OLD ENGLISH ELEGIAC LOSS AND SELF-IDENTITY IN “THE WANDERER” AND “THE SEAFARER”

In this essay I argue that the Old English elegies “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer” demonstrate the instability and fragility of Anglo-Saxon society. The reason for such instability is that the members of the un-Christian Anglo-Saxon society have no knowledge of God nor subsequently could they have any relationship with him. My analogies are based primarily on Plato’s “Myth of the Cave” from Book 7 of The Republic, and shall be furthermore expounded upon with Plotinus’ writing “On the Intellectual Beauty”. After discussing the essential content of Plato’s myth and the relationship thereof with Plotinus’ work, I shall apply them both as filters for my interpretation first to “The Wanderer”, and then to “The Seafarer”.

Plato’s “Myth of the Cave” demonstrates an individual’s release from ignorance into a profound experience upon seeing the very image of  God, whom he calls the True, Good, and Beautiful, and whom Plotinus, in his work, calls the “One”. This encounter with God allows the individual to receive enlightenment, where, being thus released from ignorance, he is given the opportunity to contemplate God as he is (Plato 280). And being enlightened by such an experience, he can no longer see the “shadows which he formerly saw”, but rather only the realities of the world outside the cave (Plato 280). It also gives the individual a “perfect self-identity”, as he “forms a multiple unity with the God silently present” (117). This enlightenment causes an individual’s separation[1] from society, as it “upholds some beings, and they see; the lower are dazzled and turn away, unfit to gaze upon that sun” (Plotinus 117). Moreover, it causes the individual to reflect upon his alienation and the state of his fellow-prisoners who are left in the cave, pitying therefore their condition as members of an unenlightened society (Plato 281). Plato explains as well that “those who attain to this beatific vision are unwilling to descend to human affairs; for their souls are ever hastening into the upper world where they desire to dwell” (282). It is this beatific vision that is the profound experience – the conversion point – of the individuals exemplified in Plato’s and Plotinus’ works.

The individual’s conversion point prompts the individual to a journey to reach what Plotinus terms as “the Beauty There” (117), the place of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful in Plato’s universe, the residence of God, which is heaven. The journey is, however, not only a spiritual undertaking towards the ideal paradise, but it is, more importantly for the individual, a quest for ultimate self-identity. Plotinus implies that nearness to God allows an individual to see an image of himself in the light of a “better beauty” (Plotinus 117). The individual then would exhibit a desire to set upon a journey to reconcile his image of a better beauty with the reality upon which it is based, a reality which is in the same realm as God, which is the Beauty There. This reconciliation allows the “two [to] become one”, a unity which, in Christian terms, brings together the individual’s soul and God’s own being (Plotinus 117). This, following Plato’s and Plotinus’ works, is thus the objective of the Christian journey, a journey which, upon completion, gives the individual a perfect form of self-identity to be found only in his union with God.

The foundation built upon an individual’s union with God and the journey for such a unity are precisely what concern(s) the author(s) of both “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer”. According to Crossley-Holland, both poems are chiefly concerned with the topic of loss (46). It is through the loss of the essential elements of their Anglo-Saxon societies that the speakers in the poems mark their alienation from their comitatus. This loss and alienation of the speakers evolves in the poems into a loss of their identity. Sharma suggests that “identity is always correlative to a cultural world” (611). Removing the individual from his society would thus be taking away his identity. The poems present this problem of identity and attempt to show the solution by having the speakers base the foundation of their identities not on their society but entirely on God.

In “The Wanderer” there is a longing to find a “ground for a self threatened by fragmentation and an abject loss of coherence on account of cultural upheaval” (Sharma 612). The cultural upheaval is experienced by the speaker of the poem through the “death of kinsmen” (line 7), his removal from his homeland (20), and his deprivation of the essential elements that make up his Anglo-Saxon heroic society, elements such as a hall and “a lord of rings” (25). All of these aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture that are specified in the poem point out to the speaker’s identity as an archetypal warrior of his society. And so his “loss of heroic culture”, as Sharma puts it, results in a loss of heroic identity (612). Indeed, the speaker laments over the complete ruin of his heroic society. He contemplates on “how the time has passed / …as if it never was” (95-96), how “that happy time is no more” (36), and, in lines 92-95, voices out his nostalgia for an atmosphere reflective of his heroic society; for ultimately the speaker stands as the last man of the Heroic Age, being placed in the poem in a “‘fiction’ of the apocalypse” (Green 502) as the Anglo-Saxons would have imagined it. Therefore such is the threat to the speaker’s self-identity that, due to the decline of the Anglo-Saxon heroic world, he experiences an “anxiety of meaninglessness”[2], an anxiety that makes him yearn for a sense stability for his identity.

This sense of stability he cannot find in his society but in God. In a world where kinsmen “fade on their way” (54), where the “middle-earth / from day to day dwindles and fails” (62-63), a world where “all is wretchedness in the realm of earth” (104), and almost everything is fleeting (108-109), the speaker turns to God for relief (1-2). It is in Him where “eal seo fæstnung stondeð” (115). In finding God, the speaker, as Plotinus explains it, “sinks into a perfect self-identity” (117). Through such a kind of self-awareness, the speaker “will learn how to achieve disillusionment, to move from destructive grief to healthy negativity” which is a kind of “melancholy logic” (Champion 195). This healthy negativity manifests itself in the form of the poem, the elegy recited by the speaker, which becomes the remedy, the bote (line 113) of the “good man” (112) for his grief. Where the “memories of kinsmen” (51) fail to bring him consolation, God offers the speaker the experience he needs to attain wisdom, for “no one is wise without his share of winters” (64). It is wisdom that allows the speaker in “The Wanderer”, being a figure representative of the released prisoners in Plato’s Cave, to reflect on his enlightened state and compare it to the state of those still left to “observe the passing shadows” (Plato 281).  Thus, being identified in the last segment of the poem as “snottor on mode”, he is consequently described as one who is “sundor æt rune” (111). The speaker, sundered in his stage of wisdom, and given a perspective through which he can contrast his condition with that of his foregone heroic comitatus, mourns the fleetingness and passing-away of their heroic society through a series of repetitions of “hwær” (92-93), “eala” (94-95), and “læne” (108-109). His final remark in the poem serves to emphasise his “frofre” (115) in the steadfastness of God that is in stark contrast with the venerating lamentation that makes up most of his speech.

In “The Seafarer” there is a more apparent sense of immediacy expressed by the speaker to undertake a journey towards the “Beauty There”. He states his dissatisfaction with earthly life, saying, “Forþon me hatran sind / dryhtnes dreamas þonne þis deade lif, / læne on londe” (64-66). He is described by Greenfield as “an aspiring peregrinus, a voluntary exile who will relinquish earthly pleasures for the greater joys of Heaven” (15). At first, the speaker perceives his journey in the sea to be “a time of hardship” (3), a “wræccan lastum” (15), and furthermore describes himself to have “harboured bitter sorrow” (4), being a “sea-weary man” (12) who is “careworn and cut off from [his] kinsmen” (14). But his perspective on his sea-voyages changes beginning on line 33, marked by the word “nu” and a subsequent change of tense from the past to the present, where he is forthwith “stirred” (34) by his “heart’s longings / …to undertake a journey” (36-37). It is a “journey”, Calder explains, “to find the heavenly land” (272). Which journey is prompted by the speaker’s attempt to “locate [his life] in a meaningless present” (Green 506).

Indeed, the speaker is attempting to find a sense of belonging in a world where the “days of great glory / …are gone forever” (81-82) and “his former friends, / the sons of princes, have been placed in the earth” (93-94). And, as the speaker in “The Wanderer”, the speaker in “The Seafarer” endeavors to find his “perfect self-identity” in God. The chief catalyst that threatens to trap permanently the speaker in a meaningless present is the loss of his lord, whereupon there will no longer be a “protector-kinsman for his wretched spirit to travel toward” (Empric 25). His reaction to the threat, as exhibited in the word-play on the word “dryhten” in lines 41 and 43, is to shift his focus from earthly to spiritual pursuits (Greenfield 19-20). No longer does he need to rely on an earthly dryhten to give him a sense of self-identity; he realizes that “the splendours of this earth will [not] survive for ever” (66-67). Instead he looks to God and His “ecan eadignesse” (120) for permanent stability.

Upon thus being able to contemplate and unify their identity with God – the Sun in Plato’s myth – the speakers of both poems shift their speech from something that reflects the personal to something that ponders on the universal[3]. Their unification with God elevates the speakers to a place of greater vision and enlightenment, the place outside Plato’s Cave, whereupon they may contemplate not only their own condition, but also, in a new light, that of their un-Christianised comitatus. It is with this transcendent understanding that they gain the wisdom to talk about the instability of their society that is deprived of the knowledge of God. And it is also with such an understanding that they share in the poems the final mutual advice that invites their audience to find their perfect self-identification in God.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography:

 

Primary sources:

 

Plato. Book VII, The Republic. Plato: Selected Dialogues. Trans. Benjamin Jowett.           Pennsylvania: The Franklin Centre, 1983. 279-282. Print.

 

Plotinus. “On the Intellectual Beauty”. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and                Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007. 111      -119. Print.

 

“The Wanderer”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt.      W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. 107-110. Print.

 

“The Wanderer”. The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. Ed.            Anne L. Klinck. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992.       75-78. Print.

 

“The Seafarer”. The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study. Ed. Anne    L. Klinck. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992. 79   -83. Print.

 

 

 

 

Secondary sources:

 

Beaston, Lawrence. “The Wanderer’s Courage”. Neophilologus, 2005. Vol. 89: 119-          137. Online.

 

Calder, Daniel G. “Setting and Mode in ‘The Seafarer’ and ‘The Wanderer’.                      Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 1971. Vol. 72 No. 2: 264-275. Online.

 

Champion, Margaret Gunnarsdóttir. “From Plaint to Praise: Language as Cure in ‘The       Wanderer’”. Studia Neophilologica, 2008. Vol. 69 No. 2: 187-202. Online.

 

Empric, Julienne H. “’The Seafarer’: An Experience in Displacement”. Notre Dame           English Journal. University of Notre Dame, 1972. Vol. 7 No. 2: 23-33. Online.

 

Green, Martin. “Man, Time, and Apocalypse in ‘The Wanderer’, ‘The Seafarer’, and          ‘Beowulf’”. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology. University of        Illinois Press, 1975. Vol. 74 No. 4: 502-518. Online.

 

Greenfield, Stanley B. “Attitudes and Values in ‘The Seafarer’. Studies in Philology.         University of North Carolina Press, 1954. Vol. 51 No. 1: 15-20. Online.

 

“The Seafarer”. The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology. Ed. Kevin Crossley-Holland.        Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2009. 53-56. Print.

Sharma, Manish. “Heroic Subject and Cultural Substance in The Wanderer”.                      Neophilologus, 2012. Vol 96: 611-629. Online.

[1] Perhaps elevation would be a better term. An individual’s enlightenment causes him to see himself in a better state than that of the prisoners in the cave (Plato 281).

[2] ‘The anxiety of meaninglessness…is anxiety about the loss of an ultimate concern, of a meaning which gives meaning to all meanings’ (Beaston 126)

[3] See Sharma 621, Champion 197, and Empric 23.

“In Geár-dagum”: Beowulf as an Anglo-Saxon Fornaldarsaga

The genre of Beowulf is a topic that continues to be hotly debated, as Breizmann has already noted[1], and as any scholar working in the field will have already observed. Indeed, Beowulf scholarship concerning matters of genre goes way back to the “Age of Enlightenment” of Beowulf criticism when J.R.R. Tolkien opened the floodgates through his revolutionary essay, The Monsters and the Critics[2]. Breizmann thoroughly documents the developments after Tolkien, citing, on top of the innovative critic and author: Irving, Earl, Greenfield, and Klein; and recording their classifications of Beowulf as a “fairy tale, elegy, heroic lay, oral-formulaic poetry, historical and legendary narrative, and Christian allegory.”[3] She adds to this her own proposal of Beowulf as romance. Moreover, there are scholars such as Greenfield who have contemplated on Beowulf’s essence as a tragedy[4]. Such a variety leads one to ask whether there may be an all-encompassing label for Beowulf, one that includes every category in Breizmann’s critical compilation. In this paper, I wish to offer my own categorisation of Beowulf as an Anglo-Saxon fornaldarsaga by exploring the definition(s) of fornaldarsögur then positioning Beowulf in such a context.

What then, we may ask, are fornaldarsögur? The term fornaldarsögur (“sagas of ancient times”) is a modern term derived from Carl Christian Rafn’s original coinage, “foraldar sögur Norðurlanda,”[5] which means “sagas of ancient times in the North.” Stephen Mitchell attempts to give a very broad definition of fornaldarsögur, writing that they are “Old Icelandic prose narratives based on traditional heroic themes, whose numerous fabulous episodes and motifs create an atmosphere of unreality.”[6] Whilst such a definition agrees with the traditional opinion that “the fornaldarsögur are heroic,”[7] it falls short when tested against contemporary standards of specificity in that its description can be applied to any of five more subdivisions of the saga genre, which include: kings’ sagas, sagas of Icelanders, bishops’ sagas, Sturlunga sagas, and riddarasögur (“knightly romances”)[8]. What can be potentially ambiguous, and thus a matter of contention, in Mitchell’s definition is its lack of a hair-splitting distinction between fornaldarsögur and riddarasögur. Torfi Tulinius, however, allows for a distinct separation between the two categories, writing that

the fornaldarsögur all take place in the North and deal with Nordic heroes but the riddarasögur take place in the south of Europe or even more remote places, and the heroes are “valiant knights” who were infrequent visitors here in the North. Furthermore, some literary characteristics distinguish between these groups of sagas[9].

Jakobsson clarifies what exactly these distinguishing literary characteristics are: “The tragic end of traditional fornaldarsögur – e.g. Hálfs saga, Hrólfs saga kraka, and Völsunga saga – also distinguishes them from adventure sagas and romance in general.”[10] Hermann Pálsson further divides the fornaldarsögur into two categories: “heroic legend” and “adventure tales.”[11] Tulinius explains that “the former are based on the same ancient heroic tradition in the tragic mode as the lays of the Edda and have links with similar traditions in other Germanic languages”; the “‘adventure tales’ usually end well about heroes undertaking a quest or series of quests.”[12]  And while there is, as yet, and despite all the aforementioned criticisms, no clear-cut authoritative definition for fornaldarsögur, Clunies-Ross provides two essential characteristics that many works which are considered fornaldarsögur share. She posits that firstly, “a number of fornaldarsögur represent a world of Scandinavian royal and heroic dynasties”[13] and that, secondly, the characters in the stories “frequently interact with beings that are not fully human.”[14]

In Beowulf, the first point in Clunies-Ross’ characterization of fornaldarsögur ­– its depiction of Scandinavian royal and heroic dynasties – becomes a major axis upon which the work’s action revolves. The poem’s narrator begins with “Hwæt wé Gár-Dena,”[15] invoking, through the use of the first-person plural pronoun “wé,” the Danish identity of both the speaker and his audience. Magennis notes, moreover, of the emphatic placement of “Gár-Dena” in Beowulf’s opening line. In light of this, Howe explains that “the setting of Beowulf may be understood as the homeland before conversion,”[16] and thus the “stories about the Danes and the Geats could serve as a powerful reminder of the Anglo-Saxon’s origins, both geographically and religiously.”[17] And if we are to divide the poem into two halves based on setting, the first being in Denmark, and the second in Geatland, we may observe in the first half an almost panoramic attention to the house of the Scyldings, the descendants of “héah Healfdene” (“the great Halfdane”)[18]. Indeed, while the first half marks the actions of the poem’s titular hero, it also prefigures and laments the downfall of the Scylding household: “nalles fácen-stafas / Þéod-Scyldingas þenden fremedon” (“The Scylding nation / was not yet familiar with feud and betrayal,” ll. 1018-1019). Such events as are referred to in Beowulf thus accentuate its essence as a fornaldarsaga, in that it “display[s] a lengthy continuity within the Nordic cultural context.”[19] Consequently, the poem aligns itself not only with Icelandic kings’ sagas such as Heimskringla[20] and Skjöldunga saga, but, more importantly, with other fornaldarsögur as well, such as Hrólfs saga kraka and Völsunga saga.

It is not surprising then, that, as North argues, “…the poet appears to draw on the unquantifiable sources of a living Danish mythology. Respectively he plays on Freyja’s Brísinga men, Óðinn’s vengeance for Baldr, and Þórr’s death by the World Serpent.”[21] Along with the quasi-mythological atmosphere of Beowulf and fornaldarsögur come the monsters and otherwordly beings. The world that their presence invokes is a world “when Scandinavia was still pagan,” and thus “the action of [fornaldarsögur] was removed from the world of the everyday, at least in part, but not so fully removed that its subject-matter could not be meaningful to [the audience].”[22] In this sense, it is difficult to fully agree with Tolkien when he writes that “it is just because the main foes in Beowulf are inhuman that the story is larger and more significant…It glimpses the cosmic and moves with the thought of all men concerning the fate of human life and efforts; it stands amid but above the petty wars of princes, and surpasses the dates and limits of historical periods, however important.”[23] In ignoring the antiquarian historicity—the reality of the pagan world—alluded to in the poem, we take away not only the full force of the Þórr myth as it is ascribed to Beowulf and his fight against the dragon[24], but also the pathos that the audience, the “Gár-Dena in géar-dagum,” are meant to feel towards their pagan ancestors. Black, et al. put the situation in a better perspective: “Whatever its underlying structural patterns, Beowulf is neither myth nor folktale; its stories of dragon-slaying and nocturnal struggles are set against a complex background of legendary history.”[25] This is what makes Beowulf a unique work of literature in the Old English tradition. Not only does it seem somewhat out of place with its “foreign-ness” (in terms of its Nordic connection) when compared with other Old English heroic poems like Judith (which stems from Biblical tradition) and The Battle of Maldon (which is set in Anglo-Saxon England), but the presence of the monsters, especially the dragon, invokes the mythic climate of the Eddas and other fornaldarsögur. Thus, it is easy to see how Richard North comes to observe there to be a growing consensus that the poet of Beowulf adapts tales connected with those of Norse mythology: Freyja’s Brísingamen; Höðr’s slaying of Baldr and Óðinn’s vengeance; and Þórr’s battle against the World Serpent,’’[26] since Beowulf belongs to what Tulinius calls “the Matter of the North” and its vast range of saga literature, as much as it belongs to the English—specifically Anglo-Saxon—tradition of poetry.

Categorising Beowulf as an Anglo-Saxon fornaldarsaga helps give us a wider perspective of the work’s historicity. It is among the many sagas that deal with Scandinavian heroic royalty, and one amongst many more that incorporate the mythic and legendary “past” of its contemporary audience, reworking themes and motifs that help(ed) shape their society and burgeoning nations. Such a grouping thus removes Beowulf from isolation and assimilates it into the wealth of Icelandic fornaldarsögur that give it context, removing our need to force it into labels which may undermine its historical and structural richness. Being a fornaldarsaga, it becomes at once a folktale, a tragedy, a romance, as well as a historical and legendary narrative.

 

 

Bibliography:

Beowulf, in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, eds. Joseph Black et al. (Toronto: Broadview                 Press, 2016), 65-116.

Breizmann, Natalia. “”Beowulf” as Romance: Literary Interpretation as Quest.” MLN 113, no. 5                   (1998): 1022-035.

Fjalldal, Magnus. “An Unnoticed “Beowulf” Analogue in “Heimskringla.”(Critical                             Essay).” Notes and Queries 60, no. 3 (2013): 341-43.

Greenfield, Stanley. “”Beowulf” and Epic Tragedy.” Comparative Literature 14 (1962): 91.

Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf. London: Faber and Faber, 1999.

Howe, Nicholas, “Beowulf and the Ancestral Homeland,” in The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical                          Casebook, edited by Eileen A. Joy and Mary K. Ramsey, 49-89. Morgantown: West Virginia                University Press, 2006.

Jakobsson, Armann. “The Royal Ideology and Genre of Hrolfs Saga Kraka.” Scandinavian Studies 71,             no. 2 (1999): 139.

Magennis, Hugh. The Cambridge Introduction to Anglo-Saxon Literature. Cambridge Introductions to                    Literature. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Mitchell, Stephen A. Heroic Sagas and Ballads. Myth and Poetics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,                   1991.

North, Richard. The Origins of Beowulf : From Vergil to Wiglaf. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University               Press, 2006.

Ross, Margaret Clunies. The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga. Cambridge                              Introductions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

—. A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics. Cambridge, UK ; Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2005.

—. Old Icelandic Literature and Society. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature ; 42. Cambridge, U.K.             New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Stefán Einarsson. A History of Icelandic Literature. New York: Johns Hopkins Press for the American               -Scandinavian Foundation, 1957.

Tolkien, J. R. R., and Tolkien, Christopher. The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays. London ;                   Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1983.

 

 

 

[1] Natalia Breizmann. “”Beowulf” as Romance: Literary Interpretation as Quest.” MLN 113, no. 5 (1998): 1022.

[2] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays. (London ; Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1983).

[3] 1022.

[4] Stanley Greenfield, “”Beowulf” and Epic Tragedy.” Comparative Literature 14 (1962).

[5] Margaret Clunies-Ross, The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 28.

[6] Stephen Mitchell, Heroic Sagas and Ballads. Myth and Poetics. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 27.

[7] Ármann Jakobsson, “The Royal Ideology and Genre of Hrolfs Saga Kraka.” Scandinavian Studies 71,no. 2 (1999): 142.

[8] Cf. Ibid.

[9] Cf. Jakobsson, 143.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Torfi Tulinius, “The Matter of the North: fiction and uncertain identities in thirteenth century Iceland” in Margaret Clunies-Ross, Old Icelandic Literature and Society, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature ; 42. Cambridge, U.K. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 243.

[12] Ibid.

[13] The Cambridge Introduction to the Old Norse-Icelandic Saga, 76.

[14] Ibid, 77.

[15] All lines from Beowulf here (in the original and in translation) are taken from Seamus Heaney’s version(1999).

[16] Nicholas Howe, “Beowulf and the Ancestral Homeland,” in The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook, edited by Eileen A. Joy and Mary K. Ramse. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2006) 52.

[17] p. 53.

[18] line 57.

[19] Mitchell, 27.

[20] Cf. Magnus Fjalldal, “An Unnoticed “Beowulf” Analogue in “Heimskringla.”(Critical Essay).” Notes and Queries 60, no. 3 (2013): 341-43.

[21] Richard North, The Origins of Beowulf : From Vergil to Wiglaf. (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 194.

[22] Clunies-Ross, The Old Norse-Icelandic Saga, 58.

[23] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics, and Other Essays. (London ; Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1983), 33.

[24] Cf. North, 202.

[25] Beowulf, in The Broadview Anthology of British Literature, eds. Joseph Black et al. (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2016), 66.

[26] And here North cites substantially: “Dronke, ‘Beowulf and Ragnarök’, 311—18. D.G. Calder, ‘Setting and Ethos: The Pattern of Measure and Limit in Beowulf’, SP 69 (1972), 21 – 37, esp. 36. Frank, ‘Skaldic Verse and the Date of Beowulf’, 132 (Baldr and Óðinn). Beowulf: A Student Edition, ed. Jack, 101 (Brísingamen). Beowulf, ed. Mitchell and Robinson, 134 (Baldr and Óðinn). Orchard, Companion, 114-23 (all three motifs). Rauer, Beowulf and the Dragon, 136-7 (Þórr and the World Serpent). Niles (Beowulf, 193) is against, albeit he believes Beowulf was composed partly for Anglicized tenth-century Danes” (Cf. North, p. 205).

Uncanny Desire and the “Death-Drive” in Magritte’s The Lovers (1928)

Death and desire are two concepts and realities that greatly concern psychoanalytical and philosophical minds. Their enigmatic natures open up opportunities for various questions, answers, and interpretations concerning their relationship not only between one another, but also with human nature. What roles do both death and desire play in human thought and activity? How do they affect our sense of self, as well as our perception, reception, and interactions with others? Freud’s theories, specifically those found in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), attempt to make sense of death’s interplay with pleasure and desire. The art world, too, has been endeavoring to contemplate and represent such ideas within (and, in some instances, with-out) the context of their cultural and historical roots. René Magritte’s The Lovers (oil on canvas, 21 3/8 x 28 7/8″, 1928) depicts the drive of desire as a distortion of the “death-drive,” consequently invoking a sense of the “uncanny” through its manifestation of the “double,” the return of the repressed, and the “compulsion to repeat.” Freud’s work on “The Uncanny” (1919) will help us unveil the psychoanalytical implications of Magritte’s work.

The Lovers’s most striking feature is its depiction of what Freud calls the “double.” In the “phenomenon of the ‘double,’” Freud explains that “we have characters who look alike…so that one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other.”[1] The two figures in the painting – the “lovers” – though distinctly gendered in their attire, are made to appear similar to each other in countenance through the cloth(s) that conceal(s) their faces. Indeed, the lovers are necessarily gendered through their clothing in order to display an expression of desire in their contact with each other. In this way, they are made to represent one aspect of the “double”: they become “an insurance against the destruction of the ego.”[2] Moreover, while the lovers do manifest “an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’”[3], they simultaneously portray another, characteristically opposing aspect of the “double.” The double, Freud writes, “from having been an assurance of immortality…becomes the uncanny harbinger of death”[4]. Thus, the lovers, while daringly expressing desire, face the inevitability of eventual death through suffocation. Their desires, in this light, become constrained by death both in a physical and a symbolical sense. The uncanny nature, then, of the figures as “doubles” emanates an anxiety of death consuming the lovers in their display of desire.

Moreover, The Lovers further heightens this anxiety through its depiction of the “return of the repressed”. The “return of the repressed” is “the frightening element” which shows itself “to be something repressed which recurs.”[5] The uncanny feeling of “the return of the repressed” is, as Freud explains, “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”[6] In the case of The Lovers, the “return of the repressed” is not overly much of a return as much as a recurring, or even a re-emerging of the death-drive which underlies every unconscious human thought. The lovers’ drive for desire obliquely coincides with their death-drive: the very expression of their desire, their mutual contact, is that which also emphasises the presence of death. In this light, The Lovers becomes an image that speaks to the irrepressibility of the death-drive. Thus, inasmuch as the desire manifested by the figures in the painting is a representation of the supposed dominance of the “pleasure principle”, so does their physical proximity – and, with it, the painting’s focal point – coincidingly accentuate the shrouding and threatening presence of death. Yet the figures arguably do not show any struggle to remove themselves from their doom-laden pose. It is because their sense of the pleasure principle – that is to say, their sense of desire – is at one with the death-drive, and, indeed, this affect of desire becomes a form of the death-drive.

To better understand why this is, it is of principal importance to observe further that the lovers express an uncanny “compulsion to repeat.” According to Freud, “it is possible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts – a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle.”[7] In The Lovers, the compulsion to repeat works to free the death-drive from the repressive impulses of the pleasure principle. There is a hint of irresistibility in the lovers’ pose: their lack of struggle to break free from their kiss despite their heads being wrapped in cloth marks their uncannily calm demeanour. Moreover, inasmuch as the binary boundary between the heimlich and the unheimlich is, as Freud hints, eventually broken down so that the “heimlich…finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich”[8], so much so is the boundary that divides the pleasure principle and the death-drive distorted, as the viewers are left to feel uncertain about whether the lovers’ primary drive is that of Eros or that of Thanatos. Thus, there is in The Lovers the inevitability of the viewer’s intellectual and emotional uncertainty regarding both the affect of desire and the anxiety of death – an uncertainty that allows the painting to radiate an overall feeling of uncanniness.

Ultimately, The Lovers prompts questions concerning the relationship between death and desire. The uncanny elements it embodies serve to make audiences obliquely contemplate over such a relationship. The presentation of the “double”, which juxtaposes themes of death and desire, points out to the ever-looming presence of death. Its depiction of the return of the repressed and the compulsion to repeat underscores the dominance of the death-drive in its unrepressed form. A Freudian reading, then, as we have seen, effectively brings out key themes from the painting – but it would be as interesting to see what Lacan or even the existentialist philosophers have to say in response.

 

 

 

 

Bibliography:

René Magritte, The Lovers, 1928, Oil on canvas, 21 3/8 x 28 7/8″ (54 x 73.4 cm)

 

Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny.” In The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary                   Trends, edited by David H. Richter, 514-532. Boston:  Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007.

 

[1] Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Richter (Boston:  Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007), 522.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] p. 523.

[5] p.526.

[6] Ibid.

[7] p. 524.

[8] p. 518.

The Movement from the Parallactic Surreal into the Heimlich in McEwan’s The Child in Time

Two works of art came out in 1987. One is Gerhard Richter’s Abstraktes Bild (648-3): the Abstract Impressionist tone of the painting radiates a sense – if only an impression – of the surreal and the uncanny. The other is Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time. The novel opens with the dissolution of home caused by the loss of a child; what happens thenceforth builds up a sense of the dissolution of reality wherein the reader is taken through the realm of the uncanny. Indeed, there is in The Child in Time a dimensional shift into the Surreal, a realm through which Stephen recovers and reinstates his lost sense of home. For it is in this realm where Stephen deals with the repressed through a liberating process that helps him dissolve the Unheimlich into the Heimlich[i], transforming the repressed into the homely. Slavoj Žižek’s work on The Parallax View[ii] will help us gain further insight into the surreal and uncanny experiences in the novel, and, more importantly, into the intricate process that gives Stephen liberation.

One of Žižek’s great contributions to philosophy and theory is his concept of the “parallax gap”. He introduces it as “a kind of Kantian revenge over Hegel”[iii]: whereas Hegel’s philosophy seeks some sort of dialectical synthesis between a thesis and antithesis, a link between two binary oppositions, Kant points out an unbridgeable gap, a transcendental illusion, “the illusion of being able to use the same language for phenomena which are mutually untranslatable”[iv]. There is thus, in Hegelian diction, “a fundamental antinomy which can never be dialectically “mediated/ sublated” into a higher synthesis, since there is no common language, no shared ground, between the two levels”[v]. What Žižek then observes in Kant’s notion of the transcendental is the presence of what he calls the “parallax gap”, “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible”[vi]. The parallax gap is made observable only through a shift, or a “minimal difference”[vii],  in the perspective of an object – a shift which Žižek further posits as an object itself. It is the third space between the phenomenal and the noumenal, a separate Dasein which we are able to contemplate.

An artistic notion that in the novel goes together with the concept of the parallax gap is that of Surrealism. André Breton in his first Surrealist Manifesto (1924) puts forth that “Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life”. This “superior reality” is accordingly what Breton calls a surreality: the “resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality”. We may then draw from this description of surreality its inherent nature of uncanniness. Being a synthesis of the state of reality and dreams, surreality delves into the realm of the unconscious, the repressed, and the uncanny. Moreover, being itself a dimension beyond reality – and, in a sense, one which encompasses reality – the realm of the surreal is free to constantly fluctuate between our familiar reality and the trans-natural domain of unconscious, psychic automatism. It is precisely such a presentation of the surreal that gives it a sense of the uncanny; it draws on the familiar and yet distinguishes itself as psychologically unfamiliar and enigmatic. The in-between-ness of surreality, its position between reality and the psychically transcendental, characterises it as a version of the parallax gap: the “reality” it offers is nothing but a transcendental illusion.

In The Child in Time[viii], Stephen is transported into the liminal realm of the parallactic surreal. His first experience with the surreal is described as such:

He set off, and within minutes found satisfaction in this new landscape. He was marching across a void. All sense of progress, and therefore all sense of time, disappeared. The trees on the far side did not come closer. This was an obsessive landscape – it thought only about wheat. The lack of hurry, the disappearance of any real sense of a destination, suited him. (p. 53)

 

Stephen thereafter is in a constant flux between surreality and reality, with no explicit struggle to understand his displacement from mundane reality. What he questions instead is the nature of time in his seemingly unnatural experiences: “What do you make of it, that thing about time?”[ix] he asks Joe regarding their accident. It is indeed difficult to clearly distinguish the real from the surreal in the novel if only because it is an attribute of the surreal to encompass the real within itself – but also because Stephen himself is unconscious of the transitions between the two dimensions. The surreal parallax gap wherein we often find him strikingly positioned is moreover an anachronistic gap between his past and his present that blurs the temporal boundaries between those two periods of his life. At times, Stephen is transported into what for him is a prenatal period, able to observe his parents from before he was born; at times, it would appear as if he is rooted in present reality – though again it is almost impossible to draw proper boundaries between reality and surreality. The surreal in the novel occurs as a “minimal difference” between the perspectives of reality and the uncanny, and the object for which these perspectives offer such a difference is Stephen himself.

What is then evoked in this surreal realm is the return of the repressed as it is symbolically and obliquely personalized for Stephen. Consequently, his two major surrealistic experiences contain maternal motifs. The scene of the lorry accident presents a birthing scene: “There was a head at Stephen’s feet. It protruded from a vertical gash in the steel. There was a bare arm too. . .”[x] The scene continues until Stephen “took hold of the man’s shoulder with one hand, and cupped the other under his face and pulled. The man groaned”[xi]. The other scene involves Stephen’s mother in a pub (p.62) where we eventually learn of her pregnancy. The scene radiates an unconscious and uncanny pathos for Stephen from which he feels “a cold, infant despondency. . .a bitter sense of exclusion and longing”[xii]. The scenes taken together thus indicate that the repressed desire for Stephen returns is the actual unheimlich desire in its most Freudian sense, the Oedipal desire to return to “the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning”[xiii]. This desire expresses itself in Stephen’s consciousness: “home, he was home, enclosed, safe and therefore able to provide, home where he owned and was owned. Home, why be anywhere else?”[xiv] In a parallel perspective, the transposition of such a repressed, unconscious desire for Stephen into the realm of reality reveals his actual but subconscious[xv] desire to repair the lost sense of “home” in his family. What, in other words, Stephen longs for after the kidnapping of Kate is the restoration of the sense of the homely – to be able to return to Julie and re-establish their shattered home.

Stephen’s experience in the parallactic surreal, while often submersing him in the realm of the repressed, paradoxically liberates him from the selfsame paralyzing realm. Such is one of the many functions of the parallax gap. For the gap, being what Žižek calls “the third space between phenomena and the noumenon itself”[xvi], contains our freedom: “Our freedom persists only in a space between the phenomenal and the noumenal”[xvii]. For Stephen, freedom from the repressed involves a form of “separation”. According to Otto Rank, it is a process of

the overcoming of previous supporting egos and ideologies from which the individual has to free himself according to the measure and speed of his own growth, a separation which is so hard, not only because it involves persons and ideas that one reveres, but because victory is always, at bottom and in some form, won over a part of one’s own ego[xviii].

It is indeed an extremely difficult struggle for Stephen to liberate the ego from paralysis. The novel depicts his struggle as such: “Almost three years on and still stuck, still trapped in the dark, enfolded with his loss, shaped by it, lost to the ordinary currents of feeling that moved far above him and belonged exclusively to other people”[xix]. What is arguably the most poignant of the surreal scenes in the novel is that which also helps liberate Stephen. “Perhaps he was crying as he backed away from the window, perhaps he was wailing like a baby walking in the night. . .”[xx]. The vision of his mother at The Bell changes from a moment of the uncanny, the unheimlich, into a moment of das Heimliche [homely][xxi]. Wells explains that “he [Stephen] imagines it. . .as a stage in a process that will lead to new life. . .Stephen’s brush with non-existence through contact with his parents’ ‘ghosts’ prompted him to follow the ‘forking path’ that led to intercourse with Julie”[xxii]. Stephen’s journey through surreality encompasses and eventually refashions the melancholia and paralysis that he experiences: “he understood that his experience there had not only been reciprocal with his parents’, it had been a continuation, a kind of repetition. He had a premonition followed instantly by a certainty…that all the sorrow, all the empty waiting had been enclosed within meaningful time, within the richest unfolding conceivable”[xxiii]. What is thus expressed here is the total transubstantiation of the Unheimlich into the Heimlich, the uncanny – and with it, the repressed – into the homely. Stephen’s surreal experience at The Bell becomes a “continuation” from an uncanny prenatal “memory” into a present reality with Julie, a reality wherein the homely may be re-established, where “the feel of the warm boards under his feet brought to mind again the idea of home”[xxiv]. The parallax gap of the surreal becomes transformed itself, from an unbridgeable gap between Stephen’s paralyzing repression and his ideal Heimlich reality, into precisely the synthesis that allows for the conversion and transition of the former to the latter, a synthesis that paves the way towards Stephen’s freedom.

The Child in Time deals with the dissolution of home in its own unique way. Stephen’s uncanny experiences become the remedy that leads him towards his healing. His submersion in the realm of the surreal becomes his therapy, for it is in this realm that the repressed becomes deconstructed and reconstructed into the very thing that provides him with closure. The Unheimlich, once a gap wherein no higher synthesis is possible, becomes the higher synthesis for Stephen, the bridge that connects his experience in The Bell with his present situation, leading him back to Julie, endowing him with a new sense of home, and finally giving him the restoration of everything he lost in the beginning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[i] I use the original German terms because they contain not only the concept of the canny and uncanny, but more importantly the key connotations of the homely and un-homely that may not be so apparent in their English counterparts.

[ii] The Parallax View (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006).

[iii] p. 4.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Žižek, 18.

[viii] All quotes taken from Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (Vintage Canada, 1987).

[ix] p.107.

[x] p. 109.

[xi] p. 105.

[xii] p. 62.

[xiii] p. 528, Sigmund Freud, in “The ‘Uncanny’” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Richter (Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007), 514-532.

[xiv] McEwan, p. 68.

[xv] As opposed to unconscious.

[xvi] p. 22.

[xvii] Žižek, 23.

[xviii] p. 375 in Otto Rank’s Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1932).

[xix] McEwan, 141.

[xx] McEwan, 62.

[xxi] Coined from Freud, 526.

[xxii] p. 54 in Lynn Wells’ Ian McEwan (Palgrave, 2009).

[xxiii] McEwan, 235.

[xxiv] McEwan, 237.

The Dissolution of Being in the Narcissus Myth

“Being” tends to be an extremely problematic term especially in twenty-first century philosophical and academic discourse. But in the artistic frame of the Narcissus myth, at least, the topic of ontology is chiefly explored through the characters of Echo and Narcissus. They are, in fact, presented at first sight as two distinct and antithetical beings, but they have foundationally similar, unconscious desires. Echo’s desire for union with Narcissus and Narcissus’ desire for union with his own reflection express their deeper, unconscious desires for a unified, complete Self; the failure to achieve such a union results in the dissolution of their beings. The psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan will help us understand the complex relationship (or lack thereof) between the two characters and that which they have with their own Selves.

Lacan provides us with three major theories on the ego, the relationship between the Self and the Other, and desire. Lacan’s fundamental notion on the ego is the ego’s illusory nature. D’Alleva explains that “for Lacan, the ego – the sense of self as coherent, rational actor expressed in the word ‘I’ – is nothing but an illusion of the unconscious”[1]. Moreover, Lacan theorises that the unconscious is structured like language: it is composed of an arbitrary chain of signifiers and signifieds. For Lacan, then, “the process of becoming a ‘self’ is the process of trying to stabilize the chain of signifiers so that meaning – including the meaning of ‘I’ – becomes possible”[2]. With the arbitrary processes of the unconscious in motion, the individual is thus left with the illusion of the “I”, the ego.

The subject’s sense of the Other, according to Lacan, is created when the subject, as an infant, realises that it is separate primarily from its mother, then eventually from the rest of the people around it. The individual’s sense of Self, following the stage of sensing the Other, is brought about in the “Mirror Stage”, a stage wherein a baby sees itself in the mirror, and, seeing its own reflection, creates a concept of its own Self. Such a perceived concept is what Lacan calls a méconnaisance, a misrecognition; for the Self identified in the mirror is only an ontological illusion of the unconscious. The mirror image is what Lacan calls the “Ideal-I”, the ideal sense of Self with which the subject attempts to reconcile the reality of its own self-perception.

Lacan also theorises about the inherent sense of absence in the unconscious. Richter explains that “the sense of absence can take the form of mere lack (manque) or need (besoin), which force the psyche to make demands, or it can take the higher form of desire (désir)”[3]. The solution for the individual’s sense of absence is language: “Lacan says that language is always about loss or absence; you only need words when the object you want is gone”[4]. Language is an attempt to retrieve what is unconsciously absent – it is the bridge that connects the Desiring to the Desired. If language, then, is the noumenal link between the desiring subject to the desired object, the performative and phenomenal expression for desire is the Gaze[5]. D’Alleva says that “according to Lacan, we try to give structure and stability to our illusions, our fantasies of Self and Other, via the Gaze”[6]. The Gaze is, in other words, the medial point between the subject’s self-perception and its Ideal-I wherein the subject’s desire may be apprehended.

Lacan’s theories come into a strong interplay upon contact with the myth of Narcissus and Echo. Our route to unfold the discoveries from the interplay is to examine the stories individually but comparatively, with the overall context of the myth as a guide, and the direct and indirect implications of Lacan’s theories as instruments for insight.

In the myth of Echo and Narcissus, Echo is presented as a personification of her name. She is described in the myth as “a strange-voiced nymph…who must speak / Unless another speak”[7]. Her curse seals her fate as an echoing character: “All she can do is double each last word, / And echo back again the voice she’s heard”[8]. Echo is accordingly a “subject” in Žižek’s sense of the term. Žižek posits that “the subject’s elementary, founding, gesture is to subject itself. . . The subject’s activity is, at its most fundamental, the activity of submitting oneself to the inevitable”[9]. Echo’s curse, in line with a Žižekian perspective, is a curse of eternal verbal passivity. And cursed to be an echoing subject, she is subsequently deprived of a complete sense of Self. What she becomes is a mere signifier, devoid of the meaning and essence that the signified Other, whom she echoes, embodies.

With the absence of a complete sense of self, Echo consequently desires the Other. According to Richter, “it is in the true desire –  for an object that is itself conscious and can desire us in return – that higher forms of self-consciousness arise”[10]. In Echo’s desire for the Other there is thus an underlying, ontological desire to complete her Being. If Echo is a Žižekian subject, then Narcissus, in Echo’s perspective, is her corresponding object: “that which moves, annoys, disturbs, traumatizes”[11]. His presence moves Echo into desire. Narcissus is a threefold object: he is Echo’s desired object inasmuch as he is the object with which Echo may achieve the completion of her sense of Being. He is, however – and more importantly – the Lacanian objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire, the object that thus “disturbs”, if not “traumatizes”, Echo.

Narcissus’ rejection and mockery of Echo leads to the literal dissolution of her Being. The myth recounts that “shamed and rejected. . .Her body shrivels. . .Only her voice and bones are left; at last / Only her voice”[12]. Echo’s relationship with Narcissus is a case of the Other responding to the subject with rejection. Echo fails in her to achieve a union the Other, a union which would otherwise have completed her Being, attaching a meaningful Signified to her empty identity as a Signifier. Echo’s body eventually disintegrates, and what is left is only her voice, a signifier of her identity. What is thus most tragic about Echo’s dissolution is that ultimately her story emphasises the ironic and profound emptiness of her character as a Signifier: not only is she deprived of a Signified to give her meaning, but what remains in the end is only a signifier of her Being-as-Signifier[13].

Narcissus, in turn, represents – to borrow a Lacanian term – a “fragmented body”[14] – or, in other words, a fragmented self. In the myth, he is introduced with a question from his mother to Tiresias: “Would he long years and ripe old age enjoy?” to which Tiresias replies, “If he shall himself know”[15]. The prophecy is eventually followed up with a curse granted by Nemesis: “So may he love – and never win his love!”[16] The curse marks Narcissus’ unconscious sense of absence; what he lacks is the perfect self, the Ideal-I. The existence of Narcissus as a character is fated with the curse of an elusive Self, the desire for the illusory Ideal-I. His desire is manifested through his Gaze, as indeed D’Alleva suggests about the action: “we reveal what we desire through the Gaze”[17]. Narcissus is doomed to spend his living moments gazing at his own reflection, desiring a theoretically impossible union with the Ideal-I. Thus, in a Lacanian point-of-view, the character of Narcissus is essentially fixated in the Mirror Stage.

Narcissus’ curse and eternal struggle in the Mirror Stage is brought about by an encounter with an Other, a “scorned youth”[18]. Squillace clarifies Narcissus’ situation for us: “The curse of self-love alights on Narcissus, in fact, from the mouth of a rejected male suitor, by the addition of whom to the traditional story Ovid suggests that what the youth spurns is not Echo per se . . .but any contact outside the circle of himself”[19]. In other words, Narcissus’ futile chase for the Ideal-I is brought about by his rejection of the Other. The concept of the Ideal-I is what Žižek calls the “transcendental I”, a “purely formal function which is neither noumenal nor phenomenal – it is empty, no phenomenal intuition corresponds to it”. Indeed, for Narcissus the Ideal-I is a transcendental illusion manifested in his own reflection. Narcissus, it is said in the myth, “could not clasp himself”[20]. He fails to realise the futility of his actions, and the narrator of the myth notes the dramatic irony: “You simple boy, why strive in vain to catch / A fleeting image? What you see is nowhere; / And what you love – but turn away – you lose! / You see a phantom of a mirrored shape; / Nothing itself”[21]. The curse upon Narcissus works psychologically and ontologically; a theoretically unified Self might have been achieved by him through a union with the Other, but in his rejection thereof he is left with a phantom image with whom union is impossible. What Narcissus consequently experiences is the dissolution of his Being. The myth marks that he is “by love wasted”, until eventually there is “but no body anywhere; / And in its stead they found a flower – behold, / White petals clustered round a cup of gold!”[22] As in the case of Echo, we see a dissolution of the body in Narcissus’ story. What remains is a flower, a signifier of Narcissus’ character. It is an ultimate dissolution of Being: the Signified ceases to exist, and even its signifier is transformed into a symbol, a thing so far removed from the Real in the mimetic order of things. The essence of Narcissus has been dissolved, and what remains of him no longer bears any semblance to his essence.

The two intricately related stories of Echo and Narcissus contain tragic accounts of the unbridgeable boundary between inherent absence and unreciprocated desire. Both characters seek a union that would give them a complete sense of Self and Being, but their failure to do so proves devastating. Echo and Narcissus seem at first to be antinomic characters, and such a perspective may justify the reason for their isolated deaths wherein they dissolve ununified with the other. But even in binary oppositions, theses and antitheses, a synthesis may be produced – unfortunately for the two characters no such synthesis is yielded.

[1] p. 96, Anne D’Alleva, Methods & Theories of Art History (Laurence King Publishing, 2012), 96-105.

[2] D’Alleva ,96.

[3] p.1112, Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David H. Richter (Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007), 1111-1128.

[4] D’Alleva, 97.

[5] The Gaze, capitalised, is “the process of looking” (D’Alleva, 104).

[6] 104.

[7] Lines 425-427, Ovid, Metamorphoses in The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature, eds. Peter E. Knox and J.C. McKeown (Oxford University Press 2013), 274-188.

[8] Ovid, 441-442.

[9] p. 17, Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006).

[10] Richter, 1112.

[11] Žižek, 17.

[12] Ovid, 467-473.

[13] I have capitalised the words Signifier and Signified when they directly refer to the characters in the myth; lower cases implicate everything else.

[14] Lacan, 1126.

[15] Ovid, 416-417.

[16] Ovid, 479.

[17] D’Alleva 104-105.

[18] Ovid, 478.

[19] xxiii in Ovid, The Metamorphoses edited by Robert Squillace (Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005).

[20] Ovid, 505.

[21] Ovid, 508-512.

[22] Ovid, 573, 595-597.

ALIENATION, MOURNING, AND MELANCHOLIA IN ELIOT’S “PRELUDES” AND “PRUFROCK”

Two of the most fundamental and universal issues of existence and ontology concern the relationships of individuals with their own Selves and those they have with other human beings. Upon entering a new and unprecedented age – an age of profound skepticism and cynicism – the modernists encountered challenges of a new front; with the façades and pretenses of the humanistic ideals of previous ages having fallen apart, there remained an anxiety of facing the emptiness of the human “Being”. There is a fear that humanity has become as cold and empty as the concrete buildings that surround it. The individual’s alienation from one’s Self and from human fellowship are themes that T.S. Eliot explores in “Preludes” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. In “Preludes”, the speaker presents the people of his (or her) city to be unaware of their alienation from their sense of humanity. Being conscious of such an alienation, he, as an observer, is in turn depicted to be in a state of mourning. The speaker in “Prufrock”, to a more personal degree, is shown to be aware of his own alienation from the world, and such a self-awareness manifests itself through his state of melancholia.

Sigmund Freud’s work on Mourning and Melancholia (1917)[1] distinguishes for us the differences between the two terms. “Mourning,” Freud writes, “is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one.”[2] In melancholia, “one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either.”[3] “In mourning,” Freud puts in another way, “it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”[4] It appears, then, that mourning according to Freud is a condition whereby an individual is in a position of being inside looking out, and in melancholia the individual is outside looking in. The mourning subject is thus in a state of extrospection, and the melancholic subject in a state of introspection[5].

In the “Preludes”, we are presented with a speaker and his/her omniscient observations. The first two movements however do not immediately indicate the presence of an interactive speaker – a first-person narrator in particular – as they seem to be fragmentary descriptions of city life by a third-person, uninvolved narrator. In fact, it is not until the third movement that the pronoun “you” is mentioned, and the possibility of the Preludes being a dramatic monologue, when taken as a whole, comes into play. But the “I” that appears in IV.10 and the idea that the “I” is interacting with “these images” (IV.11) contextualise the previous passages. They become the speaker’s very observations of the city, its atmosphere, and its people.

And what does the speaker observe? He notes the presence of “burnt-out ends of smoky days” (I.4), “withered leaves” (I.7), “vacant lots” (I.8), “broken blinds” (I.10), and a “lonely cab-horse” (I.12). The adjectives attached to the speaker’s descriptions mark a sense of absence, decay, and isolation that pervades throughout the city. If we take the descriptions further as Symbolistic[6] imageries, they become indicative of the internal emptiness of the city’s inhabitants. Indeed, when the speaker begins to observe the “you” of the third movement, he/ she draws the readers (to whom “you” is possibly referring), and consequently the whole of humanity, into the city space and the poem’s artistic frame. What we have then is a totalising and omniscient observation of modern humanity by the poem’s speaker.

The modern human being here is alienated from its sense of humanity. We see a soul “trampled by insistent feet / At four and five and six o’clock” (IV.3-4), unnoticed by people during the business of rush hours. The human Soul, far from being sublime, is “constituted” by a “thousand sordid images” (III.5,4). The only feeling beings are the personifications of evening and morning in the first and second movements. Termed by Montgomery as “collectives”[7], the entities of evening and morning are the only ones conscious of the sceneries in the respective movements, collecting “the small world of each consciousness.”[8] Such an observation of modern humanity’s condition draws the speaker into a state of mourning. He “clings” to “fancies that are curled around these images” (IV.10-11) – his observations – in an attempt to hold onto “the notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing” (IV.12-13). This “thing” is the lost sense of humanity of the speaker’s community: the city for him has become “poor and empty”[9] – and so have its residents. The speaker is unable to redeem this lost and fragile “thing,” and thus ironically comforts himself with the idea that “the worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots” (IV.15-16). The courses of human actions are as vain and absurd as the attempts to gather fuel in empty spaces.

In “Prufrock,” the speaker is conscious of his own alienation from the world. Prufrock’s state of alienation is immediately set up in the poem through the epigraph from Guido da Montefeltro, wherein he implies that Dante will not be able to return to the human world. Juxtaposed into the poem, the epigraph subsequently reflects Prufrock’s own isolation from the human world. “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” (45-46)[10] Prufrock asks. Indeed, he is a character hesitant to impose the footprints of his essence – his actions – upon the universe. He frequently repeats the question “Do I dare?” and asks moreover with the same frequency, “How should I presume?” He opts to remain as an observer, unnoticed, as he is in “the room” where “women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (13-14). Prufrock adds that he “should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” (73-74) marking his extreme displacement from human society. Here he is not only non-human (he is depicted through the synecdoche as something like a crab) but he is more importantly situated far away from the business of the modern city, scuttling unnoticeably in the still waters. He sees the “mermaids singing,” but they sing “each to each” (124). He understands his complete exclusion, and simply says, “I do not think that they will sing to me” (125). He settles on being one who merely observes them, seeing the mermaids “riding seaward on the waves” (126). Prufrock’s isolation and exclusion put him in the position of an unnoticed observer, but eventually he becomes seemingly comfortable with it.

Nevertheless, Prufrock’s alienation and isolation drive him into melancholia, a condition characterised by “an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale”[11]. He knows that he is “no prophet” and such a fact is “no great matter” (83). He describes himself as a man of high class, possessing a “morning coat” (42) and a “necktie rich and modest” (43), but after having “seen the eternal Footman hold [his] coat, and snicker” (85) – an image of Death awaiting – is made afraid of Death’s insubordination; the illusion of security his class offers him no longer seems to him believable. Prufrock also admits that he is “not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be” (111), but he quickly moves into further diminishing his status to “an attendant lord” (112) and eventually to “the Fool” (119). Ultimately all the walls that Prufrock raises to protect his ego break down, and all that is left is someone who, despite his sophistication, fails to break through the boundaries of the “formulated phrase,” and who, consequently, becomes himself formulated, paralyzed and unable to do anything about his isolation.

What we have then in “Preludes” and “Prufrock” are characters who deal, directly or indirectly, with alienation, but who ultimately are unable to do anything about it. They enter a state of mourning or melancholia, but their conditions prove to be paralyzing. Being in such dispositions, they position themselves to be mere observers of the alienation of others or the isolation of themselves. They deprive themselves of fruitful human interactions, but perhaps in invoking the readers in their use of the word “you,” they are seeking companionship with and, ultimately, empathy from the readers.

 

[1] Taken from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volue XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258.

[2] p.243

[3] p. 245

[4] p. 246

[5] And indeed, Freud remarks that “the disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning” (p.244) as mourning does not concern the ego as much as melancholia.

[6] For a brief overview of the Symbolist movement, see Sam Phillips,. …isms: Understanding Modern Art. (New York: Universe Publishing, 2012), 18-19.

[7] Marion Montgomery, “Memory and Desire in Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ in South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 38, No. 2 (South Atlantic Modern Language Association, 1973), 63.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Freud, 246.

[10] All references to “Prufrock” taken from T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, eds. David Damrosch and Kevin J.H. Dettmar (Pearson Education, Inc., 2010), 2287-2291.

[11] Freud, 246.

WRITING AND EXISTENCE IN MARTIN AMIS’ MONEY

Martin Amis opens Money with the following inscription: “This is a suicide note. By the time you lay it aside…John Self will no longer exist. Or at any rate that’s the idea. You can never tell, though, with suicide notes, can you?” With such a statement, Amis immediately puts into perspective the idea of death – but it is an idea that is subsequently superimposed with doubt. “Will John Self die?” the reader may ask. Or to be more specific: “Will John Self cease to exist?” In a novel that contains John Self’s past-tense narrative of what to him is his ever-dynamic present, his neverending “now”, these are questions that the readers are supposed to keep in mind upon reading the beginning all the way to the novel’s ending. Indeed, Money, as a suicide note, depicts John Self’s retrospective attempt to establish, through the reader, an existence that will survive his future inexistence. The novel, in this light, captures the totality of John Self’s essence as he writes and narrates events of his life to the readers. Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, Why Write?, and Peter Brooks’ work on Freud’s Masterplot will help us further understand and explain John Self’s search for such an existence.

Brooks states that “ultimately…the passion that animates us as readers of narrative is the passion for (of) meaning”, which passion “appears to be finally a desire for the end” (1162). This end, for Brooks as it was for Freud, is death. It is the final stroke of death that gives completion and meaning to the life that precedes it. “All narration is obituary in that life acquires definable meaning only at, and through, death”, says Brooks, connecting literary narratives with life and death (1163). As such, literary narratives are rendered incomplete, fragmentary, and meaningless without their appointed endings. Brooks points out that beginnings “presuppose the end” (1163),  and readers, upon reading a narrative’s beginning, assume a desire for its end. Amis taps on this expectation of death and endings, and the meaning which these bear with them, when he marks Money as a suicide note and announces, however ambiguously, John Self’s future inexistence.

Money thus becomes what Sartre would call an “appeal” by the writer to his/ her readers. In the preface to Why Write, Richter explains: “We who know that the physical world we animate with our perceptions will go on darkly after we are gone must write to make something that will survive us” (660). According to Sartre, the process of writing stems from a writer’s need to remain essential in a future wherein he no longer exists. In writing, the writer “meets everywhere only his knowledge, his will, his plans, in short, himself” (Sartre 663). The writer leaves an implant of his/her essence in the written word – a legacy that survives the writer even when he/she is gone. Ultimately, Sartre explains: “Since the creation [the written work] can find its fulfillment only in reading, since the artist must entrust to another the job of carrying out what he has begun, since it is only through the consciousness of the reader that he can regard himself as essential to his work, all literary work is an appeal” (665). “To write”, Sartre concludes, “is to have recourse to the consciousness of others in order to make one’s self be recognized as essential to the totality of being; it is to wish to live this essentiality by means of interposed persons” (670). Thus, in writing –a process that appeals to the reader’s sense of freedom to read –  the writer relays his/her being through the reader and the reader’s process of reading, and with this process of reading, the existence of the writer lives on.

 

The writer in the artistic frame of Money is John Self. The novel is an account of John Self’s experiences, conversations, and other such interactions that help readers construct a view of his character. Self’s is the main authoritative voice in the novel, and it is primarily through his own recapitulation of his own actions and conversations where we may form opinions about him. There is very little informative self-reflection and there are only very few instances where Martin Amis breaks the artistic frame to explain the dramatic ironies that concern John Self. What we have, then, is a first- person past-tense narration of Self’s experiences. In this perspective, moreover, John Self may be seen as writing in retrospect, with an end in mind even from the beginning of the novel.

The end of the novel contains the narrative of Self’s near-death experience, and the end of John Self’s narrative expresses the extra-narrative note of Martin Amis whereby “John Self will no longer exist”. Such an ending affects the overall tone of Self’s narrative. His narration thus ceases to be a mere retelling of events in his life, but, with the threat of inexistence and nothingness in the novel’s Beyond looming over his existence as a charcter, becomes an appeal. The narrative becomes Self’s appeal for a connection with the readers through his writing. In fact, Amis notes: “To whom is the note addressed? To Martina, to Fielding, to Vera, to Alec, to Selina, to Barry – to John Self? No. It is meant for you out there, the dear, the gentle”. Self’s writing, in turn, becomes a space wherein he can write out the essence of his character, so that he no longer remains simply as a voice, but becomes a being whose essence and experiences are imprinted in what he writes. The novel itself, the “note”, becomes John Self. Amis states that “usually the note is the thing. You complete it, and then resume your time travel. It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death. You never can tell, though, can you, with suicide notes”. In our case for the novel, the note is not canelled out: the note becomes the life.

 

As he comes closer to disappearance in the novel, John Self begins to exist not in the past, but in the present, a time between the past and what Richter calls the “as-yet-nonexistent future” (659), the future that will be John Self’s void of inexistence. Self tells the readers: “You know, during that time of pills and booze, during that time of suicide, my entire future flashed through my head. And guess what. It was all a drag! My past at least was – what? It was…rich. And now my life has lost its form. Now my life is only present, more present, continuous present” (392). Here, Self’s present becomes in tune with that of his readers – supposing that they have read his story thus far –  marking the fulfillment of their unity through reading, an achievement which in turn grants security in Self’s existence. With the survival of his existence secured through the process of writing and reading, John Self accordingly “signs off” (392). He says further, “I’m closer to you, I hope, than he’ll ever be” (392). Though the answer to whom “he” might be remains vague, it may be postulated that he is the Self of the past. The Self of the present indeed is closer to the reader than the Self living in the past.

John Self is a memorable character – though not necessarily the most likeable one. But it is also his unique character that draws the reader along through the novel. In this way, his carnivalesque character helps him in his case to find essentiality in his future inexistence by making the readers at least interested enough to see him through the narrative’s end, and, having such an end, give meaning and completion to the life retold in the novel. The novel is John Self’s life, and in the act of opening the book and reading its contents, the readers in their freedom breathe life into its words and pages, giving John Self a voice, a character, and ,ultimately, an existence.

 

 

 

WORKS CITED:

 

Amis, Martin. Money. Vintage, 2005

 

Brooks, Peters. Freud’s Masterplot. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary                   Trends, ed. David H. Richter, 1161-1171. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007.

 

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Why Write? The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends,               ed. David H. Richter, 659-672. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DUSK AND THE UNCANNY IN CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS

The dichotomy of Light and Darkness is noticeably prevalent and all-encompassing in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, so much so that the symbolisms and meanings of this antithetical pair may seem at times to fall into ambiguity or to get muddled into complicated significations. Yet the novel remains comfortable with such a situation. Its themes thrive on ambivalence and a tone of seeming uncertainty. What at first glance appears to be a scene of incertitude for characters can turn out to be, after an uncovering of many complex layers, a moment of revelation, self-awareness, or existential understanding. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the gulf between Light and Darkness – the gulf that harbours the uncanny, the gulf that represents Dusk – is depicted as a zone wherein Marlow experiences self-realisation and enlightenment.

There is in Heart of Darkness a gap in the dichotomy of Light and Darkness. This gap is magnified and made observable by the distinct contrast in the representative figures of Light and Darkness, and indeed they are portrayed to be almost archetypal. Kurtz is said to be “claimed” by “powers of darkness” (1989). The darkness embodied in Kurtz is universalised as Marlow describes the last moments of his life: “The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea…and Kurtz’s life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time” (2003). The juxtaposition of these sentences parallels Kurtz’s heart with the “heart of darkness” that is found everywhere from the centre of the wilderness to which the phrase alludes, to the River Thames which it threatens to encompass. Kurtz’s position as a figure that embodies darkness is further solidified when he is described in his deathbed as not being able to see the “light…within a foot of his eyes” (2004). Indeed, his stare “could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness” (2005). The irony of this description is in Kurtz’s inability to see light no matter how wide or universal his stare is. All he is able to see is darkness, and that darkness resides within him.

Inasmuch as Kurtz is unable to see the light, the Intended is ignorant of – if not unable to comprehend – the darkness in Kurtz. She is portrayed as an archetype of light and of what is beautiful, pure, and innocent. Marlow describes her thus: “She struck me as beautiful—I mean she had a beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight can be made to lie too, yet one felt that no manipulation of light and pose could have conveyed the delicate shade of truthfulness upon those features” (2007). She has “a pale head”, “fair hair”, a “pale visage”, and a “pure brow” (2007). All these fair and beautiful external features set her up in contrast with the darkness within Kurtz. However, her innocence, her “unextinguishable light of belief and love” (2008), is thought by Marlow to be incapable of understanding or bearing the reality of Kurtz’s darkness. He says that, for her, it would be “too dark altogether” (2010). He thus implies that there is a necessary separation between the dealings of Light and Darkness.

Following Marlow’s logic for separation, it would seem that the Darkness and Light that Kurtz and his Intended signify respectively have between them an unbridgeable gulf. And yet the novel complicates this distinction. Dusk, a time that rests between the bright and dark hours of the day, is depicted in the beginning of the novel with poignancy: “And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men” (1955). It is in the light of this setting sun where the Nellie’s crew go through a contemplative and aesthetic experience: “We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories” (1955). It is also in the climate of this setting wherein Marlow’s narrative is unfolded: not in the brilliance of midday nor in the darkness of midnight, but in the dying light of dusk.

Dusk is the gulf between Light and Darkness, and this gulf may be equated to the realm of the uncanny, the realm of Freud’s Unheimlich. Indeed, insofar as Freud’s concept of the Unheimlich breaks down the binary boundaries between its own essence and that of the Heimlich, so does the concept and imagery of dusk break down the dichotomy of Light and Darkness. This area of the uncanny in the novel breaks down oppositions in such a way that there is certainty to be found in uncertainty and realisation in ambiguity. The gulf of the uncanny, the gap symbolised by dusk, is a dialectical realm wherein the ethos of Marlow’s character attains an understanding of its existence and that of the world and people around him. The culmination of Marlow’s experience, being a character situated symbolically in such a realm, is described by himself as such: “It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light” (1958). In his experiences are fragments of self-realisation, revelations, and understandings, not least of which is his understanding of Kurtz’s darkness and his Intended’s sparkle of sublimity. Marlow also explains to his fellow seamen that “it seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream…No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence” (1973). His contemplations and philosophies, unclear to himself at first, are constantly deconstructed and reconstructed in the course of his journey and his narrative.

Marlow is subsequently elevated into a state of enlightenment. He becomes representative of the individual who beholds the Truth and escapes the Platonic Cave, but who also consequently becomes alienated from his company. By the end of the novel he is said to have “ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha” (2010). And indeed he has already recognised his isolation in the artistic frame when he states, “We live, as we dream—alone” (1973). Yet this alienation, this dream-like uncanny state of retrospection, allows Marlow to observe and understand the universal darkness while remaining apart from it. He thereby becomes the didactic Individual, a signifier of the Particular marked especially by his contrast with the nameless Others, his fellow seafarers, to whom he shares his profound reflections on Truth and the human soul. In this perspective he is not alone. His life, as in his dream-like narration, is recounted with company. Together, they journey through the river of experience and past memories, with the threat of the looming darkness making their quiet solidarity all the more poignant.

 

Bibliography:

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, ed.by K. J.H. Dettmar, Pearson Education, 2010. pp.1949-2010.

An Introduction to Allusions in Beowulf

The Oxford English Dictionary defines allusion as “an implied, indirect, or passing reference to a person or thing” or “any reference to someone or something”. When it comes to literature, however, it becomes a difficult task to avoid accidentally falling into affective and intentional fallacies when exploring whether or not certain words, phrases, or narratives are meant by the author to be distinct and relevant allusions to particular people or events. In works such as Beowulf, moreover, the task of pointing out allusions and understanding their meaning becomes even more difficult due to the obscurity of their context and cultural situations. Nevertheless, what I aim to explore are some allusions to elements present in Old Norse literature which are readily available to us in the text:  elements which we may assume to have been passed down to Beowulf’s author(s) through the culture of the Danelaw.

The Scyldings

One of the most notable of these allusions is that of the Scyldings. A prominent family not only in Beowulf, their stories also appear in Snorra Edda (Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda) and Hrólfs saga kraka (The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki). In the Edda, Skjöldur (Scyld Scefing), the founder of the Skjöldungar (Scyldings), is portrayed as a descendant of the god Óðinn himself. The legends of his descendants are recorded in Beowulf and Hrólfs saga kraka. Being slightly different in perspective to Beowulf, the focus of Hrólfs saga kraka is more so on Hroðgar’s nephew Hrólfur than on himself. Both narratives however include a troll-like being terrorising the halls at nightfall and a hero that comes and eradicates such threats.

Eotenas ond ylfe and gígantas

J.R.R. Tolkien notes in lines 112-113 the author’s use of two culturally different etymological sources to describe the race of Grendel and the descendants of Cain. On the one hand, Tolkien observes the use of gígantas in line 113 as a word borrowed from the Latin version of the Bible. On the other hand, he marks the words eotenas and ylfe in line 112 as distinctly Norse, coming from the words jötnar (giants) and álfar (elves). These words not only depict the author’s blending of pagan and Christian elements into the story of Beowulf, but as cultural allusions they furthermore offer a twofold perspective on Grendel’s background as a fiend – that is, he not only is an enemy of the Christians, being a descendant of Cain and the giants, but also at the sight of the pagan heroes he is considered an outcast of the Norse gods and humanity.

Wæls and Sigemund

The bard in Hroðgar’s hall recounts the story of Sigemund the dragon-slayer in lines 883-915 as words of praise, encouragement, and admonition to Beowulf. Similar narratives can be found in the Snorra Edda and the Völsunga Saga where Völsungur’s (Wæl’s) descendant Sigurður slays a dragon and takes possession of a treasure hoard. Placing these narratives in the context of Beowulf allows its author to portray ironies foreshadowing Beowulf’s death, but also comparative praise, as Sigurður is and will ever be remembered in Northern legend as Fáfnisbani –  the slayer of the dragon Fáfnir – after his death.

Thus allusions such as these allow us to understand more comprehensively the story of Beowulf. They give the text particular shades which reflect dramatic ironies that are not always obvious when the allusions are missed. And although many of these allusions and possibly the text itself are rendered obscure to us as modern audiences, their importance to the Anglo-Saxon audience as antiquarian reflections and contemporary innovations should never be understated, wont as the Anglo-Saxons would have been to do so.

 

 

Works Consulted:

Heaney, Seamus. Beowulf. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. Print.

Tolkien, J.R.R. Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:        Harper Collins Publishers, 2014. Print.

— . The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. London:                  George Allen & Unwin Publishers, 1983. Print.

 

 

 

 

DUALITY AS A TRAGIC MOTIF IN SHAKESPEARE’S MACBETH

Russ McDonald’s statement that “Shakespearean tragedy depends on a paradox” could not be better suited to any other play than in Macbeth[1]. The actions and the structure of the play hinge on the paradoxes found in accepted truths, language, and signifiers. The theme of duality, in particular, comes into special significance in Macbeth. Shakespeare utilizes duality as a tragic motif in Macbeth; that is, it is used to contextualize and procure Macbeth’s hamartia, and also to lead the hero eventually to his downfall and death. Theories from Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense” and Sigmund Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’” would help us further understand the significance of duality in Shakespeare’s play.

The theme of duality is uncannily pervasive in Macbeth,[2] as is depicted in the diction of the characters. The witches “speak in paradoxes: ‘When the battle’s lost and won,’ ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ (1.1.4,11),”[3] “Double, double, toil and trouble” (4.1.10). The human characters themselves speak at times through duality if not in paradoxes: “All our service / In every point twice done, and then done double” (1.6.15), “Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell” (2.1.64-65). Macduff, moreover, makes note of “such welcome and unwelcome things at once / ‘Tis hard to reconcile” (4.3.139-140). This extensive use of duality and paradox serves to reflect the play’s consciousness of and emphasis on the arbitrariness of language and words as signifiers.

Indeed, Nietzsche describes words as having “arbitrary assignments…beyond the canon of uncertainty” and “arbitrary differentiations”, explaining that “we believe we know something of the things themselves when we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors of things, which do not at all agree with the original entities.”[4] The human being’s “arrogance associated with knowing and feeling,”[5] as Nietzsche terms it, is tested in Macbeth, where Hecate remarks that “security / Is mortals’ chiefest enemy” (3.5.32). To be secure in the stability of language in Macbeth is to forget that “truths are illusions that have become worn out and sensuously powerless.”[6] Macbeth, who, in the beginning of the play, is “sensitive and aware”[7] of the arbitrariness of language—for in fact he notes that “two truths are told (1.3.128) which “cannot be ill, cannot be good” (1.3.132)—in the end forgets the instability of words and signifiers, that they “speak metaphorically or metonymically to a single aspect of the signified; they cannot convey its essence.”[8] Macbeth perceives the admonitions of the apparitions only in their literal sense, and confidently declares that they “will never be” (4.1.94). He forgets Banquo’s warning that “the instruments of darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s / In deepest consequence” (1.3.123-126). This situation William Scott explains thus: “In becoming a part of the self-deluding show and undoing some literalisms to confirm another, he [Macbeth] skews the boundaries of literal and figurative and of perceiver and perceived, with paradoxical results.”[9] As much as Macbeth, in self-delusion, “skews the boundaries of literal and figurative”, the witches do so as well, if not better, using Macbeth’s ambition-driven over-assurance in language to deceive him who so readily would be deceived. Accordingly, the witches’ use of seemingly impossible predictions and “hopeful messages”[10] effects the dissolution of Macbeth’s awareness of the arbitrariness of language: he who, being unprepared, thus becomes a servant to defect[11]. Hence Macbeth declares ironically that “damned [be] all those that trust them” (4.1.139), not realizing that he himself belongs with the damned.

Macbeth’s defective action, then—his hamartia,[12]—is precisely that he blindly disregards the existence of dualities in the realm of the play. This gives him a false and unhealthy sense of security as, after saying, “I cannot taint with fear…. / The mind I sway by and the heart I bear / Shall never sag with doubt nor shake with fear” (5.3.3,9-10), Macbeth, in response to the servant’s entry, and in what is consequently an expression of his paranoia, says “The devil damn thee black, though cream-faced loon! / Where got’st thou that goose look?” (5.3.11-12). This sense of security is, in turn, haunted by the duality that Macbeth overlooks, and such effects Macbeth’s tragic recognition and reversal.

Informing and qualifying the notion of this haunting duality in Macbeth is Freud’s concept of the “double”[13]. In Macbeth there can be found characters whom Freud would identify as the “doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self.”[14] In fact, two stages of Freud’s “double” are represented in the play: that which “was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death,’”[15] and that which, “from having been an assurance of immortality…becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”[16] The titular character of the play possesses three of these “doubles” in the figures of Lady Macbeth, the witches, and Macduff—and these figures offer Macbeth unique stages of his own recognition and reversal..

Lady Macbeth, as one of Macbeth’s “doubles,” figuratively completes him, exhibiting characteristics and performing actions that are either opposite or almost like his. In Act 1 Scene 5, she calls on the spirits (l. 40) to “take [her] milk for gall” (l. 48), since her husband is “too full o’th’ milk of human kindness” (l. 17). Her apostrophe to night beginning in line 50 of the same scene, resembling that of Juliet’s in Romeo and Juliet[17], is echoed by Macbeth in Act 3 Scene 2 when he calls on, “Come, seeling night” (l. 49). They both find themselves reluctant before the execution of their murderous actions, yet Lady Macbeth’s power over Macbeth’s identity earlier on in the play is such that he attempts to affirm his masculinity through Lady Macbeth so much so that “he sins to win her approbation.”[18] She inevitably corrupts his masculine identity by using it against him during his times of hesitation. Eventually Macbeth becomes “in blood / Stepped in so far that, should [he] wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3.4.137-139). Lady Macbeth realises only too late that “What’s done cannot be undone” (5.1.68). When it becomes her turn to regret the actions of herself and her husband, telling him “You must leave this” (3.2.39), Macbeth only informs her of a forthcoming plan for her to “applaud the deed” (3.2.49). Such has become of the situation of Macbeth’s identity as it relates to Lady Macbeth, that his actions have become mere performances, “deeds”, that need the applause of his one audience, his wife. Her death consequently triggers his speech in Act 5 Scene 5 wherein life is but “a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more” (ll. 24-26) –  a description of life that is very much pertinent to his own.

Realising such a fact, Macbeth “turns unsuccessfully to the witches for the power he needs to make him author of himself.”[19] The witches, who are characteristically duplicitous, symbolise Macbeth’s “double” that is supposed to assure him of immortality. They are beings who may be figuratively associated with Macbeth. Macbeth’s first words “So foul and fair a day I have not seen” (1.3.38) echo the witches’ last ones in Act 1 Scene 1 where they say “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.11) Cheung observes this of the witches’ interaction with Macbeth:

Significantly, it is not a surprise encounter but a meeting that is to take place. Already there is a hint of intercourse between the witches and Macbeth, so what seems to be an external temptation also can be interpreted, as many critics have done, as a psychological projection.[20]

The witches not only embody the external “multiplying villainies of nature / [that] Do swarm upon him” (1.2.11), but also they symbolize the internal, “black and deep desires” (1.4.51) already present in Macbeth’s character. Viewing their relationship thus makes it easier to relate such a relationship with Freud’s idea of the double where “the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other.”[21] Indeed, the witches prove to be effective because, according to Scott, “they seemed to have access to the frightening secrets of his heart.”[22] The power in the duality of their nature, being representative of both the external and internal forces of evil that besiege Macbeth, makes it highly difficult for Macbeth to resist the temptation of accessing and utilizing the murderous ambition that their prophecies leave as a readily-available option for him. However, it is exactly this duality in nature that opens up and leads Macbeth to his downfall. He recognises that he has fallen into this pitfall, but only too late: “And be these juggling fiends no more believed / That palter with us in a double sense, / That keep the word of promise to our ear / And break it to our hope” (5.8.19-22).

In the face of this realisation, Macbeth finds himself pitted against Macduff, the “double” who is the “uncanny harbinger of death” for Macbeth. For, being what Campbell terms as a “figure of the tyrant-monster”[23], Macbeth’s presence inevitably calls for “the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence will liberate the land.”[24] And Scotland must needs be liberated from Macbeth, as it is described by Lennox as a “suffering country / Under a hand accursed” (3.6.49-50). Indeed, Macduff becomes for Macbeth “a thing of terror,”[25] who tells him: “Despair thy charm, / And let the angel whom thou still hast served / Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped” (5.8.13-16)[26]. Hence is Macduff qualified to be the nemesis of Macbeth, whereby he is also portrayed as a figure that is the direct opposite of Macbeth, a figure of “the self-creating and invulnerable masculinity that Macbeth cannot fashion for himself.”[27] Macduff’s character moreover serves to haunt Macbeth with the duality that the tragic character forgets persists in the play’s dramatic universe. The very fact of Macduff’s birth and existence, the circumstances of which Macbeth deems impossible, shakes Macbeth out of his self-inflicted tragic delusion and reverses his expectation of the witches’ equivocal prophecy. His death in the hands of Macduff symbolises the taking-over of the “double”: the former, suffering self, represented in Macbeth, is replaced by the projected and more perfect – though not entirely unscathed[28] –  self in the person of Macduff[29].

This ending for Macbeth is not to be restricted with a tragic affect. “Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms,”[30] writes Joseph Campbell. Macbeth, in this light, is at once tragic and liberating. The titular character is tragic because he, blinded by ambition, undermines if not forgets about the existence of duplicity and the prevalence thereof in the world he lives – but on the same note, this selfsame duplicity allows for the liberation of the imprisoned and corrupted self in Macbeth and transfigures it into the more complete, more heroically-realised self in Macduff.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1] R. McDonald, The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare: An Introduction with Documents (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s: 2001), 86.

[2] All quotations from Macbeth are taken from D. Bevington, The Necessary Shakespeare (The University of Chicago: 2013), 710-747.

[3] D. Bevington, The Necessary Shakespeare, 712.

[4] F. Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s: 2007), 454.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid, 455.

[7] D. Bevington, The Necessary Shakepeare,711.

[8] D. H. Richter, The Critical Tradition, 438.

[9] W. Scott, “Macbeth’s—And Our—Self-Equivocations” (Shakespeare Quarterly: 1986), 160-174.

[10] Ibid, 171.

[11] I am referring here to 2.1.17-18: “Being unprepared, / Our will became the servant to defect”.

[12] Russ McDonald reminds us that hamartia would be “a term more properly understood as an error in action rather than as fatal weakness of character”. The Bedford Companion, 88.

[13] Quotes from Freud are collectively taken from “The ‘Uncanny’” in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s: 2007), 514-532.

[14]Ibid, 522.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid, 523

[17] See Juliet’s soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in The Necessary Shakespeare ed. D. Bevington (The University of Chicago: 2013), 3.2.5

[18] D. Bevington, 712.

[19] Ibid, 713.

[20] K.K. Cheung, “’Dread’ in Macbeth” (Shakespeare Quarterly: 1984), 431.

[21] S. Freud, 522.

[22] W. Scott, 170.

[23] The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell Foundation: 2008), 11

[24] Ibid.

[25] S. Freud, 523.

[26] Macbeth is certainly made terrified by this statement, saying “it hath cowed my better part of man” (5.8.18).

[27] D. Bevington, 713

[28] For Macduff has also suffered loss: the death of his wife and children.

[29] Not coincidentally, Macbeth uncannily tries to refuse killing Macduff: “Of all men else I have avoided thee” (5.8.5). He sees a vision of a more perfect and unsullied self in Macduff – to him, there is something of the uncanny in Macduff, something, according to Freud in p. 526, “familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.” This more perfect and now-alienated self that Macbeth finds in Macduff he has repressed in his murderous drive towards kingship.

[30] The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 21.