Otherness and Empathy: Harvey Kurtzman’s War Comics

I don’t remember much about the war comics I read as a kid, in part because I didn’t read them the way I read Tintin or Asterix (obsessively, slowly, repeatedly).  I couldn’t read them that way, because they weren’t mine: they belonged to the kids whose family had a little cabin next to my family’s weekend place on a lake a couple of hours into the enormous conifer and rock-outcrop forest of the Canadian Shield.  The Reichert kids were older than I was, and had lived in England for a while, and kept a stash of English and American war and horror comics in a back room of the cabin, and sometimes, when our family was visiting theirs, I’d sneak into that back room and hurriedly read through a comic or two with a flashlight.

The horror comics were a mistake: I’d always rush home and try to forget about the terrifying images by reading Asterix, but it never did any good, and I’d wake up in the middle of the night convinced that the sound of the wind in the branches could only be the wailing of corpses risen from the grave.  But the war comics were fascinating: full of guys punching out heavily armed enemies with nothing but the oversized knuckles on their spectacularly rendered fists, or jackbooted Nazis and commies marching in lockstep against our side’s ragtag bands of can-do misfits.  I do remember one exception: a grim tale of a Vietnam veteran returned home after a bad injury in the jungle, only to face social rejection, unemployment, a girlfriend who’d left him while he was away at war, and finally a crippling drug addiction.  In the end, he tries to commit suicide, but when he pulls the trigger of his old service revolver, nothing happens, and a mysterious man appears to explain that he can’t take such an easy way out: he died in the jungle, and this America to which he’d returned is hell.  But by and large the pages of Nick Fury and His Howling Commandos, Smash! and Sgt. Rock took a more gung-ho tack.

This early experience of 1970s war comics conditioned my expectations when Michael Robbins pulled a nicely produced hardcover of Corpse on the Imjin! And Other Stories by Harvey Kurtzman from his courier bag and passed it to me in the departmental lounge one evening (he’d written a review of the book for The Chicago Tribune).  Kurtzman wrote—and, frequently, illustrated—many issues of the EC comics Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat during the 1950s, and I expected to find simple jingoism like I’d seen in the comics I’d read growing up.  I mean, these were comics about war during a time when America was at war in Korea, when Cold War propaganda was picturing a red under every bed, and before we’d had the hard national disillusion of Vietnam.  But instead, I found something rather different.  Perhaps because Kurtzman had been a soldier himself during the Second World War (though not a combat infantryman), his stories tend to be defined by two characteristics: an acute sense of the suffering of all soldiers; and a sense of the essential irony of war.  That is: the soldiers in his stories aren’t the sort who’d shout “go get ‘em, boys!” and charge down an enemy machine gun nest.  Rather, they’re people whose boots aren’t good enough for the journey, who hunger, who are plagued by fear and lack of sleep and more fear and by naïve courage that lasts exactly up to the point of first contact with the enemy.  Which is also exactly as long as the best-laid plans of officers lasts: armies plan, in Kurtzman’s stories, and the gods of war laugh.  More often than not, soldiers are caught in their own traps, or by their own illusions.  And it’s not just minor characters who perish: protagonists die, sometimes quickly, sometimes alone and in pain.  At least one critic, Ng Suat Tong, writing for Comics Journal, has complained that Kurtzman presented war as “gentle, dignified, and bloodlessly pleasant”—to be perfectly honest, I do not know how he could experience Kurtzman’s stories, in which we watch corpses float down rivers, see the laboriously built homes of innocent farmers destroyed by mere chance, and witness the slaughter of P.O.W.s by their captors, in this light.  If this is dignity and pleasantness, I shudder to think of indignity and pain.

There are, to be fair, occasional moments where we hear the false note of jingoism —“America is a way of life... and as long as we believe in good we can’t go wrong!” But generally Kurtzman is better than that, even in a format that openly panders to the audience’s prejudices (the last panel of many stories consists of a little message like “That’s it readers!  Did you enjoy this magazine?  Your letters give us an idea of what you like to read so won’t you please write us and tell us what you liked and why!”).

What’s most interesting is the sympathetic treatment Kurtzman gives to the Chinese and North Korean experience of the war, in comics for an American market published during the war itself.  Although Kurtzman doesn’t get into the political issues behind the war, he does treat the ethics of individual combatants, and in doing so he refuses to elevate the Americans above their Chinese and Korean opponents: both are shown as capable of dehumanizing their enemies, both are capable of great loyalty to their fellow soldiers, and of self-sacrifice, not for some abstract cause, but for the other guys in the unit, in the hopes of getting everyone back home safely.

One story, “Air Burst!” is told from the point of view of Chinese soldiers in a dangerous retreat after a failed offensive, and they are treated with exactly the same level of sympathy one sees in Kurtzman’s stories about American G.I.s.  Unlike the faceless German soldiers of Sgt. Rock, these guys have nicknames, they carry each other when wounded, they’re individuated, with some being kinder or more skilled than others, they suffer from terror during shelling by Americans, and, like the Kurtzman’s G.I.s, their fates can be ironic—in the end, one is killed by the trap his squad set to slow the American pursuit of their retreat.  Here, we've moved beyond the sympathetic to the empathetic, in that we don't just feel for the Chinese soldiers, we feel through them, are asked to see through their eyes and feel what they feel.  We become them, to the degree that we become Jane Eyre or Huck Finn or any other protagonist with whose plight a story asks us to identify.

Or almost.  There's one major stumbling block to our identification with Kurtzman's Chinese soldiers: the way he represents their speech.  Kurtzman's American G.I.s speak as realistically as he could make them, given the anti-profanity restrictions placed on publications by the Comics Code Authority.  But his Chinese soldiers, for all their humanity, speak a stilted, formalized version of English.  "Let us pause a moment" one will say, "Why do you stop, Lee?" another will ask. Then an airstrike that would have caused one of Kurtzman's Americans to shout "hit the deck!" makes a Chinese soldier call out "fall to the ground!" and then "we shall give the Americans a taste of shrapnel."  Seeing an American observation plane, another soldier calls out "he circles us!" and "let us run!"— you get the idea: no slang, no contractions, the kind of thing the writers of Star Trek did when writing for Spock or Data.  The idea seems to be to present the Chinese characters as exotic, and this interferes with the attempt to give us their experience and their point of view, since they are exotic only to us, not to themselves.  If they come across as exotic, we are taken out of their lived experience, and reminded of their otherness.  We are no longer fully experiencing their point of view.

The easiest thing to do would be to dismiss this as a kind of failure of imagination on Kurtzman's part, but the more I think about Kurtzman's representation of Chinese speech, the more I can see a point to it.  In fact, it has some of the characteristics most admired in postmodern translation theory.

Consider this passage from Michel Foucault's essay on Pierre Klossowski's translation of the Aeneid:

It is quite necessary to admit that two kinds of translations exist; they do not have the same function or the same nature. In one, something (meaning, aesthetic value) must remain identical, and it is given passage into another language.... And then there are translations that hurl one language against another... taking the original text for a projectile and treating the translating language like a target. Their task is... to use the translated language to derail the translating language.

That is, some translations seek to appear as if they were written in the new language: to make a version of Goethe, say, that seems like a work originally written in English.  This is the most commonly held sense of what a good translation looks like, and I confess that I've often thought of good translation in these terms.  When, for example, I read a translation from the French that stays too close to the Latinate side of English, using "submarine rock formations" rather than "underwater rock formations" for the French "formations rocheuses sous-marines," I tend to sneer at this as a bit prissy.  But there's another kind of translation, one that aims to retain the sense that the translated work was written in another language—this is Foucault's "projectile" translation.

The late Antoine Berman, one of the most influential and controversial translation theorists of the last thirty years, elaborated on this second kind of translation in an essay called "Translation and the Trials of the Foreign" (the title comes from Heidegger's discussion of Hölderlin's strange translations from the Greek).  Here, Berman describes a type of translation that maintains a strong sense of the original language's difference from our own tongue, and aims "to open up the foreign work to us in its utter foreignness" by "accentuating its strangeness," which is, paradoxically, the only real way of "giving us access" to the foreign text as such, that is, as a foreign text.  The idea is to maintain a sense of strangeness in the translation, thereby preventing the reader from erasing the real, existing otherness of the original text itself.

Kurtzman, of course, isn't translating anything—he, not a Chinese author, wrote 'Air Strike!" and he wrote it in English.  But the representation of Chinese speech as a marked English, as something other than idiomatic, native-speaker stuff, may be taken as an attempt to maintain for us a sense that the people he is depicting are not simply Westerners with slightly different bodies: they come from another culture, and speak another language, and his representation of their speech keeps this always in front of us.

There's a case to be made against this kind of speech representation.  When I see pop-culture depictions of Native Americans, and they speak a kind of hyper-formal, dignified, contraction-free, unslangy English, I always rankle a bit, because it seems like this involves a flattening out of the emotional and expressive range of the characters.  They're not talking like the Cree and Blackfoot kids I knew growing up in western Canada, kids who were capable of wackiness, low diction, fast-talk, and as full a range of human affect as you or I.  But if Berman is to be believed, there's also a case for a kind of speech representation that marks difference as difference, that refuses to allow us to forget the foreignness of the foreign.  If we proceed on Berman's assumptions, then we can see "Air Strike!" as a combination of a Chinese point of view—inviting empathy—with speech effects that remind us that the empathy we're feeling is an empathy that stretches across cultural divisions.  And that's a subtle move—far subtler than many of us have been willing to attribute to something in the often maligned form of the old-school comic book.

Tradition and the Individual's Urges: Notes on T.S. Eliot

The new semester is upon me, and I find myself feverishly tapping out various course documents for my students.  I'm getting a bit ambitious in terms of what I'm assigning for the seminar on modernism I'm co-teaching, so I'm writing up some general notes for students to read ahead of time.  Here's what I've come up with for a session on Eliot that will feature The Waste Land, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," some excerpts from Eliot's writings about myth, and three early satirical poems ("The Boston Evening Transcript," "Cousin Nancy," and "Aunt Helen").  Some bits of it have been adapted from the Eliot chapter of a book called Making Nothing Happen: Poetry, Autonomy, Society that I've been working on.

1. Overview

T.S. Eliot was far from alone among modern poets in perceiving a crisis in the social position of poetry and in dreaming up a solution to that crisis.  Yeats, for example, sought to bring poetry out of the aesthete’s garret by allying it with both mystic rites and nationalism; while Ezra Pound dreamed of a world in which “the damned and despised literati” would, through clarity of language, keep “the whole machinery of social and of individual thought” functional, and therefore make themselves crucial to the legislators and governors of the world.  Eliot’s particular sense of the nature of the crisis, and of its solution, was colored by the decline of his social class and of the kind of public, moralistic culture associated with that class.  Eliot had strong family connections to a Boston-based, cultivated elite that entered a phase of steep decline around the time of his birth.  Eliot’s reaction to the decline was to satirize his declining class and its culture.  Out of his satire, though, emerged a new theory of poetry, in which the energies to which popular culture speaks are harnessed to the civilizing power of a tradition of high culture and spiritual discipline in a new kind of poetry.  Eliot theorizes about the value and meaning of high culture in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and works to fuse the energies of popular culture and the civilizing influence of high culture in his great, difficult, long poem The Waste Land.

2. Eliot’s Social Situation

The mark of the old, cultivated, civic-minded Bostonian elite was indelibly inscribed in the psyche of T.S. Eliot, but his was not an uncomplicated relation to his heritage.  There was, of course, the matter of geography.  The St. Louis-bred Eliot came from the margins of a social and cultural world whose metropolitan center was located somewhere between Harvard Square and Boston Common, and he knew it.  But even more important than his marginality to his class in space was his generational marginality with respect to that class.  When Eliot was still in his childhood it became clear that the old Bostonian elite and its national offshoots were being displaced, and in many instances dispossessed. The neighborhood surrounding the Eliot family’s house at 2635 Locust Street, once eminently respectable, was already coming down in the world when the poet was born in 1888.  It had, Eliot wrote in a memoir, “become shabby to a degree approaching slumminess,” and was an apt image for the decline of the high-minded St. Louis elite of which the Eliots had been cornerstones.  “The best citizens,” wrote Lincoln Steffens of St. Louis, “used to rule the town, and they ruled it well…. But a change occurred.  Public spirit became private spirit.” Steffens dates the change as beginning around 1890, and by the turn of the century the city had fallen into the hands of a self-interested and materialistic elite.           

            The story Lincoln Steffens tells about St. Louis was true of other places as well: indeed, his 1904 book The Shame of the Cities relates the same sad tale about Minneapolis, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York.  The older elites of many of these cities, including New York, had been influenced by the ideals of the Boston elite, but increasingly, in the decades after the Civil War, the old elites faced the same kind of displacement the Eliots and their circle faced in St. Louis.  As historian Richard Hofstadter puts it,

The rapid development of the big cities, the building of a great industrial plant, the construction of the railroads, the emergence of the corporation as the dominant form of enterprise, transformed the old society and revolutionized the distribution of power and prestige…. By the late 1880s this process had gone far enough to become the subject of frequent, anxious comment in the press…. The newly rich, the grandiosely or corruptly rich were bypassing…the old gentry…

In 1917 Eliot would write that a writer’s art is formed by “the accumulated sensations of his first twenty-one years”—a period that in his case covered the years 1888-1903.  These were the years in which the class to which he was born had to confront the hard fact that it had been diminished, that the new America of industry, growing immigrant diversity, and imperial ambition had covered the old America of the Brahmins like a flow of fresh lava.

3. Eliot’s Satiric Verse

In Eliot’s view, the old world of genteel culture was too disconnected from the vital energies of the new, urban, industrial America to be revived.  Indeed, genteel culture appears as a spent force in the satiric verse he wrote in the early 1910s. If the genteel, decaying elite represented is satirized for the stifling nature of its commitment to old codes of behavior, the younger generation is satirized for the primitive nature of its urges, and for the vulgarity of the new mass culture that expresses and speaks to those urges.  We see this kind of satire in poems like “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Cousin Nancy,” and “Aunt Helen.”  

4.  Eliot on the Imagination and Tradition

Eliot came to see the mass culture of his day—jazz music, comic strips, boxing matches, and other popular entertainments—as things that engaged people at a visceral level, speaking to their inner urges, but not linking those urges to anything more spiritual or refined.  At the same time, he saw the high culture of his own social class as civilized but anemic and disconnected from the baser urges.  Eliot attempts to bridge the gap between our inner urges and a civilizing high culture through a theory of tradition and imagination that fuses the primitive urges with a mental world conditioned by long exposure to a literary and religious cultural tradition. 

            Eliot does not limit the creative process to the primitive, unprocessed urges, but he bases it there. 

            He describes the basis of the creative process as something unpremeditated, based in the unconscious, and not fully within the artist’s control.  In discussing Virgil’s Eclogues, for example, Eliot uses the idea of prophecy to describe the method of composition:

If a prophet were by definition a man who understood the full meaning of what he was saying, this would be the end of the matter.  But if the word ‘inspiration’ is to have any meaning, it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something which he does not wholly understand—or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him.  This is certainly true of poetic inspiration…

Elsewhere, Eliot chastises the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold for failing, at times, to make his verse rise to the condition of true poetry.  The failure has, at root, what Eliot calls an insensitivity to the “auditory imagination”—though what is at stake in the auditory imagination is not mere sound, but a sounding of the depths of the unconscious:

What I call the ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back…. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses… the most ancient, and the most civilized mentality. 

Eliot finds the greatest force in poems that, unlike Arnold’s weaker productions, use words that have “a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires” and the spring from “a kind of power” that “comes from below the intellect.” In a short critical note appended to The Collected Poems of Harold Monro Eliot is quite explicit about the basis of the creative process, saying that for the poet the poem “is dictated, not by the idea—for there is no idea—but by the dark embryo within him.”

            There is another element to Eliot’s theory of poetic creation, though, one just as important.  Indeed, if we turn to the most famous of Eliot’s critical essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” we find Eliot advocating a rigorous preparation of the poet’s mind, so that the urges of the imagination will be received in particular ways.  The preparation involves the acquisition of the “historical sense,” which comes from much deliberate study, and results in a conditioning of the imagination such that the poet writes “not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling for the whole literature of Europe.” This literary tradition is “the mind of Europe,” and the poet must understand that what it offers is “more important than his own mind.”  Indeed, it is in absorbing this tradition into his bones that the poet has his “self-sacrifice” and his “extinction of personality.” As Frank Lentricchia notes, the extinction of personality Eliot describes is not an extinction into “no-self” but into “self-in-historical-community.” That is: the poet’s imagination becomes not just a theater of individual urges, fears, and desires: it becomes a place in which those urges and desires take on meanings derived from a tradition larger and wiser than the individual.  The imagination’s reception of the dictates of the dark embryo within is tempered by the tradition’s teachings about the meaning and value of those dictates, teachings that have been wholly absorbed by the poet.

            For Eliot, the artist who does not fully absorb tradition, or who fails to connect the dark embryo of urges, fears, and desires to the teachings of that tradition fails, in some significant sense, as an artist.

5. The Waste Land

In reading The Waste Land, it is easy to become paralyzed by the fear that one needs to look up every obscure phrase and locate every reference.  Much can be gained from giving the poem that kind of attention, but there is also something to be said for reading through without too much hesitation, allowing the language and images to wash over you as if you were watching a film montage.   One thing one might keep in mind during this second, less anxious kind of reading is Eliot’s emphasis on both primal urges (often associated with popular culture) and high culture (often seen as anemic or remote from everyday life as lived in the twentieth century).

The Waste Land offers both abundant examples of language reduced to the bare expression of emotion, and instances of the transformation of emotion into spiritual wisdom based on the absorption of tradition.  As the critic William Harmon has pointed out, The Waste Land is full of “animal utterances” that are “below articulate language.”  These utterances are often connected with sexual desire, as in the “Weialala leia/Wallala leilala” of the Thames maidens; or with the consequences of violent sexual encounters, as in the lament of Philomela, a figure from Greek mythology who is turned into a nightingale after being brutally raped, and who is invoked in Eliot’s poem in these lines:

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

Lust, sorrow, and other simple emotions, expressed in preverbal sounds: this is the traditionless condition, where “farmyard noises” (to use a phrase Eliot used in an interview) are the only vehicle for expression, and where what is expressed are merely crude emotions without much intellectual content.

            The repeated syllable we encounter at the very end of the poem, “DA,” seems, initially, to be yet another instance of preverbal noise, expression without meaning.   But we see, near the end of The Waste Land, the transformation of sound into language, and, in fact, into language redolent of the deep historical roots of spiritual tradition. “DA/Datta” speaks to us of the need to give, as articulated in the Sanskrit of the Upanishads; while “DA/Dayadhvam” and “DA/Damyata” speak to us of the spiritual need to sympathize and to control oneself as articulated in the same text.  Giving, controlling, and sympathizing are all matters of the disciplining of one’s more basic urges.  Eliot is dramatizing the transformation of primitive urges, of speech as a series of yelps, howls, and shouts, into the beginnings of a spiritual tradition.  The poem enacts a kind of re-creation of a spiritual and intellectual tradition that can connect with human urges. 

Fooling a Butterfly: Poetry and (Kinda, Sorta) Belief

Nabokov hoping to fool some butterflies

A few days ago, over on Facebook, Barry Schwabsky responded to my recent post about Robert Duncan's belief in mythology by saying that he's never fully understood the distinction between really believing something and only "kinda sorta" believing in it.  I was intrigued: what, after all, does it mean to only sort of believe in something?  Is there a stark belief/unbelief dichotomy?  If so, why do I refuse to blink during a Notre Dame field goal attempt, even though I tell myself I don't believe in anything so supernatural as the kind of sympathetic magic such an action entails?

The question of semi-belief came to me again today as I was reading Michael Benedikt's 1970 poetry collection Sky.  There's much to admire in that book: it's where Benedikt leaves off the Ashberyesque ellipses and Mark Strand-ish soft surrealism of his earlier work and starts to sound more like himself, or at any rate more like the poet he'll become (more talky, more anaphoric, longer-lined).  One of the poems, an elegy for Benedikt's father called "This Morning I Fooled  Butterfly," seems to capture exactly what it's like to "sorta, kinda" believe in something.  Here's the poem:

It was not real, finding an unmarked envelope of old seeds left by dead dad
It was not real, finding them acting as a place-marker in one of the armaments catalogues of
     the electronics industry for which he worked
It was not real, that there was a place left clear for planting among the weeds that had ensued
     in the six weeks since his decease
It was not real that these seeds sprouted
It was not real that that happened after three months, during which I could hardly find the time
     to return for a visit to the garden beside which my mother lived in a cottage
It was not real that they were not tended but came anyway to maturity
It was not real that, as I lay there in the garden, an insect came (some damned dumb butterfly)
     &, proceeding straight to the spot, sat on the product of all this accident, the issue of so much
     deflection & misunderstanding
& sat there on the tangle of unknown yellow & blue flowers, & roses, for a full fifteen minutes,
     as if all this were real.

On the simplest and most literal level, this is, of course, a statement of non-belief.  There was no packet of seeds, there was no fortuitous place to plant them, they didn't grow in the absence of care, and no butterfly came and perched on them.  The butterfly most certainly wasn't connected in some mysterious way to the poet's dead father, and its long stay on the flower while the poet lay nearby was in no way to be confused with the return of the poet's father, and some kind of reconciliation between living son and late father.  No sirree: that would all be a matter of "deflection and misunderstanding."  But convention indicates that we don't limit ourselves to reading poems literally, and Benedikt knows that.  Each of those things that "was not real" is implied.  Indeed, the whole scene that the poem invokes—a scene of the fortuitous recovery of the relic of a dead father, and a kind of reconciliation with the spirit of the departed—is painted quite vividly, and a reader of the poem isn't likely to discard that vivid depiction just because the repeated statement "It was not real" asks her to.  Indeed, the real effect of the repeated negation is to make us weigh the statement of the scene (that there was a spirit-visit and a reconciliation) against the assertion of that scene's unreality.  The very repetition of "it was not real" becomes less a confirmation of unreality, and more like a weakening of the assertion, the effect is to make it as if the poet were trying to convince himself that the reconciliation could not have been real.

There's a fairly strong case to be made that the poem works via Keatsian negative capability—that it leaves us, and the poet, in "uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."  In fact, the case becomes quite strong when we consider how the poem's ending balances out the poem's title.

Consider the title. What are we to make of the statement "This Morning I Fooled a Butterfly"?  I suppose the most likely interpretation is that the poet fooled the butterfly into playing the role of his dead father.  Read that way, we can take the title as a confirmation of all of those "it was not real" statements: the whole experience of the father's spirit returning was a matter of the poet projecting what he needed to believe onto a scene that did not in itself support such an interpretation.  Of course, since the butterfly would have been oblivious to all this, a more accurate statement would have been "This Morning I Fooled Myself (Into Thinking a Butterfly Embodied the Spirit of my Dead Father)"—so we can see the title as Benedikt's way of dramatizing himself almost, but not quite, admitting to the kind of self-deception he would need to undergo to believe in the father's return.  It's a nice hesitancy, but in the end the title seems to argue against the reality of the spirit's return.

But consider, too, the end of the poem.  In that final, long line we're not just told that the butterfly sitting there for fifteen minutes wasn't real: we're told something like "it was not real that the butterfly sat there as if all this were real."  This last bit is interesting, because there is a kind of redundancy of doubt.  That is, if Benedikt had only wanted us to think "oh, the butterfly sat there as if it was the spirit of his father, but it couldn't really have been the spirit of his father" he'd only have needed to begin the line with "It wasn't real"—he didn't need to add "as if all this were real" at the end.  So the statement is really more like "It wasn't really the case that the butterfly sat there just pretending to be the spirit of my dead father."  This muddles things considerably, with the result that the line could conceivably be read as the kind of double negative that produces a positive—in which case this line, unlike the rest of the poem, effectively becomes a claim that the butterfly did somehow embody the spirit of the father.

So we have a title—a statement about the poem as a whole—that seems to deny the butterfly-as-spirit hypothesis, and a final line that could possibly taken as a confirmation of that hypothesis.  The two most powerful positions, title and ending, point in different directions, underlining the kind of undecidability, or negative capability, that we get in the body of the poem, where rich description is played off against repeated denial.  We have Benedikt depicting himself as desperately wanting, even needing, the butterfly incident to be a reconciliation with the spirit of his father—but we have, just as powerfully, Benedikt's modern, secular denial of that kind of need.  The end result isn't a poem of belief or of nonbelief, but of a kind of tension between the two.  It is, at the level of tragic emotion, exactly what not blinking during a field goal attempt is at the level of game day farce: a moment of kinda, sorta belief.

The present humble blogger in his Notre Dame rally beanie, in whose football-influencing powers he kinda, sorta believes.

“That’s a Real Angel You’re Talking To”: Robert Duncan and Mythological Consciousness

“You know, that’s a real angel you’re talking to.” It was a couple of years ago, at a reception in Chicago’s Green Lantern Gallery, that I overheard that comment. I was sipping cheap wine and talking to an old friend in the crowd that had gathered at an after-party held in the wake of the Chicago Poetry Project’s symposium on Robert Duncan, and someone behind me was recalling the remark as something Duncan had said to Nathaniel Mackey after reading some of the letters to the “Angel of Dust” collected in Mackey’s From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate. Given the provenance, the remark may be apocryphal, but it’s certainly plausible, since one of the things about which Duncan was most insistent was the reality of myth, and of the figures found in myth. Indeed, the thing about Duncan that’s most challenging to (and most often discounted by) contemporary audiences is just this: that he had, or at least tried very hard to have, a truly mythological consciousness—something utterly alien to most people in our time, even those who see myth sympathetically.

What it means to have a mythological consciousness is perhaps best understood with reference to Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume Two: Mythological Thought. Cassirer, who goes largely unappreciated in literary circles nowadays, has a lot to offer us: after all, he was to neo-Kantian thought what Adorno was to Marxism, in that he wedded the rigors of his particular discipline to a belief that all of the humanities had something important to contribute to understanding, and took a strong interest in cultural forms. In his work on mythological thinking, he is at pains to distinguish between forms of thought that merely value mythology, and a true mythological form of consciousness, something he finds primarily in pre-modern contexts (though, as his chilling study of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the State, makes plain, it can enter the modern world, sometimes in dangerous ways).

By and large, says Cassier, even those of us who value myths as a source of knowledge engage in some fancy footwork to make those myths compatible with our own, non-mythological worldviews. “We are accustomed to view these contents as ‘symbolic,’ to seek behind them another, hidden sense to which they mediately refer,” he writes. “Thus, myth becomes mystery: its true significance and depth lie not in what its configurations reveal but in what they conceal…. From this result the various types and trends of myth interpretation—the attempts to disclose the meaning, whether metaphysical or ethical, that is concealed in myths.” Those who do not truly believe in mythology as fundamentally real find the value of myth in the way myths can be translated into some other kind of knowledge. Such attempts can be quite elaborate: “Medieval philosophers,” writes Cassirer, “distinguished three levels of interpretation, a sensus allegoricus, a sensus anagogicus, and a sensus mysticus.” Even those with a great deal of sympathy for myth and a strong dose of skepticism for modern rationality tend to need some kind of allegorical or symbolic interpretive method to make sense of mythology. Even the Romantics, says Cassirer, “though they strove… to understand the basic phenomena of mythology in themselves and not through their relationship to something else, did not fundamentally overcome ‘allegorisis.’”

If one truly embodies a mythological consciousness—if one thinks not about mythology, but within it—things look different. Apollo the god, and the ideas represented by the figure of Apollo are distinct to most of us (who may be sympathetic to those ideas, but who don’t expect to wake and see Apollo outside the window), but, as Cassirer points out, “only observers who no longer live in it but reflect on it read such distinctions into myth.” For those whose consciousness is truly formed by mythology, the mythical figure doesn’t stand for a thing: “it is the thing… it has the same actuality”—ideas are “transpose[d] into a material substance or being.” One way to grasp this is to think of what Cassirer calls the “mythical action,” when a “true substantiation is effected” and “the subject of the action is transformed into a god or demon.” That is: if you go to a Catholic mass and experience the transformation of the Eucharistic wafer as a metaphor or a symbol, you may be sympathetic to the meaning of the event, but you do not experience it with a truly mythological consciousness. Only if, in your true and deepest and most fundamental understanding, you actually experience the transformation of the wafer as a real, actual, literal transformation of the object into the body of Christ, into something divine, do you really experience the event with mythological consciousness. That kind of thinking represents a challenge for most of us: but if we want to understand Robert Duncan’s poetry, it’s important to take up that challenge. He wants very much to experience the world with just such a consciousness.

Consider Duncan’s comments on Milton’s Areopagitica in The Truth and Life of Myth. Attempting to explain his own relation to mythology, Duncan quotes this passage:

Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master's second coming; he shall bring together every joint and member, and shall mould them into an immortal feature of loveliness and perfection.... The light which we have gained was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge.

Most of us would read “Truth,” with a capital “T,” as an allegorical figure, and indeed as a figure of speech. But, says Duncan, “the mythological mind—and mine… is mythological—hears this not as fable or parable but as the actual drama or meaning of history, the plot and intention of Reality.” For Duncan, “Truth was a Power, and, in this, a Person in history.” To be absolutely clear: Truth, for Duncan, is not a personification—she is a person. There’s a literalism here that is alien to the modern mind, and native to truly mythological consciousness.

It’s not easy, though, for Duncan to maintain this mythological consciousness in a modern world that looks askance at such consciousness. Indeed, Duncan makes an admission of doubt, saying that poets who attempt mythological consciousness “must ever be troubled by the play of their genius, of true things in fictions and of fictions in true things.” What is more, we find Duncan making what can seem like very willful readings, or misreadings, of other poets, in defense of mythological consciousness. We see this, for example, when Duncan discussed Dante’s famous encounter with “the angel Amor” in the Vita Nuova (given here in D.G. Rossetti’s translation, the version Duncan favored): "I felt a spirit of Love begin to stir/ Within my heart, long time unfelt till then;/And saw Love coming towards me, fair and fain.../Saying “Be now indeed my worshipper!” Dante "is speaking literally here, not figuratively," says Duncan, he “is not illustrating some thought of his but telling us of an actual presentation in the crux of the reality of the poem.” Dante’s poetry, says Duncan, “insists upon the primal reality of the angel Amor” as actually real—as far as Duncan is concerned, that’s a real angel Dante’s talking to.

Those familiar with the medieval modes of interpretation might object that the spirit of love is no real angel, here, no record of a literal seraphic vision, but a figure of speech that fits neatly into the allegorical and anagogical modes of literary composition and interpretation with which Dante was familiar, and around which his Divine Comedy is structured. They may even cite no less an authority than Dante himself, who describes the angel as figurative. But Duncan will not have it. Even though Duncan admits that “Dante pleads poetic license, that this is no more than a figure of speech,” he chooses not to accept this part of Dante as sincere. Rather, Duncan decides that Dante’s description of the angel as figurative is merely a self-protecting lie. “Joan [of Arc] will be tried by ecclesiastic court and burned at the stake for talking with such demonic powers as Dante’s angels in the Vita Nuova are,” says Duncan, and “Ficino and Pico della Mirandola will come to trial for their practices of a theurgic magic to call up such personifications.” In light of this climate of fear, Duncan decides that we must see Dante’s denial of literalism in a new light, as a “pleading of insincerity [about] just what in the poem has to be sincere.”

The willfulness of this reading is hard to ignore. Not only does Duncan ignore Dante’s extensive use of allegorical and anagogical figures throughout his work, but he cites as evidence of a climate of fear and intimidation events that won’t occur for 130 or even 150 years (the Vita Nuova was written in 1295; Joan of Arc went to trial in 1431; Ficino and Pico della Mirandola had their run-ins with Papal authority in the 1480s, and merely endured exile, a punishment we know from history that Dante was quite willing to undergo for his beliefs). But my point isn’t to say that Duncan was right or wrong: my point is to say that his desire for a mythological consciousness put him on the defensive, and could even lead him to make claims that were more emotionally satisfying and philosophically authorizing than they were defensible. We might not learn much about Dante from Duncan’s comments, but we learn something about Duncan: that he badly needed allies in his battle to maintain mythological consciousness in a milieu resistant to such consciousness, and may even have invented some of those allies out of his need.