Myth is actually the most powerful form of meaning there is, because far from being something that may or may not be credited, it’s really saying THIS IS HOW MEN ARE. THIS IS THE ESSENCE OF MAN. AND YOU’D BETTER LEARN TO LIVE WITH IT BECAUSE YOU CANNOT ARGUE WITH HISTORICAL TRUTH. Myth, paradoxically for those who choose to define it as untrue stories, is Fact. And it’s Fact you can’t argue with. So maybe Casaubon, and not Frazer, had it right all along. Let me explain.
Literature has always treated Myth as a kind of cultural smorgasbord - a collection of rattling good yarns you could nick when you couldn’t be bothered to think up an original plot of your own. It immediately lent your work a historical context and dimension, and, most importantly, an inherited respectability. And that was as much the case among the playwrights of Ancient Greece as it was for the Renaissance writers who in turn took those plays as their inspiration. Whether you’re James Joyce or the Coen Brothers, ‘The Odyssey’ isn’t a bad peg to hang your meaning on (1). After all, it’s been around a long while.
So, over the millennia, you get endless re-tellings of the same story, changing names, dates and places - whatever - to suit contemporary folkways and cultural preoccupations and to make them more ‘relevant’ to their intended audience. They may end up scarcely recognizable from the original ur-plot, but that plot remains in there somewhere, buried under numerous layers of historical accretions.
So the fact that the story has survived immediately gives its meaning a historical justification, and this is Stage One in the creation of a Myth.
Then at some point, (Stage Two) that justification transcends the historical and becomes cultural. This occurs when the someone notices that other stories have a similar meaning. The more geographically and chronologically those examples are spread out, the more universally applicable that meaning can be said to be.
In Stage Three, that broadly applicable meaning coalesces into one Archetypal Story. The formative stories therefore become deracinated, to the point where their origins and immediate settings cease to matter. The original Meaning has now acquired the status of Truth.
Then, in Stage Four, the Truths start to merge together, as common ground is established between them. And what you end up with is critics saying that there’s only nine plots that power the entire Western Canon (2).
It’s like the ‘six degrees of separation’ argument. Only with literature.
So myth is its own justification. It is because it is. It’s a form of eternal meaning whose authority cannot be challenged because it has been borne out by history. Put simply, it’s the “matter” of humanity.
That is a hugely compressed version of a process that can take an incredibly long time. And its often so compressed that you’ll get critics and cultural commentators trying to chase certain mythical motifs back through the world’s cultures to determine their origins, and the route they took on their journey into contemporary culture.
But in literature, myth has been regarded as very much a double-edged sword. According to Philip Larkin, who clearly had TS Eliot and the other uber-modernists is his sights when he wrote this:
I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people. (3)
He might also have added that when an artist incorporates myth into his work, he’s looking to the past rather than the future, albeit that the meaning inherent in myth, being eternal, is present in everything we do and say.
So the use of myth can, with some justification, be viewed as an exercise in nostalgia. To which William Faulkner, in his acceptance speech for the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, might well have remarked, “and what’s wrong with that?” The writer must leave
no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
As one of the seminal modernist writers, Faulkner was convinced that things weren’t what they used to be. A spiritual dimension was lacking in the America of 1950, just as it had in the 1920’s, and using myth as his foundation stone was perhaps the only way the writer could do his bit to put some of it back. People were afraid, he noted, and the detonation of the atom bomb had cast a huge shadow over contemporary culture. There were no longer “problems of the spirit” for the artist to wrestle with, only the question “when will I be blown up?” What the use of myth would achieve was to re-connect mankind with those eternal elements in his history and character that had enabled him to make it this far.
Faulkner was, of course, saying nothing new (one of the paradoxes of myth is that it’s nigh on impossible to do anything original, since everything’s only a variation on a theme of what has been done before). Myth has often been associated with the idea of a ‘Golden Age’, and I’m sure that was as true for Edmund Spenser in the 1500’s creating a history for Elizabethan England in ‘The Faerie Queene’ as it was for Hitler when he picked over Germany’s past to manufacture a glorious (and spurious) thousand-year history as he laid the keel for his Third Reich, which was famously going to survive another thousand years.
What artists tend to do when faced with the need to ‘create’ a past, (given that they don’t [usually] have access to tanks troops and guns), is create a sense of a cultural continuum out of which their work emerges, and to which that work contributes. That way, with God having gone AWOL, and philosophy in confusion, there can at least be something underpinning and validating your art.
And no-one, but no-one was better at doing this than TS Eliot, his masterpiece in this genre being ‘The Waste Land’, a collection of “fragments” he “shored against my ruins”.
I’ve already mentioned the romantic sense of ennui that characterized culture in the 1920’s, and, with the publication of ‘The Waste Land’ in 1922, Eliot assumed the role of its high priest. So he got his head down in the library and came up with a dazzling array of fragments, loosely structured round a re-working of the Grail legend as filtered through ‘The Golden Bough’ (q.v.) and Jessie L. Weston’s treatise ‘From Ritual to Romance’. Eliot clearly did his homework, and just so that we know he did, he added (in my edition anyway) five pages of notes citing his cultural references. I think they’re worth listing:
The Book of Ezekiel, The Book of Ecclesiastes, Tristan & Isolde, the Tarot pack, Baudelaire, Dante - ‘Inferno’, John Webster - ‘The White Devil’, Shakespeare - ‘Antony & Cleopatra’, Virgil - the ‘Aeneid’, Milton - ‘Paradise Lost’, Ovid - ‘Metamorphoses’, John Middleton ‘Women Beware Women’, Edmund Spenser ‘Prothalamion’, Shakespeare - ‘The Tempest’, Marvell - ‘To His Coy Mistress’, John Day - ‘The Parliament of Bees’, an Australian ballad, Verlaine - ‘Parsifal’, Goldsmith - ‘The Vicar of Wakefield, ? - ‘The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches’, Wagner - ‘Gotterdammerung’, V. Froude - ‘Elizabeth’, Dante - ‘Purgatorio’, St. Augustine - ‘Confessions’, Buddha - ‘The Fire Sermon, Herman Hesse - ‘Blick ins Chaos’, the Upanishads, FH Bradley - ‘Appearance and Reality’, Gerard de Nerval - ‘Sonnets’, Thomas Kyd ‘Spanish Tragedy’ and, of course, we must not forget the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America.
As a smash-and-grab raid on the myth kitty it’s pretty impressive, and up there with Sir Philip Sidney in terms of erudition; that Eliot managed to fashion such a seamless robe from such a catholic variety of source material is an enormous tribute to his (and Ezra Pound’s) poetic abilities and editorial skills. And the presence of the blind prophet Tiresias, who, as a sort of narrator lends an air of historical and mythic continuity, having experienced a sizeable amount of human history. In Eliot’s notes, he’s described as “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest . . . What Tiresias sees . . . is the substance of the poem.”
Whether to view ‘The Waste Land’ as a showy Cook’s tour of (mainly Western) culture or an appropriate response to a civilizational crisis doesn’t concern us here; what does is Eliot’s conception of myth as lending Value to literary meaning. To look on literature as society’s saviour is to place an incredible burden on its shoulders, but one he thought it could bear.
Or more likely one it had to bear. I suppose it’s the best he could do while he was sorting out his intellectual issues with the Christian faith. (4)
So in a way, our argument has reached a temporary end to its journey: in the opening section, we looked at the issue of whether literary meaning had any value, since it was based on lies. Several thousand words later, we’ve arrived at the position that not only is meaning not a lie but is in fact truth. And not just any old truth, but THE truth. A transcendent truth that can prop up the entire fabric of civilization. A truth that is more real than what is real - and thus a Symbolic Truth.
And so, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you ‘Literary Meaning’.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of codas to the argument, which we must address for the sake of completeness.
The first thing to emphasize is that there are loads more Big Themes we could look at, and I’m not pretending that what I’ve written above is in any way exhaustive (and the odd additional one will sneak in as our argument progresses). Because what tends to happen is that the law of diminishing returns clicks in just beyond the point we’ve now got to, and we’ll start exploring smaller and smaller offshoots and cul-de-sacs related to the main themes we’ve already established. And this will unbalance the book. So it’s quite preposterous, as one American critic did, to identify 105 different types of meaning; for a start, it makes literature appear far more complicated than it is; there is absolutely no way you can apply them in any consistent way to actual text, as they’ll keep treading on each others’ toes; and besides, it’s bloody boring. So we’re stopping at seven.
So now I want you to forget the contents of this section. You don’t actually need to be aware of any of the above to enjoy reading, but I hope this brief peer under the bonnet of literary meaning will help explain some of its more basic elements. But if you’re going to take anything of practical value away from this section, please let it be these two fundamental ideas:
· Meaning is only someone else’s opinion, and your interpretation is likely to be just as valid as theirs;
· Meaning does not necessarily have to explain anything; it can exist just as happily as an unformed suggestion as a bald statement of fact.
So now we’ve got the bulk of the theory out of the way, let’s return to the factor in the reading equation that matters the most - people. In the next three sections, we’ll be looking at meaning from the viewpoint of the reader, the writer and the critic respectively to find out what we all bring to the party.
Footnotes:
1. In ‘Ulysses’ and the film ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ respectively
2. Which are, apparently: Cinderella, Achilles, Faust, Tristan, Circe, Romeo & Juliet, Orpheus, the Irrepressible Hero and the Wanderer.
3. And Larkin wasn’t alone in his distaste for the mythical. Other writers (Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Donald Davie) in what came to be known as ‘The Movement’ chose to address everyday British life in plain, straightforward language and often in traditional forms. It first attracted attention with the publication of the anthology New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. Conquest saw the group's work "free from both mystical and logical compulsions and - like modern philosophy - is empirical in its attitude to all that comes." So you could usually understand what they were on about.
4. I realize I’ve fallen into the old trap of using Eliot as the touchstone for Modernism in poetry, but other, less celebrated poets were at it as well; take Edward Thomas, for example, who’ only remembered for the frequently anthologized ‘Adlestrop’. In the marvellous, and beguilingly simple ‘Lob’, the eponymous character, like Eliot’s Tiresias, unites the poem’s meaning through time:
`Do you believe Jack dead before his hour?
Or that his name is Walker, or Bottlesford,
Or Button, a mere clown, or squire, or lord?
The man you saw, - Lob-lie-by-the-fire, Jack Cade,
Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade,
Young Jack, or old Jack, or Jack What-d'ye-call,
Jack-in-the-hedge, or Robin-run-by-the-wall,
Robin Hood, Ragged Robin, lazy Bob,
One of the lords of No Man's Land, good Lob, -
Although he was seen dying at Waterloo,
Hastings, Agincourt, and Sedgemoor too, -
Lives yet. He never will admit he is dead
Till millers cease to grind men's bones for bread . . .
He may not be Everyman, but he’s certainly the spirit of England that shone through some of its real and fictional native sons. And you don’t need five pages of notes to understand the poem.
Literature has always treated Myth as a kind of cultural smorgasbord - a collection of rattling good yarns you could nick when you couldn’t be bothered to think up an original plot of your own. It immediately lent your work a historical context and dimension, and, most importantly, an inherited respectability. And that was as much the case among the playwrights of Ancient Greece as it was for the Renaissance writers who in turn took those plays as their inspiration. Whether you’re James Joyce or the Coen Brothers, ‘The Odyssey’ isn’t a bad peg to hang your meaning on (1). After all, it’s been around a long while.
So, over the millennia, you get endless re-tellings of the same story, changing names, dates and places - whatever - to suit contemporary folkways and cultural preoccupations and to make them more ‘relevant’ to their intended audience. They may end up scarcely recognizable from the original ur-plot, but that plot remains in there somewhere, buried under numerous layers of historical accretions.
So the fact that the story has survived immediately gives its meaning a historical justification, and this is Stage One in the creation of a Myth.
Then at some point, (Stage Two) that justification transcends the historical and becomes cultural. This occurs when the someone notices that other stories have a similar meaning. The more geographically and chronologically those examples are spread out, the more universally applicable that meaning can be said to be.
In Stage Three, that broadly applicable meaning coalesces into one Archetypal Story. The formative stories therefore become deracinated, to the point where their origins and immediate settings cease to matter. The original Meaning has now acquired the status of Truth.
Then, in Stage Four, the Truths start to merge together, as common ground is established between them. And what you end up with is critics saying that there’s only nine plots that power the entire Western Canon (2).
It’s like the ‘six degrees of separation’ argument. Only with literature.
So myth is its own justification. It is because it is. It’s a form of eternal meaning whose authority cannot be challenged because it has been borne out by history. Put simply, it’s the “matter” of humanity.
That is a hugely compressed version of a process that can take an incredibly long time. And its often so compressed that you’ll get critics and cultural commentators trying to chase certain mythical motifs back through the world’s cultures to determine their origins, and the route they took on their journey into contemporary culture.
But in literature, myth has been regarded as very much a double-edged sword. According to Philip Larkin, who clearly had TS Eliot and the other uber-modernists is his sights when he wrote this:
I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief in 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people. (3)
He might also have added that when an artist incorporates myth into his work, he’s looking to the past rather than the future, albeit that the meaning inherent in myth, being eternal, is present in everything we do and say.
So the use of myth can, with some justification, be viewed as an exercise in nostalgia. To which William Faulkner, in his acceptance speech for the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, might well have remarked, “and what’s wrong with that?” The writer must leave
no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
As one of the seminal modernist writers, Faulkner was convinced that things weren’t what they used to be. A spiritual dimension was lacking in the America of 1950, just as it had in the 1920’s, and using myth as his foundation stone was perhaps the only way the writer could do his bit to put some of it back. People were afraid, he noted, and the detonation of the atom bomb had cast a huge shadow over contemporary culture. There were no longer “problems of the spirit” for the artist to wrestle with, only the question “when will I be blown up?” What the use of myth would achieve was to re-connect mankind with those eternal elements in his history and character that had enabled him to make it this far.
Faulkner was, of course, saying nothing new (one of the paradoxes of myth is that it’s nigh on impossible to do anything original, since everything’s only a variation on a theme of what has been done before). Myth has often been associated with the idea of a ‘Golden Age’, and I’m sure that was as true for Edmund Spenser in the 1500’s creating a history for Elizabethan England in ‘The Faerie Queene’ as it was for Hitler when he picked over Germany’s past to manufacture a glorious (and spurious) thousand-year history as he laid the keel for his Third Reich, which was famously going to survive another thousand years.
What artists tend to do when faced with the need to ‘create’ a past, (given that they don’t [usually] have access to tanks troops and guns), is create a sense of a cultural continuum out of which their work emerges, and to which that work contributes. That way, with God having gone AWOL, and philosophy in confusion, there can at least be something underpinning and validating your art.
And no-one, but no-one was better at doing this than TS Eliot, his masterpiece in this genre being ‘The Waste Land’, a collection of “fragments” he “shored against my ruins”.
I’ve already mentioned the romantic sense of ennui that characterized culture in the 1920’s, and, with the publication of ‘The Waste Land’ in 1922, Eliot assumed the role of its high priest. So he got his head down in the library and came up with a dazzling array of fragments, loosely structured round a re-working of the Grail legend as filtered through ‘The Golden Bough’ (q.v.) and Jessie L. Weston’s treatise ‘From Ritual to Romance’. Eliot clearly did his homework, and just so that we know he did, he added (in my edition anyway) five pages of notes citing his cultural references. I think they’re worth listing:
The Book of Ezekiel, The Book of Ecclesiastes, Tristan & Isolde, the Tarot pack, Baudelaire, Dante - ‘Inferno’, John Webster - ‘The White Devil’, Shakespeare - ‘Antony & Cleopatra’, Virgil - the ‘Aeneid’, Milton - ‘Paradise Lost’, Ovid - ‘Metamorphoses’, John Middleton ‘Women Beware Women’, Edmund Spenser ‘Prothalamion’, Shakespeare - ‘The Tempest’, Marvell - ‘To His Coy Mistress’, John Day - ‘The Parliament of Bees’, an Australian ballad, Verlaine - ‘Parsifal’, Goldsmith - ‘The Vicar of Wakefield, ? - ‘The Proposed Demolition of Nineteen City Churches’, Wagner - ‘Gotterdammerung’, V. Froude - ‘Elizabeth’, Dante - ‘Purgatorio’, St. Augustine - ‘Confessions’, Buddha - ‘The Fire Sermon, Herman Hesse - ‘Blick ins Chaos’, the Upanishads, FH Bradley - ‘Appearance and Reality’, Gerard de Nerval - ‘Sonnets’, Thomas Kyd ‘Spanish Tragedy’ and, of course, we must not forget the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America.
As a smash-and-grab raid on the myth kitty it’s pretty impressive, and up there with Sir Philip Sidney in terms of erudition; that Eliot managed to fashion such a seamless robe from such a catholic variety of source material is an enormous tribute to his (and Ezra Pound’s) poetic abilities and editorial skills. And the presence of the blind prophet Tiresias, who, as a sort of narrator lends an air of historical and mythic continuity, having experienced a sizeable amount of human history. In Eliot’s notes, he’s described as “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest . . . What Tiresias sees . . . is the substance of the poem.”
Whether to view ‘The Waste Land’ as a showy Cook’s tour of (mainly Western) culture or an appropriate response to a civilizational crisis doesn’t concern us here; what does is Eliot’s conception of myth as lending Value to literary meaning. To look on literature as society’s saviour is to place an incredible burden on its shoulders, but one he thought it could bear.
Or more likely one it had to bear. I suppose it’s the best he could do while he was sorting out his intellectual issues with the Christian faith. (4)
So in a way, our argument has reached a temporary end to its journey: in the opening section, we looked at the issue of whether literary meaning had any value, since it was based on lies. Several thousand words later, we’ve arrived at the position that not only is meaning not a lie but is in fact truth. And not just any old truth, but THE truth. A transcendent truth that can prop up the entire fabric of civilization. A truth that is more real than what is real - and thus a Symbolic Truth.
And so, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you ‘Literary Meaning’.
Nevertheless, there are a couple of codas to the argument, which we must address for the sake of completeness.
The first thing to emphasize is that there are loads more Big Themes we could look at, and I’m not pretending that what I’ve written above is in any way exhaustive (and the odd additional one will sneak in as our argument progresses). Because what tends to happen is that the law of diminishing returns clicks in just beyond the point we’ve now got to, and we’ll start exploring smaller and smaller offshoots and cul-de-sacs related to the main themes we’ve already established. And this will unbalance the book. So it’s quite preposterous, as one American critic did, to identify 105 different types of meaning; for a start, it makes literature appear far more complicated than it is; there is absolutely no way you can apply them in any consistent way to actual text, as they’ll keep treading on each others’ toes; and besides, it’s bloody boring. So we’re stopping at seven.
So now I want you to forget the contents of this section. You don’t actually need to be aware of any of the above to enjoy reading, but I hope this brief peer under the bonnet of literary meaning will help explain some of its more basic elements. But if you’re going to take anything of practical value away from this section, please let it be these two fundamental ideas:
· Meaning is only someone else’s opinion, and your interpretation is likely to be just as valid as theirs;
· Meaning does not necessarily have to explain anything; it can exist just as happily as an unformed suggestion as a bald statement of fact.
But these are only my opinions. Nonetheless, I’ll be re-stating them before this book’s finished.
So now we’ve got the bulk of the theory out of the way, let’s return to the factor in the reading equation that matters the most - people. In the next three sections, we’ll be looking at meaning from the viewpoint of the reader, the writer and the critic respectively to find out what we all bring to the party.
Footnotes:
1. In ‘Ulysses’ and the film ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ respectively
2. Which are, apparently: Cinderella, Achilles, Faust, Tristan, Circe, Romeo & Juliet, Orpheus, the Irrepressible Hero and the Wanderer.
3. And Larkin wasn’t alone in his distaste for the mythical. Other writers (Kingsley Amis, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings, Donald Davie) in what came to be known as ‘The Movement’ chose to address everyday British life in plain, straightforward language and often in traditional forms. It first attracted attention with the publication of the anthology New Lines, edited by Robert Conquest. Conquest saw the group's work "free from both mystical and logical compulsions and - like modern philosophy - is empirical in its attitude to all that comes." So you could usually understand what they were on about.
4. I realize I’ve fallen into the old trap of using Eliot as the touchstone for Modernism in poetry, but other, less celebrated poets were at it as well; take Edward Thomas, for example, who’ only remembered for the frequently anthologized ‘Adlestrop’. In the marvellous, and beguilingly simple ‘Lob’, the eponymous character, like Eliot’s Tiresias, unites the poem’s meaning through time:
`Do you believe Jack dead before his hour?
Or that his name is Walker, or Bottlesford,
Or Button, a mere clown, or squire, or lord?
The man you saw, - Lob-lie-by-the-fire, Jack Cade,
Jack Smith, Jack Moon, poor Jack of every trade,
Young Jack, or old Jack, or Jack What-d'ye-call,
Jack-in-the-hedge, or Robin-run-by-the-wall,
Robin Hood, Ragged Robin, lazy Bob,
One of the lords of No Man's Land, good Lob, -
Although he was seen dying at Waterloo,
Hastings, Agincourt, and Sedgemoor too, -
Lives yet. He never will admit he is dead
Till millers cease to grind men's bones for bread . . .
He may not be Everyman, but he’s certainly the spirit of England that shone through some of its real and fictional native sons. And you don’t need five pages of notes to understand the poem.
