The Eighth Day : a Novel with Critical Commentary
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University of Lethbridge Research Repository OPUS http://opus.uleth.ca Theses Arts and Science, Faculty of 1994 The eighth day : a novel with critical commentary Galbraith, Evelyn Van Lethbridge, Alta : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Science, 1994 http://hdl.handle.net/10133/25 Downloaded from University of Lethbridge Research Repository, OPUS THE EIGHTH DAY: A NOVEL WITH CRITICAL COMMENTARY Evelyn Van Galbraith Master of Arts Degree in English University of Lethbridge, 1994 A Thesis Submitted to the Council on Graduate Studies of the University of Lethbridge in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF ARTS LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA April, 1994 © Evelyn Van Galbraith, 1994 THE EIGHTH DAY: A NOVEL WITH CRITICAL COMMENTARY ABSTRACT This thesis contains two parts: a novel, The Eighth Day and its critical commentary. The novel sets the story of Olivia, a contemporary protagonist, into the Sumerian myth of Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth. Like Inanna, Olivia descends, removing her mortal vestments or metaphors of belief, in seven stages or gates that lead to the underworld where she will arrive naked and bowing low before her sister-self, Rahab. Because Olivia's ideology is rigidly bound by ethics framed in the Old Testament, both of these myths play a large part in the unfolding of her story. Livia's beliefs must be closely identified before she can dicard or amend them. The Inanna myth illuminates the spiral nature of life's journey from the blind innocence of a child descending down to a conscious innocence bom of choice. The critical commentary that precedes the novel discusses the art and technique that plays part in all fiction and in the novel, The Eighth Day. 111 Acknowledgements I wish to thank my thesis committee including Dr. Brian Tyson and Dr. Alan Aycock for their time and encouragement. I am especially indebted to Professor Martin A. Oordt whom I respect as a true scholar. I thank him for his close readings, his mighty patience, expertise, sense of humor and for his friendship. I thank Terrence C. Smith, mentor, physician and friend. I endure with the help of my family: Jill, Mattis, Carl, Bruce, Spencer and Andrew. I thank Margy Hicken, Deborah Thornton, Cynthia Ashworth, Michael Ebsworth and Caroline Christiansen. I thank Betsy Cameron for her permission to use the picture, "Wings of Enchantment". IV The lyf so short. the craft so long to lerne. — Chaucer v Critical Commentary Introduction The core of my novel was written in principle form the summer of 1992; written silently, and for the most part, unconsciously. The events, the characters, the story flowed helter-skelter through the pen. Chaos was emancipated, cut loose, released to run unfettered throughout the story. Bits of poetry learned in grade school, ancient text, mythologies: the muses ran amok. That was the first draft. Studies in art and technique proved that much of what unfolded in the original story/drama was a surprise, a surprise that needed much refining. Following drafts were affected by the scholarly work of such critics as Gass, Lubbock, Stevick, Booth, Frye and so on. Henry James suggests that criticism is a sort of exhibition and analysis: "To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and make it one's own" (viii). So, too, my studies in literature and criticism allowed me to take hold of my novel, possess it, appreciate it and edit. I began again cognizant of such techniques as stream of consciousness, dialogue, frame and so forth; thus, re-visioning the second and third drafts for clarity. My studies spawned a means to approach fiction consciously, reading closely for the multi-leveled layers of art and technique. I read with new attention the works of Findley, Dostoyevsky, Atwood, Welty, Lawerence, Joyce and more. The realm of fiction became a presence more authentic than reality. Coming to the fourth draft, I was no longer the unconscious writer, but also reader and critic. What had been clear only to me in former drafts, I re wrote to make clear to another. Confusing dialogue was set off with italics, dubious sentence constructions were disentangled or cut away. The story which, in earlier vii versions, took place over a year was now restricted to three days. Emotions, too complex to show, tell or disclose were consciously enlightened with works of art, scripture, poetry and rhyme. The blithe protagonist descends as she removes her masks of virtue, purity and honor, to reveal shame, censure and guilt; finally to return on The Eighth Day to a potential innocence bom of excruciating choice. Many symbols, principle theories, and images for The Eighth Day were suggested and even exceeded by the protagonist versed and rigidly grounded in Old Testament stories and values. The living world of flowers, shrubbery, trees, fishes, creatures, Adam (Hebrew for earth-man) and from his rib, Eve (Hebrew for mother of life), were created by Yahweh within six days. On the seventh day God rested. Olivia, the protagonist, issues from a dark wet womb to fall into the eighth day only to wake, eat and sleep again, showing the reader by both symbol and scene the human predicament. The idea of falling into divisive life is a notion that Milton describes in Paradise Lost when Adam divided becomes Adam and Eve (211). The two forever searching for what was lost (Campbell 104). Looking horizontally into the world, looking vertically for answers, looking past, around and over one another. This inception of wholeness is the animus, anima concept of Carl Jung even somewhat like the oriental notion of yin and yang. Olivia believes Adam and Eve partook of the Tree of Knowledge on the eighth day and thus, humanity collectively fell into a condition of unconscious being (Campbell 101). The catch, however, is that what remains is the journey to consciousness, the reunion of the fragmented self, the quest for the Tree of Life. Consciousness is caught in moments of awakening, epiphanies. James Joyce recorded the following about these revelatory moments: "Epiphany is a crisis action in the mind, a moment when a person, an event or a thing is seen in a light so new that it is as if it has never been seen before; at this recognition, the mental landscape of the viewer is permanently changed" (Gifford 12). All novels contain epiphanies; they are the devices that help to move a novel into vui the realm of myth. Maurice Shroder discusses this mythic motif of the novel in "The Novel as Genre": The novel records the passage from a state of innocence to a state of experience, from ignorance which is bliss to a mature recognition of the actual way of the world. (Stevick 15) Such beams of enlightenment, found in an other's story, open our eyes to our own motes —blinding craters that have reduced us to blaming, to sleeping, to gazing, mouth ajar, at the moon. Such moments are mythic in nature for when these moments are perceived as markers of an archetype, the human story takes on mythic proportions. The Eighth Day relates the story of a woman with four children and pregnant with another. Since she can remember, Olivia Whitiker Brown has restlessly searched for the Tree of Life, the meaning of her being. She pursues this in spite of the answers transmitted by her community. In her linear life of meals, bills and children, answers are not forthcoming. Olivia finds the ancient myth of Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth in a cardboard box of discarded university notes. With concordance in hand, Livie reads the ancient cuneiform of Inanna: Goddess of Sumeria and after many days of translation, many days of anguish, many days of introspection, Livia concludes she will follow this goddess (7). In the ancient myth, the goddess Inanna descends and passes seven conditional portals that lead to the underworld to confront her unconscious sister-self; in Sumerian it is Ereshkigal, or in Hebrew it is Rahab, the dragon who resides in the shades as Queen. The keeper at the gate at each of the seven thresholds demands a piece of Inanna's queenly vestments before she may pass. Thus, the narrative in the novel takes as a paradigmatic guide for Livie's vertical descent the Sumerian myth of Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (2000 B.C.E.). Olivia takes the conscious myth of Inanna to unravel her accepted yet unconscious Judaeo-Christian myth. As the Sumerian myth describes, so Livie descends locating and stripping herself of honors, those symbols and kudos that have proved her communal IX worth; locating and stripping her ruling beliefs, those tenets that upheld her as she upheld them; locating and stripping her Judaeo-Christian metaphors, the laws and testaments of how to live the model life. The chapters recount her mythic travail, and thus transpose the ancient myth into contemporary experience. The guide of the Inanna myth, along with a composite of rhyme, riddle, scripture, prose and poetry endow Livie with the strength to move from the limited world view on/of the Brown Farm to an internal world where she can examine her inner boundaries, those rigid community parameters that reject change or exchange. Each chapter moves the initiate through the rites of passage requisite when a petitioner advances to the many individual thresholds that must be traversed in the dark journey that leads to the underworld of the unconscious. With the assistance of classes in structural anthropology, myth, metaphor, fiction and with close critical readings from adept Professors, this novel comes to a close.