaving us with ‘a timeless image of concord where there was once work, economy, history, politics, and struggle’.

Taking his cue from Roland Barthes’s analysis of mythic thought, Clark demonstrates how pre-Civil War fiction fulfils a process of psychological ‘censorship’, moving from history (the ‘real conditions’ of the farmer expropriating the land of the Indians by violence) to ideology (the attribution of ‘goodness’ to the signified ‘farmer’ by association with the signifier ‘yeoman’) and so to myth (the idealised ‘American hero’ being taken to signify pure, uncomplicated ‘innocence’). The book’s fascination lies in seeing how this abstract pattern facilitates such intriguing and distinctive readings of classic texts. Though Clark’s concern is with the exposure of narrative devices, he always manages to negotiate the subtle distinction between ‘mythology’ and ‘ideology’.

#Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht (eds), Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Revisions of Jungian Thought  (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1985)

These essays comprise an extended ‘Yes, but … ‘ to Carl Jung. Yes, feminists will be grateful to him for taking ‘the feminine’ seriously, particularly the images of the ‘anima` and the ‘great mother’, and for positing the notion of a ‘collective unconscious’ that precedes the patriarchal stress on the personal (usually male) unconscious. But they ought to reject completely his dualism, which polarises male spirit (‘Logos’) and female body (‘Eros’), and his assumption that the ‘archetypes of the collective unconscious’ are eternal and essential.

These ideas are challenged generally in the editors’ introduction. Most interesting for the literary student is Annis V. Pratt’s essay, ‘Spinning Among Fields: Jung, Frye, Levi-Strauss and Feminist Archetypal Theory’. Pratt shows how the theorists listed in her title can prove
useful influences within feminism, provided they are radically reread. Jung’s description of the archetypal rebirth journey must be amended to take account of parallel quests undertaken by the protagonists of female narratives.

Frye is helpful in so far as he demonstrates archetypes to be recurrent images in the ‘total order of words’ that is literature rather than unchanging and unchangeable symbols, but his identification of men with culture and women with nature is obviously not helpful. Levi-Strauss may be acknowledged for his notion that all the varying practices of a community may be understood as forming a ‘bundle of relations’ which is its hidden meaning, but his abstract system of interpretation, which explains all phenomena according to a logical structure of signs, is ‘dualistic and imperial’.

The answer, Pratt suggests, is not simply to reject the hegemony of male reason, but to keep working across different discipline boundaries, countering absolutism: hence her metaphor of ‘spinning among fields’. In the words of the editors’ summing up of Pratt’s argument: ‘the task is to disentangle feminine archetypes from the masculine warp of culture.’ The fact that even here polarities have to be provisionally assumed may indicate what a complex and important project the editors and the contributors have set themselves.

#William G. Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Alabama, TN: University of Alabama Press, 1986)

This is a thorough guide to modern interpretations of myth rather than to the myths themselves, though of course the latter are illuminated in the process. Assuming that ritual, in the broadest sense, will always be implicit in any myth (mythos and cultus being complementary), Doty goes on to explore various dimensions of the term ‘myth’, demonstrating the diversity of emphases.

Thus, when considering the social function of myth, he distinguishes between the static model of society proposed by functionalism proper and the ideal of change explored by anthropologists such as Geertz: i.e„ myth as goal (‘model for`) as well as basis (‘model of’). Similarly, he distinguishes, within modern ‘demythologisation’, between Bultmann’s potentially useful corrective to the literal interpretation of Biblical myths and his followers’ reduction of all myths to empty fantasies.

Within ‘myth and ritual theory’ itself, he distinguishes between Frazer’s retrospective account of the primitive need for ceremonies and for their accompanying stories, on the one hand, and Victor Turner’s prospective account of ‘social drama’, which emphasises the possibilities of renewal offered to a social order by the ‘liminal’ stage of ritual in the form of trickster myths, etc., on the other.

Under the category of ‘psyche’, Doty gives a succinct account of Freud: seeing rituals as neuroses and myths as cultural dreams, the father of psychoanalysis works according to a ‘hermeneutics of deceit’ which puts both Judaism and Christianity in their place as Oedipal narratives, but which increasingly relies on his own myth of the war between Eros and Thanatos. He may be contrasted with Jung, whose ‘collective unconscious’ is far deeper and wider in scope than his mentor’s ‘archaic heritage’; but Doty, in agreement with the critic Eric Gould, rejects Jung’s essentialism.

Gould figures also in his account of ‘myth criticism’ as such: the way forward beyond the ‘totalising’ seasonal model of a Northrop Frye and the ‘monomythicism’ of a Joseph Campbell is the idea of myth as an open-ended discourse, an ongoing human expression. One wonders whether this time the odds have not been stacked unfairly here: against Frye, whose Biblical, apocalyptic project is in itself more exploratory than explanatory, if not against Campbell. However, in discussing structuralism, Doty redresses the balance: while rightly indicating the dangers of interpreting myths in terms of an abstract logic or grammar, he does point out that where deconstruction has demonstrated myth to involve endless reworking and transformation, it has in many respects been anticipated by Levi-Strauss.

This is an important, central work about modern mythography: demanding and controversial by turns, it merits close attention.

#Elinor W. Gadon, The Once and Future Goddess: A Symbol for Our Time (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1989)

The title indicates that this book is not just concerned with documenting the decline of the female deity, but seeks to promote a new spirituality centred on the goddess, which might begin to repair the damage of millennia of patriarchy. Reverence for the Earth Mother of the Ice Age (35,000-10,000 BC) was associated with the rise of art and ritual. Her replacement by the Great Goddess with the invention of agriculture in the New Stone Age was not, according to Gadon, part of the story of decline (though others, it should be said, have seen the agricultural revolution as fostering a newly aggressive and demanding attitude to the earth). Rather, she becomes the rich, complex figure of the Triple Goddess, whose phases of virgin, mother and crone embody the cycle of vegetation and moon alike.

It was against this deity that the nomadic, patriarchal tribes from the north reacted, foisting upon peaceful, egalitarian, matrifocal communities the worship of the sky god. Gadon traces in some detail the process by which the Minoan culture was destroyed, and how its rituals were subordinated in the telling of new myths of the male hero: Theseus, in particular, who triumphs over the body of the goddess, in the form of the labyrinth. Such hollow victories were not always so dramatic: she also draws on considerable scholarship to demonstrate that it was a long time after the Hebrews settled in Canaan that they decided to reject Asherah, the native goddess, as a suitable mate for their god Yahweh. Not that this prevents her from indicating the devastating effect of monotheism, with its dualism of man and woman, humanity and nature, life and death, good and evil.

So much for the goddess who was ‘once’; as for the ‘future goddess’, Gadon is inspired by James Lovelock’s vision of Gaia (which she compares to the shaman’s intuition of the wholeness of the planet) to advocate new aesthetic developments, by female artists
especially, which might restore us to a sense of the sacredness of the earth and purge us of our false identification of the spritual with the supernatural. If she also invokes Carl Jung and his follower Joseph Campbell, it is with the strict understanding that we can no longer countenance the narrative of the male journey for self-realisation away from the mother. At their best, Jung and Campbell seemed to realise this, whatever contrary pronouncements they might have made.

This is a deeply fascinating work which should interest students of art, literature, myth, religion, and anyone interested in how to regain an ‘ecological wisdom’.

#Robert A. Segal (ed), In Quest of the Hero (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)

This volume reproduces a large part of three important works of mythography: Otto Rank’s The Birth of the Hero, Lord Raglan’s The Hero, and Alan Dundes’ The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus. Rank’s approach is Freudian and symbolic: the hero stands for the childhood desires of the mythmaker and reader alike – to kill the tyrannous father and mate with the mother. However, the desire is so abhorrent that it must be repressed: hence, myths of the hero convey this Oedipal content in disguised form; hence, too, there is a need to interpret them carefully and to keep an eye out for condensed or displaced material.

Raglan’s approach is Frazerian and literalist: the hero of the myth, who should be a king, is
identical with the dying god of fertility. Whereas Rank’s hero serves himself and promotes his own life by overcoming and replacing the father/ king, Raglan’s hero saves the community, as king, by letting himself be killed. Where Rank’s focus of interest is the family, Raglan’s is the physical world. Rank thinks myth will be necessary as long as there is sexual neurosis; Raglan, with Frazer, thinks myth must finally be dismissed on scientific grounds as an illusory means of ensuring the survival of the community.

The third mythographer, Dundes, draws on both Raglan’s ritualistic approach and Rank’s psychoanalytic approach in seeking to resolve the paradox that Jesus is important not only as an historical figure, but also as a mythic hero. Raglan proposes 22 motifs of hero myth: for example, 1.’The hero’s mother is a royal virigin’; 9. ‘We are told nothing of his childhood’; 18. ‘He meets with a mysterious death’; 19. ‘Often at the top of a hill’. Dundes shows how Jesus’s life may roughly approximate to Raglan’s pattern without disqualifying his historical existence and importance. Rank sees all father-son narratives as Oedipal; Dundes agrees, and explains the way Jesus’s life has been structured via folklore to offer a wish-fulfilment for Mediterranean males. Jesus manages the impossible: he acts out his role as a dutifiul son who obeys his father, even to the point of being crucified (i.e.,castrated); yet he simultaneously triumphs over the father, by means of his resurrection and ascension into heaven and by his lasting association (implicitly sexual) with Mary Magdalene (who serves as substitute for that other Mary, his own mother).

The volume offers a good deal of such food for thought; it is lucidly introduced by Robert Segal, who usefully compares and contrasts Rank, Raglan, and Dundes with Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.

#Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber and Faber, 1992)

Hughes’s audacious thesis is that Shakespeare’s mature drama is based on one fundamental storyline, combining the plot of his two early poems, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’. The female hero of this ur-myth is the goddess of Hughes’s title, known in Latin as Venus. She can take three forms: great mother, sacred bride, and queen of the underworld. She is always implicitly the first, since that is the form which contains the whole cycle of being. She pursues Adonis as the second, only to be rejected. This provokes her, as the third, to adopt the guise of a wild boar and kill him. But the narrative is only complete when the slain young man is reborn as the woman-hating tyrant who seeks the destruction of the goddess in all her forms; as Tarquin, he then rapes Lucrece.

Hughes relates this myth to the religious and political turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare is seen as sympathetic to a Catholic faith which is centred in the body and the female: hence he identifies the destructive Adonis-Tarquin figure with Puritanism. While no one play will give us access to the complete paradigm, Hughes argues that all the problem comedies, tragedies and romances dramatise one aspect or another. Thus, typical goddess-haters include Angelo, Othello and Hamlet; again, though there are images of reconciliation at the end of The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, these are unconvincing because Shakespeare is really only interested in the mythic ‘power circuit’ of the whole story, which is about a major cultural disaster. Hughes’s vast elaboration on an hypothesis – parallel to that sketched by T. S. Eliot in his ‘Metaphysical Poets’ essay (‘dissociation of sensibility’) and that sketched by D. H. Lawrence in his discussion of Hamlet in Twilight in ltaly (a ‘change in the European psyche’ involving revulsion against the flesh) – might well scandalise the Shakespearean specialist even as it delights those seeking an accessible and stimulating overview of the plays.

 #Marc Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye and Campbell (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992)

Marc Manganaro is not only concerned with the way the rhetorical appeal to myth has functioned in literary modernism and in the criticism deriving from it: he wishes to interrogate the very nature of modern anthropology, from which writers such as Eliot drew their authority. Manganaro distinguishes between two broad approaches to the study of the ‘primitive’: the comparative method associated with Frazer and the ethnography of Malinowski. The former is concerned with ‘being everywhere’ (making ambitious
connections against an evolutionary context), while the latter concentrates on ‘being there’ (making specific observations on a given tribe as a result of field research). At first sight, the former seems ‘dialogical’, the latter monological; the former seems ‘writerly’, the latter ‘readerly’; but Manganaro wishes to demonstrate that the encyclopedic range and diversity of vision advocated by Frazer reveals its totalitarian, reductive, and Eurocentric basis once its influence on Eliot, Frye, and Campbell is studied.

To take the example of Eliot, and to use (as does Manganaro) his own terminology: the declared ‘impersonality’ of his ‘mythical method’ gives him an ‘objective correlative’ of ‘fact’, and so the authority to adopt the stance of the poet-priest who will repair the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ of modernity, restoring Western culture to unity by the power of ritual while managing to articulate the dimension of the sacred on a higher level than that of the ‘primitive’. That is, Frazer’s comparative documentation of vegetation ceremonies fosters a rhetorical claim to reunite ‘blood’ and ‘brain’, conscious and unconscious, tradition and orthodoxy in the apparently neutral ‘definition of culture’.

The complexity of Manganaro’s extensive study will be evident even (or especially) in paraphrase; but this is a book which cannot be ignored by the serious student of myth, modernism, and modernity.

#Marina Warner, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (London: Vintage, 1994)

The six chapters of this study of contemporary mythology originated in the Reith Lectures which Marina Warner gave on BBC radio in 1994, The main title is explained by etymology: Warner traces the word ‘monster’ back to two Latin words, one of which means ‘show’ and the other of which means ‘warn’. Thus: ‘a myth shows something, it’s a story spoken to a purpose, it issues a warning’ (p.19). Her account of the ‘six myths of our time’ outlined here demonstrates that we are in danger of ‘managing monsters’ only in the crude terms of the violent film or video game: that is, by slaying them. She advocates a more subtle, traditional approach to the monstrous other: negotiation, sympathy,understanding.

Thus, in the first lecture we are invited to stop demonising the female, whether in the form of the rampaging dinosaurs of Jurassic Park or of the ‘irresponsible’ single mothers of the tabloid press. From ‘monstrous mothers’ we proceed to the myths of masculinity, of childhood innocence, of the wilderness (whether as symbolised by beast or by ‘wild man’), of primitive ‘savagery’, and of nationalism. Examples are drawn from literature, film and journalism. What is advocated is a constant vigilance in the face of a corrupted imagination, and a deeper knowledge of the sources from which contemporary myths are constructed. Far from being pessimistic about the impoverishment of the collective psyche, Warner insists that myth-making is an historical necessity which can never be contained, either by the scholar or by the capitalist entertainment industry. The brevity and colloquial style of this book belie its importance.

#Christopher G. Flood, Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction (New York and London: Garland Press, 1996)

In literary studies, myth is often taken to be an archaic heritage, a given body of narratives on which writers can draw. Flood argues to the contrary that myth and mythmaking characterise modern society as much as they do archaic or ancient societies. He works within a tripartite division, indicating the complexity of the relations involved. On one side, we have ‘sacred myth’, by which he means myth as traditionally understood, in close proximity to religion. On the other side, we have ‘political ideology’, which at first seems to be quite distinct. In between, and mediating between the two apparent extremes, is ‘political myth’. It is narrative by virtue of being myth; it is ideological by virtue of being political. Like sacred myth, it consolidates a group and validates a particular version of reality by telling a story of origin, or of exemplary conduct, or of destination; like ideology, it is taken for granted, and is virtually invisible.

Flood emphasises that both myth and ideology are indispensable modes of thinking, and he rejects any definitions which suggest a deliberate, sinister process of indoctrination is involved. He tries to remain what he calls ‘neutral’, that is to say inclusive, in his own discussion. Particularly useful is his querying of attempts to separate out myth and ideology: he demonstrates that both Hitler’s and Marx’s works inevitably fuse both discourses. But also salutary is his challenge to Barthes, who notoriously declares myth to be nothing more than an instrument of ideology, a non-narrative image whose illusion must be revealed so that its power may be dispelled: for Flood, his thinking is vague and his approach is a ‘class-reductionist version of the Marxist theory of ideology’ which shows little sensitivity to the workings of myth. Such scepticism in the face of the idols of critical theory indicates the innovative and enquiring quality of this work.

#Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Myth is not a matter of origins so much as ends, according to Michael Bell; twentieth-century mythopoeia tells us where we are going rather than where we have come from. In this regard, he argues within the context of Heidegger’s ‘age of the world view’ and recognises the problem of ‘believing’ in a myth while acknowledging that it is contingent and provisional. He agrees also with Adorno and Horkheimer that the representative myth of the twentieth century is that of Odysseus, but he emphasises the theme of wandering, of quest for a homeland, rather than any implicit ideology. Indeed, one might view this book
as a timely and erudite riposte to all those who have got away with treating ‘mythology’ and ‘ideology’ as synonyms.

Bell’s sensitive reading of some key texts of modernism and of postmodernism
demonstrates that it is never enough to explain away writers as simply constrained by a world view: one has to attend to the relation between their recovery of the power of ancient myth and their attempt to challenge the given order. Indeed, he usefully distinguishes between those writers tending to the literal interpretation and application of myth (Pound largely, Eliot partially) and those trying to remain alert to its newly heuristic function (Joyce always, Lawrence intermittently). Again, while establishing the ethical importance of Primo Levi’s engagement with both history and myth, he pertinently queries the whimsical play between the two which he discovers in Angela Carter’s fiction. Of particular interest and importance is the last chapter, where Bell repudiates the stance of ‘ideological foreclosure’ adopted by certain contemporary critics, who thereby deny the exploratory power of myth. This book deserves serious attention.

#Ford Russell, Northrop Frye on Myth: An Introduction (New York: Garland Press, 1998)

The author is not interested in Frye as a literary critic so much as a theorist of myth. This means that he devotes much of his book to a comparative account of Frye and his
immediate predecessors in the field of mythography: Frazer, Cassirer, Freud, Jung, and others. This is useful work, and offers occasional insights: for instance, Cassirer and Northrop Frye share a Kantian interest in the way the human mind constructs the world as much as receives it (through symbolism, in the former case, and through the mythological imagination in the latter). On the other hand, some comparisons can be misleading: Jung and Frye are not really any more close than are Jung and Eliade, even though all three use the word ‘archetype’. That said, the central thesis of the book, emerging as it does from Russell’s painstakingly comparative work, is probably valid: that Frye is chiefly concerned to forge his own myth, and it is one that centres on the ‘ideal reader’, situated in an ‘intertextual universe’, as hero.

The task of this figure is to reach the still centre of the ‘order of words’ that is literature; having done so, he or she will have attained the point of epiphany. It will be obvious, then, that Russell’s book does suit literary students after all, even if they have to be prepared to engage with a good deal of philosophy in order to reap its benefits. Moreover, Frye’s myth of the reader as hero is also based upon theology, and so some interest in Biblical interpretation would be an advantage.

#Eleazar Meletinsky (trans. G. Lanque and A. Sadetsky), The Poetics of Myth (New York and London: Garland Press, 1998)

First written in 1976, but only recently translated, Melitinsky’s volume represents a high point in Russian critical theory. It is a comprehensive work which seeks to encompass most modern approaches to both myth and literature, most traditional forms of myth, and most of the important developments in ‘mythification’ (or mythopoeia) in twentieth-century literature. It is perhaps a significant contribution to treat myth as a mode of narrative susceptible to the same treatment as literature, on the understanding that it belongs to its ‘pre-history phase’ (hence the ‘poetics’ in his title), but his more important thesis is that literature develops from a ‘mytho-poetic base’.

This base is analysed in materialist terms, the main emphasis being on myth as a means of ordering and sanctioning social behaviour. In this respect, Melitinksy is a follower of Malinowski; but the argument becomes really interesting when he tries to marry this functionalist approach with the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. If archaic societies maintained a semantic dimension to myth (the signified being social reality, as commonly understood), modern societies have demonstrated the semiotic potential of myth (the signifier becoming less constrained and so more imaginatively interesting).

The crucial moment for Meltinisky is the demise of nineteenth-century realism and the rise of twentieth-century modernism: he explores the work of Joyce and Kafka in particular. The former revises traditional myths as if they were a ready-made fictional language. The latter creates a more spontaneous kind of myth by defamilarising familiar objects, creatures, and kinds of people in the process of attributing mythic status to them. Yet both, in a sense, seem to Melitinsky to fulfil the promise of Schlegel’s Romantic case for literary mythopoeia. Such connections are typical of this wide-ranging volume, which merits attention from students of fiction, critical theory, and the sociology of literature, as well as of mythology proper.

#Jason Whittaker, William BIake and the Myths of Britain (London: Macmillan Press, 1999)

Scholars such as E. P. Thompson and David Erdman have argued for BIake as a political radical, concerned to rewrite both Bible and native mythology in repudiation of the dominant ideology of his day. Jason Whitaker does not so much disagree with such an interpretation as insist on the need to widen and deepen it. He concentrates mainly on the figure of Albion, whom antiquarians before Blake had been identifying with the established English order. Blake by contrast identified him with the new Adam, whose awakening signified a complete transformation of human consciousness. To a large extent, this awakening would involve the end of social oppression and cultural hegemony; but for Whitaker, we fail to do BIake justice if we confine his symbolism to the political sphere. For his rereading of the myth of Albion complemented his rereading of the Bible: the point was to challenge not only monarchy and patronage, but also deism, druidism, and empiricism.

For BIake, the traditional God the Father was ‘Urizen’, and ‘your reason’ demanded control, sacrifice, and merely rational knowledge. Hence the subject of the major prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem, is the awakening of the self to its diverse powers, hitherto confined by the orthodoxy of ‘single vision and Newlon’s sleep’. For Whitaker this revelation is essentially a religious one, even if it has political implications.

He makes a good case for his kind of interpretation, drawing on psychoanalysis and poststructuralist theory rather than Marxism and historicism. While he may underestimate the importance of Thompson and Erdman, his own work effectively complements theirs.

 #Robert A. Segal, Theorizing about Myth (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999)

This volume consists of the author’s various introductions to, or essays on aspects of, key theorists of myth. Ostensibly a diverse selection, it turns out to be a consistent and coherent statement on the nature and status of ‘mythography’, or interpretation of myth. Segal assumes that any theorist will address one or more of the following questions about myth: What is its origin? What is its function? What is its subject-matter? He demonstrates that, in practice, most theorists fail to answer all three: for example, Bultmann only really talks about subject matter (the place of human beings in the world), while Malinowski only really talks about function (the sanctioning of social and religious practices).

If theorists do not on the whole offer complete accounts of myth, how are they to be assessed? Segal’s approach is to define their positions by contrast with those of others, since he sees the history of mythography as a process of reaction against predecessors. Thus: Tylor reacted against symbolic readings; Jung and Eliade reacted against Tylor; and so on. If Segal is a comparative historian of religion, then his comparisons usually end up as contrasts. This has the advantage of clarity; it also encourages students to make connections and to make intelligent generalisations. Lastly, one should point out that, as well as summing up so much, this volume also provokes discussion about established reputations: for example, Freud does not seem to have half as much to say about myth as Jung, while Campbell’s work is in many respects a distortion of Jung’s. This is a lucid and valuable volume.

#Maria Kuteeva (ed), The Ways of Creative Mythologies: Imagined Worlds and Their Makers, Tolkien Society Seminars, Volumes 1 and 2, (Telford: Tolkien Society, 2000)

This collection of papers on myth, with particular reference to Tolkien, originated in a conference held at Manchester University in 1997. The premise is that, given Tolkien is dismissed or patronised by the academy, it might be a good idea for academics to talk about the modern urge to ‘remythologisation’ in a wider context than The Lord of the Rings, though without feeling obliged to hide their enthusiasm for that magisterial work.

In the first part of Volume 1, Myth, Nationalism and ldeology, Tom Shippey sets the tone by, first, contesting the usual reasons for which critics treat Tolkien with condescension, and then going on to celebrate that twentieth-century English author’s impressive ability to incorporate the concerns of nineteenth-century German scholars of myth into his own imaginative project.

The papers in the second volume, Myth, Modernity and Postmodernity, discuss not only The Lord of the Rings as a corrective to the facile faith in technological progress for example, but also the dangers of Eliot’s narrowly modernist view of mythopoeia, as corrected by his contemporary, Kenneth Burke. The first section of this second volume – ‘Mythic lmagination’ – includes discussions of The Lord of the Rings in relation to ‘dialogism’ (a Bakhtinian concept acceptable to critics, but not normally associated with Tolkien), on the one hand, and in relation to the hierarchical cosmos of Platonism, on the other. The second part, ‘Myth in Contemporary Culture’, ranges from myth and politics in George Oppen’s poetry to the revitalisation of classical mythology in contemporary drama. Most papers are preceded by useful abstracts, and the whole thing is introduced in a lively manner by the editor.

 

 

 

See also:

For also:  Laurence Coupe, Myth 

For details, see: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/books/

 

For more on reading myth, see also:

https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/reading-for-the-myth/

https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/myth-a-very-short-introduction/

 

For more on Campbell, see: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/the-heros-journey/

 

 

GOING GREEN: THE EMERGENCE OF ECOCRITICISM

A selection of entries from ‘Ecocriticism’, published in ABES 

The Annotated Bibliography for English Studies, or ABES, was run by Dr. Robert Clark at the University of East Anglia, UK – subsequently being taken over by Routledge. I have selected some of my contributions to ABES, written betweeen 1997 and 2000,  focussing on the pioneering texts in the given discipline. I was responsible for ‘Ecocriticism’ and ‘Myth’. Here I provide my assessments of the chosen texts, but not the technical notes that accompanied the original articles.

 

#Kenneth Burke , Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984 [1935])

lf any work has the claim to be the first sustained example of ecocriticism, it must be this early theoretical book by the literary critic, Kenneth Burke. This third edition is particularly important, for it contains an ‘Afterword’ by the author, in which he spells out the continuing relevance of his early notions, such as ‘technological psychosis’.

Some commentators on Burke have accused this book of biological essentialism, with  ‘permanence’ (being, nature) seeming to be privileged over ‘change’ (becoming, history). But the human ‘purpose’ which the book anatomises is one that proceeds dialectically from ‘orientation’ (what he calls ‘trained incapacity’, a ‘way of seeing’ which is simultaneously ‘a way of not seeing’, a too exclusive sense of ‘piety’), through ‘disorientation’ (what he calls ‘perspective by incongruity’, a sense of ‘impiety’ which allows for what the initial orientation excludes), to ‘reorientation’ (what he calls ‘simplification’, involving a ‘poetry of action’, an ‘ethical universe-building’ which is informed by a spirit of cooperation, both natural and social).

If Burke appeals to ‘the Way’, the Taoist principle that ‘there is one fundamental source of human satisfaction, forever being glimpsed and lost again, and forever being restated’, his fascination with ‘restating’ prevents him taking the mystic’s short cut to ‘permanence’. At the same time, he repudiates all causal, mechanistic thinking, insisting that organism and environment are inseparable.

His method for studying the human organism is ‘metabiology’. His premise is that, being ‘bodies that learn language’, we are capable of approaching our world in terms of motive, purpose, eloquence, belief  – what he will subsequently call ‘symbolic action’. Thus, taking up the terminology of The Golden Bough, he queries Frazer’s ‘progress’ – from magic and religion to science – and demonstrates the dangers of disenchantment.

What Burke is concerned with, here as always, is the threat to both humanity and environment posed by the technological ‘Counter-Nature’ which has seemingly replaced the mythological ‘Super-Nature’.

In the course of the fascinating and self-reflective argument which runs through the book, Burke finds time to put excessively science-oriented critics like Richards in their place and to offer guarded support for the eccentric speculations of D. H. Lawrence. Those suspecting that Burke is hostile to scientific thought as such should note the epigraph, which is a quotation from the scientist A. N. Whitehead – the point of emphasis being that ‘the different modes of natural existence shade off into one another’, and so avoid neat classification.

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/kenneth-burke-pioneer-of-ecocriticism/

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/

 

#John F. Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature: A Study of ‘King Lear’ (London: Faber 1975 [1948])

Danby begins by proposing that Shakespeare’s tragedy of King Lear can be regarded as ‘a play dramatising the meanings of the single word “Nature”’. From this modest beginning – ‘the drama of ideas’ – he manages to build up an overall view of Shakespeare’s development as both artist and thinker (the two being inseparable roles for Danby) and of political and theological debate in the early modern period.

Lear embodies the ‘benignant’ nature of Richard Hooker; Edmund embodies the ‘malignant’ nature of Thomas Hobbes. Tudor and post-Tudor society is seen as suffering a ‘fission’ between these two, which Shakespeare diagnoses throughout his drama, from Henry VI to Macbeth. Nostalgic for the feudal idea of nature as normative (Lear) and deeply critical of the capitalist idea of nature as competitive (Edmund), Shakespeare develops in King Lear the radically Christian idea of nature as redemptive (Cordelia).

In doing so he anticipates not only the demands of the ‘Diggers’ during the seventeenth-century English revolution but also the critical preoccupations of the Romantic poets. ‘Nature’, it is demonstrated, has a history. Danby, while obviously owing something to the standard works by E. M. W. Tillyard and Basil Willey, produces an adventurous thesis which seems to have dated very little.

 

#Martin Heidegger, ‘Poetically Man Dwells …’ (1951), Poetry, Language, Thought, ed. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

This essay, first given as a lecture in 1951, is perhaps the most accessible of Heidegger’s pronouncements on the relationship between what we would call literature and nature, but which he would call ‘poetry’ and ‘the earth’. Though focusing on a particular text – ‘In lovely blue’ by the German romantic poet, Holderlin – it is not a conventional piece of critical exegesis. For Heidegger, poem and commentary are complementary activities, equally receptive and equally creative.

The essay’s key term, ‘dwelling’, denotes the essential feature of human existence: learning to find a place on the earth which does not dominate, manipulate, pollute, or destroy it. Only poetry can ensure this. A secondary term, ‘building’, is applied to poetry without being figurative: poetic composition is the ground of any type of building there is (i.e., actual houses).

‘Poetry’, of course, also means ‘making’: for Heidegger, this means that particular poems cannot merely be expressions of individual emotion, for language precedes and informs all such expressions. Hence the poem ‘builds’ when it is creatively received by the reader and is allowed to open up the perspective of ‘Being’. Poetry can rescue us from the dead language of stereotype, and restore us to the richness of our etymological origins. In doing so, it allows us to ‘dwell on the earth’, fully awake to our needs and responsibilities. Thus this essay stands as a significant anticipation of ecocriticism.

 

#Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976 [1964])

Having distinguished between two types of pastoralism, the ‘popular, sentimental’ type and the ‘imaginative, complex’ type, Leo Marx explains that he is primarily interested in the way the pastoral ‘design’ of the latter elaborates upon, and problematises, the pastoral ‘ideal’ of the former.

What is peculiar to the American experience is, he suggests, that the focus of concern is an actual land: this virgin territory is invested with such profound hopes that American writers are obliged to revise the whole pastoral legacy. The wilderness is on the one hand tamed and rendered productive, as ‘garden’; on the other, it is idealised, as infinite opportunity for further settlement. This revision is further complicated by the traumatic impact of the intrusion of new technology (particularly the railroads): the productive ‘garden’, emblematic of the idyllic, is now being despoiled by the ‘machine’, emblematic of the demonic, thus making it hard to maintain the initial Edenic vision.

According to Marx, the paradox is that American writers learnt how to interrogate and reaffirm the pastoral ideal from the example of an English writer. That is, the essential ‘American fable’ is to a large extent informed by the symbolism and structure of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The island in that play, like Thoreau’s woods, Melville’s sea, and Twain’s river, is an ambiguous setting in which those who have renounced corrupt, urban society have to come to terms with conflicts in their own nature (Prospero vs Caliban) as well as in their conceptions of nature (Eden vs wilderness).

The narrative pattern may begin with the renunciation of artificial life for primitive innocence; but the lesson learnt on return from the ‘symbolic middle landscape’ is the necessity of mediating between art and nature, country and city. Marx argues that the interest of the ‘American fable’ lies in the way it envisages, and engages with, this possibility.

This book is a significant work of cultural history which is an essential point of reference for those studying the development of the pastoral genre and of the representation of nature generally.

 

#Theodore Roszak, Where The Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (New York: Doubleday, 1972)

This book works within the framework of myth criticism while extending that discipline in the direction of ecocriticism. Taking his cue from William Blake, Roszak identifies the reductionism of Western ‘technocracy’ as ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’. By ‘technocracy’ he means that alliance of ‘objective’ knowledge and political power that has de-sacralised nature and drastically reduced the spiritual potential of humanity. This book documents the progress of this world view, tracing its roots to the Judaeo-Christian model of the natural world as alien and hostile, through the case for its domination made by Bacon and Descartes, to the urban-industrial ‘wasteland’ we now inhabit.

In proposing an ecologically aware, post-industrial way of living, Roszak draws on an alternative tradition which has remained faithful to the imagination repressed by the literalism, empty abstraction, and oppressive rationality of modernity. He invokes the Tao, or Way, of ancient China; he invokes hermeticism and alchemy; above all he invokes Romantic mythopoeia. In all of these, he finds evidence of a natural philosophy grounded in a sacramental vision of nature, which might form the basis of a counter-cultural, anarchist future. This would involve respect for the natural world, voluntary simplicity, and mutual trust.

In short, only by rejecting the psychology of ‘the Reality Principle’, which opposes subject and object, ‘in here’ and ‘out there’, and which in each case deadens the latter, will we recover the truth of ‘the old Gnosis’, based on the motto ‘As above, so below’, which finds the sacred in the profane, the supernatural in the natural.

For literary students, the most interesting sections of this book will be those in which Roszak makes his case for the ‘visionary powers’ and ‘transcendent symbolism’ of Romanticism. It is here, indeed, that his argument becomes particularly subtle: for he painstakingly discriminates between the spontaneous vision of Wordsworth and the systematic symbolism of BIake, making clear that Blake elaborated his myth so far that it finally lost touch with the ‘vegetative’ world. Despite his early intentions to affirm nature (‘Everything that lives is holy’), the construction of his ‘fourfold vision’, in opposition to ‘single vision and Newton’s sleep’, led to an excessive supernaturalism.

Such challenging insights are representative: Roszak’s book surely stands as one of the most important pioneering works of ecocriticism, even while it reinvigorates myth criticism.

 

#Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London: Hogarth Press, 1985 [1973])

Williams’ book can be read as an expression of his ambivalent relationship with his critical mentor F. R. Leavis: a relationship that Harold Bloom would characterise as an ‘anxiety of influence’. On grounds that are tentatively Marxist, he repudiates Leavis’s assumption (encouraged by reading George Sturt’s The Wheelwright’s Shop) of an ‘organic community’ destroyed by ‘mass civilization’; yet he shows himself equally opposed to Marx and Engels’s notorious dismissal of ‘the idiocy of rural life’. The Country and the City is an attempt to mediate between the terms of the title – along with ‘culture’ and ‘nature’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, ‘past’ and ‘present’ – without subscribing to either a pastoral nostalgia or a cult of progress.

Drawing on evidence from some of the major British writers of four centuries, Williams argues against the stereotype of an idyllic rural order destroyed by industrialisation. That order was already being disrupted by agrarian capitalism long before the ‘organic community’ was meant to have existed.

However, this is not a book which dismisses any attempt to defend nature, and Williams significantly parts company with those critics who would see all celebration of rural tradition as reactionary. Perhaps the most interesting chapter is the discussion of the Romantic idealisation of nature in the face of its rationalisation, manipulation and pollution at a time of confident ‘improvement’.  Williams demonstrates, by sympathetic contextualisation and close reading, the perfectly understandable ‘structure of feeling’ which characterises Wordsworth’s and Clare’s ‘green language’.

The book concludes with a sketch of Williams’ own proposal for that ‘socialist ecology’, or ‘green socialism’, which we will see him explore in various articles throughout the later 1970s and early 1980s. The Country and the City is perhaps the most original work by a critic whose originality lay so much in redefinition and revaluation.

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/environment/

 

#Joseph W. Meeker, The Comedy of Survival: Literary Ecology and a Play Ethic (Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1997 [1974])

Meeker’s main thesis is that humanity has to stop thinking of itself as a wholly distinct, superior species: it has to learn to follow ‘the comic way’, which necessitates a recognition that birds and animals are just as capable of ‘play’ as are humans, and can even teach us what it involves. For they have ways of avoiding that destructive behaviour which has blighted human evolution. Comedy, then, is more than a literary genre: it is a model of adaptation, cooperation and conversation. Tragedy, which Meeker traces back to Hebrew and Greek thought, emphasises individualism, male power and the glory of catastrophe.

Meeker’s distinction allows for radically new insights into classic texts. For example, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is presented as a play which mediates between the two world views, tragedy and comedy: Hamlet is a tragic revenge hero, ultimately obliged to wreak havoc; but for most of the play he deploys comic skill in delaying his violent duty, preferring to use words rather than swords. Again, Dante’s Comedy (misleadingly labelled ‘Divine’ by his admirers) moves us from the ‘hell’ of pollution and overpopulation, through a wild and luxuriant ‘earthly paradise’, to the complex ecosystem of ‘heaven’. It depicts sin as the lack of awareness of the rights of the other – which includes, of course, the environment.

There is a comic ingenuity in Meeker’s own mode of interpretation – a willingness to improvise and to run the risk of absurdity. Thus, we might enjoy the paradox by which the picaresque genre turns out to be, for him, more ecological than the pastoral: the former teaches us how to survive and to accept the natural world; the latter offers the illusion of escape from civilisation, while reinforcing the egotistical and exploitative attitude which destroys that which it claims to love (as in the American pioneer myth, which results in the ‘machine’ taking over the ‘garden’, to use Leo Marx’s terms).

Meeker’s modestly sized book has an audacious purpose: to prepare readers for entry into the ‘ecozoic’ era of the earth’s history.

 

Kenneth Burke, ‘Why Satire, with a Plan for Writing One’, The Michigan Quarterly Review, 13 (1974)

This article comprises the reflections of the literary critic Kenneth Burke on his own earlier attempt to write an ecological satire on ‘technological psychosis’ and the pollution it involves.

The human mind, according to Burke, always wishes to take projects through to ‘the end of the line’. Positively, this produces utopia; negatively, this produces the world we have now, polluted and degraded as a result of unbridled technological ambition. The genre of satire is an appropriate response, as it too goes to ‘the end of the line’, exaggerating what is already the case so that the logic of our ‘culture of waste’ may be revealed.

Burke refers us to his own demonic vision, ‘Towards Helhaven’ (published in its final form in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 79,1971, pp.11-25), which presents the consequences of
‘hyper-technologism’ in a form which parodies not only the apocalypse and Dante’s Divine Comedy but also (despite the fact that he seems to be Burke’s favourite poet) the meliorism of Walt Whitman. In short, it reveals the ‘hell’ of destruction which results from our attempts at the construction of ‘heaven’.

Burke’s exposition of his own writing raises all sorts of issues about the relation between nature and culture, ecology and literature, history and form.

 

#John Elder, Imagining the Earth: Poetry and the Vision of Nature (Urbana and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1985)

America’s ‘poetry of nature’ may arise from a sense of alienation, a feeling of hostility towards Western civilisation, but, according to John Elder, this ‘socially eccentric impulse’ may be the seed of a new vision of integration. Thus, in the work of such poets as A. R. Ammons and Gary Snyder, he traces a ‘circuit of healing’, an ‘imaginative passage from estrangement to transformation and reintegration’.

Exploring the possibilities of the dialectic between ‘culture’ and ‘wilderness’, Elder finds further evidence in modern and contemporary American writing of a parallel dialectic between ‘imagination’ and ‘Iandscape’, which in turn overlaps with that between ‘past’ and ‘present’.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspects of Elder’s comprehensive argument, which is by no means confined to American experience and expression, are two audacious conjunctions. The first is that of Gary Snyder with Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot in relation to the theme of tradition. The second is that of the seventeenth-century Zen poet Basho with William Wordsworth in relation to the scientist A. N. Whitehead’s ‘philosophy of organism’, which replaces the dualism of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ with a ‘superject’ which is co-expansive with nature.

 

#Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (London and New York: Routledge 1991)

To the ‘red’ reading of Wordsworth’s poetry (ie, Marxist and new historicist), which see him as using ‘nature’ as a means of escape from capitalist industrialism, Jonathan Bate opposes a ‘green’ reading, which sees him as ahead of his time, fully aware of the ‘economy of nature’ and the human responsibilities it entails. That is, to ‘Romantic ideology’ Bate opposes ‘Romantic ecology’. The latter has nothing to do with a ‘flight from the material world, from history and society’, but rather is an attempt ‘to enable mankind to live in the material world by entering into harmony with the environment’.

Within the ecological tradition founded by Wordsworth, Bate places John Ruskin, but he demonstrates thereby that we are not dealing with any bland transmission of wisdom: Ruskin developed his ‘educational programme of ecology’, based on the ‘moral of landscape’, by selecting and amending what he found in Wordsworth. Modern poets such as Edward Thomas are shown by Bate to be actively engaged with this dynamic tradition, and contemporary critics are advised to catch up with it.

This book, though not meant to be comprehensive, is both articulate and challenging, and stands as the most important British example of explicit ecocriticism.

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/bate-leavis-an-ecocritical-connection/

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/

 

#Cary Wolfe, ‘Nature as Critical Concept: Kenneth Burke, the Frankfurt School, and “Metabiology”’, Cultural Critique 18 (Spring 1991)

As ambitious as any book, Wolfe’s article covers the ideas which the literary critic Kenneth Burke developed in the 1930s, together with his own, more explicitly ecological ‘afterwords’ to volumes from that decade republished in the 1980s. He shows not only that the early Burke was ahead of Marxism in his understanding of the dangers of technology, but also that he was formulating an idea of ‘nature’ which was later to be shared by Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer.

Burke, with his ‘dialectical biologism’, or ‘metabiologism’, offered a critique of Enlightenment anthropocentrism, exemplified more than anyone by Marx. Without using the word, Burke understood that ‘reification’ was not to be overcome by a revolution of the ‘mode of production’, but by a challenge to the very ideas of ‘man’ as dominant subject and history as the story of his victory over nature.

Defining human endeavour not by labour but by language, Burke anticipated more recent disillusionment with the Marxist notions of ‘class’ and ‘progress’, offering ‘nature as a critical concept’ in the dual sense of ‘category within culture’ and ‘criticism of culture’.

Wolfe’s advocacy of Burke, substantiated by parallels drawn with the Frankfurt philosophers, might persuade many readers that literary theory currently has more to learn from ‘dialectical biologism’ than from ‘dialectical materialism’.

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/kenneth-burke-pioneer-of-ecocriticism/

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/

 

#Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago, lL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992)

Harrison’s complex and challenging thesis derives from the sequence of modes of ‘dwelling’ by which the philosopher Vico indicated the progress and decline of civilisation: ‘first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies’. Wishing to avoid being literal-minded, Harrison does not match each ‘ethos’ with each of his chapters, but the general drift does run in parallel.

In pagan antiquity, the forest was known as a substantial reality, preceding human institutions, and having its own power and authority. Indeed, the very battle to carve out a culture amidst a clearing involved the acquisition of a tragic wisdom, as the human and natural realms became defined against each other. In time, the establishment and maintenance of urban rule, which involved the destruction of the forest (as in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh), revealed every founding law to be also a fatal transgression.

With medieval Christianity, the logic of tragedy was replaced by the logic of comedy: it is in this era that forests may most accurately be defined as the ‘shadow’ of civilisation. For, with polytheism having been replaced by monotheism and the sense of conflicting claims having been replaced by the conviction of universal law, the ‘dark wood’ became not only the other self, or guilty conscience, of orthodoxy, but also the fallen world. The ‘comic’ point was, of course, that that world had to be experienced and understood in the context of the Christian vision of redemption (as demonstrated by Dante).

In the post-Christian era, tragedy and comedy gave way to irony, which for Vico was the trope of detachment. On the one hand, modernity meant the Enlightenment, which saw past beliefs (such as in the sacredness of the forest) as ‘truth disguised as falsehood’, since it at least indicated an awareness that the provision of timber was crucial to civilisation. On the other hand, modernity meant Romanticism, which saw present beliefs as forming a superficial veneer over ‘natural’ instincts and affections. With the latter, we are entering the phase of civilisation in which nostalgia, while occasioned by the very detachment of the Enlightenment, represents the turning of irony upon itself.

Thus Harrison traces, through and beyond modernity, a new sense of ‘dwelling’. If the post-Christian detachment from the past has ‘culminated in one way or another with detachment from the earth’, as most dramatically highlighted by the wanton destruction of the rain forests, the post-ironic era we are entering may be one in which we realise at last ‘the ecology of finitude’. Having learnt that we dwell ‘not in nature but in relation to nature’, and that ‘the forest remains an index of our exclusion’, we may learn to revere it once more.

 

#Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1993)

Though this is a work of philosophy rather than literary criticism, it is surely indispensable for the serious ecocritic. It explores the most fundamental question which green theory must address: the relationship between culture and nature.

Plumwood’s thesis is that nature has, since at least the time of Plato, been systematically subordinated to ‘the master subject’, the hero of ‘the master story’. This story privileges male over female just as it privileges reason over nature: indeed, it identifies rationality with masculinity, and justifies the absolute rights of both.

We will not be able to repudiate the tyrannous subject, declares Plumwood, until we have gone beyond dualism. Dualism is more than simple opposition: it constructs and contrasts categories as higher and lower, superior and inferior, ruler and ruled, according to its own dubious logic. For example, in the following list, the former is always maintained to be superior to the latter, the relationship being regarded as inevitable and irrefutable: culture and nature, reason and nature, male and female, mind and body, master and slave, rationality and animality, universal and particular, civilised and primitive, self and other.

Plumwood traces the history of Western philosophy in terms of this dualism, demonstrating how a ‘female’ nature has been systematically degraded, dominated, and exploited. The logical culmination, which now seems imminent, will be the destruction of the natural world by the ‘master subject’ in the name of ‘rational economy’ and global profit, unless ‘reason’ can be remade. This cannot simply involve privileging ‘female’ nature instead of subordinating it, for that is to follow the same logic as that of patriarchy. The answer is to develop ‘the rationality of the mutual self’, which would treasure ‘the incomparable riches of diversity in the world’s cultural and biological life’ and participate in ‘the community of life’.

Plumwood’s book is a lot richer than a short synopsis can convey. It is difficult but essential reading.

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/

 

#Karl Kroeber, Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)

Like the British ecocritic Jonathan Bate, Kroeber sees his task as moving beyond the sterile antagonisms of ‘Cold War criticism’, which seeks merely to expose the politically reactionary nature of Romantic poetry in the name of a politically progressive theory. Marxism, new historicism and post-colonialism do not, according to Kroeber, elucidate’ the vision of Wordsworth or Shelley, because they mistake it for ‘transcendence’ or bogus spirituality when they should be celebrating it for ‘transformation’ or creative engagement. Criticism should attend more to the ‘holistic’ quality of Romantic poetry, and should show more respect for the integrity of the given poem and for what Keats called the ‘interassimilative’ relationship between the cultural/psychic and natural/physical orders of being.

Scientific discoveries of our age, particularly those of biology, have only vindicated the prophetic insights of the Romantics: mind and nature are not opposed but are continuous; the human capacity for self-consciousness is an evolutionary advance which itself demonstrates humanity’s biological roots.

Thus Wordsworth’s explorations of the workings of memory and the ‘growth’ of the mind anticipate the ‘neural Darwinism’ of today. Kroeber may, of course, be criticised for overemphasising continuity and cohesion in his eagerness to put ideological criticism in its place; and he may also be accused of putting too much trust in the disinterestedness of scientific enquiry. But his book is full of insights, and his defence of Romantic poetry against the arrogance of ‘Cold War criticism’ is surely welcome.

 

#Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, and Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995)

The three untitled parts of this book deal respectively with theory, with particular authors and with pedagogy, though there is obviously considerable overlap between these categories. Murphy’s main interest is in moving forward to an anti-essentialist ecocriticism.

Identifying postmodernism positively with post-humanism (since the anthropocentric attitude is what has got us into our present global mess), he yet repudiates that irony and complicity which passes for much postmodernist thinking. There must be scope for agency, action and alternative. For these he looks to the example of Bakhtin’s ‘dialogics’: the notion of a self which lives by virtue of response to the ‘other’. From a Bakhtinian perspective, he reassesses feminism, being wary of ‘nature as woman’ since it may be seen as an oppressive construction.

Similarly, when considering ecology itself, he sharply distinguishes it from ‘managing the environment’, an enterprise which only substantiates the alienated and dominating consciousness of the Enlightenment. Murphy wants not ‘hierarchy’ but ‘heterarchy’: that is, a ‘volitional interdependence’ between humanity and ecosystem, a sense of ‘natured culture’ rather than ‘culture v nature’.

Instead of speaking of humanity as ‘one for oneself’ and nature as ‘things-for-us’, instead of seeking abstraction and ‘universal knowledge’ of a world that is rendered moribund in the process, Murphy proposes ‘culturopoeia’, an openness to the life and possibilities of the biosphere which takes the form of ‘situated knowledges’. To effect such insights, the ecocritic must behave like the Amerindian ‘trickster’. Ecocriticism must be guided by the spirit of ‘anotherness’, opening itself to the present of nature in order to find a viable future of ‘interanimation’.

The key writers invoked – mainly in Part 2, but also throughout – are Gary Snyder and Ursula Le Guin, but there is also a fascinating account of Patricia Hampl’s poetic sequence, Resorf. Again, Murphy offers an audacious critique of the category of ‘nature writing’, which he takes to be all about the realisation of the male self by way of a female nature. This is a demanding but rewarding book.

 

#Terry Gifford, Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)

The pastoral tradition of poetry, which is this book’s starting point, suggests a static notion of nature and of humanity’s relation to nature, ignoring the facts of rural existence and seeking solace in a special place (Arcadia) and a special time (the Golden Age). Gifford, following Raymond Williams, queries this convention, demonstrating that ‘nature is a way of thinking’ and, as such, is inseparable from a specific culture and a specific history. While acknowledging the radical reworking of this tradition by recent poets such as R. S. Thomas, he is more interested in the ‘anti-pastoral’ line, running from Crabbe and Clare to Patrick Kavanagh, which raises radical questions about the relationship between human and natural life.

His main interest, however, is in the ‘post-pastoral’ poetry which ‘anti-pastoral’ makes possible. Sorley MacLean works within the Gaelic culture and language, pushing their possibilities of expression to the limit in the face of global disaster, thereby transcending the traditional conception of ‘nature poetry’. Seamus Heaney, taking his cue from Wordsworth’s lines in ‘Home at Grasmere’ about the ‘exquisite’ way the external world and the mind are ‘fitted’, explores three interrelated themes: ‘the human as organic and animal; the pagan elements of tribal culture; and the notion of art as finding expression for the earth itself’. Ted Hughes follows BIake in addressing the problem of human dislocation from nature. He knows, in Gifford’s words, that ‘an apparent engagement with the natural world’ may effectively exclude ‘uncomfortable forces and their tensions’, as in the pastoral convention. His work discovers these forces to be at work ‘within human nature as well as external nature’, and to be both creative and destructive, as implied by Blake’s ‘fearful symmetry’. But his ‘post-pastoral’ vision also allows scope for a ‘green poetry’ which is not afraid to address specific environmental issues. This fourth kind of poetry, explicit and engaged, while conscious of cultural and historical identity, is shown to be equally valid in the hands of such diverse figures as David Craig, Heathcote Williams, Grace Nichols and Debjani Chatterjee.

This is a highly intelligent and challenging book.

 

#Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)

Lawrence Buell’s focus is on the ‘environmental nonfiction’ of Thoreau, but this monumental book also offers many insights into the representation of nature in poetry and fiction. The implication is that ‘ecocriticism’, defined as ‘the study of the relation between literature and environment conducted in a spirit of commitment to environmental praxis’, provides a radical and valid alternative to the critical orthodoxy of the past few decades. The main challenge posed is that of negotiating the legacy of ‘anthropocentrism’, often most influential where it has seemingly been denied (for instance, in much poststructuralist thinking), and to see what might be involved once we begin again to conceive of the non-human environment as a living presence and process rather than a mere cultural referent.

However, while reaffirming the importance of mimesis, Buell should not be thought to be commending the unproblematic depiction of nature: in discussing ‘literary naturism’, that is, the representation of ‘Iiteral nature’ as part of a ‘literary project’, he argues that the European literary tradition and its conventions are there to be reinterpreted rather than repudiated.

Thus, in Part 1, ‘Historical and Theoretical Contexts’, he demonstrates that ‘pastoral ideology’ may be seen positively as well as negatively, as in the central case of Thoreau: his pastoralism served him well in his challenge to the work ethic and earnest agrarianism.

It is in Part 2, ‘Forms of Literary Ecocriticism’, that Buell celebrates what is distinctive about environmentally responsible writing. Here he explores the possibilities of the ‘aesthetics of relinqueshment’, as he discusses a variety of texts which enact the move from the ‘egological self’ to the ‘ecological self’.

Part 3, ‘Environmental Sainthood’, reconsiders Thoreau, and in particular his simultaneous ‘canonization’ as environmental hero and as ‘green’ writer. Walden is used to illustrate how the environmental imagination can encourage new notions of person, of place and of planet. Buell’s ingenious, resourceful and ambitious book is a crucial work of ecocriticism.

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/

 

#Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995).

This is one of the best starting points for anyone seriously engaged in the study of the relation between culture and nature, literature and the environment. It is a work of philosophy, strictly speaking, but it explores with considerable rigour many of the issues which arise in literary and cultural studies. Soper finds a tension in contemporary thinking between ‘nature-endorsing’ views and ‘nature-sceptical’ views. While we may want simply to identify the one with ‘deep ecology’ and the other with postmodern relativism, we are warned that things are always more complicated than they seem. Green thought may ultimately be realist, but its appeal to nature must imply an acknowledgement of the fact that ‘nature’ is always culturally mediated and, indeed, has been used to sanction reactionary politics. However, the stress on construction and contingency, as opposed to ‘intrinsic value’, itself stands in need of correction. Soper’s own position is that, while ‘there is no reference to that which is independent of discourse except in discourse’, we must yet grant nature a significant degree of independence, for otherwise ‘we can offer no convincing grounds for challenging the pronouncements of culture on what is or is not “natural”’.

But her case for realism is a sophisticated one, and it negotiates many contradictions within ecological thinking. For example, the characterisation of nature as female, frequent in ecological polemic, was also adopted by colonialism, with its Oedipal imagery (the wilderness as alternately mother and maid, awaiting male desecration): the task, then, is to reappropriate and redefine the symbolism. Moreover, she sees ecofeminism as correct to draw a parallel between that other patriarchal conception of nature as bestial ‘other’ to human culture and that of the conception of woman as ‘inferior’ to man … and to counter both.

Soper’s thesis is that, while nature has an extra-discursive reality, the signification of nature is a site of ideological struggle, in which rhetoric must take a major role. This by no means commits her to the relativism of pure constructivism; but it does mean she insists on the distinction between the human and natural orders, on the understanding that it is only thereby that the former may exercise concern for the latter. Thus ‘deep ecology’ may dismiss the notion of humanity’s distinctiveness, but the very idea of ecological responsibility presupposes ‘the possession by human beings of attributes that set them apart from all other forms of life’.

All this may seem remote from literary matters, but one of Soper’s key insights is that ‘green’ discourse is primarily ‘aesthetic’ (nature as surface appearance) even while it draws on the ‘realist’ assumptions of the natural sciences (nature as norm) and on the ‘metaphysical’ assumptions of philosophy (nature as the category through which humanity thinks its difference from non-humanity). This allows her to explore many fascinating topics: for example, the contrast between the ‘sublime’ and the ‘pastoral’ conventions; again, the way Thomas Hardy’s reflections on Egdon Heath anticipate the critical insights of Raymond Williams in The Country and the City. With other observations on the poetry of Wordsworth (particularly in relation to the colonial imagery indicated above) and the aesthetics of Adorno and Heidegger (curiously similar, despite their immense ideological differences), this book is an indispensable tool for the serious student of ecocriticism.

Soper’s book is memorable for many of her pronouncements. One of the most striking is this: ‘It isn’t language that has a hole in its ozone layer.’

 

#Cheryl Glotfelty & Harold Fromm (eds), The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996)

Cheryll Glotfelty argues persuasively in her introduction that the fate of the planet should be at least as important to critical theory as are class, gender, and race: ecocriticism should now rank in stature with Marxist, feminist, and postcolonial criticism. The volume is divided into three parts, which offer a fair indication that an ecologically oriented criticism is a substantial discipline and not just a passing fashion: ‘Ecotheory: Reflections on Nature and Culture’; ‘Ecocritical Considerations of Fiction and Drama’; and ‘Critical Studies of Environmental Literature’.

This timely anthology has the advantage of being able to draw on some of the more established ecocritical material, dating back to the 1970s, much of which still manages to be quite provocative. There is, for example, Joseph Meeker’s defence of comedy as more alert than tragedy to the ‘mature complexity’ of the ecosystem. Or again, there is William Rueckert’s intriguing formulation of a ‘generative poetics’, in which poems would be ‘green plants’. These balance well with newer material, which has clearly benefited from the elder critics’ pioneering conjectures. For example, Scott Slovic reflects on nature as both ‘correspondence’ and ‘otherness’, both ‘intimacy’ and ‘distance’, with ‘nature writing’ offering the model of mediation. Also, Suellen Campbell explores ‘desire’ as a meeting point for poststructuralism and ‘deep ecology’.

Again, and even more strikingly (particularly as she is the most important contemporary writer whose work is informed by ecological concern, apart from Gary Snyder), Ursula Le Guin compares the male ‘weapon’ approach to nature (aggressive, negative, linear) with the female ‘carrier bag’ approach (receptive, affirmative, cyclical), finding that each of them produces a different conception of narrative.

This long-awaited and necessary volume will be welcome to all students of ecocriticism, even though it is primarily focused on the United States. A most significant innovation, it will be seen as a critical milestone in the years to come.

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/

 

#Louise H. Westling, The Green Breast of the New World: Landscape, Gender, and American Fiction (Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1996)

Louise Westling’s title comes from an elegaic phrase in The Great Gatsby, where it denotes a landscape developed almost to the point of destruction by people like Gatsby. The lost dream of the New World is seen as haunting not only the narrator of that novel, Nick Carraway, but American fiction and Western narrative generally.

With an ambitious sweep of exposition, the author demonstrates how male heroism has been defined by opposition to female nature ever since the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh. There the heroic quest involves destruction of a forest sacred to lnanna/lshtar; however, the assault on nature is made in the context of a long-standing awe for the goddess.

With the rise of Judaeo-Christianity, and later with the settlement of North America, the nomadic, pioneer spirit assumes total command over the ‘virgin’ territory it encounters, but in the later case, a residual sentimentality about a land personified as female informs and defines the aggression. Westling articulates this tension very clearly in her account of American fiction, within which category she provocatively includes what would normally be called nature writing.

Her argument is particularly fascinating when she addresses the ‘hierarchical’ attitude to nature of Emerson (evincing his debt to Platonic idealism) and the deep ambivalence of Thoreau to nature as female ‘other’. Again, she offers a persuasive account of what she calls ‘the defensive masculinism of Hemingway’s and Faulkner’s modernist primitivism’. But she encompasses female authors also, tracing the implications of Willa Cather’s attempts to celebrate female heroism in a beautiful but threatening environment and of Eudora Welty’s revaluation of ‘an embodied feminine identity with the Mississippi landscape’.

This is a rich work of scholarship and an exciting enquiry into the assumptions of American ideology. The conjunction of landscape and gender produces some radical insights.

See also: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/green-theory/

 

#Curry, Patrick, Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1997)

ln its own way as important as Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth, this study of Tolkien not only situates The Lord of the Rings in relation to the mythic tradition but also defends it from the sceptical gaze of the contemporary critical establishment. Invoking thinkers such as Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and Zygmunt Baumann, Curry argues that, given the demise of modernity, myth comes into its own. The world is re-enchanted, and the importance of mystery is reaffirmed. In discussing Middle-Earth, we are also discussing Nature in all its wonder.

Here the genre of fantasy is defended in particular, but the author is careful on the one hand to distinguish Tolkien’s art from that of the entertainment industry, and on the other hand to refute the notion that it is less ‘radical’ than that of feminist fantasists such as Angela Carter. Indeed, a particularly interesting aspect of the book’s thesis is that Lord of the Rings turns out to be more thoroughly postmodernist than those more recent works with mythopoeic pretensions. Curry skilfully disposes of the problem of Tolkien’s ‘allegory’, and he delicately negotiates the matter of his religious position (ie, Christian, but deeply sensitive to animism and polytheism).

This polemical book, written in a highly personal and compelling style, certainly merits inclusion under the category of ‘Ecocriticism’.

 

#Rachel Stein, Shifting the Ground: American Women Writers’ Revisions of Nature, Gender, and Race (Charlottesville, VA, and London: University of Virginia Press, 1997)

lf the traditional pioneer language of settlement saw nature as a woman, to be subjugated, exploited, and sexually assaulted, the four writers chosen by Rachel Stein demonstrate the possibility of ‘turning over’ or ‘overturning’ that dominant discourse, by means of first disorientating then reorientating it. The metaphor in her main title comes from the act of the preparatory displacement of the soil, the ‘shifting of the ground that promotes a new planting, that enables the cultivation of a new relationship between speaker and nature, between speaker and history’. As indicated by the subtitle, ‘revisions of the intersections of nature, gender and race’ are a means to ‘shift the ground of problematic aspects of American identities and allow the writers to imagine more fertile social/natural interrelations’.

For the received definition of nature as female object or Other, outside of culture and needing to be mastered by the male subject, has only ‘naturalised’ the domination of actual women, perceived as close to, or even identical with, nature. This patriarchal and hierarchical ideology has been justified by binary opposition.

Inspired by the theories of Donna Haraway, Stein advocates a ‘cyborgian intermingling’ of those opposites, a substitution of the model of mutuality and imaginative provisionality for that of alienation and dogmatic rationality. Hence, she commends the poetry of Emily Dickinson for its transgression of male-female boundaries, and its celebration of nature’s unpredictability. She commends the fiction of both Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker for its repudiation of the subjection of women of colour as beasts of burden and for its recovery of the power of spiritual collectivity, rooted in a spiritual response to nature. She commends the fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko for its engagement in ‘story wars’, its subversion of the dominant North American ‘master plot’ by a patchwork of tales which foster continuity between the human and the natural rather than suspicion and subordination.

In her discussion of each case, Stein pays close attention to formal innovations, for part of her argument is that the convention of realism has been the ‘ground’ of the oppressive conceptualisation of nature, gender, and race.

 

#Edward Picot, Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry since 1945 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997)

This book argues that some of the most important British poetry of the period since the Second World War may be seen as subscribing to the ‘Fall myth’, which in turn presupposes the ‘Eden myth’. The Book of Genesis is the source, since it depicts nature as a paradise garden from which humanity has been excluded.

The idea that there is a carefree, divinely ordained order of existence which human beings know themselves to have lost is an example of the principle which Picot calls ‘separatism’. This involves a false opposition between ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’, between mind and body, between the psyche and physicality. Darwin’s work may have demonstrated that in each case the former is very much rooted in the latter, and poets may have wished to incorporate this understanding into their verse. But again and again, we find the language and imagery they use reinforcing the notion of nature as something quite other than the human realm, and at the same time a refuge from human cares.

Picot finds two versions of separatism at work in his chosen poets: Hughes and Thomas are ‘primitivists’, who celebrate the possibility of ‘Man’ transcending his conscious, anxious self by merging with the landscape; Larkin and Tomlinson are ‘rationalists’, who acknowledge that such a merger is impossible, but insist that humanity is diminished by failing to take its need for nature into account; Heaney shows signs of both tendencies, celebrating the healing power of the Irish landscape, but exploring the historical context within which that celebration has become possible.

Picot is not afraid to criticise his five poets (though he is perhaps kindest to Heaney), nor does he have any patience with ‘separatism’ itself. He predicts that, in keeping with contemporary science’s promotion of ‘holism’, the future of nature poetry will lie in a new sense of the interconnectedness of ‘Man’ and ‘Nature’, accompanied by a new commitment (implicit in Genesis, but for long suppressed) to the ‘stewardship’ of creation. If Picot is an ecocritic, he may find himself in disagreement with some others, but his contribution to ecocriticism is welcome.

 

#Richard Kerridge & Neil Sammels, eds, Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism and Literature (London: Zed Books, 1998)

The title and the introduction indicate that all the essays in this volume focus, in some way or other, not so much on the theme of nature as on the question of how it is represented. In our era of ecological disaster we need to find new narratives by which to articulate our relation to the planet. Thus, this book is as much about culture as it is about nature.

With regard to how a theory of ‘writing the environment’ might take shape: Patrick Murphy advocates an ecofeminism informed by Bakthin’s principle of ‘anotherness’, which deconstructs any rigid division between ‘I’ as culture/male/mind and ‘other’ as nature/female/body; while Dominic Head proposes a consciously ‘weak anthropocentrism’ which has benefited from postmodern provisionality and pluralism.

With regard to traditional texts, ecocriticism has much to teach us about their residual relevance: Barbara White finds the seventeenth-century ‘Jeremiad’ still influential, in so far as natural catastrophe is given a spiritual or moral explanation; and Neil Sammels commends Oscar Wilde’s aestheticisation of nature, as an alternative to the impulse to ‘annex’ it ‘in the name of morality, normativity or nation’.

With regard to contemporary writing and entertainment, the problem of representation becomes acute: Karla Ambruster queries televison documentaries’ claim to ‘speak for’ nature; Richard Kerridge takes Don DeLillo’s novel ‘White Noise’ as a challenge to the reader’s wish for closure and stability in the face of ecological crisis; Greg Garrard praises Seamus Heaney’s poetry for exploring the violence and the victimisation which can (and has) been involved in ‘dwelling’ on the earth.

This last insight may remind us how strong and yet how anxious an influence is exerted on ecocriticism by the philosopher Martin Heidegger. If Garrard expresses the anxiety, Jonathan Bate, in contributing to the ‘theory’ section, expresses the strength: in a fascinating account of ‘poetry and biodiversity’, he demonstrates how much an ‘ecological poetics’ can learn from Heidegger, and how poets as diverse as Edward Thomas, Basil Bunting and Les Murray may be seen, in Heideggerian fashion, as exploring what it means to treat nature as a ‘home’ or ‘bioregion’.

In demonstrating that ‘writing the environment’ is a matter of continuing and exciting debate, this volume performs an invaluable service.

 

#Jhan Hochman, Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory (Moscow, lD: University of Idaho Press, 1998)

To the categories already dealt with by cultural studies – that is, class, gender, ethnicity, age (as in ‘youth culture’) – Hochman adds that of ‘worldnature’. He prefers this nomenclature, because ‘Nature’ with a capital N implies a philosophical idealism and because it has too often been invoked for reactionary purposes.

His aim, stated in his succinct and lively introduction, is to prevent the appropriation of nature by culture. His mentor here is the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno, who insisted that nature needs defending against the given culture, rather than Marx himself, who referred to nature dismissively as a ‘tool house’. Nor has he much time for poststructuralists who glibly talk of nature as a ‘construction’, thus confusing the fact that humans ‘fashion’ nature to suit themselves with the bogus notion that they somehow ’cause it to exist’ through language.

Two targets for his incisive polemic, dealt with at some length in this book, are Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway. Hochman finds much common ground between them, even though the former says little about ecology while the latter says a good deal. Both effectively render nature a mere extension of culture, even while they aim to deconstruct the boundary between the two.

Nor does Hochman rest content with challenging philosophical positions. He addresses also the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, noting a contradiction between the explicit attempt to represent nature in its distinctive otherness and an implicit, residual anthropomorphism, as if he cannot break away finally from the traditional hierarchical notion of the ‘chain of being’. Again, we are invited to consider the way the film The Silence of the Lambs (like the novel upon which it is based) effectively ‘silences’ the real screams of real, suffering animals by displacing their suffering into the mind of the protagonist.

The whole volume is a rich source of insights, and is an important contribution to cultural studies and ecocriticism alike.

 

#Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (London: Picador, 2000)

Jonathan Bate effectively launched British ecocriticism in 1991 with his book, Romantic Ecology. There he polemically and briefly proposed a ‘green’ tradition running from Wordsworth and Clare through Ruskin and Morris to Edward Thomas and beyond.

In the present book, written nearly a decade later, Bate takes a much more leisurely look at the subject of what he now calls ‘ecopoetics’. The intellectual perspective is much wider here, taking in the philosophers Rousseau, Heidegger, Adorno and Bachelard. The poetic tradition is now more focused on Clare than on Wordsworth, and it expands to include Rilke, Stevens, Bunting, and Murray. An interesting rediscovery in the sphere of fiction is Hudson’s Green Mansions, a prophetic novel about a western individual’s attitude to a threatened rain forest.

The premise of all the particular studies and arguments gathered here is that, given that culture is defined by opposition to nature, the latter becoming the ‘other’ which haunts the former; and humanity being alienated from its ‘earth household’, the only way forward is the cultivation of an ecological awareness that might take us beyond anthropocentrism. This awareness is made possible by poetry. Thus, ‘green politics’ can never fully address the challenge of our era unless it acquires an aesthetic dimension. Bate proposes that what matters is a change of consciousness and a new way of ‘dwelling’ on the earth: in other words, ‘ecopoetics’ is about letting nature speak, about hearing ‘the song of the earth’, rather than treating it as an item on a political agenda. This is a book which will be the
focus of debate for many years to come.

 

#Laurence Coupe (ed.), The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London & New York: Routledge, 2000)

Rather than write about my own book, I here cite the assessments of others below.

Jonathan Bate concludes his foreword to the volume as follows:

The Green Studies Reader should take its place as a central text in any course on the relationship between literature and questions of ecology and environment. The editor has done a superb job in terms of both extracts chosen and organisational principles. For the first time, it is possible to see both the continuity and the variety of the traditions in which ‘green thinking’ has emerged within literary culture. The theoretical, historical and practical exemplars collected in this book will stimulate new generations of students into new and vital reanimations and rethinkings of their literary inheritance.

Madeleine Minson in her review for the Times Higher Educational Supplement states:

Some 30 years after environmentalism became a force to be reckoned with in politics, it is finally making inroads into literary criticism. Urged on by the ever-growing threat to the planet – or indeed by the sheer love of nature – green theorists and critics are busy putting the physical environment centre stage, often with a view to effecting political change. Laurence Coupe’s Green Studies Reader provides an excellent overview of achievements to date in this emerging field. … [It] has the air of a pioneering publication. … With courses in ecocriticism beginning to appear in British universities, it should make a very good textbook indeed.

Peter Barry, in the final chapter of the second edition of his comprehensive and influential work, Beginning Theory (Manchester: MUP, 2002) recommends the book as follows:

This is the definitive UK collection, but it represents major contemporary American voices (Soper, Snyder, Slovic, Buell, Roszak, Glotfelty, etc) as well as British ones (Bate, Gifford, Garrard, Kerridge, etc), and includes early material from the Romantic period onwards. Fifty chapters, mostly quite short, in six well conceived and well introduced sections, so the book is kept to a sensible size of around 300 pages.

Kate Rigby, in the annotated bibliography to her lucid overview of ecological literary theory, which is included in Introducing Criticism of the 21st Century, edited by Julian Wolfrey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), writes:

[The reader] is particularly valuable in that it embeds contemporary ecocritical research and reflection in a longer history of thinking about the relationship between nature and culture from romanticism through to the critique of modernity by twentieth-century writers and philosophers, such as D. H. Lawrence, Adorno, Horkheimer and Heidegger. The second section on ‘Green Theory’ provides the basis for a more philosophically reflected ecocriticism by including work by critical theorists such as Kate Soper , Donna Haraway and Lyotard, while the final section provides a good range of examples of practical ecocriticism, including work on popular as well as canonical texts. Coupe’s general introduction and his introductions to each of the sections provide an excellent guide to the key questions motivating green theory and criticism today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Wizard of Oz

Follow the yellow brick road to find some interesting ideas

Published in various newspapers (see ‘Guest Column’) on 7 December 2023

The Wizard of Oz is an entertaining classic film that is always worth viewing again. One reason is that it’s full of interesting ideas. Here are a few.

Reality and Fantasy. Some of the characters in Kansas reappear in the land of Oz, but transfigured. The three farmhands become the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Lion who join Dorothy on her journey. The nasty Miss Gulch, who wants to have Dorothy’s little dog, Toto, put down, becomes the Wicked Witch of the West. Professor Marvel, the bogus psychic, becomes the Wizard of Oz.

This reminds us that ordinary people are potentially fascinating, and that even the wildest fantasy has its roots in the mundane world with which we might be dissatisfied.

Don’t Be Fooled! When Dorothy and her three friends stand before the awesome image of the Wizard of Oz for the second time, Toto is the one to uncover the Wizard’s secret: he pulls away a curtain to the side of the huge image of the Wizard, revealing an ordinary man manipulating a machine. The image of the almighty Wizard is a fraud. A little dog teaches us that all too often those who appear high and mighty are actually humble mortals putting on an act.

The Circuitous Quest. The traditional quest narrative nearly always involved a male hero – a warrior who has to prove his worth – but here the protagonist is a young girl with no special strength or secret power. Yet what Dorothy gains from her journey is remarkable, making her ready to return home.

If Dorothy’s adventure can be described as a quest, then it’s best described as ‘circuitous’. To quote the poet T.S.Eliot: ‘And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’

Enough Already! Dorothy thought she needed the Wizard to show her the way home, but the Good Witch tells her simply to click the heels of her ruby slippers, think of home, and she’ll be there – because she has now learnt to appreciate it. ‘There’s no place like home.’

Similarly, her three friends don’t need the Wizard to grant their wishes. In coming to Dorothy’s aid when she’s caught by the Wicked Witch, they prove that they already have a brain (Scarecrow), a heart (Tin Man) and courage (Lion).

There’s lots more to say … but for now that’s enough already!

Dancing Beneath the Diamond Sky: Reading Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ in its Visionary Contexts

Laurence Coupe places Dylan’s famous song in the context of the visionary tradition.

E-Magazine 29 (September 2005), pp 58-60

 

It is forty years since Bob Dylan’s important album, Bringing It All Back Home (1965), was released. It was important because it marked Dylan’s transition from ‘folk’ music to a new, more experimental form – referred to at the time by commentators, rather inadequately, as ‘folk rock’. In his own words, he had done with the ‘finger-pointing songs’ which characterised his earlier albums: sung to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar, in keeping with the ‘folk’ convention, such songs had dealt with the wrongs of contemporary society, whether general (‘Blowin’ in the Wind’) or specific (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’). With this new album, Dylan not only went electric musically but also seemed to have turned inward thematically, appearing to be less preoccupied with society than with the self.

However, that did not mean that his words now amounted to nothing more than introverted rambling: rather, he explored the mysteries of the inner world in such a way as to provide a new perspective on the outer world. Indeed, he could hardly be said to have abandoned his accusatory stance: ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding’ and ‘Gates of Eden’ were savage indictments of the materialism and commercialism of the USA of the mid-nineteen-sixties. What was new, perhaps, was the attempt to go well below the surface of society and to summon up the spiritual and imaginative possibilities which it had suppressed.

True, Dylan had spoken the language of the spirit before – most notably, his early songs had been studded with allusions to the Judaeo-Christian Bible – but now his sense of spirituality became less conventional. In short, it was more associated with the unpredictable power of the imagination. In taking this step, he was only following the example of his favourite writers: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and other ‘Beats’.

Kerouac’s novels might seem to the uninitiated to be merely a celebration of crazy young people travelling hectically around America, but the quest outlined by Kerouac is inner as much as outer, spiritual as much as spatial. Again, Ginsberg’s influential poem, ‘Howl’, an extended cry of pain in the face of a world devoted to wealth and warfare, succeeds in simultaneously celebrating all those who would rather be thought mad than to subscribe to its deadly logic.

For both Kerouac and Ginsberg, to be ‘Beat’ did not mean only to be inspired by the ‘beat’ of jazz, nor even to be ‘beaten down’ by the ‘square’ world, but above all to be capable of the ‘beatific’ vision. It is no coincidence that ‘Howl’ ends with the seemingly endless repetition of the word ‘holy’: it is, the poet proclaims, the outcast artists who are capable of glimpsing the sacred dimension of life — denied or (perhaps worse still) domesticated by a society given over to the pursuit of money and power.

If Dylan admired the Beats, Ginsberg (and to some extent Kerouac) were happy to return the compliment. Indeed, towards the end of his life Ginsberg went so far as to state that he regarded Dylan, with whom he had become friendly about the time that the latter was working on Bringing It All Back Home, as the greatest living American poet. Moreover, he had no doubts that both he and Dylan were working in a visionary tradition which went back at least as far as the English poet, William Blake (1757-1827). That Dylan himself was conscious of this legacy early on is brought out by a response he gave to a question posed at a press conference in 1965. When asked if his music should be called ‘folk rock’, he replied: ‘I’d like to think it of it more in terms of vision music.’ Nor should we overlook allusions made to Blake in other interviews at the time.

Known widely as the first of the Romantic poets, Blake it was who affirmed the power of vision against the forces of ignorance. He famously declared: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.’ His avowed aim was ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.’ In doing so, he would demonstrate the supremacy of imagination over reason, of spirituality over materialism, and he would stand up as one who ‘kept the divine vision in times of trouble’. Reading ‘Howl’ in the light of Blake, one realises that when Ginsberg claims to see holiness everywhere, even in the sordid streets of urban ghettoes, he is  deliberately invoking his master’s visionary affirmation: ‘Everything that lives is holy.’

Turning back to Dylan, we note that the song on Bringing It All Back Home which is most explicitly concerned with the nature of vision is ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. Unfortunately, the glib consensus over the years has been that its subject-matter is drugs. Besides the fact that Dylan himself has denied this hotly, it must be said that to interpret the figure of the tambourine man as a drug dealer is offensively reductive. To do so is to cut oneself off from the imaginative and spiritual potential of a great poem. In referring to the song as a poem, I am endorsing Ginsberg’s judgement, bearing in mind that Dylan’s is a poetry of performance rather than of the printed page. Relevant here is the fact that, though ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ is featured on the first album of Dylan’s electric phase, the song itself is sung chiefly to the accompaniment of an acoustic guitar (as with the earlier work): it seems to invite us to ponder the lyrics in depth, all of which are articulated with precision by the singer-songwriter. If we pre-empt their meaning by simply ‘ticking off’ any possible allusions to drugs, we are hardly doing it justice.

So, having decided to take the work seriously, we have to ask ourselves who we think the ‘Tambourine Man’ of the title really is. Here we could do worse than to consult the text that Dylan has previously drawn upon, namely the Bible. In the Judaic scriptures, the playing of a tambourine is frequently associated with spiritual ecstasy. Thus: ‘Some of the people of Israel were playing music on small harps…and on tambourines… [King] David and the others were happy, and they danced for the Lord with all their might’ (2 Samuel 6:5). Dylan’s central symbol would seem, then, to be that of transcendence – or at least the desire for transcendence.  In other words, the quest is for an apprehension of holiness, for a sense of the sacred. But his song is secular rather than conventionally religious, so perhaps it is indebted as much to Blake as to the Bible. That is, the aim is to cleanse ‘the doors of perception’, to experience ‘Eternity in an hour’, in defiance of the dead weight of conformist consumerism. Here again  we note the ‘Beat’ connection, for the tambourine man is the bearer of  the ‘beatific’ vision, even while the singer sings of being ‘beaten down’: specifically, he asks him to ‘play a song for me’ at the moment when ‘My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet…’

The figure invoked, then is no more a religious teacher than he is a drug dealer: rather, he is the spirit of poetry or music. It is he who has the visionary power to transport the singer ‘upon your magic swirling ship’ and to ‘cast your dancing spell my way’. In this light, we might be tempted to see him as the traditional figure of the Muse; but we need to bear in mind both that the Muse has always been thought of as feminine, and that the function of the Muse is to inspire poets rather than to actually create poetry. Though we might want to say that Dylan is the poet/singer seeking inspiration, his own song is an appeal to some superior force to create the ultimate ‘song of songs’. Thus, the tambourine man is a personification of the power of poetry – poetry being understood, in traditional terms, as inseparable from music.

While the singer’s initial request to the tambourine man is that he ‘play a song for me’ in order that he can be followed in the ‘jingle jangle morning’ – a morning brought alive by the sound of the tambourine – the figure addressed is more than a mere fellow-practitioner. He represents the force of art itself, which transcends time even while those who are touched by it necessarily remain in time. For if ‘evening’s empire has returned into sand’ – the sand of an hourglass, presumably? – then we know that, so long as we live and breathe, we are part of the cycle of daily existence, during which evening and morning are endlessly repeated. The paradox is that though time may wear us down – ‘the ancient empty street’s too dead for dreaming’ – it is always possible to ‘fade / Into my own parade’: that is, to lose oneself in the exercise of imagination. Such moments of self-transcendence are both in and out of time.

We can get closer to the heart of this paradox if we are open to the rich ambiguity of a line such as the following: ‘And but for the sky there are no fences facing.’ Now, the endless sky is an image of total freedom, but Dylan’s song reminds us that, though we have a great more spiritual potential than our society allows for, we are all of us necessarily constrained by the need to articulate our yearning for eternity and infinity in time and space. Hence the singer addresses the tambourine man as follows: ‘And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme / To your tambourine in time, it’s just a ragged clown behind, / I wouldn’t pay it any mind, it’s just a shadow / You’re seeing that he’s chasing.’ Poetry itself – this very poem, which calls out for another poem (‘play a song for me’) – works through certain agreed principles, such as ‘rhyme’. Even the ‘tambourine’ must be played ‘in time’. The ‘ragged clown’ who follows ‘behind’, as a ‘shadow’, knows this, even as he celebrates the vision of eternity which he attributes to the elusive figure whom he invokes and pursues. As Blake tells us: ‘Eternity is in love with the productions of time.’ If the poet is he who can reveal eternity to us, he does so by means of the ‘skipping reels of rhyme’: in one aspect, they are what keeps us where we are (as in the act of skipping); in another aspect, they are what makes possible the vision of eternity. The tambourine man would not exist in our imagination if some ‘shadow’ such as the singer of this song had not invoked him through the incantatory power of language.

So it is that the song concludes with the ‘ragged clown’ (he who is, we might say, ‘beaten down’ by time) knowing himself to be part of the ‘dance’ which the tambourine man creates (the ‘beatific’ vision, as it were). After the singer’s situation has been described in a series of negatives (‘there is no place I’m going to … I have no one to meet … my hands can’t feel to grip’), we come to the moment of affirmation:

‘Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free…’ Here the sky represents eternity, but we are not intended to forget that the very image of eternal freedom is one that involves temporal movement.

After all, ‘to dance beneath the diamond sky’ is a moment of illumination that the singer hopes for rather than one he claims to have had. If he were ever to reach a state ‘far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow’, he would have to be taken ‘Down the foggy ruins of time, far past the frozen leaves, / The haunted frightened trees…’

That is, the imagination would have to comprehend all the trials and tribulations of human experience. Even then, on the ‘windy beach’ he would be ‘silhouetted by the sea’ and ‘circled by the circus sands’. Such images are deeply ambiguous. The sea might represent death just as much as dream, oblivion just as much the infinite potential of the unconscious mind. The ‘circus sands’ might represent the absurd cycle of time just as much as the play of art which produces vision.

The affirmation stands, however, by virtue of the paradoxical relationship between time and eternity, between rhyme and vision, which the song revisits. The singer is entitled to feel that ‘memory and fate’ – past and future – have been ‘driven deep beneath the waves’, and that he can ‘forget about today until tomorrow’; but he knows that there is going to be a tomorrow, in which today will have become yesterday. Again, when he dances to the tune played by the tambourine man, he has ‘one hand waving free’: this is an image of constraint and abandonment simultaneously. But then, that is the very nature of imagination: it works through the dialectic between form and improvisation, between what one receives and what one gives.

It might be worth ending with Dylan’s response to another question which he was asked at about this time: did he think of himself primarily as a singer or as a poet? He replied that he thought of himself ‘more as a song and dance man’. No doubt intended to undermine the more pompous claims made on his behalf, such as ‘spokesperson for a generation’, his choice of words is nonetheless revealing. His song, ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, is a celebration of the power of the ‘song’ which is also a ‘dance’: one that releases us from the burden of time even as it follows the rhythm of time. Thus, perhaps ultimately the tambourine man represents that potential within ourselves to ‘cleanse the doors of perception’ and ‘to hold Infinity in the palm of your hand’. The ‘ragged clown’ will always be ‘circled by the circus sands’, but in his capacity as ‘song and dance man’ he will surely find a way to ‘see a World in a grain of sand’.

 

 

 

This is my celebration of the album I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight by Richard and Linda Thompson, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

 

As this is a multimedia article, it is best to read it online:

https://www.popmatters.com/richard-linda-thompson-atr-50

 

‘The 20 Best Harry Chapin Songs’

PopMatters  17 October 2023

Laurence Coupe

 

This is not only a survey of Chapin’s powerful songs, but also a sustained reminder of the influence on his work of his grandfather, the great writer Kenneth Burke.

 

As this is a multimedia article, it is necessary to visit the journal itself.

https://www.popmatters.com/harry-chapin-music-symbolic-action

 

 

Please see ‘The Story So Far’, included on the following page:

‘Selected Reviews from PNR and CQ’

‘Beyond the Incredible String Band: Seven Songs by Mike Heron’

PopMatters 7 September 2023

As this is a multimedia article, it is best to read it online:

https://www.popmatters.com/mike-heron-sevson-songs-list

 

 

 

 

 

ART AND ENCHANTMENT: How Wonder Works

Patrick Curry

London & New York: Routledge, 2023

 

Patrick Curry is, to my mind, one of the most important ecological thinkers of our time. The author of a major philosophical work, Ecological Ethics, he is also a brilliant exponent of the nature wisdom contained in the pages of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Certainly, he persuaded me – a long-time Tolkien sceptic – of the ecological importance of that wonderful work. ‘Wonder’ is, in fact, the principal concern of Curry’s more recent writing. He has certainly understood Max Weber’s argument that modernity has brought with it a ‘disenchantment of the world’, due to the excessive concern with rationality and systematisation at the expense of spiritual, communal and imaginative life.

Curry’s new book follows naturally from his earlier work, Enchantment in Modern Life. Essentially, it is an ambitious but thoroughly readable approach to the culture of the last century or more in terms of a kind of vision that opens up possibilities and connections. Metaphor is key to this: it awakens us to a new reality, a new way of being in the world. Where there is metaphor, there is also likely to be myth: image and narrative complement each other, opening up the world to the power of enchantment. In doing so, we learn to revere nature itself, our ultimate reality.

His focus being on the modern world, he is careful to make a key distinction: it is fine for a work of art to be ‘modern’, but we must be suspicious if it is specifically ‘modernist’. What he means by ‘modernism’ is an ideology of artistic progress informed by a contempt for tradition, which it associates with ignorance and superstition. Modernists espouse secularism, materialism and rationality. Some people may argue with this usage, but it certainly makes sense in terms of his argument that certain ‘modern’ works celebrate and enact enchantment while other ‘modernist’ works enact a resistance to it.

Curry focuses on exactly how we locate enchantment through art in all its main forms: music, painting, poetry, fiction. What I like about the book is that rather than give a simple history of these genres, he offers his own personal journey through them. Not that we are subject to his whims: he manages to be both expressive and authoritative.

Music is particularly important because the word ‘enchantment’ literally means the state of being ‘in a song’. We are given fascinating insights into the way music works, while being left in no doubt which forms of music and which musicians the author regards as important ‘enchanters’, and we are left in no doubt as to which classical composers are worth listening to – Chopin, Debussy and John Luther Adams, for example – and which are not, notably Wagner and John Cage.

Nor is popular music overlooked. Here I must admit that I found myself ticking off with satisfaction the names of the songwriters and/or bands which he celebrates: in particular, Bob Dylan (of course!), Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Nick Drake and the Incredible String Band.  Compared with these, he conjectures, the current pop scene seems woefully mechanical and unadventurous, though he makes a good case for some musicians who have emerged in our current century – in particular, Joanna Newsom.

With painting, he demonstrates how Monet, Matisse and Bonnard confront the world of disenchantment and convey what enchantment might be like. If you are someone who has been impressed by Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Damian Hirst, be prepared to thoroughly disabused! (By the way, it’s good to see the 19C art critic and social theorist John Ruskin celebrated as an advocate of enchantment and a resolute defender of the natural world.)

As for literary forms, it will come as no surprise to find Currry  passionately celebrating, in his chapter on fiction, the genius of Tolkien – with an interesting case also being made for Russell Hoban and Karen Blixen. Not being familiar with these writers, they have now been added to my list of prospective reading. His discussion of poetic enchantment begins, of course, with the Romantics. We then get an interesting case for Yeats’s bravery in countering the world of disenchantment. Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin and Auden are assessed in relation to the world of wonder – with Auden being seen as being dogged by his own modernist cleverness. Particularly welcome for me in this chapter is a sensitive exposition of the massive contribution of Edward Thomas to poetic enchantment in spite of his life being cut so short by war.

All in all, this is an uplifting book, encouraging us to appreciate what it means to be ‘in a song’, in a state of ‘enchantment’. There is endless possibility, despite all the forces working against this mode of being. I finished reading the book with a declaration made by the Incredible String Band in mind: ‘Be glad, for the song has no ending.’

 

Laurence Coupe

Songs of Dominic Williams

Ringing Roger, July 2010

Dominic Williams has been appearing in folk clubs for four decades or more, performing his own and other people’s songs, as well as traditional material. He has played at the Edinburgh Festival, and has also appeared several times on Radio 2. To me, the way he delivers his own lyrics is very striking: a mixture of fragility and resolution. I would strongly recommend looking up some of his performances on ‘You Tube’. I’ll just offer three examples which indicate the range of his genius.

1.‘Tommy’s Lot’

This is Williams’ classic lament about the Great War – and, by extension, all wars. If I say that the song and its accompanying film constitute a brilliantly economical history lesson, that might make it sound too dull. Put simply, I’ve rarely come across such a vivid reminder of the price paid by millions of ordinary men for the incompetence and hunger for power of their so-called betters. The idiocy and horror of war are conveyed in sharp, searching lyrics, accompanied by skilfully selected images and a sound that can only be described as superb – delicate but deliberate, lyrical but incisive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2Ed2Eja9Jw

2.‘Blue Skies Gone’

Here we move from historical disaster to ecological catastrophe. This is an elegy for nature, in our age of planetary crisis, as well as an expression of a personal sense of loss and bewilderment. The songwriter wonders what has happened to the land, to the climate, to the seas and to the very heavens above our heads, registering his own disorientation both sensitively and succinctly. Although the title might just be an ironic echo of Irving Berlin’s uplifting ditty, made famous as performed by Fred Astaire, I suspect that what Williams has chiefly in mind is Marvin Gaye’s ‘Mercy Mercy Me’, with its simple, searching line: ‘Where did all the blue skies go?’ If so, then this song makes a worthy pairing with that: each is a classic ‘Ecology Song’, to use Gaye’s subtitle. The accompanying film, complete with sound effects, moves between images of family & friends and of the natural world. The effect is poignant and thought-provoking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9matDmIstOY

3.‘Prime Cut Meat and Fine French Wine’

If ‘Tommy’s Lot’ is about history, and if ‘Blues Skies Gone’ is about ecology, then this song is about ideals. It explores what it feels like to be alive now, having come of age in the 1960s – the decade of flower power and the rise of the counterculture. The question it asks, essentially, is what went wrong? Williams addresses an old friend whom he used to think was really radical and alternative, but who has ended up as a pillar of the establishment, enjoying an affluent way of life and espousing reactionary principles. Yet there is compassion, both in the lyric and in the delivery; and Williams is canny enough to include himself in this shrewd assessment of how ideals get abandoned. Moreover, there is more than a hint that, in the first place, those ideals had been adopted by both of them, like so many others, as a matter of fashion rather than conviction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsRd9BC5Fo0

In all three songs, the songwriter manages to explore what we might call the big issues while registering their impact on individual lives. The political and the personal are brought together, to powerful effect. The songs can stand perfectly well on their own, but I do think that ‘watching’ them is really worth the effort – even if you have to unravel the mysteries of the internet in order to do so. Do have a go!

Laurence Coupe