Source: http://northropfrye-theanatomyofcriticism.blogspot.in/2009/02/third-essay-archetypal-criticism-theory.html
Archetypical Criticism
Introduction
In the art of painting it is easy to see both
structural and representational elements. A picture is normally a picture
"of" some thing: it depicts or illustrates a "subject" made
up of things analogous to "objects" in sense experience. At the same
time there are present certain elements of pictorial design: what a picture
represents is organized into structural patterns and conventions which are
found only in pictures. The words "content" and "form" are
often employed to describe these complementary aspects of painting.
"Realism" connotes an emphasis on what the picture represents;
stylization, whether primitive or sophisticated, connotes an emphasis on
pictorial structure. Extreme realism of the illusive or trompe l'oeil type is
about as far as the painter can go in one kind of emphasis; abstract, or, more
strictly, non-objective painting is about as far as he can go in the other
direction. (The phrase "non-representational painting" seems to me
illogical, a painting being itself a representation.) The illusive painter
however cannot escape from pictorial conventions, and non-objective painting is
still an imitative art in Aristotle's sense, and so we may say without much
fear of effective contradiction that the whole art of painting lies within a
combination of pictorial "form" or structure and pictorial
"content" or subject.
For some reason the traditions of both practice and
theory in Western painting have weighed down heavily on the imitative or
representational end. Even from Classical painting we have inherited a number
of depressing stories, of birds pecking painted grapes and the like, suggesting
that Greek painters took their greatest pride in concocting trompe
l'oeil puzzles. The development of perspective painting in the
Renaissance gave a great prestige to such skills, the suggesting of three
dimensions in a two-dimensional medium being essentially a trompe
l'oeil device. An eavesdropper in a modern art gallery may easily
discover the strength and persistence of the feeling that to achieve recognizable
likeness in a subject, and to make this likeness the primary thing in his
picture, is a moral obligation on the painter. A good deal of the [131]
freakishness of experimental movements in painting during the last half-century
or so has been due to the energy of its revolt against the tyranny of the
representational fallacy.
An original painter knows, of course, that when the
public demands likeness to an object, it generally wants the exact opposite,
likeness to the pictorial conventions it is familiar with. Hence when he breaks
with these conventions, he is often apt to assert that he is nothing but an
eye, that he merely paints what he sees as he sees it, and the like. His motive
in talking such nonsense is clear enough: he wishes to say that painting is not
merely facile decoration, and involves a difficult conquest of some very real
spatial problems. But this may be freely admitted without agreeing that the
formal cause of a picture is outside the picture, an assertion which would
destroy the whole art if it were taken seriously. What he has actually done is
to obey an obscure but profound impulse to revolt against the conventions
established in his own day, in order to rediscover convention on a deeper
level. By breaking with the Barbizon school, Manet discovered a deeper affinity
with Goya and Velasquez; by breaking with the impressionists, Cezanne
discovered a deeper affinity with Chardin and Masaccio, The possession of
originality cannot make an artist unconventional; it drives him further into convention,
obeying the law of the art itself, which seeks constantly to reshape itself
from its own depths, and which works through its geniuses for metamorphosis, as
it works through minor talents for mutation.
Music affords a refreshing contrast to painting in
its critical theory. When perspective was discovered in painting, music might
well have gone in a similar direction, but in fact the development of
representational or "program" music has been severely restricted.
Listeners may still derive pleasure from hearing external sounds cleverly
imitated in music, but no one asserts that a composer is being a decadent or a
charlatan if he fails to produce such imitations. Nor is it believed that these
imitations are prior in importance to the forms of music itself, still less
that they constitute those forms. The result is that the structural principles
of music are clearly understood, and can be taught even to children.
Suppose, for example, that the present book were an
introduction to musical theory instead of poetics. Then we could begin by
isolating, from the range of audible sounds, the interval of the octave, and
explain that the octave is divided into twelve theoretically [132] equal
semitones, forming a scale of twelve notes which contains potentially all the
melodies and harmonies that the reader of the book will ordinarily hear. Then
we could abstract the two points of repose in this scale, the major and minor
common chords, and explain the system of twenty-four interlocking keys and the
conventions of tonality which require that a piece should normally open and
close in the same key. We could describe the basis of rhythm as an accentuation
of every second or every third beat, and so on through the whole list of
rudiments.
Such an outline would give a rational account of
the structure of Western music from 1600 to 1900, and, in a qualified and more
flexible but not essentially different form, of everything that the user of the
book would be accustomed to call music. If we chose, we could lock up all the
music outside the Western tradition in the solitary confinement of a prefatory
chapter, before we got down to serious business. Someone might object that the
system of equal temperament, in which C$ and Db are the same note, is an
arbitrary fiction. Another might object that a composer ought not to be tied
down to so rigidly conventionalized a set of musical elements, and that the
resources of expression in music ought to be as free as the air. A third might
object that we are not talking about music at all: that while the Jupiter
Symphony is in C major and Beethoven's Fifth is in C minor, explaining the
difference between the two keys will give nobody any real notion of the
difference between the two symphonies. All these objectors could be quite safely
ignored. Our handbook would not give the reader a complete musical education,
nor would it give an account of music as it exists in the mind of God or the
practice of angels but it would do for its purposes.
In this book we are attempting to outline a few of
the grammatical rudiments of literary expression, and the elements of it that
correspond to such musical elements as tonality, simple and compound rhythm,
canonical imitation, and the like. The aim is to give a rational account of
some of the structural principles of Western literature in the context of its
Classical and Christian heritage. We are suggesting that the resources of
verbal expression are limited, if that is the word, by the literary equivalents
of rhythm and key, though that does not mean, any more than it means in music,
that its resources are artistically exhaustible. We doubtless have objectors
similar to those just imagined for music, saying [133] that our categories are
artificial, that they do not do justice to the variety of literature, or that
they are not relevant to their own experiences in reading. However, the
question of what the structural principles of literature actually are seems
important enough to discuss; and, as literature is an art of words, it should
be at least as easy to find words to describe them as to find such words as
sonata or fugue in music.
In literature, as in painting, the traditional
emphasis in both practice and theory has been on representation or
"lifelikeness." When, for instance, we pick up a novel of Dickens,
our immediate impulse, a habit fostered in us by all the criticism we know, is
to compare it with "life," whether as lived by us or by Dickens's
contemporaries. Then we meet such characters as Keep or Quilp, and, as neither
we nor the Victorians have ever known anything much "like" these
curious monsters, the method promptly breaks down. Some readers will complain
that Dickens has relapsed into "mere" caricature (as though
caricature were easy); others, more sensibly, simply give up the criterion of
lifelikeness and enjoy the creation for its own sake.
The structural principles of painting are
frequently described in terms of their analogues in plane geometry (or solid,
by a further reach of analogy). A famous letter of Cezanne speaks of the
approximation of pictorial form to the sphere and the cube, and the practice of
abstract painters seems to confirm his point. Geometrical shapes are analogous
only to pictorial forms, not by any means identical with them; the real
structural principles of painting are to be derived, not from an external
analogy with something else, but from the internal analogy of the art itself.
The structural principles of literature, similarly, are to be derived from
archetypal and anagogic criticism, the only kinds that assume a larger context
of literature as a whole. But we law in the first essay that, as the modes of
fiction move from the mythical to the low mimetic and ironic, they approach a
point of extreme "realism" or representative likeness to life. It
follows that the mythical mode, the stories about gods, in which characters
have the greatest possible power of action, is the most abstract and
conventionalized of all literary modes, just as the corresponding modes in
other arts - religious Byzantine painting, for example - show the highest
degree of stylization in their structure. Hence the structural principles of
literature are as closely related to mythology and comparative religion as
[134] those of painting are to geometry. In this essay we shall be using the
symbolism of the Bible, and to a lesser extent Classical mythology, as a
grammar of literary archetypes.
In the Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers, thought
to be the source of the Potiphar's wife story in the Joseph legend, an elder
brother's wife attempts to seduce an unmarried younger brother who lives with
them, and, when he resists her, accuses him of attempting to rape her. The
younger brother is then forced to run away, with the enraged elder brother in
pursuit. So far, the incidents reproduce more or less credible facts of life.
Then the younger brother prays to Ra for assistance, pleading the justice of
his cause; Ra places a large lake between him and his brother, and, in a burst
of divine exuberance, fills it full of crocodiles. This incident is no more a
fictional episode than anything that has preceded it, nor is it less logically
related than any other episode to the plot as a whole. But it has given up the
external analogy to "life": this, we say, is the kind of thing that
happens only in stories. The Egyptian tale has acquired, then, in its mythical
episode, an abstractly literary quality; and, as the story-teller could just as
easily have solved his little problem in a more "realistic" way, it
appears that literature in Egypt, like the other arts, preferred a certain
degree of stylization.
Similarly, a medieval saint with a huge decorated
halo around his head may look like an old man, but the mythical feature, the
halo, both imparts a more abstract structure to the painting and gives the
saint the kind of appearance that one sees only in pictures. In primitive
societies, a flourishing development in myth and folk tale usually accompanies
a taste for geometrical ornament in the plastic arts. In our tradition we have
a place for verisimilitude, for human experience skilfully and consistently
imitated. The occasional hoaxes in which fiction is presented, or even
accepted, as fact, such as Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year or
Samuel Butler's The Fair Haven, correspond to trompe l'oeil illusions
in painting. At the other extreme we have myths, or abstract fictional designs
in which gods and other such beings do whatever they like, which in practice
means whatever the story-teller likes. The return of irony to myth that we
noted in the first essay is contemporary with, and parallel to, abstraction,
expressionism, cubism, and similar efforts in painting to emphasize the
self-contained pictorial structure. Sixty years ago, Bernard Shaw stressed the
social significance of the themes in Ibsen's plays and his own. Today, [135]
Mr. Eliot calls our attention to the Alcestis archetype in The Cocktail
Party, to the Ion archetype in The Confidential Clerk. The
former is of the age of Manet and Degas; the latter of the age of Braque and
Graham Sutherland.
We begin our study of archetypes, then, with a
world of myth, an abstract or purely literary world of fictional and thematic
design, unaffected by canons of plausible adaptation to familiar experience. In
terms of narrative, myth is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable
limits of desire. The gods enjoy beautiful women, fight one another with
prodigious strength, comfort and assist man, or else watch his miseries from
the height of their immortal freedom. The fact that myth operates at the top level
of human desire does not mean that it necessarily presents its world as
attained or attainable by human beings. In terms of meaning or dianoia,
myth is the same world looked at as an area or field of activity, bearing in
mind our principle that the meaning or pattern of poetry is a structure of
imagery with conceptual implications. The world of mythical imagery is usually
represented by the conception of heaven or Paradise in religion, and it is
apocalyptic, in the sense of that word already explained, a world of total
metaphor, in which every thing is potentially identical with everything else,
as though it were all inside a single infinite body.
Realism, or the art of verisimilitude, evokes the
response "How like that is to what we know!" When what is written is
like what is known, we have an art of extended or implied simile. And as
realism is an art of implicit simile, myth is an art of implicit metaphorical
identity. The word "sun-god," with a hyphen used in stead of a
predicate, is a pure ideogram, in Pound's terminology, or literal metaphor, in
ours. In myth we see the structural principles of literature isolated; in
realism we see the same structural principles (not similar ones) fitting into a
context of plausibility. (Similarly in music, a piece by Purcell and a piece by
Benjamin Britten may not be in the least like each other, but if they are both
in D major their tonality will be the same.) The presence of a mythical
structure in realistic fiction, however, poses certain technical problems for
making it plausible, and the devices used in solving these problems may be
given the general name of displacement.
Myth, then, is one extreme of literary design;
naturalism is the other, and in between lies the whole area of romance, using
that term to mean, not the historical mode of the first essay, but the [136]
tendency, noted later in the same essay, to displace myth in a human direction
and yet, in contrast to "realism," to conventionalize content in an
idealized direction. The central principle of displacement is that what can be
metaphorically identified in a myth can only be linked in romance by some form
of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery,
and the like. In a myth we can have a sun-god or a tree-god; in a romance we
may have a person who is significantly associated with the sun or trees. In
more realistic modes the association becomes less significant and more a matter
of incidental, even coincidental or accidental, imagery. In the dragon-killing
legend of the St. George and Perseus family, of which more hereafter, a country
under an old feeble king is terrorized by a dragon who eventually demands the king's
daughter, but is slain by the hero. This seems to be a romantic analogy
(perhaps also, in this case, a descendant) of a myth of a waste land restored
to life by a fertility god. In the myth, then, the dragon and the old king
would be identified. We can in fact concentrate the myth still further into an
Oedipus fantasy in which the hero is not the old king's son-in-law but his son,
and the rescued damsel the hero's mother. If the story were a private dream
such identifications would be made as a matter of course. But to make it a
plausible, symmetrical, and morally acceptable story a good deal of
displacement is necessary, and it is only after a comparative study of the
story type has been made that the metaphorical structure within it begins to
emerge.
In Hawthorne's The Marble Faun the
statue which gives the story that name is so insistently associated with a
character named Donatello that a reader would have to be unusually dull or
inattentive to miss the point that Donatello "is" the statue. Later on
we meet a girl named Hilda, of singular purity and gentleness, who lives in a
tower surrounded by doves. The doves are very fond of her; another character
calls her his "dove," and remarks indicating some special affinity
with doves are made about her by both author and characters. If we were to say
that Hilda is a dove-goddess like Venus, identified with her doves, we should
not be reading the story quite accurately in its own mode; we should be
translating it into straight myth. But to recognize how close Hawthorne is to
myth here is not unfair. That is, we recognize that The Marble Faunis
not a typical low mimetic fiction: it is dominated by an interest that looks
back to fictional romance and forward to the [137] ironic mythical writers of
the next century to Kafka, for instance, or Cocteau. This interest is often
called allegory, but probably Hawthorne himself was right in calling it
romance. We can see how this interest tends toward abstraction in
character-drawing, and if we know no other canons than low mimetic ones, we
complain of this.
Or, again, we have, in myth, the story of
Proserpine, who disappears into the underworld for six months of every year.
The pure myth is clearly one of death and revival; the story as we have it is
slightly displaced, but the mythical pattern is easy to see. The same
structural element often recurs in Shakespearean comedy, where it has to be
adapted to a roughly high mimetic level of credibility. Hero in Much
Ado is dead enough to have a funeral song, and plausible explanations
are postponed until after the end of the play. Imogen in Cymbeline has
an assumed name and an empty grave, but she too gets some funeral obsequies.
But the story of Hermione and Perdita is so close to the Demeter and Proserpine
myth that hardly any serious pretence of plausible explanations is made.
Hermione, after her disappearance, returns once as a ghost in a dream, and her
coming to life from a statue, a displacement of the Pygmalion myth, is said to
require an awakening of faith, even though, on one level of plausibility, she
has not been a statue at all, and nothing has taken place except a harmless
deception. We notice how much more abstractly mythical a thematic writer can be
than a fictional one: Spenser's Florimell, for instance, disappears under the
sea for the winter with no questions asked, leaving a "snowy lady" in
her place and returning with a great outburst of spring floods at the end of
the fourth book.
In the low mimetic, we recognize the same
structural pattern of the death and revival of the heroine when Esther
Summerson gets smallpox, or Lorna Doone is shot at her marriage altar. But we
are getting closer to the conventions of realism, and although Lorna's eyes are
"dim with death," we know that the author does not really mean death
if he is planning to revive her. Here again it is interesting to compare The
Marble Faun, where there is so much about sculptors and the relation of
statues to living people that we almost expect some kind of denouement like
that of The Winter's Tale. Hilda mysteriously disappears, and
during her absence her lover, the sculptor Kenyon, digs out of the earth a
[138] statue that he associates with Hilda. After that Hilda returns, with a
plausible reason eventually assigned for her absence, but not without some
rather pointed and petulant remarks from Hawthorne himself to the effect that
he has no interest in concocting plausible explanations, and that he wishes his
reading public would give him a bit more freedom. Yet Hawthorne's inhibitions
seem to be at least in part self-imposed, as we can see if we turn to
Poe's Ligeia, where the straight mythical death and revival pattern
is given without apology. Poe is clearly a more radical abstractionist than
Hawthorne, which is one reason why his influence on our century is more
immediate.
This affinity between the mythical and the
abstractly literary illuminates many aspects of fiction, especially the more
popular fiction which is realistic enough to be plausible in its incidents and
yet romantic enough to be a "good story," which means a clearly
designed one. The introduction of an omen or portent, or the device of making a
whole story the fulfilment of a prophecy given at the beginning, is an example.
Such a device suggests, in its existential projection, a conception of
ineluctable fate or hidden omnipotent will. Actually, it is a piece of pure
literary design, giving the beginning some symmetrical relationship with the
end, and the only ineluctable will involved is that of the author. Hence we
often find it even in writers not temperamentally much in sympathy with the
portentous. In Anna Karenina, for instance, the death of the
railway porter in the opening book is accepted by Anna as an omen for herself.
Similarly, if we find portents and omens in Sophocles, they are there primarily
because they fit the structure of his type of dramatic tragedy, and prove
nothing about any clear-cut beliefs in fate held by either dramatist or
audience.
We have, then, three organizations of myths and
archetypal symbols in literature. First, there is undisplaced myth, generally
concerned with gods or demons, and which takes the form of two contrasting
worlds of total metaphorical identification, one desirable and the other
undesirable. These worlds are often identified with the existential heavens and
hells of the religions contemporary with such literature. These two forms of
metaphorical organization we call the apocalyptic and the demonic respectively.
Second, we have the general tendency we have called romantic, the tendency to
suggest implicit mythical patterns in a world more closely [139] associated
with human experience. Third, we have the tendency of "realism" (my
distaste for this inept term is reflected in the quotation marks) to throw the
emphasis on content and representation rather than on the shape of the story.
Ironic literature begins with realism and tends toward myth, its mythical
patterns being as a rule more suggestive of the demonic than of the
apocalyptic, though sometimes it simply continues the romantic tradition of
stylization. Hawthorne, Poe, Conrad, Hardy and Virginia Woolf all provide
examples.
In looking at a picture, we may stand close to it
and analyze the details of brush work and palette knife. This corresponds
roughly to the rhetorical analysis of the new critics in literature. At a
little distance back, the design comes into clearer view, and we study rather
the content represented: this is the best distance for realistic Dutch
pictures, for example, where we are in a sense reading the picture. The further
back we go, the more conscious we are of the organizing design. At a great
distance from, say, a Madonna, we can see nothing but the archetype of the
Madonna, a large centripetal blue mass with a contrasting point of interest at
its center. In the criticism of literature, too, we often have to "stand
back" from the poem to see its archetypal organization. If we "stand
back" from Spenser's Mutabilitie Cantoes, we see a background
of ordered circular light and a sinister black mass thrusting up into the lower
foreground much the same archetypal shape that we see in the opening of the
Book of Job. If we "stand back" from the beginning of the fifth act
of Hamlet, we see a grave opening on the stage, the hero, his
enemy, and the heroine descending into it, followed by a fatal struggle in the
upper world. If we "stand back" from a realistic novel such as
Tolstoy's Resurrectionor Zola's Germinal, we can see
the mythopoeic designs indicated by those titles. Other examples will be given
in what follows.
We proceed to give an account first of the
structure of imagery, or dianoia, of the two undisplaced worlds,
the apocalyptic and the demonic, drawing heavily on the Bible, the main source
for undisplaced myth in our tradition. Then we go on to the two intermediate
structures of imagery, and finally to the generic narratives or mythoi which
are these structures of imagery in movement. [140]
Theory of Archetypal Meaning (1): Apocalyptic
Imagery
Let us proceed according to the general scheme of
the game of Twenty Questions, or, if we prefer, of the Great Chain of Being,
the traditional scheme for classifying sense data.
The apocalyptic world, the heaven of religion,
presents, in the first place, the categories of reality in the forms of human
desire, as indicated by the forms they assume under the work of human
civilization. The form imposed by human work and desire on the vegetable world,
for instance, is that of the garden, the farm, the grove, or the park. The
human form of the animal world is a world of domesticated
animals, of which the sheep has a traditional priority in both Classical and
Christian metaphor. The human form of the mineral world, the
form into which human work transforms stone, is the city. The city, the garden,
and the sheepfold are the organizing metaphors of the Bible and of most
Christian symbolism, and they are brought into complete metaphorical
identification in the book explicitly called the Apocalypse or Revelation,
which has been carefully designed to form an undisplaced mythical conclusion
for the Bible as a whole. From our point of view this means that the Biblical
Apocalypse is our grammar of apocalyptic imagery.
Each of these three categories, the city, the
garden, and the sheepfold, is, by the principle of archetypal metaphor dealt
with in the previous essay, and which we remember is the concrete universal,
identical with the others and with each individual within it. Hence the divine
and human worlds are, similarly, identical with the sheepfold, city and garden,
and the social and individual aspects of each are identical. Thus the
apocalyptic world of the Bible presents the following pattern:
divine world = society of gods = One God
human world = society of men = One Man
animal world = sheepfold = One Lamb
vegetable world = garden or park = One Tree (of
Life)
mineral world = city = One Building, Temple, Stone
The conception "Christ" unites all these
categories in identity: Christ is both the one God and the one Man, the Lamb of
God, the tree of life, or vine of which we are the branches, the stone [141]
which the builders rejected, and the rebuilt temple which is identical with his
risen body. The religious and poetic identifications differ in intention only,
the former being existential and the latter metaphorical. In medieval criticism
the difference was of little importance, and the word "figura," as
applied to the identification of a symbol with Christ, usually implies both
kinds.
Now let us expand this pattern a little. In
Christianity the concrete universal is applied to the divine world in the form
of the Trinity. Christianity insists that, whatever dislocations of customary
mental processes may be involved, God is three persons and yet one God. The
conceptions of person and substance represent a few of the difficulties in
extending metaphor to logic. In pure metaphor, of course, the unity of God
could apply to five or seventeen or a million divine persons as easily as
three, and we may find the divine concrete universal in poetry outside the
Trinitarian orbit. When Zeus remarks, at the beginning of the eighth book of
the Iliad, that he can pull the whole chain of being up into himself when ever
he likes, we can see that for Homer there was some conception of a double
perspective in Olympus, where a group of squabbling deities may at any time
suddenly compose into the form of a single divine will. In Virgil we first meet
a malicious and spoiled Juno, but the comment of Aeneas to his men a few lines
later on, "deus dabit his quoque finem," indicates that a similar
double perspective existed for him. We may compare perhaps the Book of Job,
where Job and his friends are much too devout for it ever to occur to them that
Job could have suffered so as a result of a half-jocular bet between God and
Satan. There is a sense in which they are right, and the information given to
the reader about Satan in heaven wrong. Satan is dropped out of the end of the
poem, and whatever rewritings may be responsible for this, it is still
difficult to see how the final enlightenment of Job could ever have returned
completely from the conception of a single divine will to the mood of the
opening scene.
As for human society, the metaphor that we are all
members of one body has organized most political theory from Plato to our own
day. Milton's "A Commonwealth ought to be but as one huge Christian
personage, one mighty growth, and stature of an honest man" belongs to a
Christianized version of this metaphor, in which, as in the doctrine of the
Trinity, the full metaphorical statement "Christ is God and Man" is
orthodox, and the Arian and Docetic [142] statements in terms of simile or
likeness condemned as heretical. Hobbes's Leviathan, with its
original frontispiece depicting a number of mannikins inside the body of a
single giant, has also some connection with the same type of identification.
Plato's Republic, in which the reason, will, and desire of the individual appear
as the philosopher-king, guards, and artisans of the state, is also founded on
this metaphor, which in fact we still use whenever we speak of a group or
aggregate of human beings as a "body."
In sexual symbolism, of course, it is still easier
to employ the "one flesh" metaphor of two bodies made into the same
body by love. Donne's The Extasie is one of the many poems
organized on this image, and Shakespeare's Phoenix and the Turtle makes
great play with the outrage done to the "reason" by such identity.
Themes of loyalty, hero-worship, faithful followers, and the like also employ
the same metaphor.
The animal and vegetable worlds are identified with
each other, and with the divine and human worlds as well, in the Christian
doctrine of transubstantiation, in which the essential human forms of the
vegetable world, food and drink, the harvest and the vintage, the bread and the
wine, are the body and blood of the Lamb who is also Man and God, and in whose
body we exist as in a city or temple. Here again the orthodox doctrine insists
on metaphor as against simile, and here again the conception of substance
illustrates the struggles of logic to digest the metaphor. It is clear from the
opening of the Laws that the symposium had something of the same communion
symbolism for Plato. It would be hard to find a simpler or more vivid image of
human civilization, where man attempts to surround nature and put it inside his
(social) body, than the sacramental meal.
The conventional honors accorded the sheep in the animal
world provide us with the central archetype of pastoral imagery, as well as
with such metaphors as "pastor" and "flock" in religion.
The metaphor of the king as the shepherd of his people goes back to ancient
Egypt. Perhaps the use of this particular convention is due to the fact that,
being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded, the societies
formed by sheep are most like human ones. But of course in poetry any other
animal would do as well if the poet's audience were prepared for it: at the
opening of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for instance, the sacrificial horse,
whose body contains the whole universe, is treated in the same way that a
Christian poet [143] would treat the Lamb of God. Of birds, too, the dove has
traditionally represented the universal concord or love both of Venus and of
the Christian Holy Spirit. Identifications of gods with animals or plants and
of those again with human society form the basis of totemic symbolism. Certain
types of etiological folk tale, the stories of how supernatural beings were
turned into the animals and plants that we know, represent an attentuated form
of the same type of metaphor, and survive as the "metamorphosis"
archetype familiar from Ovid.
Similar flexibility is possible with vegetable
images. Elsewhere in the Bible the leaves or fruit of the tree of life are used
as communion symbols in place of the bread and wine. Or the concrete universal
may be applied not simply to a tree but to a single fruit or flower. In the
West the rose has a traditional priority among apocalyptic flowers: the use of
the rose as a communion symbol in the Paradiso comes readily to mind, and
in the first book of The Faerie Queene the emblem of St. George, a red cross on a
white ground, is connected not only with the risen body of Christ and the
sacramental symbolism which accompanies it, but with the union of the red and
white roses in the Tudor dynasty. In the East the lotus or the Chinese
"golden flower" often occupied the place of the rose, and in German
Romanticism the blue cornflower enjoyed a brief vogue.
The identity of the human body and the vegetable
world gives us the archetype of Arcadian imagery, of Marvell's green world, of
Shakespeare's forest comedies, of the world of Robin Hood and other green men
who lurk in the forests of romance, these last the counterparts in romance of
the metaphorical myth of the tree-god. In Marvell's The Garden we
meet a further but still conventional extension in the identification of the
human soul with a bird sitting in the branches of the tree of life. The olive
tree and its oil has supplied another identification in the
"anointed" ruler.
The city, whether called Jerusalem or not, is
apocalyptically identical with a single building or temple, a "house of
many mansions," of which individuals are "lively stones," to use
another New Testament phrase. The human use of the inorganic world involves the
highway or road as well as the city with its streets, and the metaphor of the
"way" is inseparable from all quest-literature, whether explicitly
Christian as in The Pilgrim's Progress or not. To this [144]
category also belong geometrical and architectural images: the tower and the
winding stairway of Dante and Yeats, Jacob's ladder, the ladder of the
Neo-platonic love poets, the ascending spiral or cornucopia, the "stately
pleasure dome" that Kubla Khan decreed, the cross and quincunx patterns
which Browne sought in every corner of art and nature, the circle as the emblem
of eternity, Vaughan's "ring of pure and endless light," and so on.
On the archetypal level proper, where poetry is an
artifact of human civilization, nature is the container of man. On the anagogic
level, man is the container of nature, and his cities and gardens are no longer
little hollowings on the surface of the earth, but the forms of a human
universe. Hence in apocalyptic symbolism we cannot confine man only to his two
natural elements of earth and air, and, in going from one level to the other,
symbolism must, like Tamino in The Magic Flute, pass the ordeals of water and
fire. Poetic symbolism usually puts fire just above man's life in this world,
and water just below it. Dante had to pass through a ring of fire and the river
of Eden to go from the mountain of purgatory, which is still on the surface of
our own world, to Paradise or the apocalyptic world proper. The imagery of
light and fire surrounding the angels in the Bible, the tongues of flame
descending at Pentecost, and the coal of fire applied to the mouth of Isaiah by
the seraph, associates fire with a spiritual or angelic world midway between
the human and the divine. In Classical mythology the story of Prometheus
indicates a similar provenance for fire, as does the association of Zeus with
the thunderbolt or fire of lightning. In short, heaven in the sense of the sky,
containing the fiery bodies of sun, moon, and stars, is usually identified
with, or thought of as the passage to, the heaven of the apocalyptic world.
Hence all our other categories can be identified
with fire or thought of as burning. The appearance of the Judaeo-Christian
deity in fire, surrounded by angels of fire (seraphim) and light (cherubim),
needs only to be mentioned. The burning animal of the ritual of sacrifice, the
incorporating of an animal body in a communion between divine and human worlds,
modulates into all the imagery connected with the fire and smoke of the altar,
ascending incense, and the like. The burning man is represented in the saint's
halo and the king's crown, both of which are analogues of the sun-god: one may
compare also the "burning babe" of Southwell's Christmas [145] poem.
The image of the burning bird appears in the legendary phoenix. The tree of
life may also be a burning tree, the unconsumed burning bush of Moses, the
candlestick of Jewish ritual, or the "rosy cross" of later occultism.
In alchemy the vegetable, mineral, and water worlds are identified in its rose,
stone, and elixir; flower and jewel archetypes are identified in the
"jewel in the lotus" of the Buddhist prayer. The links between fire,
intoxicating wine, and the hot red blood of animals are also common.
The identification of the city with fire explains
why the city of God in the Apocalypse is presented as a glowing mass of gold
and precious stones, each stone presumably burning with a hard gem-like flame.
For in apocalyptic symbolism the fiery bodies of heaven, sun, moon, and stars,
are all inside the universal divine and human body. The symbolism of alchemy is
apocalyptic symbolism of the same type: the center of nature, the gold and
jewels hidden in the earth, is eventually to be united to its circumference in
the sun, moon, and stars of the heavens; the center of the spiritual world, the
soul of man, is united to its circumference in God. Hence there is a close
association between the purifying of the human soul and the transmuting of
earth to gold, not only literal gold but the fiery quintessential gold of which
the heavenly bodies are made. The golden tree with its mechanical bird in
Sailing to Byzantium identifies vegetable and mineral worlds in a form
reminiscent of alchemy.
Water, on the other hand, traditionally belongs to
a realm of existence below human life, the state of chaos or dissolution which
follows ordinary death, or the reduction to the inorganic. Hence the soul
frequently crosses water or sinks into it at death. In apocalyptic symbolism we
have the "water of life," the fourfold river of Eden which reappears
in the City of God, and is represented in ritual by baptism. According to
Ezekiel the return of this river turns the sea fresh, which is apparently why
the author of Revelation says that in the apocalypse there is no more sea.
Apocalyptically, therefore, water circulates in the universal body like the
blood in the individual body. Perhaps we should say "is held within"
instead of "circulates," to avoid the anachronism of connecting a
knowledge of the circulation of the blood with Biblical themes. For centuries,
of course, the blood was one of four "humors," or bodily liquids,
just as the river of life was traditionally fourfold. [146]
Opposed to apocalyptic symbolism
is the presentation of the world that desire totally rejects: the world of the
nightmare and the scapegoat, of bondage and pain and confusion; the world as it
is before the human imagination begins to work on it and before any image of
human desire, such as the city or the garden, has been solidly established; the
world also of perverted or wasted work, ruins and catacombs, instruments of
torture and monuments of folly. And just as apocalyptic imagery in poetry is
closely associated with a religious heaven, so its dialectic opposite is
closely linked with an existential hell, like Dante's Inferno, or with the
hell that man creates on earth, as in 1984, No Exit, and Darkness at Noon, where the
titles of the last two speak for themselves. Hence one of the central themes of
demonic imagery is parody, the mocking of the exuberant play of art by
suggesting its imitation in terms of "real life."
The demonic divine world largely personifies the
vast, menacing, stupid powers of nature as they appear to a technologically
undeveloped society. Symbols of heaven in such a world tend to become
associated with the inaccessible sky, and the central idea that crystallizes
from it is the idea of inscrutable fate or external necessity. The machinery of
fate is administered by a set of remote invisible gods, whose freedom and
pleasure are ironic because they exclude man, and who intervene in human
affairs chiefly to safeguard their own prerogatives. They demand sacrifices,
punish presumption, and enforce obedience to natural and moral law as an end in
itself. Here we are not trying to describe, for instance, the gods in Greek
tragedy: we are trying to isolate the sense of human remoteness and futility in
relation to the divine order which is only one element among others in most
tragic visions of life, though an essential one in all. In later ages poets
become much more outspoken about this view of divinity: Blake's Nobodaddy,
Shelley's Jupiter, Swinburne's "supreme evil, God," Hardy's befuddled
Will, and Housman's "brute and blackguard" are examples.
The demonic human world is a society held together
by a kind of molecular tension of egos, a loyalty to the group or the leader
which diminishes the individual, or, at best, contrasts his pleasure with his
duty or honor. Such a society is an endless source of tragic [147] dilemmas
like those of Hamlet and Antigone. In the apocalyptic conception of human life
we found three kinds of fulfilment: individual, sexual, and social. In the
sinister human world one individual pole is the tyrant-leader, inscrutable,
ruthless, melancholy, and with an insatiable will, who commands loyalty only if
he is egocentric enough to represent the collective ego of his followers. The
other pole is represented by the pharmakos or sacrificed victim, who
has to be killed to strengthen the others. In the most concentrated form of the
demonic parody, the two become the same. The ritual of the killing of the
divine king in Frazer, whatever it may be in anthropology, is in literary
criticism the demonic or undisplaced radical form of tragic and ironic
structures.
In religion the spiritual world is a reality
distinct from the physical world. In poetry the physical or actual is opposed,
not to the spiritually existential, but to the hypothetical. We met in the
first essay the principle that the transmutation of act into mime, the advance
from acting out a rite to playing at the rite, is one of the central features
of the development from savagery into culture. It is easy to see a mimesis of
conflict in tennis and football, but, precisely for that very reason, tennis
and football players represent a culture superior to the culture of student
duellists and gladiators. The turning of literal act into play is a fundamental
form of the liberalizing of life which appears in more intellectual levels as
liberal education, the release of fact into imagination. It is consistent with
this that the Eucharist symbolism of the apocalyptic world, the metaphorical
identification of vegetable, animal, human, and divine bodies, should have the
imagery of cannibalism for its demonic parody. Dante's last vision of human
hell is of Ugolino gnawing his tormentor's skull; Spenser's last major allegorical
vision is of Serena stripped and prepared for a cannibal feast. The imagery of
cannibalism usually includes, not only images of torture and mutilation, but of
what is technically known as sparagmos or the tearing apart of
the sacrificial body, an image found in the myths of Osiris, Orpheus, and
Pentheus. The cannibal giant or ogre of folk tales, who enters literature as
Polyphemus, belongs here, as does a long series of sinister dealings with flesh
and blood from the story of Thyestes to Shylock's bond. Here again the form
described by Frazer as the historically original form is in literary criticism
the radical demonic form. Flaubert's Salammbo is a study [148]
of demonic imagery which was thought in its day to be archaeological but turned
out to be prophetic.
The demonic erotic relation becomes a fierce
destructive passion that works against loyalty or frustrates the one who
possesses it. It is generally symbolized by a harlot, witch, siren, or other
tantalizing female, a physical object of desire which is sought as a possession
and therefore can never be possessed. The demonic parody of marriage, or the
union of two souls in one flesh, may take the form of hermaphroditism, incest
(the most common form), or homosexuality. The social relation is that of the
mob, which is essentially human society looking for a pharmakos, and the mob is
often identified with some sinister animal image such as the hydra, Virgil's
Fama, or its development in Spenser's Blatant Beast.
The other worlds can be briefly summarized. The animal
world is portrayed in terms of monsters or beasts of prey. The wolf, the
traditional enemy of the sheep, the tiger, the vulture, the cold and
earth-bound serpent, and the dragon are all common. In the Bible, where the
demonic society is represented by Egypt and Babylon, the rulers of each are
identified with monstrous beasts: Nebuchadnezzar turns into a beast in Daniel,
and Pharaoh is called a river-dragon by Ezekiel. The dragon is especially
appropriate because it is not only monstrous and sinister but fabulous, and so
represents the paradoxical nature of evil as a moral fact and an eternal
negation. In the Apocalypse the dragon is called "the beast that was, and
is not, and yet is."
The vegetable world is a sinister forest like the
ones we meet in Comus or the opening of the Inferno, or a heath, which from
Shakespeare to Hardy has been associated with tragic destiny, or a wilderness
like that of Browning's Childe Roland or Eliot's Waste Land. Or it may be a
sinister enchanted garden like that of Circe and its Renaissance descendants in
Tasso and Spenser. In the Bible the waste land appears in its concrete
universal form in the tree of death, the tree of forbidden knowledge in
Genesis, the barren fig-tree of the Gospels, and the cross. The stake, with the
hooded heretic, the black man or the witch attached to it, is the burning tree
and body of the infernal world. Scaffolds, gallows, stocks, pillories, whips,
and birch rods are or could be modulations. The contrast of the tree of life
and the tree of death is beautifully expressed in Yeats's poem The Two Trees.
[149]
The inorganic world may remain in its unworked form
of deserts, rocks, and waste land. Cities of destruction and dreadful night
belong here, and the great ruins of pride, from the tower of Babel to the
mighty works of Ozymandias. Images of perverted work be long here too: engines
of torture, weapons of war, armor, and images of a dead mechanism which,
because it does not humanize nature, is unnatural as well as inhuman.
Corresponding to the temple or One Building of the apocalypse, we have the
prison or dungeon, the sealed furnace of heat without light, like the City of
Dis in Dante. Here too are the sinister counterparts of geometrical images: the
sinister spiral (the maelstrom, whirlpool, or Charybdis), the sinister cross,
and the sinister circle, the wheel of fate or fortune. The identification of
the circle with the serpent, conventionally a demonic animal, gives us the
ouroboros, or serpent with its tail in its mouth. Corresponding to the
apocalyptic way or straight road, the highway in the desert for God prophesied
by Isaiah, we have in this world the labyrinth or maze, the image of lost
direction, often with a monster at its heart like the Minotaur. The
labyrinthine wanderings of Israel in the desert, repeated by Jesus when in the
company of the devil (or "wild beasts," according to Mark), fit the
same pattern. The labyrinth can also be a sinister forest, as in Comus. The
catacombs are effectively used in the same context in The Marble Faun, and of course
in a further concentration of metaphor, the maze would become the winding
entrails inside the sinister monster himself.
The world of fire is a world of malignant demons
like the will-o'-the-wisps, or spirits broken from hell, and it appears in this
world in the form of the auto da fe as mentioned, or such
burning cities as Sodom. It is in contrast to the purgatorial or cleansing
fire, like the fiery furnace in Daniel. The world of water is the water of
death, often identified with spilled blood, as in the Passion and in Dante's
symbolic figure of history, and above all the "unplumbed, salt, estranging
sea," which absorbs all rivers in this world, but disappears in the
apocalypse in favor of a circulation of fresh water. In the Bible the sea and
the animal monster are identified in the figure of the leviathan, a sea-monster
also identified with the social tyrannies of Babylon and Egypt. [150]
Most imagery in poetry has of
course to deal with much less extreme worlds than the two which are usually
projected as the eternal unchanging worlds of heaven and hell. Apocalyptic
imagery is appropriate to the mythical mode, and demonic imagery to the ironic
mode in the late phase in which it returns to myth. In the other three modes
these two structures operate dialectically, pulling the reader toward the
metaphorical and mythical undisplaced core of the work. We should therefore
expect three intermediate structures of imagery, corresponding roughly to the
romantic, high mimetic, and low mimetic modes. We shall give little attention
to high mimetic imagery, however, in order to preserve the simpler pattern of
the romantic and "realistic" tendencies within the two undisplaced
structures given at the beginning of this essay.
These three structures are less rigorously
metaphorical, and are rather significant constellations of images, which, when
found together, make up what is often called, somewhat helplessly,
"atmosphere." The mode of romance presents an idealized world: in
romance heroes are brave, heroines beautiful, villains villainous, and the
frustrations, ambiguities, and embarrassments of ordinary life are made little
of. Hence its imagery presents a human counterpart of the apocalyptic world
which we may call the analogy of innocence. It is best known to us, not from
the age of romance itself, but from later romanticizings: Comus, The Tempest, and the third
book of The Faerie Queene in the Renaissance; Blake's songs of
innocence and "Beulah" imagery, Keats's Endymion and
Shelley's Epipsychidion in the Romantic period proper.
In the analogy of innocence the divine or spiritual
figures are usually parental, wise old men with magical powers like Prospero,
or friendly guardian spirits like Raphael before Adam's fall. Among the human
figures children are prominent, and so is the virtue most closely associated
with childhood and the state of innocence chastity, a virtue which in this
structure of imagery usually includes virginity. In Comus the Lady's
chastity is, like Prosperous wisdom, associated with magic, as is the
invincible chastity of Spenser's Britomart It is easiest to associate with
young women Dante's Matelda and Shakespeare's Miranda are examples but male
chastity is important too, as the Grail romances show. Sir Galahad's [151]
remark in Tennyson about his purity of heart giving him tenfold strength is
consistent with the imagery of the world he belongs in. Fire in the innocent
world is usually a purifying symbol, a world of flame that none but the
perfectly chaste can pass, as in Spenser's castle of Busirane, the refining
fire at the top of Dante's purgatory, and the flaming sword that keeps the
fallen Adam and Eve away from Paradise. In the story of the sleeping beauty,
which belongs here, the wall of flame is replaced by one of thorns and
brambles: Wagner's Die Walkure, however, retains the fire, to the discomposure of
stage managers. The moon, the coolest and hence most chaste of all the fiery
heavenly bodies, has a special importance for this world.
Of animals, the most obvious are the pastoral sheep
and lambs, along with the horses and hounds of romance, in their gentler
aspects of fidelity and devotion. The unicorn, the traditional emblem of
chastity and the lover of virgins, has an honored place here; so does the
dolphin, whose association with Arion makes him the innocent contrast to the
devouring leviathan; and also, for its humility and submissiveness, a very
different animal the ass. The dramatic festival of the ass, no less than that
of the Boy Bishop, belongs to this structure of imagery, and when Shakespeare put
an ass's head in Fairyland he was not doing something unique, as Robinson's
poem implies, but following a tradition that goes back to the transformed
Lucius listening to the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius. Birds,
butterflies (for this is Psyche's world, and Psyche means butterfly), and
spirits with their qualities, like Ariel and Hudson's Rima, are other
naturalized denizens.
The paradisal garden and the tree of life belong in
the apocalyptic structure, as we saw, but the garden of Eden itself, as
presented in the Bible and Milton, belongs rather to this one, and Dante puts
it just below his Paradiso. Spenser's Gardens of Adonis, from which the
attendant spirit inComus comes, are parallel, along with all the
medieval developments of the theme of the locus amoenus. Of special
significance is the symbol of the body of the Virgin as a hortus conclusus, derived from
the Song of Songs. A romantic counterpart to the tree of life appears in the
magician's life-giving wand, and such parallel symbols as the blossoming rod
in Tannhauser.
Cities are more alien to the pastoral and rural
spirit of this world, and the tower and the castle, with an occasional cottage
or hermitage, are the chief images of habitation. Water symbolism features
[152] chiefly fountains and pools, fertilizing rains, and an occasional stream
separating a man from a woman and so preserving the chastity of each, like the
river of Lethe in Dante. The opening rose-garden episode of Burnt Nortongives a brief
but extraordinarily complete summary of the symbols of the analogy of
innocence; one may also compare the second section of Auden's Kairos and Logos.
The innocent world is neither totally alive, like
the apocalyptic one, nor mostly dead, like ours: it is an animistic world, full
of elemental spirits. All the characters of Comus are
elemental spirits except the Lady and her brothers, and the connections of
Ariel with air-spirits, of Puck with fire-spirits (Burton says of fire-spirits
that "we commonly call them Pucks"), and of Caliban with
earth-spirits are clear enough. In Spenser we find Florimell and Marinell,
whose names indicate that they are spirits of flowers and water, a Proserpine
and an Adonis. Often, too, as in Comus and the Nativity Ode, innocent or
unfallen nature, nature as a divinely sanctioned order, is represented by the
inaudible harmony of the music of the spheres.
Just as the organizing ideas of romance are
chastity and magic, so the organizing ideas of the high mimetic area seem to be
love and form. And as the field of romantic images may be called an analogy of
innocence, so the field of high mimetic imagery may be called an analogy of
nature and reason. We find here the emphasis on cynosure or centripetal gaze,
and the tendency to idealize the human representatives of the divine and the
spiritual world, which are characteristic of the high mimetic. Divinity hedges
the king and the Courtly Love mistress is a goddess; love of both is an
educating and informing power which brings one into unity with the spiritual
and divine worlds. The fire of the angelic world blazes in the king's crown and
the lady's eyes. The animals are those of proud beauty: the eagle and the lion
stand for the vision of the royal by the loyal, the horse and falcon for
"chivalry" or the aristocracy on horseback; the peacock and the swan
are the birds of cynosure, and the phoenix or unique fire-bird is a favorite
poetic emblem, especially, in England, for Queen Elizabeth. Garden symbolism
recedes into the back ground, as city symbolism does in romance; there are
formal gardens in close association with buildings, but the idea of a garden
world is still a romantic one. The magician's wand is metamorphosed into the
royal sceptre, and the magic tree to the fluttering banner. The city is
preeminently the capital city, with the court [153] at its center and a series
of initiatory degrees of approach within the court, climaxed by the royal
"presence." We note that as we go down the modes an increasing number
of poetic images are taken from actual social conditions of life.
Water-symbolism centers on the disciplined river, in England the Thames which
runs softly in Spenser and in neo-Classical rhythms in Denham, a river whose
most appropriate ornament is the royal barge.
In the low mimetic area we enter a world that we
may call the analogy of experience, and which bears a relation to
the demonic world corresponding to the relation of the romantic innocent world
to the apocalyptic one. Except for this potentially ironic connection, and
except for a certain number of hieratic or specially indicated symbols like
Hawthorne's scarlet letter and Henry James's golden bowl and ivory tower, the
images are the ordinary images of experience, and need no further explanation
here beyond a few comments about some particular features that may be of use.
The organizing low mimetic ideas seem to be genesis and work. Divine and
spiritual beings have little functional place in low mimetic fiction, and in
thematic writing they are often deliberately rediscovered or treated as aesthetic
surrogates. The advice is given to the unborn in Erewhon (apparently
close to Butler's own view, as he repeats the idea in Life and Habit)
that if there is a spiritual world, one should turn one's back on it and find
it again in immediate work. The same doctrine of the rediscovery of faith
through works may be found in Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, and Shaw. In poets, even
in explicitly sacramental ones, there are parallel tendencies. From many points
of view there could hardly be a greater contrast than the contrast between the
"motion and a spirit" discovered by Wordsworth in Tintern Abbey and
the "chevalier" discovered by Hopkins in the windhover, yet the
tendency to anchor a spiritual vision in an empirical psychological experience
is common to both.
The low mimetic treatment of human society
reflects, of course, Wordsworth's doctrine that the essential human situations,
for the poet, are the common and typical ones. Along with this goes a good deal
of parody of the idealization of life in romance, a parody that extends to
religious and aesthetic experience. As for the animal world, Thomas Huxley's
reference to the qualities that humanity shares with the ape and the tiger is a
significantly low mimetic choice. The ape has always been par excellence the mimetic
[154] animal, and long before evolution he was specifically the imitator of
man. The rise of evolution however suggested an analogy of proportion in which
present man becomes the ape of his counterpart in the future, as in
Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Huxley's coupling of the ape and the tiger
recalls the popular belief in the implacable and invariable ferocity of both
apes and "cavemen," a belief for which there seems to be little more
evidence than for unicorns and phoenixes, but which, like them, shows a
tendency to look at natural history from within the appropriate framework of
poetic metaphors. The low mimetic is not a rich field for animal symbolism, but
Huxley's ape and tiger recur in Kipling's Jungle Book, where the
monkeys chatter in the tree-tops to no purpose, like intellectuals, while the
human animal learns instead the dark predatory wisdom of the panther in the
jungle below.
Gardens in the low mimetic give place to farms and
the painful labor of the man with the hoe, the peasant or furze cutter who
stands in Hardy as an image of man himself, "slighted and enduring."
Cities take of course the shape of the labyrinthine modern metropolis, where
the main emotional stress is on loneliness and lack of communication. And just
as water symbolism in the world of innocence consists largely of fountains and
running streams, so low mimetic imagery seeks Conrad's "destructive
element" the sea, generally with some humanized leviathan or bateau ivre on it of
any size from the Titanic in Hardy to the capsizable open boat which is, with
an irony rare even in literature, a favorite image of Shelley. Moby Dick returns us
to a more traditional form of the leviathan. The destroyer which appears at the
end of H. G. Wells's Tono-Bungay is notable as coming from a low mimetic
writer not much given to introducing hieratic symbols. Fire symbolism is often
ironic and destructive, as in the fire which ends the action of The Spoils of Poynton. In the
industrial age, however, Prometheus, who stole fire for man's use, is one of
the favorite, if not the actual favorite, mythological figure among poets.
The relation of innocence and experience to
apocalyptic and demonic imagery illustrates an aspect of displacement which we
have so far said little about: displacement in the direction of the moral The
two dialectical structures are, radically, the desirable and the undesirable.
Racks and dungeons belong in the sinister vision not because they are morally
forbidden but because it is impossible [155] to make them objects of desire.
Sexual fulfilment, on the other hand, may be desired even if it is morally
condemned. Civilization tends to try to make the desirable and the moral
coincide. The student of comparative mythology occasionally turns up, in a
primitive or ancient cult, a bit of uninhibited mythopoeia that makes him
realize how completely all the higher religions have limited their apocalyptic
visions to morally acceptable ones. A good deal of expurgation clearly lies
behind the development of Jewish, Greek, and other mythologies; or, as
Victorian students of myth used to say, a repulsive and grotesque barbarism has
been purified by a growing ethical refinement. Egyptian mythology begins with a
god who creates the world by masturbation - a logical enough way of symbolizing
the process of creation de Deo but not one that we should
expect to find in Homer, to say nothing of the Old Testament. As long as poetry
follows religion towards the moral, religious and poetic archetypes will be
very close together, as they are in Dante. Under such influence apocalyptic
sexual imagery, for instance, tends to become matrimonial or virginal; the
incestuous, the homosexual, and the adulterous go on the demonic side. The
quality in art that Aristotle called spoudaios and that Matthew Arnold
translated as "high seriousness" results from this rapprochement of
religion and poetry within a common moral framework.
But poetry continually tends to right its own
balance, to return to the pattern of desire and away from the conventional and
moral. It usually does this in satire, the genre which is furthest removed from
"high seriousness," but not always. The moral and the desirable have
many important and significant connections, but still morality, which comes to
terms with experience and necessity, is one thing, and desire, which tries to
escape from necessity, is quite another. Thus literature is as a rule less
inflexible than morality, and it owes much of its status as a liberal art to
that fact. The qualities that morality and religion usually call ribald,
obscene, subversive, lewd, and blasphemous have an essential place in
literature, but often they can achieve expression only through ingenious
techniques of displacement.
The simplest of such techniques is the phenomenon
that we may call "demonic modulation," or the deliberate reversal of
the customary moral associations of archetypes. Any symbol at all takes its
meaning primarily from its context: a dragon may be sinister in a medieval
romance or friendly in a Chinese one; an island may be [156] Prospero's island
or Circe's. But because of the large amount of learned and traditional
symbolism in literature, certain secondary associations become habitual. The
serpent, because of its role in the garden of Eden story, usually belongs on
the sinister side of our catalogue in Western literature; the revolutionary
sympathies of Shelley impel him to use an innocent serpent in The Revolt of Islam. Or a free and
equal society may be symbolized by a band of robbers, pirates, or gypsies; or
true love may be symbolized by the triumph of an adulterous liaison over
marriage, as in most triangle comedy; by a homosexual passion (if it is true
love that is celebrated in Virgil's second eclogue) or an incestuous one, as in
many Romantics. In the nineteenth century, with demonic myth approaching, this
kind of reversed symbolism is organized into all the patterns of the
"Romantic agony," chiefly sadism, Prometheanism, and diabolism, which
in some of the "decadents" seem to provide all the disadvantages of
superstition with none of the advantages of religion. Diabolism is not however
invariably a sophisticated development: Huckleberry Finn, for example, wins our
sympathy and admiration by preferring hell with his hunted friend to the heaven
of the white slave-owners' god. On the other hand, imagery traditionally
demonic may be used for the starting-point of a movement of redemption, like
the City of Destruction in The Pilgrims Progress. Alchemical symbolism
takes the ouroboros and the hermaphrodite (res bina), as well as the traditional
romantic dragon, in this redemptive context.
Apocalyptic symbolism presents the infinitely
desirable, in which the lusts and ambitions of man are identified with, adapted
to, or projected on the gods. The art of the analogy of innocence, which
includes most of the comic (in its happy-ending aspect), the idyllic, the
romantic, the reverent, the panegyrical, the idealized, and the magical, is
largely concerned with an attempt to present the desirable in human, familiar,
attainable, and morally allowable terms. Much the same is true of the relation
of the demonic world to the analogy of experience. Tragedy, for instance, is a
vision of what does happen and must be accepted. To this extent it is a moral
and plausible displacement of the bitter resentments that humanity feels
against all obstacles to its desires. However malignant we may feel Athene to
be in Sophocles' Ajax, the tragedy clearly implies that we must come to terms
with her possession of power, even in our thoughts. A Christian who believed
the Greek [157] gods to be nothing but devils would, if he were criticizing a
tragedy of Sophocles, make an undisplaced or demonic interpretation of it. Such
an interpretation would bring out everything that Sophocles was trying not to say;
but it could be a shrewd criticism of its latent or underlying demonic
structure for all that. The same kind of interpretation would be equally
possible for many passages of Christian poetry dealing with the just wrath of
God, the demonic content of which is often a hated father-figure. In pointing
out the latent apocalyptic or demonic patterns in a literary work, we should
not make the error of assuming that this latent content is the red content
hypocritically disguised by a lying censor. It is simply one factor which is
relevant to a full critical analysis. It is often, however, the factor which
lifts a work of literature out of the category of the merely historical.
Theory of Mythos: Introduction
The meaning of a poem, its structure of imagery, is
a static pattern. The five structures of meaning we have given are, to use an
other musical analogy, the keys in which they are written and finally resolve;
but narrative involves movement from one structure to another. The main area of
such movement obviously has to be the three intermediate fields. The
apocalyptic and demonic worlds, being structures of pure metaphorical identity,
suggest the eternally unchanging, and lend themselves very readily to being
projected existentially as heaven and hell, where there is continuous life but
no process of life. The analogies of innocence and experience represent the
adaptation of myth to nature: they give us, not the city and the garden at the
final goal of human vision, but the process of building and planting. The
fundamental form of process is cyclical movement, the alternation of success
and decline, effort and repose, life and death which is the rhythm of process.
Hence our seven categories of images may also be seen as different forms of
rotary or cyclical movement. Thus:
1. In the divine world the central process or
movement is that of the death and rebirth, or the disappearance and return, or
the incarnation and withdrawal, of a god. This divine activity is usually
identified or associated with one or more of the cyclical processes of nature.
The god may be a sun-god, dying at night and reborn at dawn, or else with an
annual rebirth at the winter solstice; or he [158] may be a god of vegetation,
dying in autumn and reviving in spring, or (as in the birth stones of the
Buddha) he may be an incarnate god going through a series of human or animal
life-cycles. As a god is almost by definition immortal, it is a regular feature
of all such myths that the dying god is reborn as the same person. Hence the
mythical or abstract structural principle of the cycle is that the continuum of
identity in the individual life from birth to death is extended from death to
rebirth. To this pattern of identical recurrence, the death and revival of the
same individual, all other cyclical patterns are as a rule assimilated. The
assimilation can be of course much closer in Eastern culture, where the
doctrine of reincarnation is generally accepted, than in the West.
2. The fire-world of heavenly bodies presents us
with three important cyclical rhythms. Most obvious is the daily journey of the
sun-god across the sky, often thought of as guiding a boat or chariot, followed
by a mysterious passage through a dark underworld, some times conceived as the
belly of a devouring monster, back to the starting point. The solstitial cycle
of the solar year supplies an extension of the same symbolism, incorporated in
our Christmas literature. Here there is more emphasis on the theme of a newborn
light threatened by the powers of darkness. The lunar cycle has been on the
whole of less importance to Western poetry in historic times, whatever its
prehistoric role. But its crucial sequence of old moon, "interlunar
cave," and new moon may be the source, as it is clearly a close analogy,
of the three-day rhythm of death, disappearance, and resurrection which we have
in our Easter symbolism.
3. The human world is midway between the spiritual
and the animal, and reflects that duality in its cyclical rhythms. Closely
parallel to the solar cycle of light and darkness is the imaginative cycle of
waking and of dreaming life. This cycle underlies the antithesis of the
imagination of experience and of innocence already dealt with. For the human
rhythm is the opposite of the solar one: a titanic libido wakes when the sun
sleeps, and the light of day is often the darkness of desire. Then again, in
common with animals, man exhibits the ordinary cycle of life and death, in
which there is generic but not individual rebirth.
4. It is rare, in literature as in life, to find
even a domesticated animal peacefully living through its full span of life to
reach a final nunc dimittis. The exceptions, such as Odysseus' dog, are
appropriate to the theme of nostos or full close of a cyclical
movement. [159] Animal lives, and human lives similarly subject to the order of
nature suggest more frequently the tragic process of life cut off violently by
accident, sacrifice, ferocity, or some overriding need, the continuity which
flows on after the tragic act being something other than the life itself.
5. The vegetable world supplies us of course with
the annual cycle of seasons, often identified with or represented by a divine
figure which dies in the autumn or is killed with the gathering of the harvest
and the vintage, disappears in winter, and revives in spring. The divine figure
may be male (Adonis) or female (Proserpine), but the symbolic structures
resulting differ somewhat.
6. Poets, like critics, have generally been
Spenglerians, in the sense that in poetry, as in Spengler, civilized life is
frequently assimilated to the organic cycle of growth, maturity, decline,
death, and rebirth in another individual form. Themes of a golden or heroic age
in the past, of a millennium in the future, of the wheel of fortune in social
affairs, of the ubi sunt elegy, of meditations over ruins, of
nostalgia for a lost pastoral simplicity, of regret or exultation over the
collapse of an empire, belong here.
7. Water-symbolism has also its own cycle, from
rains to springs, from springs and fountains to brooks and rivers, from rivers
to the sea or the winter snow, and back again.
These cyclical symbols are usually divided into
four main phases, the four seasons of the year being the type for four periods
of the day (morning, noon, evening, night), four aspects of the water-cycle
(rain, fountains, rivers, sea or snow), four periods of life (youth, maturity,
age, death), and the like. We find a great number of symbols from phases one
and two in Keats's Endymion, and of symbols from phases three and four
in The Waste
Land (where we have to add four stages of Western culture, medieval, Renaissance,
eighteenth-century, and contemporary). We may note that there is no cycle of
air: the wind bloweth where it listeth, and images dealing with the movement of
"spirit" are likely to be associated with the theme of
unpredictability or sudden crisis.
In studying poems of immense scope, such as
the Commedia or Paradise Lost, we find that we
have to learn a good deal of cosmology. This cosmology is presented, quite
correctly of course, as the science of its day, a schematism of correspondences
which, after supplying us with a not too efficient calendar and a few words
like [160] "phlegmatic" and "jovial," became defunct as
science. There are also other poems incorporating equally obsolete science,
such as The Purple Island, The Loves of the Plants, The
Art of Preserving Health, which survive chiefly as curiosities. A literary
critic should not overlook the compliment to poetry implied by the existence of
such poems, but still versified science, as such, keeps the descriptive
structure of science, and so imposes a non-poetic form on poetry. To make it
successful as poetry a great deal of tact is required, yet those most attracted
to such themes are very apt to be tactless poets. Dante and Milton were
certainly better poets than Darwin or Fletcher: perhaps, however, it would be
more fruitful to say that it was their finer instincts and judgements that led
them to cosmological, as distinct from scientific or descriptive, themes.
For the form of cosmology is clearly much closer to
that of poetry, and the thought suggests itself that symmetrical cosmology may
be a branch of myth. If so, then it would be, like myth, a structural principle
of poetry, whereas in science itself, symmetrical cosmology is exactly what
Bacon said it was, an idol of the theatre. Perhaps, then, this whole
pseudo-scientific world of three spirits, four humors, five elements, seven
planets, nine spheres, twelve zodiacal signs, and so on, belongs in fact, as it
does in practice, to the grammar of literary imagery. It has long been noticed
that the Ptolemaic universe provides a better framework of symbolism, with all
the identities, associations, and correspondences that symbolism demands, than
the Copernican one does. Perhaps it not only provides a framework of poetic
symbols but is one, or at any rate becomes one after it loses its validity as
science, just as Classical mythology became purely poetic after its oracles had
ceased. The same principle would account for the attraction of poets in the
last century or two to occult systems of correspondences, and to such
constructs as Yeats's Vision and Poe's Eureka.
The conception of a heaven above, a hell beneath,
and a cyclical cosmos or order of nature in between forms the ground
plan, mutatis mutandis, of both Dante and Milton. The same plan is
in paintings of the Last Judgement, where there is a rotary movement of the
saved rising on the right and the damned falling on the left. We may apply this
construct to our principle that there are two fundamental movements of
narrative: a cyclical movement within the order of nature, and a dialectical
movement from that order [161] into the apocalyptic world above. (The movement
to the demonic world below is very rare, because a constant rotation within the
order of nature is demonic in itself.)
The top half of the natural cycle is the world of
romance and the analogy of innocence; the lower half is the world of
"realism" and the analogy of experience. There are thus four main
types of mythical movement: within romance, within experience, down, and up.
The downward movement is the tragic movement, the wheel of fortune falling from
innocence toward hamartia, and from hamartia to catastrophe. The upward
movement is the comic movement, from threatening complications to a happy
ending and a general assumption of post-dated innocence in which everyone lives
happily ever after. In Dante the upward movement is through purgatory.
We have thus answered the question: are there
narrative categories of literature broader than, or logically prior to, the
ordinary literary genres? There are four such categories: the romantic, the
tragic, the comic, and the ironic or satiric. We get the same answer by
inspection if we look at the ordinary meanings of these terms. Tragedy and comedy
may have been originally names for two species of drama, but we also employ the
terms to describe general characteristics of literary fictions, without regard
to genre. It would be silly to insist that comedy can refer only to a certain
type of stage play, and must never be employed in connection with Chaucer or
Jane Austen. Chaucer himself would certainly have defined comedy, as his monk
defines tragedy, much more broadly than that. If we are told that what we are
about to read is tragic or comic, we expect a certain kind of structure and
mood, but not necessarily a certain genre. The same is true of the word
romance, and also of the words irony and satire, which are, as generally
employed, elements of the literature of experience, and which we shall here
adopt in place of "realism." We thus have four narrative pregeneric
elements of literature which I shall call mythoi or generic
plots.
If we think of our experience of these mythoi,
we shall realize that they form two opposed pairs. Tragedy and comedy contrast
rather than blend, and so do romance and irony, the champions respectively of
the ideal and the actual. On the other hand, comedy blends insensibly into
satire at one extreme and into romance at the other; romance may be comic or
tragic; tragic extends from high romance to bitter and ironic realism. [162]
Dramatic comedy, from which
fictional comedy is mainly descended, has been remarkably tenacious of its
structural principles and character types. Bernard Shaw remarked that a comic
dramatist could get a reputation for daring originality by stealing his method
from Moliere and his characters from Dickens: if we were to read Menander and
Aristophanes for Moliere and Dickens the statement would be hardly less true,
at least as a general principle. The earliest extant European comedy,
Aristophanes' The Acharnians, contains the miles gloriosus or
military braggart who is still going strong in Chaplin's Great Dictator;
the Joxer Daly of O 'Casey's Juno and the Paycock has the same
character and dramatic function as the parasites of twenty-five hundred years
ago, and the audiences of vaudeville, comic strips, and television programs
still laugh at the jokes that were declared to be outworn at the opening
of The Frogs.
The plot structure of Greek New Comedy, as
transmitted by Plautus and Terence, in itself less a form than a formula, has
become the basis for most comedy, especially in its more highly
conventionalized dramatic form, down to our own day. It will be most convenient
to work out the theory of comic construction from drama, using illustrations
from fiction only incidentally. What normally happens is that a young man wants
a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually
paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the
hero to have his will. In this simple pattern there are several complex
elements. In the first place, the movement of comedy is usually a movement from
one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play the obstructing
characters are in charge of the play's society, and the audience recognizes
that they are usurpers. At the end of the play the device in the plot that
brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the
hero, and the moment when this crystallization occurs is the point of
resolution in the action, the comic discovery, anagnorisis or cognitio.
The appearance of this new society is frequently
signalized by some kind of party or festive ritual, which either appears at the
end of the play or is assumed to take place immediately afterward. Weddings are
most common, and sometimes so many of them occur, as in the quadruple wedding
at the end of As You Like It, that they [163] suggest also the
wholesale pairing off that takes place in a dance, which is another common
conclusion, and the normal one for the masque. The banquet at the end of The
Taming of the Shrew has an ancestry that goes back to Greek Middle
Comedy; in Plautus the audience is sometimes jocosely invited to an imaginary
banquet afterwards; Old Comedy, like the modern Christmas pantomime, was more
generous, and occasionally threw bits of food to the audience. As the final
society reached by comedy is the one that the audience has recognized all along
to be the proper and desirable state of affairs, an act of communion with the
audience is in order. Tragic actors expect to be applauded as well as comic
ones, but nevertheless the word "plaudite" at the end of a Roman
comedy, the invitation to the audience to form part of the comic society, would
seem rather out of place at the end of a tragedy. The resolution of comedy
comes, so to speak, from the audience's side of the stage; in a tragedy it
comes from some mysterious world on the opposite side. In the movie, where
darkness permits a more erotically oriented audience, the plot usually moves
toward an act which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is
symbolized by a closing embrace.
The obstacles to the hero's desire, then, form the
action of the comedy, and the overcoming of them the comic resolution. The
obstacles are usually parental, hence comedy often turns on a clash between a
son's and a father's will. Thus the comic dramatist as a rule writes for the
younger men in his audience, and the older members of almost any society are
apt to feel that comedy has something subversive about it. This is certainly
one element in the social persecution of drama, which is not peculiar to
Puritans or even Christians, as Terence in pagan Rome met much the same kind of
social opposition that Ben Jonson did. There is one scene in Plautus where a
son and father are making love to the same courtesan, and the son asks his
father pointedly if he really does love mother. One has to see this scene
against the background of Roman family life to understand its importance as
psychological release. Even in Shakespeare there are startling outbreaks of
baiting older men, and in contemporary movies the triumph of youth is so
relentless that the moviemakers find some difficulty in getting anyone over the
age of seventeen into their audiences.
The opponent to the hero's wishes, when not the
father, is generally someone who partakes of the father's closer relation to
[164] established society: that is, a rival with less youth and more money. In
Plautus and Terence he is usually either the pimp who owns the girl, or a
wandering soldier with a supply of ready cash. The fury with which these
characters are baited and exploded from the stage shows that they are father-surrogates,
and even if they were not, they would still be usurpers, and their claim to
possess the girl must be shown up as somehow fraudulent. They are, in short,
impostors, and the extent to which they have real power implies some criticism
of the society that allows them their power. In Plautus and Terence this
criticism seldom goes beyond the immorality of brothels and professional
harlots, but in Renaissance dramatists, including Jonson, there is some sharp
observation of the rising power of money and the sort of ruling class it is
building up.
The tendency of comedy is to include as many people
as possible in its final society: the blocking characters are more often
reconciled or converted than simply repudiated. Comedy often includes a
scapegoat ritual of expulsion which gets rid of some irreconcilable character,
but exposure and disgrace make for pathos, or even tragedy. The
Merchant of Venice seems almost an experiment in coming as close as
possible to upsetting the comic balance. If the dramatic role of Shylock is
ever so slightly exaggerated, as it generally is when the leading actor of the
company takes the part, it is upset, and the play becomes the tragedy of the
Jew of Venice with a comic epilogue. Volpone ends with a great
bustle of sentences to penal servitude and the galleys, and one feels that the
deliverance of society hardly needs so much hard labor; but thenVolpone is
exceptional in being a kind of comic imitation of a tragedy, with the point of
Volpone's hubris carefully marked.
The principle of conversion becomes clearer with characters
whose chief function is the amusing of the audience. The original miles
gloriosus in Plautus is a son of Jove and Venus who has killed an
elephant with his fist and seven thousand men in one day's fighting. In other
words, he is trying to put on a good show: the exuberance of his boasting helps
to put the play over. The convention says that the braggart must be exposed,
ridiculed, swindled, and beaten. But why should a professional dramatist, of
all people, want so to harry a character who is putting on a good show - his
show at that? When we find Falstaff invited to the final feast in The
Merry Wives, Caliban reprieved, attempts made to mollify Malvolio, and
Angelo and Parolles allowed to live down their [165] disgrace, we are seeing a
fundamental principle of comedy at work. The tendency of the comic society to
include rather than exclude is the reason for the traditional importance of the
parasite, who has no business to be at the final festival but is nevertheless
there. The word "grace," with all its Renaissance overtones from the
graceful courtier of Castiglione to the gracious God of Christianity, is a most
important thematic word in Shakespearean comedy.
The action of comedy in moving from one social
center to another is not unlike the action of a lawsuit, in which plaintiff and
defendant construct different versions of the same situation, one finally being
judged as real and the other as illusory. This resemblance of the rhetoric of
comedy to the rhetoric of jurisprudence has been recognized from earliest
times. A little pamphlet called the Tractatus Coislinianus, closely
related to Aristotle's Poetics, which sets down all the essential
facts about comedy in about a page and a half, divides the dianoia of
comedy into two parts, opinion (pistis) and proof (gnosis). These
correspond roughly to the usurping and the desirable societies respectively.
Proofs (i.e., the means of bringing about the happier society) are subdivided
into oaths, compacts, witnesses, ordeals (or tortures), and laws in other words
the five forms of material proof in law cases listed in the Rhetoric. We notice
how often the action of a Shakespearean comedy begins with some absurd, cruel,
or irrational law: the law of killing Syracusans in the Comedy of
Errors, the law of compulsory marriage in A Midsummer Night's Dream,
the law that confirms Shylock's bond, the attempts of Angelo to legislate
people into righteousness, and the like, which the action of the comedy then
evades or breaks. Compacts are as a rule the conspiracies formed by the hero's
society; witnesses, such as overhearers of conversations or people with special
knowledge (like the hero's old nurse with her retentive memory for birthmarks),
are the commonest devices for bringing about the comic discovery. Ordeals (basanoi)
are usually tests or touchstones of the hero's character: the Greek word also
means touchstones, and seems to be echoed in Shakespeare's Bassanio whose
ordeal it is to make a judgement on the worth of metals.
There are two ways of developing the form of
comedy: one is to throw the main emphasis on the blocking characters; the other
is to throw it forward on the scenes of discovery and reconciliation. One is
the general tendency of comic irony, satire, realism, and [166] studies of
manners; the other is the tendency of Shakespearean and other types of romantic
comedy. In the comedy of manners the main ethical interest falls as a rule on
the blocking characters. The technical hero and heroine are not often very
interesting people: the adulescentes of Plautus and Terence
are all alike, as hard to tell apart in the dark as Demetrius and Lysander, who
may be parodies of them. Generally the hero's character has the neutrality that
enables him to represent a wish-fulfilment. It is very different with the
miserly or ferocious parent, the boastful or foppish rival, or the other
characters who stand in the way of the action. In Moliere we have a simple but
fully tested formula in which the ethical interest is focussed on a single
blocking character, a heavy father, a miser, a misanthrope, a hypocrite, or a
hypochondriac. These are the figures that we remember, and the plays are
usually named after them, but we can seldom remember all the Valentins and
Angeliques who wriggle out of their clutches. In The Merry Wives the
technical hero, a man named Fenton, has only a bit part, and this play has
picked up a hint or two from Plautus's Casina, where the hero and
heroine are not even brought on the stage at all. Fictional comedy, especially
Dickens, often follows the same practice of grouping its interesting characters
around a somewhat dullish pair of technical leads. Even Tom Jones, though far
more fully realized, is still deliberately associated, as his commonplace name
indicates, with the conventional and typical.
Comedy usually moves toward a happy ending, and the
normal response of the audience to a happy ending is "this should
be," which sounds like a moral judgement. So it is, except that it is not
moral in the restricted sense, but social. Its opposite is not the villainous
but the absurd, and comedy finds the virtues of Malvolio as absurd as the vices
of Angelo. Moliere's misanthrope, being committed to sincerity, which is a
virtue, is morally in a strong position, but the audience soon realizes that
his friend Philinte, who is ready to lie quite cheerfully in order to enable
other people to preserve their self-respect, is the more genuinely sincere of
the two. It is of course quite possible to have a moral comedy, but the result
is often the kind of melodrama that we have described as comedy without humor,
and which achieves its happy ending with a self-righteous tone that most comedy
avoids. It is hardly possible to imagine a drama without conflict, and it is
hardly possible to imagine a conflict without some kind of enmity. But just as
love, [167] including sexual love, is a very different thing from lust, so
enmity is a very different thing from hatred. In tragedy, of course, enmity
almost always includes hatred; comedy is different, and one feels that the
social judgement against the absurd is closer to the comic norm than the moral
judgement against the wicked.
The question then arises of what makes the blocking
character absurd. Ben Jonson explained this by his theory of the
"humor," the character dominated by what Pope calls a ruling passion.
The humor's dramatic function is to express a state of what might be called
ritual bondage. He is obsessed by his humor, and his function in the play is
primarily to repeat his obsession. A sick man is not a humor, but a
hypochondriac is, because, qua hypochondriac, he can never admit to good
health, and can never do anything inconsistent with the role that he has
prescribed for himself. A miser can do and say nothing that is not connected
with the hiding of gold or saving of money. In The Silent Woman,
Jonson's nearest approach to Moliere's type of construction, the whole action
recedes from the humor of Morose, whose determination to eliminate noise from
his life produces so loquacious a comic action.
The principle of the humor is the principle that
unincremental repetition, the literary imitation of ritual bondage, is funny.
In a tragedy -Oedipus Tyrannus is the stock example - repetition
leads logically to catastrophe. Repetition overdone or not going anywhere
belongs to comedy, for laughter is partly a reflex, and like other reflexes it
can be conditioned by a simple repeated pattern. In Synge's Riders to
the Sea a mother, after losing her husband and five sons at sea,
finally loses her last son, and the result is a very beautiful and moving play.
But if it had been a full-length tragedy plodding glumly through the seven
drownings one after another, the audience would have been helpless with
unsympathetic laughter long before it was over. The principle of repetition as
the basis of humor both in Jonson's sense and in ours is well known to the
creators of comic strips, in which a character is established as a parasite, a
glutton (often confined to one dish), or a shrew, and who begins to be funny
after the point has been made every day for several months. Continuous comic
radio programs, too, are much more amusing to habitues than to neophytes. The
girth of Falstaff and the hallucinations of Quixote are based on much the same
comic laws. Mr. E. M. Forster speaks with disdain of Dickens's Mrs. Micawber,
who never says anything except that she will never [168] desert Mr. Micawber: a
strong contrast is marked here between the refined writer too finicky for
popular formulas, and the major one who exploits them ruthlessly.
The humor in comedy is usually someone with a good
deal of social prestige and power, who is able to force much of the play's
society into line with his obsession. Thus the humor is intimately connected
with the theme of the absurd or irrational law that the action of comedy moves
toward breaking. It is significant that the central character of our earliest
humor comedy, The Wasps, is obsessed by law cases: Shylock, too,
unites a craving for the law with the humor of revenge. Often the absurd law
appears as a whim of a bemused tyrant whose will is law, like Leontes or the
humorous Duke Frederick in Shakespeare, who makes some arbitrary decision or
rash promise: here law is replaced by "oath," also mentioned in
the Tractatus. Or it may take the form of a sham Utopia, a society
of ritual bondage constructed by an act of humorous or pedantic will, like the
academic retreat in Love's Labor's Lost, This theme is also as old
as Aristophanes, whose parodies of Platonic social schemes in The Birds and Ecclesiazusae deal
with it.
The society emerging at the conclusion of comedy
represents, by contrast, a kind of moral norm, or pragmatically free society.
Its ideals are seldom defined or formulated: definition and formulation belong
to the humors, who want predictable activity. We are simply given to understand
that the newly-married couple will live happily ever after, or that at any rate
they will get along in a relatively unhumorous and clear-sighted manner. That
is one reason why the character of the successful hero is so often left
undeveloped: his real life begins at the end of the play, and we have to
believe him to be potentially a more interesting character than he appears to
be. In Terence's Adelphoi, Demea, a harsh father, is contrasted
with his brother Micio, who is indulgent. Micio being more liberal, he leads
the way to the comic resolution, and converts Demea, but then Demea points out
the indolence inspiring a good deal of Micio's liberality, and releases him
from a complementary humorous bondage.
Thus the movement from pistis to gnosis,
from a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and the older
characters to a society controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom is
fundamentally, as the Greek words suggest, a movement from illusion to reality.
Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality [169] is best
understood as its negation: whatever reality is, it's not that.
Hence the importance of the theme of creating and dispelling illusion in
comedy: the illusions caused by disguise, obsession, hypocrisy, or unknown
parentage.
The comic ending is generally manipulated by a
twist in the plot. In Roman comedy the heroine, who is usually a slave or
courtesan, turns out to be the daughter of somebody respectable, so that the
hero can marry her without loss of face. The cognitio in
comedy, in which the characters find out who their relatives are, and who is
left of the opposite sex not a relative, and hence available for marriage, is
one of the features of comedy that have never changed much: The
Confidential Clerk indicates that it still holds the attention of
dramatists. There is a brilliant parody of a cognitio at the
end of Major Barbara (the fact that the hero of this play is a
professor of Greek perhaps indicates an unusual affinity to the conventions of
Euripides and Menander), where Undershaft is enabled to break the rule that he
cannot appoint his son-in-law as successor by the fact that the son-in-law's
own father married his deceased wife's sister in Australia, so that the
son-in-law is his own first cousin as well as himself. It sounds complicated,
but the plots of comedy often are complicated because there is something
inherently absurd about complications. As the main character interest in comedy
is so often focussed on the defeated characters, comedy regularly illustrates a
victory of arbitrary plot over consistency of character. Thus, in striking
contrast to tragedy, there can hardly be such a thing as inevitable comedy, as
far as the action of the individual play is concerned. That is, we may know
that the convention of comedy will make some kind of happy ending inevitable,
but still for each play the dramatist must produce a distinctive
"gimmick" or "weenie," to use two disrespectful Hollywood
synonyms for anagnorisis. Happy endings do not impress us as true,
but as desirable, and they are brought about by manipulation. The watcher of
death and tragedy has nothing to do but sit and wait for the in evitable end;
but something gets born at the end of comedy, and the watcher of birth is a
member of a busy society.
The manipulation of plot does not always involve
metamorphosis of character, but there is no violation of comic decorum when it
does. Unlikely conversions, miraculous transformations, and providential
assistance are inseparable from comedy. Further, whatever emerges is supposed
to be there for good: if the [170] curmudgeon becomes lovable, we understand
that he will not immediately relapse again into his ritual habit. Civilizations
which stress the desirable rather than the real, and the religious as opposed
to the scientific perspective, think of drama almost entirely in terms of
comedy. In the classical drama of India, we are told, the tragic ending was
regarded as bad taste, much as the manipulated endings of comedy are regarded
as bad taste by novelists interested in ironic realism.
The total mythos of comedy, only a
small part of which is ordinarily presented, has regularly what in music is
called a ternary form: the hero's society rebels against the society of
the senex and triumphs, but the hero's society is a
Saturnalia, a reversal of social standards which recalls a golden age in the
past before the main action of the play begins. Thus we have a stable and
harmonious order disrupted by folly, obsession, forgetfulness, "pride and
prejudice," or events not understood by the characters themselves, and
then restored. Often there is a benevolent grandfather, so to speak, who
overrules the action set up by the blocking humor and so links the first and
third parts. An example is Mr. Burchell, the disguised uncle of the wicked
squire, in The Vicar of Wakefteld. A very long play, such as the
Indian Sakuntala, may present all three phases; a very intricate
one, such as many of Menander's evidently were, may indicate their outlines.
But of course very often the first phase is not given at all: the audience
simply understands an ideal state of affairs which it knows to be better than
what is revealed in the play, and which it recognizes as like that to which the
action leads. This ternary action is, ritually, like a contest of summer and
winter in which winter occupies the middle action; psychologically, it is like
the removal of a neurosis or blocking point and the restoring of an unbroken
current of energy and memory. The Jonsonian masque, with the antimasque in the
middle, gives a highly conventionalized or "abstract" version of it.
We pass now to the typical characters of comedy. In
drama, characterization depends on function; what a character is follows from
what he has to do in the play. Dramatic function in its turn depends on the
structure of the play; the character has certain things to do because the play
has such and such a shape. The structure of the play in its turn depends on the
category of the play; if it is a comedy, its structure will require a comic
resolution and a [171] prevailing comic mood. Hence when
we speak of typical characters, we are not trying to reduce lifelike characters
to stock types, though we certainly are suggesting that the sentimental notion
of an antithesis between the lifelike character and the stock type is a vulgar
error. All lifelike characters, whether in drama or fiction, owe their
consistency to the appropriateness of the stock type which belongs to their
dramatic function. That stock type is not the character but it is as necessary
to the character as a skeleton is to the actor who plays it.
With regard to the characterization of comedy,
the Tractatus lists three types of comic characters: the alazons or
impostors, the eirons or self-deprecators, and the buffoons (bomolochoi).
This list is closely related to a passage in the Ethics which
contrasts the first two, and then goes on to contrast the buffoon with a
character whom Aristotle calls agroikos or churlish, literally
rustic. We may reasonably accept the churl as a fourth character type, and so
we have two opposed pairs. The contest of eiron and alazon forms
the basis of the comic action, and the buffoon and the churl polarize the comic
mood.
We have previously dealt with the terms eiron and alazon.
The humorous blocking characters of comedy are nearly always impostors, though
it is more frequently a lack of self-knowledge than simple hypocrisy that
characterizes them. The multitudes of comic scenes in which one character
complacently soliloquizes while an other makes sarcastic asides to the audience
show the contest of eiron and alazon in its
purest form, and show too that the audience is sympathetic to the eiron side.
Central to the alazon group is the senex iratus or
heavy father, who with his rages and threats, his obsessions and his
gullibility, seems closely related to some of the demonic characters of
romance, such as Polyphemus. Occasionally a character may have the dramatic
function of such a figure with out his characteristics: an example is Squire
Allworthy in Tom Jones, who as far as the plot is concerned behaves
almost as stupidly as Squire Western. Of heavy-father surrogates, the miles
gloriosus has been mentioned: his popularity is largely due to the fact
that he is a man of words rather than deeds, and is consequently far more
useful to a practising dramatist than any tight-lipped hero could ever be. The
pedant, in Renaissance comedy often a student of the occult sciences, the fop
or coxcomb, and similar humors, require no comment. The female alazon is
rare: Katharina the [172] shrew represents to some extent a female miles
gloriosus, and the precieuse ridicule a female pedant, but
the "menace" or siren who gets in the way of the true heroine is more
often found as a sinister figure of melodrama or romance than as a ridiculous
figure in comedy.
The eiron figures need a little
more attention. Central to this group is the hero, who is an eiron figure
because, as explained, the dramatist tends to play him down and make him rather
neutral and unformed in character. Next in importance is the heroine, also
often played down: in Old Comedy, when a girl accompanies a male hero in his
triumph, she is generally a stage prop, a muta persona not
previously introduced. A more difficult form of cognitio is
achieved when the heroine disguises herself or through some other device brings
about the comic resolution, so that the person whom the hero is seeking turns
out to be the person who has sought him. The fondness of Shakespeare for this
"she stoops to conquer" theme needs only to be mentioned here, as it
belongs more naturally to the mythos of romance.
Another central eiron figure is
the type entrusted with hatching the schemes which bring about the hero's
victory. This character in Roman comedy is almost always a tricky slave (dolosus
servus), and in Renaissance comedy he becomes the scheming valet who is so
frequent in Continental plays, and in Spanish drama is called the gracioso.
Modern audiences are most familiar with him in Figaro and in the Leporello ofDon
Giovanni. Through such intermediate nineteenth-century figures as Micawber
and the Touchwood of Scott's St. Ronan's Well, who, like the
gracioso, have buffoon affiliations, he evolves into the amateur detective of
modern fiction. The Jeeves of P. G. Wodehouse is a more direct descendant.
Female confidantes of the same general family are often brought in to oil the
machinery of the well-made play. Elizabethan comedy had another type of
trickster, represented by the Matthew Merrygreek of Ralph Roister
Doister, who is generally said to be developed from the vice or iniquity of
the morality plays: as usual, the analogy is sound enough, whatever historians
decide about origins. The vice, to give him that name, is very useful to a
comic dramatist because he acts from pure love of mischief, and can set a comic
action going with the minimum of motivation. The vice may be as light-hearted
as Puck or as malignant as Don John in Much Ado, but as a rule the
vice's activity is, in spite of his name, benevolent [173] One of the tricky
slaves in Plautus, in a soliloquy, boasts that he is the architectus of
the comic action: such a character carries out the will of the author to reach
a happy ending. He is in fact the spirit of comedy, and the two clearest
examples of the type in Shakespeare, Puck and Ariel, are both spiritual beings.
The tricky slave often has his own freedom in mind as the reward of his
exertions: Ariel's longing for release is in the same tradition.
The role of the vice includes a great deal of
disguising, and the type may often be recognized by disguise. A good example is
the Brainworm of Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, who calls the
action of the play the day of his metamorphoses. Similarly Ariel has to
surmount the difficult stage direction of "Enter invisible." The vice
is combined with the hero whenever the latter is a cheeky, improvident young
man who hatches his own schemes and cheats his rich father or uncle into giving
him his patrimony along with the girl.
Another eiron type has not been
much noticed. This is a character, generally an older man, who begins the
action of the play by withdrawing from it, and ends the play by returning. He
is often a father with the motive of seeing what his son will do. The action
of Every Man in His Humour is set going in this way by Knowell
Senior. The disappearance and return of Lovewit, the owner of the house which is
the scene of The Alchemist, has the same dramatic function, though
the characterization is different. The clearest Shakespearean example is the
Duke in Measure for Measure, but Shakespeare is more addicted to
the type than might appear at first glance. In Shakespeare the vice is rarely
the realarchitectus: Puck and Ariel both act under orders from an older
man, if one may call Oberon a man for the moment. In The Tempest Shakespeare
returns to a comic action established by Aristophanes, in which an older man,
instead of retiring from the action, builds it up on the stage. When the
heroine takes the vice role in Shakespeare, she is often significantly related
to her father, even when the father is not in the play at all, like the father
of Helena, who gives her his medical knowledge, or the father of Portia, who
arranges the scheme of the caskets. A more conventionally treated example of
the same benevolent Prospero figure turned up recently in the psychiatrist
of The Cocktail Party, and one may compare the mysterious alchemist
who is the father of the heroine of The Lady's Not for Burning. The
formula is not confined to comedy: Polonius, who shows [174] so many of the
disadvantages of a literary education, attempts the role of a retreating
paternal eiron three times, once too often. Hamlet and King
Lear contain subplots which are ironic versions of stock comic themes,
Gloucester's story being the regular comedy theme of the gullible senex swindled
by a clever and unprincipled son.
We pass now to the buffoon types, those whose
function it is to increase the mood of festivity rather than to contribute to
the plot. Renaissance comedy, unlike Roman comedy, had a great variety of such
characters, professional fools, clowns, pages, singers, and incidental characters
with established comic habits like malapropism or foreign accents. The oldest
buffoon of this incidental nature is the parasite, who may be given something
to do, as Jonson gives Mosca the role of a vice in Volpone, but
who, qua parasite, does nothing but entertain the audience by
talking about his appetite. He derives chiefly from Greek Middle Comedy, which
appears to have been very full of food, and where he was, not unnaturally,
closely associated with another established buffoon type, the cook, a
conventional figure who breaks into comedies to bustle and order about and make
long speeches about the mysteries of cooking. In the role of cook the buffoon
or entertainer appears, not simply as a gratuitous addition like the parasite,
but as something more like a master of ceremonies, a center for the comic mood.
There is no cook in Shakespeare, though there is a superb description of one in
the Comedy of Errors, but a similar role is often attached to a
jovial and loquacious host, like the "mad host" of The Merry
Wives or the Simon Eyre of The Shoemakers Holiday. In
Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One the mad host type is
combined with the vice. In Falstaff and Sir Toby Belch we can see the
affinities of the buffoon or entertainer type both with the parasite and with
the master of revels. If we study this entertainer or host role carefully we
shall soon realize that it is a development of what in Aristophanic comedy is
represented by the chorus, and which in its turn goes back to the komos or
revel from which comedy is said to be descended.
Finally, there is a fourth group to which we have
assigned the word agroikos, and which usually means either churlish
or rustic, depending on the context. This type may also be extended to cover
the Elizabethan gull and what in vaudeville used to be called the straight man,
the solemn or inarticulate character who allows the [175] humor to bounce off
him, so to speak. We find churls in the miserly, snobbish, or priggish
characters whose role is that of the refuser of festivity, the killjoy who
tries to stop the fun, or, like Malvolio, locks up the food and drink instead
of dispensing it. The melancholy Jaques of As You Like It, who
walks out on the final festivities, is closely related. In the sulky and
self-centered Bertram of All's Well there is a most unusual
and ingenious combination of this type with the hero. More often, however, the
churl belongs to thealazon group, all miserly old men in comedies,
including Shylock, being churls. In The Tempest Caliban has
much the same relation to the churlish type that Ariel has to the vice or
tricky slave. But often, where the mood is more light-hearted, we may
translate agroikos simply by rustic, as with the innumerable
country squires and similar characters who provide amusement in the urban
setting of drama. Such types do not refuse the mood of festivity, but they mark
the extent of its range. In a pastoral comedy the idealized virtues of rural
life may be represented by a simple man who speaks for the pastoral ideal, like
Corin in As You Like It Corin has the same agroikos role
as the "rube" or "hayseed" of more citified comedies, but
the moral attitude to the role is reversed. Again we notice the principle that
dramatic structure is a permanent and moral attitude a variable factor in
literature.
In a very ironic comedy a different type of
character may play the role of the refuser of festivity. The more ironic the
comedy, the more absurd the society, and an absurd society may be condemned by,
or at least contrasted with, a character that we may call the plain dealer, an
outspoken advocate of a kind of moral norm who has the sympathy of the
audience. Wycherley's Manly, though he provides the name for the type, is not a
particularly good example of it: a much better one is the Cleante of Tartuffe.
Such a character is appropriate when the tone is ironic enough to get the
audience confused about its sense of the social norm: he corresponds roughly to
the chorus in a tragedy, which is there for a similar reason. When the tone
deepens from the ironic to the bitter, the plain dealer may become a malcontent
or railer, who may be morally superior to his society, as he is to some extent
in Marston's play of that name, but who may also be too motivated by envy to be
much more than another aspect of his society's evil, like Thersites, or to some
extent Apemantus. [176]
In tragedy, pity and fear, the emotions of moral
attraction and repulsion, are raised and cast out. Comedy seems to make a more
functional use of the social, even the moral judgement, than tragedy, yet
comedy seems to raise the corresponding emotions, which are sympathy and
ridicule, and cast them out in the same way. Comedy ranges from the most savage
irony to the most dreamy wish-fulfilment romance, but its structural patterns
and characterization are much the same throughout its range. This principle of
the uniformity of comic structure through a variety of attitudes is clear in
Aristophanes. Aristophanes is the most personal of writers, and his opinions on
every subject are written all over his plays. We know that he wanted peace with
Sparta and that he hated Cleon, so when his comedy depicts the attaining of
peace and the defeat of Cleon we know that he approved and wanted his audience
to approve. But in Ecclesidzusae a band of women in disguise
railroad a communistic scheme through the Assembly which is a horrid parody of
a Platonic republic, and proceed to inaugurate its sexual communism with some
astonishing improvements. Presumably Aristophanes did not altogether endorse
this, yet the comedy follows the same pattern and the same resolution. InThe
Birds the Peisthetairos who defies Zeus and blocks out Olympus with
his Cloud-Cuckoo-Land is accorded the same triumph that is given to the
Trygaios of the Peace who flies to heaven and brings a golden
age back to Athens.
Let us look now at a variety of comic structures
between the extremes of irony and romance. As comedy blends into irony and
satire at one end and into romance at the other, if there are different phases
or types of comic structure, some of them will be closely parallel to some of
the types of irony and of romance. A somewhat forbidding piece of symmetry
turns up in our argument at this point, which seems to have some literary
analogy to the circle of fifths in music. I recognize six phases of each mythos,
three being parallel to the phases of a neighboring mythos. The
first three phases of comedy are parallel to the first three phases of irony
and satire, and the second three to the second three of romance. The
distinction between an ironic comedy and a comic satire, or between a romantic
comedy and a comic romance, is tenuous, but not quite a distinction without a
difference.
The first or most ironic phase of comedy is,
naturally, the one is which a humorous society triumphs or remains undefeated.
A good [177] example of a comedy of this type is The Alchemist, in
which the returning eiron Lovewit joins the rascals, and the
plain dealer Surly is made a fool of. In The Beggar's Opera there
is a similar twist to the ending: the (projected) author feels that the hanging
of the hero is a comic ending, but is informed by the manager that the
audience's sense of comic decorum demands a reprieve, whatever Macheath's moral
status. This phase of comedy presents what Renaissance critics called speculum
consuetudinis, the way of the world, cosi fan tutte. A more
intense irony is achieved when the humorous society simply disintegrates
without anything taking its place, as in Heartbreak House and frequently
in Chekhov.
We notice in ironic comedy that the demonic world
is never far away. The rages of the senex iratus in Roman
comedy are directed mainly at the tricky slave, who is threatened with the
mill, with being flogged to death, with crucifixion, with having his head
dipped in tar and set on fire, and the like, all penalties that could be and
were exacted from slaves in life. An epilogue in Plautus informs us that the
slave-actor who has blown up in his lines will now be flogged; in one of the
Menander fragments a slave is tied up and burned with a torch on the stage. One
sometimes gets the impression that the audience of Plautus and Terence would
have guffawed uproariously all through the Passion. We may ascribe this to the
brutality of a slave society, but then we remember that boiling oil and burying
alive ("such a stuffy death") turn up in The
Mikado. Two lively comedies of the modern stage are The Cocktail
Party and The Lady's Not for Burning, but the cross
appears in the background of the one and the stake in the background of the
other. Shylock's knife and Angelo's gallows appear in Shakespeare: in Measure
for Measure every male character is at one time or an other threatened
with death. The action of comedy moves toward a deliverance from something
which, if absurd, is by no means invariably harmless. We notice too how
frequently a comic dramatist tries to bring his action as close to a
catastrophic overthrow of the hero as he can get it, and then reverses the
action as quickly as possible. The evading or breaking of a cruel law is often
a very narrow squeeze. The intervention of the king at the end of Tartuffe is
deliberately arbitrary: there is nothing in the action of the play itself to
prevent Tartuffe's triumph. Tom Jones in the final book, accused of murder,
incest, debt, and double-dealing, cast off by friends, guardian, and
sweetheart, is a woeful figure indeed before all these turn into [178]
illusions. Any reader can think of many comedies in which the fear of death,
sometimes a hideous death, hangs over the central character to the end, and is
dispelled so quickly that one has almost the sense of awakening from nightmare.
Sometimes the redeeming agent actually is divine,
like Diana in Pericles; in Tartuffe it is the
king, who is conceived as a part of the audience and the incarnation of its
will. An extraordinary number of comic stories, both in drama and fiction, seem
to approach a potentially tragic crisis near the end, a feature that I may call
the "point of ritual death" a clumsy expression that I would gladly
surrender for a better one. It is a feature not often noticed by critics, but
when it is present it is as unmistakably present as a stretto in a fugue, which
it somewhat resembles. In Smollett'sHumphry Clinker (I select this
because no one will suspect Smollett of deliberate mythopoeia but only of
following convention, at least as far as his plot is concerned) , the main
characters are nearly drowned in an accident with an upset carriage; they are
then taken to a nearby house to dry off, and a cognitio takes
place, in the course of which their family relationships are regrouped, secrets
of birth brought to light, and names changed. Similar points of ritual death
may be marked in almost any story that imprisons the hero or gives the heroine
a nearly mortal illness before an eventually happy ending.
Sometimes the point of ritual death is vestigial,
not an element in the plot but a mere change of tone. Everyone will have noted
in comic actions, even in very trivial movies and magazine stories, a point
near the end at which the tone suddenly becomes serious, sentimental, or
ominous of potential catastrophe. In Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow,
the hero Denis comes to a point of self-evaluation in which suicide nearly
suggests itself: in most of Huxley's later books some violent action, generally
suicidal, occurs at the corresponding point. In Mrs. Dalloway the
actual suicide of Septimus becomes a point of ritual death for the heroine in
the middle of her party. There are also some interesting Shakespearean
variations of the device: a clown, for instance, will make a speech near the
end in which the buffoon's mask suddenly falls off and we look straight into
the face of a beaten and ridiculed slave. Examples are the speech of Dromio of
Ephesus beginning "I am an ass indeed" in the Comedy of
Errors, and the speech of the Clown in All's Well beginning
"I am a woodland fellow." [179]
The second phase of comedy, in its simplest form,
is a comedy in which the hero does not transform a humorous society but simply
escapes or runs away from it, leaving its structure as it was before. A more
complex irony in this phase is achieved when a society is constructed by or
around a hero, but proves not sufficiently real or strong to impose itself. In
this situation the hero is usually himself at least partly a comic humor or
mental runaway, and we have either a hero's illusion thwarted by a superior
reality or a clash of two illusions. This is the quixotic phase of comedy, a
difficult phase for drama, though The Wild Duck is a fairly
pure example of it, and in drama it usually appears as a subordinate theme of
another phase. Thus in The Alchemist Sir Epicure Mammon's
dream of what he will do with the philosopher's stone is, like Quixote's, a
gigantic dream, and makes him an ironic parody of Faustus (who is mentioned in
the play), in the same way that Quixote is an ironic parody of Amadis and
Lancelot. When the tone is more light-hearted, the comic resolution may be
strong enough to sweep over all quixotic illusions. In Huckleberry Finn the
main theme is one of the oldest in comedy, the freeing of a slave, and
the cognitio tells us that Jim had already been set free
before his escape was bungled by Tom Sawyer's pedantries. Because of its
unrivalled opportunities for double-edged irony, this phase is a favorite of
Henry James: perhaps his most searching study of it is The Sacred Fount,
where the hero is an ironic parody of a Prospero figure creating another
society out of the one in front of him.
The third phase of comedy is the normal one that we
have been discussing, in which a senex iratus or other humor
gives way to a young man's desires. The sense of the comic norm is so strong
that when Shakespeare, by way of experiment, tried to reverse the pattern
in All's Well, in having two older people force Bertram to marry
Helena, the result has been an unpopular "problem" play, with a
suggestion of something sinister about it. We have noted that the cognitio of
comedy is much concerned with straightening out the details of the new society,
with distinguishing brides from sisters and parents from foster-parents. The
fact that the son and father are so often in conflict means that they are
frequently rivals for the same girl, and the psychological alliance of the
hero's bride and the mother is often expressed or implied. The occasional
"naughtiness" of comedy, as in the Restoration period, has much to
do, not only with marital infidelity, but with a kind of comic [180] Oedipus
situation in which the hero replaces his father as a lover. In Congreve's Love
for Love there are two Oedipus themes in counterpoint: the hero cheats
his father out of the heroine, and his best friend violates the wife of an
impotent old man who is the heroine's guardian. A theme which would be
recognized in real life as a form of infantile regression, the hero pretending
to be impotent in order to gain admission to the women's quarters, is employed
in Wycherley's Country Wife, where it is taken from Terence's Eunuchus.
The possibilities of incestuous combinations form
one of the minor themes of comedy. The repellent older woman offered to Figaro
in marriage turns out to be his mother, and the fear of violating a mother also
occurs in Tom Jones. When in Ghosts and Little
Eyolf Ibsen employed the old chestnut about the object of the hero's
affections being his sister (a theme as old as Menander), his startled hearers
took it for a portent of social revolution. In Shakespeare the recurring and
somewhat mysterious father-daughter relationship already alluded to appears in
its incestuous form at the beginning of Pericles, where it forms
the demonic antithesis of the hero's union with his wife and daughter at the
end. The presiding genius of comedy is Eros, and Eros has to adapt himself to
the moral facts of society: Oedipus and incest themes indicate that erotic
attachments have in their undisplaced or mythical origin a much greater
versatility.
Ambivalent attitudes naturally result, and ambivalence
is apparently the main reason for the curious feature of doubled characters
which runs all through the history of comedy. In Roman comedy there is often a
pair of young men, and consequently a pair of young women, of which one is
often related to one of the men and exogamous to the other. The doubling of
the senex figure sometimes gives us a heavy father for both
the hero and the heroine, as in The Winter's Tale, sometimes a
heavy father and benevolent uncle, as in Terence's Adelphoi and
in Tartuffe, and so on. The action of comedy, like the action of
the Christian Bible, moves from law to liberty. In the law there is an element
of ritual bondage which is abolished, and an element of habit or convention
which is fulfilled. The intolerable qualities of the senex represent
the former and compromise with him the latter in the evolution of the
comic nomos.
With the fourth phase of comedy we begin to move
out of the [181] world of experience into the ideal world of innocence and
romance. We said that normally the happier society established at the end of
the comedy is left undefined, in contrast to the ritual bondage of the humors.
But it is also possible for a comedy to present its action on two social
planes, of which one is preferred and consequently in some measure idealized.
At the beginning of Plato's Republic we have a sharp contest
between the alazon Thrasymachus and the ironic Socrates. The
dialogue could have stopped there, as several of Plato's dialogues do, with a
negative victory over a humor and the kind of society he suggests. But in the
Republic the rest of the company, including Thrasymachus, follow Socrates
inside Socrates's head, so to speak, and contemplate there the pattern of the
just state. In Aristophanes the comic action is often ironic, but in The
Acharnians we have a comedy in which a hero with the significant name
of Dicaeopolis (righteous city or citizen) makes a private peace with Sparta,
celebrates the peaceful festival of Dionysos with his family, and sets up the
pattern of a temperate social order on the stage, where it remains throughout
the play, cranks, bigots, sharpers, and scoundrels all being beaten away from
it. One of the typical comic actions is at least as clearly portrayed in our
earliest comedy as it has ever been since.
Shakespeare's type of romantic comedy follows a
tradition established by Peele and developed by Greene and Lyly, which has
affinities with the medieval tradition of the seasonal ritual-play. We may call
it the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated to the ritual theme
of the triumph of life and love over the waste land. In The Two
Gentlemen of Verona the hero Valentine becomes captain of a band of
outlaws in a forest, and all the other characters are gathered into this forest
and become converted. Thus the action of the comedy begins in a world
represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a
metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to
the normal world. The forest in this play is the embryonic form of the fairy
world of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Forest of Arden in As
You Like It, Windsor Forest in The Merry Wives, and the
pastoral world of the mythical sea-coasted Bohemia in The Winter's Tale.
In all these comedies there is the same rhythmic movement from normal world to
green world and back again. In The Merchant of Venice the
second world takes the form of Portia's mysterious house in Belmont, with its
magic caskets and the wonderful [182] cosmological harmonies that proceed from
it in the fifth act. We notice too that this second world is absent from the
more ironic comedies All's Well and Measure for
Measure.
The green world charges the comedies with the
symbolism of the victory of summer over winter, as is explicit in Love's
Labor's Lost, where the comic contest takes the form of the medieval debate
of winter and spring at the end. In The Merry Wives there is an
elaborate ritual of the defeat of winter known to folklorists as "carrying
out Death," of which Falstaff is the victim; and Falstaff must have felt
that, after being thrown into the water, dressed up as a witch and beaten out
of a house with curses, and finally supplied with a beast's head and singed
with candles, he had done about all that could reasonably be asked of any
fertility spirit.
In the rituals and myths the earth that produces
the rebirth is generally a female figure, and the death and revival, or
disappearance and withdrawal, of human figures in romantic comedy generally
involves the heroine. The fact that the heroine often brings about the comic
resolution by disguising herself as a boy is familiar enough. The treatment of
Hero in Much Ado, of Helena in All's Well, of Thaisa
in Pericles, of Fidele in Cymbeline, of Hermione
in The Winter's Tale, show the repetition of a device in which
progressively less care is taken of plausibility and in which in consequence
the mythical outline of a Proserpine figure becomes progressively clearer.
These are Shakespearean examples of the comic theme of ritual assault on a
central female figure, a theme which stretches from Menander to contemporary
soap operas. Many of Menander's plays have titles which are feminine
participles indicating the particular indignity the heroine suffers in them,
and the working formula of the soap opera is said to be to "put the
heroine behind the eight-ball and keep her there." Treatments of the theme
may be as light-hearted as The Rape of the Lock or as doggedly
persistent as Pamela. However, the theme of rebirth is not
invariably feminine in context: the rejuvenation of the senex in
Aristophanes' The Knights, and a similar theme in All's
Well based on the folklore motif of the healing of the impotent king,
come readily to mind.
The green world has analogies, not only to the
fertile world of ritual, but to the dream world that we create out of our own
desires. This dream world collides with the stumbling and blinded follies of
the world of experience, of Theseus' Athens with its [183] idiotic marriage
law, of Duke Frederick and his melancholy tyranny, of Leontes and his mad
jealousy, of the Court Party with their plots and intrigues, and yet proves
strong enough to impose the form of desire on it. Thus Shakespearean comedy
illustrates, as clearly as any mythos we have, the archetypal function of
literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from
"reality," but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries
to imitate.
In the fifth phase of comedy, some of the themes of
which we have already anticipated, we move into a world that is still more
romantic, less Utopian and more Arcadian, less festive and more pensive, where
the comic ending is less a matter of the way the plot turns out than of the
perspective of the audience. When we compare the Shakespearean fourth-phase
comedies with the late fifth-phase "romances," we notice how much
more serious an action is appropriate to the latter: they do not avoid
tragedies but contain them. The action seems to be not only a movement from a
"winter's tale" to spring, but from a lower world of confusion to an
upper world of order. The closing scene of The Winter's Talemakes
us think, not simply of a cyclical movement from tragedy and absence to
happiness and return, but of bodily metamorphosis and a transformation from one
kind of life to another. The materials of the cognitio of Pericles or The
Winter's Tale are so stock that they would be "hooted at like an
old tale," yet they seem both far-fetched and inevitably right, outraging
reality and at the same time introducing us to a world of childlike innocence
which has always made more sense than reality.
In this phase the reader or audience feels raised
above the action, in the situation of which Christopher Sly is an ironic
parody. The plotting of Cleon and Dionyza in Pericles, or of the
Court Party in The Tempest, we look down on as generic or typical
human behavior: the action, or at least the tragic implication of the action,
is presented as though it were a play within a play that we can see in all
dimensions at once. We see the action, in short, from the point of view of a
higher and better ordered world. And as the forest in Shakespeare is the usual
symbol for the dream world in conflict with and imposing its form on
experience, so the usual symbol for the lower or chaotic world is the sea, from
which the cast, or an important part of it, is saved. The group of
"sea" comedies includes A Comedy of Errors, Twelfth
Night, Pericles, and [184] The Tempest. A
Comedy of Errors, though based on a Plautine original, is much closer to
the world of Apuleius than to that of Plautus in its imagery, and the main
action, moving from shipwreck and separation to reunion in a temple in Ephesus,
is repeated in the much later play of Pericles. And just as the
second world is absent from the two "problem" comedies, so in two of
the "sea" group, Twelfth Night and The
Tempest, the entire action takes place in the second world. In Measure
for Measure the Duke disappears from the action and returns at the
end; The Tempest seems to present the same type of action
inside out, as the entire cast follows Prospero into his retreat, and is shaped
into a new social order there.
These five phases of comedy may be seen as a
sequence of stages in the life of a redeemed society. Purely ironic comedy
exhibits this society in its infancy, swaddled and smothered by the society it
should replace. Quixotic comedy exhibits it in adolescence, still too ignorant
of the ways of the world to impose itself. In the third phase it comes to
maturity and triumphs; in the fourth it is already mature and established. In
the fifth it is part of a settled order which has been there from the
beginning, an order which takes on an increasingly religious cast and seems to
be drawing away from human experience altogether. At this point the undisplaced commedia,
the vision of Dante's Paradiso, moves out of our circle ofmythoi into
the apocalyptic or abstract mythical world above it. At this point we realize
that the crudest of Plautine comedy-formulas has much the same structure as the
central Christian myth itself, with its divine son appeasing the wrath of a
father and redeeming what is at once a society and a bride.
At this point too comedy proper enters its final or
sixth phase, the phase of the collapse and disintegration of the comic society.
In this phase the social units of comedy become small and esoteric, or even confined
to a single individual. Secret and sheltered places, forests in moonlight,
secluded valleys, and happy islands become more prominent, as does the penseroso mood
of romance, the love of the occult and the marvellous, the sense of individual
detachment from routine existence. In this kind of comedy we have finally left
the world of wit and the awakened critical intelligence for the opposite pole,
an oracular solemnity which, if we surrender uncritically to it, will provide a
delightful frisson. This is the world of ghost stories, thrillers, and Gothic
romances, and, on a more [185] sophisticated level, the kind of imaginative
withdrawal portrayed in Huysmans' A Rebours. The somberness of Des
Esseintes' surroundings has nothing to do with tragedy: Des Esseintes is a
dilettante trying to amuse himself. The comic society has run the full course
from infancy to death, and in its last phase myths closely connected
psychologically with a return to the womb are appropriate.
The romance is nearest of all
literary forms to the wish-fulfilment dream, and for that reason it has
socially a curiously paradoxical role. In every age the ruling social or
intellectual class tends to project its ideals in some form of romance, where
the virtuous heroes and beautiful heroines represent the ideals and the
villains the threats to their ascendancy. This is the general character of
chivalric romance in the Middle Ages, aristocratic romance in the Renaissance,
bourgeois romance since the eighteenth century, and revolutionary romance in
contemporary Russia. Yet there is a genuinely "proletarian" element
in romance too which is never satisfied with its various incarnations, and in
fact the incarnations themselves indicate that no matter how great a change may
take place in society, romance will turn up again, as hungry as ever, looking
for new hopes and desires to feed on. The perennially child like quality of
romance is marked by its extraordinarily persistent nostalgia, its search for
some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space. There has never to my
knowledge been any period of Gothic English literature, but the list of Gothic
revivalists stretches completely across its entire history, from the Beowulf
poet to writers of our own day.
The essential element of plot in romance is
adventure, which means that romance is naturally a sequential and processional
form, hence we know it better from fiction than from drama. At its most naive
it is an endless form in which a central character who never develops or ages
goes through one adventure after an other until the author himself collapses.
We see this form in comic strips, where the central characters persist for
years in a state of refrigerated deathlessness. However, no book can rival the
continuity of the newspaper, and as soon as romance achieves a literary form,
it tends to limit itself to a sequence of minor [186] adventures leading up to
a major or climacteric adventure, usually announced from the beginning, the
completion of which rounds off the story. We may call this major adventure, the
element that gives literary form to the romance, the quest.
The complete form of the romance is clearly the
successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of
the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial
struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or
both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero. We may call these three stages
respectively, using Greek terms, the agon or conflict,
the pathos or death-struggle, and the anagnorisis or
discovery, the recognition of the hero, who has clearly proved himself to be a
hero even if he does not survive the conflict. Thus the romance expresses more
clearly the passage from struggle through a point of ritual death to a
recognition scene that we discovered in comedy. A threefold structure is
repeated in many features of romance in the frequency, for instance, with which
the successful hero is a third son, or the third to undertake the quest, or
successful on his third attempt. It is shown more directly in the three-day
rhythm of death, disappearance and revival which is found in the myth of Attis
and other dying gods, and has been incorporated in our Easter.
A quest involving conflict assumes two main
characters, a protagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy. (No doubt I
should add, for the benefit of some readers, that I have read the article
"Protagonist" in Fowler's Modern English Usage.) The
enemy may be an ordinary human being, but the nearer the romance is to myth,
the more attributes of divinity will cling to the hero and the more the enemy
will take on demonic mythical qualities. The central form of romance is
dialectical: everything is focussed on a conflict between the hero and his
enemy, and all the reader's values are bound up with the hero. Hence the hero
of romance is analogous to the mythical Messiah or deliverer who comes from an
upper world, and his enemy is analogous to the demonic powers of a lower world.
The conflict however takes place in, or at any rate primarily concerns, our
world, which is in the middle, and which is characterized by the cyclical
movement of nature. Hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are
assimilated to the opposition of the hero and his enemy. The enemy is
associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life, [187]
and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor, and
youth. As all the cyclical phenomena can be readily associated or identified,
it follows that any attempt to prove that a romantic story does or does not
resemble, say, a solar myth, or that its hero does or does not resemble a
sun-god, is likely to be a waste of time. If it is a story within this general
area, cyclical imagery is likely to be present, and solar imagery is normally
prominent among cyclical images. If the hero of a romance returns from a quest
disguised, flings off his beggar's rags, and stands forth in the resplendent
scarlet cloak of the prince, we do not have a theme which has necessarily
descended from a solar myth; we have the literary device of displacement. The
hero does something which we may or may not, as we like, associate with the
myth of the sun returning at dawn. If we are reading the story as critics, with
an eye to structural principles, we shall make the association, because the
solar analogy explains why the hero's act is an effective and conventional
incident. If we are reading the story for fun, we need not bother: that is,
some murky "subconscious" factor in our response will take care of
the association.
We have distinguished myth from romance by the
hero's power of action: in the myth proper he is divine, in the romance proper
he is human. This distinction is much sharper theologically than it is
poetically, and myth and romance both belong in the general category of
mythopoeic literature. The attributing of divinity to the chief characters of
myth, however, tends to give myth a further distinction, already referred to,
of occupying a central canonical position. Most cultures regard certain stories
with more reverence than others, either because they are thought of as
historically true or because they have come to bear a heavier weight of
conceptual meaning. The story of Adam and Eve in Eden has thus a canonical
position for poets in our tradition whether they believe in its historicity or
not. The reason for the greater profundity of canonical myth is not solely
tradition, but the result of the greater degree of metaphorical identification
that is possible is myth. In literary criticism the myth is normally the
metaphorical key to the displacements of romance, hence the importance of the
quest-myth of the Bible in what follows. But because of the tendency to
expurgate and moralize in canonical myth, the less inhibited area of legend and
folk tale often contains an equally great concentration of mythical meaning.
[188]
The central form of quest-romance is the
dragon-killing theme exemplified in the stories of St. George and Perseus,
already referred to. A land ruled by a helpless old king is laid waste by a
sea-monster, to whom one young person after another is offered to be devoured,
until the lot falls on the king's daughter: at that point the hero arrives,
kills the dragon, marries the daughter, and succeeds to the kingdom. Again, as
with comedy, we have a simple pattern with many complex elements. The ritual
analogies of the myth suggest that the monster is the sterility of the land
itself, and that the sterility of the land is present in the age and impotence
of the king, who is sometimes suffering from an incurable malady or wound, like
Amfortas in Wagner. His position is that of Adonis overcome by the boar of
winter, Adonis's traditional thigh-wound being as close to castration
symbolically as it is anatomically.
In the Bible we have a sea-monster usually named
leviathan, who is described as the enemy of the Messiah, and whom the Messiah
is destined to kill in the "day of the Lord." The leviathan is the
source of social sterility, for it is identified with Egypt and Babylon, the
oppressors of Israel, and is described in the Book of Job as "king over
all the children of pride." It also seems closely associated with the
natural sterility of the fallen world, with the blasted world of struggle and
poverty and disease into which Job is hurled by Satan and Adam by the serpent
in Eden. In the Book of Job God's revelation to Job consists largely of
descriptions of the leviathan and a slightly less sinister land cousin named
behemoth. These monsters thus apparently represent the fallen order of nature
over which Satan has some control. (I am trying to make sense of the meaning of
the Book of Job as we now have it, on the assumption that whoever was
responsible for its present version had some reason for producing that version.
Guesswork about what the poem may originally have been or meant is useless, as
it is only the version we know that has had any influence on our literature.)
In the Book of Revelation the leviathan, Satan, and the Edenic serpent are all
identified. This identification is the basis for an elaborate dragon-killing
metaphor in Christian symbolism in which the hero is Christ (often represented
in art standing on a prostrate monster), the dragon Satan, the impotent old
king Adam, whose son Christ becomes, and the rescued bride the Church. [189]
Now if the leviathan is the whole fallen world of
sin and death and tyranny into which Adam fell, it follows that Adam's children
are born, live, and die inside his belly. Hence if the Messiah is to deliver us
by killing the leviathan, he releases us. In the folk tale versions of
dragon-killing stories we notice how frequently the previous victims of the
dragon come out of him alive after he is killed. Again, if we are inside the
dragon, and the hero comes to help us, the image is suggested of the hero going
down the monster's open throat, like Jonah (whom Jesus accepted as a prototype
of himself), and returning with his redeemed behind him. Hence the symbolism of
the Harrowing of Hell, hell being regularly represented in iconography by the
"toothed gullet of an aged shark," to quote a modern reference to it.
Secular versions of journeys inside monsters occur from Lucian to our day, and
perhaps even the Trojan horse had originally some links with the same theme.
The image of the dark winding labyrinth for the monster's belly is a natural
one, and one that frequently appears in heroic quests, notably that of Theseus.
A less displaced version of the story of Theseus would have shown him emerging
from the labyrinth at the head of a procession of the Athenian youths and
maidens previously sacrificed to the Minotaur. In many solar myths, too, the
hero travels perilously through a dark labyrinthine underworld full of monsters
between sunset and sunrise. This theme may be come a structural principle of
fiction on any level of sophistication. One would expect to find it in fairy tales
or children's stories, and in fact if we "stand back" from Tom Sawyer
we can see a youth with no father or mother emerging with a maiden from a
labyrinthine cave, leaving a bat-eating demon imprisoned behind him. But in the
most complex and elusive of the later stories of Henry James, The Sense
of the Past, the same theme is used, the labyrinthine underworld being in
this case a period of past time from which the hero is released by the
sacrifice of a heroine, an Ariadne figure. In this story, as in many folktales,
the motif of the two brothers connected by sympathetic magic of some sort is
also employed.
In the Old Testament the Messiah-figure of Moses
leads his people out of Egypt. The Pharaoh of Egypt is identified with the
leviathan by Ezekiel, and the fact that the infant Moses was rescued by
Pharaoh's daughter gives to the Pharaoh something of the role of the cruel
father-figure who seeks the hero's death, a role [190] also taken by the raging
Herod of the miracle plays. Moses and the Israelites wander through a
labyrinthine desert, after which the reign of the law ends and the conquest of
the Promised Land is achieved by Joshua, whose name is the same as that of
Jesus. Thus when the angel Gabriel tells the Virgin to call her son Jesus, the
typological meaning is that the era of the law is over, and the assault on the
Promised Land is about to begin. There are thus two concentric quest-myths in
the Bible, a Genesis-apocalypse myth and an Exodus-millennium myth. In the
former Adam is cast out of Eden, loses the river of life and the tree of life,
and wanders in the labyrinth of human history until he is restored to his
original state by the Messiah. In the latter Israel is cast out of his
inheritance and wanders in the labyrinths of Egyptian and Babylonian captivity
until he is restored to his original state in the Promised Land. Eden and the
Promised Land, therefore, are typologically identical, as are the tyrannies of
Egypt and Babylon and the wilderness of the law. Paradise Regained deals with the
temptation of Christ by Satan, which is, Michael tells us in Paradise Lost, the
true form of the dragon-killing myth assigned to the Messiah. Christ is in the
situation of Israel under the law, wandering in the wilderness: his victory is
at once the conquest of the Promised Land typified by his namesake Joshua and
the raising of Eden in the wilderness.
The leviathan is usually a sea-monster, which means
metaphorically that he is the sea, and the prophecy that the
Lord will hook and land the leviathan in Ezekiel is identical with the prophecy
in Revelation that there shall be no more sea. As denizens of his belly,
therefore, we are also metaphorically under water. Hence the importance of
fishing in the Gospels, the apostles being "fishers of men" who cast
their nets into the sea of this world. Hence, too, the later development,
referred to in The Waste Land, of Adam or the impotent king as an ineffectual
"fisher king." In the same poem the appropriate link is also made
with Prospero's rescuing of a society out of the sea in The Tempest.
In other comedies, too, ranging from Sakuntala to Rudens, something
indispensable to the action or the cognitio is fished out of the sea, and many
quest heroes, including Beowulf, achieve their greatest feats under water. The
insistence on Christ's ability to command the sea belongs to the same aspect of
symbolism. And as the leviathan, in his aspect as the fallen world, contains
all forms of [191] life imprisoned within himself, so as the sea he contains
the imprisoned life-giving rain waters whose coming marks the spring. The
monstrous animal who swallows all the water in the world and is then teased or
tricked or forced into disgorging it is a favorite of folk tales, and a
Mesopotamian version lies close behind the story of Creation in Genesis. In
many solar myths the sun god is represented as sailing in a boat on the surface
of our world.
Lastly, if the leviathan is death, and the hero has
to enter the body of death, the hero has to die, and if his quest is completed
the final stage of it is, cyclically, rebirth, and, dialectically,
resurrection. In the St. George plays the hero dies in his dragon-fight and is
brought to life by a doctor, and the same symbolism runs through all the
dying-god myths. There are thus not three but four distinguishable aspects to
the quest-myth. First, the agon or conflict itself. Second,
the pathos or death, often the mutual death of hero and
monster. Third, the disappearance of the hero, a theme which often takes the
form of sparagmos or tearing to pieces. Some times the hero's
body is divided among his followers, as in Eucharist symbolism: sometimes it is
distributed around the natural world, as in the stories of Orpheus and more
especially Osiris. Fourth, the reappearance and recognition of the hero, where
sacramental Christianity follows the metaphorical logic: those who in the
fallen world have partaken of their redeemer's divided body are united with his
risen body.
The four mythoi that we are
dealing with, comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony, may now be seen as four
aspects of a central unifying myth.Agon or conflict is the basis or
archetypal theme of romance, the radical of romance being a sequence of
marvellous adventures. Pathos or catastrophe, whether in
triumph or in defeat, is the archetypal theme of tragedy. Sparagmos,
or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed
to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the
archetypal theme of irony and satire.Anagnorisis, or recognition of a
newborn society rising in triumph around a still somewhat mysterious hero and
his bride, is the archetypal theme of comedy.
We have spoken of the Messianic hero as a redeemer
of society, but in the secular quest-romances more obvious motives and rewards
for the quest are more common. Often the dragon guards [192] a hoard: the quest
for buried treasure has been a central theme of romance from the Siegfried
cycle to Nostromo, and is unlikely to be exhausted yet. Treasure means wealth,
which in mythopoeic romance often means wealth in its ideal forms, power and
wisdom. The lower world, the world inside or behind the guarding dragon, is
often inhabited by a prophetic sibyl, and is a place of oracles and secrets,
such as Woden was willing to mutilate himself to obtain. Mutilation or physical
handicap, which combines the themes of sparagmos and ritual death, is often the
price of unusual wisdom or power, as it is in the figure of the crippled smith
Weyland or Hephaistos, and in the story of the blessing of Jacob. The Arabian
Nights are full of stories of what may be called the etiology of mutilation.
Again, the reward of the quest usually is or includes a bride. This
bride-figure is ambiguous: her psychological connection with the mother in an
Oedipus fantasy is more insistent than in comedy. She is often to be found in a
perilous, forbidden, or tabooed place, like Brunnhilde's wall of fire or the
sleeping beauty's wall of thorns, and she is, of course, often rescued from the
unwelcome embraces of another and generally older male, or from giants or
bandits or other usurpers. The removal of some stigma from the heroine figures
prominently in romance as in comedy, and ranges from the "loathly
lady" theme of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale to the
forgiven harlot of the Book of Hosea. The "black but comely" bride of
the Song of Songs belongs in the same complex.
The quest-romance has analogies to both rituals and
dreams, and the rituals examined by Frazer and the dreams examined by Jung show
the remarkable similarity in form that we should expect of two symbolic
structures analogous to the same thing. Translated into dream terms, the
quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfilment
that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that
reality. The antagonists of the quest are often sinister figures, giants,
ogres, witches and magicians, that clearly have a parental origin; and yet
redeemed and emancipated paternal figures are involved too, as they are in the
psychological quests of both Freud and Jung. Translated into ritual terms, the
quest-romance is the victory of fertility over the waste land. Fertility means
food and drink, bread and wine, body and blood, the union of male and female.
The precious objects brought back from the quest, or seen or obtained as a
result of it, [193] sometimes combine the ritual and the psychological
associations. The Holy Grail, for instance, is connected with Christian
Eucharist symbolism; it is related to or descended from a miraculous food-
provider like the cornucopia, and, like other cups and hollow vessels, it has
female sexual affinities, its masculine counterpart being, we are told, the
bleeding lance. The pairing of solid food and liquid refreshment recurs in the
edible tree and the water of life in the Biblical apocalypse.
We may take the first book of The Faerie
Queene as representing perhaps the closest following of the Biblical
quest-romance theme in English literature: it is closer even than The
Pilgrims Progress, which resembles it because they both resemble the Bible.
Attempts to compare Bunyan and Spenser without reference to the Bible, or to
trace their similarities to a common origin in secular romance, are more or
less perverse. In Spenser's account of the quest of St. George, the patron
saint of England, the protagonist represents the Christian Church in England,
and hence his quest is an imitation of that of Christ. Spenser's Redcross
Knight is led by the lady Una (who is veiled in black) to the kingdom of her
parents, which is being laid waste by a dragon. The dragon is of somewhat
unusual size, at least allegorically. We are told that Una's parents held
"all the world" in their control until the dragon "Forwasted all
their land, and them expelled." Una's parents are Adam and Eve; their
kingdom is Eden or the unfallen world, and the dragon, who is the entire fallen
world, is identified with the leviathan, the serpent of Eden, Satan, and the
beast of Revelation. Thus St. George's mission, a repetition of that of Christ,
is by killing the dragon to raise Eden in the wilderness and restore England to
the status of Eden. The association of an ideal England with Eden, assisted by
legends of a happy island in the western ocean and by the similarity of the
Hesperides story to that of Eden, runs through English literature at least from
the end of Greene's Friar Bacon to Blake's "Jerusalem" hymn. St.
George's wanderings with Una, or without her, are parallel to the wandering of
the Israelites in the wilderness, between Egypt and the Promised Land, bearing
the veiled ark of the covenant and yet ready to worship a golden calf.
The battle with the dragon lasts, of course, three
days: at the end of each of the first two days St. George is beaten back and is
strengthened, first by the water of life, then by the tree of life. These
represent the two sacraments which the reformed church [194] accepted; they are
the two features of the garden of Eden to be restored to man in the apocalypse,
and they have also a more general Eucharist connection. St. George's emblem is
a red cross on a white ground, which is the flag borne by Christ in traditional
iconography when he returns in triumph from the prostrate dragon of hell. The
red and white symbolize the two aspects of the risen body, flesh and blood,
bread and wine, and in Spenser they have a historical connection with the union
of red and white roses in the reigning head of the church. The link between the
sacramental and the sexual aspects of the red and white symbolism is indicated
in alchemy, with which Spenser was clearly acquainted, in which a crucial phase
of the production of the elixir of immortality is known as the union of the red
king and the white queen.
The characterization of romance follows its general
dialectic structure, which means that subtlety and complexity are not much
favored. Characters tend to be either for or against the quest. If they assist
it they are idealized as simply gallant or pure; if they obstruct it they are
caricatured as simply villainous or cowardly. Hence every typical character in
romance tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like black and white
pieces in a chess game. In romance the "white" pieces who strive for
the quest correspond to the eiron group in comedy, though the word is no longer
appropriate, as irony has little place in romance. Romance has a counterpart to
the benevolent retreating eiron of comedy in its figure of the "old wise
man," as Jung calls him, like Prospero, Merlin, or the palmer of Spenser's
second quest, often a magician who affects the action he watches over. The
Arthur of The Faerie Queene, though not an old man, has this function. He has a
feminine counterpart in the sibylline wise mother-figure, often a potential
bride like Solveig in Peer Gynt, who sits quietly at home waiting for the hero
to finish his wanderings and come back to her. This latter figure is often the
lady for whose sake or at whose bidding the quest is performed: she is
represented by the Faerie Queene in Spenser and by Athene in the Perseus story.
These are the king and queen of the white pieces, though their power of
movement is of course reversed in actual chess. The disadvantage of making the
queen-figure the hero's mistress, in anything more than a political sense, is
that she spoils his fun with the distressed damsels he meets on his journey,
who are often enticingly tied [195] naked to rocks or trees, like Andromeda or
Angelica in Ariosto. A polarization may thus be set up between the lady of duty
and the lady of pleasure -- we have already glanced at a late development of
this in the light and dark heroines of Victorian romance. One simple way out is
to make the former the latter's mother-in-law: a theme of reconciliation after
enmity and jealousy most commonly results, as in the relations of Psyche and
Venus in Apuleius. Where there is no reconciliation, the older female remains
sinister, the cruel stepmother of folk tale.
The evil magician' and the witch, Spenser's
Archimago and Duessa, are the black king and queen. The latter is appropriately
called by Jung the "terrible mother," and he associates her with the
fear of incest and with such hags as Medusa who seem to have a suggestion of
erotic perversion about them. The redeemed figures, apart from the bride, are
generally too weak to be strongly characterized. The faithful companion or
shadow figure of the hero has his opposite in the traitor, the heroine her
opposite in the siren or beautiful witch, the dragon his opposite in the
friendly or helping animals that are so conspicuous in romance, among which the
horse who gets the hero to his quest has naturally a central place. The
conflict of son and father that we noted in comedy recurs in romance: in the
Bible the second Adam comes to the rescue of the first one, and in the Grail
cycle the pure son Galahad accomplishes what his impure father Lancelot failed
in.
The characters who elude the moral antithesis of
heroism and villainy generally are or suggest spirits of nature. They represent
partly the moral neutrality of the intermediate world of nature and partly a
world of mystery which is glimpsed but never seen, and which retreats when
approached. Among female characters of this type are the shy nymphs of
Classical legends and the elusive half-wild creatures who might be called
daughter-figures, and include Spenser's Florimell, Hawthorne's Pearl, Wagner's
Kundry, and Hudson's Rima. Their male counterparts have a little more variety.
Kipling's Mowgli is the best known of the wild boys; a green man lurked in the
forests of medieval England, appearing as Robin Hood and as the knight of
Gawain's adventure; the "salvage man," represented in Spenser by
Satyrane, is a Renaissance favorite, and the awkward but faithful giant with
unkempt hair has shambled amiably through romance for centuries.
Such characters are, more or less, children of
nature, who can [196] be brought to serve the hero, like Crusoe's Friday, but
retain the inscrutability of their origin. As servants or friends of the hero,
they impart the mysterious rapport with nature that so often marks the central
figure of romance. The paradox that many of these children of nature are
"supernatural" beings is not as distressing in romance as in logic.
The helpful fairy, the grateful dead man, the wonderful servant who has just
the abilities the hero needs in a crisis, are all folk tale commonplaces. They
are romantic intensifications of the comic tricky slave, the author's
architectus. In James Thurber's The Thirteen Clocks this character type is
called the "Golux," and there is no reason why the word should not be
adopted as a critical term.
In romance, as in comedy, there seem to be four
poles of characterization. The struggle of the hero with his enemy corresponds
to the comic contest of eiron and alazon. In the nature-spirits just referred
to we find the parallel in romance to the buffoon or master of ceremonies in
comedy: that is, their function is to intensify and provide a focus for the
romantic mood. It remains to be seen if there is a character in romance
corresponding to the agroikos type in comedy, the refuser of festivity or
rustic clown.
Such a character would call attention to realistic
aspects of life, like fear in the presence of danger, which threaten the unity
of the romantic mood. St. George and Una in Spenser are accompanied by a dwarf
who carries a bag of "needments." He is not a traitor, like the other
bag-carrier Judas Iscariot, but he is "fearful," and urges retreat
when the going is difficult. This dwarf with his needments represents, in the
dream world of romance, the shrunken and wizened form of practical waking
reality: the more realistic the story, the more important such a figure would
become, until, when we reach the opposite pole in Don Quixote, he achieves his
apotheosis as Sancho Panza. In other romances we find fools and jesters who are
licensed to show fear or make realistic comments, and who provide a localized
safety valve for realism without allowing it to disrupt the conventions of
romance. In Malory a similar role is assumed by Sir Dinadan, who, it is
carefully explained, is really a gallant knight as well as a jester: hence when
he makes jokes "the king and Launcelot laughed that they might not
sit" the suggestion of excessive and hysterical laughter being
psychologically very much to the point. [197]
Romance, like comedy, has six isolatable phases,
and as it moves from the tragic to the comic area, the first three are parallel
to the first three phases of tragedy and the second three to the second three
phases of comedy, already examined from the comic point of view. The phases
form a cyclical sequence in a romantic hero's life.
The first phase is the myth of the birth of the
hero, the morphology of which has been studied in some detail in folklore. This
myth is often associated with a flood, the regular symbol of the beginning and
the end of a cycle. The infant hero is often placed in an ark or chest floating
on the sea, as in the story of Perseus; from there he drifts to land, as in the
exordium to Beowulf, or is rescued from among reeds and bulrushes on a river
bank, as in the story of Moses. A landscape of water, boat, and reeds appears
at the beginning of Dante's journey up the mount of Purgatory, where there are
many suggestions that the soul is in that stage a newborn infant. On dry land
the infant may be rescued either from or by an animal, and many heroes are
nurtured by animals in a forest during their nonage. When Goethe's Faust begins
to look for his Helena, he searches in the reeds of the Peneus, and then finds
a centaur who carried her to safety on his back when she was a child.
Psychologically, this image is related to the
embryo in the womb, the world of the unborn often being thought of as liquid;
anthropologically, it is related to the image of seeds of new life buried in a
dead world of snow or swamp. The dragon's treasure hoard is closely linked with
this mysterious infant life enclosed in a chest. The fact that the real source
of wealth is potential fertility or new life, vegetable or human, has run
through romance from ancient myths to Ruskin's King of the Golden River,
Ruskin's treatment of wealth in his economic works being essentially a
commentary on this fairy tale. A similar association of treasure hoard and
infant life appears in more plausible guise in Silas Marner. The long literary
history of the theme of mysterious parentage from Euripides to Dickens has
already been mentioned.
In the Bible the end of a historical cycle and the
birth of a new one is marked by parallel symbols. First we have a universal
deluge and an ark, with the potency of all future life contained in it,
floating on the waters; then we have the story of the Egyptian host drowned in
the Red Sea and the Israelites set free to carry their [198] ark through the
wilderness, an image adopted by Dante as the basis of his purgatorial
symbolism. The New Testament begins with an infant in a manger, and the
tradition of depicting the world outside as sunk in snow relates the Nativity
to the same archetypal phase. Images of returning spring soon follow: the
rainbow in the Noah story, the bringing of water out of a rock by Moses, the
baptism of Christ, all show the turning of the cycle from the wintry water of
death to the reviving waters of life. The providential birds, the raven and
dove in the Noah story, the ravens feeding Elijah in the wilderness, the dove
hovering over Jesus, belong to the same complex.
Often, too, there is a search for the child, who
has to be hidden away in a secret place. The hero being of mysterious origin,
his true paternity is often concealed, and a false father appears who seeks the
child's death. This is the role of Acrisius in the Perseus story, of the Cronos
of Hesiodic myth who tries to swallow his children, of the child-killing
Pharaoh in the Old Testament, and of Herod in the New. In later fiction he
often modulates to the usurping wicked uncle who appears several times in
Shakespeare. The mother is thus often the victim of jealousy, persecuted or
calumniated like the mother of Perseus or like Constance in the Man of Law's
Tale. This version is very close psychologically to the theme of the rivalry of
the son and a hateful father for possession of the mother. The theme of the
calumniated girl ordered out of the house with her child by a cruel father,
generally into the snow, still drew tears from audiences of Victorian
melodramas, and literary developments of the theme of the hunted mother in the
same period extend from Eliza crossing the ice in Uncle Tom's Cabin to Adam
Bede and Far from the Madding Crowd. The false mother, the celebrated cruel
stepmother, is also common: her victim is of course usually female, and the
resulting conflict is portrayed in many ballads and folktales of the Cinderella
type. The true father is sometimes represented by a wise old man or teacher:
this is the relation of Prospero to Ferdinand, as well as of Chiron the centaur
to Achilles. The double of the true mother appears in the daughter of Pharaoh
who adopts Moses, In more realistic modes the cruel parent speaks with the
voice of, or takes the form of, a narrow-minded public opinion.
The second phase brings us to the innocent youth of
the hero, a phase most familiar to us from the story of Adam and Eve in [199]
Eden before the Fall. In literature this phase presents a pastoral and Arcadian
world, generally a pleasant wooded landscape, full of glades, shaded valleys,
murmuring brooks, the moon, and other images closely linked with the female or
maternal aspect of sexual imagery. Its heraldic colors are green and gold,
traditionally the colors of vanishing youth: one thinks of Sandburg's poem
Between Two Worlds. It is often a world of magic or desirable law, and it tends
to center on a youthful hero, still overshadowed by parents, surrounded by
youthful companions. The archetype of erotic innocence is less commonly
marriage than the kind of "chaste" love that precedes marriage; the
love of brother for sister, or of two boys for each other. Hence, though in
later phases it is often recalled as a lost happy time or Golden Age, the sense
of being close to a moral taboo is very frequent, as it is of course in the
Eden story itself. Johnson's Rasselas, Poe's Eleanora, and Blake's Book of Thel
introduce us to a kind of prison-Paradise or unborn world from which the
central characters long to escape to a lower world, and the same feeling of
malaise and longing to enter a world of action recurs in the most exhaustive
treatment of the phase in English literature, Keats's Endymion.
The theme of the sexual barrier in this phase takes
many forms: the serpent of the Eden story recurs in Green Mansions, and a
barrier of fire separates Amoret in Spenser from her lover Scudamour. At the
end of the Purgatorio the soul reaches again its unfallen childhood or lost
Golden Age, and Dante consequently finds him self in the garden of Eden,
separated from the young girl Matelda by the river Lethe. The dividing river
recurs in William Morris's curious story The Sundering Flood, where an arrow
shot over it has to do for the symbol of sexual contact. In Kubla Khan, which
is closely related both to the Eden story in Paradise Lost and to Rasselas, a
"sacred river" is closely followed by the distant vision of a singing
damsel. Melville's Pierre opens with a sardonic parody of this phase, the hero
still dominated by his mother but calling her his sister. A good deal of the
imagery of this world may be found in the sixth book of The Faerie Queene,
especially in the stories of Tristram and Pastorella.
The third phase is the normal quest theme that we
have been discussing, and needs no further comment at this point. The fourth
phase corresponds to the fourth phase of comedy, in which the happier society
is more or less visible throughout the action instead [200] of emerging only in
the last few moments. In romance the central theme of this phase is that of the
maintaining of the integrity of the innocent world against the assault of
experience. It thus often takes the form of a moral allegory, such as we have
in Milton's Comus, Bunyan's Holy War, and many morality plays, including The
Castell of Perseveraunce. The much simpler scheme of the Canterbury Tales,
where the only conflict is to preserve the mood of holiday and festivity
against bickering, seems for some reason to be less frequent.
The integrated body to be defended may be
individual or social, or both. The individual aspect of it is presented in the
allegory of temperance in the second book of The Faerie Queene, which forms a
natural sequel to the first book, dealing as it does with the more difficult
theme of consolidating heroic innocence in this world after the first great
quest has been completed. Guyon, the knight of temperance, has as his main
antagonists Acrasia, the mistress of the Bower of Bliss, and Mammon. These
represent "Beauty and money," in their aspects as instrumental goods
perverted into external goals. The temperate mind contains its good within
itself, continence being its prerequisite, hence it belongs to what we have
called the innocent world. The intemperate mind seeks its good in the external
object of the world of experience. Both temperance and intemperance could be
called natural, but one belongs to nature as an order and the other to nature
as a fallen world. Comus's temptation of the Lady is based on a similar
ambiguity in the meaning of nature. A central image in this phase of romance is
that of the beleaguered castle, represented in Spenser by the House of Alma,
which is described in terms of the economy of the human body.
The social aspect of the same phase is treated in
the fifth book of The Faerie Queene, the legend of justice, where power is the
prerequisite of justice, corresponding to continence in relation to temperance.
Here we meet, in the vision of Isis and Osiris, the fourth-phase image of the
monster tamed and controlled by the virgin, an image which appears episodically
in Book One in connection with Una, who tames satyrs and a lion. The Classical
prototype of it is the Gorgon's head on the shield of Athene. The theme of
invincible innocence or virginity is associated with similar images in
literature from the child leading the beasts of prey in Isaiah to Marina in the
brothel in Pericles, and it reappears in later fictions [201] in which an
unusually truculent hero is brought to heel by the heroine. An ironic parody of
the same theme forms the basis of Aristophanes' Lysistrata.
The fifth phase corresponds to the fifth phase of
comedy, and like it is a reflective, idyllic view of experience from above, in
which the movement of the natural cycle has usually a prominent place. It deals
with a world very similar to that of the second phase except that the mood is a
contemplative withdrawal from or sequel to action rather than a youthful
preparation for it. It is, like the second phase, an erotic world, but it
presents experience as comprehended and not as a mystery. This is the world of
most of Morris's romances, of Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance, of the mature
innocent wisdom of The Franklin's Tale, and of most of the imagery of the third
book of The Faerie Queene. In this last, as well as in the late Shakespearean
romances, notably Pericles, and even The Tempest, we notice a tendency to the
moral stratification of characters. The true lovers are on top of a hierarchy
of what might be called erotic imitations, going down through the various
grades of lust and passion to perversion (Argante and Oliphant in Spenser;
Antiochus and his daughter in Pericles). Such an arrangement of characters is
consistent with the detached and contemplative view of society taken in this
phase.
The sixth or penseroso phase is the last phase of
romance as of comedy. In comedy it shows the comic society breaking up into
small units or individuals; in romance it marks the end of a movement from
active to contemplative adventure. A central image of this phase, a favorite of
Yeats, is that of the old man in the tower, the lonely hermit absorbed in
occult or magical studies. On a more popular and social level it takes in what
might be called cuddle fiction: the romance that is physically associated with
comfortable beds or chairs around fireplaces or warm and cosy spots generally.
A characteristic feature of this phase is the tale in quotation marks, where we
have an opening setting -- with a small group of congenial people, and then the
real story told by one of the members. In The Turn of the Screw a large party
is telling ghost stories in a country house; then some people leave, and a much
smaller and more intimate circle gathers around the crucial tale. The opening
dismissal of catechumens is thoroughly in the spirit and conventions of this
phase. The effect of such devices is to present the story through a relaxed and
contemplative haze as something that [202] entertains us without, so to speak,
confronting us, as direct tragedy confronts us.
Collections of tales based on a symposium device
like the Decameron belong here. Morris's Earthly Paradise is a very pure
example of the same phase: there a number of the great archetypal myths of
Greek and Northern culture are personified as a group of old men who forsook
the world during the Middle Ages, refusing to be made either kings or gods ?
and who now interchange their myths in an ineffectual land of dreams. Here the
themes of the lonely old men, the intimate group, and the reported tale are
linked. The calendar arrangement of the tales links it also with the symbolism
of the natural cycle. Another and very concentrated treatment of the phase is
Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, where a play representing the history of
English life is acted before a group. The history is conceived not only as a
progression but as a cycle of which the audience is the end, and, as the last
page indicates, the beginning as well.
From Wagner's Ring to science fiction, we may
notice an increasing popularity of the flood archetype. This usually takes the
form of some cosmic disaster destroying the whole fictional society except a
small group, which begins life anew in some sheltered spot. The affinities of
this theme to that of the cosy group which has managed to shut the rest of the
world out are clear enough, and it brings us around again to the image of the
mysterious newborn infant floating on the sea.
One important detail in poetic symbolism remains to
be considered. This is the symbolic presentation of the point at which the
undisplaced apocalyptic world and the cyclical world of nature come into
alignment, and which we propose to call the point of epiphany. Its most common
settings are the mountain-top, the island, the tower, the lighthouse, and the
ladder or staircase. Folk tales and mythologies are full of stories of an
original connection between heaven or the sun and earth. We have ladders of
arrows, ropes pecked in two by mischievous birds, and the like: such stories
are often analogues of the Biblical stories of the Fall, and survive in Jack's
beanstalk, Rapunzel's hair, and even the curious bit of floating folklore known
as the Indian rope trick. The movement from one world to the other may be
symbolized by the golden fire that descends from the sun, as in the mythical
basis of the Danae [203] story, and by its human response, the fire kindled on
the sacrificial altar. The "gold bug" in Poe's story, which reminds
us that the Egyptian scarab was a solar emblem, is dropped from above on the
end of a string through the eyehole of a skull on a tree and falls on top of a
buried treasure: the archetype here is closely related to the complex of images
we are dealing with, especially to some alchemical versions of it.
In the Bible we have Jacob's ladder, which in
Paradise Lost is associated with Milton's cosmological diagram of a spherical
cosmos hanging from heaven with a hole in the top. There are several
mountain-top epiphanies in the Bible, the Transfiguration being the most
notable, and the mountain vision of Pisgah, the end of the road through the
wilderness from which Moses saw the distant Promised Land, is typologically
linked. As long as poets accepted the Ptolemaic universe, the natural place for
the point of epiphany was a mountain-top just under the moon, the lowest
heavenly body. Purgatory in Dante is an enormous mountain with a path ascending
spirally around it, on top of which, as the pilgrim gradually recovers his lost
innocence and casts off his original sin ? is the garden of Eden. It is at this
point that the prodigious apocalyptic epiphany of the closing cantos of the
Purgatorio is achieved. The sense of being between an apocalyptic world above
and a cyclical world below is present too, as from the garden of Eden all seeds
of vegetable life fall back into the world, while human life passes on.
In The Faerie Queene there is a Pisgah vision in
the first book, when St. George climbs the mountain of contemplation and sees
the heavenly city from a distance. As the dragon he has to kill is the fallen
world, there is a level of the allegory in which his dragon is the space
between himself and the distant city. In the corresponding episode of Ariosto
the link between the mountain-top and the sphere of the moon is clearer. But
Spenser's fullest treatment of the theme is the brilliant metaphysical comedy
known as the Mutabilitie Cantoes, where the conflict of being and becoming,
Jove and Mutability, order and change, is resolved at the sphere of the moon.
Mutability's evidence consists of the cyclical movements of nature, but this
evidence is turned against her and proved to be a principle of order in nature
instead of mere change. In this poem the relation of the heavenly bodies to the
apocalyptic world is not metaphorical identification, as it is, at least as a
poetic convention, in Dante's Paradiso, but likeness: they are still within
nature, and [204] only in the final stanza of the poem does the real
apocalyptic world appear.
The distinction of levels here implies that there
may be analogous forms of the point of epiphany. For instance, it may be
presented in erotic terms as a place of sexual fulfilment, where there is no
apocalyptic vision but simply a sense of arriving at the summit of experience
in nature. This natural form of the point of epiphany is called in Spenser the
Gardens of Adonis. It recurs under that name in Keats's Endymion and is the
world entered by the lovers at the end of Shelley's Revolt of Islam. The
Gardens of Adonis, like Eden in Dante, are a place of seed, into which
everything subject to the cyclical order of nature enters at death and proceeds
from at birth. Milton's early poems are, like the Mutabilitie Cantoes, full of
the sense of a distinction between nature as a divinely sanctioned order, the
nature of the music of the spheres, and nature as a fallen and largely chaotic
world. The former is symbolized by the Gardens of Adonis in Comus, from whence
the attendant spirit descends to watch over the Lady. The central image of this
archetype, Venus watching over Adonis, is (to use a modern distinction) the
analogue in terms of Eros to the Madonna and Son in the context of Agape.
Milton picks up the theme of the Pisgah vision in
Paradise Regained, which assumes an elementary principle of Biblical typology
in which the events of Christ's life repeat those of the history of Israel.
Israel goes to Egypt, brought down by Joseph, escapes a slaughter of innocents,
is cut off from Egypt by the Red Sea, organizes into twelve tribes, wanders
forty years in the wilderness, receives the law from Sinai, is saved by a
brazen serpent on a pole, crosses the Jordan, and enters the Promised Land
under "Joshua, whom the Gentiles Jesus call." Jesus goes to Egypt in
infancy, led by Joseph, escapes a slaughter of innocents, is baptized and
recognized as the Messiah, wanders forty days in the wilderness, gathers twelve
followers, preaches the Sermon on the Mount, saves man kind by dying on a pole,
and thereby conquers the Promised Land as the real Joshua. In Milton the
temptation corresponds to the Pisgah vision of Moses, except that the gaze is
turned in the opposite direction. It marks the climax of Jesus' obedience to
the law, just before his active redemption of the world begins, and the
sequence of temptations consolidates the world, flesh, and devil into the
single form of Satan, The point of epiphany is here [205] represented by the
pinnacle of the temple, from which Satan falls away as Jesus remains motionless
on top of it. The fall of Satan reminds us that the point of epiphany is also
the top of the wheel of fortune, the point from which the tragic hero falls.
This ironic use of the point of epiphany occurs in the Bible in the story of
the Tower of Babel.
The Ptolemaic cosmos eventually disappeared, but
the point of epiphany did not, though in more recent literature it is often
ironically reversed, or brought to terms with greater demands for credibility.
Allowing for this, one may still see the same archetype in the final
mountain-top scene of Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken and in the central image of
Virginia Woolf s To the Lighthouse. In the later poetry of Yeats and Eliot it
becomes a central unifying image. Such titles as The Tower and The Winding
Stair indicate its importance for Yeats, and the lunar symbolism and the
apocalyptic imagery of The Tower and Sailing to Byzantium are both thoroughly
consistent. In Eliot it is the flame reached in the fire sermon of The Waste
Land, in contrast to the natural cycle which is symbolized by water, and it is
also the "multifoliate rose" of The Hollow Men. Ash Wednesday brings
us back again to the purgatorial winding stair, and Little Gidding to the
burning rose, where there is a descending movement of fire symbolized by the
Pentecostal tongues of flame and an ascending one symbolized by Hercules' pyre
and "shirt of flame."
Thanks as usual to Aristotle, the
theory of tragedy is in considerably better shape than the other three mythoi,
and we can deal with it more briefly, as the ground is more familiar. Without
tragedy, all literary fictions might be plausibly explained as expressions of
emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfilment or of repugnance: the tragic
fiction guarantees, so to speak, a disinterested quality in literary
experience. It is largely through the tragedies of Greek culture that the sense
of the authentic natural basis of human character comes into literature. In
romance the characters are still largely dream-characters; in satire they tend
to be caricatures; in comedy their actions are twisted to fit the demands of a
happy ending. In full tragedy the main characters are emancipated from dream,
an emancipation which is at the same time a restriction, [206] because the
order of nature is present. However thickly strewn a tragedy may be with
ghosts, portents, witches, or oracles, we know that the tragic hero cannot
simply rub a lamp and summon a genie to get him out of his trouble.
Like comedy, tragedy is best and most easily
studied in drama, but it is not confined to drama, nor to actions that end in
disaster. Plays that are usually called or classified with tragedies end in
serenity, like Cymbeline, or even joy, like Alcestis or
Racine's Esther, or in an ambiguous mood that is hard to define,
like Philoctetes. On the other hand, while a predominantly sombre
mood forms part of the unity of the tragic structure, concentrating on mood
does not intensify the tragic effect: if it did, Titus Andronicus might
well be the most powerful of Shakespeare's tragedies. The source of tragic effect
must be sought, as Aristotle pointed out, in the tragic mythos or
plot-structure.
It is a commonplace of criticism that comedy tends
to deal with characters in a social group, whereas tragedy is more concentrated
on a single individual. We have given reasons in the first essay for thinking
that the typical tragic hero is somewhere between the divine and the "all
too human." This must be true even of dying gods: Prometheus, being a god,
cannot die, but he suffers for his sympathy with the "dying ones" (brotoi)
or "mortal" men, and even suffering has something subdivine about it.
The tragic hero is very great as compared with us, but there is something else,
something on the side of him opposite the audience, compared to which he is
small. This something else may be called God, gods, fate, accident, fortune,
necessity, circumstance, or any combination of these, but whatever it is the
tragic hero is our mediator with it.
The tragic hero is typically on top of the wheel of
fortune, half way between human society on the ground and the something greater
in the sky. Prometheus, Adam, and Christ hang between heaven and earth, between
a world of paradisal freedom and a world of bondage. Tragic heroes are so much
the highest points in their human landscape that they seem the inevitable
conductors of the power about them, great trees more likely to be struck by
lightning than a clump of grass. Conductors may of course be instruments as
well as victims of the divine lightning: Milton's Samson destroys the
Philistine temple with himself, and Hamlet nearly exterminates the Danish court
in his own fall. Something of Nietzsche's mountain-top air of transvaluation
clings to the tragic hero: his thoughts [207] are not ours any more than his
deeds, even if, like Faustus, he is dragged off to hell for having them.
Whatever eloquence or affability he may have, an inscrutable reserve lies
behind it. Even sinister heroes -- Tamburlaine, Macbeth, Creon -- retain this
reserve, and we are reminded that men will die loyally for a wicked or cruel
man, but not for an amiable backslapper. Those who attract most devotion from
others are those who are best able to suggest in their manner that they have no
need of it, and from the urbanity of Hamlet to the sullen ferocity of Ajax,
tragic heroes are wrapped in the mystery of their communion with that something
beyond which we can see only through them, and which is the source of their
strength and their fate alike. In the phrase which so fascinated Yeats, the
tragic hero leaves his servants to do his "living" for him, and the
center of tragedy is in the hero's isolation, not in a villain's betrayal, even
when the villain is, as he often is, a part of the hero himself.
As for the something beyond, its names are variable
but the form in which it manifests itself is fairly constant. Whether the
context is Greek, Christian, or undefined, tragedy seems to lead up to an
epiphany of law, of that which is and must be. It can hardly be an accident
that the two great developments of tragic drama, in fifth-century Athens and in
seventeenth-century Europe, were contemporary with the rise of Ionian and of
Renaissance science. In such a world-view nature is seen as an impersonal
process which human law imitates as best it can, and this direct relation of
man and natural law is in the foreground. The sense in Greek tragedy that fate
is stronger than the gods really implies that the gods exist primarily to
ratify the order of nature, and that if any personality, even a divine one,
possesses a genuine power of veto over law, it is most unlikely that he will
want to exercise it. In Christianity much the same is true of the personality
of Christ in relation to the inscrutable decrees of the Father. Similarly the
tragic process in Shakespeare is natural in the sense that it simply happens,
whatever its cause, explanation, or relationships. Characters may grope about
for conceptions of gods that kill us for their sport, or for a divinity that
shapes our ends, but the action of tragedy will not abide our questions, a fact
often transferred to the personality of Shakespeare.
In its most elementary form, the vision of law (dike)
operates as lex talionis or revenge. The hero provokes enmity,
or inherits a [208] situation of enmity, and the return of the avenger
constitutes the catastrophe. The revenge-tragedy is a simple tragic structure,
and like most simple structures can be a very powerful one, often retained as a
central theme even in the most complex tragedies. Here the original act
provoking the revenge sets up an antithetical or counterbalancing movement, and
the completion of the movement resolves the tragedy. This happens so often that
we may almost characterize the total mythos of tragedy as binary, in contrast
to the three-part saturnalia movement of comedy.
We notice however the frequency of the device of
making the revenge come from another world, through gods or ghosts or oracles.
This device expands the conceptions of both nature and law beyond the limits of
the obvious and tangible. It does not thereby transcend those conceptions, as
it is still natural law that is manifested by the tragic action. Here we see
the tragic hero as disturbing a balance in nature, nature being conceived as an
order stretching over the two kingdoms of the visible and the invisible, a
balance which sooner or later must right itself. The righting of the balance is
what the Greeks called nemesis: again, the agent or instrument
of nemesis may be human vengeance, ghostly vengeance, divine
vengeance, divine justice, accident, fate or the logic of events, but the
essential thing is that nemesis happens, and happens
impersonally, unaffected, as Oedipus Tyrannus illustrates, by
the moral quality of human motivation involved. In the Oresteia we
are led from a series of revenge-movements into a final vision of natural law,
a universal compact in which moral law is included and which the gods, in the
person of the goddess of wisdom, endorse. Here nemesis, like its
counterpart the Mosaic law in Christianity, is not abolished but fulfilled: it
is developed from a mechanical or arbitrary sense of restored order,
represented by the Furies, to the rational sense of it expounded by Athene. The
appearance of Athene does not turn the Oresteia into a comedy,
but clarifies its tragic vision.
There are two reductive formulas which have often
been used to explain tragedy. Neither is quite good enough, but each is almost
good enough, and as they are contradictory, they must represent extreme or
limiting views of tragedy. One of these is the theory that all tragedy exhibits
the omnipotence of an external fate. And, of course, the overwhelming majority
of tragedies do leave us with a sense of the supremacy of impersonal power and
of the limitation of human effort. But the fatalistic reduction of tragedy
confuses the [209] tragic condition with the tragic process: fate, in a
tragedy, normally becomes external to the hero only after the tragic process
has been set going. The Greek ananke or moira is
in its normal, or pre-tragic, form the internal balancing condition of life. It
appears as external or antithetical necessity only after it has been violated
as a condition of life, just as justice is the internal condition of an honest
man, but the external antagonist of the criminal. Homer uses a profoundly
significant phrase for the theory of tragedy when he has Zeus speak of
Aegisthus as going hyper moron, beyond fate.
The fatalistic reduction of tragedy does not distinguish
tragedy from irony, and it is again significant that we speak of the irony of
fate rather than of its tragedy. Irony does not need an exceptional central
figure: as a rule, the dingier the hero the sharper the irony, when irony alone
is aimed at. It is the admixture of heroism that gives tragedy its
characteristic splendor and exhilaration. The tragic hero has normally had an
extraordinary, often a nearly divine, destiny almost within his grasp, and the
glory of that original vision never quite fades out of tragedy. The rhetoric of
tragedy requires the noblest diction that the greatest poets can produce, and
while catastrophe is the normal end of tragedy, this is balanced by an equally
significant original greatness, a paradise lost.
The other reductive theory of tragedy is that the
act which sets the tragic process going must be primarily a violation of moral law,
whether human or divine; in short, that Aristotle's hamartia or
"flaw" must have an essential connection with sin or wrongdoing.
Again it is true that the great majority of tragic heroes do possess hubris, a
proud, passionate, obsessed or soaring mind which brings about a morally
intelligible downfall. Such hubris is the normal precipitating agent of
catastrophe, just as in comedy the cause of the happy ending is usually some
act of humility, represented by a slave or by a heroine meanly disguised. In
Aristotle the hamartia of the tragic hero is associated with Aristotle's
ethical conception of proairesis, or free choice of an end, and Aristotle
certainly does tend to think of tragedy as morally, almost physically,
intelligible. It has already been suggested, however, that the conception of
catharsis, which is central to Aristotle's view of tragedy, is inconsistent
with moral reductions of it. Pity and terror are moral feelings, and they are
relevant but not attached to the tragic situation. Shakespeare is particularly
fond of planting moral lightning-rods on both sides of his heroes to deflect
the pity and terror: we have mentioned Othello [210] flanked by Iago and
Desdemona, but Hamlet is flanked by Claudius and Ophelia, Lear by his
daughters, and even Macbeth by Lady Macbeth and Duncan. In all these tragedies
there is a sense of some far-reaching mystery of which this morally intelligible
process is only a part. The hero's act has thrown a switch in a larger machine
than his own life, or even his own society.
All theories of tragedy as morally explicable
sooner or later run into the question: is an innocent sufferer in tragedy
(i.e., poetically innocent), Iphigeneia, Cordelia, Socrates in Plato's Apology,
Christ in the Passion, not a tragic figure? It is not very convincing to try to
provide crucial moral flaws for such characters. Cordelia shows a high spirit,
perhaps a touch of wilfulness, in refusing to flatter her father, and Cordelia
gets hanged. Joan of Arc in Schiller has a moment of tenderness for an English
soldier, and Joan is burned alive, or would have been if Schiller had not
decided to sacrifice the facts to save the face of his moral theory. Here we
are getting away from tragedy, and close to a kind of insane cautionary tale,
like Mrs. Pipchin's little boy who was gored to death by a bull for asking
inconvenient questions. Tragedy, in short, seems to elude the antithesis of moral
responsibility and arbitrary fate, just as it eludes the antithesis of good and
evil.
In the third book of Paradise Lost,
Milton represents God as arguing that he made man "Sufficient to have
stood, though free to fall." God knew that Adam would fall, but did not
compel him to do so, and on that basis he disclaims legal responsibility. This
argument is so bad that Milton, if he was trying to escape refutation, did well
to ascribe it to God. Thought and act cannot be so separated: if God had foreknowledge
he must have known in the instant of creating Adam that he was creating a being
who would fall. Yet the passage is a most haunting and suggestive one
nonetheless. For Paradise Lost is not simply an attempt to
write one more tragedy, but to expound what Milton believed to be the
archetypal myth of tragedy. Hence the passage is another example of existential
projection: the real basis of the relation of Milton's God to Adam is the
relation of the tragic poet to his hero. The tragic poet knows that his hero
will be in a tragic situation, but he exerts all his power to avoid the sense
of having manipulated that situation for his own purposes. He exhibits his hero
to us as God exhibits Adam to the angels. If the hero was not sufficient to
have stood, the mode is purely ironic; if he was not free to fall, the mode is
purely romantic, [211] the story of an invincible hero who will conquer all his
antagonists as long as the story is about him. Now most theories of tragedy
take one great tragedy as their norm: thus Aristotle's theory is largely
founded on Oedipus Tyrannus, and Hegel's on Antigone.
In seeing the archetypal human tragedy in the story of Adam, Milton was, of
course, in agreement with the whole Judaeo-Christian cultural tradition, and
perhaps arguments drawn from the story of Adam may have better luck in literary
criticism than in subjects compelled to assume Adam's real existence, either as
fact or as a merely legal fiction. Chaucer's monk, who clearly understood what
he was doing, began with Lucifer and Adam, and we may be well advised to follow
his example.
Adam, then, is in a heroic human situation: he is
on top of the wheel of fortune, with the destiny of the gods almost within his
reach. He forfeits that destiny in a way which suggests moral responsibility to
some and a conspiracy of fate to others. What he does is to exchange a fortune
of unlimited freedom for the fate involved in the consequences of the act of
exchange, just as, for a man who deliberately jumps off a precipice, the law of
gravitation acts as fate for the brief remainder of his life. The exchange is
presented by Milton as itself a free act or proairesis, a use of
freedom to lose freedom. And just as comedy often sets up an arbitrary law and
then organizes the action to break or evade it, so tragedy presents the reverse
theme of narrowing a comparatively free life into a process of causation. This
happens to Macbeth when he accepts the logic of usurpation, to Hamlet when he
accepts the logic of revenge, to Lear when he accepts the logic of abdication.
The discovery oranagnorisis which comes at the end of the tragic
plot is not simply the knowledge by the hero of what has happened to him
-- Oedipus Tyrannus, despite its reputation as a typical tragedy,
is rather a special case in that regard -- but the recognition of the
determined shape of the life he has created for himself, with an implicit
comparison with the uncreated potential life he has forsaken. The line of
Milton dealing with the fall of the devils, "O how unlike the place from
whence they fell!", referring as it does both to Virgil's quantum
mutatus ab illo and Isaiah's "How art thou fallen from heaven, O
Lucifer son of the morning," combines the Classical and the Christian
archetypes of tragedy for Satan, of course, like Adam, possessed an original
glory. In Milton the complement to the vision of Adam on top of the wheel of
fortune and [212] falling into the world of the wheel is Christ standing on the
pinnacle of the temple, urged by Satan to fall, and remaining motion less.
As soon as Adam falls, he enters his own created
life ; which is also the order of nature as we know it. The tragedy of Adam,
therefore, resolves, like all other tragedies, in the manifestation of natural
law. He enters a world in which existence is itself tragic, not existence
modified by an act, deliberate or unconscious. Merely to exist is to disturb
the balance of nature. Every natural man is a Hegelian thesis, and implies a
reaction: every new birth provokes the return of an avenging death. This fact,
in itself ironic and now called Angst, becomes tragic when a sense of a lost
and originally higher destiny is added to it. Aristotle's hamartia, then, is a
condition of being, not a cause of becoming: the reason why Milton ascribes his
dubious argument to God is that he is so anxious to remove God from a predetermined
causal sequence. On one side of the tragic hero is an opportunity for freedom,
on the other the inevitable consequence of losing that freedom. These two sides
of Adam's situation are represented in Milton by the speeches of Raphael and
Michael respectively. Even with an innocent hero or martyr the same situation
arises: in the Passion story it occurs in Christ's prayer in Gethsemane.
Tragedy seems to move up to an Augenblick or crucial moment
from which point the road to what might have been and the road to what will be
can be simultaneously seen. Seen by the audience, that is: it cannot be seen by
the hero if he is in a state of hubris, for in that case the crucial moment is
for him a moment of dizziness, when the wheel of fortune begins its inevitable
cyclical movement downward.
In Adam's situation there is a feeling, which in
Christian tradition can be traced back at least to St. Augustine, that time
begins with the fall; that the fall from liberty into the natural cycle also
started the movement of time as we know it. In other tragedies too we can trace
the feeling that nemesis is deeply involved with the movement of time, whether
as the missing of a tide in the affairs of men, as a recognition that the time
is out of joint, as a sense that time is the devourer of life, the mouth of
hell at the previous moment, when the potential passes forever into the actual,
or, in its ultimate horror, Macbeth's sense of it as simply one clock-tick
after another. In comedy time plays a redeeming role: it uncovers and brings to
light what is essential to the happy ending. 213] The subtitle of
Greene's Pandosto, the source of The Winter's Tale, is
"The Triumph of Time," and it well describes the nature of
Shakespeare's action, where time is introduced as a chorus. But in tragedy
the cognitio is normally the recognition of the inevitability
of a causal sequence in time, and the forebodings and ironic anticipations
surrounding it are based on a sense of cyclical return.
In irony, as distinct from tragedy, the wheel of
time completely encloses the action, and there is no sense of an original
contact with a relatively timeless world. In the Bible the tragic fall of Adam
is followed by its historical repetition, the fall of Israel into Egyptian
bondage, which is, so to speak, its ironic confirmation. As long as the
Geoffrey version of British history was accepted, the fall of Troy was the
corresponding event in the history of Britain, and, as the fall of Troy began
with an idolatrous misapplication of an apple, there were even symbolic
parallels. Shakespeare's most ironic play, Troilus and Cressida,
presents in Ulysses the voice of worldly wisdom, expounding with great
eloquence the two primary categories of the perspective of tragic irony in the
fallen world, time and the hierarchic chain of being. The extraordinary
treatment of the tragic vision of time by Nietzsche's Zarathustra, in which the
heroic acceptance of cyclical return becomes a glumly cheerful acceptance of a
cosmology of identical recurrence, marks the influence of an age of irony.
Anyone accustomed to think archetypally of
literature will recognize in tragedy a mimesis of sacrifice. Tragedy is a
paradoxical combination of a fearful sense of Tightness (the hero must fall)
and a pitying sense of wrongness (it is too bad that he falls). There is a
similar paradox in the two elements of sacrifice. One of these is communion,
the dividing of a heroic or divine body among a group which brings them into
unity with, and as, that body. The other is propitiation, the sense that in
spite of the communion the body really belongs to another, a greater, and a
potentially wrathful power. The ritual analogies to tragedy are more obvious
than the psychological ones, for it is irony, not tragedy, that represents the
nightmare or anxiety-dream. But, just as the literary critic finds Freud most
suggestive for the theory of comedy, and Jung for the theory of romance, so for
the theory of tragedy one naturally looks to the psychology of the will to
power, as expounded in Adler and Nietzsche. Here one finds a
"Dionysiac" aggressive will, intoxicated by dreams of its own
omnipotence, impinging upon an [214] "Apollonian" sense of external
and immovable order. As a mimesis of ritual, the tragic hero is not really
killed or eaten, but the corresponding thing in art still takes place, a vision
of death which draws the survivors into a new unity. As a mimesis of dream, the
inscrutable tragic hero, like the proud and silent swan, becomes articulate at
the point of death, and the audience, like the poet in Kubla Khan, revives his
song within itself. With his fall, a greater world beyond which his gigantic
spirit had blocked out becomes for an instant visible, but there is also a
sense of the mystery and remoteness of that world.
If we are right in our suggestion that romance,
tragedy, irony and comedy are all episodes in a total quest-myth, we can see
how it is that comedy can contain a potential tragedy within itself. In myth,
the hero is a god, and hence he does not die, but dies and rises again. The
ritual pattern behind the catharsis of comedy is the resurrection that follows
the death, the epiphany or manifestation of the risen hero. In Aristophanes the
hero, who often goes through a point of ritual death, is treated as a risen god,
hailed as a new Zeus, or given the quasi-divine honors of the Olympic victor.
In New Comedy the new human body is both a hero and a social group. The
Aeschylean trilogy proceeds to the comic satyr-play, which is said to have
affinities with spring festivals. Christianity, too, sees tragedy as an episode
in the divine comedy, the larger scheme of redemption and resurrection. The
sense of tragedy as a prelude to comedy seems almost inseparable from anything
explicitly Christian. The serenity of the final double chorus in the St.
Matthew Passion would hardly be attainable if composer and audience did not
know that there was more to the story. Nor would the death of Samson lead to
"calm of mind, all passion spent," if Samson were not a prototype of
the rising Christ, associated at the appropriate moment with the phoenix.
This is an example of the way in which myths
explain the structural principles behind familiar literary facts, in this case
the fact that to make a sombre action end happily is easy enough, and to
reverse the procedure almost impossible. (Of course we have a natural dislike
of seeing pleasant situations turn out disastrously, but if a poet is working
on a solid structural basis, our natural likes and dislikes have nothing to do
with the matter.) Even Shakespeare, who can do anything, never does quite this.
The action of King Lear, which seems heading for some kind of serenity, is
suddenly [215] wrenched into agony by the hanging of Cordelia, providing a
conclusion which the stage refused to act for over a century, but none of
Shakespeare's tragedies impresses us as a comedy gone wrong -- Romeo and Juliet
has a suggestion of such a structure, but it is only a suggestion. Hence while
of course a tragedy may contain a comic action, it contains it only
episodically as a subordinate contrast or underplot.
The characterization of tragedy is very like that
of comedy in reverse. The source of nemesis, whatever it is, is an eiron, and
may appear in a great variety of agents, from wrathful gods to hypocritical
villains. In comedy we noticed three main types of eiron characters: a
benevolent withdrawing and returning figure, the tricky slave or vice, and the
hero and heroine. We have the tragic counterpart to the withdrawn eiron in the
god who decrees the tragic action, like Athene in Ajax or Aphrodite in
Hippolytus; a Christian example is God the Father in Paradise Lost. He may also
be a ghost, like Hamlet's father; or it may not be a person at all but simply
an invisible force known only by its effects, like the death that quietly
seizes on Tamburlaine when the time has come for him to die. Often, as in the
revenge-tragedy, it is an event previous to the action of which the tragedy
itself is the consequence.
A tragic counterpart to the vice or tricky slave
may be discerned in the soothsayer or prophet who foresees the inevitable end,
or more of it than the hero does, like Teiresias. A closer example is the
Machiavellian villain of Elizabethan drama, who, like the vice in comedy, is a
convenient catalyzer of the action because he requires the minimum of
motivation, being a self-starting principle of malevolence. Like the comic
vice, too, he is something of an architectus or projection of the author's
will, in this case for a tragic conclusion. "I limned this
night-piece," says Webster's Lodovico, "and it was my best."
Iago dominates the action of Othello almost to the point of being a tragic
counterpart to the black king or evil magician of romance. The affinities of
the Machiavellian villain with the diabolical are naturally close, and he may
be an actual devil like Mephistopheles, but the sense of awfulness belonging to
an agent of catastrophe can also make him something more like the high priest
of a sacrifice. There is a touch of this in Webster's Bosola. King Lear has a
Machiavellian villain in Edmund, and Edmund is contrasted with Edgar. Edgar,
with his bewildering variety [216] of disguises, his appearance to blind or mad
people in different roles, and his tendency to appear on the third sound of the
trumpet and to come pat like the catastrophe of the old comedy, seems to be an
experiment in a new type, a kind of tragic "virtue," if I may coin
this word by analogy, a counterpart in the order of nature to a guardian angel
or similar attendant in romance.
The tragic hero usually belongs of course to the
alazon group, an impostor in the sense that he is self-deceived or made dizzy
by hubris. In many tragedies he begins as a semi-divine figure, at least in his
own eyes, and then an inexorable dialectic sets to work which separates the
divine pretence from the human actuality. 'They told me I was everything,"
says Lear: " 'tis a lie; I am not ague-proof." The tragic hero is
usually vested with supreme authority, but is often in the more ambiguous
position of a tyrannos whose rule depends on his own abilities, rather than a
purely hereditary or de jure monarch (basileus) like Duncan. The latter is more
directly a symbol of the original vision or birthright, and is often a somewhat
pathetic victim, like Richard II, or even Agamemnon. Parental figures in
tragedy have the same ambivalence that they have in all other forms.
We found in comedy that the term bomolochos or
buffoon need not be restricted to farce, but could be extended to cover comic
characters who are primarily entertainers, with the function of in creasing or
focussing the comic mood. The corresponding contrasting type in tragedy is the
suppliant, the character, often female, who presents a picture of unmitigated
helplessness and destitution. Such a figure is pathetic, and pathos, though it
seems a gentler and more relaxed mood than tragedy, is even more terrifying.
Its basis is the exclusion of an individual from a group, hence it attacks the
deepest fear in ourselves that we possess a fear much deeper than the
relatively cosy and sociable bogey of hell. In the figure of the suppliant pity
and terror are brought to the highest possible pitch of intensity, and the
awful consequences of rejecting the suppliant for all concerned is a central
theme of Greek tragedy. Suppliant figures are often women threatened with death
or rape, or children, like Prince Arthur in King John. The fragility of
Shakespeare's Ophelia marks an affinity with the suppliant type. Often, too,
the suppliant is in the structurally tragic position of having lost a place of
greatness: this is the position of Adam and Eve in the tenth book of Paradise
Lost, of the Trojan women after the fall [217] of Troy, of Oedipus in the
Colonus play, and so on. A subordinate figure who plays the role of focussing
the tragic mood is the messenger who regularly announces the catastrophe in
Greek tragedy. In the final scene of comedy, when the author is usually trying
to get all his characters on the stage at once, we often notice the
introduction of a new character, generally a messenger bearing some missing
piece of the cognitio, such as Jaques de Boys in As You Like It or the gentle
astringer in All's Well, who represents the comic counterpart.
Finally, a tragic counterpart of the comic refuser
of festivity may be discerned in a tragic type of plain dealer who may be
simply the faithful friend of the hero, like Horatio in Hamlet, but is often an
outspoken critic of the tragic action, like Kent in King Lear or Enobarbus in
Antony and Cleopatra. Such a character is in the position of refusing, or at
any rate resisting, the tragic movement toward catastrophe. Abdiel's role in
the tragedy of Satan in Paradise Lost is similar. The familiar figures of
Cassandra and Teiresias combine this role with that of the soothsayer. Such
figures, when they occur in a tragedy without a chorus, are often called chorus
characters, as they illustrate one of the essential functions of the tragic
chorus. In comedy a society forms around the hero: in tragedy the chorus, however
faithful, usually represents the society from which the hero is gradually
isolated. Hence what it expresses is a social norm against which the hero's
hubris may be measured The chorus is not the voice of the hero's conscience by
any means, but very seldom does it encourage him in his hubris or prompt him to
disastrous action. The chorus or chorus character is, so to speak, the
embryonic germ of comedy in tragedy, just as the refuser of festivity, the
melancholy Jaques or Alceste, is a tragic germ in comedy.
In comedy the erotic and social affinities of the
hero are combined and unified in the final scene; tragedy usually makes love
and the social structure irreconcilable and contending forces, a conflict which
reduces love to passion and social activity to a forbidding and imperative
duty. Comedy is much concerned with integrating the family and adjusting the
family to society as a whole; tragedy is much concerned with breaking up the
family and opposing it to the rest of society. This gives us the tragic archetype
of Antigone, of which the conflict of love and honor in Classical French drama,
of Neigung and Pflicht in Schiller, of
passion and [218] authority in the Jacobeans, are all moralized
simplifications. Again, just as the heroine of comedy often ties together the
action, so it is obvious that the central female figure of a tragic action will
often polarize the tragic conflict. Eve, Helen, Gertrude, and Emily in
the Knight's Tale are some ready instances: the structural
role of Briseis in theIliad is similar. Comedy works out the proper
relations of its characters and prevents heroes from marrying their sisters or
mothers; tragedy presents the disaster of Oedipus or the incest of Siegmund.
There is a great deal in tragedy about pride of race and birthright, but its
general tendency is to isolate a ruling or noble family from the rest of
society.
The phases of tragedy move from the heroic to the
ironic, the first three corresponding to the first three phases of romance, the
last three to the last three of irony. The first phase of tragedy is the one in
which the central character is given the greatest possible dignity in contrast
to the other characters, so that we get the perspective of a stag pulled down
by wolves. The sources of dignity are courage and innocence, and in this phase
the hero or heroine usually is innocent. This phase corresponds to the myth of
the birth of the hero in romance, a theme which is occasionally incorporated
into a tragic structure, as in Racine's Athalie. But owing to the
unusual difficulty of making an interesting dramatic character out of an
infant, the central and typical figure of this phase is the calumniated woman,
often a mother the legitimacy of whose child is suspected. A whole series of
tragedies based on a Griselda figure belong here, stretching from the
Senecan Octavia to Hardy's Tess, and including the
tragedy of Hermione in The Winter's Tale. If we are to read Alcestis as
a tragedy, we have to see it as a tragedy of this phase in which Alcestis is
violated by Death and then has her fidelity vindicated by being restored to
life. Cymbeline belongs here too: in this play the theme of
the birth of the hero appears offstage, for Cymbeline was the king of Britain
at the time of the birth of Christ, and the halcyon peace in which the play
concludes has a suppressed reference to this.
An even clearer example, ,and certainly one of the
greatest in English literature, is The Duchess of Malfi. The
Duchess has the innocence of abundant life in a sick and melancholy society,
where the fact that she has "youth and a little beauty" is precisely
why she is hated. She reminds us too that one of the essential characteristics
[219] of innocence in the martyr is an unwillingness to die. When Bosola comes
to murder her he makes elaborate attempts to put her half in love with easeful
death and to suggest that death is really a deliverance. The attempt is
motivated by a grimly controlled pity, and is roughly the equivalent of the
vinegar sponge in the Passion. When the Duchess, her back to the wall, says
"I am the Duchess of Malfi still," "still" having its full
weight of "always," we understand how it is that even after her death
her invisible presence continues to be the most vital character in the play. The
White Devil is an ironic parody-treatment of the same phase.
The second phase corresponds to the youth of the
romantic hero, and is in one way or another the tragedy of innocence in the
sense of inexperience, usually involving young people. It may be simply the
tragedy of a youthful life cut off, as in the stories of Iphigeneia and
Jephthah's daughter, of Romeo and Juliet, or, in a more complex situation, in
the bewildered mixture of idealism and priggishness that brings Hippolytus to
disaster. The simplicity of Shaw's Joan and her lack of worldly wisdom place
her here also. For us however the phase is dominated by the archetypal tragedy
of the green and golden world, the loss of the innocence of Adam and Eve, who,
no matter how heavy a doctrinal load they have to carry, will always remain
dramatically in the position of children baffled by their first contact with an
adult situation. In many tragedies of this type the central character survives,
so that the action closes with some adjustment to a new and more mature
experience, "Henceforth I learn that to obey is best," says Adam, as
he and Eve go hand in hand out to the world before them. A less clear cut but
similar resolution occurs when Philoctetes, whose serpent-wound reminds us a
little of Adam, is taken off his island to enter the Trojan war. Ibsen'sLittle
Eyolf is a tragedy of this phase, and with the same continuing
conclusion, in which it is the older characters who are educated through the
death of a child.
The third phase, corresponding to the central
quest-theme of romance, is tragedy in which a strong emphasis is thrown on the
success or completeness of the hero's achievement. The Passion belongs here, as
do all tragedies in which the hero is in any way related to or a prototype of
Christ, like Samson Agonistes. The paradox of victory within
tragedy may be expressed by a double perspective in the action. Samson is a
buffoon of a Philistine carnival and simultaneously a tragic hero to the
Israelites, but the tragedy [220] ends in triumph and the carnival in catastrophe.
Much the same is true of the mocked Christ in the Passion. But just as the
second phase often ends in anticipation of greater maturity, so this one is
often a sequel to a previous tragic or heroic action, and comes at the end of a
heroic life. One of the greatest dramatic examples is Oedipus at
Colonus, where we find the usual binary form of a tragedy conditioned by a
previous tragic act, ending this time not in a second disaster, but in a full
rich serenity that goes far beyond a mere resignation to Fate. In narrative
literature we may cite Beowulf's last fight with the dragon, the pendant to his
Grendel quest. Shakespeare's Henry V is a successfully
completed romantic quest made tragic by its implicit context: everybody knows
that King Henry died almost immediately and that sixty years of un broken
disaster followed for England -- at least, if anyone in Shakespeare's audience
did not know that, his ignorance was certainly no fault of Shakespeare's.
The fourth phase is the typical fall of the hero through
hubris and hamartia that we have already discussed. In this phase we cross the
boundary line from innocence to experience, which is also the direction in
which the hero falls. In the fifth phase the ironic element increases, the
heroic decreases, and the characters look further away and in a smaller
perspective. Timon of Athens impresses us as more ironic and
less heroic than the better known tragedies, not simply because Timon is a more
middle-class hero who has to buy what authority he has, but because the feeling
that Timon's suicide has somehow failed to make a fully heroic point is very
strong. Timon is oddly isolated from the final action, in which the breach
between Alcibiades and the Athenians closes up over his head, in striking
contrast with the conclusions of most of the other tragedies, where nobody is
allowed to steal the show from the central character.
The ironic perspective in tragedy is attained by
putting the characters in a state of lower freedom than the audience. For a
Christian audience an Old Testament or pagan setting is ironic in this sense,
as it shows its characters moving according to the conditions of a law, whether
Jewish or natural, from which the audience has been, at least theoretically,
redeemed. Samson Agonistes, though unique in English literature,
presents a combination of Classical form and Hebrew subject-matter that the
greatest contemporary tragedian, Racine, also reached at the end of his life inAthalie
and [221] Esther. Similarly the epilogue to
Chaucer's Troilus puts a Courtly Love tragedy into its
historical relation to "payens corsed olde rites." The events in
Geoffrey of Monmouth's British history are supposed to be contemporary with
those of the Old Testament, and the sense of life under the law is present
everywhere in King Lear. The same structural principle accounts for
the use of astrology and other fatalistic machinery connected with the turning
wheels of fate or fortune. Romeo and Juliet are star-crossed, and Troilus loses
Criseyde because every five hundred years Jupiter and Saturn meet the crescent
moon in Cancer and claim another victim. The tragic action of the fifth phase
presents for the most part the tragedy of lost direction and lack of knowledge,
not unlike the second phase except that the context is the world of adult
experience. Oedipus Tyrannus belongs here, and all tragedies
and tragic episodes which suggest the existential projection of fatalism, and,
like much of the Book of Job, seem to raise metaphysical or theological
questions rather than social or moral ones.
Oedipus Tyrannus, however, is already moving into
the sixth phase of tragedy, a world of shock and horror in which the central
images are images of sparagmos, that is, cannibalism, mutilation, and
torture. The specific reaction known as shock is appropriate to a situation of
cruelty or outrage. (The secondary or false shock produced by the outrage done
to some emotional attachment or fixation, as in the critical reception ofJude
the Obscure or Ulysses, has no status in criticism, as false shock is
a disguised resistance to the autonomy of culture.) Any tragedy may have one or
more shocking scenes in it, but sixth-phase tragedy shocks as a whole, in its
total effect. This phase is more common as a subordinate aspect of tragedy than
as its main theme, as unqualified horror or despair makes a difficult
cadence. Prometheus Bound is a tragedy of this phase, though this is
partly an illusion due to its isolation from the trilogy to which it belongs.
In such tragedies the hero is in too great agony or humiliation to gain the privilege
of a heroic pose, hence it is usually easier to make him a villainous hero,
like Marlowe's Barabas, although Faustus also belongs to the same phase. Seneca
is fond of this phase, and bequeathed to the Elizabethans an interest in the
gruesome, an effect which usually has some connection with mutilation, as when
Ferdinand offers to shake hands with the Duchess of Malfi and gives her a dead
man's hand. Titus Andronicus is an experiment in Senecan sixth-phase
horror which [222] makes a great deal of mutilation, and shows also a strong
interest, from the opening scene on, in the sacrificial symbolism of tragedy.
At the end of this phase we reach a point of demonic epiphany, where we see or
glimpse the undisplaced demonic vision, the vision of the Inferno. Its chief
symbols, besides the prison and the mad house, are the instruments of a
torturing death, the cross under the sunset being the antithesis of the tower
under the moon. A strong element of demonic ritual in public punishments and
similar mob amusements is exploited by tragic and ironic myth. Breaking on the
wheel becomes Lear's wheel of fire; bear-baiting is an image for Gloucester and
Macbeth, and for the crucified Prometheus the humiliation of exposure, the
horror of being watched, is a greater misery than the pain. Derkou
theama (behold the spectacle; get your staring over with) is his bitterest
cry. The inability of Milton's blind Samson to stare back is his greatest
torment, and one which forces him to scream at Delilah, in one of the most
terrible passages of all tragic drama, that he will tear her to pieces if she
touches him.
We come now to the mythical
patterns of experience, the attempts to give form to the shifting ambiguities
and complexities of unidealized existence. We cannot find these patterns merely
in the mimetic or representational aspect of such literature, for that aspect
is one of content and not form. As structure, the central principle of ironic
myth is best approached as a parody of romance: the application of romantic mythical
forms to a more realistic content which fits them in unexpected ways. No one in
a romance, Don Quixote protests, ever asks who pays for the hero's
accommodation.
The chief distinction between irony and satire is
that satire is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it
assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured. Sheer
invective or name-calling ("flyting") is satire in which there is
relatively little irony: on the other hand, whenever a reader is not sure what
the author's attitude is or what his own is supposed to be, we have irony with
relatively little satire. Fielding's Jonathan Wild is satiric
irony: certain flat moral judgements made by the narrator (as in the
description of Bagshot in chapter twelve) are in accord with the decorum of the
work, but would be out of key in, [223] say, Madame Bovary. Irony
is consistent both with complete realism of content and with the suppression of
attitude on the part of the author. Satire demands at least a token fantasy, a
content which the reader recognizes as grotesque, and at least an implicit
moral standard, the latter being essential in a militant attitude to
experience. Some phenomena, such as the ravages of disease, may be called
grotesque, but to make fun of them would not be very effective satire. The
satirist has to select his absurdities, and the act of selection is a moral
act.
The argument of Swift's Modest Proposal has
a brain-softening plausibility about it: one is almost led to feel that the narrator
is not only reasonable but even humane; yet the "almost" can never
drop out of any sane man's reaction, and as long as it remains there the modest
proposal will be both fantastic and immoral. When in another passage Swift
suddenly says, discussing the poverty of Ireland, "But my Heart is too
heavy to continue this Irony longer," he is speaking of satire, which
breaks down when its content is too oppressively real to permit the maintaining
of the fantastic or hypothetical tone. Hence satire is irony which is
structurally close to the comic: the comic struggle of two societies, one
normal and the other absurd, is reflected in its double focus of morality and
fantasy. Irony with little satire is the non-heroic residue of tragedy,
centering on a theme of puzzled defeat.
Two things, then, are essential to satire; one is
wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the
other is an object of attack. Attack without humor, or pure denunciation, forms
one of the boundaries of satire. It is a very hazy boundary, because invective
is one of the most readable forms of literary art, just as panegyric is one of
the dullest. It is an established datum of literature that we like hearing
people cursed and are bored with hearing them praised, and almost any
denunciation, if vigorous enough, is followed by a reader with the kind of
pleasure that soon breaks into a smile. To attack anything, writer and audience
must agree on its undesirability, which means that the content of a great deal
of satire founded on national hatreds, snobbery, prejudice, and personal pique
goes out of date very quickly.
But attack in literature can never be a pure
expression of merely personal or even social hatred, whatever the motivation
for it may be, because the words for expressing hatred, as distinct from
enmity, have too limited a range. About the only ones we have are [224] derived
from the animal world, but calling a man a swine or a skunk or a woman a bitch
affords a severely restricted satisfaction, as most of the unpleasant qualities
of the animal are human projections. As Shakespeare's Thersites says of
Menelaus, "to what form, but that he is, should wit larded with malice,
and malice forced with wit, turn him to? To an ass, were nothing; he is both
ass and ox; to an ox, were nothing; he is both ox and ass." For effective
attack we must reach some kind of impersonal level, and that commits the
attacker, if only by implication, to a moral standard. The satirist commonly
takes a high moral line. Pope asserts that he is "To Virtue only and her
friends a friend," suggesting that that is what he is really being when he
is reflecting on the cleanliness of the underwear worn by the lady who had
jilted him.
Humor, like attack, is founded on convention. The
world of humor is a rigidly-stylized world in which generous Scotchmen,
obedient wives, beloved mothers-in-law, and professors with presence of mind
are not permitted to exist. All humor demands agreement that certain things,
such as a picture of a wife beating her husband in a comic strip, are
conventionally funny. To introduce a comic strip in which a husband beats his
wife would distress the reader, because it would mean learning a new
convention. The humor of pure fantasy, the other boundary of satire, belongs to
romance, though it is uneasy there, as humor perceives the incongruous, and the
conventions of romance are idealized. Most fantasy is pulled back into satire
by a powerful undertow often called allegory, which may be described as the
implicit reference to experience in the perception of the incongruous. The
White Knight in Alice who felt that one should be provided for everything, and
therefore put anklets around his horse's feet to guard against the bites of
sharks, may pass as pure fantasy. But when he goes on to sing an elaborate
parody of Wordsworth we begin to sniff the acrid, pungent smell of satire, and
when we take a second look at the White Knight we recognize a character type
closely related both to Quixote and to the pedant of comedy.
As in this mythos we have the
difficulty of two words to contend with, it may be simplest, if the reader is
now accustomed to our sequence of six phases, to start with them and describe
them in order, instead of abstracting a typical form and discussing it first.
The first three are phases of satire, and correspond to the first three or
ironic phases of comedy. [225]
The first phase corresponds to the first phase of
ironic comedy in which there is no displacement of the humorous society. The
sense of absurdity about such a comedy arises as a kind of back fire or recall
after the work has been seen or read. Once we have finished with it, deserts of
futility open up on all sides, and we have, in spite of the humor, a sense of
nightmare and a close proximity to something demonic. Even in very
light-hearted comedy we may get a trace of this feeling: if the main theme of Pride
and Prejudice had been the married life of Collins and Charlotte
Lucas, one wonders how long Collins would continue to be funny. Hence it is in
decorum for even a satire prevailingly light in tone, such as Pope's second
Moral Essay on the characters of women, to rise to a terrifying climax of moral
intensity.
The satire typical of this phase may be called the
satire of the low norm. It takes for granted a world which is full of
anomalies, injustices, follies, and crimes, and yet is permanent and undisplaceable.
Its principle is that anyone who wishes to keep his balance in such a world
must learn first of all to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. Counsels of
prudence, urging the reader in effect to adopt an eiron role,
have been prominent in literature from Egyptian times. What is recommended is
conventional life at its best: a clairvoyant knowledge of human nature in
oneself and others, an avoidance of all illusion and compulsive behavior, a
reliance on observation and timing rather than on aggressiveness. This is
wisdom, the tried and tested way of life, which does not question the logic of
social convention, but merely follows the procedures which in fact do serve to
maintain one's balance from one day to the next. The eiron of
the low norm takes an attitude of flexible pragmatism; he assumes that society
will, if given any chance, behave more or less like Caliban's Setebos in
Browning's poem, and he conducts himself accordingly. On all doubtful points of
behavior convention is his deepest conviction. And however good or bad expertly
conventional behavior may be thought to be, it is certainly the most difficult
of all forms of behavior to satirize, just as anyone with a new theory of
behavior, even if saint or prophet, is the easiest of all people to ridicule as
a crank.
Hence the satirist may employ a plain,
common-sense, conventional person as a foil for the various alazons of
society. Such a person may be the author himself or a narrator, and he
corresponds to the plain dealer in comedy or the blunt adviser in tragedy. When
[226] distinguished from the author, he is often a rustic with pastoral
affinities, illustrating the connection of his role with the agroikos type
in comedy. The kind of American satire that passes as folk humor, exemplified
by the Biglow Papers, Mr. Dooley, Artemus Ward, and Will Rogers, makes a good
deal of him, and this genre is closely linked with the North American
development of the counsel of prudence in Poor Richard's Almanac and the Sam
Slick papers. Other examples are easy enough to find, both where we expect
them, as in Crabbe, whose tale The Patron also belongs to the
counsel-of-prudence genre, and where we might not expect them, as in the
Fish-Eater dialogue in Erasmus's Colloquies, Chaucer represents
himself as a shy, demure, inconspicuous member of his pilgrimage, agreeing
politely with everybody ("And I seyde his opinion was good"), and
showing to the pilgrims none of the powers of observation that he displays to
his reader. We are not surprised therefore to find that one of his
"own" tales is in the counsel of prudence tradition.
The most elaborate form of low-norm satire is the
encyclopaedic form favored by the Middle Ages, closely allied to preaching, and
generally based on the encyclopaedic scheme of the seven deadly sins, a form
which survived as late as Elizabethan times in Nashe's Pierce Penilesse and
Lodge's Wits Miserie. Erasmus's Praise of Folly belongs
to this tradition, in which the link with the corresponding comic phase, the
view of an upside-down world dominated by humors and ruling passions, can be
clearly seen. When adopted by a preacher, or even an intellectual, the low norm
device is part of an implied a fortiori argument: if people
cannot reach even ordinary common sense, or church porch virtue, there is
little point in comparing them with any higher standards.
Where gaiety predominates in such satire, we have
an attitude which fundamentally accepts social conventions but stresses
tolerance and flexibility within their limits. Close to the conventional norm
we find the lovable eccentric, the Uncle Toby or Betsey Trotwood who
diversifies, without challenging, accepted codes of behavior. Such characters
have much of the child about them, and a child's behavior is usually thought of
as coming towards an accepted standard instead of moving away from it. Where
attack predominates, we have an inconspicuous, unobtrusiveeiron standard
contrasted with the alazons or blocking humors who are in
charge of society. This situation has for its archetype an ironic [227]
counterpart of the romance theme of giant-killing. For society to exist at all
there must be a delegation of prestige and influence to organized groups such
as the church, the army, the professions and the government, all of which
consist of individuals given more than individual power by the institutions to
which they belong. If a satirist presents, say, a clergyman as a fool or
hypocrite, he is, qua satirist, attacking neither a man nor a
church. The former has no literary or hypothetical point, and the latter
carries him outside the range of satire. He is attacking an evil man protected
by his church, and such a man is a gigantic monster: monstrous because not what
he should be, gigantic because protected by his position and by the prestige of
good clergymen. The cowl might make the monk if it were not for satire.
Milton says, "for a Satyr as it was born out
of a Tragedy, so ought to resemble his parentage, to strike high, and adventure
dangerously at the most eminent vices among the greatest persons." Apart
from the etymology, this needs one qualification: a great vice does not need a
great person to represent it. We have mentioned the gigantic size of Sir
Epicure Mammon's dream in The Alchemist: the whole mystery of the
corrupted human will is in it, yet the utter impotence of the dreamer is
essential to the satire. Similarly, we miss much of the point of Jonathan
Wild unless we take the hero seriously as a parody of greatness, or
false social standards of valuation. But in general the principle may be
accepted for the satirist's antagonists that the larger they come, the easier
they fall. In low-norm satire the alazon is a Goliath
encountered by a tiny David with his sudden and vicious stones, a giant prodded
by a cool and observant but almost invisible enemy into a blind, stampeding
fury and then polished off at leisure. This situation has run through satire
from the stories of Polyphemus and Blunderbore to, in a much more ironic and
equivocal context, the Chaplin films. Dryden transforms his victims into
fantastic dinosaurs of bulging flesh and peanut brains; he seems genuinely
impressed by the "goodly and great" bulk of Og and by the furious
energy of the poet Doeg.
The figure of the low-norm eiron is
irony's substitute for the hero, and when he is removed from satire we can see
more clearly that one of the central themes of the mythos is
the disappearance of the heroic. This is the main reason for the predominance
in fictional satire of what may be called the Omphale archetype, the man
bullied or dominated by women, which has been prominent in [228] satire all
through its history, and embraces a vast area of contemporary humor, both
popular and sophisticated. Similarly, when the giant or monster is removed we
can see that he is the mythical form of society, the hydra or fama full of
tongues, Spenser's blatant beast which is still at large. And while the crank
with his new idea is an obvious target for satire, still social convention is
mainly fossilized dogma, and the standard appealed to by low-norm satire is a
set of conventions largely invented by dead cranks. The strength of the
conventional person is not in the conventions but in his common-sense way of
handling them. Hence the logic of satire itself drives it on from its first phase
of conventional satire on the unconventional to a second phase in which the
sources and values of conventions themselves are objects of ridicule.
The simplest form of the corresponding second phase
of comedy is the comedy of escape, in which a hero runs away to a more
congenial society without transforming his own. The satiric counter part of
this is the picaresque novel, the story of the successful rogue who, from
Reynard the Fox on, makes conventional society look foolish without setting up
any positive standard. The picaresque novel is the social form of what with Don
Quixote modulates into a more intellectualized satire, the nature of which
needs some explanation.
Satire, according to Juvenal's useful if hackneyed
formula, has an interest in anything men do. The philosopher, on the other
hand, teaches a certain way or method of living; he stresses some things and
despises others; what he recommends is carefully selected from the data of
human life; he continually passes moral judgements on social behavior. His
attitude is dogmatic; that of the satirist pragmatic. Hence satire may often
represent the collision between a selection of standards from experience and
the feeling that experience is bigger than any set of beliefs about it. The
satirist demonstrates the infinite variety of what men do by showing the
futility, not only of saying what they ought to do, but even of attempts to
systematize or formulate a coherent scheme of what they do. Philosophies of
life abstract from life, and an abstraction implies the leaving out of
inconvenient data. The satirist brings up these in convenient data, sometimes
in the form of alternative and equally plausible theories, like the Erewhonian
treatment of crime and disease or Swift's demonstration of the mechanical
operation of spirit. [229]
The central theme in the second or quixotic phase
of satire, then, is the setting of ideas and generalizations and theories and
dogmas over against the life they are supposed to explain. This theme is
presented very clearly in Lucian's dialogue The Sale of Lives, in
which a series of slave-philosophers pass in review, with all their arguments
and guarantees, before a buyer who has to consider living with them. He buys a
few, it is true, but as slaves, not as masters or teachers. Lucian's attitude
to Greek philosophy is repeated in the attitude of Erasmus and Rabelais to the
scholastics, of Swift and Samuel Butler I to Descartes and the Royal Society,
of Voltaire to the Leibnitzians, of Peacock to the Romantics, of Samuel Butler
II to the Darwinians, of Aldous Huxley to the behaviorists. We notice that
low-norm satire often becomes merely anti-intellectual, a tendency that crops
up in Crabbe (vide The Learned Boy) and even in Swift. The influence of
low-norm satire in American culture has produced a popular contempt for
longhairs and ivory towers, an example of what may be called a fallacy of
poetic projection, or taking literary conventions to be facts of life.
Anti-intellectual satire proper, however, is based on a sense of the
comparative naivete of systematic thought, and should not be limited by such
ready-made terms as skeptical or cynical.
Skepticism itself may be or become a dogmatic
attitude, a comic humor of doubting plain evidence. Cynicism is a little closer
to the satiric norm: Menippus, the founder of the Menippean satire, was a
cynic, and cynics are generally associated with the role of intellectual
Thersites. Lyly's play Campaspe, for instance, presents Plato,
Aristotle, and Diogenes, but the first two are bores, and Diogenes, who is not
a philosopher at all but an Elizabethan clown of the malcontent type, steals
the show. But still cynicism is a philosophy, and one that may produce the
strange spiritual pride of the Peregrinus of whom Lucian makes a searching and
terrible analysis. In the Sale of Lives the cynic and the
skeptic are auctioned in their turn, and the latter is the last to be sold,
dragged off to have his very skepticism refuted, not by argument but by life.
Erasmus and Burton called themselves Democritus Junior, followers of the philosopher
who laughed at mankind, but Lucian's buyer considers that Democritus too has
overdone his pose. Insofar as the satirist has a "position" of his
own, it is the preference of practice to theory, experience to metaphysics.
When Lucian goes to consult his master Menippus, he is told that the method of
wisdom is to do the task [230] that lies to hand, advice repeated in
Voltaire's Candide and in the instructions given to the unborn
in Erewhon. Thus philosophical pedantry becomes, as every target of
satire eventually does, a form of romanticism or the imposing of
over-simplified ideals on experience.
The satiric attitude here is neither philosophical
nor anti-philosophical, but an expression of the hypothetical form of art.
Satire on ideas is only the special kind of art that defends its own creative
detachment. The demand for order in thought produces a supply of intellectual
systems: some of these attract and convert artists, but as an equally great
poet could defend any other system equally well, no one system can contain the
arts as they stand. Hence a systematic reasoner, given the power, would be
likely to establish hierarchies in the arts, or censor and expurgate as Plato
wished to do to Homer. Satire on systems of reasoning, especially on the social
effects of such systems, is art's first line of defence against all such
invasions.
In the warfare of science against superstition, the
satirists have done famously. Satire itself appears to have begun with the
Greek silloi which were pro-scientific attacks on
superstition. In English literature, Chaucer and Ben Jonson riddled the
alchemists with a cross-fire of their own jargon; Nashe and Swift hounded
astrologers into premature graves; Browning's Sludge the Medium annihilated
the spiritualists, and a rabble of occultists, numerologists, Pythagoreans, and
Rosicrucians lie sprawling in the wake of Hudibras. To the
scientist it may seem little short of perverse that satire placidly goes on
making fun of legitimate astronomers in The Elephant in the Moon,
of experimental laboratories inGulliver's Travels, of Darwinian and
Malthusian cosmology in Erewhon, of conditioned reflexes in Brave
New World, of technological efficiency in 1984. Charles Fort,
one of the few who have continued the tradition of intellectual satire in this
century, brings the wheel full circle by mocking the scientists for their very
freedom from superstition itself, a rational attitude which, like all rational
attitudes, still refuses to examine all the evidence.
Similarly with religion. The satirist may feel with
Lucian that the eliminating of superstition would also eliminate religion, or
with Erasmus that it would restore health to religion. But whether Zeus exists
or not is a question; that men who think him vicious and stupid will insist
that he change the weather is a fact, accepted by [231] scoffer and devout
alike. Any really devout person would surely welcome a satirist who cauterized
hypocrisy and superstition as an ally of true religion. Yet once a hypocrite
who sounds exactly like a good man is sufficiently blackened, the good man also
may begin to seem a little dingier than he was. Those who would agree even with
the theoretical parts of Holy Willie's Prayer in Burns look
rather like Holy Willies themselves. One feels similarly that while the
personal attitudes of Erasmus, Rabelais, Swift, and Voltaire to institutional
religion varied a good deal, the effect of their satire varies much less.
Satire on religion includes the parody of the sacramental life in English Protestantism
that runs from Milton's divorce pamphlets to The Way of All Flesh,
and the antagonism to Christianity in Nietzsche, Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence
based on the conception of Jesus as another kind of romantic idealist.
The narrator in Erewhon remarks
that while the real religion of most of the Erewhonians was, whatever they said
it was, the acceptance of low-norm conventionality (the goddess Ydgrun), there
was also a small group of "high Ydgrunites" who were the best people
he found in Erewhon. The attitude of these people reminds us rather of
Montaigne: they had the eiron's sense of the value of conventions
that had been long established and were now harmless; they had the eiron's
distrust of the ability of anyone's reason, including their own, to transform
society into a better structure. But they were also intellectually detached
from the conventions they lived with, and were capable of seeing their
anomalies and absurdities as well as their stabilizing conservatism.
The literary form that high Ydgrunism produces in
second-phase satire we may call the ingenu form, after
Voltaire's dialogue of that name. Here an outsider to the society, in this case
an American Indian, is the low norm: he has no dogmatic views of his own, but
he grants none of the premises which make the absurdities of society look
logical to those accustomed to them. He is really a pastoral figure, and like
the pastoral, a form congenial to satire, he contrasts a set of simple
standards with the complex rationalizations of society. But we have just seen
that it is precisely the complexity of data in experience which the satirist
insists on and the simple set of standards which he distrusts. That is why theingenu is
an outsider; he comes from another world which is either unattainable or
associated with something else undesirable. Montaigne's cannibals have all the
virtues we have not, if we don't mind being [232] cannibals. More's Utopia is
an ideal state except that to enter it we must give up the idea of Christendom.
The Houyhnhnms live the life of reason and nature better than we, but Gulliver
finds that he is born a Yahoo, and that such a life would be nearer the
capacities of gifted animals than of humans. Whenever the "other
world" appears in satire, it appears as an ironic counterpart to our own,
a reversal of accepted social standards. This form of satire is represented in
Lucian's Kataplous and Charon, journeys to the
other world in which the eminent in this one are shown doing appropriate but
unaccustomed things, a form incorporated in Rabelais, and in the medieval danse
macabre. In the last named the simple equality of death is set against the
complex inequalities of life.
Intellectual satire defends the creative detachment
in art, but art too tends to seek out socially accepted ideas and become in its
turn a social fixation. We have spoken of the idealized art of romance as in
particular the form in which an ascendant class tends to express itself, and so
the rising middle class in medieval Europe naturally turned to mock-romance.
Other forms of satire have a similar function, whether so intended or not.
The danse macabre and the kataplous are
ironic reversals of the kind of romanticism that we have in the serious vision
of the other world. In Dante, for instance, the judgements of the next world
usually confirm the standards of this one, and in heaven itself nearly the
whole available billeting is marked for officers only. The cultural effect of
such satire is not to denigrate romance, but to prevent any group of
conventions from dominating the whole of literary experience. Second-phase
satire shows literature assuming a special function of analysis, of breaking up
the lumber of stereotypes, fossilized beliefs, superstitious terrors, crank
theories, pedantic dogmatisms, oppressive fashions, and all other things that
impede the free movement (not necessarily, of course, the progress) of society.
Such satire is the completion of the logical process known as the reductio
ad absurdum, which is not designed to hold one in perpetual captivity, but
to bring one to the point at which one can escape from an incorrect procedure.
The romantic fixation which revolves around the
beauty of perfect form, in art or elsewhere, is also a logical target for
satire. The word satire is said to come from satura, or hash, and a
kind of parody of form seems to run all through its tradition, from the [233]
mixture of prose and verse in early satire to the jerky cinematic changes of
scene in Rabelais (I am thinking of a somewhat archaic type of cinema). Tristram
Shandy andDon Juan illustrate very clearly the constant
tendency to self-parody in satiric rhetoric which prevents even the process of
writing itself from becoming an over simplified convention or ideal. In Don
Juan we simultaneously read the poem and watch the poet at work
writing it: we eavesdrop on his associations, his struggles for rhymes, his
tentative and discarded plans, the subjective preferences organizing his choice
of details (e.g.: "Her stature tall -- I hate a dumpy woman"), his
decisions whether to be "serious" or mask himself with humor. All of
this and even more is true of Tristram Shandy. A deliberate
rambling digressiveness, which in A Tale of a Tub reaches the
point of including a digression in praise of digressions, is endemic in the
narrative technique of satire, and so is a calculated bathos or art of sinking
in its suspense, such as the quizzical mock-oracular conclusions in Apuleius
and Rabelais and in the refusal of Sterne for hundreds of pages even to get his
hero born. An extraordinary number of great satires are fragmentary,
unfinished, or anonymous. In ironic fiction a good many devices turning on the
difficulty of communication, such as having a story presented through an idiot
mind, serve the same purpose. Virginia Woolf's The Waves is
made up of speeches of characters constructed precisely out of what they do not
say, but what their behavior and attitudes say in spite of them.
This technique of disintegration brings us well
into the third phase of satire, the satire of the high norm. Second-phase
satire may make a tactical defence of the pragmatic against the dogmatic, but
here we must let go even of ordinary common sense as a standard. For common
sense too has certain implied dogmas, notably that the data of sense experience
are reliable and consistent, and that our customary associations with things
form a solid basis for interpreting the present and predicting the future. The
satirist cannot explore all the possibilities of his form without seeing what
happens if he questions these assumptions. That is why he so often gives to
ordinary life a logical and self-consistent shift of perspective. He will show
us society suddenly in a telescope as posturing and dignified pygmies, or in a
microscope as hideous and reeking giants, or he will change his hero into an
ass and show us how humanity looks from an ass's point of view. This type of
fantasy [234] breaks down customary associations, deduces sense experience to
one of many possible categories, and brings out the tentative, als ob basis
of all our thinking. Emerson says that such shifts of perspective afford
"a low degree of the sublime," but actually they afford something of
far greater artistic importance, a high degree of the ridiculous. And,
consistently with the general basis of satire as parody-romance, they are
usually adaptations of romance themes: the fairyland of little people, the land
of giants, the world of enchanted animals, the wonderlands parodied in
Lucian's True History.
When we fall back from the outworks of faith and
reason to the tangible realities of the senses, satire follows us up. A slight
shift of perspective, a different tinge in the emotional coloring, and the
solid earth becomes an intolerable horror. Gulliver's Travels shows
us man as a venomous rodent, man as a noisome and clumsy pachyderm, the mind of
man as a bear-pit, and the body of man as a compound of filth and ferocity. But
Swift is simply following where his satiric genius leads him, and genius seems
to have led practically every great satirist to become what the world calls
obscene. Social convention means people parading in front of each other, and
the preservation of it demands that the dignity of some men and the beauty of
some women should be thought of apart from excretion, copulation, and similar
embarrassments. Constant reference to these latter brings us down to a bodily
democracy paralleling the democracy of death in the danse macabre.
Swift's affinity with the danse macabre tradition is marked in
his description of the Struldbrugs, and his Directions to Servants and
his more unquotable poems are in the tradition of the medieval preachers who
painted the repulsiveness of gluttony and lechery. For here as everywhere else
in satire there is a moral reference: it is all very well to eat, drink, and be
merry, but one cannot always put off dying until tomorrow.
In the riotous chaos of Rabelais, Petronius, and
Apuleius satire plunges through to its final victory over common sense. When we
have finished with their weirdly logical fantasies of debauch, dream, and
delirium we wake up wondering if Paracelsus' suggestion is right that the
things seen in delirium are really there, like stars in daytime, and invisible
for the same reason. Lucius becomes initiated and slips evasively out of our
grasp, whether he lied or told the truth, as St. Augustine says with a touch of
exasperation; Rabelais promises us a final oracle and leaves us staring at an
empty [235] bottle; Joyce's HCE struggles for pages toward wakening, but just
as we seem on the point of grasping something tangible we are swung around to
the first page of the book again. The Satyricon is a torn
fragment from what seems like a history of some monstrous Atlantean race that
vanished in the sea, still drunk.
The first phase of satire is dominated by the
figure of the giant-killer, but in this rending of the stable universe a giant
power rears up in satire itself. When the Philistine giant comes out to battle
with the children of light, he naturally expects to find someone his own size
ready to meet him, someone who is head and shoulders over every man in Israel.
Such a Titan would have to bear down his opponent by sheer weight of words, and
hence be a master of that technique of torrential abuse which we call
invective. The gigantic figures in Rabelais, the awakened forms of the bound or
sleeping giants that meet us in Finnegans Wake and the opening
of Gullivers Travels, are expressions of a creative exuberance of
which the most typical and obvious sign is the verbal tempest, the tremendous
outpouring of words in catalogues, abusive epithets and erudite technicalities
which since the third chapter of Isaiah (a satire on female ornament) has been
a feature, and almost a monopoly, of third-phase satire. Its golden age in
English literature was the age of Burton, Nashe, Marston, and Urquhart of
Cromarty, the uninhibited translator of Rabelais, who in his spare time was
what Nashe would call a "scholastical squitter-book," producing books
with such titles as Trissotetras,Pantochronochanon, Exkubalauron and Logopandecteison.
Nobody except Joyce has in modern English made much sustained effort to carry
on this tradition of verbal exuberance: even Carlyle, from this point of view,
is a sad comedown after Burton and Urquhart. In American culture it is
represented by the "tall talk" of the folklore boaster, which has some
literary congeners in the catalogues of Whitman and Moby Dick.
With the fourth phase we move around to the ironic
aspect of tragedy, and satire begins to recede. The fall of the tragic hero,
especially in Shakespeare, is so delicately balanced emotionally that we almost
exaggerate any one element in it merely by calling attention to it. One of
these elements is the elegiac aspect in which irony is at a minimum, the sense
of gentle and dignified pathos, often symbolized by music, which marks the
desertion of Antony by Hercules, the dream of the rejected Queen Catherine in Henry
VIII, Hamlet's "absent thee from felicity awhile," and Othello's
[236] Aleppo speech. One can of course find irony even here, as Mr. Eliot has
found it in the last named, but the main emotional weight is surely thrown on
the opposite side. Yet we are also aware that Hamlet dies in the middle of a
frantically muddled effort at revenge which has taken eight lives instead of
one, that Cleopatra fades away with great dignity after a careful search for
easy ways to die, that Coriolanus is badly confused by his mother and violently
resents being called a boy. Such tragic irony differs from satire in that there
is no attempt to make fun of the character, but only to bring out clearly the
"all too human," as distinct from the heroic, aspects of the tragedy.
King Lear attempts to achieve heroic dignity through his position as a king and
father, and finds it instead in his suffering humanity: hence it is in King
Lear that we find what has been called the "comedy of the
grotesque," the ironic parody of the tragic situation, most elaborately
developed.
As a phase of irony in its own right, the fourth
phase looks at tragedy from below, from the moral and realistic perspective of
the state of experience. It stresses the humanity of its heroes, minimizes the
sense of ritual inevitability in tragedy, supplies social and psychological
explanations for catastrophe, and makes as much as possible of human misery
seem, in Thoreau's phrase, "superfluous and evitable." This is the
phase of most sincere, explicit realism: it is in general Tolstoy's phase, and
also that of a good deal of Hardy and Conrad. One of its central themes is
Stein's answer to the problem of the "romantic" Lord Jim in Conrad:
"in the destructive element immerse." This remark, without ridiculing
Jim, still brings out the quixotic and romantic element in his nature and
criticizes it from the point of view of experience. The chapter on watches and
chronometers in Melville's Pierre takes a similar attitude.
The fifth phase, corresponding to fatalistic or
fifth-phase tragedy, is irony in which the main emphasis is on the natural
cycle, the steady unbroken turning of the wheel of fate or fortune. It sees
experience, in our terms, with the point of epiphany closed up, and its motto
is Browning's "there may be heaven; there must be hell." Like the
corresponding phase of tragedy, it is less moral and more generalized and
metaphysical in its interest, less melioristic and more stoical and resigned.
The treatment of Napoleon in War and Peace and in The
Dynastsaffords a good contrast between the fourth and fifth phases of
irony. The refrain in the Old English Complaint of Deor:
"Thaes ofereode; thisses swa maeg" (freely [237] translatable as
"Other people got through things; maybe I can") expresses a stoicism
not of the "invictus" type, which maintains a romantic dignity, but
rather a sense, found also in the parallel second phase of satire, that the
practical and immediate situation is likely to be worthy of more respect than
the theoretical explanation of it.
The sixth phase presents human life in terms of
largely unrelieved bondage. Its settings feature prisons, madhouses, lynching
mobs, and places of execution, and it differs from a pure inferno mainly in the
fact that in human experience suffering has an end in death. In our day the
chief form of this phase is the nightmare of social tyranny, of which 1984 is
perhaps the most familiar. We often find, on this boundary of the visio
malefica, the use of parody-religious symbols suggesting some form of Satan
or Antichrist worship. In Kafka's In the Penal Colony a parody
of original sin appears in the officer's remark, "Guilt is never to be
doubted." In 1984 the parody of religion in the final scenes is more
elaborate: there is a parody of the atonement, for instance, when the hero is
tortured into urging that the torments be inflicted on the heroine instead. The
assumption is made in this story that the lust for sadistic power on the part
of the ruling class is strong enough to last indefinitely, which is precisely
the assumption one has to make about devils in order to accept the orthodox
picture of hell. The "telescreen" device brings into irony the tragic
theme of derkou theama, the humiliation of being constantly watched
by a hostile or derisive eye.
The human figures of this phase are, of
course, desdichado figures of misery or madness, often
parodies of romantic roles. Thus the romantic theme of the helpful servant
giant is parodied in The Hairy Ape and Of Mice and Men,
and the romantic presenter or Prospero figure is parodied in the Benjy of The
Sound and the Fury whose idiot mind contains, without comprehending,
the whole action of the novel. Sinister parental figures naturally abound, for
this is the world of the ogre and the witch, of Baudelaire's black giantess and
Pope's goddess Dullness, who also has much of the parody deity about her
("Light dies before thy uncreating word!"), of the siren with the
imprisoning image of shrouding hair, and, of course, of the femme
fatale or malignant grinning female, "older than the rocks among
which she sits," as Pater says of her.
This brings us around again to the point of demonic
epiphany, [238] the dark tower and prison of endless pain, the city of dreadful
night in the desert, or, with a more erudite irony, the tour abolie,
the goal of the quest that isn't there. But on the other side of this blasted
world of repulsiveness and idiocy, a world without pity and without hope,
satire begins again. At the bottom of Dante's hell, which is also the center of
the spherical earth, Dante sees Satan standing upright in the circle of ice,
and as he cautiously follows Virgil over the hip and thigh of the evil giant,
letting himself down by the tufts of hair on his skin, he passes the center and
finds him self no longer going down but going up, climbing out on the other
side of the world to see the stars again. From this point of view, the devil is
no longer upright, but standing on his head, in the same attitude in which he
was hurled downward from heaven upon the other side of the earth. Tragedy and
tragic irony take us into a hell of narrowing circles and culminate in some
such vision of the source of all evil in a personal form. Tragedy can take us
no farther; but if we persevere with the mythos of irony and satire, we shall
pass a dead center, and finally see the gentlemanly Prince of Darkness bottom
side up. [239]
