Classical Mythology in John Keats’S ‘Hyperion Poems’ and Dan Simmons’S Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion

PROTEAN DEITIES: CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN JOHN KEATS’S ‘HYPERION POEMS’ AND DAN SIMMONS’S HYPERION AND THE FALL OF HYPERION by HERCO JACOBUS STEYN submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in the subject ENGLISH at the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA SUPERVISOR: DR DW LLOYD February 2011 Declaration of Own Work Student number: 4198-288-6 I, the undersigned, declare that this dissertation, entitled “Protean Deities: Classical Mythology in John Keats’s ‘Hyperion Poems’ and Dan Simmons’s Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion”, is my own work and that all the sources I have used or quoted have been indicated and acknowledged by means of complete references. _____________________________ _____________________________ Signature: Mr HJ Steyn Date Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to the following two individuals: • My supervisor, Dr David Lloyd, for his sustained support and guidance. As I have come to understand, there is a vast difference between knowing the path and walking the path, and he was the master of showing me the path, yet allowing me genuinely to find my own voice within the dissertation. • My wife, Leonét, for comprehending the importance of this dissertation to me personally, for continuously encouraging me to persist, for unshakably believing in my abilities, and, above all, for her unconditional love. Contents Summary .............................................................................................................................. i Introduction......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I: Methodologies ................................................................................................... 5 Chapter II: Hesiod’s Titanomachia and Keats’s Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion ..... 42 Chapter III: Simmons’s Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion ........................................... 82 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 127 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 129 ‘Science continues to conserve the archaic heritage of myth, content to clothe it in another form.’ Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth i Summary This dissertation concurs with the Jungian postulation that certain psychological archetypes are inclined to be reproduced by the collective unconscious. In turn, these psychological archetypes are revealed to emerge in literature as literary archetypes. It is consequently argued that science fiction has come to form a new mythology because the archetypal images are displaced in a modern, scientific guise. This signifies a shift in the collective world view of humanity, or a shift in its collective consciousness. It is consequently argued that humanity’s collective consciousness has evolved from mythic thought to scientific thought, courtesy of the numerous groundbreaking scientific discoveries of the past few centuries. This dissertation posits as a premise that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s supposition of humanity’s collective consciousness evolving towards what he calls the Omega Point to hold true. The scientific displacement of the literary archetypes reveals humankind’s evolution towards the Omega Point and a cosmic consciousness. Key terms: collective unconscious, archetype, myth, displacement, allusion, intertextuality, epic, science fiction, collective consciousness, weltanschauung, ideology, Romanticism, Omega Point, Hegelian dialectic. 1 Introduction This dissertation consolidates several seemingly disparate hypotheses, the first of which is Carl Gustav Jung’s postulation of psychological archetypes, which are produced by the collective unconscious. Jung’s sense of the psychological archetype is reconciled with the myth critic, Northrop Frye’s, conception of literary archetypes. The literary archetypes that are identified in Chapter One provide a concrete point of reference from which the transformation of myth through time, from the Classical Greek period (circa 510-323 BC) to the present day, may be tracked. The tracking of the transformation of myth through time is accomplished by means of employing Frye’s literary technique of displacement. It is therefore argued that modern-day mythmaking is indeed taking place, but that the myths themselves have been ‘displaced’ in order to reflect humanity’s changing perception of the world. For the purposes of this dissertation, humankind’s changing perception is traced from the Classical Greek period up to the present day. It is argued that due to certain events (such as the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution), ‘radical’ scientific and other theories (such as heliocentrism, the biological classification system, and evolution), and scientific and technological discoveries (such as electricity, computers, robotics, and air and space travel), humankind’s perception of the world, and consequently his place in it, have changed. When speaking of humankind’s perception, it is inferred that this perception is the collective perception of humankind. This collective perception of humankind may be usefully related to Émile Durkheim’s hypothesis of the collective consciousness of humankind (Jary and Jary, 1991:93). However, if the collective perception of humankind, that is the collective consciousness, changes through the ages in step with scientific and technological discoveries, it would mean that humankind’s collective consciousness is evolving, as advocated by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1959:300-301). 2 Because humankind is not monolithic, the evolution of humankind’s collective consciousness in the context of this dissertation is taken to mean the evolution of the collective consciousness of the more educated classes of the West. Moreover, if humankind’s collective consciousness is evolving, it would be reflected by the literature of different periods of Western culture. In this dissertation, it is examined how the literary archetypes are displaced from the Classical Greek period, to the Romantic period, to the contemporary period. This is done by examining the transformation of the same myth, namely the myth of the Titanomachia (or Hyperion myth), through the three periods mentioned. It is shown that myths are still produced, but that they are displaced in modern form to reflect the scientific direction of modern humankind’s collective consciousness. Because myths are still produced, albeit in scientific garb, I will argue that science fiction is the contemporary guise of myth. The reason why humankind’s collective consciousness evolved from what Claude Lévi- Strauss calls ‘mythic thought’ (Dubuisson, 1993:119) to a more scientific world view is that new conceptual developments have invalidated many of the old ‘certainties’ that mythopoeic man implicitly believed, for example that the earth is flat or that the earth is the centre of the universe. For early mythopoeic man, the transcendental or Platonic world consisted of the cosmos with its gods, planets, and other inexplicable phenomena. f, in the contemporary era of scientific myth, the transcendent referent can no longer be the cosmos because scientific research has shown that it is empirically knowable, and thus no longer entirely transcendent (Sutton and Sutton, 1969:235). As concerns the re-presentation (the hyphen is added intentionally) of the myth of the Titanomachia, the three authors that are focussed on in this dissertation are the ancient Greek writer, Hesiod, the Romantic poet, John Keats, and the contemporary science fiction author, Dan Simmons. It is revealed that both Keats and Simmons share an evolutionary world view in which the principle of the survival of the fittest and the most beautiful (with beauty signifying evolutionary superiority) prevails. In addition to subscribing to an evolutionary world view, both Keats and Simmons are revealed to 3 support Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s proposition that humankind’s collective consciousness is evolving towards a certain point in the future, called the Omega Point (which signifies supreme consciousness). However, it is ultimately concluded that both Keats and Simmons grasp the fundamental characteristic of evolution, namely that it is a relentless quest for improvement and thus it never stops, not even when the supposed Omega Point is achieved because just as it appears as though the Omega Point is about to be attained, it is revealed that it can never be reached. This signifies that humankind will always evolve further and, perhaps more profoundly, that perfection is ultimately unattainable. With regards to the structure of this dissertation, I acknowledge that the chapters are perilously long. Instead of opting for the more conventional approach of dividing the dissertation into four chapters of approximately thirty pages each, I have chosen to make use of only three chapters of approximately forty pages each. My reason for doing so is that I have a substantial number of seemingly disparate hypotheses and concepts which are consolidated in Chapter One, thus accounting for its length. I have also decided not to split the longest chapter (Chapter Three – the chapter on Simmons) because the archetypes are dealt with in relation to each character and his or her role within the two novels as a whole, thus two chapters would appear repetitious and incoherent.

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