Re-Visioning the Fall: Mythic Implications Of Archibald Macleish's Songs for Eve

By

Richard T. Felt

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

August 2002 Re-Visioning the Fall: Mythic Implications Of Archibald Macleish's Songs for Eve

By RichardT. Felt

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Howard Pearce, Department of English, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty members of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

Thesis Advisor

Vice Provost Date

11 ABSTRACT

Author: Richard T. Felt

Title: Re-Visioning the Fall: Mythic Implications of Archibald Macleish's Songs for Eve

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Howard Pearce

Degree: Master of Arts

Year: 2002

The history of Western thought is permeated by a dualistic habit of mind which prevents a deeper connection with that primordial world mediated by myth and archetypes. Nietzsche described this dualism as the imposition of rationalistic Apollonian values on the far older tradition of intuitive Dionysian modes of being. Extending this concept further, James Hillman describes this same phenomenon as a lack of soul which he calls psyche. Without a reconnection to psyche, Western civilization is schizoid and incomplete. Using these insights as a basis for critical exploration, this thesis examines Archibald

Macleish's 1954 poem cycle Songs for Eve and its inversion of the traditional

Western archetypes of the Fall and woman's role in it. By rejecting the traditional

Western allegorical interpretation and reinstating the older Dionysian understanding of the Fall, Macleish awakens the reader to a new and deeper understanding of this pervasive mythic motif.

111 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One: Foundations ...... 1

Chapter Two: Applications ...... 22

Appendix: Titles of Poems...... 51

Works Cited ...... 52

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Possession by Dionysus' ecstasy, his sacred frenzy, opens the soul's prophetic eyes.

Euripides The Bacchae

v Chapter One: Foundations

Joseph Campbell, the great mythologist and anthropologist, said that "the

long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed" (Hero 387). How

can this be, when we live in an age inundated by symbols of every sort­

commercial, political, religious, cultural? When semioticians are busy analyzing

and explicating every nuance of thought and signification? The power that was once inherent in the symbols and patterns of myth and ritual have been deracinated by the Western cult of rationalism and nominalism. We live now in a world marked by a great spiritual malaise, a crisis of soul to which the Western

religious tradition no longer ministers; humans cry out for meaning only to hear empty echoes reverberate from the billboards and skyscrapers of Madison

Avenue. In lieu of a vibrant and communal oral tradition which fosters and sustains mythic tradition, we turn to the personal experience of reading in hopes of replenishing the well of soul. Literature is, indeed, one of the few places left where the power of myth can still be discerned. The greatest of today's writers and poets have taken the place of the shamans and sacred storytellers who once guided men and women in the search for meaning.

The role of the modern mythopoet is not the re-inventor of symbols but rather the re-animator of symbols; the one who returns life force to a barren world sundered from its psychic source. It is the battle between mimesis and poesis: the author does not mirror the real world but instead creates an in-between world, a liminal space wherein we can interact directly with the depths that lie

1 beneath the literalist, ego-dominated fa<;ade we take for reality. The artist functions as the hero whose successful adventure can unlock "and release again the flow of life into the body of the world" (Hero 40). "It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse" (Hero 391 ). The greatest of artists are able to tap into the deep wellspring of universal soul that transcends human particulars of race, culture, language, history and that lead­ or at least point-humanity back to its true nature, and the source of that wellspring is the archetypes that act out their drama through myth.

Lawyer, statesman, academician-Archibald Macleish is not known for his mythopoesis, even though some of his most significant works are reinterpretations of "myths, legends, and beliefs that have become accepted in traditional ways" (Falk 34 ), nor has he garnered much mainstream critical attention in the past 30 years. 1 As poet and playwright, he has been seen as a pragmatist in search of answers, insisting that art address social and political problems. It is little wonder, then, that his work has received scant archetypal exploration. And yet through his works, most notably the biblically-themed plays

Nobodaddy and J.B. and the mythologically inspired poem Pot of Earth, there runs a thread which invites the reader to return mythically (the via regia of the storyteller) to the depths of the psyche as the source of all that is human. The power and nature of Macleish's mythopoesis is most clearly developed in his late poem cycle, Songs for Eve. In it, we see the rehabilitation of the Judea­

Christian archetype of the Fall through an inversion of the conventional, Western dualistic interpretation (which has become solidified into a cultural archetype).

2 Apollo and Dionysus

To categorize and explore Macleish as a mythopoet, we must begin by examining the past two millennia of history of Western thought. It can be argued that, throughout its written history, the nature of Western thought has been fundamentally dualistic: male versus female, God versus Devil, monotheism versus polytheism, spirit versus flesh, Apollonian versus Dionysian. Our way of thinking is organized around these pairs of opposites, and to think otherwise, to think inclusively and paradoxically (such as is done in the East), is difficult if not impossible for any member of Occidental culture. In literature, this mode of seeing the world is a limiting one, both for the poet as well as the reader. Critical methodologies from this tradition focus on reader and artifact, subject and object, mimesis versus fantasy, correct interpretation versus error, historicity versus imagination. Both hermeneutics and phenomenology are aligned in the same camp as myth criticism in their attempt to penetrate beyond dualistic segregation, concentrating on literature's polysemous nature and transformative power.

Leitch says that with its eidetic and transcendental methods of analysis, phenomenology "subverted not only empiricism and idealism, but Cartesian dualism and modern scientific method. [While phenomenologists] worked hard to heal the rift between self and world, experience and knowledge, and consciousness and creation" (152), hermeneutics' emphasis on historicity and cultural specificity undermines the universal and timeless nature of myth and archetype (191).

An archetypal or mythic world view, on the other hand, is willing to accept

3 all possibilities, all potentialities, and invites us into the limitless vastness of the

human soul. 2 Myth criticism strives to discern connections between literature and

the fundamental, primordial well of pan-cultural archetypes and patterns inhering

in the depths of the human psyche. It seeks not so much to evaluate as it does to make manifest the pre-lingual and imagistic sources which give great literature

its power to affect and deeply move the reader: "The creator has an idea, an

image which, by its nature, has to be non-verbal, but the poet, as a creator, has to clothe that idea in words. The result is something that you either see on a

page, or hear in your ear, and the whole point is to awaken response in another human being" (Parker 60). The text is viewed in relation to a larger context, a universal backdrop against which the reader is able to witness the timeless interplay of gods and goddesses, heroes and demons.

Myth criticism is not the single-minded search for myths in every narrative and in every poem, applying willy-nilly our favorite critical magnifying lens to every artifact, only to discover what we are looking for whether it is truly there or not. Following Umberto Eco's advice, we must avoid rigid (mis)interpretation and misapplication of critical paradigms, and allow the text to suggest the most profitable lines of exegesis to pursue (60-2); obviously, certain texts will more readily display mythic themes and archetypes than others, and attempting to force those which do not to fit into one's critical perspective is a disservice to text and reader. Nor does myth criticism form a perfected and self-contained critical system. Rather, this approach is a way of processing the literary text in a non­ dualistic, inclusive fashion, of allowing it its own ontological reality that may enter

4 into the deepest recesses of soul that lie beyond the barriers of cognition. In this

way, we connect the literary artifact with the whole of our psyche, not just that

verbal, rational part that in our dualistic thinking is too often taken for the entire

individual. lnclusivity and fusion of the Apollonian/Dionysian are to be our

guiding principles as we explore Macleish's Songs for Eve.

Such a broad statement of principle is all well and good, but to make

practical · use of it, we must first set forth our methodology and clarify our terminology. What do we mean by dualism, archetype, psyche? How can the

process of criticism be anything other than analytical and logocentric (the antithesis of myth) when its very heart is the examination of parts and the written communication thereof? Before we proceed to Macleish's poem, it is necessary to address these questions. First, we shall turn our attention to the Western dualistic tradition against which the mythic world view is juxtaposed. This tradition is best exemplified historically by the ascendancy of male-dominated religion and culture, and philosophically by the dialectic between Apollo and

Dionysus.

Ethnographers tell us that for thousands of years, early mankind's spiritual world was organized around a female-based religion-the worship of the Great

Goddess or the Great Mother (about whom we will speak more in chapter two).

However, in time a radical shift in religion and culture elevated a male-centered world view while at the same time completely vitiating the person and role of woman as embodiment of the divine. The historicity of this shift is readily demonstrable; existence of an earlier, female-centered Western culture is borne

5 out by archeology, especially the work of Marija Gimbutas. She asserts that the

peoples of the Near East and Old Europe (pre Indo-Aryan invasion) were

matriarchal and worshipped the Goddess as a primary deity. The archeological

evidence has been found at sites all across Europe and the Near East:

thousands of female figurines (a famous example being the Venus of Willendorf,

c. 30,000 BCE) have been found but no corresponding male figurines,

suggesting the primacy of the female (112); often, these figurines are found in

conjunction with snake imagery, 3 suggesting a religious or ritualistic connection

which will be pertinent to our exploration of Macleish. These figurines, she

asserts, represent the Goddess as life-creator and life-sustainer, a symbol of

renewal, and that both Athena, as goddess of wisdom, as well as Hera descend

from them ( 158 ). These fetishistic representations of the Goddess span the

whole of human prehistory in Europe and the Near East, only to disappear

completely in the Near East with the rise of the hieratic city state (c. 2500 - 1500

BCE), and in Europe with the invasion of the horse-riding, pastoralist lndo-Aryans

(c. 1500 - 500 BCE). By the time of the invention of writing and formal

government (both male-dominated domains), the Goddess had been supplanted

by the hegemony of male solar or sky deities. By the time that the Western

phallocentric religions of Judaism and Christianity (and later Islam) had become firmly established, women's place of honor had fallen to that of temptress and

cause of mankind's fall from grace, possibly, as Campbell speculates, "not so

much to honor God as to simplify life by keeping woman in the kitchen" (Primitive

Myth 323).

6 Philosophically, the Western dualistic tradition can be exemplified by the

dichotomy between Dionysus and Apollo. Named for the Greek gods Dionysus, god of wine, vegetation and excess, and Apollo, solar deity and god of poetry and orderly beauty, this dichotomy represents the shift (coeval with the invention of writing) from an earth-centered, female-dominated religion and communal, agrarian society to a sky-centered, male-dominated religion and an

individualistic, urban society. The tension between these two forces has led to advances in many aspects of culture, thought, and science, but has also contributed to the West's schizoid repulsion of those characteristics in nature and in itself that it finds ugly or frightening. While not the first to recognize this split in

Western culture, Friedrich Nietzsche offered a particularly clear and lucid explication of this dichotomy in his seminal Birth of Tragedy.

Nietzsche posits a dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian that, through their dialectical influences, gave rise to Greek tragedy, and whose interplay we may extrapolate to other areas of creative endeavor. Nietzsche's thesis is that the Apollonian realm is characterized by dream, while the Dionysian realm is characterized by intoxication. Here we understand Nietzsche's use of the word "dream" to mean the phenomenal world of the individual, the world of forms that exists within each individual's mind, created by that mind, and which veils the deeper, primordial nature of the collective: the Dionysian. This

Apollonian aspect is characterized by rationality, regularity, order, knowledge, restraint; in essence, a world friendly to humankind, able to be subdued by them.

These are not the characteristics one would normally assign to the dream world;

7 but the Apollonian dream is not the phantasmagoria of the sleeper; rather, it is the recognition that the world of forms is an illusion (albeit a powerful illusion) created by the individual to tame and make sense of the dark ambiguity of the

unconscious realm . It is a mask, an overlay of fragile security. Dwelling behind the walls of this "artificial Olympus" (30), the Occidental individual fancies himself safe from the titanic forces of nature which he neither understands nor controls.

Born of ttie rational mind's need for order, the Apollonian world created by the

Western mind is logical, objective, moral, logocentric, controlled; this is the world of Western patriarchy, of Yahweh, of science, and the preeminence of the city as a concrete expression of humanity's ability to order and tame its environment.

In opposition to the Apollonian dream is the Dionysian intoxication. Here one is able to make contact with the true world which lies beyond the world of forms. The entrance into this world requires an intoxicant which frees one from the constraints of the Apollonian order; for Nietzsche, that intoxicant is the sublimity of art (specifically music) and the beauty of nature, leading to a world that is completely at odds with the rational Apollonian world . This Dionysian realm is an older world, both beautiful as well as brutal, a world of the Goddess, of intuition, of paradox, and a reverence for nature not as an idealized form but as the liminal intermediary between humans and gods. This abandonment of the

Apollonian world of forms is fraught with danger but holds out the promise of transfiguration and union with the primordial universe: to enter into "an ecstatic reality which once again takes no account of the individual and may even destroy him, or else redeem him through a mystical experience of the collective" (24 ). A

8 tremendous dread grips the individual when suddenly cut adrift from the cognitive form of appearances. This breaking of the Apollonian comfort shatters the ego of the individual and permits "fusion with the original Oneness" (56). Extrapolating from Nietzsche's main area of examination-Greek tragedy-we recognize that the pursuit of myth in all its forms, even though couched in Apollo's language, can lead us, transform us, into the Dionysian, in the same way that the sublimity of music can.

Apollo is a god of form and distinction, of light and clarity, of demarcation and clear definition; Dionysus is a god of vegetation and fecundity, those powers of nature that lie beyond human control, of liquidity-wine, certainly, but also

4 blood (especially menstrual ), sap, and milk, representing "nature's chthonic fluidity" (Paglia 30)-and ambiguity. Apollo dreams the world, but Dionysus intoxicates and gives life. Here one is able to make contact with the true world which lies beyond the world of forms, a world that is nonlinear, subjective, amoral, intuitive, excessive. The Dionysian is ecstatic, standing in sharp contrast to Apollo's sterility and lack of passion. Intoxicated by the maenads' dithyramb, the followers of Dionysus are incited into a frenzy "to tear asunder the veil of

Maya, to sink back into the original oneness of nature" (Nietzsche 27). But the dominant Apollonian ego fights heroically against these archetypal imperatives, forcing them into the realm of the subconscious.

The great innovator and proponent of archetypal psychology Carl Jung put the argument in terms of male versus female, between the principles of Logos and Eros. For Jung, "Eros is a shadowland which entangles him in his feminine

9 unconscious, in something 'psychic,' while for woman Logos is a deadly boring

kind of sophistry if she is not actually repelled and frightened by it. [ .. .] A man is

usually satisfied with 'logic' alone. Everything 'psychic,' 'unconscious,' etc., is

repugnant to him; he considers it vague, nebulous, and morbid" (Jung, Aspects

66-7). 'The man's Eros does not lead upward only but downward into that

uncanny dark world of Hecate and Kali, which is a horror to any intellectual man.

The understanding possessed by this type of woman will be a guiding star to him

in the darkness and seemingly unending mazes of life" (129). Western man is

incomplete and rudderless unless he embraces his intuitive, feminine psyche.

For Western people, then, the dichotomy between the Apollonian and the

Dionysian points out two essentials: the rationale for wholeness and the path towards achieving it. First, the individual must recognize that he is incomplete as long as Apollo is exalted and Dionysus is debased; this is not to advocate replacing the Apollonian hegemony with a Dionysian one, but rather the need for a balanced position that recognizes the value and realm of each. The Western mind does not want to accept those aspects of humanity which are frightening, ugly, and brutal, those aspects directly related to our Dionysian nature. But to disown that which is an integral part of oneself is to invite psychosis and imbalance, both for the individual and for society. One must embrace all aspects of human nature in order to achieve wholeness. The way of unification is to embrace both the good and the bad, the rational and the irrational, and recognize that there exist multiple modes of entry into both. One must also recognize that

10 both the realms and the paths that lead to them are dangerous and must not be approached and entered into lightly.

The poet in particular is in a position to connect with the Dionysian, both in the act of creating and in serving as soul guide to the reader; however, as soon as the reader begins to evaluate, to comprehend, to analyze, the Apollonian mind takes over and the connection is broken. To achieve a lasting connection, the mythopoet who is able reveal the Dionysian to us must write more than just paeans to nature; the exaltation of nature and the uncontrived is still firmly encamped in dualism. We might be lured into believing that the Romantics, with their emphasis on nature, had returned to the Dionysian, but in reality they did not embrace the totality of nature-its darkness, its brutality, its unknowableness; rather, they practiced a selective seeing, a type of wishful thinking-what nature might be. They were still immured by Western dualism, pitting the soul­ desiccating urban against the soul-reviving pastoral, the contrived and artificial versus the natural and unfabricated, rather than embracing the totality of all. lnclusivity and paradox are the hallmarks of the Dionysian; it accepts all of these apparent opposites as equally valid .

James Hillman continues Nietzsche's vein of thought more than a hundred years later in Re-Visioning Psychology, wherein he proposes a psychology of soul rather than intellect, one that rests on both a poetic and imaginative basis rather than on rationality or empiricism. His goal, he asserts, is to "reaffirm the tragic connection between the mortal and the immortal" (xi). To do this, he moves beyond Nietzsche's dialectic between the Apollonian and the Dionysian,

11 instead characterizing the modern (schizoid) state of mind as the result of a

fundamental agon between the proscriptions of Hebrewism5 and the abandon of

Hellenism. His basic assertion is that Western culture and civilization spring from

these two diametrically opposed sources: on the one hand, the monotheism and

phallologocentricism of Hebrew religion and culture as it took shape in Christian

Europe (broadly speaking) or, on the other, the plurality and imaginal nature of

Hellenic ·religion and culture. What this means for Western psychology in

particular and Western thought in general is that the dominion of intellect over

soul has led to the pathologizing of what was once the sacred and powerful: "We

can find no renewal in our ego's conscious tradition, only reinforcement for drying

habits of a monocentric mind that would hold its universe together with

guiltmaking sermons; Hellenism, however, brings the tradition of the unconscious

imagination; Greek polytheistic complexity bespeaks our complicated and

unknown psychic situation" (28).

In the wake of Hebrewism's triumph of monocentricism and rationality

(notwithstanding Hellenism's polytheism and imaginal nature and their periodic

resurgence), Western individuals have lost their ability to communicate with their

innermost, mystic being: soul. This emphasis on a single, Apollonian ego­

consciousness and a disavowal of a pantheon of gods (and thus a plurality of

personas in the psyche) have stifled our relationship with soul. Hillman argues for a new psychology which will reanimate (as in anima) mankind with soul.

Hillman is concerned that what in modern science passes for psychopathology is

in actuality nothing more than suppressed soul's attempt to communicate, though

12 we have forgotten how to listen. What modern medical methodology has labeled illness is in reality soul's plea to be returned to her rightful place within a pantheon of psychic personas. To do so, however, requires a fundamental shift in how we view and interact with the psychic world.

To understand Hillman's position, one must begin with his definition of soul, which he names psyche. This naming is important in that it reminds us (as did Jung) that soul is feminine in nature, the antithesis of the modern male­ dominated Western world. It is this psyche that makes meaning possible by taking external events and shaping them into interior experiences; soul is the imaginative possibility in our natures which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical: the experiences of reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy. Psyche is akin to Dionysus-untamed, nonlinear, nonspatial, nonrational, nonverbal; hers is the moon-realm of night, dream, fantasy, lunacy, death, the chthonic world, and the direction of soul travel is downward. 6 Psyche is not a unified, single ego consciousness, but rather a realm of polycentric personas (in the same way that the Greek pantheon is a plurality of gods, some being more dominant, all with their own specialized realms, but all active in the affairs of humankind). She speaks to us through images rather than through words, and her images make her pervasive, both inside and outside of ourselves. Psyche has been replaced, however, by the phallologocentric, Apollonian mindset of pneuma (spirit). Pneuma is bright and quick, fire and wind, an energizing force, "its direction is vertical and ascending; it is arrow-straight, knife-sharp, and phallic. It is masculine, the active principle,

13 making forms, order, and clear distinctions" (68). Spirit seeks to discipline soul, harness her desires, empty her imagination and dreams. Pneuma is none other than the monism of ego.

If, then, we are to return psyche to her proper sphere, argues Hillman, we must recognize how she functions and how she communicates. First, we must recognize the imaginal nature of her being, that these images are organized into archetypes, and that these images must not be taken for mere allegory but are in fact polysemous, psychically ontological entities. Second, we perceive that her pervasive nature reaches outside of ourselves and may be found in language, but only when language has been freed from the fetters of nominalism-the emptying of words of their psychic content by seeing them as nothing more than manmade (and therefore relativistic and contrived) signs without inherent connection or relation to the thing signified.

Soul exists for and through images, since the fantasy-images of psyche are the only ones that we can know directly and immediately, without the intermediary of language: "these images create our worlds and call them realities. [ .. .] To live psychologically means to imagine things; to be in touch with soul means to live in sensuous connection with fantasy. To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the basic reality of fantasy" (Hillman

23). It is through soul that "we are initiated into imaginal understanding, who makes possible experiencing through images, for she embodies the reflective, reactive, mirroring activity of consciousness" (43). Hillman wants us to embrace the purity and the complexity of the images that come to us in dreams, literature

14 and archetypes as they are, avoiding the inauthentic and rationalizing

interpretations of allegory; soul's imaginal communications are undermined by

such cognition. Hebrewism (as well as Protestantism) is strongly anti-imagistic.

Those Western systems whose primary modality is imaginative (and thus

esoteric-Gnosticism, alchemy, Neoplatonism) have been shunted into occultism

and heresy. Western rationalism is iconoclastic and nominalistic-it smashes

images ·and empties words of psychic meaning.7 The fiction of reality

(Nietzsche's dream) blinds us to the deeper truth of soul; literalism prevents

mysticism, impedes our approach to mystery and soul, disconnects us from our

psychic source just as Antaeus was disconnected by Hercules from the power of

Gaea.

Western mind does not function along a continuum; rather, it is bi-polar:

outer tangible reality and inner states of mind. We have lost what earlier

humanity knew-that there is a third, intermediary state. This is the world of

soul, "a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection" (68), the middle ground where psyche and pneuma can mesh. The psychic world is a dream-world:8

intermediate, ambiguous, and metaphorical; it is a liminal place where soul can enact her psychic drama in the form of myth and archetype, where the multiplicity of soul-denizens can interact with the Apollonian ego-consciousness and the outside world, and a world in which, according to Freud, there is no obstacle to the combining of contraries and contradictions: "They show a particular preference for combining contraries into a unity or for representing them as one and the same" (353). As such, it is at odds with the fixed, definitive, and literal

15 world of modern Western culture and science. From the latter's restrictive point of view, only the human being is subjective and active, with a single ego­ consciousness, and is the only being capable of embodying soul. But Hillman would assert that this monism is an imposition of Hebrewism (or the Apollonian) and forces us to disavow multipersoned soul and her imaginal realm, leading to disaffection and psychopathology. Instead, we must foster soul and reestablish contact with her by returning archetypes and imagistic power to a place of prominence, or at the very least, accessibility.

According to Jung, archetypes are a system of universal images and emotions which are inherited and part of the "chthonic portion of the psyche"

(Sharp 27). These archetypes are arranged into patterns and motifs, differing in their particulars but agreeing in general, that are shared by all humanity; they are the human genetic memory stored in the collective unconscious. These patterns and motifs come directly from the myths and rituals studied by the earlier anthropologists; examples include the Great Mother, the hero, the quest and homecoming, initiation, the shadow, and the cyclic nature of life. Strictly speaking, archetypes themselves are irrepresentable, but through metaphor they continually make their presence known, influencing culture, religion, ritual, art, and literature. Noted Jungian theorist James Hollis characterizes archetypes as an active agent, saying that "It is the archetypal imagination which, through the agencies of symbol and metaphor and in its constitutive power of imaging [ . .. ] is the means by which the individual brings pattern and process to chaos, and it is the means by which the individual participates in those energies of the cosmos of

16 which we are a part" (7). In our modern culture, though, archetypes have been

stripped of their psychic power by conceptualization and nominalization: "by

encapsulating the mystery, we lose it entirely. This is the terrible temptation of

literalist fundamentalism of all kinds. [ ...] The images that arise out of primal

experience [ ...] thus become artifacts of ego rather than intimations of eternity"

(4-5).

Hillman also wants us to understand archetypes as the means of access

to soul rather than a label by which to further categorize and nominalize

psychological processes. As we said, psyche is metalinguistic and imagistic; to

connect with psyche we cannot use words, but must instead depend on

archetypes, the primordial images-numinous, liminal, 9 ludic-through which

psyche speaks; by being rooted in the depths of soul, they have been

empowered with "the widest, richest, and deepest possible significance" (Hillman

"Inquiry" 83). They cannot be known directly or linguistically (to attempt to do so

is to contradict their very nature) but rather must be approached imagistically and

metaphorically, or better yet, mythically. Myths are the activities in which

archetypes engage, the patterns of action which give meaning (to view archetypes independent of their mythic context is fall back into dualism). Myths give to experience a multiplicity of personal and universal meanings: "Myths do

not tell us how. They simply give the invisible background which starts us imaging, questioning, going deeper. The very act of questioning is a step away from practical life, deviating from its highroad of continuity, seeing it from another perspective" (Hillman Re-Visioning 158). To live mythically is to partake of all

17 experience, to set aside our rational, logocentric way of seeing, to accept the ambiguity of all phenomena; myth is an experience in, not mere attendance at an event. If we are to know and integrate the whole self-left and right brain, psyche and pneuma, Apollo and Dionysus-then we must not only recognize the mythic patterns which permeate our lives, but also be willing to follow whither they lead.

The ambiguous and polysemous nature of archetypes is at odds with the

Western tradition of allegorical interpretation. We are afraid of the deep powers lurking within the psyche, powers which must be either tamed or covered up. In the Western paradigm, we have eviscerated the power of archetypes by allegorizing them; this allegorization is a construct (consciously fabricated) of the rational, Apollonian mind. It is a conventional understanding of psychic events, moralistic stereotypes meant to instruct on a strictly transactional basis. Allegory and its close cousin typology provide a one-to-one correspondence which is most in keeping with our Apollonian nature and comfort zone; we strive to discover what each character and symbol represents, to unlock meaning as if by rubric.

This allegorical approach consciously repulses the deeper psychic significance that lies behind the archetype, vitiating its Dionysian force. These allegories serve as little more than nominalism-they've become dry, empty words severed from any real meaning. And yet we yearn for meaning, depth, substance that only the imaginal and the archetypal can provide, and which can be found in the mythopoetic power of literature.10

18 Archetypes and Literature

How, then, do we to go about implementing archetypal theory into critical practice? We have spent quite a few pages railing against Apollonian literalism and allegorical interpretation. But the process of criticism and analysis is inherently Apollonian in nature, and by utilizing its logocentric and rationalistic tools we run the risk of demythologizing and depotentiating whatever we examine. Therefore, our first concern is to avoid the dry scholastic approach of simply identifying mythic correspondence; this technique, certainly, can help us to recognize the host of multivalent interconnections and associations that mythic forms suggest, but we must not lose sight of the main goal: to reconnect humanity with soul through the mythopoetic power of literature. Secondly, we must recognize the inherent limitations of language, especially written language.

To speak of soul we require a conventional means of signifying, but that is at odds with the Dionysian nature of soul. When we write, we by necessity reduce images to conventional signs, and the numinous power that lies behind the images can be lost in the translation. We cannot use language that is literal and univocal; the mythic power lies outside of the text-behind it, beyond it. We must be cautious then in approaching any text literally and linguistically: "A text is a place where the irreducible polysemy of symbols is in fact reduced because in a text symbols are anchored to their context" (Eco 21 ). The successful archetypal approach to literary criticism is then to approach the text imagistically, to illuminate connections to archetypal patterns and mythic actions, suggesting the multiplicity of meaning and possibility, without insisting on any definitive reading;

19 not to impose meaning but rather to discover meaning in all its ambiguous and polysemous outpouring.

Hillman's new re-visioning of psychology presents a tool for connecting with the affective qualities of literature, especially poetry-for after all , is not the main appeal of poetry to our emotions? It is evocative, imageful, trying to express in language the inexpressible, to reach beyond the rational, Apollonian wall which blocks entrance to psyche. Indeed, this very paper and its analytical argument is exactly that, just more logocentric constructs; but perhaps by recognizing what is beyond Apollo's border and by developing a means of gaining access, Hillman allows a new way of responding to poetry. Certainly, though , we recognize that a single key is not capable of opening all locks, and this applies to literary criticism as well ; an archetypal approach must be warranted by the text itself, not forced upon it by the well meaning critic. That is at the very heart of the approach: to avoid the Apollonian imposition of meaning.

The text suggests its own meaning and the key to unlocking it.

In applying the mythic approach to literature, we must always keep in mind the maxim: "A fictional text has an ontology of its own that must be respected"

(Eco "Small Worlds" 60). Instead of viewing a literary text as a kind of allegory, where the critic matches up characters and narrative events via some sort of critical formula, we need to approach the text in a much less dogmatic fashion, recognizing that the fictional world has a reality all its own. Tolkien reminds of this in his essay "On Fairy-Stories" when he speaks of secondary belief: while the reader is immersed in a well-crafted fictional world , one becomes a part of that

20 world, accepting its reality for one's own reality, truly experiencing a character's joys and sorrows, achievements and downfalls as if they were a part of the reader's own world (37-38). Instead of viewing the fictional world as an either/or dualism of reality (truth) and fiction (falsity), one is free to see it as a point along a single continuum between actual and possible realities. This possible worlds perspective frees the critic from the forced readings of any one particular critical school; in particular, it allows the practice of myth criticism to return to its original purpose of exposing the underlying patterns of a text (those fundamental elements which form the base of all human poesis), thereby expanding meaning rather than narrowing interpretation. One must enter wholly into the text and allow it to be whatever it is, uncovering a component of meaning without imposing meaning upon it. Our approach then is one of exploration rather than exegesis, intuition rather than cognition.

21 Chapter Two: Applications

The Judea-Christian archetype of the Fall has long been firmly established in the Western mythic tradition. Along with this image of humanity's fall from grace through disobedience comes the concomitant image of woman as temptres·s and pliable tool of Satan. The mythic implication is that humanity has been cursed for reaching beyond its appointed grasp and cannot redeem itself through its own effort. Later Christian apologists attempted to transform the into the felix culpa or fortunate fall, the act which allows God to demonstrate His mercy by sending a redeemer, but this precludes humanity's participation in its own destiny in any other way than passive acceptance. 11 Macleish knew that this would be the image in readers' minds in their initial approach to his poem cycle Songs for Eve and utilized it as his departure point. However, instead of reworking an already well-worked theme, he has inverted the implication of both the Fall and woman's role in that Fall. Songs for Eve presents the Fall and the role of woman in a Dionysian light: it is not the cause of original sin and all mankind's woes; rather, it is his initiation into the world of soul. Reverting to the far older archetypes of spiritual rebirth and the Great Goddess that arose alongside the antecedents of the Old Testament, Macleish invests a no longer viable archetype with new vitality and meaning; the Fall becomes, in his hands, a spiritual awakening, and Eve is the shaman who initiates humanity into spiritual knowledge. Macleish takes a bare-bones biblical account (yet one whose roots

22 run deeply throughout Mesopotamian and Semitic mythology) and gives it substance so that the reader is able to enter into the world of Eden and allow it, for a space of time, to become the reader's reality. In so doing, readers reinterprets their own world in light of this new perspective on Eden, rather than allowing their world to dictate an interpretation of the text.

Macleish's genius for mythopoesis shines brightly in each of these multifaceted gems which comprise his poem cycle. On first reading, one is most struck by the sound quality and the strongly rhythmic, stubby lines of Songs for

Eve, and the careless reader is likely to dismiss them as light verse, possibly even childish verse. And just as the nursery rhyme cadences of Macleish's poems beg a dismissive reading, so the all too familiar fable of the Fall begs a simplistic allegorical interpretation. On their surface, the 28 poems which comprise Macleish's 1954 poem cycle present the narrative events of, and commentary on , the biblical Fall-hardly new ground , to be sure. But through inversion of the traditional Fall imagery and interpretation, and through reversion to far older archetypes, Songs for Eve presents us with an opportunity to experience the archetype of the Fall from a mythic vantage point outside the traditional Judea-Christian mythos, and in so doing revitalizes it for the modern reader. In keeping with the archetypal principles laid down in chapter one, we shall closely examine several of the Eden images to be found in Macleish's poems, noting their traditional interpretation and the poet's Dionysian inversion of that traditional interpretation.

23 Critical Background

For such a prolific poet, dramatist, and public figure as Macleish, critical recognition is surprisingly limited. Only two works have been written which are devoted entirely to Macleish; much of the critical attention in these works is focused on his plays (notably J.B.) and his epic chef d'oeuvre, Conquistador. To date, little critical attention has been paid to Macleish's 1954 poem cycle; this deficiency is possibly due, in part, to the surface simplicity of the constituent poems, a careful critical exegesis of which has not been published . Signi Falk, in her balanced and clear examination of Macleish's life and work, devotes a little more than three pages to Songs for Eve. There she presents a straightforward, rather allegorical explication: Eve represents the questioning spirit who roused mankind from its animal-like somnolence; the serpent is the cynic who plays on man's guilt and reflects the orthodoxy of institutionalized Christianity; and the Fall represents not loss of grace but liberation into knowledge of self and infinity. The cycle of Eden poems as a whole, she insists, "defines what life and man might be and suggests the forces which hold him back" (132-33). She makes no attempt to probe deeper for any archetypal elements or anagogic interpretation, but rather is willing to settle for the one-to-one correspondence typology. Likewise,

Grover Smith presents a clear and articulate, though unimaginative, exposition of

Songs for Eve in his 48-page monograph on Macleish's major works. He adds nothing new to Falk's more thorough examination of the poem cycle, although he proposes that Macleish's theme is that of humanity's ordering function (39-40).

24 Only one critic, Sickels, has commented explicitly on the archetypal elements of Songs for Eve. In her article "Macleish and the Fortunate Fall,"

Sickels recognizes and comments on Macleish's overt use of biblical themes; however, she is mainly interested in Macleish's reworking of the Job myth in his

1958 play J.B. While she does make the connection to the archetypal significance of Eve and the tree imagery in Songs for Eve, she does so only cursorily·, equating the green tree with the World Navel (omphalos) as identified by Eliade and other religious historians, and the dry tree with both human accomplishment and also the Christian emphasis on suffering and redemption.

In 1982, Macleish was the subject of a symposium held by Greenfield

Community College; of the 21 papers presented in the proceedings from the symposium, only one dealt explicitly with Songs for Eve: Alice Parker discussed her setting of the poems to music, and in so doing, recognizes Macleish's constant pairing of opposites, but makes no attempt at exegesis (57-60). Only one other paper made glancing mention of the poem cycle: Helen Ellis examines

Macleish's complete oeuvre for his depiction of the nature of woman. In her brief remarks about Songs for Eve, she sees Eve as the all-inclusive and intuitive mother who can reconcile and accept both mortality and immortality, but does not pursue the motif (89-91 ).

25 Songs for Eve

We begin our exploration of the poem cycle with the title. Recall to mind

Nietzsche's specific premise that the Dionysian intoxication of music can transcend and penetrate beyond Apollonian language-the maenads' ecstatic dithyrambs were transportive, inductive. In our discussion of Songs For Eve, this focus on music begins our investigation into the mythic connection between these poems and the Dionysian. Though the poems are not set to music,

Macleish has titled his cycle of poems as songs, songs not only for Eve, but also many by Eve herself. If one truly cannot connect to the Dionysian realm through the artifice of language, then one must resort to those deeper patterns that are intuitive to humans: "The cosmic symbolism of music resists any adequate treatment by language, for the simple reason that music, in referring to primordial contradiction and pain, symbolizes a sphere which is both earlier than appearance and beyond it" (46). 12

We must look beneath the words (very apropos, since the world of soul lies in the underworld), and the title, Songs for Eve, points the path we must tread in order to reach the world beyond forms and cognition. "The listener can be drawn through that incredible power of music to speak from heart to heart into that original, non-verbal sense, experience, idea, image, which gave rise to the poem in the first place" (Parker 60). In this sense, the poems that comprise

Songs for Eve are able to pierce the bulwarks of Apollonian rationalism and nominalism; in particular, the four riddles (poems 14-17) spoken by Adam, the serpent, Eve, and the babe exhibit an enigmatic, koan-like quality used by Zen

26 practitioners to move beyond the ego-fa~ade to reach the intuitive, natural self that is a part of the fundamental, unfabricated universe which is whole and without constituent parts. Thus, to approach soul, we must let go of the rational and embrace the intuitive, and the analogy with music provides a major path to that end. This is the first of Macleish's inversions, since the traditional approach to exegesis (biblical as well as literary) has been through the language of rhetoric and logic.

In the Judea-Christian myth of the Fall as set forth in Genesis and in its traditional western interpretation, Eve's act of disobedience divides the world into a series of dualities: male and female; human and God ; flesh and spirit; good and evil; knowledge and ignorance; innocence and (sexual) experience. These oppositions are the Western paradigm, the Occidental way of viewing the cosmos and mankind's position therein. Sin is a dualistic concept: there cannot be salvation without sin , and there cannot be sin without rules to break. There cannot be a God without a devil-superego vs. id , a psychodrama played upon a universal stage. This interpretation emphasizes both humanity's pride (a desire to be god-like) and its disobedience, both Apollonian traits. The Hebrew interpretation (as opposed to the Hellenic) does not allow for imagination; rather, it is didactic, punitive, taking the perspective of not what can be, but what must not be. The Fall denotes a downward movement, a descent. In the traditional interpretation, it is a movement from heaven to earth, from bliss to woe; from this fall, humanity must recapture its former state of holiness-an act that can only be accomplished through divine intervention, not human action. But in older

27 traditions, a descent into the underworld was required to achieve rebirth or

spiritual wisdom, and while arduous and fraught with peril, it would result in bliss

and renewal (Henderson 20-24 ). The Semitic/patriarchal tradition has been pre­

interpreted the meaning of the Fall for us, allowing no room for soul to enter into

the story and invest it with a deeper meaning.

Within this context of opposition and duality, the idyllic world of Eden has

been corrupted by Eve's act of disobedience, so that "nature as we know it is

corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a

corrupter" (Campbell Power of Myth 4 7). For the high tragedy of mankind's lost

innocence, Eve bears the burden of guilt. Adam and Eve before the Fall were

nothing more than babes, innocent of their own nature, of God's nature, of the

world's nature; Eden was an idyllic place without lack or threat, a place where there was a direct and physical connection between the human and the divine

(Eiiade's in il/o tempore, the sacred, primordial time when humans and gods

mixed freely). Into this paradise came the serpent, (dualistic) embodiment of evil.

Through Eve's act of disobedience, all is lost-all grace, all divinity-in a single

stroke: humanity is plunged headlong into a perpetual state of sin and corruption from which it can be redeemed only by a power greater than itself. Because of the Fall, humankind can no longer live in peace with itself (neither with the flesh

nor the soul), with nature, or with God. Life and the activities of life are identified with sin, and the refusal to accept the divinity of the procreative act is nothing less than a refusal to accept life in all its aspects and contradictions; it is a repudiation of nature and humanity's true place within nature. The traditional

28 myth of the Fall is Apollonian, masculine, sinful, mortifying, dualistic. The usual

interpretation of the significance of the Fall, especially in the study of archetypes, is that it represents an initiation into knowledge-a sorrowful knowledge that humankind has been irrevocably severed from the divine; that the cosmos is divided into dualistic pairs and that the individual must align oneself with one side or the other. The Fall, then, is traditionally the initiation from innocence into experience, but also the division of holistic reality into a straining dialectic.

Humanity's lost state of grace can only be recaptured through trial and repentance, and only through acceptance of divine intervention (thus emphasizing humanity's powerlessness) can there be a restoration of its prelapsarian state (Burrows 454 ).

From the beginning, Macleish's poems invert this traditional paradigm.

Whereas the Judea-Christian myth emphasizes mankind's sinful nature and his disconnection from nature and the divine, Macleish's re-vision emphasizes the mystical initiatory qualities of Eve's actions and humanity's connection to both

God and nature. For Macleish, humanity is not inherently evil, but inherently divine; humans are not dualistic beings, but whole and completed beings. The

Dionysian concept seeks rather to incorporate all aspects, good and evil, into a whole. To do this, one must recognize and communicate with the shadow, that aspect of the psyche which the Apollonian ego would disavow. Macleish's awakened (postlapsarian) individual is able to recognize both man the animal and man the god, and reconcile the two:

29 You came by the soul As you came by the skin Where the raging strikes in And the wrestlers must roll. [ ...... ] The flight that was flown From the place in the sky­ The flesh and the bone Made those wings that could fly. (18:17-32)13

Soul enters into the flesh not through some divine and ephemeral breath but

through · the physical exertion of the procreative act; nor can soul soar without

mortal wings-to be whole requires both body and soul. Macleish's Fall is

Dionysian, feminine, soulful, ecstatic, non-dualistic. The Fall is not the beginning

of sin; the Fall is the beginning of soul.

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche touches on the archetype of the Fall,

and it is useful to digress briefly here and examine his comments. Nietzsche

illuminates the dichotomy between earlier and later religious thought in Europe

by examining by two versions of the Fall, the story of Prometheus and the story of Adam and Eve. They illustrate two different world views and two different ways of interpreting the Fall archetype: the hubris and courage of a noble soul or the temerity and iniquity of vain humanity, and whether humanity is transmuted and exalted by the consequent suffering for its crime or crushed and buried beneath an inexorable weight of guilt. It is worthwhile to quote Nietzsche's argument at length:

Man's highest good must be bought with a crime and paid for by the flood of grief and suffering which the offended divinities visit upon the human race in its noble ambition. An austere notion, this, which by the dignity it confers on crime presents a strange contrast to the Semitic myth of the Fall-myth that exhibits curiosity, deception, suggestibility, concupiscence, in short a whole series

30 of principally feminine frailties, as the root of all evil. What distinguishes the Aryan conception is an exalted notion of active sin as the properly Promethean virtue; [ ...] The Aryan nation assign to crime the male, the Semites to sin the female gender; and it is quite consistent with these notions that the original act of hubris should be attributed to a man, original sin to a woman. (64)

Since early Christian times, Western civilization has accepted fully the

Semitic/patriarchal interpretation of the Fall, with its attendant requirement of

expiation through suffering; in this view, Yahweh is glorified and humanity is

debased. However, Yahweh is conspicuously absent from the Songs for Eve-a

romantic if not humanistic view, where humankind is the measure and God cannot be found; God goes from being an objective fact to the mere imaginings of humans. Macleish's Eve returns to the Nietzschean notion that there is no sin in hubris, only in the unwillingness to accept the consequences:

The profound poet tells us that a man who is truly noble is incapable of sin; though every law, every natural order, indeed the entire canon of ethics, perish by his actions, those very actions will create a circle of higher consequences able to found a new world on the ruins of the old. (60)

Eve echoes this exact sentiment when she says

Get down, said Eve Upon your shins, Upon your shanks, And pray reprieve, And give God thanks For Eden Sins.

The Fall! she said­ From earth to God! Give thanks, said she, for branch, for bole, For Eve who found the grace to fall From Adam, browsing animal, Into the soaring of the soul! (8:6-18)

The Fall here is not the traditional fall into degradation and sin, but rather the act

31 which ensouls humanity, allowing us to soar; Eve falls upward, into the divine, becoming god-like.14 In this image, we have the inversion of falling for soaring, and in the next poem she again uses the imagery of upward motion in connection to soul: "To separate myself from time I I gave the stars my soul to climb" (9:3-4).

But at the same time, Eve firmly embraces her humanity:

Who said you were bred Not of flesh and of bone But of somebody flown From a place in the sky Had no thew and no thigh And no pelt and no poll? Who told you that lie About body and soul? (18:1-8)

There is no duality here, no separation of body and soul, mortal and divine; all are one, undeniably and inextricably bound together.

At the very onset, the title informs the reader that these will be poems for

Eve, that we are to expect not the traditional phallocentric view of the Genesis story but rather a new take, a feminine take, on the old story. And that is exactly what we get from Macleish: Eve is neither the foolish ingenue who blatantly disobeyed God nor the wicked seductress who took advantage of Adam's faith ; nor is she an unwitting instrument to be used by others, gods or devils. Eve is a powerful and self-confident force in Eden and in human destiny:

Space and time I disobeyed: It was so that he was made, Little man so fast afraid. [ ...... ] Only when I disobeyed Was the bliss of Eden stayed­ Bliss of sleep in that thick shade. How else can heavenly thunder shake The heart but if the heart awake? (23: 3-20)

32 Eve, then, becomes a guide who can reconnect the reader, through the polysemous and numinous imagery and the enigmatic quality of the poems, with the Dionysian understanding of the Fall. Adam is depicted as nothing more than an animal moved by instinct ("Eve in the Dawn"), or as a child frightened by his lack of understanding of soul ("Adam's Jealousy: Eve's Answer''). In this capacity as prime mover in Eden, Eve reverts to her original status as the Great Mother, worshipped throughout the ancient world before she was supplanted by the phallologocentric god of the Israelites (Campbell Power of Myth 171-2).15 In "Eve

Quiets Her Children," it is Eve to whom man addresses his eternal questions, and it is Eve who, in reply, exhorts man to wake from the sleep of animals. Eve is not the cause of sin, but rather the cause of soul (as Hillman defines it) and divinity. Eve's actions are not disobedient; they are, rather, defiant and courageous. Eliade notes in his discussion of tantrism that the position of the

Great Goddess, and women by extension, are energized with mystical (and thus mythical) power, and Macleish makes use of this energy in his inversion of Eve's role in the Fall:

recognition of all that is remote, 'transcendent,' invulnerable in woman; and thus woman comes to symbolize the irreducibility of the sacred and the divine, the inapprehensible essence of the ultimate reality. Woman incarnates both the mystery of creation and the mystery of Being, of everything that is, that incompre­ hensibly becomes and dies and is reborn. (Eiiade 361)

Eve is none other than the archetypal Great Mother, the life-giving and life­ sustaining Goddess of fertility and birth. 16 The Great Mother as an archetype is often associated with places of fertility, such as gardens, and with qualities which

33 include maternal solicitude and sympathy (a character trait at odds with the punitive Yahweh of Genesis); "the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility. The place of magic transformation and rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants, are presided over by the mother'' (Jung Four Archetypes 16).

This is not, however, the typical Western understanding of the place of woman in the divine scheme. In the Genesis story, it is man who was infused with the breath of God, and woman is made from man; she is once removed from the divine. The tradition that Eve was less intelligent and weaker than Adam is well established in both Hebrew commentaries as well as early Christian thought.

"The natural inferiority of women is, however, stressed all through the Middle

Ages, in Latin and in vernacular writings" (Murdoch 39-40). Woman also represents nature, and as such must be subjugated and controlled by man. But of much greater (and detrimental) impact was the long-standing tradition of woman as temptress. That Eve was the flesh and Adam was the intellect was a perception firmly established in Medieval thought (Murdoch 60), even up till the time of Milton's Paradise Lost. The Malleus Maleficarum (1496), a text for witch finders, completely demonized women, attributing to them an insatiable sexual lust that was the source of their sinfulness: "It is true that in the Old Testament the Scriptures have much that is evil to say about women, and this because of the first temptress, Eve, and her imitators" (Kramer 243-44 ).

34 "The idea of Eve that Milton's age inherited resulted from a dualistic habit of mind [ .. . ]: the supposition that nature and spirit, body and soul, passion and reason, and art and truth are inherently antithetical and that woman, the primordial temptress, represents the dark and dangerous (or rebellious and thrilling) side of each antithesis" (McColley 3). Pre-Miltonian Eve as "the mother of mankind in art and verse is weak, vain, useless, mindless, trifling, grasping, vacillating , wanton, obstinate, presumptuous, and (nonetheless) fatally seductive.

At her most appealing, she embodies passion subjugating reason; at her worst she is the apt and willing instrument of evil. So great is the weight of misogynous tradition, in fact, that few readers of Paradise Lost have made bold to say with

Adam that God has done his part." Milton's predecessors offered two prevailing attitudes toward Eve's role in the Fall of Man. One was to blame the world's woes on Woman and regard her as a malum necessarium shaped for procreation and otherwise a briefly honeyed snare: an explanation that casts grave doubt on the providence of her Maker. The other was to agree that Eve was a "fair defect of nature" but to vindicate God by averring that the Fall was fortunate: sin entered the world through Eve that God might more perfectly manifest his glory through the process of redemption (McColley 1-2). In the latter argument, Eve is simply a tool to be used by God for His own aggrandizement.

Milton, in his great epic, is bent on the Puritan and Augustinian argument which asserts the necessity of obedience in all spheres of life. To this end , he makes an example of Eve's disobedience and its consequences. But Milton's great work is still firmly entrenched in the Western dualistic tradition . In Book IX

35 of Paradise Lost (722-1189), Milton presents an argument of Western logic and

logocentricism; we note the rhetorical (Apollonian) logic of both the serpent's and

Eve's argument, as well as Milton's assertion in Book I to justify the ways of God to man. But poor old Adam is moved by love and not Eve's rationalizing; he would rather sin and die with her than live without her (IX, 1017-1033). Both the serpent's argument and Eve's rationalization (the temptation to knowledge) are

Apollonian. Note also the quality of the knowledge gained: in Milton, that knowledge is Apollonian head knowledge; any sexual knowledge is sterile and imparts no mystical connection, either to another human or to the divine. The natural and thus Dionysian (pre-Fall) state is one of honor, innocence, faith , purity, and non-duality (IX, 1160-61 ), all of which are lost in the gaining of

Apollonian knowledge. Woman is shown as lustful: "greedily she ingorg'd without restraint" the forbidden fruit (IX, 791) and her "Female charm" is an overpowering temptation to Adam's "better knowledge" (IX, 998-99). Woman is shown as weak and easily deceived: "[the serpent's] words replete with guile I Into her heart too easie entrance won" (IX, 733-34 ). But Macleish offers another possibility: a powerful Eve, self-possessed, self-aware, initiative, active.

In actuality, Macleish's inversion of Eve's character is only one aspect of a more pervasive theme: the Apollonian world of the Old Testament versus the

Dionysian world of a far older (and paradoxically, far newer) pagan Near East and Europe. In the traditional Genesis story, Eden is an ordered world . The masculine God creates all things, and masculine Adam gives them reality through the use of (Apollonian) language (naming the animals). Adam and Eve

36 are purposeful caretakers of the garden who look to its order. There is a tree of

(dualistic) knowledge of good and evil. Rules and boundaries are established

("the lion's law" in "Eve to the Storm" 8), dominion is bestowed; there is safety and familiarity:

Stars that circle in their sleep Silver solemn statutes keep. [ ...... ] Suns and moons and nails and claws Sleep out time's revolving laws. (21: 10-14)

Into this ordered world comes the incarnation of evil, the antithesis of God .

There is disobedience, and so there must be punishment. If Eve represents psyche, as Hillman suggests (21 ), then psyche must be disciplined for transgressing the Apollonian order. Thus man is expelled from idyllic Eden to suffer the consequences of sin.

Songs for Eve, however, presents a Dionysian version of the Fall. There is that which transcends the Apollonian reality of space-time (with its fixed rules laid out by modern physics), 17 that which recognizes the subjectivity of all things.

In the first poem, "What Eve Sang," we have the announcement that there is more than just space-time (the delineated, confined dimensional universe)- there is an overarching pattern or rhythm to the universe which transcends and which can provide wholeness and totality if one is willing to reach for it, if one is willing to go beyond the orderly limits of the Apollonian cosmos:

Space-time Is all there is of space and time But is not all. [ ...... ] I heard beyond that tree a tree Stir in silence over me.

37 [ ...... ] But oh! I heard the whole of time And all of space giving ringing rhyme And ring and ring and chime and chime When I reached out to touch and climb In spite of space, in spite of time. (1: 1-17)

Before the Fall, we only perceived what eyes or ears can perceive in space and

time (the greenwood tree), but there is a vaster transcendent tree (cf. Steven's

palm in ".Of Mere Being") that can only be known through the fruit "past touch,

past sight" (8: 6). Through Eve's act of daring,

We were awake then who had slept Our bodies out of Eden leapt Together to a lifted place Past space of time and time of space That neither space nor time had made. (11: 11-15)

But to gain access to this awakened state, one requires initiation and a

willingness to submit to the ecstatic throes of the soul; anything less is to refuse

the inspiration of the divine.

Initiation always follows a familiar pattern: the individual must first be separated from the group, the mysteries revealed, and then one is reintegrated into society; such a pattern "transfers the neophyte from the profane to the sacred world and places him in direct and permanent communication with the latter" (Van Gennep 89). Eve certainly passes through these same stages: she is warned that to eat of the fruit will bring death (Gen. 3:3); the initiator (the serpent) leads her to her doom; she willingly accepts her fate and eats the forbidden fruit; she awakens to the mystical world; and finally, she returns to

Adam (humanity) with her new knowledge. In the Dionysian tradition, one must be similarly initiated into the mysteries of the god of ecstatic transcendence;

38 without proper initiation, one falls prey to mysterious and incomprehensible

powers. Adam bewails such a fate in "Adam's Jealousy: Eve's Answer":

Cover that infant's mouth and eyes, Said Adam, softly where it lies: The soul that lurks, the soul that flies, Will enter where it clucks and cries. [ ...... ] The invisible souls, now Eden's lost, Hunt, he said, the chosen host To house them, body sick with ghost I fear the souls, said Adam, most. (13: 1-12)

In Macleish's inversion of the Fall myth, it is the serpent who initiates Eve ("The

Serpent's Cradle Song") by introducing her to soul knowledge, so that her act of disobedience is transformed into a liminal action. The traditional view of the serpent was that it was an incarnation of temptation and deceit: Eve says that

"the serpent beguiled me" (Gen. 3:13), and for its part in the Fall, the serpent is cursed above all animals by God. In the story of the Fall, Genesis presents us with two truths: God's truth (obedience, rationalism, Apollonianism) versus the serpent's truth (nature, mystical knowledge, Dionysianism). 18 From the earliest times up through the Middle Ages and beyond, the dominant understanding of the serpent in the Genesis story is that the devil was speaking through it, making it a passive instrument of evil (Murdoch 18).

However, in his re-visioning of the Fall, Macleish has returned to a far older mythic understanding of the serpent. Prior to the Israelite masculinization of the Garden story, the serpent represented the mystical power of transformation and resurrection (the snake sheds its skin, thus transforming and renewing itself). The snake was widely and popularly worshipped in Old Europe,

39 if we are to believe the archeological import of all the snake artifacts found in conjunction with prehistoric goddess figurines (Gimbutas 152). The snake is often depicted as entwining the caduceus of Hermes, that god of equivocation and mystical transformation, hidden knowledge, and spirit-guide; two snakes entwining (in possible copulation) on the caduceus, "is a reference to the divine, world-renovating connubium of the monster serpent with the naked goddess in her serpent form" (Primitive Myth 416). Analogously, when the serpent entwines the sacred tree, that axis mundi which represents the pivotal point where sacred and profane meet, it represents the confluence of heaven and earth, time and eternity (Campbell, Occidental Mythology 9-12). Dionysus himself was said to be crowned with serpents (Euripides 9). Both Egyptian and Indian cultures revered it; the Great Goddess throughout Canaan was associated with it, often represented as holding it aloft. In ancient Greek and Roman civilization, snakes guarded the household and multiplied wealth-Zeus Ktesios and penates familiaris, respectively (Gimbutas 163). In Rabbinic tradition, the serpent of

Genesis originally walked upright, was highly intelligent, and of great beauty

(Murdoch 18-9), and is actually described in Genesis not as Satan but only as

"the most subtle creature" in the Garden (Gen 3:1 ). If one thinks about it, "[The serpent] is the primary god, actually, in the Garden of Eden. Yahweh, the one who walks there in the cool of the evening, is just a visitor" (Campbell, Power of

Myth 4 7). Ultimately, the archetype of the serpent represents the chthonic world of hidden knowledge, and the natural world of twisted creepers and tangled vines

"probing dumb fingers of fetid organic life which Wordsworth taught us to call

40 pretty" (Paglia 11 ). The serpent approached Eve not because she was the weaker vessel or inherently evil, but because she was receptive to the ancient wisdom that flows from the springs of an earlier world.

Thus, the malevolent serpent of Genesis has been replaced by the serpent of wisdom and transformation, and through its shaman-like guidance Eve awakens to all that lies beyond the dualistic limits of space and time. In the same way, the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the traditional Judea-Christian myth is transformed into Macleish's mystical symbol of (luminescent) transcendence which connects heaven and earth: 'The branching tree stood dark alight" (1: 6). Long before the Israelites had written down their creation story, the tree as symbol of union between earth and heaven and as a symbol of fertility had been firmly established (Wallace 114). Macleish reverts to this older symbolism-it is not the tree of forbidden fruit, but the tree of life, from which the universe itself grows.

The Garden of Eden is another archetype which must be considered in

Macleish's reworking of the Fall. The biblical garden shares many common elements with descriptions of divine dwellings in earlier Mesopotamian,

Canaanite, and other religions coming our of the near east (Wallace 83). As described in Genesis, it was a perfect place without fear, toil, or bloodshed, set apart from the rest of the world created by God, from which humanity has been forever banned. This is again an example of dualistic Western thought: the sacred world has been lost irrevocably through Eve's act of disobedience; it is an either/or proposition. But viewed from an archetypal vantage, the Garden is a

41 liminal place that stands between the sacred and the profane and allows movement in both directions: "a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to both" (Hillman 68). As such, we fully expect to find there Eve in her role as the Goddess; its vegetative fecundity is in perfect accord with the fertility of the Great Mother. Dionysian rites usually took place in the wild places arid the woods; ancient cultures of many places and temperaments recognized the liminal power of the forest (e.g., Celtic tree worship, the classical story of the garden of the Hesperides complete with tree and apples, etc.). On the other hand, Yahweh is an outsider, a patriarchal usurper who seems out of place. After the Fall, there is no chance of return except through His intercession; the intermediary place where Psyche and Pneuma, Eros and Logos can communicate freely is placed irrevocably out of reach. Those who somehow do find their way back are branded impractical dreamers at best, insane at worst.

Through her initiation, Eve makes both a spatial and a temporal journey

(from green tree to dry tree in "What Eve Said"), but also a vertical soul journey

"From earth to God!" (8: 14). Eve has not fallen from grace; Eve soars toward the heavens, as we read in "Eve's Now-1-Lay-Me":

To separate myself from space I gave the water pool my face: To separate myself from time I gave the stars my soul to climb. (9: 1-4)

The pool reflects the true self and is a symbol of self-awareness, and the stars are the path to ecstasy, to soul; Eve has made the connection to the rhyme that is beyond all of space and all of time. But in becoming self-aware, Eve (and

42 humanity) falls prey to the dualism of I and you, human and animal, mortal and

divine, and is alienated from nature:

Fish and hawk have eyes of glass Wherein the skies and waters pass As in a glass the images-

They mirror but they may not see. When I had tasted fruit of tree Fish and hawk, they fled from me:

"She has a watcher in her eyes," The hawk screamed from the steep of skies, Fish from sea-deep where he lies.

Our exile is our eyes that see. (5:10-19)

This awakening into self can begin the path toward Apollonian dualism; certainly, the original oneness of prelapsarian humanity with nature is perceived as lost.

However, it is a question of perception only, and through proper initiation, one can achieve the paradoxical inclusion of both views: "Eve and thrush shall cease-and be" (27: 38).

In the sacred and liminal dream-time of the Garden, Eve gives herself over to the ecstasy of revelation as any good Dionysian should, and in so doing, inverts the traditional Judea-Christian theme of sin to one of mystical revelation:

We were awake then who had slept. Our bodies out of Eden leapt

Together to a lifted place Past space of time and time of space That neither space nor time had made. (11 :11-15)

Nor is the Dionysian content with the constraints of order and hierarchy laid upon him by the Apollonian god:

43 Waking is forbidden To all in space and time­ Star and stone, bird and beast

Wakers see what sleep has hidden. Wakers will no longer rest In space and time as they were bidden. (4: 1-6)

And also in "The Serpent's Cradle Song":

Said the king to the cock: When the day comes to bloom Be quiet for once! I must sleep in the tomb. Said the king to the huntsman: Quiet your horn! Let the day begin dumb: There is sleep to be born. But the pip of the apple Was quick in the blood: Eve's children can sleep But not well-not for good. (22: 16-27)

What is it, then, that Eve has gained through her ecstatic initiation? Knowledge, certainly-knowledge that does not come from the Apollonian God but from the

Dionysian transcendence of space and time, and which was acquired through initiation. Dualities have been reconciled: body and soul, god and man are inextricably bound: "Flesh and bone have wonder done I And wonder, bone and flesh are One" (13: 15-16). Eve does not have to choose between the day and the night, the Apollonian and the Dionysian; she knows that she is inextricably a part of both and in so doing knows all of her true self:

What did I eat when I ate apple? What did I eat in the sweet Day, in the leaves' dapple? Eve.

44 What did I know when I knew apple? What did I know in the new Night, in the stars' stipple? Eve.

In other words, she has gained nothing less than access to the soul, complete with all its imaginings and paradoxes. Hillman asserts that soul is feminine and circuitous; that soul is intimately connected to the transformation of events into experience, has a unique relationship with death, and expresses the power of imagination (xvi). If we examine Songs for Eve with Hillman's concept of soul in mind, we find that, indeed, Eve is a truly mythic figure who personifies soul. Eve finds soul-meaning in the experience of life's journey, that journey from green tree (symbol of vitality and growth) to dry tree (symbol of mystical knowledge and threshold to the realm of soul):

From tree to tree Will journey be; [ ...... ] And what's between, Eve said, Our lives mean. (2: 2-9)

Her journey has been both temporal and spatial, from innocence to experience, but also transcendent because the end of the journey is "World without end" (2:

18). However, Eve's journey is not so much about reaching an end destination as it is a process of becoming and self-knowing.

In addition, Eve's act of defiance gives humanity a unique awareness of death and the passing of time:

The sun at last will stand and stare And blaze and burn its planets out, And all God's works of skill and care Will strew the starry sky about (26: 1-4)

45 And :

The taste of time is sweet at first, Then salt as tears, then tame as water: Time to the old tastes bitter, bitter. (24: 1-3)

This awareness of time and death has intimations of immortality ("What the Wind said to the Water") when the water (that deep reservoir of the soul, according to

Freudian and Jungian thought) whispers to the wind (the Apollonian Pneuma):

"Tell me, what is man I That immortal order can?" ( 15 ). The playful nature of soul is revealed here: does she mean the ability to put the cosmos in order, to understand the immortal order, or to order the immortal about? The imaginative and playful quality of soul, as well as its ineffable nature, is further expressed in the four riddles poems (14-18): Adam demands to know "What's born of three?"'

(14: 9); the serpent wants to know what is it (and why) that "couples astraddle I

But thinks it is moth I That on heavenly wing I Can fly and can fling" (15: 5-8);

Eve asks what is it that "Eve must take apple I Before it can be" (16: 7-8); and the babe asks "What knows its own father?" (17: 9). The answer to each is indeed soul (indeed, the serpent's riddle even uses the word "moth," an alternative translation of the Greek psyche), but one can only come to that answer through

Dionysian intuition and associative reasoning-Apollonian logic is of no use in solving the mystery of soul. Eve as shaman has reintegrated Psyche and

Pneuma: "Flesh and bone have wonder done I And wonder, bone and flesh are

One" (13: 15-6) and returned soul to her rightful place in the pantheon of human being.

46 Conclusion

Songs for Eve revitalizes the traditional myth of the Fall by reverting to an older archetype that may well outlast that of the Judea-Christian myth. The Fall, the Goddess, the garden, the serpent, and the tree are powerful markers which point towards our quest's goal-inclusive wholeness and the recognition of

Psyche's labyrinthine and pervasive power. By following the return of soul to the

Genesis story, in the person of a powerful and self-confident Eve, in the image of the rehabilitated serpent, and by reclaiming the most ancient of archetypes, the reader discovers new relevance in the journey of life. No longer is Eve the traditional Western figure of scorn and contempt, the cause of all man's woes; she is, instead, the bearer of knowledge, of humanity, of soul. It is right and fitting that we sing her song.

Macleish has creatively and skillfully produced a small jewel of mythic imagining which has lain hidden in the dust for close on 50 years. The exploration begun in this paper only serves to show how much work is still to be done, in particular on Macleish's overall relationship with Christianity and orthodoxy, as well as the overarching pattern of archetypes to be found throughout his corpus. While claiming neither primacy nor exclusivity, myth criticism provides an important key to unlocking meaning in Songs for Eve and throughout Macleish's oeuvre; it provides a mode by which we may explore the depth and connectiveness of imagery and universal patterns both here and in literature as a whole. By exploiting this critical paradigm, we return soul to her rightful place and recognize the ambiguous, playful and polysemous nature of human imagination and artistry.

47 Endnotes

1 Mullay, in his checklist of Macleish criticism, mentions that from a critical standpoint, Macleish's work has all but been ignored. "It becomes apparent that, despite his lasting contribution to American letters, and his close personal involvement with other writers, Macleish has received little formal critical attention" (p. x). Critically, J.B. has received the most attention: 30 separate critical articles between its publication in 1956 and 1965, as opposed to 3 for Songs for Eve (pp. 79-86) in the same period. Since 1965, a total of 94 critical articles covering all aspects of Macleish's work have been published, but only three of which are expressly mythical in orientation.

2 In general, "archetypal" and "mythic" will be used interchangeably; they are not, however, synonymous. While "archetypal" refers to individual elements or motifs (mythologems), "mythic" refers to a broader sweep of vision, a willingness to step out of the linear flow of time and the three dimensions of space and enter into the timeless patterns of action.

3 Not to be confused with psychoanalytic pseudophallic interpretation (which, like sympathetic magic, bases its interpretation on analogous shape), snakes are inherently a female archetype. Eliade notes that of its variety of meanings, regeneration (and thus fertility) is the most important (400).

4 The menstrual cycle and the lunar cycle are the same length, further establishing the connection of Dionysus with the role of feminine power in earlier Indo-European mythology.

5 Hillman seems to prefer "Hebrewism" rather than "Hebraism."

6 Cf. the motif in Mesopotamian and classical mythology of the hero's descent into the underworld: Gilgamesh, Hercules, Odysseus, Aeneas, Orpheus, Eros. Also note that Hermes is the god of both hidden knowledge in his role as mediator between the world of the living and the dead (Cirlot 198-99), and equivocation and duplicity (Hillman 160).

7 Even when the Western mind does try to rediscover the pre-Apollonian world of soul, it is through the logocentric, Apollonian discipline of anthropology and thus dualistic: modern, enlightened religion versus primitive, prescientific animism.

48 8 Not to be confused with Nietzsche's concept of dream as the world of phenomenal forms which exists within the individual's mind.

9 Spariosu suggests that the confluence of real and imaginative worlds creates an intermediary place beyond the dualistic agon between truth and fiction, reality and appearance, an in-between place that permits the development of a non-Western thought paradigm; here, difference is no longer otherness but openness, a spaciousness of mind.

10 Perhaps this is the reason for the meteoric rise in the last half century of imaginative genres such as fantasy and science fiction.

11 To be sure, the Fall as a means of enlightenment is not new artistically: "The romantic versions, as first developed by William Blake, inverted its meaning and reclaimed its validity not as abstract, depersonalized allegory, but as a profound and universal myth. [... ] Though the romantics employ the narrative pattern of the story, they tend to describe the action as a psychodrama, a revelation of 'the development of the soul.' [ ...] the emergence of the self and, ultimately, to marry psychology and religion" (Otten 9).

12 It is more than mere coincidence that of the few heroes in classical mythology to journey down into the underworld (the world of soul, literally) and return, one (Orpheus) was a musician.

13 Songs for Eve is made up of 28 individual poems. For brevity's sake, the poem number will be given rather that its title, with the line numbers following a colon. Full titles of each poem are provided in the appendix.

14 We have no difficulty with Eve's movement upward in this instance. Although the general direction of soul (its resting place) is downward, Eve's soul is liberated and moves freely along a vertical continuum without a dualistic notion of upwards and downwards.

15 In his study of early Western religion, Occidental Mythology, Campbell traces the roots of the Eden story to the Mesopotamian world and there finds strong parallels (garden, snake, initiation, woman) with the Genesis story. But in these earlier versions, the woman in the Garden is none other than the Great Goddess who is venerated for her role in humanity's initiation into knowledge.

16 Her incarnations throughout Europe and the Near East are numerous: Isis, lshtar, Astarte, Cybele, Aphrodite, Ceres (and her daughter Persephone), Rhea, and each is associated with a corresponding male deity (usually in the relationship of lover/son): Osiris, Tammuz, Baal, Attis, Adonis, Dionysus, respectively. The worship of the Great Mother and her consort was popular and widespread, and was part of the sympathetic magic rites which reenacted and

49 renewed the cosmic cycle of life and were often accompanied by wild, ecstatic celebration, including human bloodshed and self-mutilation (emasculation): the male consort of the Goddess must die and be resurrected in order to ensure the fertility of the earth (Frazer 426-97). This ancient myth was to form the basis for Macleish's earlier poem, "Pot of Earth" (1925). Ancient Judaism rejected the Great Mother and her attendant rites because of its "feminine changeableness and the fear of orgiastic sex associated with the popular rites" (Henderson 19- 21 ). In the Semitic/patriarchal tradition, this pattern is instead subverted and incomplete-Adam is expelled from Eden but there is no hope of return (later Christians would claim that Christ completes the cycle, but this is specious typology which attempts to retrofit this later tradition onto that of the earlier pagan tradition which had been incorporated into Christianity through syncretism).

17 Macleish seems to have been profoundly influenced by the tremendous changes to our world view brought about by modern science. Cf. his poem "Einstein" written in 1929.

18 In psychoanalytic terms, the serpent is the id to Yahweh's superego. Instead of allowing diversity and autonomy, Yahweh demands to be the only god ; this domination is counter to depth psychology's understanding that the ego is not the only complex, but one of many (Hillman 32). The liminality of the Garden provides a perfect analogy to the dream state where the domination of the ego gives way to the multiplicity of the sub-personalities.

50 Appendix: Individual Titles of Poems from Songs for Eve

1. What Eve Sang 2. What Eve Said 3. What Adam Said 4. What the Green Tree Said 5. l;ve's Exile 6. Eve Answers the Burdock 7. What the Vine Said to Eve 8. The Fall! 9. Eve's Now-1-Lay-Me 10. Adam in the Evening 11. Eve in the Dawn 12. Eve's Child 13. Adam's Jealousy: Eve's Answer 14. Adam's Riddle 15. The Serpent's Riddle 16. Eve's Riddle 17. The Babe's Riddle 18. Eve's Rebuke to her Child 19. What the Serpent Said to Adam 20. What the Lion Said to the Child 21. Eve Quiets Her Children 22. The Serpent's Cradle Song 23. Eve to the Storm of Thunder 24. Eve Old 25. Eve's First Prophecy 26. Eve's Second Prophecy 27. Eve Explains to the Thrush Who Repeats Everything 28. What the Wind Said to the Water: What the Water Replied

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