Chapter 4: Myth and the Modern (Section C: topic study)

Essential reading

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. This poem is printed in many editions and collections. The edition used here is from Selected Poems. (London: Faber, 1970) [ISBN 057108614].

Hughes, Ted The Hawk in the Rain. (London: Faber, 1957) [ISBN 0571086144].

Hughes, Ted Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. (London: Faber, 1972) [ISBN 571099157].

Note: a good alternative to obtaining both of the Hughes’ texts is to obtain Selected Poems 1957–1981 (London: Faber, 1982) [ISBN 0571119166]. All poems by Ted Hughes referred to in this chapter are printed in this collection.

Further reading

Bentley, Paul Poetry of Ted Hughes: Illusion and Beyond. (London: Longman, 1998) [ISBN 0582227755].

Brown, J.A.C. Freud and the Post-Freudians. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969) [ISBN 140205225]. See especially pp.41–52 for accessible material on Jung.

Cox, C.B. and Arnold P. Hinchliffe The Casebook Series: T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land. (London: Macmillan, 1968) [ISBN 0333003012]. See especially Brooks, Cleanth ‘The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth’, pp.128–61.

Dyson, A.E. Three Contemporary Poets: Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes and R.S. Thomas. (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1990) [ISBN 0333319427]. Contains interesting material by Hughes himself (see pp.102–15), and some useful critical studies.

*Frye, Northrop Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971) [ISBN 069102989]. A classic of literary theory. See especially ‘Third Essay – Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths.’

Hirschberg, Stuart Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes. (Portmarnock: Wolfhound Press, 1981) [ISBN 0905473507]. Somewhat dated in critical approach, but has some interesting material on Crow.

Joyce, James Ulysses. (London: Penguin in association with The Bodley Head, student edition with a new Preface by Richard Ellmann, 1986) [ISBN 0140084274]. Note: this topic does not require thorough knowledge of this difficult text, but it would be helpful to have some understanding of Joyce’s handling of the Odyssey. See Peake, Charles James Joyce: the Citizen and the Artist. London: Edward Arnold, 1977 [ISBN 071359006], pp.123–41. This gives a judicious account of the purposes of Homeric ‘correspondence’ in Ulysses. Peake also prints the Odyssean scheme of Ulysses, produced by Joyce himself (see Peake pp.120–21). For a different view of how myth operates in Ulysses see Platt, Len Joyce and the Anglo-Irish. (Rodopi: Amsterdam-Atlanta, 1998) [ISBN 9042006242]. See Chapter 3 ‘Corresponding with the Greeks’.

*Sagar, Keith The Art of Ted Hughes. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) [ISBN 0521207142]. A now standard critical account of Hughes’ early work. Includes material on Crow.

Sagar, Keith The Laughter of Foxes. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000) [ISBN 0853235651].

* Especially recommended

Introduction

One of the contradictions of modernism is that for all its engagement with science and technology, rationalism, commercialism, the urban, and so on, the modern has frequently commandeered ‘archaic’ cultural forms, drawing on fairy tale, folklore and mythology. Of course, literary culture in earlier periods had utilised myth, particularly classical myth. But the nature, style and functions of working with myth materials changed in the modern period.

Activity

As you work through this chapter, use the table below to record your ideas about how myth materials may have been used distinctively in the literary culture of the modern period. Some examples of how myth usage may have operated in ninteenth-century literature are given.

Nineteenth century

 

Twentieth century

1. It is sometimes claimed that myth was used for ‘decoration’ (see for instance, Keat’s ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ which is specifically about ‘decoration’).

2. Myth was used to imply identification with the premier cultures of antiquity. In Tennyson’s poem ‘Locksley Hall’, for instance, the immediate culture of nineteenth-century England becomes conflated with myths and legends from Judaism and classical Greece. This ‘association’ would confer status.

3. It could be argued that in eighteenth/ninteenth-century England, myth was an escape from the sober realities of industrialisation and urbanism. Could William Blake’s mythopoetics be read in this way?

In the early modern period, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (published between 1890 and 1915), a vast anthropological study, made mythology part of the common intellectual currency of the day. Frazer’s identification and analysis of mythic ‘archetypes’ which crossed cultures seemed to point towards the reclamation of a lost human reality, a communality which resided not only in the ancient stories but also in contemporary ‘primitive’ culture. Moreover, psychology – a prestige science in the early modern period – was claiming that residuals of the myth world remained in the unconscious mind. Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) contributed hugely to the status of the mythic in modern culture, because he presented the human unconscious not just as the site of repressed desires, as Freud had done, but also as the repository of a highly creative folk memory. Beneath the ‘personal unconscious’, Jung identified a ‘collective or racial unconscious’, which:

…contained the collective beliefs and myths of the race to which the individual belonged. (Brown, p.45)

In a period which many saw as one of almost uncontrollable change, the mythic represented a continuity of human experience, a bedrock of symbolic imagination, which may partially explain the centrality of the mythic in some of the key texts of so-called ‘high modernism’ (classical modernism). The Waste Land, in many ways the signature tune of early modernism, was apparently built from myth materials. Eliot himself explained in his ‘footnotes’ to this influential poem, how Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, a study of the Grail myths and the Fisher King legends, suggested ‘not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism’ for The Waste Land. Joyce’s Ulysses, as we have seen, was structured around the Odyssey. The ‘schema’ which Joyce produced for his friends shows how characters and episodes, as well as colours, symbols, ‘scenes’, and some literary styles, are ‘correspondent’ in Ulysses to a Homeric prototype. For Eliot, Joyce was the progenitor of the ‘mythical method’ which somehow made ‘the modern world possible for art’.

In using myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is simply pursuing a method which others must pursue after him… It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history…Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step towards making the modern world possible for art…’
(Eliot, 1923)

Activity

Consider Eliot’s statement carefully. What does he mean by ‘the mythical method’? How might this be related to ‘history’?

For later artists and commentators, however, myth ‘correspondence’ was to become symptomatic of a perceived arty stylisation in a modern culture which was fatuously attempting to invest itself with importance. Certainly by the 1950s English poets and novelists were consciously defining themselves against the ‘pretentiousness’ of an earlier period. Robert Conquest’s 1956 anthology, New Lines, described the new generation of poets as ‘down to earth’. The complex, allusive, often obscure poetry of high modernism was displaced by a poetry of the commonplace:

…common men speaking to common men of common things in common language, all congratulating each other on their refusal to be taken in, aggressively provincial and slangy.
(Sagar, p.13)

Myth, in British literary culture, had become unfashionable – except that the youngest of the contributors of New Lines, Ted Hughes, himself an anthropologist, was to establish an entire aesthetic which turned on myth and folklore. In the process, Hughes was to become one of the most important post-war British poets and was the Poet Laureate. Stuart Hirschberg writes that:

ancient archetypes reverberate in his poetry with an evocativeness, continuity and power that makes much of contemporary poetry seem bloodless by comparison.(Hirschberg, p.9)

Hughes himself writes of myth and folklore as the place where ‘understanding has it roots and stores its X-rays’.

In this chapter, we will be examining further this relationship between the modern and the mythic. We will be identifying the similarities and the differences between how writers use mythic materials, using some of the writers we are already familiar with from earlier chapters in order to emphasise the importance of linkage as you work through the subject guide.

Myth and high modern

The following is a brief and highly simplified account of the Fisher King legends, and of Jessie L. Weston’s commentary. Read the account carefully:

The Fisher King has lost his virility through sexual mutilation (i.e. maiming) or sickness and this is associated with the desolation of his lands. Crops cannnot grow and the power of propagation is suspended. The curse of aridity can only be removed by a quester, a youthful knight who must undertake a journey to the Castle or Chapel of the Grail. The quester must submit to trial and ascertain the office of the Grail and the significance of the symbols and the cup. If he succeeds the King will be healed and the land restored to fertility. There is a mass of literature concerning the Grail cycle, both ancient and modern. The chief sources of the principal group of legends are the Peredur (Welsh and given in the Mabinogion), Wolfram’s Parzifal (c.1210 and transformed by ecclesiastical influence) and the thirteenth-century French version, Percival le Gallois (the romantic incarnation of the legend).

The cup and the lance, dominant symbols in the legends, carry Christian significance. The lance is linked to the piercing of Christ’s side and the cup to the chalice used at the Last Supper and preserved by Joseph of Arimathea to receive Christ’s blood at the crucifixion. Jessie L.Weston, however, finds earlier pagan origins of these symbols in Egyptian culture (through the Osiris myth); Greek culture (through the Adonis myth) and in the Phrygian Atys myths.

In Weston’s analysis the cup and the lance function as symbols of male and female sex.

There is a relic of this symbolism, Weston claims, in the two red suits of the modern pack of cards, the diamond being the lance head and the heart the chalice. Weston sees analogies between myths and religions of many cultures and diverse historical periods.

Activity

Use this information in a reading of Eliot’s The Waste Land. How helpful is it?
What are its limitations?

The above outline is limited, and you might now feel that you need to know something more substantial about the Grail legends. However, even this very basic introduction should help with Eliot’s poem. Resurrection myths, myths of pilgrimage, of death and of sexuality provide a kind of vocabulary for The Waste Land. The ‘dead land’ (line 2) of Eliot’s landscape is a conflation of legend and modernity, consciously worked to produce some startling montage effects, as when the fisher king of antiquity is ‘fishing in the dull canal/On a winter evening round behind the gashouse’ (lines 189–190). The most obvious concentration of allusions to the Grail legends occur in part five of the poem, ‘What the Thunder Said’, where the dryness of the land is expressed as a kind of litany (see lines 344–358) and the questing motif is very strong. Weston’s idea about Grail symbolism carrying over into playing cards seems to be taken up at line 43, and is reflected in the Tarot card imagery which runs through the poem.

These are some of the many allusions to the Grail myths in Eliot’s poem. We can generalise about the purposes of these allusions. On the one hand, the Grail legends of a barren land which cannot rejuvenate itself are used in confirmation of Eliot’s vision of modernity. In this poem, the presentation of the modern world as a dead land – spiritually and emotionally – is achieved partly through reference to the prototype narrative(s). On the other hand, the process of allusion to myth generally seems to be linked to Eliot’s sense of the importance of tradition. In his famous essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Eliot writes that the poet must deploy the historical sense, which:

…involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

Myth then is part of a cultural tradition which Eliot digests, as it were. The tradition is not simply ‘reproduced’ in the culture of contemporaneity, but self-consciously worked on and transformed. The result is frequently a collision of past and present, rather than a ‘smooth’ continuty.

For Eliot this collision is a serious business. Behind Eliot’s cracked images of an empty modernity is a desire for the spiritual, the whole, the meaningful. It is arguably this desire for wholeness and meaning which produces the characteristically dark and doleful tones of Eliot’s poem. Joyce’s modernity, on the other hand, is a very much more comic construction, as can be seen in a comparison between Joyce and Eliot’s myth materials.

Activity

Familiarise yourself with the Homeric ‘parallels’ deployed in Ulysses. Using the diagram reproduced on Peake, pp.120–21, is a fast way of doing so. Compare Joyce’s use of myth materials with Eliot’s.

It should be clear that Homer’s Odyssey penetrates Ulysses at many levels. Apart from the obvious – that Bloom ‘equals’ Odysseus and Stephen ‘Telemachus’; that Molly ‘stands for’ Penelope and so on – there are the incredibly elaborate correspondences, like the geographical one in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode. Here Dublin and its characters ‘become’ the landscape of Ulyssean travel. The river Liffey thus ‘represents’ the Bosphorus; the Viceroy ‘equals’ ‘the European bank’ and Father Conmee ‘equals’ ‘the Asiatic bank’. Myth correspondence in Ulysses is clearer and much more structured and persistent than it is in The Waste Land. It is also, in many cases, much more obscure. It might be obvious that the bigoted nationalist in the ‘Cyclops’ corresponds to the one-eyed Polyphemus of Homer’s story, but who could work out that Sargent in the second chapter of Ulysses ‘equals’ Pisistratus, or that the cocklepicker of ‘Proteus’ ‘equals’ Megapenthus? We know about these latter correspondences only because Joyce reveals them in his schema. There is nothing substantial in the text to support these particular correspondences.

There is also a difficulty in understanding what ‘equals’ means in Joyce’s text. What are the purposes of this complex ghosting effect? Some critics have claimed that Homeric correspondence simply provides a framework for a novel which seems uninterested in conventional narrative. Others (although this is now a rare position) argue that myth provides some kind of ‘key’ to unlock hidden meaning. Most would accept that Ulysses is a ‘mock epic’. The relationship between the new Ulysses (Bloom) and the prototype (Odysseus) is essentially ironic and comic. Bloom is irretrievably bourgeois, rarely travels, and is deeply anti-heroic. He is a voyeur and a self-abuser and his wife, the new Penelope (an emblem of loyalty in Homer’s version), has just spent a passionate day with her lover.

Activity

Are these views about the purpose of myth patterns in Ulysses consistent or inconsistent with Eliot’s comments about Joyce’s use of myth (see above).

In Joyce’s new myth, as in Eliot’s, the relationship between modernity and the ancient world is strained to the point of collapse. The difference is that in the case of Eliot this produces a bereaved poem which seems to mourn a lost order, whereas Joyce’s mock epic laughs at modernity.

There is a further position on Joyce’s use of myth which is worth consideration. The ‘fit’ between Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey is hopelessly disjointed. Analogies between Dublin and ancient Greece; Bloom and Odysseus; Molly and Penelope and so on are not just occasionally, but invariably twisted. The ‘correspondence’ is hopelessly compromised and distorted. Joyce’s encounter with a classical Greek mythology of incredibly high European cultural status is essentially farcical. Is it then possible that Joyce is actually mocking the whole business of mythic correspondence?

Activity

Consider the last point carefully. Why would Joyce be mocking myth correspondence?

Ted Hughes: shaman and trickster

In 1953, while studying at Pembroke College, Cambridge, Ted Hughes transferred his course of study from English to Archaeology and Anthropology. The Cambridge tradition of anthropology included such luminaries as Sir James Frazer, Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, Francis Cornford and A.B. Cook. It was within this tradition that Hughes made his first serious study of myth and folklore. This was to have a strong influence on his poetry, and not just as ‘device’ or in terms of ‘artifice’, as is arguably the case in The Waste Land. As critics like Sagar and Hirschberg have shown, Hughes is utterly absorbed in the epistemology of ancient mythologies. In the early animal poems (see, for instance, Hughes first collection, The Hawk in the Rain) animals become primordial totems, and the poet a shaman ‘recreating the rite of blood brotherhood with his animal helper’ (Hirschberg, p.8). Hirschberg continues, ‘Hughes establishes a mystical alliance and “exchanges blood” with his animal familiars’ thus making ‘contact with the feral energy at the heart of the cosmos’ (Hirschberg, p.8). This ‘contact’ is at the centre of Hughes’ early poetry. Hirschberg’s precise identification of Hughes as shaman is not inconsistent with the more general, and less extreme, view that Hughes’:

…admiration for and kinship with a primitive and barbaric strain in the animal world has led [him] to a contempt for ‘mere’ civilisation and, even more, for the particular configuration of values and attitudes that has strangled man’s native energy and perverted his force. (Geoffrey Thurley in Dyson, p.156)

Activity

There are actually only some half a dozen animal poems in Hughes’ first collection. Read ‘The Jaguar’ and ‘The Horses’, and some non-animal poems, ‘Six Young Men’ and ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, for instance. Also see what Hughes himself has to say about shamanism in Dyson, 106.

How far would you accept Hirschberg’s view on the shamanistic nature of Hughes’ early poetry?

Hirschberg also thinks that Hughes’ poetic development follows archetypal myth patterns, so that in the Crow collection the poet-shaman is displaced by the misfit trickster who, far from surrendering to cosmic machinery as the shaman does, tries to understand the universe. The trickster cannot resist intervention and corruption of the processes. The particular pride of the Crow-narrator is in his ability to escape punishment – although eventual punishment is inevitable. In later collections, such as Prometheus on his Crag, Cave Birds and Gaudete, Hughes:

…writes poetry from the point of view of the victim, the Scapegoat, scorched, held in suspension, subjected to withering scutiny: the poetry of The Hanged Man.
(Hirschberg, p.8)

Activity

Hughes, unlike either Joyce or Eliot, knew and worked within the discipline of anthropology. He draws on myth and folklore traditions from a wide range of cultures, many of them non-Western cultures. This is another important distinction between Hughes and the early modernists. Eliot and Joyce use myths of Western culture, or of cultures which have become wholly assimilated into Western culture. Hughes is more eclectic and uses non-European traditions.

Read Crow, and one of the critical accounts of this collection in either Hirschberg or Sagar. Identify the cultures and cultural traditions that Hughes is using. Make some provisional notes on how he uses these traditions, and the purposes which his usage serves.

Inevitably, as you work through this collection, you will be asking yourself: who or what is Crow?

As Keith Sagar shows, Crow has a distinguished and complex lineage (see Sagar, pp.101–46). The God of healing (Cronos/Saturn/Aesculpius/Apollo) was a Crow-god. The Celtic incarnation was Bran. Morrigu, the Celtic death Goddess, was a Crow. In Inuit tradition, it is a crow which helps man to create woman out of clay. As the trickster figure, Crow is in the company of Anansi and Coyote (from African and Amerindian traditions respectively) and possibly of Noah’s raven. In some Talmudic traditions, the latter was the precursor of the dove. A crow was the first bird that Noah sent out to report on the Flood, but the crow became too busily engaged in eating carrion to return to the ark.

The characteristics of the trickster, a figure forgotten by civilised man according to Jung, are that he is greedy, over-sexed, covetous, mischievous, free from shame and has an incredible capacity for survival. He is often seen as functioning in oral literature as the creator of narrative possibility in the face of tribal restraints. This latter point would seem to have particular relevance to those Crow poems where Crow inflicts serious damage on some of Western culture’s most embedded myths and traditions. See, for example, ‘A Childish Prank’ where the Judaeo-Christian creation myth is utterly subverted. In this poem, God is a tired, dull creature. Unable to work out how to breath life into man and women, he falls asleep. Crow, seizing the opportunity for a ‘prank’, bites the Worm ‘God’s only son/Into two writhing halves’:

He stuffed into man the tail half
With the wounded end hanging out.
He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman
And it crept in deeper and up
To peer out through her eyes
Calling its tail-half to join up quickly, quickly
Because O it was so painful.

In this way, man and woman are given life and souls.

It should be clear that crow stories have a wide cultural currency. Hughes himself has remarked that crows lived almost everywhere in the world, and so do crow myths and legends.

Activity

Hughes has said that his ‘main concern’ in Crow:

…was to produce something with the minimum cultural accretions of the museum sort – something autochthonous and complete in itself, as it might be invented after the holocaust and demolition of all libraries…So the comparative religion/mythology background was irrelevant to me, except as I could forget it. If I couldn’t find it again original in Crow, I wasn’t interested to make a trophy of it.

Bearing this comment in mind, of what value is the anthropological ‘background’ to the Crow reader? How does Hughes ‘find it again original in Crow’?

In thinking about the second of the above questions, consider how Hughes merges the archaic with modernity in Crow. Space-travel, modern warfare, cartoon characters and fast-cars are part of the fabric of these poems. See, for instance, ‘Crow and the Birds’. In this little ‘parable’ the birds are struggling against modernity: ‘the heron laboured clear of the Bessemer glare’; ‘the bluetit zipped clear of lace panties’ and ‘the peewit tumbled clear of the laundromat’. Crow, the true inheritor, is unperturbed: ‘Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garbage, guzzling a dropped ice-cream.’

Crow is a developing character. He starts from ‘nothing’, is born, studies the universe and learns its lessons. Chart the progress of Crow and evaluate the conclusion of ‘Littleblood’. This is best done from the complete Crow poems, but the progression is clear in the Crow poems published in Selected Poems.

A brief note on myth criticism

Developing from the anthropological work of Frazer and Joseph Campbell, and from Jungian psychology, a school of literary criticism evolved which examined characters, symbols and genres in relation to myth archtypes. This ‘myth criticism’, which was particularly strong in America, had its most eloquent exponent in Northrop Frye whose influential Anatomy of Criticism was published in 1957. This elegant exposition is still held in high regard, but the myth approach in general is now completely unfashionable; in fact, such an approach is quite inconsistent with many contemporary theoretical positions. Of course, this has had little impact on writers, who continue to draw on mythic and fairy-tale materials. So-called ‘magic realism’, for instance, is developing traditions of myth and fairy-tale assimilation which owe a great deal to the early modern period.

Activity

You might consider why it is that ‘myth criticism’ is inconsistent with so many contemporary theoretical approaches to literature.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this chapter and having studied the suggested primary texts and some of the recommended secondary reading, you should be able to:

Sample examination questions

  1. 1. ‘In the Trickster Tales of early and primitive literatures…optimism and creative joy are fundamental’ (Ted Hughes). Discuss the use of Trickster tales in the work of any two writers of the period.
  2. 2. Compare and contrast the use of myth in the work of any two modern writers.
  3. 3. Why have myth and fairy tale been of such importance to writers in the modern period? Discuss with reference to at least two modern writers.

Suggestions for further study

You might now choose to develop your studies by examining magic realism. Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus would be a good place to start. This novel has a woman who can fly, a shaman with his apprentice, and a totem bear. Alternatively, you might consider developing author studies, on Eliot, Joyce or Hughes, from this topic work.