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Volume 20 Number 2 Article 2 Spring 3-15-1994 The Mythical Method of Descent Into Hell Evans Lansing Smith Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Smith, Evans Lansing (1994) "The Mythical Method of Descent Into Hell," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 20 : No. 2 , Article 2. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol20/iss2/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Considers Williams’s Descent Into Hell as an excellent “example of the use of the mythical method [as defined by T.S. Eliot] as a metaphor of poesis, by which the fundamental forms of the imagination are catalyzed.” Geometrical symbolism and the underworld journey link it to many modernist works. Additional Keywords Threshold imagery in Descent Into Hell; Underworld imagery in Descent Into Hell; Williams, Charles. Descent Into Hell—Symbolism This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol20/iss2/2 p a x s e 10 Issu e 76 jSpRINQ 1994 ^ I y t I^Lo r g ® xi JSfeIBxs>®> ©fli M m m m r Jkmn> S^IUL ^ V A N S L a m SlKl Q jScD lTl? escent Into Hell, published in 1937 by Charles and crystals in his novel Hopscotch, a novel which relies Williams, is a fine example of the use of the heavily on "The nekias of today" (180) and on the "delicate mythical method as a metaphor of poesis, by alchemies" (379) involved in the reduction of material which the fundamental forms of the imagina­ compounds to their elemental substances (429). These ar­ tion are catalyzed. T. S. Eliot defined the "mythical chetypal forms are in fact often represented in Modernism method" as "a continuous parallel between contempora­ by geometrical configurations: In A Vision, Yeats uses the neity and antiquity," with the result of "giving a shape and gyrating cones; in the Joseph novels, Mann uses the circle, significance . to the futility and anarchy which is con­ die square, the triangle, and the sphere (124); Borges uses temporary history" (681). This method yielded a wide the diamond in "Death and the Compass," the wheel in range of Modernist works written during the late 1930's "The God's Script," and the labyrinth in many stories; and, and early 1940's (such as Eliot's Four Quartets, Mann's in Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (a novel Joseph novels and Dr. Faustus, Hermann Broch's The Death like Leonora Carrington's about a psychotic breakdown), o f Virgil, Nikos Kazantzakis' The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, these fundamental figures of the mind are evoked by the and the stories in Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges) which fuse symbolism of a "circle in the square" in the center of a realistic details with such myths as the apocalypse, the ruined city (54), which becomes the "inner pattern or maze, and the descent to the underworld.1 Several of these template" of the outer city (94). works use the threshold imagery of doorways, gates, win­ Charles Williams developed his own vocabulary to dows, and staircases common to the iconography of the express the revelation of fundamental forms effected by myths of the maze and the descent, and all of them share the the descent into Hades. The character Wentworth, for central theme of the myths of the underworld and the apoca­ example is preoccupied with geometrical configurations lypse: i.e., the revelation of those fundamental ideas which of the eidola. He develops abstract "diagrams" by which give shape and significance to life and art, ideas for which the reality is "geometricized" (24), and the narrator tells us Modernists developed a complex variety of terms. that his historical studies "reduced the world to diagrams" Eliot simply used the phrase "formal pattern" in asso­ (35). This habit persists in Wentworths's death, which ciation with die "box circle" and lotos pool of "Burnt Williams presents in Madame Tussaud's House of Wax, Norton" (14). Thomas Mann used such terms as "funda­ where Wentworth struggles to rearrange the figures of mental types" ('Grundtypen') (Doctor Faustus 488; 647), history on "diagrams, squares and rectangles," looking for "pious formula" ('fromme Formel') and "timeless the "right" or the "real" diagram, which unfortunately schema" ('zeitlose Schema') ("Freud and the Future" 422; constantly changes (217). Wentworth's journey is the most 493), and "given forms" '(gegebene Formen'), "pattern" infernal in the novel, but he shares with the rather angelic ('Muster'), "prototype and abstract" ('Urbild und Inbe- Margaret Anstruther the notion that "the spirit of a man griff') and "archetype" ('Urbild') (Joseph 81,123,23; 94,149, at death saw truly what he was and had been" by the 29). In The Death of Virgil, Hermann Broch created a wide "lucid power of intelligence" and "energy of knowledge" range of synonyms, such as "crystalline archetype" ('kris- activated by death and dying (67), a process of revelation tallische Urbild') (444; 418), "symbol of all symbols" by which "another system of relations" is created (158). ('Sinnbild aller Sinnbild')(89; 85), and "first image of all But it is M argaret's granddaughter Pauline who develops archetypes" ('Urbild aller bilder') (481; 453). C. G. Jung the most complex variety of synonyms for the fundamen­ (who was much interested in the underworld and al­ tal forms of the soul which give shape and significance to chemy) derived his notion of the archetypes from the life. With the help of the poet Stanhope, she discovers the Platonic notion of the "eidola," a term which James Hill­ "laws" of a universe the "very fundamentals" of which are man has recently associated with the name Hades, and altered by her communion with her dead martyred ances­ defined as "ideational forms and shapes" (51). Borges tor Struther (104). For Stanhope's Christian doctrine of referred to these elementary ideas in fiction as "ancient "substituted love" bridges the gap between the living and forms, forms incorruptible and eternal" 'formas antiguas, the dead and contains "the hint of a new organization of formas incorruptibles y etemas' (Labyrinths 70; Obras 117), all things: a shape, of incredible difficulty in the finding, while Julio Cortazar used the term "figuras" to refer to of incredible simplicity found, an infinitely alien arrange­ geometrical archetypes like kaleidoscopes, polyhedrons, ment of infinitely familiar things" (150). The words "or­ JWyrfol-OKe Issu e 76 jSpmNG 1994 P * Q e n ganization," "shape," and "arrangement" in this passage Ereshkigal (Wolkstein and Kramer 52-61). This archaic embody in simple and powerful terms that sense of reve­ notion of the underworld as a labyrinthine mansion of lation effected by the descent. During the performance of many chambers also recurs in Virgil's H alls of Dis and in Stanhope's play, Pauline uses the phrases "fundamental the illuminated manuscript traditions, which picture the thing," "essential nature of all," and "sacred order" to gateway into Hell as the gaping jaws of the devil leading express her sense of a "mystery" revealed by the verse and into an infernal palace. This imagery persists in Medieval her "communion with the dead" (180). All of these terms and Renaissance paintings of the "Harrowing of Hell," in refer ultimately to "The central mystery of Christendom, which we often see Jesus standing at the doorway into the terrible substitution" of God's love on the Cross, which Hell, and sometimes, as in Diirer, beneath an archway, to W illiams calls the "root of a universal rule," rather than a rescue the souls of Adam and Eve. Dante has his famous "miraculous exception" (189). gateway superscribed by the words "Abandon all Hope Ye Who Enter Here," while Blake often used doorways This lovely vocabulary of form accords with the Mod­ into caves to depict the journey of the soul. In Modernism, ernist notion that the myth of the descent into Hades threshold imagery is central in the descents depicted in catalyzes the revelation of the root forms of the mind and such works as Death in Venice, The Death of Virgil, "The soul. The underworld could be almost anywhere for the Garden of Forking Paths," or, for that matter Gravity's Modernists: the streets of Paris in Strindberg's Inferno-, Rainbow, or Hopscotch. The descent through a sequence of Byzantium in the poetry of Yeats; a pond, river, bam, or doorways is also invoked in such films as Mumau's Nos- channel in Lawrence's "The Horse Dealer's Daughter," feratu, Cocteau's Belle et Bete and Orphee, and Ingmar Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, or Women in Love; a bazaar, Bergman's Wild Strawberries.2 park where truant boys play hookey, hotel room, beach, or cemetery in Joyce's A Portrait, Dubliners, or Ulysses; an We find such doorway and gate motifs throughout insane asylum in Leonora Carrington's Down Below; lotos Descent into Hell, in which Williams persistently uses pool, tube stop, or streets of London in Eliot's Four Quar­ threshold imagery to evoke the transition between worlds.
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