ONLINE TEACHING - LECTURE #5

LECTURE #5 (ONLINE)

MYTH AND MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE IN 20^TH-CENTURY BRITISH LITERATURE

The main argument of the course is that the major contributions to and innovations in, 20th c. art in Britain and elsewhere in Western culture occur under the sign of irrationalism (i.e., a distrust of reason and rationalism, intellectualism, logic and analysis, common sense etc.) which takes many forms and is pursued along various avenues of literary exploration. One of these is the rediscovery of the irrational experience of mysticism and the impenetrable nature of myth.

Perhaps it is natural to start a review of writers attached to the incomprehensible world of myth with Irish writer William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), a Nobel prize winner best known and revered for his poetry which may still enchant us with its exquisite combination of mystery and sensuality. Like Blake before him, whom he admired, Yeats’ imagination was steeped in a world of mystical fervor and of the occult (they both admired Swedish mystic Swedenborg), but as an Irish nationalist his poetic creativity drew avidly from Gaelic folklore, Celtic mythology. In reviving and reshaping the myths and legends of yore, however, he combined them imaginatively with idiosyncratic ideas from Gnostic and esoteric thought. This often yielded a mythopoeic streak in Yeats’ poetry, who is credited as a myth-making artist. His mystical opinions about the world and human history were systematized in a book called A Vision (1925).

Yeats’ approach to poetry shared a lot with Symbolism. The symbols that he uses in practically every poem are neither gimmicks to induce a mysterious atmosphere, nor mere artistic ornaments. Instead, they perform a mystical function of joining two worlds by endowing the unassuming elements of the material and the physical life with transcendental and eternal significance. Take, for instance, the poem The Song of the Old Mother:

I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;
And the young lie long and dream in their bed
Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,
And their day goes over in idleness,
And they sigh if the wind but lift up a tress:
While I must work because I am old,
And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.

At one level of reading, this may be a snapshot of the decay and indignity of old age. The ancient woman is reduced to a mere functional role where serving the young through hard manual labor is her only reason for (still) being. At best, the fire getting feeble and cold is an analogy for her dwindling vitality. But if one considers the symbolic and archetypal implications of the elements and actions in the poem, it all acquires unexpected transcendental significance. The hearth is a central element in a home and the axis of human dwelling; taking care of the fire and keeping it alive is a symbol of preserving both life and the eternal light of the spirit which is ignored and endangered by the oblivious new generations with their frivolous modern style. The use of the unexpected metaphor “the seed of the fire” suggests that this might be a fertility ritual. In this archetypal reading, “old” now means primeval and eternal.

In a similar fashion, Leda and the Swan is the brusque anatomy of a beastly violent action such as Zeus who takes the shape of a swan in order to rape an unsuspecting maiden, but Yeats insinuates that it all has larger-than-life implications. Superficially, the poem may sound almost pornographic. It could be seen as a no more than a voyeuristic, perverse fixation on the details of the brutal sexual act (“…her thighs caressed/By the dark webs”, “How can those terrified vague fingers push/The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?”, or “A shudder in the loins”). Yet, there is an implication that the omnipotent god is able to deliberately enact some impenetrable divine design by a loosening of base mating instincts.

The poem also seems to suggest that everything that happens is morally ambivalent in a world were contraries coexist. Indeed, one constant concern in Yeats’ poetry is with the dialectical battle and union of contradictory forces in the universe (coincidentia oppositorum). Destruction of an old order and civilization (the Trojan war) is the premise of a new, glorious civilization (Aeneas fleeing from fallen Troy is the ancestor of Romulus the legendary founder of Rome – a great empire that start from a fratricide as Romulus kills his brother Remus in some accounts). The penetration of the maiden is justified by impenetrable godly intentions. A vile action such as a rape (or fratricide) leads to the creation of a majestic civilization which is endowed with the glory of the divine rapist. We are led to believe that making history and human progress are predicated upon evil and wrong-doing.

Every time he discusses an individual experience or a historical incident, Yeats does it by projecting these incidents against a larger metaphysical frame where they acquire cosmic significance in keeping with his mystical philosophy of the baffling union of the sensual and the spiritual, of the material and the immaterial, and of all opposite forces. (A similar intuition of the metaphysical force of the sensual will later feature in the poetry of Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney.) But the magnetism of his work comes from the gifted matching of metaphysical sophistication with irresistible music of his verse, as demonstrated by a host of poems of which The Song of Wandering Angus, The lake Isle of Innisfree, He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, or When You Are Old.

(You can hear Yeats reciting from his own poetry here - link to Yeats audio.)

In a modern world defined by capitalism and technology, a world increasingly entrapped by materialism and given to frivolity, the more reflexive and sensitive artists at the turn of the 20^th century warned the public against these perils and tried to point in the direction of more profound and mysterious realities. They wanted to rekindle an appetite for the sacred power of myth, but in the new cultural climate myths had to be reimagined and rephrased in a language that would both entice and intrigue. Myth, archetype, symbol – these had become the new tools of the literary trade for writers of the early 20^th century such W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Joseph, Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster or, in the second half of the century, Robert Graves, John Fowles, William Golding, Geoffrey Hill, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, or Seamus Heaney – to say nothing of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and an entire literary realm of (heroic) fantasies.

TO BE CONTINUED…