Poetry Nation Review articles

Michael Schmidt's journal has been running for well over three decades, and it has a well-deserved reputation for intelligent discussion of not only poetry but also the arts and culture generally. It has been an honour to write for it over the years. Here's an article I contributed on Marina Warner, together with a sample of four reviews.

On this page:

• The Comedy of Terrors: Reading Myth with Marina Warner
• The Voice of Ariel
• The Moronic Inferno
• The Story So Far
• The Beat Vision

The Comedy of Terrors: Reading Myth with Marina Warner

July/August 1999

When Marina Warner began writing about myth, in the mid-seventies, the term 'myth critic' was a term of abuse. It meant that one was probably an unthinking admirer of Carl Jung, and was given to unsubstantiated generalisations about primordial narrative patterns and about archetypal images such as the 'great mother' and the 'wise old man'. This nonchalant approach was in the process of being replaced by aggressive new methods derived from structural linguistics. A leading influence was Roland Barthes, author of the recently translated Mythologies. The title, of course, was meant to be provocative; the point was that when Barthes used the word 'mythology' he really meant 'ideology'. Thus, instead of musing upon rites of passage and quests for the Grail, one should be rigorously exposing the way advertisements, magazine covers and sporting events deluded their consumers, persuading them that what was artificial was perfectly natural, that the way things were was the way they had always been.

Early on schooled in structuralism, which had taught her to see everything from table manners to religious rituals as the phonemes of a cultural grammar, Warner knew Barthes's Mythologies thoroughly.  But, without going over to the other extreme, the Jungian game of 'spot the archetype', she avoided the stance of abrasive confidence with which 'semiological' analysis , interrogating the 'production' of meanings by 'sign-systems', emptied myths of all mystery.  Indeed, we can trace her development as a successful overcoming of the anxiety of Barthes's influence.  In her early work she invokes him in the manner of a disciple; in her later work, though he is still being acknowledged, she clearly finds his equation of 'mythology' and 'ideology' inadequate.  Perhaps we are now in a position to see that her contribution to the interpretation of myths is by far the more valuable: in going beyond his narrow agenda, she opens up their infinite potential. 

Even in one of her earliest books, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Wiedenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), we can see Warner refusing merely to 'expose' a set of stories or symbols.  While enlisting Barthes in her repudiation of  'the eternally feminine', she may be seen even here to be prevented by her fascination with Catholic iconography from offering a reductive reading of Christian mythology.  Indeed, it is precisely in developing her historical approach that she demonstrates the residual power of the female image.  She celebrates what we might call 'the everchanging feminine'.  Thus, she moves with ease from Inanna, the Mesopotamian goddess of fertility, to the 'beloved' in the Song of Songs, to the 'bride' of the Book of Revelation, to the worshipped lady of Troubadour poetry, and so to Dante's Beatrice.  The unifying factor is the Virgin Mary herself, who is either anticipated by, or anticipates, each of these figures.  Indeed, Warner is able to make such transitions in the spirit of the Christian witness itself, with its dynamic structuring in relation to previous scriptures.  For it is clear that her concern with time, with the interaction of past and present, derives from her own early Catholicism.  A good deal of Alone of All Her Sex focuses on Mary as 'the second Eve'.  Though she does not use the term, what she is addressing is the principle of 'typology', whereby the 'type' (Adam, Eve) is temporally related to the 'antitype' (Jesus, Mary). As she explains in her interview with Nicholas Tredell:

The New Testament is the book, the Old Testament is the prefiguration of the book, there is an Old Covenant and a New Covenant, and the New Covenant exists as not just a continuum but as a recapitulation in an actual form of the promise of the past. (Conversations with Critics, Carcanet, 1995, p. 246). 

As she further explains, this is the principle behind much of her own fiction.  She mentions Indigo, which is informed by 'the sense that we re-enact what was prefigured, that, without it being deterministic, there's some sort of divine plan, that the structures repeat' (p. 247).  Here she is using 'divine plan' figuratively, but with the deference that is due to Christianity's ambitious attempt to read history as a narrative of redemption.  Thus, though Indigo is a reworking of The Tempest rather than the Testament, the idea that myths gain resonance in time, through imaginative reworking, is a lesson learnt from scripture, with its dimensions of prefiguration and fulfilment, foreshadowing and realisation.  Interestingly, Warner's volume of short stories Mermaids in the Basement is essentially an audacious series of  'antitypes', with the tales of the fall, of the flood, of the encounter of Susannah with the elders, and of the visit of Solomon by the Queen of Sheba, amongst others, acquiring new life in the contemporary world.  If the original idea was that the Christian scriptures were the completion of earlier ones, Warner implies that the best stories are those which never exhaust their promises.  In effect, what she is about is the secularisation of the scriptural pattern, in such a way that the closure of 'typology' is translated into the endless possibility of transformation.

The initial idea that myth extends itself in history, through the power of the imagination, has itself been explicitly addressed in her last three critical works.  These might be thought of as comprising a 'trilogy': one which so powerfully demonstrates her capacity for reading and rereading, telling and retelling, that one hesitates to categorise it as 'non-fiction'.  It deals with the themes of monstrosity and fear, and it indicates how these might be accommodated in a vital, open-ended narrative of understanding. The latest of the three volumes has already been widely and favourably reviewed – though in the process it has been treated very much as a 'one-off'.  Here we might redress the balance by relating it to the rest of the 'trilogy'.  

The first volume, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (Vintage, 1994), is the transcription of the 'Reith Lectures' broadcast the same year.  It attempts to move between the areas of mythography (interpretation of myth), literary criticism (revaluation of classic texts) and cultural studies (description of  popular entertainment).  The six lectures deal respectively with demonic females, with aggressive males, with childhood innocence, with the  'wilderness', with primitive 'savagery' and with nationalism.  Once again, Barthes is acknowledged, but here the reservations are explicit: while his work may amount to an 'exposure' of myth, 'as he reveals how it works to conceal political motives and secretly circulate ideology through society', her 'own view is less pessimistic…' (pp xiii-xiv).  For the 'process of clarification' can 'give rise to newly told stories, can sew and weave and knit different patterns into the social fabric, and 'this is a continuous process for everyone to take part in' (p xiv).  Her main title is explained by etymology: she traces the word 'monster' back to two Latin words, one of which means 'show' and the other of which means 'warn'.  Thus: 'a myth shows something, it's a story spoken to a purpose, it issues a warning' (p 19).  Her account of  'six myths of our time' demonstrates that we are in danger of 'managing monsters' only in the crude terms of the violent film or video game: that is, by slaying them – in which process we are effectively destroying the richness of our own inner lives, and so destroying ourselves.  She advocates a more subtle, traditional approach to the monstrous other: negotiation, sympathy, understanding.  We need to maintain constant vigilance in the face of imaginative corruption, and we need to attain a deeper knowledge of the sources from which contemporary myths are constructed. 

Though, or perhaps because, Warner is a great advocate of cinema as a 'realm of enchantment', she is sharply critical of  films that never get beyond stereotypes.  Hence in her first lecture, she shrewdly parallels the fact that the rampaging dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are female with the demonisation of the single mother in the tabloid press.  But she is not only concerned to make contemporary connections: she traces the figure of the 'monstrous mother' back through the realms of 'classic' literature, to Euripides's verse tragedy Medea.  The 'she-monster' is not a static image: Warner searches her out within different times and places, between 'high' and 'low' art.  If our culture seems content with cliche, we need to reconsider our tradition, seeking elements in it which might help us go against the current grain.  For Euripides, in depicting Medea as the child-killer, also threw down a challenge: how are we to view extreme female aberration?  Warner answers by widening the context and considering different shifts of emphasis in its retelling.  Thus, she rediscovers the beguiling attraction of the creature celebrated in Keat's poem 'Lamia'; she notes how the fifteenth-century poet Christine de Pizan stresses Medea's beauty and her powers of enchantment, remarking only in passing on her final state of 'despondency'.  This extended answer culminates in her own unsettling reading of Plath's 'Edge' and 'Lady Lazarus', poems inspired by the Medea story, in which 'transgressive appetites' are defiantly associated with the poet's 'own powers of verbal enchantment' (p 10).  By putting the 'she-monster' in this endlessly intriguing perspective, Warner reveals the poverty of  'blockbuster' and tabloid stereotypes far more persuasively than a 'semiological' reading might achieve.

In the same year as Managing Monsters there appeared an even more spacious survey of traditional narrative: From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (Chatto & Windus, 1994).  This is the second volume of her recent 'trilogy'.  Here we have, to balance her reservations about Barthes, Warner's most explicit repudiation of Jung's archetypal approach: it ignores, we are told, the historical production, reception and reinvigoration of stories.  But interestingly, she also queries the still-dominant assumptions of Freud's psychoanalysis: if you take every tale to be told from the point of view of the child, you ignore the circumstances of the adult telling.  Hence the subtitle.  According to Warner, these stories emerged out of domestic and economic anxiety.  She surmises that the old women who narrated what came to be known as 'fairy tales' felt themselves threatened, either as nurses who might easily be dismissed or as relatives superfluous to family arrangements. Thus, following the 'social model' rather than the psychoanalytic, we can say that the telling of the tale was an attempt to present themselves in a good light, as old crones who turned out to be 'fairy godmothers', and to present the females who had domestic power in a bad light, as 'wicked stepmothers'.  This kind of insight perfectly illustrates the power of Warner's documentation to unsettle received assumptions and indicate future directions for reinterpreting and retelling stories.

As for her main title, it may serve as a reminder that, if we are to think of Warner as a myth critic, she is one who understands that stucturalism and other attempts to abstract the elements of myth according to a linguistic model need to give way to a truly historical approach.  That is, it is insufficient, as does Barthes, to invoke 'History' with a capital 'H' as the repressed content of each and every myth.  She really does want to follow the trajectory from 'beast' to 'blonde'; she really does want to be historical rather than to gesture rhetorically towards that dimension.  Her clue to the labyrinth of time is the story of 'Beauty and the Beast', which she traces back to the tale of Psyche and Cupid, as recounted by the Roman poet Apuleius.  The young girl for whom it spells disaster to apprehend the terrible, bestial nature of her lover is a motif which may be located throughout literature and popular entertainment.  In many traditional versions, the idea is that the male may be civilised by the love of a good woman; in this century, we have witnessed a growing sympathy with the very wildness of the beast, as in the film of King Kong ('It was Beauty who killed the Beast') and in Disney's commendably, if opportunistically, liberal version of the fairy tale itself.  Nor should it be forgotten that the very idea of the threatening 'stepmother' (synonymous for many years with 'mother-in-law') goes back to Apuleius: it is Venus, Cupid's mother, who punishes Psyche for her audacity in seeking to look upon his body.  Warner does not forget such things, and it is this erudition which makes the culmination of her argument, focusing on the 'blonde', so compelling.  This figure, this variation upon the 'beauty', has its origin in Proserpina, goddess of the shining harvest, and may be traced through the beatific vision of the Virgin Mary, through conventional illustrations of a fair-haired Cinderella in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the sex symbol of the Hollywood era. 

But this is not the end of her thesis: she wants to orient the history back to the implications of the 'teller'.  In an absorbing account of various works, from Ovid's and Homer's poems to Shakespeare's plays, and so to Angela Carter's fiction and Jane Campion's cinema, she poses the central question: who is allowed to speak?  Taking as her cue the ancient Sibyl who was respected for the oracular powers of her tongue, she shows how gradually the status of female speech was demeaned and denied, culminating in, at best, the mistrust of 'gossips' and, at worst, the burning of witches.  Only by knowing our myths and knowing our history can we understand what this really means; but as one might expect, it is literary and other arts which can ensure that we do.  Warner explores the character of the silenced woman, most dramatically represented by Ovid's Philomela (whose tongue is cut out by the rapist King Tereus, to prevent her reporting his assault) and by Shakespeare's Cordelia (who is asked an impossible question by her foolish father, and suffers for replying 'Nothing').  Literature functions by the dialectic of speech and silence; but with female silence having deepened over the centuries, Warner's thesis is only complete when she can affirm once again the right to liberating speech.  Hence her celebration of Carter's conscious recovery of verbal magic.  In particular, she notes with approval the 'growing presence of humour' in the latter's fiction, which signals her defiant hold on 'heroic optimism' – 'the mood she singled out as characteristic of a happy ending, whatever the odds' (p 197).  Inspired by Carter, Warner is able to conclude her book by affirming that, if fairy tales represent wishful thinking, then we need to learn to respond more fully to their 'creative enchantments': 'The faculty of wonder, like curiosity, can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due' (p 418).

If the second book in the recent 'trilogy' moves from the 'beast' to the 'blonde' to the power of 'wonder', then the third book moves back again, beyond the 'beast' to the very source of 'horror'.  No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (Chatto & Windus,1998) examines the process by which the ogre or demon is created from the depths of the psyche, then projected, then credited with an independent existence; but her ultimate interest is in how it might then be 'managed' (to use an earlier concept) by the imagination.  The book is divided into three sections, corresponding to the terms of the subtitle.  Part I deals with the convention of summoning the bogeyman, the ogre, the demon.  Part II deals with the means by which fear has been dispelled, notably through song, as with the 'lullaby'.  Part III deals with the device of laughing off the power of the bogeyman.  In each case, a play of positive and negative impulses is involved.  Firstly, to invoke the terror of the ogre or demon is also to assume the power that goes with invocation.  Secondly, traditional lullabies may aim to sooth away distress and encourage sleep, but they seem only to work by first vividly depicting the threat of death, embodied in such frightening figures as the wolf,  the 'Sandman' (originally sinister) and King Herod. Thirdly, there is a sense of release from fear that comes with laughter, but unfortunately the desire to 'mock' ogres has all too often been confused with the impulse to demonise members of another race.  To say Warner's case is a complex one would be an understatement, particularly as it is sustained over 430 pages of detailed exemplification and elaboration. 

Particularly memorable is her account of Kronos devouring his children, a story which is seen as prefiguring the surprisingly pervasive motifs in our culture of cannibalism and infanticide. She reads it against the grain, of course, so that it comes to express, in the first instance, male jealousy of the female capacity for childbirth, and, in the second instance, parental anxiety about what children represent – the passing of time, the succession of generations, the fact that birth leads to death.  Equally arresting is her speculation that, if the ogre may be traced to diverse sources, then etymology suggests that one of these might be Hades, lord of the underworld (his  Roman name being 'Orcus'). In time, his realm was identified with the Christian hell, and so it was with Christianity that ogres came to occupy a realm of pure evil: Warner is particularly astute about the way cannibalism, that most horrific image of the obliteration of the self, featured in representations of damnation, notably Dante's.  But she shows, too, how Catholic countries have always maintained the means to deal with the devil, many of its festivals not only incorporating impersonations of demons but also allowing the demonic energy full sway in the midst of the festivities.  We should, then, continue to bear in mind the implications of Warner's earlier title, Managing Monsters: Warner's point is not simply to register the impact of terrifying figures, from the Cyclops to Hannibal Lecter (though she does that most vividly), but to argue, in line with Vico, that what human beings have made is what human beings can understand.

Late on in No Go the Bogeyman, Warner remarks: 'A theme of this book has been a contradiction at the heart of human responses to fear: the processes by which people seek to undo enemy power simultaneously makes it visible.  In other words, the drive to define and delimit “home”, to name and circumscribe the abode and the milieu to which one belongs and where one feels safe, leads to naming and defining things – and people – out there beyond the fence on the other side of the perimeter wire' (p. 328).  If, then, we cannot help but define home by abroad, self by other,  rationality by irrationality, safety by peril, we are still obliged to understand what is involved.  Warner muses on the meaning of Goya's sketch 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters': it might imply that monsters rush in when reason is off its guard; or it might imply that reason's own dreams are full of monsters, that the rational person is potentially irrational.  Hailing Goya as the father of 'the grotesque', Warner argues that art is at its richest when it forgets neither of these possibilities.

But if one image of art, one myth, lingers in the mind after closing this book, it is that of Circe. To appreciate her importance, Warner goes back to Homer, of course, but also to Ovid's understanding that nature may be explained by the principle of metamorphosis, whereby 'everything changes' but 'nothing dies'.  She contrasts this sense of fluidity and diversity with the official Christian doctrine of the uniqueness of the individual, embodied soul.  Despite the widespread influence of this doctrine, there has been within Christendom a residual, recurrent urge towards the loss of self, the escape from identity, the finding of an alternative point of view – as in the magical transformations of the fairy tale.  It is here that the ambiguity of Homer's Circe, as presented in the Odyssey, becomes apparent.  On the one hand she is demonic, depriving men of their dignity and turning them into beasts.  On the other hand, she is famed as a wise woman whose power to charm is inseparable from the magic of her language.  Warner, pondering this dual role, wishes to celebrate the capacity of the sorceress to cross the boundaries of humanity and animality, duty and pleasure, heroism and effeminacy, chastity and sensuality.  She refers to Plutarch's speculation that one of Odysseus' crew, called 'Gryllus', decides to eschew the chance to return to human form and to conventional standards of male behaviour, preferring the world of fantasy, even at the cost of lost dignity.  She concludes: 'Circe presides over Gryllus' choice: behind the elective beast, a doubled comic mirror of humanity, stands the feared and even derided witch, herself a figure of art, with her song, her voice, her sway over mutations, combinations and metamorphoses that can challenge thought and make settled values twist and turn' (pp 282-3).  It is that word 'comic' which needs stressing, for Warner is claiming that 'Circe is comic in the true sense: she can be read as a denial of the importance of being earnest.  She occupies the area where humour overlaps with amusement, not jokes.  …  [She] claims lightness as a good' (pp 263-4).

It is significant that, in a book which documents the variety of male ogres which have haunted the collective imagination, it is a female character who simultaneously represents, comprehends and transcends the threat of monstrosity.  For this is Warner's point: metamorphosis, which challenges our sense of identity and which shows us we have monsters within, is the very process which can save us from ourselves.  It is a lesson understood by the various writers she enlists in her cause. True, Spenser's puritanical resistance to Circean charms has been influential; but when Milton imagines a son for Circe, he cannot help but convey his residual imaginative sympathy for the world of Comus, as is evident in the intense lyricism of the language ('Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth…?').  Moreover, by the time we get to James Joyce, whose reputation owes so much to his love of verbal magic, Circe's is a tale to be retold with undisguised relish. But perhaps it is only in our own time, the age of the 'late grotesque', that we can fully appreciate the charms of Circe.  Warner's hope seems to be that we will 'manage' the monster, will accommodate the beast, will know the bogeyman, only when we have become, like Circe, 'comic in the true sense'.  Her final chapter on, of all things, the humour inspired by fruit, reminds us that the laughter that resorts to stereotype, as with the racism of so many jokes about bananas, is not the laughter that liberates.  Her own work, erudite but always elegant, engaging and entertaining, shows us what that might involve.

Laurence Coupe

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The Voice of Ariel

Sept/Oct 2000

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

You can tell a lot about a critic by the way he or she reads The Tempest.   It is a play which seems to encourage formulaic pronouncements.  At one extreme, there is the serene, archetypal approach: identifying the motif of death by water and the pattern of esoteric initiation.  On the other hand, there is the outraged, political perspective: asserting the rights of Caliban, as the dispossessed inhabitant of the island.  Perhaps what unites the extremes is the heavy-handedness with which they treat a text of such delicacy and diversity. 

Above all, neither has much to say about Ariel.  In effect, they leave him confined to the limits of Prospero's plan, whether we situate it in mystical or in post-colonial terms.  But surely, being given some of the best lines about those forces which are deeper and finer than 'This rough magic', he should not be dismissed as a mere dramatic device.  Jonathan Bate's remarkable reading of the play, in the third chapter of a remarkable book, demonstrates his extraordinary flair as an interpreter of Shakespeare by in effect liberating Ariel from the condescension of conventional criticism.  Now we can see that the play, and indeed a good deal of other literature, is about him.  For the voice of Ariel is 'the song of the earth'.

Bate has already written at length on Shakespeare, in two previous books; but his reputation is mainly that of an advocate of ecological literary criticism.  He prefers the term 'ecopoetics' to the more generally accepted 'ecocriticism'.  If 'ecology' may be translated as 'language about our earthly dwelling place', and if our understanding is that we have absented ourselves from this primary home, then poetry is that language which returns us to it.  Thus a 'poetics' is more appropriate than a 'criticism', since what we have to do is stop evaluating words and world from the standpoint of the opportunistic subject, and to begin to learn to dwell humbly in the texture of poem and ecosystem alike.  Hearing Ariel's voice, we rediscover the enchantment of the island, of any island, and by extension of the earth itself.

Bate's previous exploration of the 'green' dimension of literature was Romantic Ecology (Routledge, 1991).  If we wanted to gauge the distance he has travelled since then, we might note the subtitle of that earlier work:  'Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition'.  In The Song of the Earth, the word 'environment' is queried, in so far as it implies that the natural world is a surrounding, standing reserve which is worth protecting mainly because of its benefits to human beings. Nature must not become the object of a political programme, the item on an agenda, the occasion for a strategy, no matter how 'green' the cause.  In spirit, Bate now seems closer to 'deep ecology', which demands not so much external reform as a complete transformation of our way of regarding ourselves in the context of the biosphere. There again, he is careful to explain that, while putting the earth first may involve radical action, the concern of 'ecopoetics' is with phenomenology rather than politics.  This in itself could be seen as marking a shift of emphasis from Romantic Ecology, where he celebrated the republican Wordsworth whose 'love of nature' was matched by his 'love of mankind', and demonstrated how influential his radicalism was (on Ruskin and so on Morris, for example). 

If The Song of the Earth has a hero, then, it is not Wordsworth but Clare: ideologically and aesthetically naïve he may have seemed to academic 'experts' on romanticism, but for Bate no poet conveys more acutely the experience of the natural world, as memory, as need and as loss.  Indeed, the phrase which Bate translates from the philosopher of science, Michel Serres, 'to think fragility', which he applies initially to the Keats of the ode 'To Autumn', turns out to apply equally, if not more so, to Clare. If 'men can do everything except make a bird's nest', as the proverb has it, Bate shows us that each of his best poems is an analogue of that achievement.  'Clare is above all a poet of the experience of miniature inhabited environments,' we are told. Knowing and loving all that is small, vulnerable and unassuming, he reveals what it might be like 'to live fully without profligacy upon our crowded earth'.

Meanwhile, Wordsworth has not totally been abandoned: the present volume has an impressive rereading of The River Duddon, which demonstrates the critic's considerable gift for recovering unjustly neglected texts – just as in Romantic Ecology, we were invited to look again without defensive irony at The Excursion.  But Wordsworth's function here seems to be to dispose the argument towards a bioregional vision which favours diversity and subtle interrelatedness, thus leading on to considerations of Basil Bunting and Les Murray.  Not that one should complain of this: admirers of Romantic Ecology will not want to see Bate confined to its parameters for evermore.  

Indeed, The Song of the Earth takes us into a whole new world, philosophically speaking.  Taking his bearings from Kate Soper's invaluable work, What is Nature?, he engages with the 'dilemma of environmentalism', the paradox that, once you invent the category of the human, you have to make nature its 'other'; and having done so, you need a sense of nature as an 'aesthetic' phenomenon, which is worthy of reverence, in order to remind us of what has been lost in the process of estrangement.  Hence the principle of 'ecopoetics' – that the very capacity which ensured our triumph over the non-human world, namely language, is our only hope of finding atonement.  Language both excludes and restores.

The guiding light here is Martin Heidegger, who sought to replace conventional, dualistic philosophy with ecocentric thinking.   Significantly, he had in his early years made the mistake of subscribing to a disastrous political faith, one of the attractions of which was that it offered to save both the soil and the soul of the German nation.  In his later years, his special form of thought arose from his reflections on poetry; and it is those essays on poetic dwelling that have inspired Bate. Indeed, the closing forty pages of his book constitute a tactful and frequently moving attempt to redeem Heidegger from the stain of fascism and to allow him to illumine our darkening world. A particularly effective touchstone is a poem by Paul Celan, whose parents died in a Nazi internment camp, yet who acknowledged his debt to Heidegger's ability to reveal the miracle of earthly existence.

In the light of that final chapter, it seems inappropriate to complain about the deliberate absence of a political agenda from this book.  Bate's insistence that we only learn to love the earth once we have started listening for Ariel's voice, and that our first duty is to learn from the poets how 'to think fragility', may not please those who assumed 'green' theory would take its place alongside Marxism, new historicism and all the other 'isms'.  But Bate is so fine a reader of poetry, so alert to the ecological potential of language, that the responsive reader of this book will surely begin to hear the song which is its subject. 

Laurence Coupe

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The Moronic Inferno

Jan/Feb 2001

Ivo Mosley ed., Dumbing Down: Culture, politics and the mass media (Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 2000)

T.S.Eliot was a devotee of the music hall, and wrote appreciatively about the performances of Marie Lloyd. He advocated a poetry of primitive depth that would reach down into the roots of the collective psyche. He famously defined culture as a 'whole way of life' that included 'a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar'. So far so good for those who nowadays speak the rhetoric of populism, who frequently invoke 'the people' in a vague gesture of generosity. However, Eliot also argued that the social 'organism' needed defending against the claims of commerce and bureaucracy, and against a naïve faith in technology. Though his list of representative artefacts stretched humorously yet approvingly across a broad cultural spectrum, it is hard to imagine him constructing one today that would include, for instance, the national lottery, muzak, TV 'makeover' programmes, McDonald's beefburgers, karaoke, the Dome and the latest recipient of the Turner Prize. He might have some doubts about a globalized civilisation (he would withhold the word 'culture') which fosters greed and envy, which equates vitality with sensationalism, and which relies on indifference to the environment which sustains it.

Ivo Mosley's anthology is not compiled with Eliot in mind. Nor, surprisingly, is there any mention of F. R. Leavis or John Ruskin. After all, these three represent a most important tradition of resistance to the adulteration of human experience effected by industrial modernity – a tradition which we might do well to recall in this era of post-industrial postmodernity, when experience is so hard to assess, merging as it does with ubiquitous entertainment. However, in today's academy, their names are frequently used with defensive flippancy, their moral stance having become something of an embarrassment. Thus, it is perhaps the very fact that any appeal to a canon of critique is so difficult today that makes Dumbing Down pertinent. One can only admire the courage of the editor's convictions, evident in the very challenge of the title, and express one's gratitude that at last we have a map of the 'moronic inferno' foretold by Wyndham Lewis and apprehended by Saul Bellow. In this ersatz realm, consumerism counts as democracy, choice of commodity as pluralism, publicity as sincerity, and the catchphrase as considered opinion. The result, in the editor's own understatement, is that 'a kind of numbness has taken over'.

But Dumbing Down does not counter this numbness with its own nostrum. What it offers is a diversity of objections to 'dumbocracy', that is, 'the rule of cleverness without wisdom'. 'Dumbocracy', if unchecked, could spell the demise of democracy. Mosley declares that the sentence 'Give us your vote and we'll take care of everything' has been taken literally, so that responsibility for defence spending, transport policy and the administration of the arts, for example, as well as 'the safeguarding of basic freedoms' have been abandoned for trivial satisfactions. Several contributors offer variations on this theme. Redmond Mullen sees 'the executive machine' as gradually swallowing up the right to dissent, and proposes that voluntary bodies, notably non-funded charities, might offer a model of 'constructive disorder', restoring a sense of initiative and risk. Again, as far as government itself is concerned, Tam Dalyell objects to the replacement of Bagehot's 'government by conversation' by the 'party machine', the 'spin doctor' and the self-serving servility of members of parliament.

As for the 'culture' of Mosley's subtitle, the consensus here seems to be that trivialisation is the norm. Philip Rieff disapproves of the current cult of Oscar Wilde, in that it honours his capacity for scandal and subversion rather than his concern for social justice and aesthetic standards – the result being a pervasive infantilism. This observation complements Claire Fox's objection to the impoverishment of higher education, which she sees as surrendering to the ethos of the service economy: with lecturers being obliged to put consumer interests above content, courses that challenge or stretch the minds of students are replaced by a syallabus based on what they already know.

Mention should also be made of a surprising but welcome contributor, Ravi Shankar, who expresses his hopes for cultural diversity and the mutual influence of musical traditions, but voices also his fears that multinational commercialism is foisting an indifferent noise on the young in the name of entertainment. Shankar was, of course, one of the inspirations behind the Beatles' reinvigoration of popular song, so his misgivings about the quality of today's youth culture certainly carry weight. But his presence should also remind us that 'pop' does not necessarily mean 'pap'. In recent years there may have been the Spice Girls, but there have also been the Smiths. However, while such discriminations need making, this volume may not be the place for them, as it is not merely another symposium on 'high' v 'low' culture.

Indeed, the editorial vision would seem to extend, finally, through and beyond the cultural, to address the plight of the planet itself. It is worth noting that Mosley has previously edited the Green Book of Poetry (Frontier, 1994), a pioneering selection of verse which opened up possibilities for the teaching and appreciation of literature from an environmental perspective. Certainly, the organisation of Dumbing Down makes sense in that perspective, culminating as it does in two essays sketching the damage human culture has done to nature, the more so as it claims to be independent of it. Thus, 'dumbing down' is not just a matter of hailing the worst of the 'mass media' as the norm but involves a willed blankness towards the natural world, a sterile detachment from what Eliot called 'the life of significant soil'. We may agree that we inhabit a 'moronic inferno', but the point of this collection would seem to be that ultimately the reduction of human possibility is inseparable from the degradation of the earth. Perhaps, then, this volume may take its place in the canon of critique. In the middle of the last century, Leavis tried to resist the insane logic of the 'technologico-Benthamite age'. A century before that, Ruskin declared that, there being 'no wealth but life', the destruction of the environment was an impoverishment of the human soul. That logic, that destruction, has almost won the day, as Mosley's volume reminds us.

Laurence Coupe

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The Story So Far

March/April 2003

Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth
Jeanette Winterson, Weight
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad
(Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005)

It was with some relief that I picked up these three volumes in Canongate's new series, The Myths. For too long the field of mythology has been aggressively ploughed by the more rigorous followers of Roland Barthes. When he himself began, half a century ago, to read certain artefacts of popular culture as 'myths', and to ponder their hidden bourgeois agenda in a series of elegant articles, it must have seemed very exciting. Who would have thought that a magazine cover or a wrestling match or an advert for washing powder could merit so much political speculation? But in the intervening years, with the institutionalisation of his insights, a speculative method has been reduced to a mechanical exercise. First, catch your artefact. Next, search out its secret. Now call it a 'myth'. The order is variable, in practice; but as long as one succeeds in demonstrating that the 'myth' suppresses history and discourages radical cultural change, the job is done. 'Mythology', in short, is synonymous with 'ideology', in its pejorative sense. It is a realm of delusion.

Such an approach may properly be assigned to what Paul Ricoeur called the 'hermeneutics of suspicion'. Insofar as it has triumphed, mythology as traditionally understood has tended to be overlooked. The approach works best with Hello rather than Homer, with Diehard rather than Dionysus – which rather narrows its potential. Just as importantly, the idea that mythology is valuable precisely because it can provide opportunities to revise our view of ourselves and our world – as propounded by Ricoeur and by writers as diverse as Ernst Bloch and Marina Warner – has been regarded as eccentric. The Canongate series, based on the idea that traditional stories still matter, and that they can be told and retold indefinitely, always throwing up new kinds of significance, is therefore especially welcome. It reminds us of a pleasing paradox: mythology is both universal and cultural, both timeless and historical. It is a realm of perpetual possibility.

This world is opened up for us by Karen Armstrong in the introductory volume, A Short History of Myth. The very title is another reminder of the fact that myths are told in time; what she does is demonstrate how they acquire new significance as history unfolds. She knows the value of keeping the past alive in the present for the future. Deities of sky and earth, seasonal sacrifices, rites of passage: they all begin to resonate once more, thanks to the considerable weight of her learning, which Armstrong wears very lightly indeed. Similarly, she manages to survey religions which are at ease with myths (Hinduism, Buddhism) and ones which pretend to do without them but actually rewrite them radically (Judaism, Christianity), with such an eye for relevance that we can only wonder why we ever thought we could get away with neglecting them.

Of course, anyone who sets out to trace the development of mythology from 20,000 BCE to 2005CE in one short volume must be aware of the risks. Someone is bound to fault one's scholarship on specific points, even if one is the author of some of the most important studies in religion and cultural history written over the past twenty years. Did the 'Sky God' really precede the 'Great Goddess'? There are plenty of scholars willing to argue the reverse. Do 'hero' myths really date back as far as the Paleolithic era? The more widespread assumption is that mythology does not feature human protagonists until the rise of a patriarchal warrior class.

I am sure that Armstrong could respond coherently and cogently to such challenges. But a more general concern is likely to be expressed, not by fellow scholars of myth but by proponents of the dreaded 'hermeneutics of suspicion'. Has not mythology been replaced by science, which saved us once and for all from irrationality? Here Armstrong has to draw on an ancient lesson, exploring the distinction in Greek thought between mythos (story) and logos (reason): philosophers began to mistrust the one and overvalue the other, but they found they couldn't do without either. Plato realised that the best way of explaining his new ideas was to revise the old stories. Moreover, Plato – along with Buddha, Lao-Tse and others – exemplifies Karl Jaspers' 'Axial Age' (c. 800-200 BCE), the era in which the meaning of mythology became more and more internalised and spiritualised. We who belong to what Armstrong calls 'The Great Western Transformation' (c. 1500-2000CE) need to learn that Axial lesson anew. We need to keep making finer and finer sense of myths if we are not to act them out disastrously in the historical world (think of Auschwitz, think of Stalin's gulags, think of Bosnia).

In short, according to Armstrong, we suppress one or other of these dimensions – mythos or logos – at our peril. Myth without reason, or reason without myth: either way, we fail to live as fully spiritual, fully ethical, fully human beings. It is in our interests to keep mythology alive and well, not to surrender to the fallacy of 'demythologisation'. Her case is unanswerable, it seems to me, and not only because it chimes in with my own modest researches. It certainly creates high expectations for the retelling of myths which the rest of the series is about. We are not disappointed.

In Weight, Jeanette Winterson reworks the ancient Greek story of Atlas, the Titan condemned to hold up the heavens on his shoulders, as a punishment for leading a rebellion against the new order of Olympian deities, ruled by Zeus. This story overlaps with that of Heracles, one of the many offspring resulting from sexual liaisons between Zeus and mortal women. We may recall the 'twelve labours' he undertook in his attempt to evade the animosity of Zeus's wife, Hera, and to earn the right to live forever. One of these tasks was to pick the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, daughters of Atlas and Hespiris. Heracles offered to take over Atlas's wearisome work briefly, provided Atlas would go and gather the fruit; Atlas thought he might use this opportunity to escape from his burden once and for all, but Heracles tricked him into resuming his position.

Knowing this material inside out, Winterson offers us an audacious and intriguing exploration of what it means to want freedom, while knowing that there must always be a boundary to one's desires (as for Atlas), and of what it is like to be constantly preoccupied with both love and death, divinity and humanity, immortality and fate (as for Heracles). Making all this seem relevant today without descending into bathos cannot be easy, but Winterson manages to incorporate colloquial exchanges between the characters ('You see, Atlas, my old mountain, my old mate…') without marring the lapidary style which proves so effective in the refashioning of the myth ('Time was my Medusa. Time was turning me to stone…'). Nor should we overlook her ability to fuse ancient Greek cosmology ('I am the Kosmos…') and contemporary physics ('Atlas was in a black hole…'). What carries her through is her faith in the supremacy of storytelling, which is well rewarded here.

It is a faith shared by Margaret Atwood. The Penelopiad is her retelling of the story of Penelope and Odysseus, chiefly from the point of view of the former (though not exclusively). This treating of background as foreground permits us illuminating glimpses of an alternative world, in which male heroics appear less impressive than we had thought. Further destabilisation is achieved by letting the female protagonist speak from the perspective of the underworld, Penelope being dead by the time she tells her side of the story. In Hades she is free to comment on the vain, incurably flirtatious Helen, the Greek beauty who ran away with Paris to Troy, thus causing the Trojan War, which is the subject of Homer's Iliad. But her main focus is on the clumsy but crafty Odysseus, the Greek hero whose long journey back from the war is the subject of Homer's Odyssey, in which Penelope takes the part of the patient wife besieged by suitors. Death distances us from what used to be the main events; the female voice allows another sense of humanity to be heard.

Odysseus' innumerable adventures and sexual intrigues with goddesses, his final return in disguise to Ithaca, his recognition by his old nurse, his slaying of the suitors and of those maids of Penelope whom he thinks to have betrayed the household's honour, his reunion with his wife: we are used to thinking of these as impressive achievements. But Atwood allows us to think otherwise, and to question the cult of the male hero. This is done subtly, without denying Odysseus' capacity for charm and intrigue as well as brute force, so that we do not feel ourselves to be reading a feminist tract. Indeed, the feminist tract features as part of a general medley of voices heard throughout the novel (which includes poems, songs, dramatic scenes, court transcripts, etc). The murdered maids give a lively, if posthumous, lecture on anthropology, focussing on the suppression of matriarchal goddess-worship by patriarchal hero-worship. But when, at the end of Odysseus' trial, they summon up the Furies to ensure his eternal punishment, they inadvertently allow for a shift of sympathy. The more he keeps having to be reborn ('He's been a film star, an inventor, an advertising man….'), the more Penelope sees his side of the story again. Perhaps she realises that as the wayward warrior he was a lot less tedious than more recent occupants of Hades ('Adolf', for example).

Both Winterson's and Atwood's novels, nicely situated by Armstrong's exposition, reveal the power of myth, when retold well, to challenge our preconceptions and to help us imagine otherness. 'Mythology' means so much more than 'ideology'. The tale that can always be retold promises a new way of seeing, as this timely series has clearly begun to demonstrate.

Laurence Coupe

Jan/Feb 2007

Lynn M. Zott (ed.), The Beat Generation: A Gale Critical Companion (London: Gale-Thompson, 2006), 3 vols.

Admitting a taste for the Beats can still be something of a faux pas in certain academic circles – to be greeted by a look of pained incredulity. After all, Jack Kerouac wrote rambling novels, attempting to present his own tedious travels as a sustained act of rebellion. Allen Ginsberg was a shallow self-publicist, whose meagre poetic talent was squandered in pursuit of the role of guru of the hippies. Gary Snyder may be impressive for his devotion to the ecological cause, but his poetry is flat, prosaic and dull. Such opinions represent a significant consensus, I suspect.

So established is the assumption that 'Beat' means 'bad' that the fact that for half a century the common reader has felt otherwise, and been 'turned on' to literature by discovering this or that Beat writer, cannot prevail against it. Nor can the fact that, more recently, students have opted for courses on the Beat movement in large numbers – and not always as a soft option. For Kerouac, Ginsberg and Snyder are not really an easy read: common readers and students alike find that this body of work makes demands, opens minds, changes worldviews. Indeed, at their best, they merit inclusion in that great visionary tradition which stretches back, not only to Whitman and American Transcendentalism, but also to Blake and English Romanticism: 'If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.'

That may be a controversial claim: mine, I mean, not Blake's – which at least has the advantage of longevity. But it would seem to be sustained by this ambitious, three-volume celebration of a literary movement which, in its own way, has had as big an impact on Western culture as has modernism. Significantly, both the Beats and the modernists have suffered from stereotyping: the former being regarded as elitist and esoteric; the latter being regarded as ill-disciplined and self-indulgent. Interestingly, more than one article reproduced in this critical companion suggests that a poem such as 'Howl' is more indebted to Eliot's The Waste Land than at first appears. After all, it presents us with the demonic metropolis, the descent into darkness, the journey into the wilderness, and the promise of salvation: for 'Shantih shantih shantih' read 'Holy holy holy'. However, it is only in a Romantic context that we can fully understand Ginsberg's 'Footnote to Howl', reaffirming as it does the bardic affirmation of Blake: 'Everything that lives is holy'. The essays gathered here largely support this approach: allusions to Romanticism are as frequent as those to bebop music and to post-war bohemianism. Though all of them have been published before, seeing them together – one volume on 'Topics', the other two on 'Authors' – makes one realise how important it is to come to terms with the way the Beats revised and extended the visionary tradition.

True, it is a pleasure to re-read Kenneth Rexroth's early commendation of their experiments, which for him aligned them with Charlie Parker and Jackson Pollock, but we find other commentators and reviewers soon beginning to adopt a longer perspective. Again and again, Ginsberg is praised for his Blakean manner, even while doubts are expressed about whether he manages the Blakean balance between poet and seer. More generally, the debt is recognised to be as much spiritual as literary, with most summations of the Beat movement honouring the equipoise achieved in the best of the writing. One of the more recent pieces, Robert C. Fuller's comprehensive account of the 'psychedelic' dimension of Beat spirituality, is probably one of the best, informed as it is by a half-century of speculation. Summation is not easy, however, and it is noteworthy that he feels it appropriate to invoke another commentator, Robert Ellwood, when it comes to stating the case as unequivocally as possible. Thus, the Beats effected '(1) a shift from mainline to nonconformist religion, (2) a rediscovery of natural rather than revealed religion, (3) a new appreciation for Eastern religious thought, and (4) a new Romanticism that accords spiritual importance to certain nonrational modes of thought and perception.' That seems to me to get the picture clear: a spiritual revolution that is made possible through a literary achievement – and which could not have been made any other way. The Beats may have got their basic philosophy at the outset from the Buddha, but it was Blake who showed them that it was possible to give poetic life to such ideas.

In this context, it is worth recalling (as do many of the contributors to this companion) that Kerouac regarded himself as a religious writer. He it was who used the word 'Beat' to mean 'beatific'. The introductory essay on him (in volume 3) points out that the tension between the inner world of spirituality and the outer world of bohemian hedonism is the very subject of his most famous novel, On the Road. Other contributors follow on from here, reading such novels as The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels as meditations on the nature of religious belief. According to Omar Swartz, Kerouac sponsored 'the cult of high experience': this may have encouraged the excesses of 'flower power', but he himself was always conscious that vision is not possible without constraint. Though he was responsible for introducing his fellow-writers to Zen Buddhism, it was the discipline he was interested in rather than the supposed licence to act the holy fool. Finally, disillusioned with the follies of the counterculture, he returned to the strict faith of his childhood.

As for Snyder, he has stayed true to Zen: the real thing, that is: a spiritual practice dedicated to attaining harmony with nature, not the phoney, bohemian Zen of the 'beatniks' (the hangers-on of the Beats). Though we have to acknowledge his own unease about the label of 'Beat', the material reproduced here comprises a good case for his work as a necessary corrective from within the movement to the excesses of Ginsberg. Beat poetry, that is, does not just mean a long, rambling line and an indeterminate apocalypse; it also means a sharp, clear image of nature and a laconic indictment of its enemies. Snyder, we might say, is a neo-Romantic ecologist who has had a neo-classical training – if we allow the Japanese haiku to be an appropriate model. He represents the Beat vision in its purest form.

Alan Watts once declared that 'a universe which has manifested Gary Snyder could never be called a failure'. If that rather overstates the case, let us limit ourselves to the hypothesis that any literary movement that produces poems such as 'Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout' or 'Front Lines' could never be called a failure. See them as expressive of a genuine shift in sensibility, and the publication of this companion is justified. Every writer associated with the Beat movement is included – though it is especially revealing on the three I have mentioned. It should find a place on the shelves of all public and academic libraries; as for common readers and students, they could do worse than club together – in true Beat spirit – to buy these three volumes between them and circulate them in perpetuity.

Laurence Coupe

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