Mythic Implications of Archibald Macleish's Songs for Eve

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 IV chav yap o 8£oc; tc; 1:0 aw~ £A.811 rroA.uc;, AEyEtv 1: 0 J.lEAAov 1:ouc; J.lEJ.lllVO'ta<; rrotE.i. 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.

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