THE MODERN MYTH OF ADOLESCENCE: COMING-OF-AGE AS DEVIATION FROM MATURATION
DAMON LINDLER LAZZARA
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Program in Humanities York University Toronto, Ontario July 2012
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This dissertation traces the development of a conceptual trend within adolescence in the
West in an interdisciplinary context, and determines how and why coming-of-age in this trend transformed from a temporary liminal stage in ancient myth into a fixed liminal state—or “liminal trap”—in modem culture and literature. The dissertation uses a comparative backdrop of Anglophone poetry written from 1850 to 1950 for historical and cultural context, as well as selected examples of works participating in the
Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novelistic genre, as examples of the transformation of adolescent myth. The dissertation examines adolescence on the meta-cultural level through the primary theoretical vehicles of Gregory Castle’s Reading the Modernist
Bildungsroman (2006), which uses Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics to explain the immanent critique of adolescence found in the modernist Bildungsroman, and Stephen
Burt’s The Forms o f Youth (2007), which argues that modem poetry in English, of all literary expressions, best represents the experience of adolescence. This study closely reads selected poetry of W.H. Auden, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.),
Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman, D.H. Lawrence, Irving Layton, Dorothy Livesay,
Claude McKay, Stevie Smith, Wallace Stevens, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, and
William Carlos Williams. It also analyses selected novels participating in the
Bildungsroman genre by James Baldwin, Dionne Brand, Douglas Coupland, Gustave
Flaubert, E.M. Forster, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mark Haddon, James Joyce,
Franz Kafka, Alice Munro, J.D. Salinger, and Virginia Woolf. Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all the teachers, mentors, colleagues, and students who have inspired and supported me throughout my education and during the process of writing this dissertation, most especially my supervisor, Prof. Priscila Uppal, as well as Profs.
Gisela Argyle and Matthew Clark of my supervisory committee. Of course, 1 must recognise my parents, Richard and Celeste Lazzara, and my husband, Gustavo Blanco, for believing in me even when I did not, and for quietly supporting me without complaint until the battle was won.
I extend my eternal thanks to my Great Uncle George Andrew Lindler, who taught me how to be a gentleman and a scholar; to my Grandmother and Grandfather Lindler, who, even after their passing, provided me with the means to realise my Canadian dream; to my Nana and Nano Lazzara, whose generosity continues even today, despite their absence; and to my Great Uncle Sam Lazzara, for whom I hope I have made the family proud.
Let this dissertation be proof to every young person with physical, mental, and intellectual differences that it can be done, it should be done, and it must be done. Table of Contents
Introduction: The Intersection of Adolescence, Modern Poetry, and Myth 1
Chapter I: The Cultural, Mythic, and Scientific Record of Adolescence 19
Chapter II: The Literary Transition from Coming-of-Age to Halting Development 87
Chapter III: Resistance to the Liminal Trap, Actual and Potential 167
Conclusion: At the Crossroads—To What End Myth? 223
Works Cited 232
IV Introduction: The Intersection of Adolescence, Modem Poetry, and Myth
Since the emergence of the Bildungsroman genre during the late-eighteenth century, youth and adolescence, and texts about youth and adolescence, have become established forms in modem Western culture. The idea of adolescence has permeated popular and scholarly culture, including art, music, literature, and the sciences. It has also done so in a curious manner in that the idea of adolescence is omnipresent and celebrated, yet little is discussed of its origins and development. Even less consensus has been reached as to a precise definition of adolescence that could span the disciplines and provide a common vocabulary for its discussion. Despite the gradual permeation of the idea of adolescence through modern Western culture, it has nonetheless escaped substantial critical attention as to its conceptual development.
In this dissertation I will argue that there is a trend in the Western literary arts that has, over the past four centuries, recapitulated and adapted ancient mythic forms of coming-of-age to construct one of the w'ays of thinking about adolescence as it is known today. Although not all literary texts lead to this conclusion, there are enough in the canon of coming-of-age literature that do to justify investigation. The modem Western literary genres that contribute most directly to the re-mythification of coming-of-age are the Bildungsroman and modern poetry, the former codifying the modern myth, and the latter speaking as a radical voice of change and experimentation. In the trend I identify, the modern myth of adolescence differs considerably from the classical Western mythic forms from which it draws its inspiration. Rather than furthering the transition from childhood to adulthood, the modern myth in this literary trend attempts to create and maintain an adolescent state that is trapped in the liminality of becoming mature, but never leads to maturity—a phenomenon to which I refer as the “liminal trap.’' Because
1 of the difficulties involved in defining adolescence, I will provide an overview of the discourse of adolescence in various disciplines as it contributes to the modem myth.
Additionally, I will be intentionally broad and inclusive in my use of the term adolescence, strongly associating it with the pubertal phase of biological development, but also, in deference to the extended liminality I explore in the liminal trap, expanding it to include the process of coming to awareness and independence of thought and action at any age.
1 envision my dissertation as a response to and continuation of Gregory Castle's
Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman (2006) and Stephen Burt’s The Forms o f Youth
(2007). Castle’s work addresses the modernist Bildungsroman as a genre operating by the negative dialectics described by Theodor Adorno. While 1 am not chiefly concerned with Adorno’s negative dialectics as an overarching philosophical approach, what
Castle does with Adorno is critical to my connecting the modem and ancient.
Succinctly, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966) dashes the attempts by Western philosophers, from Aristotle to Hegel, to assemble a philosophy of self-sustaining positive propositions and verifications:
The formulation “negative dialectics” transgresses against tradition. Already in Plato dialectics intended to establish something positive through the thought-means of the negation; the figure of a negation of the negation named this precisely. The book would like to emancipate dialectics from these types of affirmative essence, without relinquishing anything in terms of determinacy. The development of its paradoxical title is one of its intentions. (1)
With Adorno’s negative dialectical system, Castle posits that the failure of adolescence, apprenticeship, and coming-of-age are not the death of these exercises or the genre with which they are coupled. The failure of the genre to impart formulaic narrative outcomes is instead the starting point for modes of perpetual seeking akin to
2 the cyclical time of myth (Armstrong 15-16). Castle's use of the word “failure" is best thought of in the sense imagined by Samuel Beckett as “a self-correcting dynamic that is undeluded about its own tendency to lapse into inauthenticity,” rather than the vernacular sense of an irrevocable termination of an ineffective experiment (Riquelme
360). Thus the Bildungsroman genre continues to exist, grow, and change although the works now classified as belonging to that genre no longer include or resemble narratives in which there is the formation of an independent self integrated into a sociocultural context.1 Castle arrives at this conclusion by applying Adorno’s rejection of
“affirmative essence” to the modernist Bildungsroman’s form, leading to his discovery of an “immanent critique [...] that allows for more sensitive negotiations of complex problems concerning identity, nationality, education, the role of the artist, and social as well as personal relationships” (1,3). The genre has thus transitioned from a vehicle for predictably directing an individual’s purpose to an exceptional space away from
Western teleology where individuals have an abundance of identity choices.
Very different from Castle’s enterprise, but nonetheless germane to this dissertation, Burt’s The Forms o f Youth investigates the adolescent themes and energies in modem Anglophone poetry that fuelled artistic and cultural modernism in general. I share with Burt the inclination to concentrate on Anglophone poetry because in English- speaking nations—primarily the United States, but also in the United Kingdom,
Australia, and Canada—these expressive qualities related to youth were most keen (this
1 Solon Kimbali observes, "An increasing number are forced to accomplish their transitions [between life stages] alone and with private symbols (qtd. in Van Gennep xviii). The privatisation of symbols resonates with Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard’s definition o f the postmodern condition as the fall o f "great metanarratives” (1979 xxiv). Castle’s work both echoes postmodern thought and refutes it by conceding the failure of a great metanarrative— that of the Bildungsroman genre— while redefining failure to include adaptation that sustains the same metanarrative. This is not to say that, in terms o f the privatisation of symbols of coming-of-age the Bildungsroman can become anything its readers or writers wish it to be, but the form gains an elasticity that sets it apart from others. 3 is perhaps because three of these four nations were themselves young and coming into national identities during the period 1850-1950. Burt begins with the thesis that modern conceptions of adolescence directly informed much of the essential structure and content of modern poetry in the English language. He discovers therein a range of traces of adolescence, from poems that overtly verbalise adolescent experiences to poems that structurally embody the open-endedness of this modem period, which, as he writes, follows the pulse of “the unfinished, uncertain, or unstable attitudes that characterise adolescence, as adults continue to imagine it, in much of the English- speaking world” (3). Anglophone poetry also offers me the convenience as a reader of having poetic encounters with works in my first language, as well as to avoid translation issues that can raise many problems in the preservation of the sound, sense, and structures of poetic works in translation. Castle’s idea of the modernist Bildungsroman carving out an alternative space to the teleology of the classical or Goethean
Bildungsroman2 recurs in The Forms o f Youth as Burt specifies that this alternative space also exists in the fluidity of modern poetry in which adolescence is present in “an enclosed, aestheticized space insulated from practical pressures and identified with poetry itself (43; author’s italics).
Burt is suitably wary of a confusion he believes all-too-common at the intersection of adolescence and literature. He writes of The Forms o f Youth: “This is a book about adolescence, not [...] about poems by adolescent writers, nor a book about
2 Goethean Bildungsromane, the incipient form of the genre, roughly follow the narrative line of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795), in which the protagonist follows "the conventional sense of teleological and masculine destiny” closely tied to the formation of the exceptional self, rich in both material power and education— an enviable position unavailable to many, both in the eighteenth century and now (Esty 408). I will expand on the history of the Bildungsroman in chapter I, and on Goethe’s germinal Bildungsromane in chapter II. 4 what poems young readers read” (17; author’s italics).3 At the same time, he further focuses his analytical stance by asserting that his work is not an all-encompassing study of adolescence because modern poetry “would make a poor base for a study that aimed to describe a whole culture’s attitude toward adolescence,” and that he prefers to “use what we already know about attitudes toward adolescence, what cultural historians, psychologists, social critics, and poets themselves have said and shown about modern youth, to draw conclusions about poets, poetry, and poems” (5). Burt relies heavily on these a priori conclusions about novel and transformational views of youth, broadly proclaiming that modem poets—and American poets, in particular—“all find in the modem adolescent a focus for their own concerns and a figure for the distinctively modern poem” (43). However, Burt attends with ease to the tensions within the ostensibly monolithic nature of “what we already know” to tease out the wide range of the adolescent artistic palette, from nostalgia to spontaneity. His efforts might even be extrapolated into a prism through which other life transitions, such as parenthood, immigration, dying, and death, gain new nuance and colour.
Hence, the aforementioned traces of adolescence in modern poetry are not a cause in themselves but a symptom of a wider movement, and Burt’s distancing of himself from the what adolescents themselves read and write is particularly telling: in a rather appropriate twist of negation a la Castle’s invocation of Adorno, Burt regards adolescence within its own continuum bound to no specific vantage point, least especially of all the category of age. In spite of the incontestability of aging, Burt writes
’ Similarly, this dissertation is about adolescence rather than about poems or fiction by adolescent writers or written for adolescents. In keeping with the trend I identify, I am grouping texts that capture adolescent energies as well as texts that record prevailing attitudes about adolescence at the time of their composition. While there are plenty of fictional works written to encourage adolescents to follow the traditional path of coming-of-age as codified in the classical Bildungsroman, the deviation from this path is what interests me. that adulthood, at least for poets, “seems to have no value anymore”; more importantly, adolescence, rather than a state of becoming, “is simply the state we are in,” brought into being to “postpone closure” and skirt the adult or paternal need for teleological closure (211, 157).4 At this juncture of Burt’s thinking I find some of the seeds of the liminal trap, whose mechanism includes elements of Castle’s treatment of Adorno’s negative dialectics. Both central ideas can be connected to the non-teleological, but not non-purposeful operation of myth, and both have frightening implications for the dissonant relationship between cultural and societal expectations of adolescence and what actually happens during and because of adolescence.^ No longer can a culture assume that the purpose of adolescence is to lead children to adulthood, so it must now question the worth of investing so much time and effort into promoting and maintaining institutions entirely contingent on adolescence.
I am interested in the reciprocal relationship between the full spectrum of the arts and adolescence, but for this analysis, much as do Castle and Burt, I especially privilege literary sources as they are the longest-standing generic forms in Western culture when compared to film, television, and other newer media. While in future work I intend to expand my horizons to the consideration of non-literary sources in an ongoing project to understand the operation of adolescence in Western culture, literary texts are a logical foundation given their rich content, both explicit and through interpretation. My concentration on the novelistic text should also come as no surprise since it is the foundation of the modem coming-of-age narrative, out of which so many other expressions of adolescence, written and otherwise, have originated. Modern
4 This is not to say that there were not modern poets who explored themes of aging in their work, e.g. W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. In his defence, Burt might argue that the transformative nature of aging for modern poets would still engage the experimentalism of their youth and of youth, but such a discussion would be a digression from his main argument. 5 I elaborate on this dissonance in chapters II and III. 6 poetry, as I argue in chapter I, although a written art, engages the multiple aspects of the imagination, and lives a multi-faceted life as verbal, visual, and literary expression.
And although my primary sources are literary, my interpretations of them are interdisciplinary by virtue of the theoretical materials I employ in their explication.
In terms of theory, I share with Fredric Jameson the belief that a literary text is an individual symbolic act dealing with real social conditions and contradictions, bringing to bear “the very center of political, social, and historical life” (95). They are therefore well able to denote and connote more than simply the literary. History and texts are inseparable, yet not identical: “History is not a text, not a narrative master or otherwise [...] but an absent cause [which] is inaccessible to us except in textual form...” (35) In the text are myriad facets beyond the “thing” of the text in itself, and in our reading and what we bring to it are also myriad facets since “the act of interpretation
[...] presupposes, as its organizational fiction, that we never really confront a text immediately. [T]exts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or-—if the text is brand-new— through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretive traditions...” (9-10) In that vein, the literary arts offer an exceptional vision of the “modem” century, a designation simultaneously steering change and resonating against it. 1 must offer the caveat that not all the pairings of poetry and prose align in perfect contextual harmony, and may appear disjunctive because of their combination of different societies and periods that modernised at different times and paces. These facts require we dedicate even more attention to each text individually, thereby exposing the sympathetic energies I believe exist between them. It might appear at first reading,
7 then, that I apply the Jamesonian reading selectively, when in fact I am applying it to varying degrees based on its usefulness to my analysis regarding myth and adolescence.
For my contextual analysis, and in the spirit of Burt’sThe Forms o f Youth, I will use a comparative backdrop of Anglophone poetry written between 1850 and 1950 as a potent cross-section of historical, national, geographical, and cultural forces. In short, through poetry, I am in search of a “feeling” or “way of being” that is both uniquely modern and adolescent. I am impressed by the power of the lyric poem to encapsulate, without restricting sentiments, as Walter Ong writes, “a circular or unordered addition of unities that are more or less autonomous,” as opposed to the narrative poem’s linear
“concatenation of interdependent unities” (76). This is not to say that narrative or longer-form poetry is incapable of lyric poetry’s energy of expression, but I believe that the lyric is the benchmark of the individualised poetics M. H. Abrams identifies in his four coordinates of literary criticism, first in the romantic eighteenth-century exaltation of self-expression, and later more holistically as literary meaning expanded beyond the modernist formalism of “the work” to “the audience” and “the universe” (6, 22-25).6 As
Paul Zumthor writes, the poetic voice, first oral, then written, is an extension of the essence of human existence; the poetic voice “calls on being” by taking on the
“responsibility of the word” (99).
6 Northrop Frye, writing several years after Abrams, elaborates on the function o f literature— as well as on the function and “science” of literary criticism— in his essay “Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols" from his Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In the essay, as well as the collection as a whole, he makes a valuable contribution to the legitimating of mythic content in non-classical or “primitive” literature and mythic literary criticism, writing that the mythical symbolic phase deals with the archetypes and intertextuality that were already standard players in literary modernism (95-115). An archetypal (or mythic) critic would read a poem “as part of poetry, and poetry as part o f the total human imitation of nature that we call civilization” (105). Also, Frye seems to elaborate on Abrams’ idea about individuals’ creativity seeking spiritual communion with “the universe” when he writes of the anagogic phase of criticism, which treats literary symbols (of which poetry would harbor some of the richest and most numerous) as “monads” expressing the highest possible spiritual meaning: “[Literature imitates the total dream of man, and so imitates the thought of a human mind which is at the circumference and not the center of its reality” (119). 8 In poetry is the story of the individual and his or her society. This story is intertwined with language and linguistic structures that were disseminated in an unprecedented manner by new mass-media technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The technologies and circumstances of the century between 1850 and 1950 amplified what Harold Bloom dubs “the anxiety of influence” on modem poets practising their craft beneath the imposing ancestral shadows of their lauded predecessors. Bloom writes extensively about the rebellion of the poet, a rebellion he christens “misprision,” or intentional misinterpretation, that exalts the individual poet's subjective psychology as pre-eminent in the revisionary poetic undertaking. Bloom’s theoretical approach pertains to both modern poetry and to adolescence because of the latter’s association with rebellion, as well as with the “making it new” of the modern poetry which Burt links to adolescence.
Bloom precisely distinguishes the mechanisms of misprision, which are noted here and reflected on at greater length in subsequent chapters. In clinamen, a poet judges a previous poetic message as partially valid, but decides to turn away from its received meaning because of its expressive inadequacy (19). tessera In , a poet effectively reverses the meaning of an ancestral poem, forming an antithetical meaning from the received meaning (49). In kenosis, a poet breaks from another poet’s perceived repetition as a defence mechanism from compulsive behaviour (77). In daemonisation, a poet surpasses the sublimity of another work with his or her own sublimity; this is especially interesting because it involves a conscious superseding of language with language (99). In askesis, the poet compromises with another's poem, though not synthetically (115). Finally, in apophrades, the poet becomes so allegiant to
9 another poem that he or she nearly reproduces it, but not without first having come full- circle through the entire revisionary course that Bloom theorises (139).
Bloom’s elaborate expansion on the many guises of poetic rebellion merits mention in full here because I believe rebellion is not simply a single act that occurs in a single fashion. Rebellion is as complex as any other human behaviour, and the simplification or reduction of rebellion into the two-dimensional representation that it has sometimes become in popular consciousness threatens to obliterate any pursuit of a thorough explication of who rebels, how, and why. We rebel for many reasons, and since rebellion can be the beginning of responsibility, it might benefit the rebellious as a positive step toward the development and growth of the self as an agent of individual and sociocultural change.7 Without rebellion, there would be no liminal trap, but rather a dead end.
Thoroughly wrapped into Bloom’s revisionary ratios is the imagination, wholly imbued with modern perceptions of the individual mind and spirit. Misinterpretation and imagination become synonymous, as do misinterpretation and criticism. The anxiety of influence, rather than being mollified by revisionary communicative action, is never resolved, and is deferred indefinitely along the poetic lineage. Thus even the most minor or unknown poets and critics interweave into a fabric within which no individual is privileged with authorship or authority over another. Hence he and I share the view that poets share with poets and readers with readers on a collective scale, for example, the hope and despair of the waning nineteenth century, pessimism turned to horror during WWI, and the anxiety over nuclear fears after WWI1. We encounter this relationship not only between poets and their readers, but also between the authors of
7 This is often the thread running through the canon of adolescent studies— whether rebellion is negative or destructive, or whether it is positive and creative. Destructive rebellion is generalized as anti-social, while creative rebellion benefits both the individual and society. 10 the Bildungsromane and their readers; as well, there is a relationship between all three groups in the greater sociocultural context.
While this dissertation will suggest how myth can be utilised by adolescents themselves and by researchers and critics seeking a better understanding of the phase, it will not offer the prescriptions of developmental psychology. Rather, it will examine adolescence on the meta-cultural level in an interdisciplinary context, and will illuminate some reasons for the pervasiveness of modern myths of adolescence in
Western culture, how and why coming-of-age transformed from a temporary, liminal stage in classical Western myth toward a paradoxical fixed liminal state in modern
Western cultural adaptations, and where the transformation might lead. Also, I do not intend to explore revisionist mythmakingper se, although there will be the occasional comparisons between classical and modern myths. Rather it is the mythic mechanism one can derive from classical myth and early mythic thought that interests me.
Otherwise one is in danger of simply hunting for analogues and making comparisons where they most easily suit the argument in lieu of grasping the underpinnings of the mythic mechanism.
Crucial to the understanding of modern adolescence is the role of modernity in its inception, augmentation, and acceleration as a cultural force. Bloom, Burt, Castle, and Jameson all factor into their work insights into the modem, and while the concepts of “the modern,” “modernity,” and “modernism” are contentious, to say the least,
Ramazani’s comments on these in the context of poetry in the Norton Anthology o f
Modern and Contemporary Poetry provides a cogent basic introduction:
[J]ust when poetry in English became ‘modern’ is not easy to determine. The word modern comes from the Latin word modo, meaning “just now,” and so modern poetry in a general sense is new or innovative poetry, perhaps beginning with Whitman and continuing to today. As a period
11 term, however, modern can be used more narrowly, for poetry centered in the first half of the twentieth century, bounded by the Victorian era on one and the contemporary period [...] on the other, (xxxvii; author’s italics)
He continues to typify the “modern” as affronting us with “new shapes, rhythms, and sounds” in verse sometimes “based on tormented syntax and inelegant vocabulary”
(xxxix). In terms of poetic art imitating life, “Formal coherence, metrical rules, and generic laws must be broken or, at least, twisted and distorted to fit the unsettled times...” (xl)
Beyond Ramazani’s description of the modern, it is important to clarify the uses of the terms “modern,” “modernity,” and “modernism” in this dissertation. In my opinion, the state of being modern, if we are to analyse it from the standpoint of how individuals feel about themselves and their environment, begins after the Middle Ages with a growing sense of individuality and self-awareness. The modern also invokes the
“newness” of sensations such as persistent anxiety, an inability to cope with accelerating changes—often brought about by the evolution of technology—and other sensations ranging from dread to wonder that began with the Renaissance and continue to the present day. Maintaining this timeframe does well to incorporate the advent of apprenticeship and its development into other rituals of coming-of-age that develop after the classical period. Accordingly, I would assign to this period the term
“modernity.” Modernism, the artistic and literary reaction to the period roughly corresponding to my poetic selections, heralds the experimentation with revisionism and rejection of realism—a movement to which many of my literary and poetic texts belong.
Although no theory specifically elaborates on modem Western adolescence as myth, there is a sizeable body of work linking adolescence or coming-of-age with myth.
The foundational text about adolescence as a discrete topic, which inspired so many
12 others of its kind, is Hall’s Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (1906). (A number of studies, manuals, and commentaries have followed, though few are useful in this study due to their basis in editorial opinion or special interest.) Walter Burkert’s
Structure and Myth in Greek Mythology and Ritual (1979) informs my thinking about the similarities between ancient myth and the processes of more recent mythmaking, especially his writings on “action programs,” a series of activities whose goal is the accomplishment of a basic life task (14-18, 57). Not only do these action programs arise from the exigencies of life, but they also relate directly to historical events through
“crystallization” (18-22). When myths and rituals are viewed from this angle, they become flexible according to their cultural superstructure, all the while preserving fundamental “action programs.”
The third literary body I assemble is of fictional prose texts that participate in the
Bildungsroman genre in the Western continental, American, and Commonwealth traditions, from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795) to the present. 1 have chosen works recognised as modern and which have protagonists’ adolescence as their topic. These texts have found appeal across racial, sex, gender, class, and regional lines, and, within these categories, demonstrate the tailoring of myth to diverse applications. Notwithstanding its European genesis, the Bildungsroman serves well to right the wrongs of unjust literary institutions that have often segregated marginalised minorities from powerful majorities. The locked oppositionalism between male and female, Western and non-Westem are not necessarily a given in the genre of coming-of- age, as evidenced by the diversity of literature now available identified by authors or other literary establishments as “coming-of-age novels.”
13 Castle has already exploded any notions of traditional expectations readers
should have of the Bildungsroman, so rather than seek out a programmatic rubric, I am
interested instead in texts which generally address the opening of consciousness toward
the awareness and responsibilities of adulthood, or which expose the failure of
adolescence to convey the individual toward such maturity. It must be noted that any
temporal incongruity between the poetry of 1850-1950 and Bildungsromane of the late
eighteenth century until the present is not intended to render these two bodies of
literature separate and distinct. I intend that they work in harmony, and that the years
during which the two groupings are not in direct temporal correspondence not convey
Q any separation between the relevance of the poetry and prose works. I will then link
these latter works to the resurgence of interest in myth since the Bildungsroman as well
as to ancient and more recent myths as they pertain to ritual as examples of the
ingrained human tendency to make myths as coping and survival mechanisms.
Although I say more about the liminal trap in subsequent chapters, I would like
to articulate where and how I identify it. In terms of the origins of the trap, the
imposition of outside expectations, usually by adult authority onto adolescents, leads to
the seeds of rebellion as these adolescents become aware of conflicting life paths and
identities. Most of these paths, and historically for adolescents the most attractive
among them, are not the outcome of imposed expectations, and instead arise from either
independent individual thought—as independent as any thought is of cultural
influence—or from the social network of human relations in which most adolescents
find themselves. Inherent in adolescent volition, rebellion is a step in the broader
8 In fact, it is in the novels published after 1950 that best exemplify the escape from the liminal trap, which might imply a crisis point of coming-of-age around that time. Also, I do not believe we can draw a definitive line mid-twentieth-century regarding the relevance o f poetic texts as context to subsequent coming-of-age texts; the poetry and its sentiments continue to cast a long shadow into the second half of the twentieth century and beyond. 14 process of maturation in which disobedience is the beginning of responsibility. Peter
Bearman and C. Wayne Gordon, while evaluating the “duality in orientation” (Bearman
504) between “seeking the approval of peers” and “behaviour that adults would approve and [...] reward,” suggest by the absence of gradation in their either/or formulation the eliding of disobedience with independence and the continuation of this elision into
responsibility (Gordon 378). If responsibility entails a degree of self-determination and an ownership of one’s conduct and affairs, then the rebellion often perceived as a
shirking of responsibility in fact leads to its achievement: the former is a prerequisite for the latter.
What we see, then, is not the duality of a fixed either/or choice at all, but rather an adolescence that is a project open to revisitation, retrospection, and self-revision.
This is in stark contrast to some common conceptions of adolescence as exclusively youthful. This re-envisioning of adolescence as a continuum grants individuals and their cultures increased potential to navigate and cope with internal and external conflict. “Growing up” transforms from a static developmental period, captive to
immutable choices, into an ongoing, lifelong process of change and adjustment. Thus we should recognise coming-of-age narratives that blur the boundaries of adolescence in response to the failure of the traditional adolescent construct to prepare individuals for life’s unpredictable fluctuations.
Inherent in the traditional adolescent choice duality is a tension that Calvin
Colarusso characterises as a period during which “maternal time”—the cyclical mentality of childhood, flexibility, and experimentation—transitions to “paternal time”—the linear mentality of teleological time. This course is not easy, and can turn traumatic (243, 251). For example, the pressure to adopt “paternal time”—or any other
15 absolute path—has proven unsuitable for minority populations and has inspired a reaction to, as Dianne Klein writes, the canon of predominantly white, heterosexual coming-of-age stories. Stories “of the others” exhibit a common thread of, as she writes, going “beyond the dualities” of life into a “great cycle” that binds humanity (21,
25).
Klein’s observations contextualise everyday adolescent choices historically, both in terms of linear and cyclical time. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes of the function of history in terms we have already associated with adolescence in the sense of the bridging of dualities that Klein envisions. He writes in his Adventures in the Dialectic that “[k]nowledge and action are two poles of a single existence. Our relationship to history is not only one of understanding [for] [...] [w]e would not be spectators if we were not involved in the past” (11). Merleau-Ponty seems to suggest that any worthwhile endeavour over time requires reflection on the past, and challenges us to give “the drama” of life its “last act” through the difficult practice of looking back (11).
Few examples better demonstrate the mechanics of the liminal trap than the prosecution of the act of rebellion leading to responsibility. At some point on the line of the human lifespan, rebellion becomes an end unto itself, and those in the trap refuse the personal investment required to formulate a position in opposition to that or those against which they rebel. To struggle, to always be in opposition to, to throw up cognitive barricades: these are the rebellions of adolescents and adults in the liminal trap. To a lesser extent the trap’s guiding impulse to rebel also dovetails with the artistic impulse to defeat death through creativity, whether it be through the writing of a coming-of-age novel, the composition of a defiant poem, or the construction of the self as an artistic object (or subject) in itself. While the liminal trap impedes the developmental dialogue between the individual and his or her sociocultural milieu, the impulse toward immortality in the form of an unrestricted period of development is perfectly understandable given the human fear of death. Merleau-Ponty might even agree that one avoids giving drama "its last act” by refusing to look anywhere but back.
We might ask how Adorno’s negative dialectics apply in the trap, given their seemingly identical discourse of negation, rebellion, and opposition. Adorno consciously avoids ideological positioning in his philosophy, so it would be difficult to deny that rebellion from within the liminal trap plays dialectically with culturally hegemonic forces, and necessarily defines itself as the mirror opposite of such forces.
The "no” of rebellion is not the "negative” of Adorno; it is an affirmation of the trap’s existence and right to exist. Despite the destructiveness of rebellion without responsibility toward which an Adornian reading of adolescence strongly points, Castle, under the aegis of Adorno, is optimistic about the “working out” of adolescence through the modernist Bildungsroman. The fact remains, however, that there is a median drawn between rebellion and responsibility that fails to be crossed, and nonetheless the mythic fundamentals linger. It might be, then, that Castle, while appreciating the traditional
Bildungsroman genre’s contribution to current visions of adolescence, actually promotes the modernist Bildungsroman genre as a guide to providing a real-world escape from the liminal trap into a more humane and sustainable way of being adolescent. In this way the reciprocal relationship between life and art is, if not proven, at least theoretically strengthened.
The structure of this dissertation is as follows. In chapter I, entitled “The
Mythic. Cultural, Scientific Record of Adolescence,” I justify the grouping of modern poetry, artistic texts about adolescence, and myth studies while defining each. I
17 challenge contemporary assumptions about adolescence and coming-of-age, especially those couched in universal, scientific, or naturalistic terms. I propose that a new assessment of adolescence as a mythic function is necessary to escape the liminal trap in which it is entwined. In chapter II, “The Literary Transition from Coming-of-Age to
Halting Development,” I trace the transformation of mythic exemplars in the rites of passage toward the supreme individual, and then begin my literary analysis with
Goethe’s seminal Bildungsromane, the traditions they establish, and these traditions’ relatively rapid dissolution. In chapter III, “Resistance to the Liminal Trap, Actual and
Potential,” I find elements of successful coming-of-age in narratives of its failure, especially in minority protagonists. I conclude with remarks about the path toward and away from the liminal trap in the modem myth of adolescence, and end on a hopeful note that myth continues to harbor positive potential for adolescents, families, communities, and societies as one of the oldest and most relevant human traditions.
18 Chapter I: The Cultural. Mythic, and Scientific Record of Adolescence
Since classical myth looms large over any discussion of myth and coming-of- age, we need to establish that adolescence is not unique to our world and time, and existed in some form in the ancient world. While the privileged phase of adolescence today, with its complex set of rituals and material features already familiar to us, figures most strongly in this analysis, we should not presume that the modem West “invented” adolescence sui generis. In the collection, Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of
Childhood from the Ancient Past (2003; ed. Jenifer Neils and John H. Oakley), Jeremy
Rutter writes that in Minoan Neopalatial art as early as the Late Bronze Age, there was an increase in the representation of children with a high degree of realism and a clear concentration on different groups and stages of development (31-2). In the same collection, Helene Foley discusses the importance of play and education in the formation of the young Athenian (120).
Concerning adolescence proper, David D. Leila writes, “[T]he process of growing up in ancient Greek society involved not just a simple transition from non-adult to adult [...] but involved the assumption of many different social identities, which together made up the complex social personality of a member of a complex society”
(110). Much of the contemporary literature about initiation, integration, and liminality in the ancient world reflects the influence of Arnold Van Gennep in his studies on tribal initiation. Although the implications of “tribalism” unfairly reduce the complexity and nuance of Greek society and culture, the structuralist approach of binary opposites and the transition between them are also helpful. The functionalist theories of Bronislaw
19 Malinowski generally inform my belief that the idea of adolescence arises from a cultural need to explain and manage an individual, biological process in the context of an increasingly complex sociocultural structure. In this sense it becomes an experience of collective importance, with the trappings and rituals that lead to traditions and rituals deeply ingrained in the sociocultural fabric. With time, these traditions and rituals not only find themselves mythologised, but they also find themselves tracking the developments of modernity, most notably science, such as in the case of G. Stanley Hall and his elaborate tum-of-the-last-century scientific systematisation of adolescence. I return to Hall and the other aforementioned theorists for a more elaborate theoretical exploration later in this chapter.
Before adolescence was identified as a discrete temporal and physical category in the modern West, it first needed, as would a cell undergoing the reproductive division of mitosis, a delineation of the borders of its new membrane. In Centuries of
Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962), Philippe Aries describes such a division as he formulated it for the cultural construction of childhood. Many of the same historical processes he credits with the setting apart of childhood in the modern
West as a special period dovetail with the setting apart of adolescence. Aries first observes an awareness of childhood as a separate phase of modern life in the thirteenth century in the sudden ubiquity of naked children in Catholic artwork that did not correspond directly to the “semi-pagan angels,” or putti, used purely as decoration in classical art, and from which these naked children had apparently descended (44).
The decorative imagery of children took on an appearance still recognizable today; no longer were they miniaturised adults that appeared proportionally incorrect or even grotesque to modern eyes. According to Aries, this first recognition of modern 20 childhood in the visual arts reflected the sixteenth-century emotional conversion of childhood into a period of adoration and coddling. Childhood gained its connotations of innocence and naive charm, and, as adolescence would later become, a time worthy of nostalgia. Sixteenth-century childhood offered an escape for adults from progressively longer and more complicated lives. In their physical and emotional play with their children, adults allowed themselves to temporarily surrender their quotidian cares and enjoy the apparent nonsense and unreason in which children were then expected to enjoy their young lives (130).
From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, a new moralistic tone developed in response to the perceived sentimental excesses of coddling children. It was during this period that childhood as a period of moral and physical formation, as informed by secular and religious education, first appeared. Although he does not say so explicitly,
Aries reminds his readers that the progressive child psychology of the nineteenth century was the second, not the first, materialisation of a modern world obsessed “by the physical, moral, and sexual problems of childhood” (411-12). This first period of guardianship, however, is characterised by a religious and spiritual focus lacking, due to the ascendancy of science, during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Aries worries that the setting apart of childhood, and the concurrent physical and emotional separation of children from adults, results in a societal organisation in which individuals must “resemble a conventional model” or an “ideal type” from which little deviation can be tolerated (413, 415). His is a valid concern given the ascendancy of science and its rationalising influence. As always, quantifying human behaviour might prove useful in broad generalisations, but sociocultural mechanisms that attempt to
21 mould behaviour based on those generalisations inevitably encounter resistance, reaction, and even personal or societal crises.
There should be little wonder, however, that such a rigid view of childhood, and later adolescence, took hold. After the eighteenth century, those with the means had wrought “a much-loved, emotionally important being who was extremely expensive to raise in terms of parental time, personal, and material-social resources, and who therefore could only be ‘produced’ a few times at most” (Johansson 352). As a result of these and other factors, by the twentieth century, the privileged position childhood had achieved had eroded, partly because of the “high cultural priority given to individual self-fulfillment” that led “modem adults [to lose] interest in marriage, family life, and having children” (Ibid). Aries leaves us at a crucial point in his findings, namely at the juncture of elevated individualism brought forth by a special period of development.
This period came part and parcel with distinctive behaviours, material cultures and subcultures, and even its own linguistic and symbolic vocabularies. From what we know of the “invention” of adolescence thus far, this juncture should seem familiar.
Likewise, childhood not only affects and cultivates children, but also the surrounding general cultural and social configurations that affect everyone in their domain. The intervention of moral, spiritual, and religious guidance and, later, the rationalised guidance of the ideologies of science are also fundamental aspects of childhood which seem to be shared with adolescence.
If, as Aries proposes, childhood had become a discrete phase of the life by the sixteenth century, then using the previous imagery of cellular mitosis, it had laid the groundwork for the further division of life into how we generally see it today: a linear progression from infancy, to childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood, to middle age, and 22 finally to old age. Goethe rightfully titled his seminal Bildungsroman Wilhelm
Meister’s Apprenticeship for the work concerns a precise form of apprenticeship that was commonplace among certain classes in Europe from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, a period at whose end Goethe was writing. His protagonist Wilhelm
Meister’s apprenticeship, and those of other young men—and sometimes women—of his place and time, involved leaving home to train for a craft with a master craftsman under the supervision of an artisan guild. In one sense, the compelling cause behind apprenticeship can be simplified to material wants and needs: apprentices fashioned goods and provided services of economic necessity or luxury demanded by their communities. The guilds made arrangements between the apprentices’ parents and the master craftsmen, arrangements that guaranteed a percentage of financial remuneration for the craftsman in exchange for apprentices’ housing, food, and training (Mitterauer &
Sieder 105). These guild-regulated apprenticeships, although occurring away from an apprentice’s immediate family, maintained the social structures and strictures of a traditional family in that master craftsmen exercised disciplinary authority over apprentices. In short, while young apprentices enjoyed a degree of freedom from the traditional bounds of family life, their behaviour was restricted by a semi-familial relationship with the “master.”
The social structure of apprenticeships is revealing of the attitudes of their participants. First, it is clear that parents, guilds, and master craftsmen believed that the years during which apprentices were in formation were ones of transitional responsibility and professional development. Apprentices left their parents and their homes, but were cared for in a parental fashion by patriarchal figureheads who provided the physical and moral sustenance that apprentices, because of their transitional status,
23 could not provide for themselves. The moral guidance of master craftsmen for their charges was a matter of community priority. Although the opportunities for labour abuses or other types of mistreatment were numerous, the European guilds kept close watch on the conduct of master craftsmen to ensure the legitimacy of the apprenticeship system and of the larger guild system.
In an antiquated yet telling commentary on the guild system, William Kerrish writes, “Guild regulations and ordinances, homely as some of their subject matter may appear to a more sophisticated age, all seemed to be designed to temper the fierceness and harshness of the battle for existence; to Christianise the economic relationships of life” (506). Overt religiosity aside, Kerrish’s notion of “Christianisation” refers also to the humane management of an economic system that was emerging from the brutality of the dark ages into capitalism. Kerrish’s religious terminology evokes what we might imagine today as social engineering and a social safety net that ensures and equalises opportunities for young people apprenticing for a trade. Conspicuously absent from these socioeconomic arrangements is an organised network of guilds across regions.
The guild system was community- and city-based, profoundly interrelated with local identity and pride, and quite unique in each locale. Absent also was the idea of competition within and outside a region, a far cry from the prime moving force of modern industrial capitalism (Applebaum 268-9).
Some scholars do not believe that apprenticeship was the dominant entree of proto-adolescents into a greater social context, but there is consensus that whether or not apprenticeship was a dominant social form, the general practice of moulding young people through work was made manifest in similar ways. David Nicholas writes that
“[apprenticeship was far less widespread than child labour as a whole” and that 24 “[apprenticeship records thus cannot show statistically the extent of adolescent labour”; however “[t]he labour of the child, whether in a family shop or in apprenticeship [...]
involved both a working and an educational relationship”—a relationship closely monitored by professional and other peers in the greater communities of Medieval
Western Europe (1109, 1114, 1119). The interchangeability of the words “child,”
“youth,” and “adolescent” in contemporary literature about Medieval or Early Modern apprenticeships and child labour, many of which are approximate translations of the terminology employed by original sources, can extend the study of childhood, as pioneered by Aries, into the realm of adolescence as we might envision it today.
While Aries might have considered pre-sixteenth-century apprentices not-quite- children because they had yet to enter into the coddling phase of childhood, the liminality of their grouping 500 years ago foretells a continuing problematic question: what are individuals between childhood and adulthood? Evidently, Medieval and Early
Modern Europeans, through the development of the apprenticeship and labour systems of the guilds concurrently with the evolution of childhood, were able to build sociocultural structures to accommodate new divisions of generations. At first, these structures appear to be more practical responses to economic realities than anything else, but with their persistence over time, as is often the case with cultural practices arising from economic necessity, they became naturalised to the point at which generational phases and the phases of individual development were regarded as simply given.
The nascent perceptions of the individual as undergoing individual phases of development led directly to the idea of the peer group or cohort undergoing generational phases of development. This awareness is noticeable in the formation of medieval 25 states in which “rights of feudal lordship” were “reduced to civic and economic rights of individuals” (Coleman 39). As well, the volition inherent in these civic and economic rights implied that each individual had control over his or her destiny in the pursuit of employment and habitation options. However, children, who, according to Aries, were to be protected, required a degree of nurturing before they could become fully-fledged adult individuals. With the caveat from Janet Coleman that we should not credit a
“liberal economy” as “always the necessary precursor of individual and communal freedom” (216), Kierkegaard’s declaration that “anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility” rings especially true for young individuals in the birthing period of a freer socioeconomic system, faced with unbounded possibilities only one step beyond familial protection (42). This scenario might seem all-too-familiar to young people today, but one can imagine its impact on Early Modern Europeans who were among the first to feel its effects. One can also imagine, in the greater sociocultural context, the powerful swelling and cumulative effect that generations of the anxious “free” would have on their successors.
Now that we can imagine the materialisation of adolescence against a background of apprenticeship, education, and other socioeconomic and cultural dynamics, let us follow Aries’ lead and trace, with cultural and artistic artefacts, as well as with the language of science, a more intricate picture of how adolescence came to be.
Doing so requires us to justify grouping modem poetry, artistic literary texts about adolescence, and myth studies; it also requires us to challenge contemporary assumptions about adolescence and coming of age, especially those couched in universalised or naturalistic terms we might blindly accept. Finally we will need to re- envision adolescence as a mythic function in order to escape the liminal trap in which it
26 is entwined. In mythic function we might better understand the interplay between the excitement of self-discovery and the contrasting anxious uncertainty about adulthood with which adolescence is now synonymous.
Myth, Adolescence & Modern Poetry
Since modem poetry will provide the bulk of the introductory cultural and historical context for my analysis, I would like to begin by establishing the genre’s relevance to adolescence. I have selected five poetic works I believe exemplify the deftness with which modern poetry develops and delves into adolescence, all the while navigating its complexities without caricaturisation.9 Indeed, a genre typified by
Pound’s dictum to “make it new” is well suited not only to execute the creation of novelty, but also to demonstrate how modern poetry operates on an individual and cultural scale. The first and oldest of these works is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In
Memoriam (1849), which I select for its prescience about modem anxieties. I will follow, chronologically, with W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” (1940), which powerfully revises the myth of Icarus and Daedalus in modem terms; Gwendolyn
Brooks’ “Appendix to the Anniad” (1949), which demonstrates the flexibility of myth in poetry to address female and African-American concerns; Irving Layton’s “The
Black Huntsmen” (1951), which deals with questions of identity, religious and otherwise, applicable to the adolescent experience; and William Carlos Williams’
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (1962), which underscores the height of tragedy that occurs when the lessons of myth are ignored.
9 I employ this term not only to refer to the comedic possibilities of adolescence that have become endemic to modem and contemporary discourse, but also to refer to the cliched and reductionist shadow of adolescence which often stands in for the idea without adequately investigating its many nuances and contradictions. 27 Written to memorialise Tennyson’s friend, Arthur Henry Hallam, after Hallam’s death in 1833, In Memoriam barely touches the beginning of the century between 1850 and 1950. Nonetheless, the poem is an exhaustive compendium of modem concerns. In the poem, which is organised into 131 sections called “cantos,” in addition to an introductory verse and an epilogue, Tennyson, on one level, passes through the phases of grief and mourning for his 22-year-old friend; on subsequent levels, Tennyson passes through phases of grief that are uniquely modem given the pressing and conflicting scientific, humanistic, philosophical, and religious questions facing him and his audience at the apex of the nineteenth century. In some ways,In Memoriam portends, though with poetic language and structures that are firmly Victorian and, at their most traditional, neoclassical, Auden’s similarly lengthy and wide-ranging Age of Anxiety o f a century later.
Arthur Hallam’s death and the emotional storm it touched off is Tennyson’s point of departure. Of course, the budding of the modern world eclipses the subject of a single man, so Tennyson enlarges his scope by expanding his subject matter and, most notably for our purposes, by prominently integrating myth into the overarching poetic narrative. That Tennyson would feel so comfortable within the mythic realm is not surprising, especially when the poetic content concerns life and death, cosmic and individual, since he had been readying himself for such a fusion for almost twenty years. Writing immediately in the wake of Hallam’s death, Tennyson, in “Ulysses,” fuses the cyclicality of the sea voyage with that of the voyage of the soul.10 The structure of “Ulysses” is also a hybrid of ancient and modem designs. Though written
10 Preceding “Ulysses” were Tennyson’s studies of history and myth through the Ulyssean persona— "The Lotos-Eaters” ( 1832) and "The Sea Fairies” (1830), which, in the former most conspicuously the liminal trap surfaces in the lotos-eaters’ desire for rest in oblivion.
28 in the classical form of a dramatic monologue, the poem is starkly individualistic. It is, in effect, an epic tale, abbreviated in length, told from an individual’s point of view, the story of a man tossed asunder by the winds of fate, the cruelty and caprice of the gods, and by many other forces beyond his control. “Ulysses” is another example of
Tennyson’s mastery of prosody. His speech might be direct and focused, but the iambic pentameter through which he expresses himself is punctuated by interrupting spondees and enjambments. We might infer that the dreary rhythm of life in the pentameter is interrupted by the irregularities of Ulysses’ mind as it reckons with the perennial question of the frustrated mortal, “Is this it?”
The Ulysses of Tennyson’s poem resembles most closely the version of Dante, although there are strong Homeric vestiges in him. He has arrived in Ithaka, but wishes to venture out again due to boredom and lack of purpose: “It little profits that an idle king, / By this still hearth, among these barren crags, / Match’d with an aged wife, / 1 mete and dole [...] I cannot rest from travel...” (“Ulysses” lines 1-3, 5) The parallels here between Ulysses’, Tennyson’s, and Hallam’s journeys are easily drawn: “...I cannot rest from travel: I will drink / Life to the lees: All times I have enjoyed / Greatly, have suffer’d greatly...” (6-8). Tennyson means to signal Hallam’s corporeal journey has ended—“Death closes all: but sometimes ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done...” (lines 51-52)—while at the same time implying that near and beyond death one might continue “[t]o strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (line
70). He is more explicit in canto XCV ofIn Memoriam about achieving some semblance of spiritual union with his dead friend during the process of writing that work, further developing the idea that the journey of life and the journey of death are not incompatible, and might in fact intersect:
29 But when those others, one by one, Withdrew themselves from me and night, And in the house light after light Went out, and I was all alone,
[...]
And strangely on the silence broke The silent-speaking words, and strange Was love's dumb cry defying change To test his worth; and strangely spoke
[...]
So word by word, and line by line, The dead man touch'd me from the past, And all at once it seem'd at last The living soul was flash'd on mine... (Canto XCV, lines 16-35)
Referring to this spiritual communion, W. David Shaw writes that Tennyson, “aroused by the blended might of natural oppositions, makes powerful contact with something beyond faith, with a vision that speaks to him from the far side of death. Because
Tennyson occupies himself with a search for possibilities greater than those already domesticated, he is able to recover the sublime, to bring it home and naturalize it...”
(27) This reconciliation exemplifies Tennyson’s “coming to consciousness,” a victory of individual development that resonates from one individual to another. Shaw continues, “Because the poet’s presentations are wholly individual [...] a poem like In
Memoriam [...] even in speaking to and for our common humanity, is speaking to each of us alone” (46). In his appeal to the individual, living or dead, physical or metaphysical, Tennyson coincidentally shares his vision of God with Hegel. Unlike
Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” who is static, the Almighty is always becoming, always dynamic (232). So, too, is the human mind as it grows and changes in the Ulyssean passage toward greater understanding of the self and the world around it.
30 Tennyson’s catharsis is long and arduous, but necessary for him to integrate the
chaos and confusion of his world into a meaningful whole. To that end, In Memoriam is
a poem of epic scale, rendered of many parts that nonetheless maintain a holistic
contiguity usually attributed to the shorter, less structurally complex lyric.11 The impact of In Memoriam on the poetic canon extends beyond content to form: the stanzaic
format Tennyson employs, iambic tetrameter, is now synonymous with the poem, so
much so that many refer to this poetic structure as the “In Memoriam Stanza.” The
most notable effect of iambic tetrameter is its similarity to the musical rhythm of the
funeral dirge customary to Tennyson’s audience, which elicits, aside from the usual associations of grief and mourning, the monotony of the duration of grieving from which Tennyson suffered in his loss of Hallam. Isobel Armstrong writes, “Tennyson talked of ‘the need of going forward’ after Hallam’s death, but actually writes of a continuously dissolving horizon in ‘Ulysses’” (96)—a horizon he attempts to breach in
In Memoriam as “[t]he self s relationship to the world [...] as it gives up, at some, though not at all points in the poem, a longing to incorporate the dead” (254).
In addition to canto XCV, in which Tennyson connects with the spirit of Hallam beyond the grave, the Prologue and cantos XXVII and LVI of In Memoriam are worth particular attention. The Prologue, which Tennyson wrote as the capstone of the work and after the other cantos, is a prayer to Christ, presumably as a corporeal intercessor for the Almighty, for the strength to, “By faith, and faith alone, embrace, / Believing
11 Just as Tennyson was compelled to write a poetic work o f great length to glean a meaning with which he could stand to live the rest of his life without the presence of his friend, I am intentionally privileging In Memoriam in this section of contextual poetic analysis as a demonstration of the working-out of meaning in a modem poem that connects myth and adolescence. In Memoriam, itself, could be read as a cyclical, mythic expression, requiring the exhaustive repetition— with its incumbent exposure to the liminal trap of remaining in mourning— o f the rituals of grief as a means to again set right the mind and calm the spirit. My reading ofIn Memoriam is a positive one, which is especially important to me given Tennyson’s place as a vanguard scribe of the Victorian Age, because he does emerge from grief a changed, if not improved, man, despite adequate opportunity for failure. 31 where we cannot prove...” (lines 3-4) Tennyson’s religious references, despite their legitimacy in what might be considered secular literature due to the nature of public discourse in Victorian England, are not simply petitions to divine power. Tennyson is addressing Christ—the bridge, at least in Christian philosophy, between the spiritual and the corporeal—as the closest approximation to an empirical proof of Divinity because of His humanity. The believer’s relationship with Christ becomes a metaphor for the rationality of exercising faith in the non-empirical or metaphysical. The logical positivism of the Enlightenment is thus obliged to invert itself in order to prove the as- yet-unprovable. Philosophical contradictions aside, Tennyson’s words persuade readers to continue the human struggle with nary a grain of justification. Like the
Bildungsroman form, the exercise of faith in a traditional structure, in this case religious or spiritual faith, is replaced by selected elements of that structure that permit a perpetuation of the motions of the exercise. The resolution, however, is indefinitely deferred and undefined.
Despite the growth of human knowledge “from more to more,” Tennyson concedes that “[o]ur little systems have their day; / They have their day and cease to be...” (lines 25, 17-18) In a tribute to his cognitive maturation, the poet recognises the immaturity of his inability to straightforwardly bridge the enormity of empirical human knowledge with that which cannot be proven empirically. His solution is faith, but faith tempered by the obligation to continue striving to attain the unattainable state of omniscience. He appropriately likens the darkness of ignorance to the folly of young life, and asks the Divine for guidance so that youthful thinking might lead to more intelligent clarity with age: “Forgive these wild and wandering cries, / Confusions of a wasted youth; / Forgive them where they fail in truth, / And in thy wisdom make me
32 wise” (lines 41-44). Canto XXVII elaborates on the painful progression from ignorance to fuller consciousness, writing that he does not envy “[t]he captive void of noble rage,”
“[t]he linnet bom within the cage,” ‘'[t]he heart that never plighted troth,” concluding famously, “[t]is better to have love and lost / Than never to have loved at all” (lines 2-3,
10, 15-16).
Although the Darwinian theory of natural selection would not be published to the wider reading public until 1859, canto LVI, often referred to by its most famous line, “Nature, red in tooth and Claw,” seems to presage the cultural sentiments of
“survival of the fittest” which would become prevalent during the Anglo-American
Victorian period. Canto LVI corresponds with Tennyson’s height of grief and doubt.
Armstrong writes that this canto “envisages the obliteration of the human species, the end of its history, as the logical consequence of the fractures o f‘scarped cliff and quarried stone’” (261). Devoid of faith and referring not to God or Christ, Tennyson describes a capricious and even angry spirit of Mother Nature: “She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone: / 1 care for nothing all shall go’” (lines 3-4). Shall man, he asks, “ .. .her last work, who seem’d so fair [...] Be blown about the desert dust / Or seal’d within the iron hills?” (lines 9, 19-20) The pointlessness of life at times overpowers any faith the poet has in God to protect his greatest creation from the ravages of a post-Edenic earth where life is “futile” and “frail” (line 25).
It bears repeating that Tennyson fuses the cyclicality of Christian and mystical/pagan/pre- and/or proto-religious beliefs, as well as the cyclicality of geologic time as described by Victorian science (Armstrong 255). The constant disruption of colliding cyclical forces not only accompanies the psychological processes of mourning, but also furnishes a degree of comfort in their familiar repetition. One of the strongest 33 examples of this fusion is his closing of the poem with an epithalamion, or wedding poem. Again, not only does Tennyson concern himself with the ritual of mourning, but he also embraces cyclicality by coming full circle to a celebration of life. In many respects, what Tennyson does time and time again in In Memoriam is to raise categories, so common an activity to Victorian science and reasoning, only to destroy them in a direct challenge to the cultural hegemony to which Tennyson, as a canonical
Victorian poet, belonged. And although the disposition of Tennyson’s loss originates in his and his deceased friend’s relative youth, his references to youth are as a state of an inexperienced and unexamined mind. In mourning he tarries in one liminal trap, and in blind faith he tarries in another. His solution is to continue moving, as does the Divine of Hegel: "Regret is dead, but love is more / Than in the summers that are flown, / For I myself with these have grown / To something greater than before” (Epilogue, lines 17-
20). By the end of In Memoriam, Tennyson welcomes the great unknown of the future and accepts the changes and challenges it brings to cleanse himself of the confusions of youth articulated in the Prologue.
Nearly a century after the publication ofIn Memoriam, W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” takes up, in a much more compact and unrhymed form, the task of blending myth and adolescence in modernity. By the time of the poem’s composition, the Western world had been shaken by war and economic depression. Faith in blind progress waned, as did faith in the redemption of humanity, and an intensification of mythological retrospection and revision had begun. Reacting to the fragility of the collective Western consciousness, especially on the eve of WWII, Auden summons the myth of Daedalus and Icarus to frame growing Western nihilism and lend concreteness and hope to twentieth-century uncertainties. In the poem, he reports his impression of
34 Peter Breughel the Elder’s 1558 painting, Fall of Icarus, in which quotidian peasant life thematically and visually overshadows Icarus’s drowning.12 But Auden, as Gabriele
Lusser Rico writes, does more than adapt image to words; the poet interweaves two mythic icons with what they have stood for in Western consciousness over the span of millennia. Rico writes:
Just as the Daedalus story embodies the universal human impulse toward making art, the related story of the son, Icarus, embodies the universal adolescent impulse toward freedom. The following suggestions, which focus on recreations of the Daedalus/Icarus story in art and poetry, demonstrate the connections among the arts and between art and adolescent experience. (18)
In this fashion, the individual’s plight—in this case, that of Icarus—is magnified with greater facility into that of an entire society, and in multiple temporalities.
Auden refines the overt sentimentality of Tennyson’s In Memoriam into a cool detachment from his subject. He does, however, employ the tactic of delayed revelation to magnify the personal tragedy of the poetic voice into a grand tragedy. Nonchalantly,
Auden declares, “About suffering they were never wrong, / ...how well they understood
/ ...how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window...’’ Auden tailors the sixteenth-century sensibilities of the painter to his own time, during which great suffering occurred, by accentuating the compulsion to overlook suffering. He captures the phenomenon perhaps perfected in the twentieth century of ignoring the defining moments of one’s humanity, be they the validation of another’s suffering or the ineluctable downfall that all face when they fail to validate it: “how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may / Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not an important failure.” For the “Old Masters,”
12 The painting hangs in the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique in Brussels, Belgium. 35 suffering was integral to the “human position,” coming to pass at even the most unexceptional times to participate in the mythical cycle in which suffering and triumph supply equal portions.
Like the ship in Breughel’s painting, Auden intimates that modem individuals have “somewhere to get to,” and will miss “something amazing” by disregarding the performance of a mythic narrative. Of Auden’s poetic method in “Musee des Beaux
Arts,” Mendelson writes: “[E]vents of the greatest pathos and importance occur in settings that seem to be out at the edge of history [...] The poetic imagination that seeks out grandeur and sublimity could scarcely be bothered with those insignificant figures lost in the background or in the crowd” (363). In an attempt to remind his readers of the events “at the edge of history,” Auden attaches himself to Icarus. He ventures his readers will grasp the weight of the classical myth as well as its twentieth-century allegorical significance. He implies that the failure to acknowledge others’ suffering equates to the failure of a people to allow itself a coming of age that will lead it to sensible, ethical ways. The “humility, strong passion, charity and hope” of which
Auden writes in defence of A.E. Housman’s poetry as the values of adolescence are in fact the qualities that Auden seeks from the readers of “Musee des Beaux Arts.” His point is that the audience for which he is writing lacks these exact qualities, and that the twentieth century would do well to adopt them. The power of Daedalus’ artifice, here equated to the “high style” of classically influenced Christianity, ironically denying its own mythological roots, buckles under the moral authority of the act of admitting and embracing faults (363).
In Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Appendix to The Anniad,” the terminus of the long poem The Anniad from her 1949 volume Annie Allen, the poet seizes upon Auden’s 36 personalised approach to overarching societal critique and myth, and further solidifies the connection between the mythic figure, cultural phenomena, and the individual. Her title, The Anniad, alludes to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid, but instead of giving an account of the grand gestures of gods and men, and how men are often pitted against impossible situations wrought by the gods, Brooks follows the trials and disappointments of a young African-American girl as she is pitted against similarly impossible situations wrought by sociocultural forces. Like Auden’s “Musee des Beaux
Arts,’’ the “Appendix” is unrhymed, save for occasional end rhyme or internal rhyme, liberating the text from conventional prosodic constraints and proclaiming the poetic voice’s independence. The striking effect of Brooks’s end rhyme and internal rhyme results from her sporadic interjections of Black American English for added emphasis
(Wright 56-7). Brooks writes with a triple-consciousness in The Anniad: the first of race, in the Du Boisean sense of a double-consciousness, the second of gender, and the third of maturity in tension with youth’s blind acceptance of the destructive notions of physical beauty, romantic love, and the promises they imply, yet often break (Yemisi
167). Ann Stanford writes:
Three poems comprise the “Appendix,” the first of which Brooks gives the epigraph, “(‘thousands-killed in action’)” [parentheses in original]. Reading like a newspaper headline or a line from a newscast, and following on the heels of the final image of Annie as “almost thoroughly / Derelict and dim and done,” the epigraph, like a Greek chorus, comments on “The Anniad.” Not only Annie, but also “thousands” of women have fallen on the battlefield of romantic idealism, a field mapped by Western cultural definitions of femininity and romance. (297)
Hence the personal becomes the cultural becomes the epic. “Romance,” Stanford continues, “becomes a battlefield where survival of the female self is imperilled. And, in
Brooks's hands, female desire is not only thwarted but punished, as Annie remains
37 trapped in a destructive and endlessly unfulfilling construct of romantic idealism”
(Ibid). However, “The call of romantic love is tenacious [...] [t]he final two poems in
‘Appendix’ return to the voice of the younger, more naive Annie” (298)— in which she waxes hopeful that romantic encounters will validate her, despite the multiplicity of societal forces which diminish her. The younger voice is nonetheless chastened and leery: “Oh mother, mother, where is happiness? / They took my lover’s tallness off to war, / Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess / What I can use an empty heart-cup for. /
He won’t be coming back here any more” (Brooks 48). The final manifestation of the younger voice contrasts with the naivete of her counterpart from the first sections of
Annie Allen, but the synthesis of mother’s adult wisdom—a wisdom we might attribute to the sufferings of Penelope—with youthful optimism still contains certain qualities of helplessness that no antidote will quell.
It is almost as if Brooks constructs Annie’s coming-of-age as an intentional exercise in retrospection, writing not of adolescence in the present tense, but in the sense of the rear-view mirror phenomenon that McLuhan observed, a metaphor that explains how the present could not be revealed until it had become the past, and why established traditions, rather than pressing realities, dominate the present (18). The back-and-forth dialectic between the reality of romantic love’s and beauty’s destructiveness and their firm entrenchment in tradition in spite of it is palpable in “The
Appendix.” The adult mother-voice warns, “You need the untranslatable ice to watch. /
You need to loiter a little among the vague / Hushes, the clever evasions of the vagueness / Above the healthy energy of decay” (47). Lesley Wheeler writes, “Annie
Allen [...] narrates [the] move toward the mature, mother’s voice, a voice (in her poetic world) of leadership and authority” (229; author’s parentheses). However, the move
38 toward maturity is not linear, and is perpetually in doubt. Only a few lines after the mother’s bleak warning, the temptation to dream of impulsive self-salvation in the romantic other returns: “.. .we two are worshipers of life, / Being young, being masters of the long-legged stride, / Gypsy arm-swing [...] We wants nights / of vague adventure, lips lax wet and warm, / Bees in the stomach, sweat across the brow. Now”
(Brooks 48).
Annie undergoes, as Stanford writes, “conflicts between opposites within herself: realism/idealism, assertion/submission, and expression/repression [...] While the poetry constitutes a trenchant critique, it also manifests a profound ambivalence toward female power” (283). Stanford also finds that Annie “remains trapped in a destructive and endlessly unfulfilling construct of romantic idealism” (298). At this point, we are moving closer and closer to the liminal trap as the bridge between the immature and the maternal proves insufficient. The synthesis between the two, trapped in ambivalence, cannot provide adequate explanation for the traversing of adolescence into adulthood.
Brooks believes that the wise mother emerges from the catharsis of painful aging, but how she arrives at that juncture is left to the reader’s imagination. The liminal spaces and temporalities between ambiguities become a refuge for what does not work about the individual’s adolescence as prescribed by her sociocultural context. Although
Brooks’s implication is that Annie, if she ascends to the level of matron, will transcend her uneasy flux, she cannot or will not articulate how.13 Brooks is thus locked into a teleological model of individual development, but perhaps unsuspectingly betrays a lack
' ’ Stanford’s concern over this ambivalence is all the more relevant here: the role of matron/mother/mother-figure is one fraught with limits and complications; it is privileged, but proscribed in terms of how a woman achieves it and to what traditions she must adhere to be recognised as such. 39 of faith in its ability to lead her protagonist to clear thought or positive action; Annie is trapped in a liminality that is not only temporal, but also racial and gendered.
Irving Layton’s “The Black Huntsmen,” written only a few years afterAnnie
Allen, conveys similar misgivings about the forbidden knowledge acquired as one comes to consciousness about his or her relationship with the world and those in it.
Layton is keenly aware of identity as an exercise in contrasts; in this sense his work mirrors that of Brooks, but instead of writing in a majority Caucasian world through the lens of an impoverished African-American woman, he does so through the lens of an impoverished Jewish-Canadian immigrant in a majority Anglo-Catholic world. Like
Brooks, Layton primarily writes for a majority audience rather than, in the case of other poets of their generation such as A.M. Klein, writing for more specialised minority audiences who resemble their own backgrounds (in Klein’s case Jewish-Canadian immigrants, especially those who had immigrated to French Canada from Eastern
Europe). Brooks and Layton are both bridge-builders, and in “The Black Huntsmen,” the bridge is a myth shared by the religious traditions of both Judaism and Christianity: the creation myth of the Garden of Eden. Mostly to situate his personal history, Layton specifies his faith with allusions to his mother’s sheitel (half-wig) and his tzizith (the fringe of the prayer shawl), but mention of these items serves not to limit his audience, but rather to openly challenge the comfort they provide to the faithful.
In addition to questioning the comforts of blind adherence to tradition, Layton’s themes include the effects of assimilating forbidden knowledge into one’s awareness, a time-honoured component of coming-of-age, as well as the related emotions of nostalgia for simpler times and the unsettling wrangling with death that accompanies the age of accountability. Layton writes, “Before ever I knew men were hunting me / 1 40 knew delight as water in a glass in a pool...” (5) Although more abstract in content and expression than any of the poems we have examined thus far, Layton’s fanciful style complements his references to Arthurian legend as couched in the poetry of a poetic predecessor: ‘"...I discovered Tennyson in a secondhand bookstore [...] And down his
Aquitaine nose a diminutive King Arthur / Rode out of our grocery shop bowing to left and to right...” (Ibid) Northrop Frye writes that Layton is “a poet whose imagination is still fettered by a moral conscience, even an anti-conventional one, [giving] the impression of being in the same state of bondage as the society he attacks” (“The Bush
Garden” 8). Furthermore, he claims that Layton is a “wistful, lonely, and rather frightened poet” with a “defiant fear of a hostile and pursuing world...” (Ibid) Both of
Frye’s observations are helpful for identifying the adolescent nature of “The Black
Huntsmen” in its defiance and its exploration of liminality.
First, the poetic voice is defiant toward a perceived hostility, although his final words betray his resignation that the complex future, represented by a woven tapestry of which his childish awareness of religious tradition is only a small part. Layton writes,
“[F]or myself I had preferred / A death by water or sky” (6). We might conjecture that
Layton writes in the shadow of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, given his fondness for the sublime imagery of forests and the vast expanses of water or sky which reverberate with the “church of nature” sensibilities and deified geologic machinations of Tennyson’s elegiac masterpiece. A young man’s reading of In Memoriam would undoubtedly enliven and reinforce the power of death and grieving in his impressionable mind, but it might also shock his system with an appreciation for the great, uncontrollable forces facing each mortal which we all must resist to make maximum use of limited mortal resources and time. Hence “the men hunting me” (6) are not men as individuals, but a
41 metaphor for the manifold features of the mortal condition: the rapidly-approaching footsteps of death, the expectations of one’s family, culture, and religion on a boy quickly becoming a man, and the nagging pressure to return to a better time that never existed. The hunting men stand for all that pursues us to our untimely end. They
“[make] their sortie out of a forest of gold” (Ibid)—the same forest (or Garden of Eden) which harboured the atemporality and lack of teleology—driving the boy onward toward manhood. He then must “look out for the evil retinue” until, of course, it catches us with him—the prophetic memento mori fulfilled (Ibid).
Second, “The Black Huntsmen” plays with liminality within the parameters of the liminal trap, and does so by and large through defiance. The poetic voice might on some level accept the sad truth of death and the embracing thereof mandated by his culture’s definition of adulthood, but he nonetheless flees toward an unachievable recapitulation of innocence. He takes comfort in the childish play of the imagination, all the while cursing the fuel of the imaginative fire—in Layton’s case, the loss of innocence engendered by the writings of Tennyson, though any number of other sources of enlightenment would suffice to bring about the age of accountability. He announces his preference for a certain kind of romanticised death, knowing full well that although he is certain to die, there is no certainty of how. Curiously, the death he most fears falls short of the obligatory terror we might expect: it is signified by the weaving of a tapestry by the consorts of the “evil retinue.”14 Death comes not from nature, but from ongoing and gruelling human action that only ends, as far as the poets we are reading can determine, with the closing of consciousness in death itself. If the wrestling with liminality in which Layton engages strikes us as offensive, there is an alternative,
14 This “evil retinue” suggests the fates, weaving the tapestry of human lives, only to cut it off at their whim . 42 however equally offensive it might be in different ways: we might ignore the exigencies of the modem world before us. Another poet takes in hand this very possibility, though, predictably, the results simply defer that which offends us to a later, more powerful, and more damaging crisis.
Between 1944 and 1945, William Carlos Williams took interest in the same painting of Breughel that had prompted Auden to raise the spirit of Icarus as a rallying cry for the maturation of the twentieth-century consciousness through poetry. Williams’ poem, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” pithily recapitulates Auden’s allegorical reading of the Breughel painting: “when Icarus fell [...] the whole pageantry of the year was...concerned / with itself.” The entire world has turned its back on Icarus and his raison d ’etre, as understood by the Greeks, to alert those who are sated with their pride and prideful accomplishments to the dangers of self-captivation. Curiously, the poet uses no punctuation, running one descriptive sentence to an informal ending without so much as a period, perhaps an unconscious nod to the non-linear temporality of the ancient Greeks. Finality comes with the punch of the final two lines, “this was / Icarus drowning,” which explains the “splash quite unnoticed” by the other characters in the painting.
In contrast to Auden’s version of the Breughel interpretation of Daedalus-Icarus,
Williams’ poem lacks overt self-reflection, focusing its energies instead on the reinforcement of Icarus’ demise. Breughel’s painting depicts several participants in his painting other than Icarus, and the painter leads his viewers to wonder what would have happened to the young man if someone had noticed him either falling or flailing in the water. Williams amplifies this hypothetical question, rendering it the central theme of his poem. Icarus “unnoticed” is Icarus irrelevant; the opportunity to learn from 43 another’s mistake can be seized upon only by those prepared for the lesson.
Recollection and remembering, as a cultural function, entails a process that curiously relapses into circularity: without an expectation for the fall of Icarus, those in a position to observe the event and its broader implications unknowingly avert their attentions.
Conversely, it might be that the commonalities binding all individuals necessarily prepare them for the articulation of their innate understanding of life into Daedalus-
Icarus, but they prefer the story dares not speak its name.
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” thus underscores the height of tragedy: the catastrophe of true ignorance brought on by the longstanding denial of the power of myth, and the catastrophe of feigned ignorance brought on by the fear of myth. For
Williams, his contemporaries are discounting the sometimes-unpleasant consequences of myth—growth through discomfort—choosing instead the immediate panacea of forgetting, which will only result in further and enhanced misery. Historically, such tragedy plays out in WWI, WWII, and the nuclear anxieties of the Cold War, from which the twentieth-century poets considered above felt either direct or indirect effects.
Williams assumes the mask of Daedalus, forewarning his readers, as did Auden, of the cost they must pay for abandoning the old myths and believing that their twentieth- century status, with its veneer of absolute agency among “the whole pageantry / of the year,” somehow transcends the human limitations observed by the ancients. We might question if the myths have lost their relevance in this world, but their stubborn reappearances signal otherwise.
And so we arrive at the end of the roughly 100 years during which myth and the thematic of adolescence collide and collude in the poetry of the Anglo-American tradition. If there is a trend to be discovered in this sequence of five poems, it is that the 44 "working out’* of problems that was once assumed a given outcome of maturation has surrendered to an indifferent malaise. Whereas Tennyson’s In Memoriam saw him grow out of a paralysed and protracted episode of mourning by confronting existential questions, Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” less than a century later, can only offer its readers vague encouragement of mutual kindness in the face of human suffering. Both poems address the human condition and offer solutions for our common humanity, but the former labours toward its solution while the latter sees no need to even take into account that a definitive solution exists.
Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Appendix to the Anniad,” following what I perceive as an accelerating trend of failure to achieve internal conflict resolution during the twentieth century, synthesises both Tennyson’s and Auden’s contrasting approaches.
Brooks grants the failure of existing narratives about race, love, and sexuality, and lays them bare as bankrupt while speaking in multiple, conflicting voices. The whimsically defiant but fatalistic surrender of Layton’s “The Black Huntsmen” follows Brooks’s oscillation between viewpoints in stride, and the subtle disgust of Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” completes the circuit by coolly protesting the cultural detachment that permits evil by the withholding of good—a protest devoid of any overt resistance. Still, Williams speaks from the edge of defeat rather than the pit of despair, conveying the slim potential for hope and the survival of the species by means of myth as a passive pedagogical device. If there is one uniting thread to the modern poems I have selected, and to modem poetry at large, it is the willingness to stare down the insurmountable obstacles of late modernity and to recognize that only hard work and hard thought can begin to resolve them. In this way modem poetry manages to embrace
45 subjects such as adolescence without succumbing to the temptation of oversimplification.
Science, Scientific Myth & the Modern Context
If modern poetry represents a cultural voice that resonates with and against broader movements within Western society during the modem century 1850-1950, we must ask with what and against what is it resonating. Stephen Burt, as we have read, believes that modem poetry alone is inadequate to encapsulate an entire culture’s attitude about adolescence. I agree with Burt that poetry, as a discrete entity, cannot tell us everything we need to know about adolescence and the development of the liminal trap. I do believe, however, that poetry, as the voice of the individual in a linguistic, cultural, and, novel to the modem century, mass media context, can direct us to the sources of its anxieties and rebellions. The very language of anxiety and rebellion already denotes the terminology of science and psychology. These disciplines are not immune from myth themselves, and though I will not investigate at length science as a belief system with its own myths, I will implicate science in the furthering and strengthening of mythic assumptions about adolescence in late-modern and contemporary times as an exceptional phase.
Myth and adolescence intersect by following two main paths under the auspices of science. The first path is that taken by Richard Caldwell in The Origin o f the Gods
(1989), which, despite its controversial nature as a Freudian analysis of Greek myth, illustrates one angle from which a hegemonic scientific method can legitimate myth
46 through interpretive reframing.13 The second is that of G. Stanley Hall in his collected works of Adolescence (1904) and Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene (1906), which attempt categorical taxonomies to institute an authoritative, fixed, and singular vision of adolescence. Historically, the latter angle of intersection dominates, and, unsurprisingly, given our cursory familiarity with the liminal trap, the latter angle might enhance the anxiety of adolescents and their guardians who feel pressured to follow a prescribed course of development. From these works I will shift my focus to anthropological myth theory as it applies to pan-historical myth, as well as to the function of art in and about myth, following Caldwell, as a working out of the issues of a culture’s collective unconscious.
Since Caldwell’s Origin arises from “classical” Freudian psychoanalysis, we must recognise it as a synthesis of ideologically-driven science tinged with assumptions from a specific cultural milieu in the late-nineteenth-century Western European environment.16 Caldwell performs somewhat of a meta-analysis of Freudian psychoanalysis to derive core ideas about myth from a methodology that, at its theoretical base, itself derives core ideas from Greek myth. Caldwell writes for an audience already acquainted with Freud, but the mythic elements of Freud’s theories are worth restating here. In Totem and Taboo (1912-1913), Freud writes for the first time his theory on the origins of the ritualistic aspects of religion, which we might transitively associate with myth: “I want to state the conclusion that the beginnings of
15 For an example of the criticism Caldwell’s book received from classicists for its blending of the modern and the classical, see Peter Walcot’s review in The Classics Review. 40, 2. (1990): 502-503. 16 As Jay Geller reminds us, we should not be too dismissive o f Freud. Although the prevailing attitude of Freud is of a “misogynist and a homophobe, who marginalized if not dismissed women’s experience (and psychology) and pathologized homosexuality, as well as infantilized non-Europeans and viewed the working class as a mob at the mercy of group psychology[...] Freud’s work is far from univocal on questions of identity, gender, and sexuality, often working against its tendency toward reflecting bourgeois norms, and in part, a rather paradoxical part, because of those very changes” (34-35). 47 religion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex. This is in entire accord with the findings of psychoanalysis, namely, that the nucleus of all neuroses as far as our present knowledge of them goes is the Oedipus complex” (90). Twenty-five years later, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud expands on the literal correspondence between the Oedipus myth and the events leading to the rituals of religion and neurosis:
The strong male was the master and father of the whole horde, unlimited in his power [...] the fate of the sons was a hard one; if they excited their father’s jealousy they were killed or castrated or driven out. [...] The one or the other son might succeed in attaining a situation similar to that of the father in the original horde. One favored position came about in a natural way: it was that of the youngest son, who, protected by his mother's love, could profit by his father’s advancing years and replace him after his death. An echo of the expulsion of the eldest son, as well as of the favored position of the youngest, seems to linger in many myths and fairy-tales. (130-3)
Freud’s bias against religion does not diminish his high regard for myth: the latter makes sense of the former; the former is thus less in truth-value than the latter. Robert
Eisner writes, “Freud loved mythology, but despised religion [because] [m]yth does not make the same demands upon us as religion does, but only asks for our attention, not for our belief’ (248). Eisner concludes that Freud admired myth because it allows practitioners to work toward approximations of the truths of self-understanding despite, or perhaps because of, their lack of teleology (Ibid). In this sense myth stands as a compromise, between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, between fantasy and reality, between the mystical and the physical, and can be said to be the first science because of it, describing the world in metaphor through observation and even theory
(Segal 83, 149). The need for a psychoanalytic study of the Greek myth that was so central to Freud’s fundamental theories arises from Freud’s rather paradoxical neglect to codify, in such a way as he did in the cases of dream interpretation or the reassembling
48 of the fractured ego to a “normal” state, his theories and methods of understanding myth.
Daniel Merkur laments that Freud only “mentioned myths both in passing and as brief digressions in his writings,” leaving “scattered remarks concerning an interpretive method he occasionally applied to myths” (1). Merkur cites a letter Freud wrote to
Wilhelm Fleiss which defines Freud’s “psycho-mythology”: “The dim inner perception of one’s own psychic apparatus stimulates thought illusions, which of course are projected onto the outside and, characteristically into the future and beyond” (Ibid).
Logically, the reversal of these projected thought perceptions through the scientific methodologies of psychology would lead to a supplanting of the metaphysics of myth with a metapsychology (2). Freud’s closest approximation to this process in a fully developed form is his methodology in his 1899 The Interpretation o f Dreams, and
Caldwell seizes upon the similarities between what Freud describes in his letter to
Wilhelm Fleiss and what Freud writes about these symbolic languages of the unconscious mind in what is perhaps his most influential work. In this sense, Caldwell follows the work of Hungarian anthropologist and psychoanalyst Geza Roheim, who did not distinguish between dreams and myth, and who traced dreaming to the incestuous and murderous desires of the Oedipal myth (45).
At its core, Caldwell’s Origin o f the Gods performs a strictly Freudian analysis of Hesiod’s Theogony. However, his introduction to the psychoanalysis of Greek and other myths renders expansive possibilities for the extrapolation of mythic function as a societal and individual therapeutic rooted in human psychological development. For
Caldwell, myth and psychoanalysis are linked by the expression of unconscious, often suppressed ideas in a socially sanctioned form. For that reason, he asserts ”[t]he formal 49 definition of myth must be expanded to include its psychological structure [and] among the functions of myth the psychological function must be given priority,” principally because myth “regularly represents through symbolic transformation unconscious ideas and conflicts...” (6). Caldwell’s thesis is that there are three psychological functions of myth: “(1) the expression of unconscious ideas in a specific form; (2) the transfer of emotional energy to nonpsychological matters and functions; (3) the provision of a societal response to shared psychological needs” (6-7).
Caldwell then draws a conclusion from his Freudian perspective that might seem odd on the surface, but jibes with the tenets of Freudian psychology: “[T]he expression of repressed ideas in mythic form is functional in the same way that dreams are functional; both maintain psychic health and stability through the allowable (because transformed, or disguised, or sanctioned by society) expression of repressed ideas” (7; author’s parentheses). Myth becomes for a society what dreams are for individuals: both maintain psychic health through the allowable transformed expression of repressed ideas, one of the primary functions of myth being then the fulfillment of emotional needs. Caldwell elaborates further on mythic function for the individual and his or her culture, writing, “just as individuals seem to need their own idiosyncratic dreams and private rituals in order to prevent anxiety and preserve sanity, it would seem that societies need shared myths and public rituals to maintain the emotional integrity and collective health of the group” (17). Caldwell reframes mythic function by retroactively applying Freudian theories about the conscious and unconscious mind of the individual, and of his or her civilization, thereby transferring the authority of a dogmatic and thoroughly modern science to the province of the fantastic or the primitive.
50 For the many criticisms that could be laid at the feet of Freudian psychology, its emphasis on symbolism and figurative language tenders considerable value to students of myth in poetry and literature. Caldwell recognises the linguistic connection to the operation of the unconscious and conscious mind. He writes, “[S]ymbolism is a kind of displacement, of meaning if not always of emotion, and even our conscious thinking regularly makes use of symbolic formations” (59). The likening of the symbolism of the mind and the symbolism of language and literature makes a convenient segue between psychology and literature, and Caldwell holds poetry in particularly high esteem since poetry uses metaphor and metonymy more so than the prosaic language associated with conscious thought: “[W]e would not be wrong in regarding unconscious thinking as an extreme instance of poetic styles of thought” (59-60).
The scientific establishment of the United States during the late nineteenth century contributed its own vocabulary of symbols to the ongoing project to construct myths of adolescence. No one academic or scientific figure is more ubiquitous in the discourse of adolescence in America than Granville Stanley Hall (1844-1924). Few modem works on adolescence neglect to mention him, and his own works, as well as those of his proteges, have crossed into popular discourse. Indeed, of all the theorists whose works on adolescence 1 mention in this dissertation, Hall casts the longest and most sustained intellectual shadow. Recently, an event took place that reminds us of the impact of Hall’s seminal modem thoughts on adolescence: Jeffrey Jansen Arnett, a research psychologist and professor at Clark University (the very university Hall founded in 1887) in commemoration of the centennial of Hall’s 1904 publication of
Adolescence, began writing a series of articles and a book that explore Hall’s continued relevance. Even more importantly, Arnett has brought Hall back into the popular
51 sphere, all the while introducing his own theoretical brainchild, “emerging adulthood.”
Since the discussion of adolescence cannot be limited to the academy because of its cultural pervasiveness, Amett provides us a convenient bridge between the scholarly and the popular, namely in his numerous interviews in popular journalistic outlets.
To attest to Hall’s relevance, we need only read Arnett’s interviews in the New
York Times magazine. The first, by Judith Warner, published in May 2010, is entitled
“The Why Worry Generation,” and while so many examples of journalism about adolescence result in the hackneyed repetition of tired cliches, Warner seeks Arnett’s counsel about the central qualities of the generation many believe are living in an extended adolescence. Of the generation in question, Amett says, “Almost universally they want to find a job [that is] an expression of their identity, a form of self- fulfillment,” elaborating that “[tjhey’re extraordinarily optimistic that life will work out for them [...] Everybody thinks bright days are ahead...” (Warner MM11) Robin
Marantz Henig, in another New York Times Magazine article interview with Arnett, extrapolates one of the questions raised in Warner’s article: “Why are so many people in their 20s taking so long to grow up?” (MM28) The optimism that Amett describes in
Warner’s article is disturbing for older generations who wonder what the path to maturity will be for those younger than they. Arnett reaches to the past and to Hall, reassuring his interviewer that “what is happening now is analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create adolescence”—a stage now taken as natural, but which required societal and institutional transformation and development to both contain and assist those within it (Ibid).
Arnett’s “emerging adulthood” shares many similarities with Hall’s vision of adolescence: “identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between” (Ibid). 52 However, he quite definitively closes the period of emerging adulthood at 30 with a grave deadline related to the waning of life options and the making of lifelong commitments, be they relationships, children, or careers. His portrayal of emerging adulthood might seem, at least to an audience unfamiliar with his more serious research, an ever-extending average lifespan during which its participants recognize that only with an increasing amount of time during the first third of life for self-exploration can happiness and self-fulfillment be achieved—before emerging adults are worn into the routines of adulthood which seems to lock individuals into predictable behaviour patterns.
There is more to the story, however, as can be found in Arnett’s book, Emerging
Adulthood (2004), which carefully lays out his thesis about the recognition of a new life phase. In his book, Amett introduces a “longer road to adulthood” in which “[t]o be young [...] today is to experience both excitement and uncertainty, wide-open possibility and confusion, new freedoms and new fears” (Arnett is careful to limit his generalizations to developed countries, and specifically to the United States, since he believes that, as Hall’s conception of adolescence was bom of socioeconomic and cultural forces endemic to industrialized nations, emerging adolescence springs from more advanced socioeconomic and cultural forces in those same nations today)
(Emerging Adulthood 1). As he said in his interview with Henig, setting a deadline for the end of emerging adulthood at 30, Amett is careful to delineate emerging adulthood from adolescence at 18(18). Thus we have a clear period from 18 to 30 with which to read Arnett’s theoretical structure, and to refute or critique it. Emerging adulthood arises on the heels of several factors, including the increase in average ages of marriage and child rearing, and an increased freedom to “use the intervening years, between the
53 end of secondary school [...] to explore a wide range of different possible future paths”
(4). He continues, “Young people of the past were constricted in a variety of ways, from gender roles to economics, which prevented them from using their late teens and twenties for exploration. In contrast, today’s emerging adults have unprecedented freedom” (7). With the complicity of a more flexible sociocultural and economic context, one could even say that emerging adulthood is a collective, community-enabled expression of a generational yearning to find “perfect fits” in life, from relationships to careers.
In his book, Amett is more explicit in his elaboration of the five main features of emerging adulthoods:
1. It is the age of identity exploration, of trying out various possibilities, especially in love and work. 2. It is the age of instability. 3. It is the most self-focused age of life. 4. It is the age of feeling in-between, in transition, neither adolescent nor adult. 5. It is the age of possibilities, when hopes flourish, when people have an unparalleled opportunity to transform their lives. (8; author’s italics)
The feature with which I would most readily disagree, number four, relates to Arnett’s tendency to set deadlines and spirited defence of absolute terms, specifically in this case that the “feeling in-between” or transitional nature of emerging adulthood somehow differs from those of adolescence. If anything these features could be an amplification or expansion of the work of Hall or even his predecessors. However, I am not concerned at this moment with determining the suitability of Arnett’s most recent work for the canon of adolescent studies, but rather to use it as a snapshot of the most recent thinking about and beyond adolescence in an evolutionary timeline that focuses on Hall.
54 G. Stanley Hall’s Youth & Adolescence
Although the term “adolescence” does not join the vernacular until after Hall’s seminal publications, Hall himself was informed by established ways of looking at that as-yet-unnamed period. Thus I see him as inheriting the mantle of modem Western thought about adolescence, and as expressing and continuing to express the dominant conception of adolescence. Beginning with the Emile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau catalogued the thinking about young people from Aristotle to himself. He quotes
Aristotle as saying youth “are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine,” and Socrates as saying youth are inclined to “contradict their parents” and “tyrannize their teachers.”
In light of these dire proclamations, Rousseau, addressing youth as much as their parents or teachers, warns “[a]s the roaring of the waves precedes the tempest, so the murmur of rising passions announces the tumultuous change [...] Keep your head upon the helm, or all is lost” (172-173). The common thread these classical and
Enlightenment attitudes share is the implication that adolescent storm and stress is characteristic of all young people and that the source of it is purely biological. By virtue solely of the demographic analysis Arnett performs in Emerging Adulthood, to say nothing of innumerable other contemporary studies that link the influence of external forces on the behaviours of specific generations, this attitude is clearly false
(Amett, “Adolescent Storm and Stress, Reconsidered,” 317). However, this attitude points toward Hall’s quasi-inherited theory of evolution he adopted from Lamarck, whose theory of evolution heavily influenced Hall’s thinking about evolutionary psychology, as it did Freud’s and Jung’s. Lamarck proposed that evolution occurs not by a mechanism of natural selection and the survival and passing along of the fittest characteristics of a species, but as a result of beneficial experiences and characteristics
55 accumulated in one generation that transfer through a sort of “memory” to subsequent generations (318).
In line with Lamarckian theory, Hall considered adolescence “suggestive of some ancient period of storm and stress” that had made an indelible mark of the species memory of humankind (Vol. 1 xiii). Hall’s model of storm and stress in adolescence involves three fundamental factors: conflicts with authority, emotional volatility, and reckless behaviour. Conflicts with authority occur as “the wisdom and advice of parents and teachers is overtopped, and in ruder natures may be met by blank contradiction”
(Vol. 2 79); in addition to their origins in evolutionary psychology, such conflicts might be exacerbated by the youthful desire for independence colliding with parents who “still think of their offspring as mere children, and tighten the rein where they should loosen it” (Vol. 2 384). Hall explains that adolescence is “the age of [...] rapid fluctuation of moods” (Vol. 1 xv), a conclusion he draws not only from prevailing attitudes, but also from empirical observations as an educational professional and psychologist. Betraying an androcentrism that had already existed in the Bildungsroman genre and in general cultural discussions and expressions of adolescence, Hall’s examination of recklessness in adolescence addresses the “period of semicriminality” which he deemed “normal for all healthy [adolescent] boys” (Vol. 1 404).
Inasmuch as Hall embraced the “storm and stress” model of adolescence, as he had inherited it from the centuries before him, he nonetheless extolled adolescence as
“the birthday of the imagination” (Vol. 1313) and “the best decade of life” (Vol. 1 xviii), during which “the life of feeling has its prime” (Vol. 1 59). Yet again, the verbalising of adolescence inspires the language of paradox as those who speak of it struggle with a concept that is charged with undertaking the unenviable task of carving 56 out meaning in an environment that challenges that very task. Arnett’s “G. Stanley
Hall’s Adolescence: Brilliance and Nonsense” (2006) brings this issue to a head,
provoking readers to perform a reliable test of the longevity and strength of an idea
through its persistence in public consciousness. We might venture that an idea, if
endowed with the mythic qualities of temporal exceptionalism, requires a certain quality
of feeling to those who believe in the idea, that it has always been true and shall remain
so. An idea’s persistence lends credibility, then, to its truth, regardless of our ability to
prove it. However, this tendency in the history of ideas presents us with a biased
problematic when we seek to gather the requisite data to establish credibility. In the
abstract, this situation is worthy of a caveat that thoughtful scholars ought be able to
heed without too much trouble. In a specific application, such as to the idea of
adolescence promulgated by G. Stanley Hall, things fall apart. For those wishing to
connect adolescence to a greater overarching myth, this is welcome news, but it requires
some explanation. First, though, we need to review the impact that Hall and his major
ideas have had on the contemporary human sciences (i.e. psychology, sociology,
anthropology, etc.), particularly in the areas of adolescent identity.
Generally, the similarities and differences between Hall’s initial findings and
contemporary science fall into five categories. The first, an acceptance of the emotional
fluctuation that occurs during adolescence, has remained virtually unchanged.
Similarly, adolescence as a period of experimentation has become a common refrain.
The question of cultural influence in tension with a rebellion from culture is similarly an
ongoing and thus unanswered question, and to that end the median stage between culture and individual, the peer relationship, continues to preoccupy those who think about adolescence. A sampling of scholarly material spanning the early onset of Hall’s
57 theories up to the recent academic conversation about adolescence bears out the persistence of these categories.
Between the 1940s and 1950s, developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst
Erik Erikson wrote of the development of the “ego identity” to describe the
“comprehensive gains which the individual, at the end of adolescence, must have derived from all of his pre-adult experience in order to be ready for the tasks of adulthood” (223). Erikson saw that Freud used the term “identity” in a psychosocial context in terms of religion, specifically Judaism. Identity appears as a “common readiness to live in opposition [...] a common freedom from prejudices which narrow the use of the intellect. Here the term identity points to an individual’s link with the unique values, fostered by a unique history, of his people” (Ibid). In the half-century since Hall’s influence had begun, all of the five categories persist in Erikson’s characterisation of “identity”: the emotional fluctuation and behavioural experimentation implicit in the “comprehensive gains” that prepare the late-adolescent for “the tasks of adulthood”; the contextual and cultural role of identity as an expression of living “in opposition,” free from “prejudiced which narrow the use of the intellect”— yet linked to the values of one’s people.
Barbara Hanawalt believes that “[sjocial scientists in their relatively short existence in our intellectual history have contributed much to our ability to analyze the life stage,” especially in the work of Van Gennep from around the same time as Hall’s major contributions, which differentiates physical and social puberty, and also in that of anthropologist Victor Turner, who contributed in the 1960s to the concept of liminality inherent to adolescence (20-21). One of Turner’s theories is particularly useful in my
58 analysis—that of the “liminoid” as opposed to the liminal. In From Ritual to Theatre:
The Human Seriousness o f Play (1982), Turner considers “comparative symbology,” the non-verbal cultural symbols and expressions that mark particular rites of passage (20).
His concept of liminality is similar to mine in its ritualized movement from one state into another, with fundamental in-betweenness, in which an individual is metaphorically or literally separated from the first state before the ritual process and thrust into the chaos of transition before emerging in the second state. The liminal is obligatory, forced upon us by our culture, and even traumatic or terrifying. However, Turner then turns to the liminoid. Unlike liminal rites of passage, liminoid experiences are voluntary and even pleasurable. He writes that “[o]ne works at the liminal, one plays at the liminoid” (55; author’s italics). When undertaken with a community, the liminoid forms strong bonds among its members, engendering them with new senses of meaning or purpose (48).
I envision the liminal trap as very much a product of the chaos and trauma of the obligatory rites of passage through which individuals are forced to pass by their sociocultural context, as well as the pressures exerted upon them by the myths whose structures are founded in the rituals of these rites. In the narratives of failed coming-of- age I consider in subsequent chapters, we should pay close attention to the frustration of the protagonists when they must engage in the rites of passage in a certain way and into an expected outcome that is impossible. However, the narratives of coming-of-age in which the liminoid is engaged produce a noteworthy escape from the liminal trap, often through “play” (i.e. creativity, art, experimentation, etc.), and often within a small community of the likeminded. We might conclude that the liminal, aside from being work, is also fraught with danger—the seeds of mythic and ritual inversion of the 59 liminal trap—and the liminoid, though play, serves as an antidote to the disease, as it were. Turner’s articulation of the liminoid might therefore be taken as seriously or more seriously than his articulation of the liminal because it supplants the frustrated state with a more open-ended one that quite simplyworks in our modem and contemporary contexts in ways that old myths, rituals, and rites do not.
In the 1970s, sociologist Glen Elder, Jr. introduced cross-temporal and cross- cultural analysis of adolescents, concluding that there is a consistent struggle between adults and youth that “cuts across national, class, gender, and time lines” regarding which group controlled “entrance to or exit from the liminal stage” (22). In the years before, during, and after Erikson’s work on identity, the “in-betweenness” restated by
Arnett in his explanation of emerging adulthood became more of a central umbrella term to encompass the experimental, rebellious nature of adolescence.
I prefer the terminology of liminality, as does Turner and van Gennep, as it does well to compress behavioural fluctuation, experimentation, rebellion, and the tensions between adolescence, culture, and context (including, to an extent, certain facets of peer relationships, although “liminality” is less inclusive of the latter category). Although
Hall was undeniably writing about adolescence in the heyday of American industrialism and expansion, his language in Adolescence tends to unwittingly universalise his historical context, as so much Western science of the day is guilty of doing. Elder, rather than criticising or condemning Hall’s magnification of a potentially temporally- and geographically-localised phenomenon, tests its validity through cross-cultural comparison, aided by the development of the concept of liminality.
60 Even more recently, in the 1980s, biologist and psychoanalyst Peter Bios engaged Freud, as did Erikson, in search of universalities or cross-cultural commonalities in adolescence, but refuted the classical psychoanalytic recapitulation theory as an explanation of adolescence “because certain emotional experiences and tasks do not find their normal timing until adolescence, when the developmental progression confronts the child with novel, maturationally evoked, conflictual constellations” (286). In challenging Freud’s psychoanalytic approach as the deepest possible analytic framework through which to understand adolescence, Bios confirms and universalises adolescence as a distinct, discrete entity whose existence is unquestionable and most basic to the human condition, reflecting the majority attitude of both the “hard” and “soft” sciences. Nonetheless, psychologist Lene Jensen, also of
Clark University, disabuses us from believing that universalisation simplifies adolescence. She writes, “[Developing a cultural identity in the course of adolescence has become more complex. Adolescents seldom grow up knowing of only one culture but increasingly have interactions with people from diverse cultures, either first-hand or indirectly through different media. Increasingly then, adolescents forge multicultural identities” (189). Jensen presents contemporary, globalised adolescence as a double- edged sword, fraught with new challenges to the formation of a whole, mature individual, yet brimming with possibilities for the creation of pluralistic, democratic new generations capable of greater levels of coexistence in a shrinking world (194-95).
Much like myth, Hall’s theories in Adolescence are adequately flexible, broad, and in some respects, powerful to both adapt to the changing landscape of adolescent studies and also to solidify their dominance in the ways we think about adolescence.
Even in their most potentially tricky negotiations between past and present cultural
61 context, such as in the cases of universalism and globalism, Hall’s theories remain remarkably resilient. Nonetheless, we must note that there are some aspects of
Adolescence that are seldom mentioned in the contemporary literature because of what scholars might now call their self-evident incorrectness, modem inapplicability, cultural bias, or plain absurdity. As previously mentioned, Hall’s main fault is his almost fanatical adherence to a literal interpretation of Lamarckian evolution, which led him to decree that children’s formation and education must follow “a knowledge of nascent stages and the aggregate interests of different ages of life” to “best safeguard against very many of the prevalent errors of education and of life” (Vol. 1 viii). For instance,
Hall believed children should not pursue literacy until age eight because reading and writing emerged relatively late on the timeline of human evolution. Adolescents, given their high level of activity brought about by social as well as biological triggers, are in need of a mirroring of an active physicality in some distant evolutionary past, and should “have pets, till the soil, build, manufacture, use tools, and master elementary processes and skills [...] truly repeating the history of the race” (Vol. 1 174). Hall’s entire premise about evolutionary recapitulation is predicated upon the validity of
Lamarck’s evolutionary theories—theories long since discredited. Thus the evolutionary angle of Hall’s thinking must be discredited and discarded. The same is not quite so easy for the other differences between Hall’s version of adolescence and the picture that has unfolded henceforth because they are not so much factual, but attitudinal.
Like so many of his generation and in his field, Hall had an optimistic outlook about the fruits that evolutionary psychology would yield. More generally, Hall's faith in progress could be understood as a symptom of the age in which he lived. By the end
62 of the nineteenth century, technological progress had advanced so quickly and so radically that the unending improvement of the human race seemed assured. Whether
Darwinian or Lamarckian, the basic tenets of evolution had penetrated nearly all academic and social disciplines, and many, including Hall, saw no other direction to head than onward and upward. Hall writes, “Nothing so reinforces optimism as evolution. It is the best, or at any rate not the worst, that survive. Development is upward, creative, and not decreative. From cosmic gas onward there is progress, advancement, and improvement” (Vol. 2 546). Hall’s teleological optimism becomes a myth: self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating, and with a central tenet—adolescence—at its centre which furnishes the adaptability required for self-reinforcement and self perpetuation. Adolescence is “a state from which some of the bad, but far more of the good qualities of life and mind arise” (Vol. 1 351). In these words, we can sense Hall’s valourisation and privileging of adolescence as a period during which beneficial outcomes far outweigh potential drawbacks, and readers might logically conclude that the longer individuals’ adolescent periods endure, the more “improved” they can become, both for their sakes and for the sake of the species. And while the bases, again, of Hall’s conclusions are in Lamarckian evolution, adherents to Hall’s theories need not accept the Lamarckian component to believe in Hall. Thus, evolutionary recapitulation can be easily discarded and an illogical faith in the “special” qualities of adolescence embraced with mutual exclusivity. While Lamarckian evolution faded, the new, Hall’s conception of adolescence would persist. Longer equalled better for Hall as far as adolescence was concerned, with apparent disregard to any number of caveats regarding moderation.
63 Aside from overenthusiastic optimism, Hall also suffered from other contagions of his cultural context, namely the Victorian outlooks on the perennially controversial subjects of sex, sexuality, and religion. For example, despite repeatedly declaring a certain degree of independence from all-encompassing sexual repression,17 he echoes it nonetheless in his discussion of masturbation, which he threatens might cause limited
“[gjrowth, especially in the moral and intellectual regions,” as well as “early physical signs of decrepitude and senescence” (Vol. 1 443-444). Perhaps most bizarre was
Hall’s claim that male adolescent masturbation would result in the destruction of “the potency of good heredity”; the offending adolescent’s future children were at risk for substandard genetics if their parents masturbated (453). Common Victorian prescriptions were thus recommended to prevent the degradation of the race, including
“[wjork,” “[gjood music,” and “[c]old washing” (465-9).
For Hall, the ultimate prescription for the idle temptations of the flesh was a moral if not religious one. In a broad stroke that might have been more autobiographical than empirical, Hall dedicates an entire chapter of the second volume of Adolescence to the “universal” phenomenon of adolescent religious conversion. He posits religious conversion as ideal and proper during adolescence, but there is significant nuance to how he imagines religious conversion, even though he describes the process in the Christian terminology of the Victorians. Sin, for example, was the crime of a lack of personal, societal, cultural, and hereditary progress, and religion served the purpose of promoting said progress “if we interpret it in terms of modem psychology rather than [...] dogma” (Vol. 2 314). With an unmistakable Christian bent,
17 “Sex is the most potent and magic open sesame to the deepest mysteries of life, death, religion, and love. It is, therefore, one of the cardinal sins against youth to repress healthy thoughts of sex at the proper age” (Vol. 2 109). 64 Hall explains that religious conversion entails a process in which “[s]elf-love merges in resignation and renunciation into love of man. Religion has no other function than to make this change complete [...] for the love of God and the love of man are one and inseparable” (304).
Theologically, this brings us to intersection of the spiritual and the corporeal in which Christ is a focal point for Victorian Christians. Hall writes that Jesus was “the culmination of the entire series of organic forms of existence [...] the revealer of a new and higher form of cosmic consciousness, advancing the human ideal and opening the way to the higher destiny of man” (328). The Son of God therefore fulfills the role of spiritual exemplar, but also of the evolutionary summit of humanity if it is allowed to progress toward its ultimate teleology. The conversion of each individual to a dedicated mindset of interdisciplinary, multifaceted human progress leads to the perfecting of the great circular chain of being leading from the Almighty to the human and back; and in the Lamarckian sense, all that we as humans need do to eventually reach the goal of equality with God (i.e. evolutionary perfection) is to strive our best, generation after generation, so as to ensure the requisite gradations of improvement.
As we come to the end of our consideration of G. Stanley Hall and his contribution to the liminal trap, we must remember that our primary concern and source of data as we move forward are the literary arts. I do believe it apt, however, to transition from science to art gently, via the bridge of the scientific study of culture and art as it pertains specifically to myth, and the myth(s) of coming of age. The questions 1 wish to pose, and hopefully answer during this transitional section, regard the procedure myth follows in the collective unconscious as it is expressed by art. In so doing, I examine the works of French structuralist anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Polish 65 functionalist anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, German classicist Walter Burkert,
French ethnographer and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep, and Romanian historian and philosopher Mircea Eliade, who, though probing myth from different approaches, are essentially seeking answers to these same questions about the structures and functions of myth, often in ancient or classical sociocultural contexts, but also in their and our present day.
Myth in the Artistic Cultural Consciousness
The resurgence of interest in myth in the late nineteenth century did not occur in a vacuum. We must presume that there was an impetus for the academy to begin to study myth from an objective or scientific position. This academic impulse draws much of its energy from the same source that drove the composition of modem poetry or the modem(ist) Bildungsroman. Credit must be given to Sir James George Frazer and his first edition of volumes entitled The Golden Bough (1890) for establishing the scientific and comparative study of myth, and he and his contemporaries and successors have been affected by what Judith Bemstock writes is a phenomenon in which writers “have tended to be less concerned with illustrating literally the narrative content of myths, than with interpreting them symbolically in harmony with their personal experiences” (153).
These pioneering scholars all lived during the first (and some during the second) half of the twentieth century, many of them undergoing the trials of war, economic depression, and exile, and all of them encountering the explosive growth of communication technologies, the development of mass culture, and, generally, radical changes from the beginnings to the ends of their lives. The academic interest in myth might very well have been a reaching toward tradition, into the most basic units of the cultural institutions of the West in search of symbolic meanings applicable to modern 66 times. What follows, then, is a brief summary of several scholars of myth whose work is especially relevant for an analysis of modem Western adolescence from a mythic point of view. The list is by no means exhaustive, and cannot encapsulate the breadth of their scholarship, but I have isolated their main contributions that are the most pertinent to my project. We begin with the originator of structuralism.
Claude Levi-Strauss contributed significantly to the contemporary study of myth in his multi-volume work, Introduction to a Science o f Mythology (1964-1971). In it he hypothesises the function of myth as the bridging of contradictory oppositions with possible solutions, and he does so in a manner reaffirming the relevance of myth not only to the ancients, but also to their descendants. Levi-Strauss introduced many of the points on which he elaborated in detail in the Introduction in a pioneering essay, “The
Structural Study of Myth” (1955), in which he laid out his belief that “mythical thought always works from the awareness of oppositions towards their progressive mediation,” and that “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction” (440, 443). Levi-Strauss proposed an algebraic formula involving
“functions” and “terms” to establish the foundations for narrative structure in search of paradigmatic oppositions (442). Thus, although he recognized linear orders of events, he preferred to concentrate on underlying oppositions, not necessarily in a linearly- ordered fashion. By doing so, Levi-Strauss granted himself tremendous breadth of scope in examining the richness of the construction of myth and ritual, from the most significant (e.g. the justification of a tribal rivalry) to the most mundane (e.g. the place settings at the dinner table).
By the time he wrote volume three of the Introduction, Levi-Strauss summarised his methodology thusly: “By dividing the myth into sequences not always clearly
67 indicated by the plot, and by relating each sequence to paradigmatic sets capable of giving them a meaning, we eventually found ourselves in a position to define the fundamental characteristics of myth...” (199) In volume four, persisting in his belief set out in his 1955 essay, he writes of “mythemes”—the most basic unit of myth—“Of course, all mythemes of whatever kind must, generally speaking, lend themselves to binary operations, since such operations are an inherent feature of the means invented by nature to make possible the functioning of language and thought” (559). Several decades had not softened his allegiance to the strict structural study of myth, despite its obvious limitations engendered by what some consider the prison of binary thinking in an increasingly complex world of multiplying complications of life choices. Levi-
Strauss would likely defend any shortcomings of his brand of structuralism with the simple rationalisation that a deconstruction of binary components of phenomena that motivate myth and ritual is the best way to take in entities that, at first impression, are unrevealing of their inner workings or, even more dangerously to the structuralist analyst, “self-evident.” He grants the modem mythic project a powerful tool to understand mythic motivation and function, but in the extreme minutiae of the details, one can become easily consumed. Those pursuing a macro rather than a micro view of mythic function would need to examine the cultural analyses of other scholars who paint with a broader brush.
A broad view of cultural function is precisely the labour of Bronislaw
Malinowski and his philosophy of functionalism, the belief that cultural practice serves to meet the satisfaction of functional needs for human survival. If Levi-Strauss can be said to pursue the “how” of cultural operation, Malinowski can be said to pursue the
“why” in his Scientific Theory o f Culture (1944). The functionality of culture, however,
68 is far from simple in its action. Malinowski writes, “[W]e do not find a simple or exclusively oriented cultural apparatus, aiming at the satisfaction of hunger or related exclusively to reproduction or safety or the maintenance of health.” Rather, he writes,
“What actually occurs is a chained series of institutions...” (110) Malinowski includes myth in his list of institutions, writing, “[C]harter, above all, is a piece of customary law, backed up by retrospective mythological elements in tradition,” which require “a full understanding of the role of symbolism in culture. ..” (111) Myth is among those
“traditionally established values, programs, and principles of behaviour [that] correspond [...] to our concept of drive,” that is, drive as the organic impulse for survival (140). Malinowski concludes that the survival impulse “can never be eliminated from any cultural performance, simple or complex. The reason why an artifice, a habit, or an idea or belief becomes permanently incorporated into a culture, primitive or civilized, is because it enters an instrumental series at one stage or another, and because it remains as an integral part of an instrumental series” (141-142).
Malinowski reminds us that everything we do draws its inspiration from our innate biological drive to continue living as long and as well possible. His functionalist focus on the survival instinct is especially relevant to our examination of myth and adolescence because of the many survivalist implications of coming-of-age: self- support, self-discovery, reproduction, the assimilation of the lessons of past generations and contribution of new skills to future generations, etc. Malinowski also informs us of some of the possible sources of the anxieties of adolescence; the “instrumental series” is replete with habits, ideas, and beliefs passed forward since the beginning of a culture’s awareness of itself. These instruments in the series that confront young people whose own self-awareness is beginning to mature might overwhelm them with choices because
69 they are all, by implication, chained to the drive instinct. Malinowski’s articulation of the scholar’s need to understand ’‘the full understanding of the role of symbolism in culture" might seem obvious, but it makes all the more vital our consideration of the poetic and fictional products of individuals’ and cultural formations’ coming-of-age in the modem West as we examine this culture’s traditions and their relationship to what
Malinowski calls “drive.”
Walter Burkert both builds on and challenges the ideas of Levi-Strauss and
Malinowski. Indeed, the bulk of the first chapter of Structure and History in Greek
Myth and Ritual (1979) concerns itself with challenging structuralism’s adequacy as a scientific approach for studying myth. In a footnote, he writes that structuralism does not fulfill the most basic requirement to preserve mythic phenomena and to explain them (12). Burkert counters structuralism and presents his own argument in the form of four theses. The first is that “[m]yth belongs to the more general class of traditional tale” (1). Notably, Burkert employs the word “belongs,” which might or might not intentionally complicate the meaning of the first thesis. For example, how exactly does
“belonging” describe the relationship of myth to such tales? What, indeed, does
152 “traditional” mean? The second thesis begins where Propp and Levi-Strauss leave off: myths are composed of a “sequence of motifemes,” a “program of action” (15). The third thesis states, “tale structures, as sequences of motifemes, are founded on the basic biological or cultural programs of action” (18). Finally, his fourth thesis claims, as a kind of summation of the previous three, that “[t]he specific character of myth seems to lie neither in the structure nor in the content of a tale, but in the use to which it is put;
18 Vladimir Propp, author of Morphology of the Folktale (1928) is widely credited as being the first folklorist to reduce the narrative elements of traditional tales to their most basic, indivisible components. 70 and this would be my final thesis: myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial
reference to something o f collective importance” (23; author’s italics).
As seen in his title, Burkert believes myth and ritual are linked, but as
corresponding equivalents rather than intertwined dependents. A myth, or a traditional
tale with no factual basis, illustrates an “action program” that promotes group survival
(14-18). Likewise, a ritual entails a series of categorised steps or stages that portray an
“action program” (57). Burkert’s theoretical contribution of the “action program”
relates to Vladimir Propp’s “functions” in the analysis of Russian folktales, but Burkert
expands these functions to describe sequences of activities that accomplish basic life
tasks, “from the reality of life, nay from biology” (15). Burkert makes a second major
contribution to myth and ritual theory: “crystallization” (18-22). Crystallization
explains how myths and rituals not only come about due to action programs arising
from necessity, but also from historical contexts. This explains the flexibility of myth
and ritual to take on many different guises in the various cultures they might encounter
or into which they might evolve—all without sacrificing the initial action programs that
influenced their creation. Herein lies what I see as Burkert’s most valuable contribution to my mythic analysis of adolescence: the flexibility of a traditional tale to be recast
from old structures into new symbolisms in apparently inexhaustible ways; this
mechanism is nearly indistinguishable from Castle’s description of the Bildungsroman genre’s interaction through Adorno’s negative dialectics with the concept of “failure” not as an end to a particular narrative or way of telling a narrative, but as a transformative and self-perpetuating narrative apparatus that survives as long as its host culture does.
71 Arnold Van Gennep’s interest in myth and ritual developed around the theme of coming-of-age. In his introduction to Van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage (1909), Solon
Kimbali distils Van Gennep’s major theoretical contribution to the examination of the ceremonies and rituals that accompany the transition between life stages. Kimbali writes: “It was possible to distinguish three major phases: separation [...] transition [...] and incorporation.” It is, of course, the phase of transition that should most interest us
(vii). During the early twentieth century, when Van Gennep was writing The Rites of
Passage, he observed that “the only clearly marked social division remaining in modern society is that which distinguishes between the secular and the religious worlds— between the profane and the sacred” (1). To that end, he concludes: “So great is the incompatibility between the profane and the sacred worlds that a man cannot pass from one to the other without going through an intermediate stage” (Ibid). There is thus a certain power, a sacred power in intermediate or liminal stages. To speak of the liminal is to conjure the sacred, though not necessarily in the stereotypical magico-religious terms of that category. Van Gennep admits that rites of passage need not be neatly balanced with equal time and consideration given to each stage, which indeed sets the scene for the exaggeration of or dwelling in one stage longer than another. He writes,
“[Ajlthough a complete scheme of rites includes preliminal rites (rites of separation), liminal rites (rites of transition), and postliminal rites (rites of incorporation), in specific instances these three types are not always equally important or equally elaborated” (11; author’s parentheses).
The cyclicality of myth meshes with the cyclicality of rites of passage in that
“such changes are regarded as real and important [are] demonstrated by the recurrence of rites...” In essence, reality—and myth—are based in repetition (13). The qualities
72 of all rites, whether cast in a literal or symbolic light, “include a passage over or across something, joint prayers and sacrifices, and so forth. One notes the role of intermediaries.” These qualities “facilitate the changing of condition without violent social disruptions or an abrupt cessation of individual and collective life” (48). Van
Gennep writes of pubertal rites at some length and with some specificity. He begins his discussion by professing “physiological puberty and ‘social puberty’ are essentially different and only rarely converge” (65). He then suggests it might be better to refer to such rites as simply “initiation rites” (66). Initiation rites concerning the assignment of adult status by recognizing sexual maturity “are rites of separation from the asexual world, and they are followed by rites of incorporation into the world of sexuality and, in all societies and in all social groups, into a group confined to persons of one sex or the other” (67). The mental (and sometimes physical) paralysis sometimes ascribed to the adolescent might have some origin in humanity’s tribal background. In some tribes’ rites of initiation, Van Gennep writes the novice “is considered dead, and he remains dead for the duration of his novitiate.” The “death” or “physical and mental weakening
[...] is undoubtedly intended to make him lose all recollection of his childhood existence” (75). The allure of the ineffable and exalted spiritual experience might lend itself to the desire for those who undergo rites of passage to dwell within them.
According to Van Gennep, “In short [...] as a result of this passage through the sacred world [during the rites of passage], the initiate retains a special magico-religious quality” (82). This quality, along with the concept of ritual liminality, casts a long shadow over our examination of adolescence, both in terms of a special time of transition, but as a period during which one might become isolated or trapped in that transition.
73 In the magico-religious vein of Van Gennep, Mircea Eliade writes that myths originating in archaic societies share certain characteristics, among them the history of the acts of supernatural beings (usually including the creation of the universe and its inner-workings, including the behaviours of its denizens, namely humans), a history that is both true and sacred. Knowing these myths enables one to control and manipulate them, ritually, ceremonially, or by other means of performance. The myths therefore affect the lives of those who know them by seizing them and making them recollect and apply mythic power to their present life situations (18-19). “In short, myths reveal that the World, man, and life have a supernatural origin and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary” (19). Again, we find in the scholarly work of
Eliade and in those whose interests intersect with his the recapitulation of myth due to the uncertainty of modernity, and a resulting reactionary spirit back toward classical, tribal, and other ancient traditions.
There is a certain prestige, as Eliade puts it, to the perfection either implied or outright assigned to various beginnings in myth and ritual— the beginnings to which tradition aspires, though not always with total success. He writes, “The idea that perfection was at the beginning appears to be quite old. In any case, it is extremely widespread. Then too, it is an idea capable of being indefinitely reinterpreted and incorporated into an endless variety of [...] conceptions” (51). The last sentence is key to understanding how and why adolescence, with its inherent qualities of beginnings in the creation of the “whole” individual, could become sacrosanct, or even perceived as not worth departing. Perhaps this is due to a sociocultural misunderstanding or ignorance of the totality of mythic-ritualistic function, perhaps not. Nonetheless, there is a long history of preference for beginnings rather than transitions or endings, and
74 Eliade does well, for our purposes, to expose this erroneous state of affairs. He does so by examining the transformation of myth over time, from the creation myths of the universe to the creation of human beings, then by expanding on to the eventual degeneration of supernatural or sacred beings into mortals. The distance between the divine and the mortal begins to shrink, until the universal mechanisms governing—or governed by—the former more clearly infiltrate the latter (108-11).
Modern Poetry as Cultural Context
Having already drawn the connections between myth and the symbolic and narrative vocabulary of culture, I now return to the symbolic and narrative art forms that record modern Western adolescence and its modes of operation. I will elaborate on the appropriateness of modern poetry as context for works participating in the
Bildungsroman genre, first with the help of Stephen Burt’s Forms o f Youth, as well as with the help of theoretical writings of selected poets and theorists of poetry from the nineteenth century to the present. Then, I will further consider the Bildungsroman genre, especially its transformation from Goethe to the present, as well as lay out its modernist form as a vehicle for self-critique, self-destruction, and nonetheless self perpetuation. This will set the stage for an examination of modern poetry and the
Bildungsroman in which I identify myth as an informing force for both genres. From there, I will consider whether these genres emerged alongside the modern conception of adolescence, and if they developed the codes of meaning and expectations now commonly associated with adolescence.
As stated in my introduction, I am using a comparative backdrop of Western
Anglophone poetry written between 1850 and 1950 as a cross-section of historical,
75 national, geographical, and cultural forces to gauge what individuals were thinking about themselves and their circumstances during and around that period. In the modern lyrical poetic record, I am in search of a modern ‘'feeling” or "way of being.” I have already mentioned the findings of Abrams, Ong, Bloom, and Zumthor that connect the form, content, and spirit of the age contained within poetry, as well as the historical lineage of poets; however, there are several other poets and theorists whose observations are worth noting. The first, chronologically, is Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the quintessential American poets of that country’s early-modern period. In his essay, “The Poet” (1850), he addresses poets he considers the true voice of the populace, a voice that thrives in and from the people and that concerns itself with the spirit of its age. Emerson’s poet is a seer of universal truths who articulates what all feel but what only specially-endowed poets can articulate; their imagination is the liberator of humanity because of its capacity to share transcendental visions not only of what is, but what could be (13, 15). Emerson also foreshadows Walt Whitman’s exaltation of the American spirit in the decades to come. Both poets belong to a modern and transcendental movement that is self-conscious and self-reflexive, and that is also conscious of its chosen role as both a literary trend and a cultural movement for the spiritual advancement of a nation—advancement based on universal and democratic striving to improve the individual’s internal and external conditions.
Around the same time and across the Atlantic, Matthew Arnold was writing in the “Preface” to his first edition Poems about the importance of “architectonics,” the process of achieving unity by subordinating form and content to the whole of the poem to better depict human action (21). He condemns poems written for the sake of single lines or passages, stray metaphors, images, and fancy expressions (23). Scattered
76 images and happy turns of phrase, he writes, can only provide partial effects, and do not contribute to unity. Arnold urges modem poets to shun allusiveness and not to fall into the temptation of gross subjectivity (12). He exhorts them to achieve the poetic greatness of the ancients and to become exemplars of a new poetic and literary greatness. He feels that poets’ seriousness of purpose and composition has guaranteed the survival of great poetry, and that such poems are worthy of emulation in the future.
His choice of words, “human action,” is of special import because it refers to what
Arnold believed good poetry does: capture human action, from the grand gestures of nations to the simple spirituality of a humble family.
Later, two decades into the twentieth century, the American T.S. Eliot, writing nonetheless firmly in the English and European literary context, in “Tradition and the
Individual Talent” from The Sacred Wood (1920), continues with Arnold’s classicist supremacy and elaborates on the pre-eminence of traditions that validate poetic advancements. Like Arnold, Eliot prefers a historical sensibility in poetry, one of a relationship to the past as well as to the elements of present creators’ own novel productions. New poets’ work, if of sufficient quality, alters the order he calls the
“Mind of Europe” by their private, subjective minds, though the private and subjective are always subsumed into the Mind or canon. This renders the poet a depersonalised vessel or medium without the total metaphysical, individual unity described by Arnold, but with certain limited features of feelings, emotions, and energies that are synthesised into the greater unity (9-10). The presentation of poetic signs, properly integrated into the canon, then correlate to emotions in an “objective correlative,” or formulaic correspondence, an idea also proposed in “Hamlet and His Problems” from Eliot’s same
1920 collection.
77 As regards the transmissibility of “feeling” through poetry, English poet and critic A.E. Housman’s essay “The Name and Nature of Poetry” (1933) meditates on this possibility ardently. Poetry, he writes, should appeal to emotions rather than to intellect, a theme he reiterates often in the essay (38-39, 41). For Housman, the transfusing of emotion or sensory vibrations between the poet and reader is the
“peculiar function” of poetry (12). He discounts poetical ideals that claim exceptionalism—the notion that poetry expresses itself in ways that prose cannot—and furthermore that poetry surpasses prose for the effecting of verbal communication, cannot be paraphrased, and is somehow ahistorical. Houseman disclaims these beliefs, amending the record that no truth is too precious, no observation too profound, and no sentiment too passionate to be expressed in prose (36). It is possible, however, that some ideas are expressed more favourably in poetry, enhancing their potency or transmissibility (Ibid). Poetry’s emotional and sensory facility distinguishes it from other literary forms, and that produces the “peculiar” effect Housman has observed between poets— living or dead—and their readers.
Housman’s “vibration” metaphor reappears in American Charles Olson’s
“Projective Verse” (1950). He writes:
[I]f [the artist] is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secret objects to share. And by an inverse law his shapes will make their own way. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man. (25)
Although Olson’s visual imagery of the poetic mechanism is somewhat different from
Housman’s (an aural-oral analogy as compared to a visual-physical one), the basic idea is quite similar. Olson continues, “A poem is energy transferred from where the poet
78 got it [...] by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to the reader. The poem itself must be a high energy-construct and an energy-discharge” (16). If one were forming the impression from Olson that he believes in a continuum of poetic energy that surpasses space, time, and human mortality, he confirms this suspicion: “One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception” (17). There is, then, a universality and eternal quality to poetry since it is, after all, energy, which can neither be created nor destroyed. Similarly, fields of energy affect other fields of energy, so, at least according to Olson, any energies from human thought or action become part of the projected verse in the poetic continuum.
The containment in literature of the historical conditions of poems also finds a proponent in Marxist theories of cultural productions, which yield fruitful insights into the contextual effects of history— namely the politics wrought by economic forces—on cultural texts. Critics who have sought the politico-economic residue in culture include
Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, and Anthony Easthope, who have written extensively on poetry as a discourse interacting with material ideology. Williams, in
Culture and Society (1958), makes the case for historical materialism as the superior analytical stance for cultural criticism from the beginning of the British Industrial
Revolution until the mid-twentieth century (265-284); Jameson, in his influential
Political Unconscious (1981), sets himself apart as a pre-eminent Marxist critic and cultural analyst whose motto “always historicize” opens his book and to which he is faithful throughout his exploration of how literary texts must be analyzed within historical interpretive frameworks (1, 3).
Easthope, in Poetry as Discourse (1983), makes slight variations on the
Hegelian-Marxist technique described above, classifying poetry as the reification of 79 poetic language (15). However, poetry, despite the historicisation of poetic language and of the poetic object, best foregrounds the utterance (16). Easthope concedes that poetry is governed by formalism rather than contentism, and always occurs within the material discourses that are inevitably affected by ideologies, societal and social; nonetheless, it is these discourses that provide poetry’s autonomy (17). For example, the English poetic discourse tends to be materially determined by the consistent shaping of signifiers in it, which is ideologically determined by being a product of history, and subjectively determined by readers (47). Paraphrasing Robert Graves and Linda Rising,
Easthope agrees with them that metre is a convention of society and that the variations therein are the assertion of the individual (68). Thus, despite the inescapable “prison of history,” poets and readers are liberated by the very special exception of the great chain of poetic being, that gives them a voice, projected indefinitely from their present into the future, that subjectively captures what they think and feel at a given moment.
The Bildungsroman: Changing Format& Function
The Bildungsroman genre acts in much the same way as modem poetry, given its tendencies to transmit feelings as well as the vocabulary of development and formative experience. Of course, the lineage of modem poetry is as old as language, itself, whereas the Bildungsroman emerges from a much more recent place and time. G.B.
Tennyson writes that the Bildungsroman, or “novel of formation,” is “a coinage of the
German critic and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, who first used it in 1870 in a biography of Friedrich Schleiermacher.” The style depicts “the development of a human being in various stages, forms, and periods of life” (135). Critic Karl
Morgenstem had actually referred to the genre’s existence fifty years earlier in a series
80 of lectures, saying the purpose of genre was twofold: first, to portray “the hero’s
Bildung (formation) as it begins and proceeds to a certain level of perfection,” and second, to inspire “the Bildung of the reader to a greater extent than any other type of novel” (Emmel 78; author’s italics). The Bildungsroman tradition became and remains the basis for the Western literary conception of adolescence. Both the modem tradition of the Bildungsroman and the classical tradition of myth share what Carl Ladensack describes as “an elaborate figurative representation of man’s continuous struggle to overcome problems” (403).
In her oft-cited treatise on what Castle would call the “classical” Bildungsroman as a genre, Marianne Hirsch writes of the basic requirements a novel must have to be considered a Bildungsroman. It must, generally, follow an individual’s development within a sociocultural context, including apprenticeships and other quests or searches for meaning within and outside oneself. Additionally, the genre might require the hero or heroine to experience tragedy or loss to compel him or her into the world from the relative security of childhood. There might be additional “growing pains” during the long process of maturation as the hero or heroine is forced to compromise between his or her needs or desires and those of the sociocultural context. Finally, the hero or heroine integrates the sociocultural order, including its expectations and requirements, into him or herself while retaining some individualist principles and traits (298-305).
While Castle, Hirsch, and others have discerned the parameters of the Bildungsroman, and so many authors and critics have participated in its survival as a recognisable genre within said parameters, Castle gives us a curious warning of what would likely happen to the genre if it fit too well within its own borders: “Starting in the 1890s, the modernist Bildungsroman begins to critique the very society it was meant to validate
81 and legitimize [...] Had this critical tendency not emerged, the Bildungsroman might well have followed the Edwardian family romance into obscurity” (23). And so it was the turn into self-critique, a curious and exceptional deviation of the genre that had once held society’s ideals as at least equal to, if not superior to, those of the individual, that makes the Bildungsroman a special vehicle for the examination of the self in and against culture.
In the preface to Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman, Castle paints a bleak picture of coming-of-age and the novelistic genre that narrates and helps shape it:
We have come a long way from the world of Wilhelm Meister, whose happy future is determined by a social class that welcomes him as an equal [...] The hero’s experience with the social world yields no meaningful relationship [...] [T]hat is to say, the hero gleans no meaning of himself through his normative connections with that world. The social contexts for Bildung—vocation and recreation, personal relationships (marriage, parenthood, friendship), social obligations— persist but with a sense of cynicism and loss. (14-15)
These are dire words from a scholar who has only just begun a protracted exercise in the reading of a subgenre of the Bildungsroman. Castle continues: “[F]or the nineteenth century generally, the heroes of the Bildungsroman are always returning to the authorities they have spurned, not because they have seen ‘the error of their ways,’ but because they have, for all their efforts, found no other home” (23). “Always returning” immediately reminds us of the work of Eliade on the “eternal return” of arriving repeatedly at the origin of things.
The collision of teleological time with mythic time around the end of the 1890s has several sources. Castle writes: “Paul Sheehan, in his study of the relationship between humanism and modernism, notes the critical role that the Bildungsroman plays in the modernist period [...] [H]e is arguing that there is a productive tension between 82 the conventionality of the Bildungsroman form (both its narrative structure and its humanist thematics) and the procedures of experimental modernism” (25). One of those procedures is most certainly myth. Needless to say, experimental modernism was rife with encounters with myth, often under the guise of revisionist mythmaking that modified classical myth into more contemporary language and contexts. However, this is only one example of what modernism did with myth, and since my interest goes beyond identifying analogues between classical myths and modem revisionist texts, the
“productive tension” Castle summarises from Sheehan—the tendency toward mythic thinking more deeply embedded in texts rather than myths as content in the surface of texts—turns out a more productive jumping-off point for the mythic consideration of adolescence than simply identifying modernist revision of myth.
Rather than myth, though, Castle focuses on the Bildungsroman’s failure. We soon find that failure is much more of a complex and productive phenomenon than it is commonly given credit. Castle writes, “That modernist Bildungsromane so frequently deal with failure suggests a critique of the cultural conditions in which Bildung takes place and which deprive individuals of the freedom to think critically about their identities and how they relate to structures of power” (26). Soon, we discover that failure has a function within the greater cultural critique of Theodor Adorno in Negative
Dialectics. Castle “connects] this cultural problematic to the problem in philosophy that Theodor Adorno diagnoses in Negative Dialectics... [the] failure of culture and the failure of Enlightenment thinking about the subject, subjectivity identity, and dialectics, to the failure of a way of thinking that produced the Bildungsroman as the quintessential narrative of the sovereign and autonomous, harmoniously self-identical subject of
83 Bildung” (Ibid). Castle traces the seeds of failure to the archetypal early
Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister, and its author:
Goethe [...] understood the importance of finding narrative forms of representing self-development [...] The elements and values of Bildung were formulated in a region of Europe that was constantly undergoing population shifts, invasions, religious pressures, intellectual discoveries [...] Goethe’s novel was written in the relatively halcyon early 1790s, when events in France could still be regarded favourably by liberal- minded Enlightenment thinkers elsewhere. The thematics of socialization that we see in Wilhelm Meister, therefore, reflect confidence in the possibilities of a rapprochement between the individual who seeks the aesthetic unity of his faculties and a benign, authoritarian, protocapitalist agrarian utopia unscathed by potentially hostile neighbors. (36-37)
For the Bildungsroman to work, then, as a genre that narrated self-development, it needed a stable cultural context in which to be written and read. It needed also a context in which the individual who becomes subsumed by culture in the process of
Bildung has somewhere useful to go and something useful to do. If such stability is unattainable, then the culture should at least share the protagonist’s individualistic
“fighting spirit” against forces that would challenge his or her harmonious development within him or herself and in culture; the culture should also not attempt to interfere maliciously with this development.
Castle attributes to John Stuart Mill the reworking of a foundational principle of
Bildung: the cultivation of the self and the moral imperative to concomitantly cultivate others (52). Castle writes, “[Mill’s] vision stresses a compromise between the requirements of the state and the desire of the individual to pursue self-development...”
(Ibid) Therein lies one of the important turns away from “absolute freedom” that begins to steer the Bildungsroman genre and the narratives produced within it toward the
84 inevitable failure endemic to the form and content of the modernist Bildungsroman.19
Castle describes this process: “[Ojver time the processes that Max Weber so well describes—bureaucratization, rationalization, instrumentalization—transformed the desire to cultivate oneself, to nurture one's inner culture, into the desire for social success and for a social pedagogy that teaches young men and women the ‘way of the world”’ (53). The notions of the self prevalent when Goethe was writing Wilhelm
Meister were to “become obsolete in the face of a rationalized educational system and a bureaucratized market economy. Self-cultivation becomes subject formation, inner culture becomes socialization, and the paths toward Bildung become the ‘mediated routes’ of social mobility” (57). Castle, of course, generalises here since this movement does not occur uniformly across the Western world or along the same timeline.
Nonetheless, his statement holds true in the literary analyses in the coming chapters.
For Castle, the Bildungsroman reaches a crisis point during the late nineteenth century. He writes, “[T]he modernist Bildungsroman, in its representation of an unbridgeable chasm, highlights this specific aspect of late modernity: that the project of the self that began in the late eighteenth century, which should, theoretically, extend itself into the future forever, exhausts itself in the failure of cultural representations to offer satisfying narratives of self-development” (63). This all seems simple enough, but what modernist writers do with the Bildungsroman results in a fascinating exercise in
“eternal return”—the deployment, intentionally or not, of non-teleological, circular mythic thinking to rework the genre in such a way that re-enables it to narrate self development in a world that is apparently anti-self and pro-“subject.” Castle writes:
19 Goethe did not believe in “absolute freedom,” as the interventions of his wise literary characters into the lives of his more callow ones demonstrates, and thus even the author credited with “inventing” the Bildungsroman might be equally guilty of beginning the process of uninventing it. 85 “[T]o say that modernist writers recuperate classical Bildung is to say that they resist the totalizing norms for self-development imposed by an advanced capitalist society” (68).
In the modernist period, “the Bildungsroman critiques these modes of closure and offers alternatives that are open and fluid. Inner culture reveals a ground in contrariness and nonidentity, while aesthetic education seeks less the dialectics of harmony than the dialectics of resistance” (71-72). In this resistance to closure, totalisation, conformity, telos, there is a tendency to drift comfortably toward the mythic, toward the ultimate traditionalism in human storytelling.
In this chapter I have given my justification for grouping modern poetry, artistic texts about adolescence, and myth studies. I have challenged contemporary assumptions about adolescence and coming of age, especially those couched in universal, scientific, or naturalistic terms. I have also explored the form and function of the Bildungsroman, and specifically the modernist Bildungsroman’s junction with myth as it moved away from its heritage of self-cultivation toward modes of self-critique, self-destruction, and self-perpetuation through a failure that actually allows for success in self-discovery. Finally, I have proposed that a new assessment of adolescence as a mythic function is necessary to escape the liminal trap in which it is entwined. In the next chapter I will use the theoretical texts and ideas surveyed above to analyse poetic and fictional literary texts that exhibit the evolution of the coming-of-age narrative through stages of development that gradually grind to a halt within the parameters of the classical Bildungsroman, priming them for a reworking that intersects with mythic thought. This intersection also occurs at a crossroads between the liminal trap and freedom from it, and the style of contact that we and our literary and poetic protagonists have with myth very much determines whether the trap prevails.
86 Chapter II: The Literary Transition from Coming-of-Age to Halting Development
I concluded the previous chapter by asking whether the liminal trap will consume literary protagonists and ourselves in the Western sociocultural context, halting our coming-of-age, or whether we will prevail through a mixture of flexibility within the Bildungsroman genre, the freedom expressed by modem poetry, and the resurgence of mythic thought. The proposition rests upon the basic assumption of the discrete existence of the individual and of that individual as somehow sacrosanct—or even divine. Another equally crucial assumption is that the text can interact with the individual and his or her sociocultural context in a way that readers and writers can appreciably affect and be affected by.
In this chapter, I set out first to examine the conditions for a discussion about the individuals in our literary examples, both as characters in texts and as proxies for those outside the texts. Then, I will introduce the concepts of success and failure as they relate to the formation of the individual and as they are manifested in modem poetry and in the early classical Bildungsroman genre. From there, I will demonstrate the departure of the coming-of-age myth from the narrative of a ritualised survival mechanism toward a potentially dangerous turn toward the liminal trap. In the liminal trap of modern adolescence, the individual’s developmental period expands into a spectrum, with one extreme being a perpetual refuge and the other being a wresting of the individual from any roots in tradition or sociocultural organisation. We will encounter various modern factors in our literary excursions that will support this analysis, including war, revolution, race, class, sexuality, and nationality. First, though, we must return to one of the earliest recorded narratives in human history, the heroic narrative, as historicised and interpreted by Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye. 87 Frye, in studying literary modes of fiction based on the heroic narrative, discerns over time the individualisation of the hero from god to mortal. In the first of his four essays inAnatomy o f Criticism (1957), Frye sets out to develop a theory of literary modes. The mode, Frye writes, is a “conventional power of action assumed about the chief characters in fictional literature, or the corresponding attitude assumed by the poet toward his audience in thematic literature. Such modes tend to succeed one another in historical sequence” (366). One differentiates between modes by the hero’s relationship to others and to his environment, which produces five distinct categories. The first is myth, in which the hero is singularly superior to others and to his or her environment.
The second, romance, features a similarly superior hero, but whose superiority rests on a measurable hierarchy of degrees. In the third mode, high mimesis, the hero is superior to others, but not to the environment. The fourth mode, low mimesis, has a hero equal to others and subject to the environment. Finally, the fifth mode, irony, is ironic in that the hero is inferior to others and the environment (33^1). The hero’s relationship to society provides additional aspects of the shadings between comedy and tragedy.
Examples of the five modes in both their comedic and tragic guises are numerous. I will concentrate on the mythic, for obvious reasons. Mythic comedy concerns heroes who gain the acceptance of the gods, and who therefore ascend to their status. The stories of Mercury and Flercules, or of Jesus in the New Testament, are among Frye’s examples. These stories give the impression of fantastic mythical realms and eternal worlds as vehicles for the themes of acceptance, integration, and assumption into a mythical order (43). Mythic tragedy, on the other hand, concerns heroes who are dying or isolated, and who gain the sympathy of the natural environment. The stories of
Orpheus, and again Hercules and Jesus, this time from the tragic angle, are examples
88 (36). In keeping with the idea that the modes follow each other in a sequence, we might conclude that the failure of the hero to be classically heroic in the ironic mode leads to a resetting of the sequence to the beginning. This would follow from the notion that in modernity, we might recapitulate myth when faced with the extinction of faith in post-
Enlightenment institutions. What we have, then, is a running through the cycle of modes, from mythic to ironic, in which heroes descend, in degrees, from godlike to less- than-human. Dissatisfied with the descent of the heroic narrative, we reach back to the earliest vestiges of human culture for a panacea in myth. However, it is not possible to return to the beginning having known and experienced the rest of the cycle, and the mythic mode is tainted.
Nonetheless, we can be satisfied that whatever our predicament over what to do with the heroic narrative, Frye has presented one account of how heroes transform from the divine to the mortal, and how myths may have become personalised, decoupled from mythic time, and demythologised. The basic narrative components of myth survive, but they are no longer part of a sacred realm with its own temporal (or atemporal) character. Myths lose their ability to explain, edify, and comfort, and become no more than the stories of everyday life composed by everyday people. Even if we return to myth to explain our world and ourselves when reason has failed us, we are set at odds between a mythic mode to which we aspire and a mythic mode corrupted by the unleashing of teleological history, and the preconditions for the liminal trap present themselves. The reasons for this devolution of myth can be attributed to innumerable changes in the sociocultural context: contact with other cultures, technological advancement, the advent of rational and instrumental thinking, the rise of humanistic thinking, etc.
89 A discussion of “demythologisation” must include the scholarly debate in which
the process of demythologising a narrative is most complete and most contentious: the
reinterpretation of the Bible from a mythic text into an historic text. I am following
Frye’s grouping of biblical myth with classical myth, which he performs in his analysis
of the mythic modes, and making a strong association between the mythic in the Bible
and the mythic, in general. Christian theologian Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976) coined
the term “demythologization” while he was reading much of the Bible as a myth in
order to open it to reinterpretation by human reason.20 He was attempting to historicise
religion in a way that made it more relevant to late modernity, and to bridge the chasm
between religion and post-Enlightenment views of history, science, and reason.
Bultmann writes:
The whole conception of the world, which is presupposed in the preaching of Jesus as in the New Testament generally, is mythological [...] This conception of the world we call mythological because it is different from the conception of the world which has been formed and developed since its inception in ancient Greece and which has been accepted by all modem men. In this modem conception of the world the cause-and-effect nexus is fundament [...] In any case, modem science does not believe that the course of nature can be interrupted or, so to speak, perforated by supernatural powers. (15)
Roger A. Johnson summarises Bultmann’s procedure as the “[stripping] away from the
New Testament its antiquated world view, its objectifying conceptuality, its spatial and
cosmological images” (2). This radical departure should be undertaken because,
Bultmann writes, “[w]e must ask whether the eschatological preaching and the
mythological sayings as a whole contain a still deeper meaning which is concealed
under the cover of mythology. If that is so, let us abandon the mythological conceptions
precisely because we want to retain their deeper meaning” (18). Through
20 The modern demythologisation project began with David Strauss in Das Leben Jesu (1 8 3 5 ), in w hich the author attempted to historicise the figure o f Jesus by describing His supernatural deeds as mythical. 90 demythologisation, Bultmann’s aim “is not to eliminate the mythological statements but to interpret them. It is a method o f hermeneutics” (Ibid).
Demythologisation has spurred serious contention among scholars. Johnson warns that, “[ljike natural science, so the science of history demythologizes, not because it takes away an inappropriate objectifying conceptuality, but precisely because it insists upon regarding the past in a way consistent with its own objectifying perspective”
(163). Charles T. Mathewes goes so far as to call the term itself “a kind of hubris, implicit in the assumption that we can [...] in some final way get to an absolute language with which to interpret reality” (204). He argues that our language, scientific though it may be, continues to coexist alongside myth, and to attempt an extraction of myth would be nihilistic. The process of demythologisation “can itself become a tragedy, can turn against its makers, leaving them trapped in a final, absolute myth, ‘the iron cage’ of epistemic sterility” (Ibid). Mathewes’ words echo uncannily my anxieties about the liminal trap and the mythic problems of modern adolescence. Leszek
Kolakowski also echoes Burt’s terminology about the negative dialectics of failure, writing Bultmann “is doomed to failure at the outset. First, what he assumes to be a
‘modem’ worldview is not modern at all: the resurrection was as impossible to Jesus’ contemporaries as it is to us; on the other hand, contemporary people believe in absurdities no less than ancient people did. Modern science does not pretend to offer a global understanding of reality...” (102)
Linda Woodhead provides an alternate mechanism for demythologisation from
Bultmann’s and those of similar rationalists. Hers is a feminist critique that criticises myth not so much on the basis of history or scientific reason, but on the experiences that underpin truth. The result is that once-convincing texts cannot be regarded as truth 91 because they contain descriptions of events that do not and cannot line up with the personal experiences of the reader. She writes:
In tracing back the authority of Christian belief to the self-interested strategies of patriarchal clerics, the feminist construal of Christianity is of course inherently critical. It undermines Christian dogma’s constitutive claim to be true and revelatory and suggests that it is in fact nothing more than what Ruether refers to as “codified collective experience” [...] Not that feminist theologians want to deny the importance and value of religious ‘symbols’—rather they want to stress their provisionality and revisability and their subordination to the individual religious “experience” they inadequately express. (194)
Again, although Woodhead and the others are discussing myth in the Christian context, as Frye did, I apply their explications to other myths. I am not alone in doing so; Eliade, giving the process a slightly different name—“demythicization”—notes in his comparative studies of myth a point in a culture’s history at which mythic time gives way to historical time. Eliade writes: “[A]t a certain moment in History—especially in
Greece and India but also in Egypt—an elite begins to lose interest in thisdivine history and arrives (as in Greece) at the point of no longer believing in the myths...'" (Ill; author’s italics and parentheses) For the Greeks, the arrival at the “essential” no longer involved a regression of ritualistic means, but an effort of logical thought (112). This shift, however, did not eliminate myth or mythic thought. Only the “awakening of the historical consciousness in the Judaeo-Christianity and its propagation by Hegel his successors [...] that myth could be left behind. But we hesitate to say that mythical thought has been abolished” (Ibid).
The critiques of Bultmann’s demythologisation project share common threads, those of anxieties over the retroactive historicisation of narratives written before history as we know it. To do so shapes a tension between myth and pseudo-myth, with the result being the necessity of making a choice between two options: leave myth well 92 enough alone as it stands, or historicise myth at the expense of forcing new meanings upon it. Between this binary is a void impossible to straddle, even if we supplant the old myths with new myths (for example the myth of science as all-encompassing, omniscient, and omnipotent). What is pivotal, however, is the attempt to make ancient myth relevant in in recent centuries, for it betrays an implicit confession that our metanarratives and institutions do not yet hold all the answers. In modem poetry and the Bildungsroman genre, the myth of coming-of-age suits our needs, even if we do not fully appreciate its mythic aspects.
From Frye, we see that the protagonists of mythic narratives fall from grace and become men. From Bultmann, we have a call to historicise the mythic. We also read in his critics’ work a warning that this process, if it can be successfully performed at all, is fraught with epistemological and even existential dangers. Still, whether or not we choose to accept the historicisation and personalisation of myth, we must recognise the preconditions for the idea of the self. Charles Taylor calls these the “sources of the self.” The self, he writes, is “something that can exist only in a space of moral issues, and this means that ‘to know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand’ to the good” (49, 27). On the other hand, the relation goes the other way as well and so “our understandings of the good are tied up with our understanding of the self (105). Taylor articulates three main sources: an inwardness that encompasses self-control and self exploration, an affirmation of quotidian life, and an expressivist conception of nature.
Taylor writes: “[W]hat I am as a self is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me” (34). He recognises the social aspect of selfhood in that “one is a self only among other selves” (35).
93 Taylor’s assessment of modem art resonates with the revising myth to suit present-day needs. He writes that art can be “epiphanic”: “this notion of a work of art
[is] as the locus of a manifestation which brings us into the presence of something which is otherwise inaccessible, and which is of the highest moral or spiritual significance” (419). We may search for epiphany, a spiritual exercise, because reason has failed us. He writes:
We could say that rationality is no longer defined substantively, in terms of the order of being, but rather procedurally, in terms of the standards by which we construct orders in science and life. For Plato, to be rational we have to be right about the order of things. For Descartes rationality means thinking according to certain canons. The judgement now turns on properties of the activity of thinking rather than on the substantive beliefs that come from it. [...] Rationality is now an internal property of subjective thinking, rather than consisting in its vision of reality. (156)
He adds: “[F]or Descartes the whole point of the reflexive turn is to achieve a quite self- sufficient certainty [...] to give ourselves the certainty we seek seems to have been the key insight in Descartes’s decisive moment of inspiration...” (156-7) Our interest should be what happens when faith in reason, and in the reason of the individual, is no longer sufficient to give ourselves certainty about our lives. If “[t]he moral or spiritual order of things must come to us indexed to a personal vision,” then the onus is solely upon the individual to cope with myths containing no innate space for personal vision
(428). And so if the historical narrative is the source of meaning, the instrumentality of reason inherent to it inevitably places constraints upon what can be known of myth in the post-mythic mind.
The turn from myth to internalised, subject-oriented reason as the dominant worldview in the West can be measured, if we position ourselves as historians, by the
94 shifts in the representation of reality in literature, specifically, how personages in stories become more individual and "real” over time. To that end, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis
(1953) performs a comparative analysis between a mythic text, Homer’sOdyssey , and a text of early history, Genesis 22:1. The portion of theOdyssey that Auerbach chooses is the occasion of the return of Odysseus from decades of war and travel. He compares it with the story of the binding of Isaac, in which Abraham is confronted with the divine command to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Auerbach does so because he believes the two narratives are polar opposites: the former detached and multi-faceted, and the latter specific, logical, and rhetorical (11); the former an ahistorical diversion to "make us forget our own reality for a few hours,” and the latter a clearly teleological, historical text that “make[s] us fit our own life into its world” (15). More significantly for our purposes is Auerbach’s reading of the part of struggle in both stories; in the Odyssey, the conflict is between characters, and explicitly outward in its action, but in Genesis, the conflict is internalised by Abraham, and no outward violence occurs. Additionally, the gods in the Odyssey, often petty and flawed in their behaviour, bear no resemblance to the mysterious and commanding deity in Genesis. Finally, change occurs in the characters in Genesis, while Homer’s characters remain static and superficial.
Auerbach’s and Frye’s readings of the Bible appear at odds when Frye claims the
Bible belongs to the mythic mode of fiction, and is not modern. However, Frye’s categorisation is based primarily on the content of the biblical narrative in which the supernatural is the source of eternal redemption. Auerbach is more interested in how the narrative is portrayed through grammar, vocabulary, and other philological elements, and on those terms, the episode of the binding of Isaac is closer to the modern realist mode than to Frye’s mythic mode. Indeed, there must be gradations of shading 95 between modes since they follow one another in sequence, and we should not be surprised if modes overlap—or if they synthesise, as when ancient and modem forms coalesce. As for Taylor’s thesis that the modem self is partially determined by our relationship with “the good” and our personal interests, Abraham’s moral quandary over whether to follow his allegiance to his son or to his God could hardly provide a starker example. Less dramatically, but no less importantly, the search for “the good” relates to adolescence on multiple levels, since one of the priorities of this period is self- improvement—becoming a “better” person in one’s private and public lives.
I return for a moment to Jameson’s Political Unconscious to again examine the preconditions for master narratives in the novel and also the place of the individual in those master narratives. Jameson’s overarching aim to historicise narratives comes from his belief that narrative is the main function of the mind. Master narratives are of the utmost importance because they “have inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them; such allegorical narrative signifieds are a persistent dimension of literary and cultural texts precisely because they reflect a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality”— a history that “does not yield interpretation as such, but rather at best its (indispensable) preconditions” (19, 1). He cites Frye’s critical stance that literature is “a weaker form of myth or a later stage of ritual, to conclude that in that sense all literature, no matter how weakly, must be informed by what we have called a political unconscious, that all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community” (56). So, according to Jameson, we have a political reading inherent to all texts that yields master narratives about community that spring from the historical context of their configuration. The existence of community must presuppose the existence of 96 individuals in that community, and, as Taylor would argue, the existence of intermeshing and ongoing mediations between individuals defining their relationships to the good.
We must now ask what the relationship is of the individual in and through the text. The role of individuals in producing texts and of texts helping to produce individuals is the final step before we typify the “successful” and “unsuccessful” individual/protagonist in modern poetry and in the Bildungsroman genre.
Psychoanalytic critic Norman Holland, in his article, “Unity Identity Text Self’ (1975), attempts to find and to define the correlations between the four terms in his title as he explores the linkages between readers and texts. For Holland, “text” is “just what the writer wrote or [...] what he wove [...] or what he made...” (813). Unity is arrived at
“by grouping particular details of a work together until I arrive at a few basic terms which constitute a central theme” (Ibid). Self, that is to say the self of the reader and the selves of characters in literature, is defined more by exclusion, that is, the walling off of a single person by commonly-understood borders between his or her body and another’s, his or her mind and another’s, etc. (814) He writes, “[W]e can be precise about individuality by conceiving of the individual as living out variations on an identity theme,” thus defining identity as the sum total map of an individual’s behaviours and styles from which specific instances are culled (Ibid). He then places the terms in various ratios of comparison: “Text and self are very close to experience, while unity and identity represent quite abstract principles drawn from the experience of text or self ’ (815; author’s italics).
97 Interpretation occurs through identity, "specifically, identity conceived as variations upon an identity theme. [...] We work out through the text our own characteristic patterns of desire and adaptations. We interact with the work, making it a part of our own psychic economy and making ourselves part of the literary work—as we interpret it” (816). It is impossible, then, to interact with texts, or for that matter with other people, present or absent, through symbolic means (usually language), without reading ourselves into the interaction. The individual “shapes the materials the literary work offers him—including its author—to give him what he characteristically both wishes and fears, and that he also constructs his characteristic way of achieving what he wishes and defeating what he fears” (817). Without doing so, the individual would not be able to relate to the text. In our historicised age, texts must become individualised to be understood, and read through the lens of identity. Each reader’s identity creates his or her unity by interrelating “what he says about his own writing, the writing of others, or the relation of science to poetry or matter to spirit” (820). Following the above ratio,
“the only way one can ever discover unity in texts or identity in selves is by creating them from one’s own inner style, for we are all caught up in the general principles that identity creates and re-creates itself as each of us discovers and achieves the world in his own mind” (Ibid).
In his conclusion, Holland broadens what he believes to be the applicability of the ratios between unity, identity, text, and self to the entire realm of human communication: “Every time a human being reaches out, across, or by means of symbols to the world, he re-enacts the principles that define the mingling of self and other, the creative and relational quality of all our experience, not least the writing and reading of literature” (821). Naturally, the negation of Holland’s formula results in
98 alienation, such as in the works of Kafka and Becket. Certain literary movements, such as Naturalism, nearly guarantee the relatable individualisation of protagonists, but the phenomenon is not universal. Rather, it should be seen as paired with said negation, and deployed by various authors to varying effects.
We can now conceptualise the individual as a product of the demythologised heroic or antiheroic figure, descended from mythic narratives, historicised in texts that are influenced by the circumstances of their historical context, and involved in a reflexive activity of reading/being read through personalised psychological projections.
Individuals’ identities are the result of the performance of portions of the unity of styles or characteristics that are potential in the self, which is a self-consciously constructed awareness of the difference and apartness of one mind and body from others. Thus we can proceed in our analysis of texts confident that our protagonists are the descendants of mythic figures, and that their transition from mythic figures to historicised fictional characters is accompanied by the imprint of the age in which they were “woven.” We can believe that these characters are individuals because we read them through ourselves, and can be reasonably sure that the compatibility between their unity and our unity, their identity and our identity, happens because we exist within the same ontological and epistemological spaces during the activity of experiencing a text.
The Contrast Between Success & Failure
Now that we have developed a working theory of how myth becomes history and mythic figures become fictional protagonists, let us read two sets of modern poetic texts in order to see the modem individual through the pseudo-mythic figures of young men coming of age. The first aim of these readings is to establish a clearer 99 understanding of “success” and “failure” in the process of coming-of-age in modernity before we examine these themes more deeply in two Bildungsromane that Castle would classify as “classical.” Readers might hesitate to name the following nineteenth-century poets’ works as integral components of the modern mythological project because neither explicitly mentions myth nor mythological figures in his poetry. Nevertheless,
Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman have garnered canonical acceptance as modem poets, due mainly to their bleak, fatalistic outlook and their sobering reflection on the
Victorian age. Each harnessed his understanding of humanity and of the individual to generate a living space in which to negotiate the paradoxical—a situation in which escape from the most fundamental shortcomings seemed viable, but proved at last fleeting. Searching for the familiar, the poets returned to mythic constructions, and these constructions resonated with the story of the fallen Icarus. The correspondence is not always obvious, and readers must recognise the poets’ overlaying of newer myths atop a classical groundwork, as well as recognise the interplay between both layers.
Thomas Hardy’s “A Young Man’s Exhortation” (1867), “Ditty” (1870),
“Budmouth Dears” (1908), and “Her Temple” (1922)21 amass the poet’s internal musings into tangible expressions of his myth-influenced philosophy, illuminating his creation of a bulwark against the fragility of life through self-expression. It exemplifies
Hardy’s thematic penchant for austere fatalism and the destruction of the innocence of childhood by adult knowledge, as well as his preoccupation with time, change, and unpredictability of life. The poems’ accounts of the vicissitudes of young life, most palpably the tremendous downturns resulting from remarkable upturns, divulge Hardy’s allegiance to the cautionary tale inherent to myths of coming-of-age, such as that of
21 These poems can be most easily located in editor James Gibson’s Thomas Hardy: The Complete P oem s. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 555, 17, 930, 586 (respectively). 100 Icarus. The first poem in the cycle, “A Young Man’s Exhortation,” includes two sections, one joyful and one mournfully reflective. At first reading, Hardy’s retrospective foray into adolescence bears little resemblance to a coming-of-age myth; readers can derive from the title that the protagonist is a young man and that he is urging his readers to consider the weight of his words. Soon, though, Hardy metaphorically calls upon the muse of adolescence, setting apart a mythic time and
99 space from the linear into the eternal.
The key lines of the first section command readers to “put forth joys,” “charm life’s lourings fair,” “exalt and crown the hour,” and “fill it [...] with blind glee.” The blind rejoicing abates with the conditional phrase, “were heedfulness in power,” which governs the preceding outbursts. The first section continues festively, imploring readers to “send up [...] touching strains” in hopes of reaping the investment of sending self- expression into the world, with the associated risks. In the postponed solemnity of the second section surfaces the message that Hardy considered so essential that he sent it into the world: “If I have seen one thing / It is the passing preciousness of dreams.”
Hardy has set the stage for the rise and fall of emotion in response to the excitement of dreams and the dejection of their passing; Hardy also incorporates the wisdom of self- realisation into the young man’s turns of phrase, empowering the poetic voice to appreciate the sanctity of youthful foolhardiness and to reflect on the worst consequences thereof.
The ironically titled “Ditty” retells events of such sorrow that its own title is cruel and misleading.
Beneath a knap where flown
23 The word “eternal,” though often misused in the vernacular to refer to a temporal period of extreme length with a fixed beginning, should rather refer to a state of existence in which time neither begins nor ends in a linear fashion. 101 Nestling’s play, Within walls of weathered stone, Far away From the files of formal houses, By the bough the firstling browses, Lives a Sweet: no merchants meet, No man barters, no man sells Where she dwells.
In subsequent stanzas, “Ditty” gradually reveals that the forlorn lover is mourning the death of his beloved, and that “where she dwells” refers to her grave. “Ditty” is a delayed revelation, giving measured doses of the tragedy of a woman’s death so that readers’ shock and horror subconsciously build, climaxing with an awakening heralded by the words “she is nought.” The young man asks, “Should 1 lapse to what I was / Ere we met?” and answers himself, in Hardy’s parentheses, “(such will not be, but because some forget let me feign it).” “To feel I might have kissed” foreshadows the building intensity of regret with the force of affection. Regret overflows in the divulgence of the loved woman’s status, unleashed: “a smart severe—severer / In the thought that she is nought...” Emotions abate, and “Where she dwells” is restated with the influence of new, possibly comforting, understanding of humankind’s indentured servitude to the fate of mortality, despite the cultural departure from the classical idea of fate. In
“Ditty,” readers may find an allegory to Daedalus’ loss of his son or Icarus’ loss of a sense of omnipotence during his fall. They may also find in it the integration of the vestiges of classical notions of fate with the mortality that has not yet been eliminated in, eliciting the nature of mythic time that is the basis for the inescapability of mortal participants in classical myth.
“Budmouth Dears” announces itself with markedly punctuated verse and powerful assonance:
When we lay where Budmouth Beach is, 102 O, the girls were fresh as peaches, With their tall and tossing figures and their eyes of blue and brown! And our hearts would ache with longing As we paced from our sing-songing, With a smart Clink! Clink! up the Esplanade and down.
Each verse expresses various aspects of excitement that young soldiers encounter during
the crackling atmosphere of wartime: their promenading in uniform up the esplanade,
their running back to camp after illicit forays into town, and their prowling the parlours
for the dears of Budmouth Beach. Hardy’s tone changes in the third stanza from high
spirits to regret over the end of youthful enthusiasm. Ever marching forward with the
same intensity as during the innocent days of playing soldier, the fourth stanza’s
reminiscing over lost love implies that one should not outrun the end of happiness.
“Budmouth Dears” plies readers to ponder the price they must pay for the ardour of
youth in light of its inevitable loss. Hardy notably diverges from the Greeks in his
suggestion that individuals should continue striving despite the losses to come,
inconspicuously setting precedent for the twentieth-century tragic figure so inextricably
tied to war.23 He subtly admits the position of human agency into the weaving of
meaning from triumph to tragedy, not unlike Daedalus’ insistence to his son to “take the
middle ground.” Hardy’s proposal, however, necessitates that the triumph and tragedy
happen before meaning is possible, and that wisdom transpires only after synthesising
the two.
“Her Temple” embodies the gentler, tenderer side of Hardy’s young man.
Moved by love rather than by loss, he comforts an unnamed woman with words of
reassurance and praise:
Dear, think not that they will forget you:
23 For Hardy, this precedent begins in the Napoleonic wars, which served as the setting for his novel, The Trumpet Major (1880), as well as the epic poem The Dynasts (1904-08), from which “Budmouth Dears” is excerpted. 103 - If craftsmanly art should be mine I will build up a temple, and set you Therein as its shrine.
They may say: “Why a woman such honour?” - Be told, “O so sweet was her fame, That a man heaped this splendour upon her; None now knows his name.”
Hardy inspires readers to consider that everyone possesses immortal qualities that defy death, and that a woman’s greatness, in conjunction with the Herculean effort of the one who loves her, will grant her immortality. More generally, “Her Temple” portrays mythic characteristics in its emphasis on the remembrance of a tragic figure at the expense of the one who eulogises that figure: for example, although Icarus dies from his fall, leaving Daedalus to remember him, Icarus arrives at immortality in cultural memory while Daedalus lingers in the background. Through a more construal more contemporary for its time, the poem may refer to an individual’s fear of losing the potential for agency because of mortality, either the final mortality of obliteration or the gradual mortality of entropic decay. The poetic voice proposes a mythologizing of his accomplishment—his love for another—by placing her in a temple suitable to her
“fame” and preserving forever the “splendour” of their relationship.
The question remains: are the young men in these selected poems of Thomas
Hardy succeeding or failing to come of age? In “A Young Man’s Exhortation,” the final stanza is clear in indicating a degree of wisdom that tempers the nearly blind enthusiasm that precedes it. The poetic voice has seen both joy and sorrow, and does not abide in the latter. Let us label this a narrative of success. “Ditty” contains a poetic voice that regards death as an object of avoidance. The techniques he uses to avoid are artful and metaphoric, but he cannot resist exclaiming the true facts of the matter of his
104 lover’s death. The young man, himself, is living in the past in such a way that prevents him from envisioning a future in which his central focus is on anything but this death, and thus his is a narrative of failure. “Budmouth Dears” is saturated with nostalgia, and its only content dealing with the present is the question, “Do they miss us much, I wonder...” when the grandeur of war meets its grim reality. The poetic voice is quite fixed in a temporal rut, thus our labelling this narrative one of failure. “Her Temple,” though an elegy to a lost love, has an air of optimism as the poetic voice looks forward to a future of glorifying the deceased object of affection. Optimism, however, cannot completely conceal the poetic voice’s inability to detach himself from a possible past that extends indefinitely, one of perpetual mourning and a singular fixation on the memory of a dead lover. Hence, this narrative appears to illustrate a failed coming-of- age.
In 1896, A. E. Housman published a collection of poems inA Shropshire Lad, which B. J. Leggett writes “relates to the tragic view of life which permeates
[Housman’s] poetry” within the mythical setting of the Shropshire lad and his tales of love, loss, and resignation. Defending against critics’ questioning of the value of A
Shropshire Lad, twentieth-century poet W.H. Auden contends that the stereotyping of
Housman’s poetry as “adolescent” should not connote simplicity or superficiality.
Rather, Housman’s construction of the adolescent delves into the profound anxieties of an individual on the precipice of adulthood that have direct bearing on all stages of life.
Indeed, for our purposes this stereotyping is a powerful indicator that our culture strongly reads itself through Housman’s poems and recognizes its adolescent self in them. Auden elaborates:
105 It has often been said that Housman is a poet of adolescence, and this is fair enough as long as this judgment is not meant to imply, as it usually is, that nobody over the age of twenty-one can or should enjoy reading him. To grow up does not mean to outgrow either childhood or adolescence but to make use of them in an adult way [...] All that a mature man can give his child and adolescent in return for what they keep giving him are humility, strong passion, charity and hope. (qtd. in Ricks 4)
In the title poem, the wind, signifying the force of destiny, blows through the
“tree of man” (Housman 37). Thus, the tree is and has never been quiet, for the “gale of life” blows forever (57). Housman implies that the forces the ancients would not hesitate to name as fate follow his “lad” into the poet’s own time. “From far, from eve and morning,” retells the sublime, subdued excursion of Housman’s young man as he makes his way through the psychic journeys of solitude toward long-awaited contact with others. The lad, an awakening dreamer escaping the foggy state of unconsciousness, carries Housman’s message of stoic endurance, a theme of courage that later fuelled the works of Faulkner and Hemingway. Housman’s lad, confronted with the overwhelming burden of living, nonetheless “takes [his] endless way” (37)
Housman interjects a moment of levity in the midst of the Shropshire lad’s labours: “Oh, when I was in love with you” irreverently and ironically smirks at the swift caprice of adolescent love. Its jaunty, confident swagger bounces with the casual and witty attitude of a confident young person whose journey in love is long from finished. Readers heed a young man who alters his ways to please his partner, and since his community reacts with surprise at his reform, the “lad” clearly has no reputation as
“clean” or “brave.” By the final stanza, the young man shrugs off the affair as an inconsequential “fancy.” The persistence of emotion rarely affords anyone the luxury of instant detachment, and when the speaker alleges that "nothing will remain” of his relationship, he and his readers know that he grieves his loss (25) Still, the lad carries
106 on with blithe hope, proving to himself and others that a fall need not curtail the journey toward wisdom.
“Clun” broaches fate with more explicit melancholy than its poetic brethren inA
Shropshire Lad. The final solution for Housman’s Shropshire lad, as it is for Hardy's young man, is an acceptance of the cosmic order and of the inevitability of death. As the beginning and end of the life cycle, death—literal, figurative, in oneself, and in others—epitomises the enduring traditions of myth. Housman summarises the human connection to the deathless cosmos in the last stanza of “Clun”:
‘Tis a long way further than Knighton, A quieter place than Clun, Where doomsday may thunder and lighten And little ‘twill matter to one. (54)
Again, as we did with the poems of Hardy, let us classify Housman’s poems in terms of success and failure. “On Wenlock Edge,” though tumultuous and dramatic in subject, does not lead to the poetic voice’s despair or resignation. He accepts his historical and cultural lineage, from the Roman to the yeoman, and pits the eternal cycles of nature against the brief, linear human lifespan. However, there is an acceptance implicit in his tone that regardless of the finitude of his life, he has been a part of a universal order that others, now deceased, were, as well, and is thus somehow subsumed into that order. “From far, from eve and morning” is similar in theme, in that the poetic voice is explicitly self-conscious of his place in an eternal universal order.
His way is “endless,” and he sees himself as a temporary manifestation of the “stuff of life” that has only temporarily coalesced to produce him as a discrete individual. Again, this narrative is successful in that the poetic voice is willing to change and willing to accept his circumstances, open to relationships with others and his environment, however fleeting. Like all of Hardy’s poems above, “Oh, when I was in love with you” 107 deals with the endings of relationships, be they with people or with a halcyon period of time. Rather than behave, as does Hardy's young man, fixated on a moment to the point of mythologising it, Housman’s lad dismisses a lost love (albeit a loss without death) as a "fancy” that diverted him from being “quite myself.” Once again, Housman renders a successful coming-of-age narrative. Finally, in “Clun,” Housman ventures into the dangerous territory of nostalgia. His poetic voice seems to be asking for an overarching purpose to life that will justify its many sufferings, but is unable to find one, and instead pursues comfort in “doomsday,” his language for his own death. There is a tension between success and failure in this poem more so than in any of the others we have just seen; the lad accepts his place in an inevitable universal order, but not without pain and resistance. From the point of view of a young man, the lad has already made up his mind how his life will unfold. Mythic in its fatalism, yet bordering on the failure of pseudo-myth in its resignation, this narrative straddles our simple binary, probably due to its richness and complexity that we will see more often in longer-form fictional 94 Bildungsromane.
Hardy and Housman recounted the same unpleasant realities brought about by maturation and maturity. They also recounted the fortitude and grit that all must carry in a world often driven by forces beyond their control. These stories, far from novel inventions, are the perpetuation of conclusions and truths recorded and transmitted by the survivors of adolescence who observe their good fortune of succeeding in coming-
24 Housman’s poem, “To An Athlete Dying Young,” also from the Shropshire Lad collection, similarly appeals to the mythic imagination as an elegy to a young man at the peak of his adolescent physical glory who loses in life in the cruelest blow of fate. Another Sh ropshire poem, "Terence, this is stupid stuff’— Housman’s apologia for the gloomy poems of the collection—justifies the poet’s bleak fatalism by prescribing it as a panacea for life’s tribulations: to know the myth of the cyclical ups and downs of life is to steel oneself from their sting. 108 of-age while others do not.^ They have formed for us the background against and with which we will now read two early and highly influential Bildungsromane, Goethe's
Wilhelm Meister 's Apprenticeship (1795) and The Sorrows o f Young Wert her(1774).
Goethe & the Bildungsroman: Wilhelm Meister & Werther
We should remember Castle’s observation about the sociocultural conditions during Goethe’s composition of Wilhelm Meister, and we can readily apply it to the period nearly two decades earlier during which Werther was written: '‘Goethe’s novel was written in the relatively halcyon early 1790s, when events in France could still be regarded favourably by liberal-minded Enlightenment thinkers elsewhere. The thematics of socialization that we see in Wilhelm Meister, therefore, reflect confidence in the possibilities of a rapprochement between the individual who seeks the aesthetic unity of his faculties and a benign, authoritarian, protocapitalist agrarian utopia unscathed by potentially hostile neighbors” (36-7). Thus, there is strong potential for a
“successful” adolescent myth to take place within this early Bildungsroman—a
Bildungsroman that, because it is a “classical” example of the genre should, by definition, convey success. I have thus selected Wilhelm Meister and Werther for their participation in the classical Bildungsroman genre and as the foundation of the trend, by virtue of their immanent critique, that leads coming-of-age as deviation from maturation.
25 A Shropshire Lad proved so sympathetic to twentieth-century Western artists that portions were adapted to song form by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ivor Gurney in the 1910s and 1920s. See Hurd, M ichael. On Wenlock Edge/Ludlow and Teme. London: Hyperion Records Limited, 1990. The Hardy poems analysed here were also set to music in the 1920s by Gerald Finzi. See McVeagh, Diana.E arth and Air and Rain. London: Hyperion Records Limited, 1984. 109 Similarly, Werther, although written earlier than Wilhelm Meister, should contain the potential for individual success because it shares with Wilhelm Meister a sociocultural and historical context. Nonetheless, Werther serves as a caveat of the disastrous consequences that can result from a failure to achieve Bildung, despite favourable conditions for it. Werther, however, should not be construed as an example of failure in Castle’s sense, because the protagonist fails, quite literally by his own hand, and not due to the inaccessibility of Bildung. The burden of success or failure in both novels is upon the young men after which they are named, underscoring the severe individuality that is imposed upon them by their author, which is nonetheless contrasted, in Wilhelm Meister's success, by a vital communitarianism.
In Wilhelm Meister, the protagonist, a young bourgeois, rejects a life in commerce in favour of a career on stage, and sets out on a journey of self-discovery in which he encounters a host of fascinating characters. He falls in love more than once, fathers a child, and is initiated into an elite society dedicated to an almost mystical version of humanism. At the end of the episodic narrative, Wilhelm Meister undergoes a transformative moment during which he realises how his fellow men and women, as well as their culture, happily conspired to further his self-discovery. Wilhelm Meister is not without tragedy and loss, but most of the events in the novel, when read in light of
Meister’s revelation, are in the protagonist’s best long-term interest. Above all,
Wilhelm Meister is a story of education, although almost all of the education Wilhelm receives is experiential. His education frees him, and yet trains him into a standing sociocultural order. In short, Wilhelm Meister’s apprenticeship is his experiential education, all that which he requires to become a whole self, and from which it is his responsibility to avail himself. Fortunately for Wilhelm Meister, he makes good use of
110 his opportunities, and is portrayed as victorious by the end of the novel as he accepts his
station as father and husband.
Since education is the primary vehicle through which Wilhelm Meister succeeds,
let us examine Goethe’s balance of individual drive and sociocultural context that lead
Wilhelm down the path of Bildung—a path on whose course he symbolically renounces
his family name “Meister,” as he considers himself unworthy during his formation. The
Abbe, a member of the Tower Society into which Wilhelm Meister would be inducted
and whose careful attention encourages Meister’s development, says: “What infinite
operations of art and nature must have joined in before a cultivated human being can be
formed” (Book VIII Ch. II).26 His meaning is somewhat cryptic, but his reference to art
must include the purposeful actions of people, since art is an extension of human
creativity; as well, for the Abbe, art and nature are divided, but must join in to cultivate
a whole person. For most of the novel, these human interventions are hidden, and
Wilhelm Meister’s teachers are not always apparent. Indeed, Goethe heavily
foreshadows Meister’s external influences by his frequent references to his love for
puppetry—a theatrical art wholly dependent on the hidden manipulation of physical
objects. Wilhelm tells Mariana, his first love, about his father’s having a puppet theatre
constructed for him, “seeming only to look at the transaction, as it were, through his
fingers; for his maxim was, that children should not be allowed to see the kindness
which is felt towards them, lest their pretensions come to extend too far” (Book I Ch.
V). The implication here is that the father’s intervention is presumed to be benevolent,
which we should remember later when reading modernist Bildungsromane in which the
forces impinging on individuals are not always so.
26 Because of the multitude of editions and translations of Wilhelm Meister, 1 cite it here by book and chapter for ease of reference. Ill From “The Confessions of a Fair Saint,” we learn the overriding philosophy at play in Wilhelm Meister's education from the Abbe: “[I]n order to accomplish anything by education, we must first become acquainted with the pupil’s tendencies and wishes
[...] He ought to be transported to a situation where he may, as speedily as possible, content the former and attain the latter” (Book VI). This is an elaboration on the beliefs he expressed upon first meeting Wilhelm Meister, during which he expressed how a
“circuitous path” is the best route for self-discovery and leading individuals “back to themselves again” (Book II Ch. IX). Later, another student of the Abbe, Natalia, explains his belief in the superiority of experiential learning, even if the student is headed for a fall: “[He augurs] better of a child, a youth who is wandering astray on a path of his own, than of many who are walking upright upon paths which are not theirs”
(Book VIII Ch. III). When Wilhelm, after his “erroneous” foray into the theatre, confronts the Abbe, the wise man defends himself: “To guard from error is not the instructor’s duty, but to lead the erring pupil; nay, to let him quaff his error in deep satiating draughts, this is the instructor’s wisdom” (Book VII Ch. IX). According to
Wilhelm’s friend, Jamo, the Abbe “likes to act the part of Destiny a little, so he does not fail to show a taste for making matches” (Book VIII Ch. V). The Abbe does just that when he manipulates Wilhelm “out of all condition to resist” the woman he eventually marries, Natalia, the paragon of a balanced individual’s ideal companion. The Abbe fulfills a specific role for Wilhelm Meister, that of a wise but usually absent or detached guardian or guide. He is patrician without being too imposing, and always acts in what he believes is Wilhelm’s best interest, even if some stages of Wilhelm’s education are temporarily painful.
112 Wilhelm Meister also has a teacher in his friend Jamo, who exemplifies the rationalist affinity for logic and a classical appreciation of art. His is a stricter pedagogical approach than that of the Abbe: "I cannot bear to look on people making awkward trials. When I see a person wandering from his path, I feel constrained to call on him...” (Book VIII Ch. V) True to his rationalist beliefs, Jamo believes he simply tells “the naked truth” (Ibid). Jarno’s mission is to broaden Wilhelm’s artistic horizons and sensibilities so that he may “see in the performances of art something more than yourself and your individual inclinations” (Book I Ch. XVII). He does so most famously in his recommendation that Wilhelm study Shakespeare, which culminates in his seeing each part of the play within the holistic order. Eventually, the discipline
Jarno instils in Wilhelm results in Wilhelm’s rejection of the theatre once it had served its purpose in his life, and “the stage could now produce no more illusion in him” (Book
VII Ch. IX).
Even with the best of instructors. Wilhelm often wishes to pursue his own path without outside interference. While Wilhelm’s father and friend Werner want him to go into business, he resists:
The ideal of the happiness of civic life, which his worthy brother sketched, by no means charmed him; on the contrary, a secret spirit of contradiction dragged him forcibly the other way. He convinced himself that, except on the stage, he could nowhere find that mental culture which he longed to give himself; he seemed to grow the more decided in his resolution, the more Werner, without knowing it, opposed him. (Book V Ch. II)
When Jarno criticises Wilhelm for his emotional attachment to friends, Wilhelm counters angrily: “All that thou hast power to offer me is not worth the sentiment which binds me to these forlorn beings” (Book III Ch. XI). Wilhelm is most suspicious of the counsel of others when he discovers how his life has been manipulated, even if it has 113 been for his benefit. “[I]t appeared with certainty enough that, in many actions of his life, in which he had conceived himself to be proceeding freely and in secret, he had been observed, nay, guided; and perhaps the thought of this had given him an unpleasant feeling” (Book VIII Ch. II).
Far from disparaging Wilhelm, Goethe illustrates how his protagonist’s self- directed choices have benefitted him. He compares Wilhelm and his friend, Werner, who had been working in commerce for some time. Wilhelm was “taller, stronger, straighter [...] how it all suits and fits together!” (Book VIII Ch. I) Werner, on the other hand, had aged, and “brow and crown had lost their hair” (Ibid). Wilhelm’s rebelliousness had served him well, and it appears that whatever influence had been levelled upon him by his teachers, he retained the ability to think for himself and act in his own best interest, even when offered alternatives that were not clearly any worse than the choices he eventually made. This synthesis of individual drive, based on self- interest yet tempered by an awareness of the need to integrate into and accept the order into which one was bom, establishes a high benchmark of success: the integration of the self into a greater philosophical, cultural, and societal whole. The consequences of neglecting a balance between the self and its context is the upsetting of the delicate equilibrium that Jarno tries so hard to inculcate in Wilhelm, the wages of which are unhappiness and possibly death, for either the individual or the individual’s associates.
Goethe demonstrates this idea most tragically in W erther}1
271 present these two works of Goethe in reverse order according to publication date. W erther, published first in 1774, reflects not only the frustrations of unrequited love, but also of unrealised intellectual and career potential brought about by the feudal system in German principalities before the Napoleonic abolition and its opening of professional careers to a broader range of candidates. Wilhelm Meister, published in the post-French and -American Revolutionary years of 1795-96, betrays a strong affinity for non-hierarchical sociocultural structures. 114 That Werther ends in the title character’s suicide will be the focus of our analysis of this text. Werther’s clear abnegation of responsibility to himself and to others is the climax of the narrative of a young man whose selfishness (a thing quite different from self-interestedness) and caprice are evident throughout the novel. An epistolary work whose form accentuates the realism Goethe harnesses to reflect the reality of the readers, giving him or her the sensation that similar events could take place in reality or perhaps their own lives, Werther serves as a caveat for the budding modern individual about what not to do and who not to be. Despite a sound intellect, an education, gainful opportunities for employment in the highest court circles, and a keen emotional sensitivity that enables him to embrace the wonders of nature and beauty, Werther squanders his life over a seemingly simple frustration: an unobtainable love in the character of Charlotte. His frustration is what leads to his suicide, but more fundamentally, his character is flawed in such a way that he fails to acculturate to the way of his world, and cannot achieve a harmonious union with others. In short, he does not broaden his worldly education by embracing the outwardness or self-projection into the world, and instead behaves himself in a childlike manner without thought of the compromise that is needed for personal growth and “success.”
We first see Werther’s self-fixation in his description of himself as blameless for his soured relationships with women: “Were not all my other attachments especially designed by fate to torment a heart like mine? Poor Leonore! And yet I was not to blame. Was it my fault, that, while the capricious charms of her sister afforded me agreeable entertainment, a passion for me developed in her poor heart?” (1) This is the first example of Werther’s distancing or even isolating himself from the thoughts and feelings of others, and it complements Goethe’s message in Wilhelm Meister that successful self-formation and coming-of-age involve not only inner cultivation, but also an integration into a social order. Simply put, a young person must learn to interact productively and compassionately with others. Werther’s state of mind early in the novel, with its affinity for nature that is often deemed “romantic,” also conveys his vision of how he interacts with the world as if he were the only one in it: “[T]he world grows dim before my eyes and earth and sky seem to dwell in my soul and absorb its power, like the form of a beloved” (3).
Chasing his origin in nature in vain and lamenting the loss of innocence he believes has resulted from being thrust into a cruel world in which his basic desires cannot be met, Werther writes: “Alas, that the friend of my youth is gone! Alas, that I ever knew her! I might say to myself, ‘You are a fool to seek what is not to be found here below.’ But she was mine. I have felt that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be” (7).
His lament for a false unity with the world in nature or in childhood cements Werther’s unwillingness or inability to grow outward, beyond his innate capacities. Again, instead of embracing the change of maturation, he reverts to an obsession with an idealised fiction of a nostalgic childhood in which all needs were provided for and no effort was required of him. It is not surprising, then, that Werther often speaks of children in an idealised fashion, wishing to be like them or to be a child, once more.
Werther waxes extensively about his childlike nature throughout the novel, often calling himself a child. He even invokes the Biblical passages Psalm 128 and Matthew
19:14, which guarantee the entry into heaven of children (or those who adhere to the
Heavenly Father's commands in a child-like manner) (27-8). Werther also has a peculiar notion of freedom that ties into his adulation of children, that of the “simple 116 life” of peasants who can “dignify their paltry employments, and sometimes even their passions, with high-sounding phrases, representing them to mankind as gigantic achievements performed for their welfare and glory” (9). In a foreshadowing of
Werther’s suicide, he adds such a person “still preserves in his bosom the sweet feeling of liberty, and knows he can quit this prison whenever he likes” (Ibid). Another sign of
Werther’s immaturity appears when he is confronted for the first time with the awareness that Charlotte is betrothed to Albert. He cannot reconcile that his romantic obsession cannot become manifest and “became confused” (22).
Werther’s confusion boils over into full internalised conflict with Albert soon after: “I do not know the man able to supplant me in the heart of Charlotte; and yet when she speaks of her betrothed with so much warmth and affection, I feel like the soldier who has been stripped of his honours and titles, and deprived of his sword” (37).
Werther oscillates between rage and self-pity, unable to quit the untempered emotions that have overwhelmed him. He ruminates constantly over the love he cannot have to the point of hysteria, “in the morning,” “at night,” and “when I feel for her in the half confusion of sleep, and awaken, tears flow from my oppressed heart; and, bereft of all comfort, I weep over my future woes” (55). When Werther takes a position under an ambassador at court, these woes follow him, and eventually destroy his career opportunities. Werther’s self-destructiveness in the professional world is not surprising; his life is an extended fantasy of the all-consuming self, and any external systems, conventions, or hierarchies that infringe on this fantasy are quickly dismissed, for they endanger Werther’s quest for a “world of idyllic peace” with himself as the centre (69).
117 When Werther learns, quite to his surprise, that Albert has married Charlotte, he pens a vicious letter to the newlyweds that illuminates exactly how opposed he feels toward people and circumstances that do not conform to his vision:
God bless you, my dear friends, and may he grant you that happiness which he denies to me! 1 thank you, Albert, for having deceived me. I was waiting to hear when your wedding day was to be; I intended n that day solemnly to take down Charlotte’s silhouette from the wall, and to bury it along with all of my papers. Now you are married, and her picture is still up. Well, let it remain! Why not! I know that I am still near you, that I still have a place in Charlotte’s heart— the second place, but I intend to keep it. Oh, I would go mad if she could ever forget! Albert, that thought is hell! Farewell, Albert—farewell, angel from heaven—farewell, Charlotte! (72)
It would not be an exaggeration to call this letter an expression of infantile jealousy, and
a fore-echo of Werther’s suicide. Before he kills himself, though, Werther retreats into
a haze of wishful thinking in which he regresses into himself and his childlike nature,
trying to seek some consolation. He returns to his birthplace as almost a reversal of his
path from birth to his present: “I shall enter at the same gate through which I left with
my mother, when, after my father’s death, she moved away from that delightful retreat
to bury herself in that melancholy town of hers” (78).
But this regression cannot satisfy him, and his anger and frustration only mount.
He becomes further withdrawn, even paranoid, and convinces himself that the isolation
he and he alone has created is the result of an innate unfairness in life: “I could tear
open my breast and dash out my brains to think how little we can actually mean to each
other. No one can communicate to me those sensations of love, joy, rapture, and delight
which I do not myself possess; and though my heart may be filled with bliss, I cannot
make him happy who stands before me cold and indifferent” (93). Werther has
achieved almost complete sequestration from the social order, and he has prepared himself for the ultimate expression of destructive self-focus— self pity: “ She does not see, she does not feel that she is preparing a poison which will destroy us both; and I drink deeply of the draught that is to prove my destruction” (97). By this point in the narrative, the only capacity Werther has to reach out to others lies in an act of self- destruction that first satisfies his selfish needs, and then does significant emotional damage to those who care for him. If words fail to communicate his anger and frustration to those he sees as “cold and indifferent,” then a dramatic act must. And although Werther blames Charlotte for “preparing a poison” that is ostensibly the cause of his suicide, the suicide is his choice alone, made without regard for its impact on others or on his society, to which he, with all his talents and sensitivities, could have contributed considerably.
Finally, as the seasonal cycle that frames Werther draws to its wintry close,
Werther articulates his intention: “Yes, Charlotte, why should I not say it? One of us three must go; it shall be Werther. O Beloved! This heart, excited by rage and fury, has often had the monstrous impulse to murder your husband—you—myself! Now, it is decided” (118). The result is Werther’s death by suicide on the eve of Christmas Eve, a shocking and alienating deed that emotionally destroys Charlotte and Albert (139).
Werther’s suicide represents the diametric opposite of Bildung, and warns its readers against the consequences of the pathological stubbornness from which he suffers.
Ignace Feuerlicht writes that “the frequent use of biblical language before the suicide, the comparisons with Christ’s crucifixion, the fact that Werther ends his life on the eve of Christmas Eve, and that his last supper consists of bread and wine, lend to the pathetic suicide of a loafing young man an air of fate, and raise it to the spheres of tragedy, myth, or religion” (487). Werther became ensnared in his own liminal trap
119 rather than the liminal trap because conditions were once favourable for his development; and although Goethe does not convey his protagonist’s plight in terms of arrested development, the telltale vestiges of myth remain.
For their canonical recognition as two of the first major works in the
Bildungsroman genre, I selected Wilhelm Meister and Werther as my first examples in the literary section of my analysis. Inasmuch as Wilhelm Meister and Werther are descriptive of coming-of-age, they are also prescriptive, demonstrating a desire on
Goethe’s part to engage with his sociocultural context. The individuals and events in each book can stand in for particular character types with traits with which almost any reader in the same sociocultural context can relate or identify. 7X Wilhelm Meister succeeds because he is willing and able to accept assistance from and learn from others.
He is adaptable, adequately flexible, and willing to change his mind and his course because he believed a greater purpose was to be reached once he had undergone his trials. Werther fails because he is almost the exact opposite of Wilhelm; whereas
Wilhelm is able to end one romance and begin another, Werther is not. This is his sticking point, but it only serves to amplify even more profound faults in his personality and development. Werther’s trajectory is regressive rather than progressive, and he devotes all of his energies to attaining the bliss and happiness only possible as a very young child or even before birth. Logically, this regressive trajectory would lead to oblivion, and death. Goethe’s readers thus benefit from his warnings and encouragements, but only if they, like his two male protagonists, enjoy a fruitful
28 Both stories continue to be enjoyed in operatic form; Wilhelm Meister was adapted into the opera M ignon ( 1866) by Ambroise Thomas, andW erther was adapted into the opera of the same name (1887) by Jules Massenet. 120 environment in which to develop. The lack of such an environment is the departure from coming-of-age as a modem narrative of a ritualised survival mechanism.
First Departures from Coming-of-Age
For the sake of argument, let us posit that Goethe’s sociocultural reflections in
Wilhelm Meister and Werther are those of the ideal conditions for coming-of-age, the post-Enlightenment, teleological embodiment of ancient and classical myth of the same theme. The difference between Goethe’s worlds of middle- and upper-class Weimar and Walheim and the world of Goethe’s less upwardly mobile contemporaries (as well as the contemporaries of subsequent Bildungsromane) was a stark exercise in socioeconomic contrasts. Hence, the representation of reality in fiction did not match reality. In this disconnect, a schism in inevitable, and it is this schism that Castle credits with turning the Bildungsroman inward rather than outward. The expansion of the individual into the world is then pursued critically and with an inward perspective, and the mythic forces at work under the surface continue their machinations, but in a way that subverts and defeats traditional expectations of coming-of-age in return for a perpetuation of mythic elements. The myth and its adherents struggle to hold together a coherent vision of coming-of-age, even if none is taking place.
The result of the machinations of myth in survival mode is the persistence of the conventions of the Bildungsroman, with all its features and expectations. The writers and readers of texts about coming-of age begin to accept an unrealisable template of an ideal while progressively, albeit internally at first, accepting that they might not or cannot achieve it. To eschew our mythic heritage could prove disastrous, for it would cast us into an existential crisis prompted by an awakening sense of hopelessness. In
121 this sense, the mythologisation of modern coming-of-age acts as a stopgap measure for cultural crisis, a method of developmental procrastination that allows progress to appear to proceed, but leads to a state of diminishing returns. Going through the motions of coming-of-age, and producing texts participating therein, Western culture reaches a point of stagnation that puts pressure on the fabric of society, and alienates each new generation. Gustave Flaubert’s realist Bildungsroman Sentimental Education (1869), through its protagonist, Frederic Moreau, shows the alienating effects of the restructuring of class in post-Napoleonic France, as well as the struggling for position and prestige of the rising bourgeoisie. The outcome is a winding, sometimes convoluted life path of young people that leads to very little self-integration or sociocultural integration.29
Flaubert’s critique of the young bourgeois is not as overtly scathing as D.H.
Lawrence’s diatribe, “How Beastly the Bourgeois Is” (1929)30, which I have chosen to introduce Flaubert’s novel because of the pointedness of the poem that makes it an excellent site of reflection before we analyse Frederic Moreau’s alleged coming-of-age.
Structurally, the poem consists of nine free verse stanzas in a pyramidal order, gradually increasing in length and linguistic density until the climax of the fourth stanza, and then gradually decreasing in the denouement. Stanzas one, five, and eight are a refrain of the
291 do not wish to claim that all Bildungsromane written after the mid-nineteenth century convey the failure of their sociocultural context to elevate individuals to higher states of consciousness; while in my selected texts I identity this trend, there are novels in which the authors maintain optimism in their protagonists’ ability to grow up in the world in which they were born. For example, Rudyard Kipling’s Captain's Courageous (1897), the stories of Horatio Alger, Jr., and, in the science fiction genre, the Bildungsromane of Robert A. Heinlein. It should be noted that in my opinion, Alger’s works belong to a subgenre of “agenda” Bildungsromane that promoted free-market capitalism, and Heinlein’s Bildungsromane, based on their participating in the science fiction genre, introduced a speculative element to coming-of-age that rendered it more experimental and less constrained than the classical Bildungsroman permitted. 30 In The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th Edition. Vol. Ed. 2.M. H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 1993. 2127.
122 title, repeated as if readers require reminding that the deception of appearances must be called out for its sins. Lawrence states in plain terms the worst traits of the bourgeois,
“especially the male of the species.” The bourgeois male is “[p]resentable, eminently presentable,” all appearance, object, and item of and for self-interested manipulation.
The “thingness” of these men inspires the poet to ask, rhetorically, “[Sjhall I make you a present of him?” Rather than being a self-aware actor in the world, he is reduced to an article to be beheld:
Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen? Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside? Isn’t it God’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day after partridges, or a little rubber ball? wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing...
Lawrence dramatically explicates why, despite shining appearances, such a man is
“beastly”: “Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another / man’s need, / let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life / face him with a new demand on his understanding / and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.” “A new demand on his intelligence, a new life demand” reduces him “into a mess, either a fool or a bully.” The poet is warning against the consequences of placing emphases on appearances and rampant acquisitiveness, a common critique of middle-class behaviour, relevant from the nineteenth century up to the present day.
Lawrence’s assessment of the economic power wielded by the bourgeois is similarly scathing. He envisions them “like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life / sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life / than his own.” And like an old mushroom, they are “all gone inside [...] hollow / under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.” His prescription for what to do with the bourgeois is harsh: “what
123 a pity they can't all be kicked over / like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly / into the soil.. The general sense of the poem is that those who have attained economic status and power on the backs of the less fortunate no longer deserve our esteem as human beings. Change, such as a confrontation with “another man’s need” or a “moral difficulty” is the test of a moral, ethical person—to become a “fool or a bully” in response is to abrogate one’s most human duties. Because individuals have become preoccupied in their middle-class lives with activities centred on self-gratification, they no longer integrate into their sociocultural context as part of self-formation. They become objects blended into the background, and although they on some level believe they are on a progressive course, they are headed toward estrangement from their fellow human beings and from themselves. In his poem, Lawrence is building a critique of the individual’s plight in concentrated verse. In Sentimental Education, Flaubert makes a more extensive and subtler argument against the corrupting influence of a new class system in an unstable political context.
Flaubert’s novel joins Frederic in medias res', when we first encounter the young law student in 1840 on a boat from Paris to his ancestral home of Nugent, he is already eighteen. We do not know the details of his childhood up to that point, nor do we have, as in the cases of Werther and Wilhelm Meister much information about formative events in his life. Those in search of a classical Bildungsroman thus do not find one in Sentimental Education: the development of the protagonist is to occur later in his life, but the author manipulates the genre’s expectations to constantly defer development. This technique not only legitimates the process of coming-of-age occurring after physical puberty, but also heightens the feeling of failure readers have toward the protagonist when he learns little or nothing about himself, despite the
124 additional time granted to him to “work out” his selfhood. As well, as much as Flaubert concentrates on the development of his protagonist, from the opening passage of the novel we see he is observing the development of Frederic’s sociocultural context.
Flaubert writes:
In the front of the Quai St. Bernard, the Ville de Montereau, which was just about to start, was puffing great whirlwinds of smoke. It was six o’clock on the morning of the 15th of September 1840. People rushed on board the vessel in frantic haste. The traffic was obstructed by casks, cables, and baskets of linen. The sailors answered no questions. People jostled one another. Between the two paddle- boxes was a heap of parcels; the clamour was drowned in the loud hissing of steam, which, making its way through the plates of sheet- iron, encompassed everything in a white mist, while the bell at the prow kept continuously ringing. At last, the vessel drew away; and the banks of the river, crowded with warehouses, timber-yards, and manufactories, opened out like two huge ribbons being unrolled. A young man about eighteen, with long hair, holding an album under his arm, stood motionless near the helm. Penetrating the haze, he could see steeples, buildings of which he did not know the names; then, with a farewell glance, he observed the lie St. Louis, the Cite, and Notre Dame. As Paris faded from view he heaved a deep sigh. (Book I 1)
This lengthy, descriptive passage allows us to appreciate the extent to which Flaubert sets the scene. Only after he has recreated in painstaking detail the protagonist’s surroundings do we learn his name. There is a great deal of detail relating to commerce—“warehouses, timber-yards [...] manufactories,” as well as to the impersonal nature of the bustling crowd. Flaubert is foreshadowing the course Frederic was about to take with that of the boat about to sail downriver, a course of acquisition, consumption, and trade. There are hints that he belongs to the burgeoning new phenomenon of “mass culture,” and can be easily lost in the crowd as only one of many people seen from above. Accordingly, we should take into account the world in which
125 Frederic was living, from his first appearance to the episode of reminiscence with his friend Deslauriers at the close of the book.
We know that Frederic is eighteen in 1840, and the book closes in 1867.
Hence the book follows him from the cusp of adulthood to the age of 45. The period between 1840 and 1867 in France is known for its many noteworthy events in the timeline of the development of contemporary Europe. For most of Frederic’s life until
1848, France had been a liberal constitutional monarchy under King Louis Philippe.
The king’s power-base came mostly from the upper-middle classes, merchants, and bankers, so their economic interests were paramount. In 1848, a constitutional republic was declared, but soon after in late 1851 and early 1852 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoleon I, declared himself emperor of the second Empire, later liberalising
T I trade, which would have an effect on manufacturers and merchants. Only three years after we part with Frederic, the second Empire fell. These dramatic historical events play an important part in Flaubert’s novel, but Flaubert’s narrator, in all his third-person dispassionate omniscience, does not quite rise to the level of excitement that Frederic might feel as a young Parisian in the thick of events. Instead, personal details interest the narrator, and, at times, these details subtly accentuate the triteness of his characters, especially Frederic.
The counter-heroic qualities of Frederic indicate the turn in the
Bildungsroman genre toward a destabilisation of its classical form. First, he is not the focus of the opening of the narrative. Second, he is not venturing into the wide world; rather, he is returning home to his mother’s country house for a period of idleness (Book
31 Summarised from France in the Nineteenth Century: 1830-1890 by Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer. Ithaca: Cornell, 2009. 126 I 12). The narrator, already distanced from and unallied with the protagonist, often fades away to allow Frederic’s interior thoughts to tell his story. This technique, rather than thrusting Frederic to the fore, encourages readers to judge him disinterestedly rather than sympathise with him—a point-of-view that quickly betrays his lack of action to pursue of his goals and desires. Frederic’s main unfulfilled desire is his romantic feeling for Madame Amoux, his perennial love interest whom he first notices on the steamship and whose advances he, after many tortuous years, finally rejects (Book I 5;
Book II 201). In an early episode of Frederic’s fantasy romance with Madame Arnoux, he muses:
One thing caused astonishment to himself, that he felt in no way jealous of Amoux; and he could not picture her in his imagination undressed, so natural did her modesty appear, and so far did her sex recede into a mysterious background. Nevertheless, he dreamed of the happiness of living with her, of “theeing” and “thouing” her, of passing his hand lingeringly over her head-bands, or remaining in a kneeling posture on the floor, with both arms clasped round her waist, so as to drink in her soul through his eyes [...] [A]nd so, incapable of action, cursing God, and accusing himself of being a coward, he kept moving restlessly within the confines of his passion just as a prisoner keeps moving about in his dungeon. (Book I 90)
There are strong parallels between Frederic’s paralysed longing and the longing of
Werther, and this excerpt, taken out of context and compared with Werther’s many moments of anguish about Charlotte, would seem to follow the classical
Bildungsroman’s convention of drawing the reader into sympathy for the protagonist.
However, by the end ofSentimental Education, we behold a protagonist who was impotent to do anything about his love for Madame Amoux, much less pursue it to fruition. The narrator thus permits a passivity in the portrayal of Frederic, one that
Goethe never does. In fact, we feel such sympathy for Werther that his death, to many, is eminently tragic in an exceedingly personal way; readers identify with him and 127 mourn his bad fortune even though he is wholeheartedly responsible for it. Frederic, on the other hand, inspires no such emotional response.
In the prelude to the penultimate scene in Sentimental Education, when
Frederic rejects the affections of Madame Amoux, we are informed by the narrator of the cooling of his zeal for life and love:
He mingled in society, and he conceived attachments to many women. But the constant recollection of his first love made them all appear insipid; and besides, the vehemence of desire, the bloom of the sensation had gone. In like manner, his intellectual ambitions had grown weaker. Years passed; and he was merely supporting the burthen of a life in which his mind was unoccupied and his heart bereft of energy. (Book II 195)
Frederic’s active imagination sustains his character throughout the novel—his failure to realise with any seriousness his interests or ventures leaves little else to. Unlike
Wilhelm Meister, whose story ends in triumph, or Werther, whose story ends in tragedy,
Frederic’s story ends with the extinguishing of an ember that never burned brightly, at all. An explanation for this general failure to act could be the commodification and objectification of relationships, a contagion of the bourgeois values into which Frederic is quite literally “sold down the river.” The strategy endemic to such a worldview inverts the outward action of myth, vestiges of which remain in the classical
Bildungsroman, into the interior of the psychological landscape. There, myriad possibilities present themselves, but, as in Frederic’s case, it is more comfortable to remain lost in one’s thoughts than to effect change on oneself or on the world.
Nowhere is Frederic’s action-paralysis more evident than in his mostly internalised relationship with Madame Amoux. Flaubert writes:
128 Though he was now better acquainted with Madame Amoux (for that very reason perhaps), he was still more faint-hearted than before. Each morning he swore to himself that he would take a bold course. He was prevented from doing so by an unconquerable feeling of bashfulness; and he had no example to guide him, inasmuch as she was different from other women. (Book I 220)
Not only does Frederic have “no example to guide him” in the case of his relationship with Madame Amoux, he has no examples to guide him in any capacity. His passions are, as Flaubert writes, “inactive,” for that is the story he wished to tell in Sentimental
Education according to one of his letters: “I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation—or, more accurately, the history of their feelings. It’s a book about love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays—that is to say, inactive”
{Letters 80; author’s italics). 1 connect the lack of what Flaubert calls “passion” to several factors. The first is the further moving away from the mythic mode due to the increased stress of teleological, object-oriented, and acquisitive thinking that was mounting with the growth of commerce. As well, the goals of self-enrichment and immediate gratification encroach upon the values espoused in classical Bildungsromane of harmonious integration into one’s sociocultural context, and the outward action required to do so is replaced by an inward mechanism of strategising, plotting, scheming and objectifying oneself and others. As such, life becomes an elaborate chessboard in a game whose outcome is a state of constant dissatisfaction and the casting aside of meaningful relationships with others.
The final scene in Flaubert’s novel is a disappointment from both a literary and developmental angle, and purposefully so. After their many adventures, the building of careers, and the observation of and participation in monumental historical events, both
Frederic and his long-time friend reflect on their lives, and come to no satisfying conclusions: 129 They had both failed in their objects—the one who dreamed only of love, and the other of power. What was the reason of this? “’Tis perhaps on account of not having taken up the proper line,” said Frederick. “In your case that may be so. 1, on the contrary, have sinned through excess of rectitude, without giving due weight to a thousand secondary things more important than any. I had too much logic, and you too much sentiment.” Then they blamed luck, circumstances, the epoch at which they were bom. (Book II 205-6)
Perhaps most frustrating and most telling is the two men’s conclusion about the highlight of their lives. In recalling the story of their misadventures at a brothel they visited during their youth, they both agree: “T believe that was the best time we ever had!’ said Frederick. ‘Well, perhaps! Yes, I, too, believe that was the best time we ever had,’ said Deslauriers” (Book II 208). Neither had learned much, and we cannot escape the feeling that Flaubert had intended to expose that fact.
Gustave Flaubert’s Sentimental Education serves as a literary artefact that preserves an early instance of the failure of the Bildungsroman genre to convey its protagonist toward individual success and sociocultural integration. Despite the novel containing the requisite tropes of the Bildungsroman, including romantic love and the adoption of a career, protagonist Frederic Moreau nonetheless descends into petty cycles of self-gratification, eschewing many possibilities for self-improvement and self- awareness. Rather than participate in the failure of the genre, I believe Flaubert is acutely aware of its insufficiency for the protagonist, his place, and his time. Here we see the turn, or “immanent critique” in which the heroic myth becomes an antiheroic myth, and the genre, challenged with failure, begins to turn in on itself to preserve its relevance and in fulfillment of the revisionist tendencies of myth.
130 The Individual Deracinated from Tradition
The deracination from tradition and the effects of sociocultural upheaval are laid bare by the end of Flaubert’s novel. WhileSentimental Education excerpts a pivotal moment in Western history and is very much a product of post-Revolutionary France, it sets the stage for a further investigation of the destructiveness toward the individual that the disconnection from tradition can inflict. In this next section, I will perform a contrast of extremes between Walt Whitman’s long poem, Song of Myself (1855)32, and
Franz Kafka’s short story, “The Judgment” (1913). Whitman’s poem, I contend, expresses a strong sense of self in a discourse of self that Whitman practically invents for his poem. He represents the paragon of a genre of American poetry that reflects the awakening power of a nation on the cusp of world power, and of a people whose determination, and, at times, blind optimism, compelled them to believe in the strength of individuals to bend the world to their will. Conversely, Kafka’s short story tells of an individual’s fragility, self-doubt, and, ultimately, self-destruction; it paints a vicious portrait of the weakness of one man and his inability to strike out on his own. The contrast between individual fragility and independence is but one representation of the adolescent plight that can lead either to the cleaving to the virtues of the liminal trap or excelling beyond them.
There is an adolescent quality about Whitman’sSong o f Myself in the sense that the poem excels at capturing the opening of consciousness in both inner and outer directions. Whitman’s voice is an example of Burt’s claim that adolescent poetry need not come from adolescents or express themes commonly associated with pubertal rites,
j2 For ease of reference, I will cite the 1867 edition because o f its subdivision of the poem into 52 numbered sections. The original source text is Leavesof Grass. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1891-92. 29-79.
131 but that it can stand in as a synecdoche of the novel aspects of modernity and democracy (17). Not only does the poem follow Whitman’s openness to new experiences, but it also does so without judgment or shame, attempting to be as inclusive and democratic as possible. The struggle to find and accept oneself, then, becomes more of a journey than a conflict. In section 1, Whitman, after declaring
“every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you,” writes: “1 loafe and invite my soul, / 1 lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass...” Lulled by the free verse and languorous open vowels of Whitman’s poetic construction, the reader is welcomed, and likely accepts the poet’s coming overtures in section 5: “Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat, / Not words, not music or rhyme I want, / not custom or lecture, not even the best, / Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.” The poet is setting up an environment free of criticism and open to possibilities.
Both he and the reader are equals in this poetic microcosm. Whitman exalts experience as superior to accomplishment, living as superior to doing:
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe, And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.
In the same vein, as if to mock the seriousness of academic studies as unnecessary constructions and complications, he writes in section 2: “Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? / Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems...” In the middle of the Victorian Age, when the body and sexuality
132 were taboo, Whitman praises both and the acceptance of both—an acceptance of the body as it is, and as having an integral function to play in human life:
.. .First rate to ride, to fight, to hit the bull’s eye, to sail a skiff, to sing a song or play on the banjo. Preferring scars and the beard and faces pitted with small-pox over all latherers, And those well-tann’d to those that keep out of the sun. (Section 47) I believe in the flesh and the appetites, Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle. Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from... (Section 24)
The human being, as he or she is, is divine and holy, despite all its problems, challenges, weaknesses, and frailties. Most importantly for Whitman, all human beings are equals: '‘Growing among black folks as among white, / Kanuck, Tuckahoe,
Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same” (Section 6). The potentiality of the human being is paramount for Whitman, and more than anything, he wishes to inspire his readers to cast away their fears and inhibitions in order to manifest their potential and to do nothing more in return for his inspiration than to acknowledge him: “Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, / Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, / To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair” (Section 46).
Although Whitman takes great pains to avoid anything but an egalitarian tone in
Song of Myself, his voice is one of a teacher and advisor, and even a mystic or seer. His claims to and of wisdom position him as parental, or even paternal. Whitman’s paternalism lacks any vestiges of the traditional father figure, with its connotations of fearfulness and dictatorial manipulation. Rather, he is a sage peer, expressing wisdom yet maintaining equality with his interlocutors in a poetic conversation. The solidity of
133 his self-image is second only to the solidity of the self-image he assumes of his readers, and both seem to be “built” in an almost ideal fashion if we are to take the classical
Bildungsroman model of formation as an exemplar. Curiously, the general sense we have gathered thus far from the fathers of our Bildungsroman protagonists is that they are either mysteriously absent or exceedingly supportive. “The Judgment” rounds out this grouping by adding a father who is the antithesis of Walt Whitman and his philosophy, which is whySong of Myself proves such a powerful contrast. The father in
Kafka’s story is a terrifying, towering figure who drives his son from a state of dutiful concern to the frenzied madness of suicide. He is a person for whom his son can never possibly grow up to be good enough for his father’s approval; indeed, he is a person for whom his son can never possibly grow up.
Shortly after completing “The Judgment,” Kafka wrote a revealing entry in his diary:
This story, “The Judgment,” I wrote at one sitting during the night of the 22nd-23rd, from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning. I was hardly able to pull my legs out from under the desk, they had got so stiff from sitting. The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me, as if I were advancing over water [...] How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again [...] Only in this way can writing be done, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening of the body and the soul [...] Thoughts about Freud, of course. (212-13; author’s italics)
Despite his uneasiness with Freud’s theories, Kafka had composed his short story under the influence of the literary sources that also influenced Freud and his developmental concept of the unconscious. In an earlier diary entry, he describes an internal conflict between his work as a lawyer for an insurance agency and his calling as a writer (48-9).
“The Judgment” would be cathartic, then, but the results are as stunning as they are
134 shocking, especially if read as a realistic text. From this point of view, the plot is simple: Georg Bendemann, a young, successful businessman, writes a letter to his longtime friend in Russia to announce his engagement to an eligible woman. When he is finished, he approaches his father to discuss the letter. The father, for no apparent reason, interrogates Georg as to whether his friend is actually a friend, or whether he exists, for that matter. In a bizarre turn of events, the father claims to be in more intimate contact with the friend than is Georg, and proclaims allegiance to Georg’s dead mother. After accusing Georg of being devilish and scheming, he condemns his son to death by drowning, a sentence his son willingly carries out through suicide. Georg’s last words are of praise and love for his parents.
The story is nonsensical if taken literally, but Kafka has already given us clues for the appropriate interpretational schema through which to read his story: Freudian psychoanalytics, which considers the ambivalence of the super-ego as an introjected authority figure—in this case, a father figure (Freud 641-2). From the Freudian point of view, Georg suffers the guilt of the Oedipal revolt. His rebellion is exacerbated by his mother’s death, and he wishes to control, dominate, and, ultimately, kill his father. In doing so, he wishes to become his father, and to reclaim his maternal relationship by marrying. The delving into Georg’s unconscious is mirrored by the narration of the story, which is from his perspective, and which quickly moves from an objective description of events around Georg to goings-on within him. This schism is reflected in his father’s seemingly contradictory statements that Georg is both, as Kafka writes, “an innocent child” and a “devilish human being”; the former is how Georg consciously observes himself, and the latter the inescapable conclusion we might come to if we understand his destructive unconscious intentions (Complete Stories 87).
135 Before we accept the course of events in '‘The Judgment,” whether through a literal or Freudian lens, we must establish Georg’s guilt or innocence. His father accuses him of being “devilish” in his attempt to replace or become his father. It is true that Georg has taken an active role in the family business, and has channelled much of his energies into the business since the death of his mother (78-9). During this time,
Georg has rarely seen his father, and, despite their cohabitation, has spent months without speaking to him. Instead of mourning his mother’s death, he has passed his free time socialising with friends and with his fiancee. Nonetheless, he expresses care and concern for his father, and dotes on his father as if he were a child, offering to change rooms, to tuck his father in, and to undress his father, mostly out of guilt (84). He even decides to move his father into his home after he marries. However, when pushed by his father, who vigorously jumps up in his bed in a display of non-cooperation, Georg wants his father to collapse and come crashing down, betraying his true feelings (86).
Once Georg has realised these feelings, he is unable to reconcile them with his self- image of the “innocent boy” to whom he had grown so attached. The introjected father figure of his superego, agreeing fully with the father on whose model it was constructed, has no choice but to destroy the father’s creation of the son (87). And before we relegate Georg’s “friend” to an afterthought, we should notice that Georg’s father calls the friend “a son after his own heart” (85).
We observe the differences between the two young men: Georg is ambitious, successful, romantically attached, and resides at home; the friend is unsuccessful, alone, and in a foreign land. These qualities render Georg “devilish” and the friend “innocent” because Georg’s devilishness is a result of a positive resolution to the Oedipal conflict
(the expected course of events in male development) and the friend’s innocence is the
136 result of a negative resolution (by definition an abnormal or incomplete development).
From Kafka’s portrayal of the two possible paths of maturation in the Freudian model, neither seems to offer a suitable outcome. Furthermore, if we are to read the story autobiographically according to Kafka’s diary entries, we can conclude that the author has struggled to reconcile the paternalistic expectations of professional, economic, and social stability represented by a stable career, marriage, and family life with the creative impulse whose drives resisted those expectations. For Kafka, there is no happy medium for the Oedipal conflict, and there is similarly no happy medium for the conflict affecting his personal development.
Unlike the protagonists in Werther and Sentimental Education, who enjoyed the luxury of choice in their respective situations, and who meandered into personal failure by means of their own choosing, Georg Bendemann and Kafka, himself, are caught in situation from which there is no way out. Georg, like Werther, commits suicide, but for very different reasons. Kafka’s near-autobiographical character is ensnared by the liminal trap, and suffers the most serious of its punishments. Kafka, fortunately, does not suffer the same fate, but gazes into the same existential chasm that Georg does. If a young person cannot choose between two intractable paths without violating either his or her personal morality or certain “rules” of psychological development, there is nothing left to do but negate life. The character of Georg’s friend stands in for the stunted development from which individuals facing the liminal trap can choose over the many consequences of maturing—the most extreme of which are illustrated by the conflict with the father in “The Judgment.” Better yet, those facing the liminal trap might prefer to not even approach any degree of development and hold back even further.
137 In another Kafka short story, “Letter to His Father” (1919), Kafka is directly autobiographical about his difficulties with his father as well as with his condition as a
German-speaking Jew in Prague. Klaus Wagenbach writes, “What he regarded as 'the world’ kept changing from office work to father to wife—but it was always in opposition to his writing” (128). Kafka’s father “objected most violently” to Kafka’s engagement to Julie Wohryzek, since a marriage to a woman of the “lowest rung” of the
Jewish middle-class would have been an affront to the family name (129). In the
“Letter,” which Kafka never sent, he blames his father for his own sense of failure, brought about by the man’s physical presence and dictatorial nature, going so far as to blame his father for his physical and mental diminishment that could not even be rectified by marriage. Issues of faith also arise in the letter when Kafka criticises his father for not inculcating in him a strong sense of his Jewish faith and identity (49, 55-
6). These specifics as to Kafka’s coming of age present clear dangers for the writer as an individual, but they do coincide with the latent forces that explode into the totalitarianism and open conflict only a few years after the publication of these stories.
Kafka’s “Judgment” dramatises in stark fashion why a young person in the modem world would fear the completion of coming-of-age, and this for only reasons of internal and familial psychological dynamics. Georg Bendemann is deracinated from tradition because the figurehead of tradition, his father, refuses to nurture him out of a counter-Oedipal anxiety made worse by the death of his wife. Bendemann’s predicament is made even starker by the contrasting of Kafka’s “Judgment” with
Whitman's Song of Myself in which the adolescent energies of coming-of-age and coming-to-consciousness are so strong and so focussed on the exalted figure of the
138 individual. Both texts focus inward on the role of the individual, and speak to the readers with a powerful internal voice as individuals.
Sadly, there would be even more powerful external dynamics only a year after the publication of “The Judgment” that would cast a pall over an entire generation of young people who were to be drawn into the First World War. Many would lose their lives before having come of age, and many would have their first serious trials of maturation in combat. The trauma of war and of a generation suffering the toll of war en masse would drive them to re-evaluate the institutions and the culture they had taken for granted, and would lead to a rethinking of adolescence and its importance in the
West. In general, one of the effects of the trauma of war led to nostalgia for youth and a solemn new commitment to adolescence as sacred and privileged. In the next pair of texts, Virginia W oolfs Jacob’s Room (1922), prefaced by Wilfred Owen’s poem,
“Anthem for Doomed Youth” (1917), this literary and cultural commitment to adolescence is solidified in a way unprecedented in the approximately twenty years since the developmental period had been named by G. Stanley Hall.
Adolescence as Refuge from Trauma
Wilfred Owen belonged to a group of poets who recounted their experiences in or reactions to WWI; this group included Siegfried Sassoon, who was, to an extent,
Owen’s mentor, as well as Isaac Rosenberg, Rudyard Kipling, and Robert Graves.
Although the early poetry of WWI lent itself to the glorification of battle and the valourisation of the young men engaged in it, the harsh reality of mass, mechanised warfare soon began to sink into the cultural productions about the “Great War,” and the tone of war poetry took a dark turn. Perhaps one of the most emblematic expressions of 139 grief, horror, and resignation among this oeuvre is Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed
Youth,” itself written by a man whose life was to be claimed by the fighting he recorded and critiqued. The poem’s power as both history and biography is among the reasons I select it to introduce a novel in which both are tested by trauma.
Written ironically as a sonnet—a poetic form often reserved for stirring the passions of romantic, political, or religious fervour (in addition to expressing the order of tradition)—the “Anthem” instead expresses its appreciation for “doomed youth” by mourning their loss and concentrating on their absence from the poetic landscape as well as the absence of order and the shattering of tradition. In fact it is the faint outline of their absence much more so than their presence that makes these doomed youth such a haunting personification of Owen’s anti-war sentiments, and we will see a similar technique of absence/presence employed by WoolfJacob’s in Room to underscore the tragedy of youthful death in wartime.
Owen’s “Anthem,” a Petrarchan sonnet, opens with the following octet:
What passing bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells, Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,— The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires. (44)
The poetic voice likens the sounds of the mechanised battlefield—the guns and rifles— to that of funeral bells and the rapid, mechanical repetition in onomatopoeia of funeral prayers. The theme of mechanisation is further reinforced by the comparison of the soldiers to cattle in a massive farming operation. Religion has no place in this scene, and if it were to encroach it would be a “mockery” of the peaceful teachings of
140 Christianity. The only choirs, like the substitutes for the funeral bells and prayers, are from weaponry on the battlefield, and trumpeted death announcements in the small towns and counties in England from which so many of the young soldiers hailed.
The sestet contrasts with the octet in that it returns us to the “home front” to examine the civilian toll of war:
What candles may be held to speed them all? Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes. The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds. (44-5)
Religion and religious ceremonies dominate the sestet. But it is not the lighting of candles or the processions of altar boys who express the funeral rites of the young men that sanctifies them; rather, it is in the mournful faces of the women who have lost sons and husbands. They will remember the lost lives as a tribute far greater than that of flowers. Owen invokes the pathetic fallacy, implying that the slow dusk encroaches as if inspired by the shutting of blinds in the windows of grieving households. His bridging of nature with individual rituals may seem hyperbolic, but Owen is aiming at a universal target in order to hit a worldly one: despite the horrors of the trenches, the worst damages of war are done unto civilians—families and friends. The sociocultural landscape changes under the weight of war, and this is true for both warriors and those who do not fight on the battlefield. The preconditions necessary for mobilisation— industrialisation, educational and religious institutions, nationalism—exist first in the sociocultural context before wartime has even begun, and Virginia Woolf almost blithely and casually chronicles the run-up to the unspeakable inJacob's Room,
141 depicting, as does Owen, the absences that make such a difference in the coming to pass of poignant and immediate presences that define war.
For the readers of Jacob's Room at the time of its publication, protagonist Jacob
Flanders’ very name signified his doom. Bom in the late nineteenth century and growing up through a Cambridge education in the years preceding WWI, he is the
Flanders of Canadian poet Lt. Colonel John McCrae’s 1915 elegy, “In Flanders Fields.”
Jacob is the “[d]ead. Short days ago / [He] lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,” and now lies lifeless (3). The immediate connection between W oolfs novel and McCrae’s elegy is one of the factors that led me to choose this novel of WWI over others; it is self consciously poetic and inspired, at least partially, by the poetry of its age. As well,
Jacob’s Room is as much about death as it is about life, but in a peculiar way, which also led to my choice of this novel over others of the “Great War.” Woolf pays attention to crafting the timescape of her novel so that readers’ awareness of time and its passage comes not from a rigid, realistic, teleological framework, but from a more subtle overlapping effect of the various vignette-like perspectives, mostly from characters other than the protagonist. In this respect Jacob’s Room is almost a novel without an internal teleology, although readers are compelled to conclude a pacifist message on their own. Furthermore, Woolf assigns to her narrative a flow of time that is at once looming and foreboding with the inescapability of death, yet fluid in its facility of accelerating, decelerating, or even reversing the perspective of time. Our awareness of Jacob’s demise is an example of the latter, in that it not only concludes the narrative, but also foreshadows it constantly from its very inception. In light of these departures from the realism of nineteenth-century literature and Woolf s embracing of
142 non-linear time, Jacob’s Room embraces modernism and myth, and itsa priori relationship with poetry situates it well within the scope of this analysis.
The uncertainty of the modem world, both at war and at peace, leads Woolf to a writing style of delightful ambivalence, ambiguity, and doubt. She shies away from embracing anything concrete, up to and including the formation of the complete individual in adolescence. She writes:
[I]t must come as a shock about the age of twenty—the world of the elderly—thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably disagreeable—‘I am what I am, and intend to be it,’ for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself. (28)
W oolfs impressionistic references to the moors, Byron, the sea and lighthouse of
Jacob’s childhood home of Scarborough, and the sheep’s skull allude to the tentative flow and flux of life. As well, they intimate that even if Jacob comes of age, he will not necessarily be reborn into a state of strong-willed independence; this is the danger of living in a time of unknowns. The worst outcome is for Jacob, or any person, to come into his or her own for the sake of others, for the sake of the dominant order into conformity.
Conformity is the easiest outcome for Jacob, given his privileged position, but it is also easy given his apparent lack of a strong coalescing of individuating traits. Such weakness of identity leads him and his narrator to speechlessness. Referring to Jacob’s attempt to express his feelings for Clara Durrant to his mother, Woolf writes, “Jacob had nothing to hide from his mother. It was only that he could make no sense himself of his extraordinary excitement, and as for writing it down— ” (102). W oolfs extended
143 dash, reaching unpunctuated to eternity, both encapsulates and fails to encapsulate the failure of words to describe Jacob’s emotional and ontological state. She ambiguously represents the ambiguity, or formlessness, of her protagonist. Jacob might even be as much an anti-protagonist as a protagonist because of his diaphanous nature, although he is solid enough to be mortally infringed upon by the antagonistic forces of war. So we are left with the vague observations of Jacob, of many perspectives but yielding few tangible details, and Woolf warns us why: “[NJobody sees any one as he is.. .They see a while—they see all sorts of things—they see themselves” (24).
There is a mythic tone to W oolfs aforementioned caveat, one that implies we might superimpose ourselves upon the absence that is the image of Jacob in our minds.
As much as the caveat cautions us against trusting our impressions of others and of the world, it also cautions against our assumptions about our own path. Take, for instance, the course that leads Jacob to war and to his demise. By his day’s standards, he is handsome, educated, intelligent, of adequate means, and sufficiently bonded to the ruling classes; he tours Europe, takes up an apartment in London, and is prepared for a secure professional sinecure that would sustain him for life. However, the same apparatus that ensures Jacob’s ease and comfort from childhood into adulthood turns against him. The hand that feeds him just as likely condemns him. Woolf evokes two powerful metaphors of this fatal turn of events:
[A] dozen young men in the prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery of machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together. Like blocks of tin soldiers the army covers the cornfield, moves up the hillside, stops, reels slightly this way and that, and falls flat, save that, through the field glasses, it can be seen that one or two pieces still agitate up and down like fragments of broken match-stick. (122)
144 The same culture that had cultivated a generation to accept its orders unquestioningly, with the presumed outcome of the reinforcement of the wealth and power to which they had become accustomed, exercises their complacency as eventual cannon fodder.
At times, Woolf displays as much sympathy for Jacob’s generation as for Jacob, individually. He may, in fact, be a synecdoche for his generation, and the idea of Jacob as a placeholder resonates with his emptiness and incompleteness. Woolf allows herself to wonder what might have been for these young men had they lived, but quickly turns away because their fate is too overwhelming for her to overcome. She writes:
Behind the grey walls sat so many young men, some undoubtedly reading, magazines, shilling shockers, no doubt; legs, perhaps, over the arms of chairs; smoking; sprawling over tables, and writing while their heads went round in a circle as the pen moved—simple young men, these, who would—but there is no need to think of them grown old... (33)
Even if these young men had the opportunity to grow old, Woolf thinks little of the rest of their hypothetical lives. They would suffer “violent disillusionment [that] is generally to be expected in young men in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become fathers of families and directors of banks” (119). Jacob, specifically, after the precedent set by his unrequited love for the married Sandra
Wentworth Williams, “had in him the seeds of extreme disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life” (125).
How, then, how does Woolf feel about the best, worst, and in-between of the modem condition? Regardless of cause or timing, the generation of young men to which Jacob belongs will die, as do all mortals. Woolf wrestles with the logical pointlessness of grief, yet accepts its sting as one of the most potent human emotions.
The passing of time toward annihilation draws us to cling to and pretend to know the
145 ineffable and ghostly, as if we could slow that measured procession in the act. This clinging and pretending is part of the exercise of knowing Jacob while not knowing him, part of the hypothesising of what could have been for Jacob and his peers, and part of the reclamation of mythic meaning to fill the hollow void in modem life where faith in corporeal and spiritual betterment no longer operates. In a particularly poignant passage from Jacob’s Room, Woolf muses on the state of life:
In any case life is a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this—and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us—why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him. (56)
“Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love,” she concludes
(Ibid).
As much as Jacob disappoints in being a knowable individual, he also fails as the pinnacle of his cultural inheritance, a role W oolfs narrative half-heartedly attempts to assign him. When his mother and friend Bonamy enter his London flat after his death, alongside the miscellaneous paperwork, bills, clothes, shoes, and other assorted chaos are Jacob’s books. The Greek classics, the Elizabethans, romantic literature, history, are stacked and shelved in no particular order. “Nothing arranged,” thinks Bonamy; “Such confusion!” says Betty Flanders (139). Jacob had self-consciously possessed these books, the record of his Western culture, but could not keep them in the order that the culture required to make teleological sense of itself. Again, we might suspect that Jacob as a mythical figure is clashing with modern historical sensibilities. Perhaps he even presents a model opportunity for surmounting cultural limitations.
146 Nonetheless, there is palpable conflict between Jacob and the culture to whose high attributes he aspires, while that same culture's lowest attributes are all that he receives, in turn. Woolf does not trust this culture of hers; she sees in it the incipient death of her protagonist:
Stone lies solid over the British Museum, as bone lies cool over the visions and heat of the brain. Only here the brain is Plato’s brain and Shakespeare’s; the brain has made pots and statues, great bulls and little jewels, and crossed the river of death this way and that incessantly, seeking some landing, now wrapping the body well for its long sleep; now laying a penny piece on the eyes; now turning the toes scrupulously to the East. Meanwhile, Plato continues his dialogue; in spite of the rain; in spite of the cab whistles... (86)
We are left wondering why Jacob must die for a culture whose greatness is ostensibly in the discovery and collection of knowledge, knowledge that requires a degree of humility, gentility, and creativity. These are qualities lost in the battles waged by its inheritors against each other. Jacob's Room demonstrates to us that the discovery and collection of knowledge assures us of nothing—not greatness, not peace, not the full acquaintance of another human being. In these respects and others, Jacob’s Room exemplified the joint power of modernism and myth to portray adolescence as a refuge—or liminal trap—in which its participants could hide away from the trauma of brutal conflict.
We learn from Woolf that we are neither guaranteed a fair and just life, nor the fulfillment of our potential, nor even complete self-awareness, as Jacob’s spotty inner- monologues suggest. Is it any wonder, then, that the promise of coming-of-age rings hollow, especially when contrasted against a time of war in which a generation was called upon to sacrifice itself? The nurturing sociocultural order that the young person needs to achieve the Bildung of Wilhelm Meister falls apart, and the predictable reaction
147 over time will be for young people to resist acculturation and assimilation through the
usual rituals of coming-of-age. Instead, they will either embrace the liminal trap or
reinvent adolescence altogether. In the next section, I present an example of the former
in the iconic mid-twentieth-century coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, in
which the protagonist revels in his rejection of the rituals of coming-of-age that are
expected of him by the authority figures in his life. To him, the failure of authority justifies his rebellion, but he fails to offer any viable alternatives other than a repetition
of the tired adolescent platitudes.
The Failure of Authority
I would like to frame J.D. Salinger’s novel with Dorothy Livesay’s elegy about
the 1936 assassination of Federico Garcia Lorca by the forces of Spanish General
Francisco Franco because of the youthful Livesay’s powerful commentary on right
versus wrong and authenticity versus pretence, a commentary on which Salinger
elaborates in his novel. Livesay, a Canadian poet with communist sympathies, wrote an
essay identifying the three themes of the Spanish conflict that informed her poem:
“disgust with the Western powers’ nonintervention, the Fascists’ betrayal of the
Christianity they claimed to espouse, and a view of the war as a final showdown
between civilization and barbarism” (Irr 221-2). More generally, Livesay saw' the war
as the ultimate conflict between established world powers and the idealism of
democracy that the Spanish Loyalists represented (Ibid). Similarly to Salinger’s
protagonist, Holden Caulfield, who rails against the “phony” world of adults and their establishments, Livesay’s poetic voice in “Lorca” laments the loss of the genuineness of the Spanish poet and tries to make sense of the mad, fragmented world without him. In
148 a sense, the Spanish Civil War, which immediately preceded WWII, can be construed as a prelude for that greater conflict, and thus Livesay’s poem— and its disappointment with how various establishments handle themselves during wartime—can connect with
Caulfield’s disgust with the adult world in immediate post-WWII America. We know, for example, that both our poet and our protagonist suffer from the wages of hypocrisy.
The metaphor of the war between civilisation and barbarism also connects “Lorca” with
Catcher in the Rye, though in the latter, Salinger differentiates them in subtler terms.
Livesay is not so subtle at the opening of her elegy. She evokes images of death,
“[w]hen veins congeal” and when “voice’s door / Is shut forever.” “Sheets go cold” and
“[t]he heart hammer” turns to “silence driven in / Nailed down.” Without Lorca’s voice, “we descend., .down from heaven / Into earth’s mould,” as if earthly life is closer to the celestial while he is alive (30). The poet’s voice is the illuminating beacon of truth, inhabiting all, from nature to human speech:
If you were living now This Cliffside tree With its embracing bough Would speak to me.
If you were speaking now The waves below Would be the organ stops For breath to blow. (31)
Livesay makes clear that she believes Lorca is alive in spiritual or mythic time, in the
“grass flash emerald sight / Dash of dog for ball / And skipping rope’s bright blink /
Lashing the light!” (Ibid) The poetic word, sung “out aloud / Arching the silent wood /
To stretch itself, tiptoe, / Above the crowd...” propels the poet into a dimension in which “song outsoars / The bombers range” (32). The spirit of Lorca, in italics, commands us, though his words are not explicitly or grammatically a command, ‘'‘'Light
149 flight and word/ The unassailed, the token!” (Ibid; author’s italics) Unseparated by
commas, the former line conflates the revelation of truth (light) with the freedom of
movement (flight) and the free expression of thought (word). The latter line celebrates
the inviolability of spirit, and the word “token” may refer to the tangible manifestation
of the abstraction that is that spirit. It is as if Livesay acts as a medium through which
Lorca again speaks, and engenders in us his courage and bravery to speak truth to
power, despite the consequences.
To some extent, Livesay heals herself of the disillusionment wrought by the death
of her hero, but the fact remains that Lorca, despite his continuation in mythic or
spiritual memory, has departed the mortal plane in which his words held the most sway
over worldly events. In the same fashion, Holden Caulfield clings to a fantasy of
dualities from which he feigns the ability to remain an objective party. These dualities
all revolve around the categories of childhood and adulthood: genuine versus “phony,”
innocent versus corrupt, pure versus perverse, static versus fluctuating, alive versus
dead, etc. Thus Livesay’s rendering of Lorca and Holden’s rendering of himself are
deified, if not messianic, and their figures reach toward the mythic in their stretching of
the temporal boundaries of everyday existence.
The crux of Holden’s philosophy is encapsulated in his misreading of a Robert
Bums poem, “Comin Thro’ the Rye” (1782), and, similarly to how I chose to analyse
Jacob’s Room because of its existing in the shadow of McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” I
choose Catcher in the Rye because it also lives in the shadow of a poem. As well,
Catcher quite clearly deals with the resolution of diametric opposites in a mythic
operation akin to those described by Levi-Strauss. We remember from Harold Bloom
that the “anxiety of influence” compels poets to misread existing poems through a 150 process of “misprision.” His revisionary ratio,tessera , involves the reversal of an ancestral poem’s meaning, forming an antithetical meaning from the received meaning
(49). In the case of Burns’ poem as interpreted by Holden, the line “Gin [should] a body meet a body / Comin thro’ the rye...” becomes “If a body catch a body / [C]omin’ though the rye...” (Bums 181; Salinger 224). Holden’s misreading converts the erotic subtext of Burns’ poem into a romanticised (rather than romantic) fantasy in which he finds his adult calling by catching children from plunging off the side of a cliff into the death of adulthood from their idyllic rye fields of childhood innocence. His dream is ironically dashed by his much younger sister’s blunt correction of the poetic meaning.
Holden’s misreading of the Bums poem, and his sister’s subsequent correction thereof, brings to the fore the novel’s main motif: the pitting against—and attempt to hold together—the aforementioned extreme dualities. From the novel’s opening paragraph, in which Holden criticises his brother, D.B., for “prostituting” himself and his writing to Hollywood, to the repeated references he makes to his late brother Allie’s innocence preserved in death, we are confronted by repeated references to the tensions between irresolvable options. For example, there is Holden’s encounter with the aged teacher Spencer at the beginning of the novel as contrasted with his final encounter with sister Phoebe; the first symbolic of the terrors of aging and death, the second symbolic of the innocence and splendour of childhood. Holden’s desperation to find a “third way” toward coming-of-age causes him to excoriate the only two models he could emulate as insufficient: Stradlater, one schoolmate, is hypersexualised, violent, and ill tempered, whereas Ackley, another schoolmate, is perverted to the point of filthiness by his sexual repression.
151 If anything, sexuality and sexual maturity are among Holden’s chief anxieties.
Seeing himself as the “catcher” of children about to lose their innocence, his sensitivities are especially heightened when confronted with the subject of sex. Salinger leads us to suspect his protagonist fears his own sexuality more than the sexual awakening of his juniors:
Somebody’d written “Fuck you” on the wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant... I figured it was some pervert bum that’d sneaked in the school late at night to take a leak or something and then wrote it on the wall... I hardly even had the guts to rub it off the wall with my hand, if you want to know the truth. I was afraid some teacher would catch me rubbing it off and would think I'd written it. (260-1; author’s italics).
For Holden, sexuality symbolises the mental and physical changes of maturation whose outcomes are of no possible comfort or relief. He loses himself in thoughts of stasis and death. This is the liminal trap of the most extreme order, but even it cannot protect
Holden from his worst fears. He reflects after visiting the mummies in the New York
Museum of Natural History:
You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You maythink there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and right under that it’ll say “Fuck you.” I’m positive, in fact. (264; author’s italics)
The museum also provides the setting for Salinger’s most potent images of the stasis for which Holden longs. The first is the mummy tomb, and the second is the
Eskimo exhibit, where “[y]ou could go [...] a hundred times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way
152 south...” In this liminal space between being and becoming, identity, language, and even thought fall apart for Holden: "I can’t explain what I mean. And even if I could,
I'm not sure I’d feel like it” (157-8). The Museum cannot be separated from Phoebe, as she stands for the innocence Holden desperately wishes to both preserve and possess.
Part of him knows, however, that it may be impossible to do either: “I kept thinking about old Phoebe going to that museum on Saturdays the way I used to. I thought how she’d see the same stuff I used to see, and how s h e ’d be different every time she saw it
[...] Certain things they should stay the way they are” (158; author's italics). The urgency with which Holden carries out his protectionist attitudes toward his sister betrays deeply personal anxieties about the kind of man Holden worries he could become, and how that man might adversely affect youth who are coming of age.
It is no secret that Holden feels alienated from his family elders and his other authority figures, mainly teachers. His parents are entirely absent from the narrative, save for their implied intervention in placing Holden in a sanatorium for his physical and mental ailments brought about by his crisis. What is worse, his brother D.B. has succumbed to the seduction of money. Only his brother, Allie, escapes reproach, and
Phoebe is a constant source of worry. Yet the domain of Holden’s worry cannot be confined to what she alone might discover in life to shatter her innocence: Holden must, at some level of consciousness, suspect that he, as an older role model for his sister, risks failing her by becoming “phony,” corrupt, perverse, fluctuating, and dead. In his mind, the only thing worse than one’s adversaries is becoming like one’s adversaries.
Early in the novel, Holden does confess to some of the less admirable qualities he often ascribes to his adversaries:
153 [S]ometimes I act like I’m about thirteen. It’s really ironical, because I’m six foot two and a half and I have gray hair [...] And yet I still act sometimes like I was only about twelve. Everybody says that, especially my father [...] Sometimes I act a lot older than I am— I really do—but people never notice it. (13)
Holden, despite his best efforts, is becoming rather than being, that is, being in the third- party, objective sense to which he clings as his mantle of superiority, much as he does his red hunting hat.
All young people are in danger of falling from childhood grace, and in Holden’s estimation, seemingly all of them lose their integrity during coming-of-age. Holden sees this in himself, though he alludes to it only obliquely. He is not so kind to others, for example Sunny, the young prostitute with whom he attempts to have a liaison shortly after his arrival in New York City: “She was a pretty spooky kid. Even with that little bitty voice she had, she could sort of scare you a little bit. If she’d been a big old prostitute, with a lot of makeup on her face and all, she wouldn’t have been half as spooky” (127). The figure of Sunny uncomfortably conflates gross, mature sexuality with just enough childlikeness to remind Holden that the first phase runs fluidly into the second. Phoebe, the pinnacle of childlike innocence, is not immune from Holden’s suspicion because “she’s a little too affectionate sometimes. She’s very emotional, for a child. She really is” (89). His fear of what could happen to Phoebe puts Holden into an especially protective state, the culmination of which is the episode of “Little Shirley
Beans,” the title of a record he buys for her. At first, he praises the recording:
It was about a little kid that wouldn’t go out of the house because two of her front teeth were out and she was ashamed to [...] I knew it would knock old Phoebe out... It was a very old record, terrific record that this colored girl singer, Estelle Fletcher, made about twenty years ago. She sings it very Dixieland and whorehouse... (149)
154 After time and some subconscious reflection that he does not report to his readers,
Holden accidentally drops the record and responds with strong emotion—“I damn near cried...” (199). He collects the numerous shards of the record in its envelope, symbolically preserving the ambiguous message that the sexualised song of apparent innocence renders him an agent of corruption for his sister, despite the inherent dangers of childhood to corrupt, and regardless of Holden’s efforts.
Holden’s surreptitious return home to New York City and to his parents’ apartment proves cathartic for him. There he begins to work through and shed his compulsions to externalise his internal desire to be preserved as an innocent—or promoted to a “superior”—and confronts the impossibility of these desires. Toward the end of his urban adventure, when his defences are at their weakest and his physical and mental health are waning, he admits that he is the one he wants saved. Leaving his childhood home he had secretly entered, he says, “It was a helluva lot easier getting out of the house than it was getting in... For one thing, I didn’t give much a damn any more if they caught me... I figure if they caught me, they caught me. I almost wish they did, in a way” (233-4).
Shortly thereafter, his need to be saved is confirmed when he visits a former teacher, Mr. Antolini, who lives nearby. It is late, and the teacher is inebriated after a dinner party. His older wife putters in the kitchen, her image drawn as a grotesque caricature of female beauty. In the context of a most distasteful version of an adult household, Mr. Antolini holds forth some words of wisdom that ring somewhat hollow in Holden’s ears:
[Yjou’U find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behaviour. You’re by no 155 means alone on that score, you’ll be excited andstimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them— if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. (246; author’s italics)
The episode peaks with the teacher suggestively stroking Holden’s head after he falls asleep on the couch, which the young man construes as a homosexual overture.
However, the situation is somewhat more complex than an older man’s taking advantage of a younger man during a moment of vulnerability. Salinger does not mean to portray Mr. Antolini as a predator—Holden does so unilaterally. He needs to eradicate the nuance in what his teacher has said, for it challenges the system of dualities through which Holden interprets the world. To accept Antolini’s words of comfort at face value would invalidate this system, but to refute them on the grounds that he is a “pervert” enables him to disregard any wisdom he may have had to impart.
Holden eventually concludes that it is better to say nothing to young people who are troubled by their growing pains. In one of the final scenes of the novel, Phoebe is reaching from her seat toward the gold ring in the nose of the merry-go-round horse she was riding, and Holden is afraid she will fall: “The thing with kids is, if they want to grab for the gold ring, you have to let them do it, and not say anything. If they fall off, they fall off, but it’s bad if you say anything to them (273-4). We might read Holden’s conclusion as a step forward in his evolution as an adult, that he is emerging from the liminal trap and passing through the modern myth of adolescence rather than dwelling in the myth for its own sake. However, Holden’s solution at the end of the novel is to proceed to yet another high school; his attitude, despite the psychotherapy he has received and the lessons he could have learned from near-collapse, is to continue down the same path that led him to that collapse. 156 Far from reflecting the inversion of the adolescent myth in its author, Catcher in the Rye reveals a stunning level of awareness from Salinger. He has written a trenchant critique of the plight of the adolescent whose intelligence and sensitivity unravels the packaged hypocrisy of the post-WWII world. As well, Salinger, like Livesay, explores the search for heroes and idols on which many young people embark. Unlike Livesay, who may well be acceding to the worship of Lorca as a hero or idol, Salinger exposes the risks a young person assumes by projecting him or herself onto or through an impossible ideal. Holden’s projection of his conflicting inner dualities out into the world grapples with the imperfect order of the “powers that be” that Livesay similarly blames for the violation of the best qualities and possibilities of youth. While Salinger captures his protagonist’s plight and accomplishes a degree of mastery over it within the
Bildungsroman genre, he cannot and will not attempt to force a resolution to Holden’s predicament. Accordingly, readers should not confuse Salinger’s limited temporal scope, which implies clean breaks at the start and finish of the narrative, with the realities of the unresolved adolescence of its protagonist. The very reasons for my selecting Catcher as an exemplar of the post-WWII Bildungsroman are that the novel most explicitly explores the lack of resolution between extremes, and most self consciously takes as its inspiration the reading (or misreading) of a poem in which a mythic figure sets an example for the protagonist, albeit a failed one.
In a continuation of our exploration of unresolved adolescence in racial and ethnic identities, I conclude this chapter with an analysis of James Baldwin’s Another Country
(1962), preceded by Claude McKay’s “America” (1921), first because these works add to our discussion the vital topic of the African-American experience in coming-of-age, and also because they dovetail in terms of time and place with Catcher in the Rye. In
157 fact, we might imagine the disaffected Holden Caulfield ending up in Baldwin’s
Greenwich Village, encountering the bohemian lifestyle of artists, writers, and musicians who openly flaunt convention and attempt to live without the “phony” trappings of traditional life at which Holden casts such a critical eye. McKay’s poem, though read as specific to the African-American situation in the pre-civil rights United
States, can just as easily be read as a cry from the disaffected and alienated, two categories to which Holden almost gleefully belongs. Holden and his fully articulated liminal trap casts a long shadow into the future, as the protagonists in coming-of-age novels written after the publication of Catcher will demonstrate.
Discrimination against the Outsider
McKay’s “America,” first published in 1921, is a product of a unique author from unique circumstances, which makes his poem suitable for a discussion of the broader
African diasporic condition. McKay was bom in Jamaica in 1889, and moved to the
United States in 1912 to attend the historically black college, the Tuskegee Institute.
Kati Ramesh and Kandula Randi write that McKay’s multinational and colonial perspective make a “unique contribution to the global discourse of black writing...[inaugurating] two significant black cultural movements, the Harlem
Renaissance in the United States and Negritude in Europe” (1). McKay’s unique positioning as a British colonial subject, and later as an African-American—to say nothing of the long transitional period in between, since McKay did not become a naturalized US citizen until 1940—makes him the nexus of cultural forces that showcases the difficult situation of those belonging to multiple minorities. In McKay’s case, these were colonial subject, American, and person of African extraction. As we
158 will see later in Another Country, Baldwin exchanges colonial subject with sexual minority, but the mounting of identity tensions onto the marginalised subject has similar pressuring effects—effects with tragic results.33
Ambiguity is the overriding feeling conveyed in “America.” The first ambiguity is from the poetic voice’s attitude toward the country, and the second from the poetic voice’s orientation with or relationship to the country. The poem, a traditional fourteen- line sonnet, containing three quatrains and a concluding couplet, all in regular iambic pentameter, exhibits great nuance in its personification of the country as a confluence of many conflicting currents, as well as the order and tradition the sonnet typically represents, as it did in Owen’s “Anthem.” The poem begins:
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! (153)
Already, McKay is using contrasts to convey ambiguity. A maternal America feeds him, but the food is the “bread of bitterness.” She threatens to take his life by violence, but his response is love toward her “cultured hell”—a seeming contradiction. He continues:
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. (Ibid)
The country’s energy both animates him and bolsters him against her impending assaults. Her geographical grandeur is at once impressive and destructive:
Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred
33 Some scholars believe that McKay was not strictly heterosexual, which is another link to Baldwin and his characters, and points to his relationship with his first mentor, Walter Jekyll, as a precursor to later same-sex relationships with other poets and writers (Ramesh & Rani 189). 159 Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. (Ibid)
He is paralysed by majesty, despite the evils she has wrought. Still, he feels no ill will toward the country:
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand. (Ibid)
The final section holds the least hope for America. Any glory she may contain threatens to be submerged by the sands of time, like everything in the temporal world. Here we find McKay’s ambiguous relationship with America useful, as it liberates him from the myth of the country as eternal, if not eternally in transition. He escapes the trap of
American myth, although not until after some struggle to define whether he loves or fears the country. The end of the poem is not a happy one, but realistic, and reflects the ever-changing and stressful relationships between identity, geography, and sociocultural context. These overarching themes make “America” an ideal poem to begin a discussion of a novel that treats many of the same themes in similar ways.
For my discussion of discrimination against the outsider and the liminal trap’s appeal to them, I have selected Baldwin’s Another Country: a lengthy, sprawling, and complex novel that ambitiously attempts to confront questions of race, class, and sexuality in New York’s Greenwich Village in the late 1950s, not long after Salinger’s
Holden Caulfield has had his “urban crisis” in that same city. It is prescient in its treatment of a diverse cast of characters who try to live together, love together, and otherwise coexist without regard to the divisive racial, class, and sexual tensions in which they are immersed. Predictably, these tensions periodically explode, starkly reminding them of the complexities of human relationships in modem life, especially in
160 the context of cities to which diverse populations have moved in search of economic opportunity or social acceptance. Even in the pluralistic metropolis, society’s shortcomings and inequalities claim victims, sometimes even their lives, and sometimes by their victims’ own hands. Thus it is in a discussion of the character of Rufus Scott— the only black man of major consequence in this black man’s novel, and one who dies after only a third of he narrative has passed—on which I wish to spend the remainder of this chapter. Like McKay, the fictional Rufus is a union of multiple identities: African-
American, male, and bisexual. The three fail to integrate, and his centre cannot hold.
On his last night alive, Rufus, an unemployed jazz drummer who has resorted to prostituting himself to men in order to survive, wanders the streets of New York. The
City stands for the worst of the sociocultural context in which and by which Rufus was raised as a young African-American, and his experience in the washroom at Benno’s
Bar reflects this:
It smelled of thousands of travelers, oceans of piss, tons of bile and vomit and shit. He added his stream to the ocean, holding that most despised part of himself loosely between two fingers of one hand. But 1 ’ve got to stay there so long... He looked at the horrible history splashes furiously on the walls—telephone numbers, cocks, breasts, balls, cunts, etched into these walled with hatred. (83; author’s italics)
In his immersion into the vile, inhumane sea that is the seediest underbelly of his city and country, Rufus suffers an attack of the most extreme alienation. When he hears
Bessie Smith sing, “There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no mo’” he “wondered how others had moved beyond the emptiness and horror which faced him now” (49). The only movement
Rufus makes is toward his death in a plunge off the George Washington Bridge. He rides the subway toward his final destination, “sitting in the lighted car which was far
161 from empty, which would be choked with people before they got very far uptown, and stood or sat in the isolation cell into which they transformed every inch of space they held” (85).
The train lumbers from the affluent whiteness of downtown Manhattan to the poverty of black uptown. The divisions and tensions of race and sexuality are palpable:
Many white people and many black people, chained together in time and space, and by history, and all of them in a hurry. In a hurry to get away from each other, he thought, but we ain’t ever going to make it. We been fucked for fair... The train, as though protesting its heavier burden, as though protesting the proximity of white buttock to black knee, groaned, lurched... The train rushed into the blackness with a phallic abandon, into the blackness which opened to receive it, opened, opened, the world shook with their coupling... (86)
Personal relationships, sexual and otherwise, are what lead Rufus to his discontent.
This may be so because his contacts with the greater sociocultural context are too overwhelming, or perhaps because given the enormity and adversarial nature of the institutions with which he has contact, the personal is the only meaningful vehicle for communication. Unfortunately, these personal relationships are fraught with the problems that alienate Rufus from his greater sociocultural context.
For example, his relationship with Leona, a young white southern woman, stokes his anger toward whites to the extent that he physically mistreats her. His vitriol toward her and her race directly contributes to his death and her confinement in a mental institution. The seeds of the abuse in their relationship are sown the first time they consummate their relationship:
[Njothing could have stopped him, not the white God himself nor a lynch mob arriving on wings. Under his breath he cursed the milk- white bitch and groaned and rose his weapon between her thighs...
162 [He] felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-white babies. (22)
Rufus’ homosexual relationship with Eric, as well as his prostitution to men, further troubles him. His approach/avoid stance toward his similarly sexually ambiguous white
Italian friend, Vivaldo, yields the one exchange Rufus has with another human being in which there is even a hint of connection:
“Have you ever wished you were queer?” Rufus asked, suddenly. Vivaldo smiled, looking into his glass. “I used to think maybe I was. Hell, I think I even wished I was.” He laughed. “But I’m not. So I’m stuck.” Rufus walked to Vivaldo’s window. “So you been all up and down that street, too,” he said. “We’ve all been up the same streets. There aren’t a hell of a lot of streets.” (52)
The underlying problem is that Rufus feels that neither his friend nor anyone else has been “up the same streets” as he.
There is a direct link between Rufus’ alienation and that of Holden Caulfield: both suffer from post-WWII conformity, with its binary codes of conduct. Acceptable liminal spaces and states of being were few and far between, and the notion of transcending a narrow range of identities was unfathomable. Holden saw conformity in terms of “phoniness,” and Rufus in terms of an even more visceral affront that threated his very existence. In this vein, Baldwin writes an apt description of New York as the trap of identities:
It was a city without oases, run entirely, insofar, at least, as human perception could tell, for money; and its citizens seemed to have lost entirely any sense of their right to renew themselves. Whoever, in New York, attempted to cling to this right, lived in New York in exile— in exile from the life around him; and this, paradoxically, had the effect of placing him in perpetual danger of being forever banished from any real sense of himself. (316)
163 Baldwin’s prescription, as suggested in his novel’s title, to live in another country
(which is echoed in Vivaldo’s suggestion to the desperate Rufus to leave town for a while [49]) thus becomes an antidote for the ailing soul who cannot come of age due to an unfriendly sociocultural context. This would be a true exile, not the exile Baldwin decries in the above passage—an exile of alienation, of a separation between consciousness and meaning. Holden feels a similar compulsion to exile himself by travelling West, but, like Rufus, does not leave. Holden leaves us with the threat for further personal disaster, but Rufus completes the act of self-annihilation in unambiguous, hateful detail.
Rufus Scott is the (anti)hero of Another Country, his death reverberating through the remainder of the novel as a warning to others to leam how to love themselves and others or die, an Audenesque philosophy of the same era. As the final death we study in this chapter, after the suicides of Werther and Georg and the battlefield casualty of
Jacob, we must ask ourselves how these deaths differ or are similar. Since our concern is coming-of-age into adulthood, we should also ask ourselves why so many
Bildungsromane protagonists are dying before they can complete their chief task. As I have argued before, the case of Werther is somewhat of an exception: he has the requisite support from friends, family, society, and culture, but selfishly ends his life because he cannot compromise his ideals with the realities of his life. Thus I do not believe the liminal trap applies to Werther because his choice to depart his developmental trajectory results from personal choice rather than contextual failings.
Georg Bendemann, on the other hand, cannot reconcile the conflicting moralities imposed upon him by society to emulate and improve upon his father’s accomplishments, both romantic and financial, and by his father to remain childlike and
164 subservient into adulthood. These are enough to provoke an existential crisis from which there is no way out other than death.
Jacob Flanders’ death, though not a suicide, to outside observers seems preordained by his strict adherence to the expected activities of a man of his age, generation, and class. He participates in the ritual sacrifice of his sociocultural context, and if he were not expecting to be subject to such a fate, the fault is entirely his.
Finally, Rufus Scott is a victim from all sides, though if given more time, as Baldwin suggests, he may have arrived at some compromise that would have opened avenues to less painful ways of living. These deaths are but a few instances of authorial and cultural apprehension that arise when fictional young people are put through the paces of coming-of-age within the Bildungsroman’s classical framework. The form cannot contain the innumerable exceptions to the world of the classical Bildungsroman that become the norm as time progresses. Powerless to save their protagonists from forces beyond their control, authors must explore alternative resolutions to their narratives beyond the premature deaths of their protagonists.
Authors and others participating in the representation of coming-of-age begin to explore constructive options, namely the many other manifestations of the liminal trap that generally defeat the purpose of the classical Bildungsroman. In the next and final chapter, I will discuss texts written in the Bildungsroman tradition, but which deviate from its classical form without resorting to an exploitation of the liminal trap. These texts openly dispute the coming-of-age genre while taking part in it, and embrace the creative and artistic aspects of self-formation. In addition, I will propose a new role for myth in coming-of-age as a response to challenges and crises whose goal is the compromise required for young people to survive and thrive in a world, whether 165 fictional or real, that cannot always offer the supportive sociocultural context presupposed by the classical Bildungsroman.
166 Chapter III: Resistance to the Liminal Trap. Actual and Potential
During the period between the late eighteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, the narratives of my selected Bildungsromane followed less closely the genre’s classical form. Despite the protagonists’ following of the prescribed rituals of coming- of-age, these infrequently resulted in the achievement of maturity or adulthood. Indeed,
the protagonists became stuck in the liminal trap of a perpetual myth of adolescence that, rather than being transformative, rendered its participants static, inert, and
frustrated (and in several cases, dead). The socioculturally sanctioned rituals for a very
specific period of life no longer functioned as intended. As Castle has argued, the
Bildungsroman genre turns on itself and, around the turn of the last century, begins to
critique coming-of-age in late modernity. Had this critical tendency not emerged, the
genre might have disappeared entirely (23). Instead, the genre was compelled to change
because of its roots in the mythic consciousness of Western culture, because we need
this genre or something similar to survive. If we have learned anything from myths thus
far, it is that they adapt to their circumstances, and the Bildungsroman genre, as a form
of myth, does so as well.
In this third and final chapter, I will present examples of coming-of-age fiction
in which the classical ideals of Bildung are not met, but in which coming-of-age
nonetheless occurs. In other words, the failure belongs to the genre rather than to the
protagonists, and instead of the disastrous results of failure we saw in chapter II, we see
a transformation of the genre that allows it to remain relevant and powerful in its
culture.34 The protagonists in these novels are as different from the traditional
34 Of course, this is failure is Castle’s and Adorno’s sense, in the fashion o f ‘adapt or die”— a phrase applicable as much to the genre as to its protagonists. We must remember that, in an historical sense, 167 Bildungshelden as can be: they are minorities—sexual, racial, and in class. Their stories cannot be reconciled with the blueprint of the classical Bildungsroman because they have neither the means, nor the societal connections, nor often the education of their classical counterparts. They live in worlds of marginalisation, isolation, and uncertainty. In this way they are reflections of how readers might view themselves if they were to write the narratives of their lives—an instance of art imitating life, and vice-versa, and an expression of how mythic exemplars can make for a meaningful life.
If we lack in reality even mentors and elders from whose examples we can learn, as
Moretti so famously put it, “the way of the world,” we should not be surprised to find literary protagonists with a similar plight.
Moretti’s argument in his eponymous book, that the Bildungsroman serves as a
“symbolic form” rather than as a mimetic reflection, supports that the genre changes in order to allow society to adapt to the caprice and unpredictability of modernity (5).
Socialisation, as the “interiorisation of contradiction,” teaches young people how to compromise, and this compromise appears in the Bildungsromane that self-critique (10).
The closure that classical Bildungsromane sought no longer matters as much as the story’s “open-ended process” (7). The idea of a modernist Bildungsroman would, at least to Moretti, be a contradiction: the more recent a Bildungsroman is, the less
“conclusion” or “maturity” is possible (27).35 Thus the modernist Bildungsroman is not strictly a Bildungsroman in classical terms, at all. Indeed, scholars might wish to consider alternative terminologies to describe the novelistic coming-of-age genre,
myth begets the Bildungsroman genre, and if the child strays too far from the parent, it is disciplined and corrected per the needs of the culture (an assumption that rests of the basic need o f humanity for myth, which seems supported by the global persistence and diversity of myth thereof). ’5This would follow Moretti’s thesis that the Bildungsroman arose out o f specific conditions in nineteenth-century Europe, conditions that quickly began to change as soon as the conventions of the Bildungsroman became set in literature. 168 perhaps taking into account its mythic roots. The term “coming-of-age novel” is already synonymous with “Bildungsroman,” so any variation thereupon would not be
advisable. In the spirit of the other term coined for this analysis, perhaps a “novel of
liminality,” or, in keeping with the original German, a “Liminalitatsroman.” We
already know from Castle’s work that he might disagree with such a radical step of
renaming and reclassifying, and he probably would not be alone in objecting.
Nonetheless, with the following texts I argue that a new pattern and new tendencies in
the genre can be readily detected, the most important of which is the resistance to the
liminal trap that, in the preceding examples, has triumphed. I do so after introducing a
seminal coming-of-age text from the beginning of the twentieth century that both Castle
and I associate with the surrender to the “immanent critique” in the Bildungsroman
genre.
I make one exception to my analytical pattern by including here, without poetic
introduction, James Joyce’s A Portrait o f the Artist as a Young Man(1916). I do so
because of Castle’s reliance on it for his analysis, as well as for its unique treatment of
classical myth that achieves revisionist mythmaking within its own mythic system and
without simply demythifying its source into a linear analogue. The classical Greek
myth on which James Joyce bases his semi-autobiographical novel paints Daedalus the
father as the careful artificer of Crete and Icarus the son as the careless inheritor and
squanderer of his father’s talents. Judith Bemstock writes: “In the twentieth century as
in the past, the moral tragedy of Icarus, who suffered the fatal consequences of not
heeding his father’s advice, has generally symbolized the penalty for an excess of zeal
and ambition in political, social, and artistic domains” (179). The myth falls neatly into
the worldview of those whom Armstrong claims live in “mythic time.” Almost
169 paradoxically, the story of this father-son duo impresses readers because of the teleological reading: behaviour X=consequence Y. Joyce may have recognized the approachability of the Daedalus-Icarus myth for himself as a participant in literary modernism and for his contemporary reading public, but his grasp of an artist’s spiritual strivings toward aesthetic perfection extends much farther into the timelessness of myth than could any typically and thoroughly modem novel.
The most telling incongruity between the Daedalus-Icarus myth of Ovid and
Joyce’s reinterpretation lies in readers’ inability to determine which classical character corresponds to which Joycian character. One is tempted to meld the two in Portrait'. father Simon Dedalus, rather than triumphing over imprisonment through ingenuity, resigns himself to an alcoholic haze of nostalgia with no redemption in sight; son
Stephen Dedalus, though not named Icarus, by his youth becomes so, and with readers’ ensuing expectation for his precipitous fall. As far as one can conclude from Portrait, without the benefit of foresight from Joyce’s Ulysses, it is the Icarus analogue (Stephen) that holds the most promise and the Daedalus analogue (Simon) around whom hangs a cloud of impending disaster. The closest one can come to a consensus as to the order of correspondence entails the melding of all four of the characters into one synthetic individual.
The incongruous superimposition of any reductionist intent over Joyce’s
Portrait is fraught with pitfalls especially because of a lack of perfect, direct, one-to-one correlation between characters and circumstances in the myth and those in Joyce’s novel. In some cases even the closest approximations fail. For example, theDeus Ex
Machina in classical Greek mythology cannot be adequately equated to the role of
Catholicism in Portrait—though the latter may descend, at least circuitously, from the 170 former—and the human agency in Portrait, exemplified by Stephen’s dramatic statement of an aesthetic truth system, appears nowhere in its mythic inspiration. Lois
Hinckley attempts to liken individual motivation or agency in modern myth with classical mythology from a time before agency with an argument that bypasses the widespread tendency to seek easily identifiable equivalences between old and new myths. She writes:
[We use] “Divine machinery”; the difference is that the Greeks and Romans were less shy about putting a name to the intervening deity. [...] Most often modem fiction explains actions exclusively in terms of internal motivation. A character does as s/he does because of childhood experiences, heredity, mood, etc. (249-50)
Few of these experiences are more personal or symbolic than the lessons of the costs and benefits of heady youth—or, more generally, the flirting with danger at any age—that have fascinated readers before, during, and since the time of Joyce. However, it is not enough to generalize that the Daedalus-Icarus myth is simply timeless and appeals to everyone automatically. Rather, Joyce intentionally directs his readers to place his narrative within the context of the adolescent myth that had, historically, already become synonymous with the Bildungsroman and its predecessor, the heroic myth.
Stephen Dedalus may not cross vast geographical distances or vanquish teeming hordes of adversaries as did any number of preceding heroic figures, but he does undergo several defining trials-by-fire throughout the course of Joyce’s novel. With
Joyce’s Portrait as a guide, we find that the Daedalus-Icarus myth contains multiple artifices, artificers, ascents, and descents. The most transparent of all of these is Simon
Dedalus’ steady dissipation and bankruptcy throughout the novel, which motivates
Stephen’s dwindling respect for his father as well as his dwindling material inheritance. 171 Stephen has a monopoly on artifice throughout the novel, as it emerges in response to both his ascents and descents. His earliest ascents occur during the childhood years at
Clongowes and at home, from a protected child into an intelligent, socially aware individual keenly observant of the adult issues around him. A childhood Christmas dinner, during which Stephen observes his father engaged in a raucous political discussion, is a watershed moment for him, as is his stalwart Catholic family’s rejection of his crush on a protestant neighbourhood girl. In response, Stephen composes poetry to make sense of the irrational ways of his Irish world. Stephen employs artifice in response to adversity, either through verse or by moulding his consciousness as an extension of his art, as evidenced by his challenging of the injustice of the status quo at his Catholic school when he feels punishment has been improperly meted out upon him, an opportune allusion to the story’s earlier title, “Stephen Hero.”
In Stephen’s eyes, his worst downfall involves adolescent sexual transgression with a Dublin prostitute. In light of his strong Catholic upbringing, Stephen does not immediately appreciate the need for a “fall” as a component of the formative equation set forth in the Bildungsroman genre. Later, Stephen’s spiritual awakening at the behest of a paternalistic Jesuit hones his psychological and physical discipline, though he later rejects the religious aspects of his conversion. These and other ascents and descents preface the most revelatory of Stephen’s experiences, his mystical encounter with birds and especially with the “Bird Girl,” coinciding with his decision not to serve as a member of the Jesuit order. Eugene Waith labels Stephen’s mystical encounter with the birds outside the library of his school as a pivotal moment, noting that Stephen communes with them in the name of his patron Daedalus, and also intensely identifies with the Egyptian god Thoth, assayer of the underworld. Reading Stephen becomes a
172 multi-faceted task, since his analogues range from Daedalus to Icarus to Thoth—to say nothing of Wagner’s Siegfried with his sword that “forge[s] in the smithy of [his] soul”—each reading with its set of consequences to the outcome of Portrait (256).
Maurice Beebe writes of Stephen’s greatest triumph: the theory of aesthetics by which the artist will live his life, “cunningly presented as an exercise in pseudo-Thomistic dialectic and rooted psychologically in this moment of vision—the Girl-Muse as stasis in a 'timeless’ setting—when, worn out by his failure to participate domestically [...] sensually [...] or religiously [...] he dedicates himself to his vocation and realizes for the first time that ‘His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spuming her grave- clothes’” (308).
Of the novel’s end, Michael Levenson writes:
Stephen himself has consistently worried over endings, from his early concern that “he did not know where the universe ended” to his moment of anxiety during a late conversation with Cranly: ‘Stephen, struck by [Cranly’s] tone of closure, reopened the discussion at once.’ The refusal of closure represents a powerful motive for Stephen; his succession of rebellions can be seen as attempts to avoid closed forms, to ‘reopen discussion.’ The proud cry of the aspiring artist, ‘On and on and on and on!’ is a demand for a perpetual crossing of limits, a resolute march to the end of the universe. (1020)
There are echoes in Levenson’s explication of Armstrong’s mythic time. Essentially, the novel operates according to the attitudes of its protagonist as he confronts the finite through various modes of repetition, fostering readers’ perceptions of Stephen as an individual compelled by infinite and unending iterations—“as the sort of character, that is, who having done a thing once, would as soon do it a million times” (1021). The outcome, writes Waith, is that some critics believe that Portrait's main theme is sin:
“the development of Stephen Dedalus from a bundle of sensations to a self-conscious, dedicated, fallen being (256-7). Written in an age when religion no longer held primacy 173 over the West, Portrait, with its setting as an exceptionally religious Ireland as a contrast, recasts sin as an activity spurring not only great downfall and tragedy, but also of the promise of victory over the less-pleasant human fates.
Victory, in Joyce’s formula, translates into the creation of a man or woman from the trying fires of childhood and adolescence’s crucibles. However, as Castle has often reminded us, the running of the gauntlet no longer follows the predictable script of the classical Bildungsroman, and the trials of adolescence have as much to do with traditional rites of coming-of-age as they do with the acclimatisation of young people to the failure of these rites—and the demands incumbent upon them to craft new rites, or to deal without them, altogether. These strivings for compromise with failed rituals and their literary engagements foreshadow the events of other Bildungsromane that resist the liminal trap, several of which we shall analyse in the shadow of Joyce and other progenitors of the modernist Bildungsroman. I do so in full recognition of Joyce’s novel as one of the first Bildungsromane that fully realises myth in participation with
Castle’s mechanism of failure; however, it is far from being the last, and only one of many variations of the execution of Bildungsromane self-consciously usurping the liminal trap.
Failure in/and Success
Identifying coming-of-age in narratives of its failure, at least in traditional terms, challenges us to find protagonists who both transgress the conventions of the
Bildungsroman and elude the liminal trap. Since the earliest protagonists of the
Bildungsroman were white, heterosexual men, intelligent or clever, and of some means and long-term attachment to their surroundings, it would stand to reason that seeking 174 out their opposites would yield fruitful starting-points. To that end, I have selected novels concerning the queer, the female, the multi-ethnic and displaced, and the intellectually challenged. In addition, these novels chart some measureable progress in the development of their protagonists, either in the resolution of personal conflicts and the gaining of internal insight, or in their social advancement and integration. These markers of development come into focus against a strong hegemonic tide that counteracts them, but they emerge all the same. I should emphasise that of the novels I have selected for this chapter, each deviates in some way from the traditional novelistic form. I believe this is the result of the turn that Castle describes as transforming the
Bildungsroman and prolonging the genre’s life beyond the sociocultural conditions that spurred it. These novels adapt, either in form or content or both, to the exigencies of the age in which they were written and the characters with which they were written.
Following the mythic impulse to adapt and survive, the novel, in general, and the
Bildungsroman, specifically, change accordingly, departing from their conventional forms.
I perform the experiment of finding success in failure in the following texts which I have selected for the following reasons: E.M. Forster’s Maurice (1913-1971) introduced by W.H. Auden’s “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love’’ (1937) for their bold treatment of the gay experience; then in Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women
(1971) introduced by H.D.’s “Mid-Day’’ (1916) for their articulation of female anxieties in an androcentric world; Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005) introduced by
Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning’’ (1915; 1923) for their expression of the stresses of finding identity in times of changing traditions; and finally Mark Haddon’s Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003) introduced by Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving
175 But Drowning” (1957) for their pioneering examination of cognitive difficulties and misunderstood communication, respectively.
Few poems express the ambiguity of love as poignantly as W.H. Auden does in his poem, “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love” (also known as “Lullaby”). As Auden was an openly gay man and his poetry typically speaks from an intimately personal voice, I read the poem as a man’s romantic homage to another man. This is not to say that the poem cannot stand for an expression of universal “human love”—Auden’s own terms from the poem’s conclusion—but as the backdrop for E.M. Forster’s ground breaking gay Bildungsroman, Maurice, it is best read as an expression of the gay experience during the first half of the twentieth century.
The first stanza of Auden’s poem establishes a rhythm commensurate with the mood of its content. The meter is trochaic tetrameter, but in catalectic form. The catalectic removes a syllable or ends a line with an incomplete foot. A sense of absence as well as hurriedness is engendered by the rhyme scheme as seen in the first stanza:
Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers bum away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral... (53)
The effect is most noticeable between in the line breaks between “away” and
“[Individual,” and between “from” and “[tjhoughtful,” and continues throughout the poem.
Auden’s narrative concerns a man overseeing the sleep of his lover, and he is careful not to elevate either his or his lover’s status to the mythical, heroic, or grandiose:
176 the lover's head is but “[hjuman,” and the poetic voice “faithless.” He emphasises the
fleeting nature of all things human, “burn[ed] away” by “[t]ime and fevers.” And while
the poetic voice recognises his temporal predicament, he rhetorically asks the universal
forces governing their fate to “[l]et the living creature lie... [m]ortal; guilty, but [...]
entirely beautiful.” The poetic voice pleads for an exception to his lover’s mortal plight,
hurrying, like the rhyme scheme, but also pausing pregnantly. In the second stanza, the
poetic voice proclaims the sublime joy of the union of bodies and souls in “their
ordinary swoon.” He then critiques the pathetic fallacy: “Grave the vision Venus sends
/ Of supernatural sympathy, / Universal love and hope; While an abstract insight wakes
/ Among the glaciers and the rocks / The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.” The third stanza
refers indirectly to the “Cinderella” fairy tale, when “[o]n the stroke of midnight
pass...[c]ertainty, fidelity...” One hears the “pedantic boring cry” of the “fashionable
madmen,” like the town crier announcing the evening news in pre-literate days,
announces the “cost, / All the dreaded cards foretell...”—the certain coming of death
and dissolution, or, earlier than that, disunion and the abandonment of love. Until that
time, however, “from this night / Not a whisper, not a thought, / Not a kiss nor look be
lost” (54). Whether the lovers’ careful study of and attention to each other can suspend
the effects of time on the organic self is unknown, but Auden’s poetic voice incants it
might be so under the guise of the subjective sovereignty of perception.
The poetic voice begrudgingly admits that time takes its inevitable toll: “Beauty,
midnight, vision dies...” (54) The most he can wish for his beloved is that the “winds
of dawn [...] such a day of sweetness show, / Eye and knocking heart may bless, / Find
the mortal world enough...” (Ibid) The final four lines subtly disclose the gay
experience, and it is only through a queer reading of these lines that their vague
177 statement becomes potently meaningful. The poetic voice, already paternal in tone, understands that he cannot watch over the man he loves at all times, and that in a heterosexist and homophobic world, the younger, less experienced man will endure the prejudice of the majority sexuality, either through its overt oppression or through the mechanism of internalised homophobia. The young man is wished “[njoons of dryness” to “see you fed / By the involuntary powers”—those strange yet ubiquitous winds of fate or divine assistance that visit mythic participants during their moments of need
(Ibid). A young gay man in the 1930s required extraordinary strength and conviction to survive were he honest about his sexuality. The days and “[njights of insult” he would bear, presumably apart from his lover, would pass less bitterly if “[wjatched by every human love” (Ibid). The “human” of “human love” underscores both the universality of love across the sexual spectrum and the particularity of gay love, which has yet to achieve the respect necessary to “pass” without “insult.”
Above all, Auden’s poetic voice in “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love” exercises his powers of prediction for a younger man who has yet to come of age into a sexual minority culture. The older man might express tenderness and hope for the paused moment of contentedness he enjoys with his lover, but his overall conclusion holds little hope for either of their happiness. Physical beauty will fade, as will the blissful innocence of the child whose existence is “ephemeral.” The older man, world- weary and sensitive to endings, almost guiltily revels in this moment of intimacy that he knows cannot last. His longing, palpable in his hoping against hopes for the equality of all loves in an unequal world, projects on the younger man a sense of possibility, as if there could be more for him. The poet’s projection expands on his personal history into characters who both fail and succeed at accepting themselves as they are.
178 The poem’s relationship with the novel is somewhat more complex, however, in that although Auden’s pessimism dominates his poem, he found the courage to publish it during his lifetime. Also, Forster relies more heavily on his cultural inheritance as an educated, middle-class Briton to justify homosexual relationships as a natural progression of Western classical history. Auden alludes to myth in his language and imagery, but more so for aesthetic effect than for validation, and his striving for a universality of the language of love does not quite overlap with the Edwardian cultural milieu in which Forster writes. The vein of commonality running through “Lay Your
Sleeping Head, My Love” and Maurice is their honest, understated, and tender humanising of the love that “dare not speak its name” by means of existing, traditional literary forms that could not quite contain the expansion into homoeroticism. These works, rather than capitulating to the failure of their genre, undergo the adaptation of the mythic corrective.
In Auden’s case, he knows that the expectation of regularity engendered by a trimeter rhyme scheme contradicts the fleeting nature of his subject; however, the dissonance of form and content, far from causing confusion, blends masterfully in a parallel exposition. For Forster, the rupture of the classical Bildungsroman genre operates with more layers than the contrasting duality of Auden’s poem, but the general principle is the same: to challenge convention without obliterating it. He and Auden do so to expand the horizons of their genres, but, more importantly, to ensure that the literary and cultural work being performed through their narrative content is accessible and relevant to their culture. One of the many sides of the liminal trap in the classical
Bildungsroman genre is its expression of the irrelevance of the conventional expectations of older people for young people and for young people of themselves. At
179 the same time, these expectations are so ingrained in our consciousness that they symbolically stand in for the general process of coming-of-age.
E.M. Forster must have been, one some level, aware that he would have to cloak a gay Bildungsroman in tradition. The general narrative structure of actions of Maurice follows a familiar path: we encounter several episodes of a young person’s development, starting with the most distant past and progressing to some future point in the story’s self-contained temporalities.36 Our first encounter with Maurice Hall is a comic depiction of the fourteen-year-old boy’s awkward conversation with his teacher,
Mr. Ducie, about human reproduction. Maurice’s incipient sense that such a lesson for some reason does not apply to him initiates his isolation as a misfit in the strict social system of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century England. The alienated Maurice thus joins the ranks of Bildungsroman protagonists who feel exceptional. We then find
Maurice in university, where he becomes quasi-romantically involved with his first love-interest, Clive Durham. Their sexless relationship is fuelled by Greek writings on the virtues of homosexuality that are, to the middle- and upper-classes, vices. Like
Meister, Moreau, Flanders, and Caulfield, Maurice Hall represents the pinnacle of not only his class, but also his cultural lineage, as if the evolution of the West occurred solely to produce this one exceptional man burdened by great expectations. Maurice’s burden grows in its impossibility when his isolation is reinforced in adulthood by a consultation with his family doctor that ends in stalemate—he will not acknowledge homosexuality, and certainly not in his patient.
’6 We might draw parallels between the structures ofM au rice and Jacob's Room, but while both present self-contained episodes in relative temporal order, the latter does so in shorter vignettes and in a looser manner than in M aurice. Nonetheless, both belong to a strain of the Bildungsroman in which the entirety of an individual’s development is not portrayed, only what the author believes most salient. Naturally, all narratives of coming-of-age are incomplete by necessity: often the details of a protagonist’s early years are neglected, and the narrative could not possibly be completed without a fuller account o f his or her life (and sometimes death). 180 Time passes, and Maurice, having advanced in an unfriendly culture to a respectable position as a stockbroker who regularly performs charity work, still suffers from nagging anxieties about his sexual and emotional longings. Appointments with a hypnotist—one of few options at that time for the professional, non-religious handling of Maurice’s ‘’problem”—confirm his homosexuality, and then, after a vacation with the newly-married Clive Durham at his estate, he has his watershed moment. Finally, with the Durhams’ gamekeeper, Alec Scudder, Maurice is able to have an emotional and physical liaison. Scudder, the catalyst for Maurice’s awakening, belongs to a long line of similar Bildungsromane characters; in our analysis, Wilhelm Meister’s Natalia,
Werther’s Charlotte, and Frederic Moreau’s Marie Amoux. The two live out the rest of their lives together in the novel’s open-ended conclusion, though not until Maurice divulges his relationship to an apoplectic Clive. Forster crafts their final meeting so that readers can only deduce that Maurice has triumphed in becoming a whole person, and that Clive has utterly failed.
There are, of course, significant differences in the content of Maurice that set it apart from its predecessors in the classical Bildungsroman genre, and these differences are what trigger the departure of Forster’s novel into a more flexible space that reduces the capacity of the liminal trap to take hold. First, despite Maurice’s inhabiting the literary place-holder of an exceptional member of his world—the place-holder intended for a Bildungshelden who might resist integration into his or her sociocultural context, but who is obligated to in order to reach is or her pinnacle of cultivation—this ‘'hero” is merely an average, middle-class man, adequately educated and regularly employed. He excels neither in sport, nor in art, nor in intellectual pursuits. Maurice’s true
181 exceptionalism emerges when he, like Holden Caulfield, can no longer abide the hypocrisy of the world in which he is imprisoned.
Second, like Jacob Flanders, Maurice is a poor standard-bearer for Western culture. To celebrate Maurice is to celebrate an everyman, far from a hero. However, it is Maurice’s simple honesty, his almost naive quest for truth in his inner life, that makes him such an effective and relatable protagonist, self-consciously fallen as was Stephen
Dedalus and most others who fall short of the heroic ideal. Third, the catalytic character in the narrative of a young man is another young man. Rather than drawing inspiration or compulsion from the love of a woman, Maurice Hall comes into his own and draws on his inner strength as a tribute to his love for Alec Scudder. Their relationship contrasts sharply with the tepid, insufficient coupling of Clive with his wife, Kitty, which only supports Clive’s fa9ade as a successful man and undermines any chance he might have for inner harmony. Maurice’s formation as an individual within a traditional narrative of these inverted circumstances should be of prime interest to us, and the majority of this development occurs during and after his Cambridge years.
The narrator describes Maurice’s home at which he sojourns before university as the “land of facilities” in which “nothing had to be striven for, and success was indistinguishable from failure” (16-17). Home was an extension of the breeding of mediocrity and hypocrisy young Maurice learns to detest in all conventional Edwardian society. Its only redeeming quality was the employment of the young George, the garden attendant whose presence “stir[red] in the unfathomable depths of his heart”
(16). The contrast between Maurice’s unspeakable desire and his failed sociocultural context etches a haunting image of him as but a shadow on the ceiling, reflected formlessly from the glass of the windowpane. He cannot see himself in detail, and is 182 afraid (19). Much of Maurice’s fear could be blamed on the failure of his secondary school education, overseen by a principal who neglects to notice that by the end of their course, his students “had developed into men,” believing them everlasting children,
“celibate and immortal” (10). The curriculum’s inadequacy in imparting sex education is what obliges Mr. Ducie to have his awkward discussion with the boy, a painful scene regardless of the teacher’s good intentions (13). Sensing the inadequacy of his initiation into heteronormativity, Maurice thinks to himself, “Liar, coward, he’s told me nothing”
(15).
Forster grants access to Maurice’s inner-life through the protagonist’s dreams:
“Where all is obscure and unrealized the best similitude is in a dream” (21). In one,
Maurice fantasises about George running naked toward him. In another, Maurice hears a voice saying “that is your friend,” and draws a connection to the imagery of the first dream. In pursuit of the emulation of others who present similar characteristics to those of his inner-life, Maurice finds Risley at Cambridge. “[D]ark, tall and affected,” Risley comes across as refreshingly open with his emotions and opinions, and Maurice feels liberated that he might not have to live as a “piece of cardboard” if he followed his friend’s lead (30, 29). Living in such a way exposes Maurice to “becoming a pillar of
Church and Society,” as was his father when he died, “and other things being alike
Maurice would have stiffened too” (45). We cannot know if the early death of
Maurice’s father foreshadows the impending threat of death of Maurice’s inner-life, or if it, in fact, suggests an Oedipal confusion in the younger man; staunch traditionalists might use the patriarchal absence as an explanation for Maurice’s sexual orientation, but
Forster would only lead them to believe this psychological platitude as a means to later enlighten them (or to insult them). Risley’s refreshing effect on Maurice proves
183 temporary, and his interest turns to Clive Durham, another member of the aesthetically sensitive circle at Cambridge.
While it seems that Clive might satisfy Maurice’s needs for an exemplar in his initiation into full selfhood, Clive’s mutual affection for Maurice’s backfires from his overabundance of enthusiasm. He admits he loves Maurice, but the words are too blunt for the nascent, conformist homosexual. Maurice feigns scandal, calling Clive’s confession “rot” and a “crime”; he also appeals to their shared English identity as justification enough that such feelings cannot stand (57). His moment of dishonesty serves a higher purpose, though, and as soon as he stirs from his conformist slumber, his horizons open “from the vastness of the ruin [that] ecstasy had wrought,” and he promises himself no longer to repress his inner-self and to “pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own” (61). “[H]e loved men,”
Forster writes, “and always had loved them” (Ibid). But he could not love Clive, at least not in the mind-body-soul fashion of the Greeks he idealised. Frustrated and lonely, he again expresses himself through the narrator in his reveries:
A refined nature would have behaved better and perhaps have suffered less. Maurice was not intellectual, nor religious, nor had he that strange solace of self-pity that is granted to some. Except on one point his temperament was normal [...] Memories of Clive might pass. But the loneliness remained [...] Clive took to visiting him in dreams [...] He knew there was no one, but Clive, smiling in his sweet way, said “I’m genuine this time,” to torture him. Once he had a dream about the dream of the face and the voice, a dream about it, no nearer. (130-1)
Maurice begins to search for a community, a social manifestation in the outside world of the conditions within himself: “the greenwood” (131). Although Clive falls from Maurice’s romantic favour, they maintain a cool friendship. Conveniently, Clive and his wife, Anne, live in an estate surrounded by green woods. Penge, the estate, and
184 its inhabitants, is a synecdoche for all that is stilted and conventional, but its wild, natural entourage redeems it. Between two worlds Maurice must decide during visits to his friends, and there at Penge he meets Alec Scudder (161). Maurice, sleepless and suffocating inside Penge, leans out his window and, aloud, invites an unnamed guest to come to his room (171). During the day, he is drawn to the outdoors, for “indoors [...] he’d moulder, a respectable pillar of society,” not unlike his father, who, “stiffening” into another such pillar, met his death (182). For some time, Maurice observes Scudder in his natural habitat: the gamekeeper’s domain. Concluding that events have transpired to unite him and Scudder, Maurice interprets his nocturnal invitation as one meant for his future lover, and repeats it. The gamekeeper hears the invitation, and appears at the window with “a noise so intimate that it might have arisen inside his own body: ... "Sir, was you calling out for me? ... Sir, I know... I know,’ and touched him” (187). The scene of first consummation is startling not only for its explicitness for its time, but also for its levelling of class distinctions. No one notices this more than Maurice, who asks
Scudder, “What I want to know is—what I can’t tell you nor you me—how did a country lad like that know so much about me” (209).
Given time, Maurice worries about the differences between his class and
Scudder’s. Forster exploits this new source of anxiety to further explore Maurice’s conflict between the external expectations of his society and his inner, more “truthful” life. He had accepted almost his entire life, despite the anguish it caused him, that “‘life on earth’— it ought to be the same as daily life—-the same as society” (210). With the typical catastrophic flair of the high Empire, he worries that “if the will can overlap class, civilization as we have made it will go to pieces” (202). Maurice believes himself
“fixed” to his class, in spite of not being “afraid or ashamed anymore” (210). The
185 climax of conflict occurs at the British Museum, symbol of empire and supposed
repository of the totality of Western knowledge, where Maurice and Scudder meet to
discuss the possibility of Scudder blackmailing his ‘'gentleman.” There is a comical and
highly unlikely run-in with none other than Mr. Ducie, the first untruth-teller Maurice
can recall from his early life. Ducie misremembers Maurice’s last name, and in a fit of
frustration, Maurice tells him that his name is Scudder. Finally, Maurice “had the
inclination to lie; he was tired of their endless inaccuracy, he had suffered too much
from it” (219).
Maurice’s name-taking of his lover’s identity solidifies the erasure of the class
space between them, shocking both men into the discovery that they love each other.37
Scudder thus becomes a man worthy of emulation, and Maurice worthy of emulation as
well, since both make the decision to exile themselves from society into the
“greenwood,” a place of isolated geography and a state of mind in direct conflict with
the societal mores that had governed their lives. For his part, Maurice had given the
status quo ample chances before rejecting it outright. Glen Cavaliero writes Maurice, in
Forster’s narrative, approached the “four guardians of society—the schoolmaster, the
doctor, the scientist, and the priest. All four in different ways condemn him, and not
one of them can offer any help” (137). The young man tried in vain to gain the
conversion offered by these four guardians, but they would not have him. Short of
suicide, the creation of a new way of living was Maurice’s only option. In this way,
Maurice triumphs where Georg Bendemann failed in Kafka’s “The Judgment.”
,7 The category of socioeconomic class poses interesting challenges when we attempt to understand its role in the liminal trap. While the privileged might seem to have an easier time coming of age because of the resources available to them, we nonetheless find an example like Maurice Hall for whom the traditions of his class suffocate him and prevent him from realising an adulthood best suited to him. Conversely, as is the case with Alec Scudder, the freedom from class-based expectations can be liberating. 186 Bendemann dies in the name of the dominant order, undermining his developmental and heroic potential. Maurice lives and lives well, but violates the rules, rupturing the genre but saving his life (and possibly the lives of some of Forster’s readers).
In mythic terms, Forster has composed a text that forgoes the teleological effects of myth and embraces a flexible template for those in a developmental stage that although affected by its sociocultural context, does not slavishly adhere to tradition.
Alternative narratives of coming-of-age open innumerable avenues for individuals who do not or cannot conform to the expectations of adolescence dictated by the classical
Bildungsroman genre. We have already seen this in Forster’s alternative narrative for gay men, but many other populations benefit from a deviation from the norm, namely minorities. I must qualify the term minorities, especially in the discussion of the
Bildungsroman. Because the classical version of the Bildungsroman genre deals mostly with the formation of the young, educated heterosexual man of at least some means, almost anyone who does not conform in some way to this archetype could be a minority. It is to women and girls to whom I will proceed in the work of Alice Munro as introduced by the poetry of Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)
H.D.’s poem “Mid-Day,” from her first volume of poetry,Sea Garden (1916), is
in keeping with the high-imagist style for which she would become famous. Writing in the shadow of Ezra Pound, who gave her her pen name, she felt his weight of influence as the father of imagism. She writes in the space between identity and anonymity, conveying the pain of the impersonal poet tasked to write as the scribe of the
fragmented and fragmenting world of the first half of the twentieth century. H.D.’s
subjectivity as a woman is an undeniable influence on her poetry, and although she
struggles for “direct treatment of the image,” the autobiographical is never far away. 187 Thus, she straddles the objective and subjective, recording the age around her while recording herself.
The result of the friction between these two worlds can be felt in the alienation and the impersonality of H.D.’s poetry, which cannot be entirely attributed to her attempt to achieve objectivity. She compresses and distils this sensation in a way that makes palpable the estrangement and disaffection of one who cannot find a place in the dominant order. For this reason I pair her “Mid-Day” with Alice Munro’s female
Bildungsroman, The Lives o f Girls and Women (1971). I do so also because both the
TO poem and the novel feature strong central characters that are reaching out to find connection with meaning beyond themselves. The poetic voice in “Mid-Day,” and the protagonist, Del Jordan, of The Lives o f Girls and Women, are unhappy in a sociocultural context in which they are objects rather than subjects. Their lack of agency drives them to grapple with the enlargement of their consciousness to extend beyond the boundaries that have been imposed upon them, an application of their individual will to write their own narrative of coming-of-age, in the case of Del, or coming-to awareness, in the case of H.D.’s poetic voice.
“Mid-Day,” Susan Stanford Friedman writes, is written predominantly in “the present, what George Wright has called ‘the lyric tense,’ a poetic form that dislocates ordinary space and time and asserts the ‘presence’ of past and future in the lyric moment...” (52) She cites the “split leaf crackles on the paved floor,” “a slight wind shakes the seed-pods” as part of the “present [...] which is forever” (H.D. 6; Friedman
’8 Munro’s work is a collection of short stories about the same protagonist, and while each story may be read separately and outside of the context of the others, there is a unity among all o f them, including a clear progression of each character in age and in action, that leads many to readLives of Girls and Women as a novel. 188 52). The lyric, addressing at once the future, present, and past, escapes the linear, teleological temporality of the post-Enlightenment West that demands conformity and development according to a prescribed set of guidelines. As well, Friedman writes, no one can dominate another in the “lyric [or mythic] tense” because there is no history of oppression and no threat of domination. All is equal and possible in the present, and although there is anguish in “Mid-Day,” it “has no story” (65). However, a lack of teleology or history does not prevent us from capturing this moment, holding it in our minds, and deriving meaning from it.
The poem begins with an unrhymed quatrain of noticeable linear structure: the first and third lines are longer and descriptive, the second and fourth lines short and declarative. The tension between linear structure and natural imagery heightens the awareness of myth because of the noticeable contrast between the human control of writing and the cyclical, spiritual, otherworldly mysteries of nature. The beating light and crackling leaves “startled” her, and the crackling leaves then visit anguish and defeat upon her. If the first stanza asks “why,” the second responds as “because”: twice the length of the introductory stanza, the second presents imagery of seed-pods and a dreaded warm wind. She likens the “hot shrivelled seeds” to herself, “scattered” and
“spent” in thought. More than anything else, she dreads her thoughts and their power.
In the third and next stanza, she conjures an image of her thought-seeds “split on the path” as “the grass bends with dust.” There is a volitional tension in these visual impressions, as if the poetic voice must choose in which direction to channel her thoughts while feeling the magnetic influence of the wind. She dwells in a territory of uncertainty, wherein the “spent seed-pods, / and the blackened stalks of mint” are overshadowed by the “poplar [...] bright on the hill” that “spreads out, / deep-rooted
189 among trees,” The tree, an object of respect and awe, exudes strength and stability, as well as the mild threat of dominion over all other vegetable growth.
We might ask if the poplar is Pound, H.D.’s chief exponent and one-time fiance, assuming that the poetic voice is H.D. and the poem autobiographical. Given those assumptions, we might further ask if the poem concerns the influence of male artists over female. Her paean to the poplar in the final stanza carries with it a personal tone:
“...you are great / among the hill-stones...” It thrives while she “perish[es] on the path
/ among the crevices of the rocks.” Autobiography aside, the poetic voice does seem to be enduring the “anxiety of influence.” The poem’s imagery captures the agony of a choice that the poetic voice must make. Whether this choice is to follow the greatness of the poplar tree or to allow her seeds to scatter in unknown directions, it grieves her.
We sense her grief in the suspension and immediacy of the always present. In our awareness of the “present-ness” of this poem, we must also recognise its timelessness.
Aside from the linearity of our reading of the poem, we cannot position the events of the poem within any specific time frame, which clashes with the strength of the present and the present tense in the poem. Contradiction, often noted as one of the hallmarks of imagist poetry, comes through strongly in “Mid-Day” in an extended form—the poetic voice cannot thrive in the same environment as the great poplar, yet she cannot even ask the question of herself as to what to do. Her contradiction is her inner-conflict. How might she escape the unfriendly climes of the arid landscape in which she resides? She feels she will perish where she stands, forever in the shadow of the tree she admires.
She has no self-determination, and bends to the whims of natural forces. She can, though, express herself in the vocabulary of the visual, imbuing the image with her
190 emotions and intellect, thereby externalising her problem and giving it the potential to be changed.
Similarly, through writing, the protagonist of The Lives of Girls and Women identifies the suffocating aspects of her sociocultural context and attempts to rewrite them according to the nature and nurture she requires. Rebecca Smith defines the new female Bildungsroman, to which she writes Munro’s novel belongs, as novels in which
“sensitive female protagonists encounter the attempts of society to force them into stereotypical roles as they move from childhood through adulthood; they alternate between acceptance, the path of least resistance and rebellion; but finally they must attempt to live in the world on their own terms, so they suffer through to a new, authentic human role” (127). We are reminded of other female Bildungsromane in which the literary representation of female development involves the overlay and synthesis of layers of personal stories, cultural history, and encounters with hegemonic culture, namely Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Maxine Hong Kingston’s
The Woman Warrior (1976). Even the life Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood in The Bell
Jar (1963), because of her debilitating anxieties, unfolds in a similar trial-by-fire. Like
Del’s story, these female Bildungsromane outline and attempt to defeat the women’s oppression.
Del Jordan often finds herself trapped in binary oppositions, male/female and oral/written being the two strongest. She also feels pulled between mind and body, as exemplified by the tensions between her intellectual pursuits as promoted by her mother, and her physical pleasure as provided by her boyfriend Garnet. Even the choice of physical pleasure and sexual fulfillment entails another duality, that between the enchantment of Garnet’s passionate mystery and the detestable qualities of a young man 191 from the “wrong side of the tracks.” Del’s unsuitability to binaries forces her to join the trend of twentieth-century women authors who “turn inward, towards the body, the emotions, and ultimately the mind” (Gadpaille viii). In the mind, Judith Gardiner writes, “the author exercises magical control over her character, creating her from representations ofherself and her ideals...[thus] the hero is her author’s daughter”
(349).
Del Jordan, the “author’s daughter,” is herself a nascent author who, by the end of the book, decides to write the quotidian as the artistic. Her overlapping of the everyday with the aesthetics of writing exposes her to power structures and the question of narrative authority. Del’s first-person narration of her own Bildungsroman affords readers an omniscient view into the character’s psyche, and it is a unique phenomenon that the narrator of the Bildungsroman of a female is by a female. However, readers’ omniscient view of Del’s psyche is limited to the protagonist’s point of view; Del is recalling her past, and her version of events may not be comprehensive. The protagonist’s narrative limitations do not detract from the retelling, and in fact may, to discerning readers, add an imaginary space between text and interpreter within which to experiment with forms of memory that are not restricted to the linear, teleological confines of the male Bildungsroman, and which encourage multifaceted readings that are more in keeping with the experimental spirit of the female Bildungsromane.
Del’s retrospective description of her surroundings paints a portrait of an artist gifted with mature powers of observation. For example, she and her brother Owen play a game of recollection to catalogue the contents of their Uncle Benny’s cluttered home.
She triumphs over her younger sibling, although there are simply too many items for either of them to recall them all (3). In her own house, she demonstrates an almost 192 photographic memory of what is where: “the plain black wall of home, the pale chipped brick, the cement platform outside the kitchen door, washtubs hanging on nails, the pump, the lilac bush with brown-spotted leaves” (4-5). Once she begins to read, another dimension opens: “I read faster and faster, all I could hold, then reeled out into the sun
[...] I was bloated and giddy with revelations of evil, of its versatility and grand invention and horrific playfulness” (4). The same Uncle Benny whose hoarded possessions provided entertainment for a pre-literate Dell later feeds her insatiable appetite for reading, inviting the young girl to read his many newspapers. In these accounts of local, national, and international events, Del begins to understand that life’s stories are as legitimate as fantasy.
Later, Del’s Uncle Craig introduces her to local and family history, and she relishes in his attention to detail in his history of Wawanash county, bolstering her belief in the worthiness of everyday events as material for writing. Uncle Craig’s work differs from his sisters’—Del’s aunts. She writes they were “prepared to believe in what he did,” even though it “made no difference if [he] had actually had ‘abstract, intellectual pursuits,’ or if he had spent the day sorting henfeathers...” (27) Their days pass quite differently, doing the household and kitchen chores traditionally ascribed to women in the beginning of the twentieth century. They “respected men’s work beyond anything; they also laughed at it” (Ibid). She learns that her aunts’ laughter masks sadness; her world demands that women conceal their talent and intellect. Nonetheless, they participate in this system of oppression, a spiralling of their life stories that contrasts with the progressive linearity of the men’s apparent direction. When Del’s cousin earns a college scholarship, she refuses the money and the education to stay home (32). Del, perplexed, asks herself, “Why was this such an admirable thing to have
193 done?” (Ibid) As she ages, Del realises that “reading books was something like chewing gum, a habit to be abandoned when the seriousness and satisfactions of adult life took over” (99). She would have to surmount this major obstacle if she wished to fully develop as a writer and woman, sending her into an isolation in which her interior landscape takes precedence in her writing.
Del’s mother Addie stands as a bridge between her aunts’ domestic traditionalism and the open-ended freedom of the young protagonist. Addie moves from one fulfilling endeavour to the next, selling encyclopaedias, writing letters to newspapers, and enrolling in correspondence courses. Her energy and drive inspire her daughter, but Del does feel some embarrassment after being used as a demonstration of the effectiveness of the encyclopaedias they would sell door-to-door (56). Del’s decision to conceal her brilliance and creativity from the public sphere clashes with another aspect of her coming-of-age: her relationship with organised religion. Whereas she hides her intellect, Del overtly relishes religion. In the sanctioned organisation of the Anglican Church—“the only church in town with a bell”—she revels in “what all those Methodists and Congregationalists and Presbyterians had fearfully abolished—the theatrical in religion” (83). Another establishment from which Del derives great emotional and intellectual satisfaction is the town library: “I was happy in the library.
Walls of printed pages, evidence of so many created worlds— this was a comfort to me”
(99).
Del’s penchant for the theatrical reappears in chapter V with the annual school operetta. She relishes the permitted display of the creative mind. The “powerful and helpless and tragic” Pied Piper captivates her, as does the young man who plays him
(110). The fantasy, co-produced by the school’s Miss Ferris, is marred by the teacher’s 194 drowning. Del cannot shake the painful reality of Miss Ferris’ death, nor the pall it casts over all memories of her. The facilitator of fantasy thus becomes the victim of reality; some unpleasantness cannot be escaped, and as an artist, Del would have to accept the tragedy of the everyday life she uses as fodder for the writer’s craft. “Miss
Ferris floating face down, unprotesting, in the Wawanash river” would have to coexist in Del’s mind alongside the same figure in a velvet skating costume (118).
Sexual initiation, a mainstay of many Bildungsromane, takes on added significance in the female Bildungsroman because of the complicating tension between traditional and liberal sex-role expectations. As in other aspects of her life, Del thrives as an observer. In this way, she can control the events she observes. The same is true even if the events are fantasy: “We had liked to imagine ourselves victims of passion; now we were established as onlookers, or at most cold and gleeful experimenters”
(123). Appropriately, Del’s sexual encounter with Mr. Chamberlain consists of no more than observing him masturbate. There is little erotic or exciting about the scene, with
Chamberlain making “involuntary, last-ditch human noises [...] at the same time theatrical, unlikely” (141). Again, the theatrical comes to the fore as an important consideration for Del; the sexual act as performance renders it bearable for the observer and socially acceptable for the performer, whose face is “blind and wobbling like a mask on a stick” (Ibid).
Del’s broadening awareness shifts her reading tastes to “modem books” replete with the stories of “rich and titled people who despised the very sort of people who in
Jubilee were at the top of society—druggists, dentists, storekeepers” (146). Although she has always felt out-of-place in Jubilee, the reinforcement of literature regaling the urban life further repels her from her birthplace. Del’s mother assures her that there is a 195 new future awaiting the “lives of girls and women,” one based on the application of intellect and a certain independence from men (Ibid). Del begrudges her mother’s advice because it “assume[s] being female made you damageable, that a certain amount of carefulness and solemn fuss and self-protection were called for...” (147) Certain now that her role was to be that of an outside observer, she draws closer to fiction to encapsulate and manage the palimpsest of her world. The outsider role not only liberates her, but also distances her from former sources of comfort and familiarity, such as her friend Naomi, who, suddenly prepossessed with her appearance, frightens Del
(149).
Del’s declaration of outsiderhood also proves exhausting and frustrating. When she reads a magazine article written by a Freudian psychiatrist, she is furious with his denigration of the female intellect (150). Ironically, Del suppresses her intellectual power in return for the sexual attentions of her first boyfriend, Garnet French. She attends Baptist meetings to please him, “successfully hid[ing] from him what I was like”
(183). Garnet insists that Del convert to the Baptist faith so they can marry. His furious response to her rejection compels him to attempt a mock drowning of her, but Del defiantly calls his rashness a “mistake, to think he had real power over me” (197). Del loses her lover, and although she mourns his loss, her sacrifice is not in vain: she has discovered a truth about her need for independence as a writer and individual.
Independence comes not only at the expense of alienating others, but also of alienating herself, consciously falling from grace, again, like Stephen Dedalus, and becoming aware of her outsiderhood. When she sees herself in the mirror, what or whom she sees is unfocused and distorted: “I was amazed to think that the person suffering was me, for it was not me at all” (200). She had observed her transformation from a figure
196 ensconced in the limits of worldly pragmatism into the newest iteration of a mythic heroine, and soon after, she decides to escape her hometown for the outside world, not only departing from place, but also from the aspects of her self rooted in Jubilee (201).
After a half-hearted attempt to write a novel about a family from Jubilee, Del realises she must full invest herself in a new story that takes into account her experiences, those experiences of real life worthy of fictionalisation.
Munro’s protagonist has an extraordinary talent aside from her obvious imagination, intellectual capacity, and memory. This talent is the strength to resist compartmentalisation in the liminal trap, despite her hostile sociocultural context. The fate of women in Jubilee in the first half of the twentieth century almost requires young women, regardless of their potential, to suppress their development. The reduction of women into “help-mates,” chore-masters, and child-rearers borders on their infantilisation; they cannot perform the rites of self-support, professionalisation, or education, which are the trademarks of “men’s work,” and hence of maturity and adulthood. As H.D. expressed in “Mid-Day,” the thinking person, under the choking influence of a dominant other, can become stifled and even despondent when he or she can no longer express his or her uniqueness in a hostile environment.
Del Jordan is one such thinking person, although she appears to rout the oppressors in her life. She occasionally surrenders to self-pity or even self-sacrifice for her immediate pleasurable benefit, but is still willing and likely to sacrifice short-term comfort for long-term gain. These are her responses to contradictions as a contradiction. Del’s reaction to and methods of addressing contradiction succeed because they fully realise the mythic potential of the heroine in a twentieth-century context. Taking from the modernism of H.D., with its willingness to exploit the rupture 197 of linear and teleological, masculine time, Munro’s heroine— at once a recollected semi- fictional autobiography as well as an extension of the classical hero— can be andis any woman, any outsider, and any minority who is expected to subjugate him or herself to a dominant order. The story is altogether mythic: flexible, adaptable, eternal. Munro, through her protagonist, writes her protagonist out of the liminal trap, reflexively providing herself and all “girls and women” an avenue for escape. Of course, this
“writing out” does not come without struggle or sacrifice.
The themes of struggle and sacrifice introduced in Munro’s work are expanded upon when we widen our circle of coming-of-age protagonists to the contemporary
Torontonian characters in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005). In it we discover the complications of race, place, class, nationality, and identity that a contemporary metropolis synthesises into a whirlwind of distress for young people. It is the story of two generations that do not meet the classical criteria for successful coming- of-age, the journey of the exiled home, and the redeeming qualities of the creative self in self-formation and the dissolution of old beliefs in this new creation. In its own complex way, Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” (1915; 1923) attempts to accomplish the same: the coming-to-consciousness and seeking of certainty and wholeness in a time of disbelief and dissolution. The differences between Stevens’ poem and Brand’s novel, to say nothing of the historical gap between them, do not lend themselves to an easy comparison or a finding of instantaneous parallels between the two, but in a circuitous way, the poem lays a foundation for a way of thinking about the novel. This is so because Stevens works so diligently to re-examine and reconsider the operations of human consciousness as it ruminates on vital, existential choices. I therefore choose to call him a poet of “reversal” after his willingness to, after accepting
198 a proposition, revisit the same proposition, assay it in comparison to others, and reverse his original stance.
This most sprawling and contemplative of Stevens’ poems of reversal, in eight parts divided into eight substantial stanzas, spans 2,000 years of history, touching on the ancient pagan, and peering into nature as the seed of the sacred. Stevens’ propensity for ordinary times and places bridges Florida and Palestine, the tomb of Jesus with
Stonehenge, and Eden with the mundane idleness of a twentieth-century bourgeois morning. Each stanza and section segregates the poetic voice’s reversals of doubt, ending on an ambiguous note that signals the poetic voice’s inclination to enter fully into a true relationship with him or herself and others, and bypassing outside pressures and expectations. “Sunday Morning” narrates the anxiety of an individual who feels the weight of his or her sociocultural context and who must nonetheless strike out in a declaration of sovereignty in the sacred mythic moment.
Readers with keen eyes and ears can enjoy the transparency of Stevens’ mind and of his poems, delving into layer after layer of the poet’s increasing capturing of the transitory world in its mythic creation. Each stanza contains exactly fifteen lines, an odd number clashing with the even number of eight stanzas. The number of stanzas could be dismissed as arbitrary, whereas the number of lines per stanza cannot; the uniformity of lines per stanza lets slip the poet’s careful consideration and measurement of the structure through which his mental filters will allow the means for communication. These stanzas are punctuated by multiple sentences characterised by manifold ideas and a dialogic nature. “Sunday Morning” glimmers with visual activity, alive in the effervescent inner-dialogue of the poetic voice that dominates the poem’s content. 199 In sections I and II, the woman who speaks in the poem rationalises her enjoyment of a Sunday morning in her house rather than in a house of God, expressing her preference for the former’s “[cjomplacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair...” She asks herself, “Why should [I] give [my] bounty to the dead?” Her rejection ironically equates “the dead” with the unattainable, invisible people of the Bible’s distant past, despite the gospel’s repeated promises of life everlasting for believers. For the poetic voice, the Bible and its ostensible followers have become participants in a ritual of death. She concludes, “Divinity must live with herself,” demarcated by “pleasures” and “pains” of her experience, and not by the
“dividing and indifferent blue” sky many believers reckon separates themselves and eternity (Stevens 53-54). In section III of the poem, Stevens offers some unique alternatives in ancient Greek mythology as well as in Christian mythology to the poetic voice’s dead, isolated version of religion. Steven’s voice persists in her interrogative pursuits, asking questions of gender, position, and kinship in each of these cases.
Readers come upon allusions to “Jove” and “his inhuman birth” who “[moved] among us, as a muttering king,” “[w]ith heaven, brought such requital to desire.” Jove could be read as Christ as well as His archetypal forerunner(s), and both “divine” actors are cast by Stevens not to rule from on high, but to walk among mortals. In section V, the poetic voice says that only changes brought about by death fulfill her need for “some imperishable bliss,” since “[d]eath is the mother of beauty...” the ongoing temporality of everyday life, tempered to some extent by the spectre of an unexpected end, the best, most humane, and most divine deeds are possible. “Death is the mother of beauty,” the poetic voice concludes by the end of section VI, “within whose burning bosom we devise...” (55).
200 Continuing in section VII with the theme of contrast, Stevens switches his attentions to primitive religions, capturing a moment of pagan or Druidic ritual in which
“a ring of men [...] chant in orgy on summer mom.” They worship the features of nature, the “windy lake,” “[t]he trees, like serafin, and echoing hills...” Crossing the symbolic watery divide in section VIII, the poetic voice hears a message from herself through her relationship with her surroundings. It speaks of the grave of Jesus, reminding her that “[w]e live in an old chaos of the sun, / Or old dependency of day and night.” In contrast lives nature, symbolised by pigeons who “sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” As certain as the poetic voice is about the setting of the sun at the end of the day, she feels the same about the continuation of nature not in bleak disparities of dead or alive, but in an eternal circularity. Her eagerness to assume responsibility of the living world where “[d]eer walk upon our mountains” (a gentle but powerful retort to “that wide water, inescapable”) liberates her from blindly or slavishly following the expectations of her sociocultural context, and, in the shadow of mythic thinking, indicates the maturity of coming-of-age that occurs in tandem with coming-to- consciousness. The overall lesson we learn from Stevens is that despite the rupture between ourselves and tradition, there is an art to articulating our identities that encompasses the history we might or might not know, as well as our present circumstances, that constantly renews itself if we allow it to do so.
The theme of renewal performed in the delicate space between tradition and the present furnishes the foundation for Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For. We know immediately from the author’s proclamation that “[l]ives in the city are doubled, tripled, conjugated” that she deals with the same messy overlaying of old, new, and hybrid beliefs—from the best-intentioned to the erroneous. Brand brings together her
201 characters based on their parents’ decisions to join various diasporas. All must deal with the results of their parents’ decisions to flee home or live in geographical flux.
Tuyen, Carla, Oku, and Jackie are the outcome of their parents’ mobility. Tuyen is a lesbian artist bom to Vietnamese parents who are saddled with guilt over the loss of their son, Quy, during their flight to North America. Carla is the product of an affair between a black man and an Italian-Canadian woman, who, along with her brother,
Jamal, live between two (or three) worlds. Jamaican-Canadian Oku, a poet who adores jazz, and African-Canadian Jackie, displaced from the Maritimes, share with the others the fragmentation of their senses of place, identity, and memory. The confluence of these characters forms a perfect storm of global backgrounds with vastly different and denied myths that doubly and triply layer them in a liminal trap of the utmost instability.
Each character has “the feeling of living in two dimensions, the look of being on the brink, at the doorway listening for everything” (20). Indeed, Brand’s clear expression of her young protagonists’ sense of being in liminalityin perpetuity best exemplifies, out of all the literature we have examined in this project, the liminal trap. I also believe that she most effectively tackles, out of all the authors we have examined in this project, the question of how such young people might exceed the boundaries of coming-of-age as dictated by Western culture and its exemplar of adolescence, the classical Bildungsroman. She writes:
They all, Tuyen, Carla, Oku, and Jackie, felt as if they inhabited two countries—their parents’ and their own [...] Each left home in the morning as if making a long journey, untangling themselves from the seaweed of other shores wrapped around their parents. Breaking their doorways, they left the sleepwalk of their mothers and fathers and ran across the unobserved borders of the city, sliding across ice to arrive at their own birthplace—the city. They were bom in the city from people bom elsewhere (20).
202 Although all of Brand’s characters share an artistic bent, from music to cooking to the visual arts, Tuyen emerges as the most prominent artist among them. We might see her individual story as a Kunstlerroman in a larger Bildungsroman, not unlike the story of
Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait, and her character dominates the narrative as
Brand’s archetype. Tuyen deals in the realm of symbols to grapple with her anxieties and griefs, whether these symbols are actual art installations or her physical actions in time and space. For example, she symbolically destroys the walls of her small apartment, “surreptitiously [breaking] down the wall between her bedroom and the kitchen, making one large room for her installations” (25).
In the case of her living space and many others, Tuyen lives in diametric opposition to her parents’ neat, luxurious, and relatively secluded lifestyle in the affluent Toronto suburb of Richmond Hill. But whereas they and other immigrant elders maintain the illusion of joining the “good” Canadian middle-class life, Brand’s protagonists are not “able to join in what their parents called ‘regular Canadian life’.
The crucial piece, of course, was that they weren’t the required race” (47). She writes:
Binh and Tuyen were both in the city, so they [...] were required to disentangle puzzlement; any idiom or gesture or word, they were counted on to translate. Cam and Tuan expected much from them. As if assuming a new blood had entered their veins; as if their umbilical cords were also attached to this mothering city, and this made Binh and Tuyen not Vietnamese but that desired ineffable nationality: Western. For Tuan and Cam, the children were their interpreters, their annotators and paraphrasts, across the confusion of their new life. (67)
Urban Toronto serves as the great unifier for all the characters; Brand describes them as
“defined by the city” and its “polyphonic murmuring” (66, 149). Nonetheless, they move through its space with “heterogeneous baggage” that conflicts with the only figure of shared identity among them (5). In their urban context, the protagonists “felt alive.
203 More alive, they thought, than most people around them. They believed in it, this living. Its raw openness. They saw the street outside, its chaos, as their only hope”
(212).
The only character to live entirely outside or beyond the city is the clandestine
Quy, Tuyen’s brother, who, upon arriving in Toronto 30 years after his disappearance fleeing Vietnam, meets his fate “half-dead by the road” at the hands of Carla’s brother,
Jamal (318). Quy, “not having to do anything, never failed at anything. And who, not having a physical presence, could never be scrutinized for flaws and mistakes. That mythic brother grew in perfection” (122). He typifies the aspirations of his parents’ generation as only possible in the mythic imagination, but, importantly, one that is false in its limitations and restrictions, and which relies unstintingly on the precise obeisance of unrealistic sociocultural and parental programming, be it explicit or implied through the lifestyle the family elders actively pursue. Brand’s prescription for escaping this trap is artistry in the greatest artwork of which individuals are capable: themselves.
Against the fragmentation of her life, and of the lives of her second-generation-
Canadian cohorts, Tuyen, the consummate artist in Brand’s postmodern “portraits,” employs art to manifest the inner turmoil that they feel. Envisioning an installation called a lubaio, Tuyen constructs in her mind:
.. .a hundred boxes of varying sizes made of a transparent translucent material floating in a room, suspended by no known element. The floor of the room would be water, and she would walk through the room bumping into the boxes, which would not be discernible to the naked eye. As she collided with the boxes, things would fall out, spikes and keys and mouths and voices. (126)
Energised by the lubaio project, she begins asking strangers in the city what they long for, and what they do not. These words “[paint] radical images against the dying
204 poetics of the anglicised city” (134). Brand specifically critiques the vestiges of English
Canada as they strain to maintain dominance, but she could be critiquing any waning or transforming traditional order.
With race, ethnicity, and cultures in transit in the liminality of the contemporary city framing the alienation and fear of Brand’s characters, she questions their adolescence: how does an individual and generation grow into members in or against their sociocultural context? This she does in the shadow of earlier ethnic
Bildungsromane, such as Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1984), in which there are similar themes of escaping traditions and reclaiming lost family members— be they physically absent or merely trapped in inequitable power structure— through protagonist Esperanza Cordero in the gritty Latino neighbourhoods of Chicago.
And the pain of assimilation, or refusal to perform it, in Brand’s youth, as well as their learning to remember and compartmentalise memory, allude to the work of N. Scott
Momaday’s House Made o f Dawn (1969), in which protagonist Abel struggles to negotiate his identity as a Native American.39
The central struggle of the individual, as descended from the mythic hero into late modem and present times and projected through the written narrative construct, remains to find him or herself and to name that self in such a way that “self’ denotes a certain degree of epistemological certainty. As in “Sunday Morning,” the characters in
Brand’s novel are longing for a strong replacement for the crumbling authorities of the
Old and New Worlds, but none seems suitable save for the Audenesque dictum to “love
39 Cisneros and Momaday also refer, to varying degrees, to myth and folklore in their works, contrasting the oppositions between contemporary Western life and the myths— many of them denied simply by virtue o f their sociocultural incompatibility with the more recent colonial host— that in themselves craft meaning. 205 one another or die.” Love for oneself and another, the highest form of art, according to the authors in whose company we entertain these notions, both demands and delivers said certainty. Such love is neither linear nor causal, but rather cyclical and circular, underscoring the ongoing importance of myth to the human story even while teleology dictates everyday actions.
The final poem and novel I read for this project are meant to bring my analysis full-circle. They represent the pinnacles of the failure of rational thinking and the success of the revisionist myth. Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning” (1957), complements Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) in that it foregrounds the crisis of the novel’s protagonist—an individual by nature beset by cognitive complications—with a compelling example of how cognitive complications can have deadly consequences. Both texts condemn the gross rationality of logical thought, but the more recent posits an escape through the re-enactment of the coming-of-age myth, most familiar in Haddon’s re-articulation as the Ulyssean or
Odyssean myth, made even more stark in its presentation by the superimposed hero’s overt affinity for post-mythic, teleological thought. In this way, Haddon reassures us that even those apparently condemned to rationalise themselves into mental paralysis can pass through adolescent liminality and emerge stronger, more capable, and more self-determined. Contrasted with Smith’s deadly alternative, there is no other choice.
“Not Waving but Drowning” confirms that the basic underpinnings of modem
Western thought can be brought down by twelve short lines of poetry. The poem viciously condemns the irrational faith we have in our logical and empirical abilities to properly assess and react to our environment. The poem begins: “Nobody heard him, the dead man, / But still he lay moaning...” She comments on the essential role of 206 observation to rational understanding—because “[njbody heard him,” he does not exist outside of himself, where he curiously “lay moaning.” The switching of the implied time-frame, in which “the dead man” is nonetheless “moaning” as if alive disrupts the linear flow of time, and challenges our epistemic foundation for how we know identity in time. The man is known as “dead” because his fate was death, as is everyone’s, but we might safely assume that at some point before his death he uttered unintelligible sounds, perhaps a metaphor for the pitiful utterances all humans make during desperate lives of failed communication with others.
The “[p]oor chap [...] always loved larking / And now he’s dead,” a victim of the man who cried wolf—his silliness could not be differentiated from the desperate cries of a drowning man, yet another failure of the observers’ reason. “They said” the cold caused his heart to give way, a wild conjecture that nonetheless satisfied the sense- making urge of those affected by the man’s death. Suddenly, he speaks: “Oh, no no no, it was too cold always / (Still the dead one lay moaning).” Smith cleverly places the dead man’s persona in parentheses, elevating him to the cautionary status of a tragic, mythic figure. His warning is what moans, and will continue to moan as the sole commentary on continued misunderstanding, miscommunication, and aborted reason.
These tools of logic cannot alone hold together the human centre, and the man, as we, are “much too far out all [our] life / And not waving but drowning.” Whether we are ignored, rejected, or overlooked by each other under the guise of instrumental reason, we suffer many deaths during life—deaths of misunderstanding or a loss of the fullness of the human experience that result from the narrowing of perceptions to limited teleological parameters.
207 Mark Haddon harbours a similar scepticism for gross rationality as does Stevie
Smith, but rather than condemning it, he experiments with alternatives to “one best way” of thinking with a nuanced introduction of myth that tempers teleological thinking about adolescence. Haddon’s novel nearly achieves the status of an anti-
Bildungsroman, in that his narrative refutes the most classical of the Bildungsroman’s qualities as capable of conveying an adolescent through trials and traumas into adulthood. Reason, science, and the fortunate and timely intervention of role models fail Haddon’s protagonist. Nonetheless, he embarks upon his journey to discover the murderer of his neighbour’s poodle, and is propelled into a quest through which he comes of age and integrates transformative experiences into his identity. The triumph of the mythic journey Christopher undergoes is also the triumph of the novel as a
Bildungsroman; although not a classical Bildungsroman, it is something more in that it makes gestures toward its historical background while at the same time conceding that background’s inadequacy.
Haddon’s first salvo against the classical Bildungsroman, and perhaps his reason for seeking the flexibility of myth, is his characterization of Christopher as a high- functioning autistic who “find[s] people confusing” (14). When the narrator-protagonist of a novel about individual development, which is intended to mirror or project the readers’ similar experiences, confesses an inability to identify with others, the onus is on the readers to find some commonalities between themselves and the protagonist. If reason and other Enlightenment traditions with which most read the novel fail them, there is a powerful alternative. And even if Haddon does not explicitly refer to myth, we read myth into his story; additionally, Christopher performs as the mythic hero, coming full-circle, in a way similar to how I previously described an alternative reading
208 of Frye’s “theory of modes,” back to the core of his humanity in which resides the
mythic impulse. Haddon encourages Christopher’s journey toward myth by pairing the
irrationality of life events with the logic of which the boy is so fond. He has almost
religious faith in logic: “[Ijntuition can sometimes get things wrong. And intuition is
what people use in life to make decisions. But logic can help you work out the right
answer” (65). That Christopher qualifies “work[ing] out the right answer” with “help”
echoes an incipient uncertainty in his mind that harkens to one of his teacher’s caveats:
“In life there are no straightforward answers at the end” (62). Despite the appeal of
logic and reason for their clarity and procedural rules, at the end of the “life story” there
is no straightforward answer to the problems before us.
Christopher’s autobiography comes wrapped in the guise of detective fiction
because he abhors “proper” fiction, with its metaphors he considers lies (4-5).
Christopher’s detective story contains several levels of puzzles, mathematical
representations, and logic games, all framed by a title originating from a Sherlock
Holmes quote from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story “Silver Blaze.” Strangely, the
solving of the mystery of who killed the dog and why occurs early in the novel when
Christopher’s father confesses to the crime. The careful construction of a logical narrative, only to have it become quickly secondary to Christopher’s story, illustrates the collapse of the rational in understanding human motivation and behaviour. The climax and quick denouement of Christopher’s version of the detective genre leaves a space into which myth can encroach in order to satisfy what reason does not. This
indirect affront to the rational is complemented rather humorously by Christopher’s
insistence that he does not grasp humour, all the while making digressions from his
209 logical tale with humorous asides full of irony—a vital and underlying precondition for much of comedy.
According to his stark logic, Christopher thinks metaphors, another sine qua non of comedy, “should be called [lies] because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards” (15). Irony here operates on two levels: the first in that the protagonist treats metaphors with a disdainful irony, and the second in that by employing common metaphors to undermine them, the protagonist falls victim to using the very metaphors he purports eludes him. Man cannot live on logic alone, and in the species lies an incipient need for the figurative, the allegorical, and the imaginatively non-literal and “untruthful.” Even a young man who claims not to have an imagination like other people is able to project his unique version thereof through the experimental vehicle of mythical writing (98). He even articulates the qualities of myth, that of the aforementioned non-literal “untruthful,” in his confession of telling a lie: “I realize I told a lie [...] because I said ‘I cannot tell jokes,’ because I do know 3 jokes and one of them is about a cow, and Siobhan [his special-education teacher] said I didn’t have to go back and change what I wrote [...] because it doesn’t matter because it is not a lie, just a clarification” (176-77; author’s italics). Truth comes into being as a process of clarification and revision rather than as the static, absolute assertions of a logical proof.
As much as Christopher worships the objective truth in the recounting of a dog’s assassination, he relies on fiction to order his chaotic, intimidating world. Although fiction elicits complaints from Christopher, the creativity and imagination behind it provides as much of a survival mechanism as does his vaunted logic’s forced order upon the world. The fictional elements of his life-writing also allow him to reveal emotions to those who do not interpret the world the way he does. More importantly, a fictional 210 hero, Sherlock Holmes, breaks through the barriers of Christopher’s own experience, in which he is seemingly trapped, to provide inspiration usually delivered by a living role model. The likelihood of Christopher finding a role model in everyday life, however, is quite small given his conclusion that “[a]ll the other children at my school are stupid”
(43). Fiction, then, serves a unique purpose for Christopher that renders it more powerful than it would be for others who more easily build experience by interpreting actions and information that are new to them. His writing of a novel proves to
Christopher that he is enabled to achieve anything, if not more than, the normal mind: “1 found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything”
(221).
Thoughts on “Generation X”
No contemporary reflection on coming-of-age would be complete without mention of Douglas Coupland’s first novel. This work brought coming-of-age to the fore in such a way unparalleled since G. Stanley Hall published his extensive studies on adolescence nearly a century earlier. When Generation Xappeared in 1991, it was a watershed moment in the discourse about young people. Even today, the book’s title and its variations denote coming-of-age in, as Coupland termed it, an “accelerated culture.” The novel’s characters—the bartender-narrator Andy, the office-worker- turned-bartender Dag, the dilettante Claire, and the minor characters, the nouveau- yuppie Tobias, the drifter Elvissa, and Andy’s jealous younger brother, Tyler—mostly straddle the line between their twenties and thirties during the early 1990s. They are
American or Canadian, and tell their stories to each other in vignettes that “pretend” to be a novel. The episodic style is reminiscent of Munro’s in Lives o f Girls and Women-,
211 however, unlike Munro’s Del Jordan, who confidently pursues a career as a writer,
Coupland’s characters see no future at all, save for the nuclear holocaust they expected to conclude the waning Cold War.
The denizens of Generation X, as exemplified by Coupland’s six wayfarers, live in an ironic cloud of cynicism and suspicion, poverty and plenty. They know who they are by who they are not, and this distinction mostly comes from their firm belief in assured apocalypse, a nightmarish certainty to which Andy dedicates the book’s final chapter, “Jan. 01, 2000,” in fantastic, even psychedelic style: “[l]t was a thermonuclear cloud—as high in the sky as the horizon is far away—angry and thick, with an anvil shaped head the size of a medieval kingdom and as black as a bedroom at night” (176).
Earlier, Andy retells Dag’s vision of the impending certainty of apocalypse, this time to conjecture why the latter will not consummate a romantic relationship with Claire, and to generally explain why Gen Xers choose not to pursue “serious” relationships with compatible partners. Conjuring the image of a supermarket immediately pre-nuclear holocaust, he says: “The lights brighten, return to normal, then die [...] That’s when the sirens begin, the worst sound in the world, and the sound you’ve dreaded all your life.
It’s here: the soundtrack to hell—wailing, flaring, warbling, and unreal...” (63; author’s italics). This is Dag’s “mental ground zero,” or as Coupland defines it, “The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping of the atomic bomb...” (Ibid) Only in the certainty of extermination can “your best friend [crane] his neck, [lurch] over to where you lie, and [kiss] you on the mouth, after which he says to you ‘There. I’ve always wanted to do that’” (64). Although fictional, Dag’s tale stands in for his relationship with Claire, and for any conventional committed relationship that his demographic would refuse except with “it’s all over” (Ibid).
212 The catastrophic thinking that fortifies Coupland’s cadre both stunts and comforts them. With it, they enjoy a degree of telos, albeit one marked by disaster. Nonetheless, nuclear holocaust is a preferable option to growing older and more responsible, or having to change and adapt to Coupland’s accelerating culture. Coupland coins the term “mid-twenties breakdown” to describe “[a] period of mental collapse occurring in one’s twenties, often caused by an inability to function outside of school or structured environments, couples with a realization of one’s essential aloneness in the world” (27).
These young people, well out of adolescence, are not so much caught in a liminal trap of mythic origins, but consciously denying that they have any future in any developmental state. They are suspended in a different timelessness from that of myth— an anti timelessness in which they expect, or even welcome, death at any moment. Desperately in need of structure, these characters first seek out that kind imposed from without, and in its absence, lose their sense of worldly and spiritual order. His characters’ yearning for community and order are a desire for the ritual of myth and the togetherness engendered by the shared practice thereof.
The nihilism I find in Coupland’s first novel, the result of late-Cold War nuclear anxieties, might now be partially replaced by the fear of terrorism, financial turmoil, or ecological disaster, but these lack the institutional duration of the Western world’s complex love-hate relationship with “the bomb.” The continuation of life of which
Generation X types s were most afraid came true, and with it came the need for beliefs in and connections to something greater than the self. Postmodern pastiche, irony, and escapism through the embracing of pan-planetary and pan-temporal accessorising (see
“poverty jet set” and “decade blending”) ultimately prove unsatisfying and unsustainable—personally, spiritually, and economically (6, 15). As we have seen in
213 the aforementioned novels in which the protagonists of Bildungsromane have been escaping the liminal trap since the beginning of the twentieth century, we can conclude that the path toward the fate of Generation X, as well as their chosen lifestyle, was a parallel evolution of a specific demographic that did not represent the entirety of coming-of-age during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Suffice it to say
Generation Xat least roused awareness of delayed development and some of its possible causes. More than an example of individuals trapped in liminality, the book gloomily recounts a capitulation to the worst of all possible life eventualities, and if enough suffered this affliction at a certain place during a certain time, their plight deserves exploration as a cultural movement apart from the trend I have been exploring.
Escaping the Trap & Healing its Wounds
While my intention has never been to prescribe a “proper” or “correct” approach to myth, I am aware that my thesis contains an intrinsic implication that myths, as templates for passage through liminal life-phases, have been surpassed by the inversion of myth as a means to do the exact opposite. I have portrayed the results of this gradual and consistent shift as a crisis of the individual, but once the number of individuals caught in this tendency grows beyond one, the problem becomes social and cultural.
The feedback loop between individual and sociocultural context ensures, as Malcolm
Gladwell writes, a “tipping point” at which the liminal trap becomes a self-sustaining and self-perpetuating inevitability for young people in the West. But is the shift in the mythic outcomes in Bildungsromane since the late-eighteenth century an outcome we have no choice but to embrace, or are we obligated for the sake of our own survival to reclaim myths, and specifically those pertaining to the rites of passage?
214 At a time when “myth” is synonymous with “lie,” conjecturing about the future role of myth in Western culture poses considerable risk. However, despite strong currents drawing the protagonists of coming-of-age novels since the nineteenth century into the liminal trap, and despite sociocultural conditions that have become less conducive to well-rounded development in the fashion of the classical Bildungsroman, the need for myth to conduct young people toward maturity has not waned. We see this in the perseverance and adaptation of the heroic narrative in recent Bildungsromane, an evolution that parallels Castle’s conclusion that the Bildungsroman encompasses within itself the seeds of its own destruction and redemption. Whether a Bildungsroman critiques itself and mocks the traditional expectations of adolescents or it upholds those expectations, it all the same narrates a process. As long as the process remains paramount and the hope remains in a culture for young people to find their way, and even for older people to continue growing and changing, the two seem to be drawn to each other.
From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, myth responds to challenges and crises as a survivalist compromise. The overt engagement of myth, then, as a constructive reaction to challenges, from the life-threatening to the mundane, heralds the soundness of a culture. The ability of myth to adapt to cultures in transition or to those in internal or external conflict highlights its potential for resolving generational clashes and other conflicts and crises. Although we have seen myth deployed for the reinforcement of dominant ideology, it is just as much complicit in the modification of that ideology, and as a common vocabulary across the cultural and generational spectrum can alter sociocultural expectations for individual development. We might even imagine myth blending old traditions with new ones that succeed in eschewing the
215 teleology and hierarchical authority that are to blame for the liminal trap. However, we
must not overlook that the inversion of myth was a necessary step for myth to rise to
new prominence in the eighteenth century and beyond. As the core of the
Bildungsroman genre, myth remains germane to our culture’s collective narratives.
The radical changes that have occurred from early-Modem Europe to the present
have not dispelled the usefulness of myth. Now more than ever in a globalised world
replete with the free flow of information, we are able to engage in comparative myth
studies within our culture, and between our culture and others. Commonalities between
myths and among texts informed by myths or mythic structures are more readily
discoverable, and we might, as has been done by Freud, Jung, and others in the
interpretations of dream symbolism, consider the worth of myth as a window into the
truths of universal human experience. As we have read in the work of Eliade, myth
excites within us a regenerative impulse derived from its orientation in the “beginnings
of things,” reminding us that it is never too late to begin again, even in the direst of
circumstances.
I intentionally referred on the previous page to the conflation of myth with
falsehood to reiterate Freud’s opinion that myths are the “distorted vestiges of the wish-
fantasies of whole nations—the age-long dreams of young humanity” because, whether
entirely accurate or not, it engenders myth with the scientific, empirical truth we now
demand for a concept’s validation (Doty 136). Freud, and later Jung, also brought
myth, and its unconscious counterpart, dreams, into the realm of psychotherapy, a
widely accepted process of self-repair. Jung’s split with Freud, David A. Leeming
writes, “can be traced in part to their different understandings of myth, dream, and
religion in the context of psychology” (117). “For Jung,” he continues, “myths, and by 216 extension religions—and, it must be added, dreams—were, on the contrary, sophisticated attempts to understand the world and our place in it [...] the records of the human quest—personal and collective—for self-realization or individualism” (Ibid).
Jung, and later Eliade, pursued myths as vessels for creative energies that emanated from a time when humans were in touch with a collective mythic consciousness. In short, and in concert with the rise of the liminal trap as projected by the Bildungsroman, the farther we stray from myth, the deeper we sink into despair and crisis. Joseph
Campbell, renowned for his take on Jungian mythic archetypes, promises redemption from this quagmire through the “wonderful song of the soul’s high adventure,” the symbolic portrayal of the human spiritual arc toward totality, if only we are willing to hear it and join in (22).
The evidence that Campbell’s “song” continues to be sung, and sung with greater amplitude over time, materialises in the narratives of literary and filmic arts.
Revisionist mythmaking, popular in modern and contemporary literature, has sustained its momentum as a literary device well into the twentieth century and beyond. An ambitious example of the genre is the collection commissioned by Canongate publishers, whose introductory work, Karen Armstrong’s A Short History o f Myth, I have mentioned several times. “The Myths” series includes contemporary retellings of ancient myths from myriad backgrounds, from the classical Western to Norse.
Canongate has engaged authors such as Margaret Atwood, Michel Faber, and Philip
Pullman to contribute to its ambitious project of 100 volumes (Alexander).
There has also been a renewed interest in myth for formal educational purposes over the past twenty years. The didactic element of myth can appeal to children throughout their of development, likely because of the significance of myth in coming- 217 of-age narratives to which they can directly relate. Myth counterbalances scientific rationalism by assigning meaning through narratives and symbols that create a unified concept of nature and human life. Attention to myth in education can support the values of imagination, meaning, and community: in childhood, the creative imagination, and in adolescence, the making of meaning. Myth continues to be important on different levels to people who may no longer live in tribal or closed religious societies. We have read that Jung, Campbell, and Frye are careful to, in an age of science, reassert myth as an expression of universal characteristics of the psyche and imagination, and connect the effects of myth on our understanding of the individual in relation to a community.
This community, for many in the West, begins with their formal schooling.
Contemporary scholars who extol the virtues of myth in education are in fine company: among the first recorded exponents of myth in education is Plato, in whose view, according to Janet E. Smith, “myth served two chief functions in the education of the unphilosophic [the “many”]: to assist in the acquisition of true opinion, and to help men learn control of their emotions” (21). Plato’s prescription for educating the masses might strike us as dictatorial, but the fact remains he saw the utility of myth as an educational vehicle. In our more democratic conception of education, we might garner positive results by integrating myth into education with an emphasis on the tailoring of myth to the individual rather than a supreme authority’s interpretation of “the truth.”
Rather than conditioning the unthinking masses to behave within stipulated parameters, myth could foster communitarian sensibilities and give voice to those suffering from the disconnection that utilitarian and teleological thinking have imposed, especially upon those of sensitive dispositions such as children and adolescents. We should not, however, discount the rational, scientific, and even utilitarian and teleological thinking
218 in which we are so immersed as damnable and ripe for replacement by a resurgence of prehistoric, tribal energies. Just as religion and science are capable of coexisting, so too are science and myth.
Once, myth explained the unexplainable, yet now we have the capacity to explain and understand, to say nothing of control, many of the phenomena of the universe, including our own bodies and behaviours. However, the language in which much of this explanation, understanding, and sometimes control, is far from universal.
Now, myth might, through its malleable narrative structure, convey the mysteries of the universe, the answer to whose secrets lie in formulae and equations incomprehensible to most. I am encouraged by the prospect of this reunion of old and new partly because of my belief in the power of myth, and partly because the persistence of myth indicates a willingness of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century mind to embrace the new as long as it is couched in the framework of the familiar. It is perhaps the familiarity of myth that makes it such an apt domain in which to discuss the familiar, the unfamiliar, and that which can possibly never be known. Myth gives a centre to an ever-expanding universe that radiates outward in both distance and epistemic options.
We must also remember that, when given the option to pledge our philosophical allegiances to either science or myth in an either/or false paradigm that science, like myth, at its best, revises itself. The precise methods of revision differ, but as we have seen in our examination of the myth of coming-of-age in the Bildungsroman, myth changes over time or it becomes something other than myth. So, too, does science necessarily change over time, correcting itself when needed. Otherwise, it risks becoming something other than science. In the world of cosmology, the scientific discipline most equivalent to explaining the origin of the universe as once did origin 219 myth, the keen participant must be aware of the dangers of an uncorrected knowledge system. Astronomer Edwin C. Krupp writes: “[0]ur yardstick for plotting our location and course—the measurement of intergalactic distance—is so fraught with error that the entire history of modem cosmology sometimes seems like a tale of inadequate measurement” (343).
Krupp’s evaluation might serve as a synecdoche for the history of science in general, but his recognition of the importance of error is his most important insight.
Error, be it in science or myth, teaches us our most weighty lessons in which change is the only constant. Neither system speaks to the totality of human needs, but neither, at its best, has at its core a static mass of dogma. Still, the role of error in myth is different from the role of error in science. Inasmuch as myth is untrue, a lie, or an expression of error in that it does not concern itself with the precise retelling of the facts within their respective locations and times, it does communicate an idea and its component actions that are important enough to be enshrined in tradition. In this respect myth is at less peril of falling into dogmatism as long as it is not read literally, as science theoretically is supposed to be. So, too, does myth express its ideas with less finality and definitude as science and scientists are wont to do with theirs. The temptation to twist the scientific method to state one’s latest conclusions or findings as the last word on the subject contradicts the necessity of revisionism in the scientific method, and science can leam, by gentle reminder, from myth’s open-ended structure that there is rarely a last word, judgment, or opinion on any given matter.
If the Bildungsroman is the inheritor of the mythic tradition of coming-of-age, then we should not be surprised that the effect of myth’s open-ended structure perpetuates the genre despite the changes in sociocultural context and, in many cases, 220 integrates these changes into the fabric of contemporary coming-of-age texts. Over the past twenty-five years, novels catagorisable under the Bildungsroman genre have appeared regularly on best-seller lists, indicating their acceptance by the reading public and that same public’s willingness to continue the coming-of-age “conversation” between themselves, the texts’ authors, and the sociocultural context that weaves them together. Some of these include John Irving’s The Cider House Rules (1985), Jeffrey
Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides (1993), Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life o f Bees
(2002), Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003), and Ann Brashares’ Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series (2003-). Many have been adapted for the screen, and some are written with the express intent for such adaptation. The genre extends past the page and screen into other, newer media, such as comic books, blogs, video-logs on YouTube and similar websites, and web-zines.
Kenneth Miller is correct to declare contemporary coming of age “[s]ubject to
[c]hange” (vii). There is more to this statement than a pithy evaluation of the self- evident. “Adolescents,” he writes, “are important because of the ways in which they are at the forefront of social change, even while they are simultaneously the product of an adult social culture that shapes their development” (1). At the same time, Miller alludes to a curious problem with American adolescence, but one with which we are intimately familiar: “The popularity of the coming-of-age genre in the United States is partly a symptom of Americans’ abiding fascination with the idea of innocence [...] an original innocence which is mythical, imaginary, or nostalgic” (181). Miller might refer to the “original innocence” as mythical, in the sense of myth as a lie, but I read him as referring to the inversion of myth in the liminal trap. Through the process of mythmaking with which we have observed in the historical evolution of the
221 Bildungsroman, we can be assured that the Bildungsroman’s “narrative functions make the genre amenable to a variety of social and political interpretations while still preserving a space for an individual choice that is unique and compelling” (182). The future of the genre, therefore, is seemingly assured, even if it manifests itself in media other than the novel.
222 Conclusion: At the Crossroads—To What End Myth?
In this dissertation, I have followed the path of a literary trend regarding the myth of adolescence from its origins before modernity and into modernity, and have done so specifically to demonstrate the emergence of and escape from the “liminal trap” in selected works of poetry and in novels participating in the Bildungsroman, or coming- of-age, genre. In doing so, I have reviewed contemporary scholarly and popular expressions that critique adolescence. The two sources from which I draw early and sustained stimulus are Gregory Castle’s Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman and
Stephen Burt’s The Forms of Youth. Castle provides a crucial component of my theoretical framework in his articulation of Theodor Adorno’s “negative dialectics” as they apply to modernist Bildungsromane. The operations of negative dialectics in such
Bildungsromane give them an inexhaustible flexibility and relevance for the times in which they are written and read, and closely ally the structure of the coming-of-age novel and those novels participating significantly in the genre with the much earlier structural features of myth. Burt posits modem poetry as representative of adolescent themes and energies with the artistic and cultural modernism that extend beyond poetry, connecting the adolescence of modernity with the young person coming of age in the
Bildungsroman and his or her mythic heritage.
I have privileged literary artistic works as my primary sources because of their traceable role in the creation of cultural expressions and expectations of adolescence.
My focus is literary because of the form’s historical standing, as opposed to that of film, television, or other new media that have yet to become as historically established. I use these primary texts to explore the relationship between art that creates adolescence and adolescence that creates art. I have used selected poetry spanning the century 1850- 223 1950 from the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada, written in English, as a measurement of the cultural barometer, as proposed by Burt. I have read the poetry not only as literature, but also as cultural history with geographical and historical significance for post-eighteenth-century coming-of-age texts in the Bildungsroman novelistic genre. I have performed cross-cultural and cross-national analyses of modernist themes, such as love, war, trauma, and alienation, and have done so with a focus on the lyric poem because of its compression, internal ambiguities and tensions, and character as one of the vehicles for the spontaneity of modernism. I have also excerpted from longer poems that share the qualities of the lyric.
I have selected texts participating in the Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age genre, broadly belonging to the Western continental, American, and Commonwealth traditions from the publication of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister ’s Apprenticeship to the present. The novels I have chosen are cultural and artistic texts recognised as dealing with the adolescence of the modern individual. This recognition includes the wide, cross- cultural distribution of these texts’ ideas of adolescence, popular knowledge, broad discussion, and acceptance of adolescence not only in original audiences, but also in common knowledge. I have been careful to include thematic material with racial, sex- gender, class, and regional differences to underscore the cross-cultural nature of my analysis. 1 have specifically chosen texts that address the opening of consciousness toward the awareness and responsibilities assigned to adulthood in modernity, as well as those that expose the failure of adolescence to convey the individual toward these responsibilities that comprise ‘‘maturity.”
I have given ample background in theoretical works concerning myth, psychology, and literary theory to demonstrate the resurgence of interest in myth and 224 coming-of-age since the advent of the Bildungsroman. I have done so by including material about myth, coming-of-age, and revisionism in these disciplines that link ancient ritual and myth with modem and contemporary life. I proposed that certain rituals are ingrained in human social groups as survival mechanisms, and that the
Greeks are but one example of a human tendency for mythmaking that began before them and continues in the present. The written text works as an integral component of the articulation and perpetuation of modern myth and the idea of the self, fitting hand- in-glove with mythic traditions.
I then introduced the concept of the “liminal trap,” a term 1 coined to describe the dwelling-in of a myth without regard to that myth’s liminal purpose or intended outcome. In the case of the myth of adolescence, the liminal trap is the awareness of adolescence as a phase of development and the participation in that phase without the intention of crossing into the next phase. The liminal trap may be understood as both a conscious choice and as an unconscious behaviour encouraged by environment, or, as I have phrased it, sociocultural context—a term including social, cultural, and historical background. I believe the liminal trap partially builds on Castle’s view of the systems of the Bildungsroman genre as capable of outliving its original purpose, although, as we have seen, the results of which can be evolutionary or atavistic.
In chapter I, I justified the grouping of modem poetry, artistic texts about adolescence, and myth studies while defining each. I challenged contemporary assumptions about adolescence and coming of age, especially those couched in universal, scientific, or naturalistic terms. I proposed that a new assessment of adolescence as a mythic function was necessary to escape the liminal trap in which it is entwined. Explaining adolescence in the West since the late-eighteenth century as a 225 growing awareness of the apartness of the phase between childhood and adulthood, I see its emergence as due to political, social, and economic factors, such as apprenticeship, more intensive education, and placement in the societal scheme. These factors created a seminal interplay between the excitement of self-discovery and an anxious uncertainty about adulthood that has resonated for centuries.
As a preliminary exercise, I established the prominence of myth and adolescence in modem poetry in a cross-section of poems adhering to my established scope and limitations of study. I also explored myths of coming-of-age in the history of science, which has justified and perpetuated mythic assumptions about adolescence as an exceptional phase. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, as well as G. Stanley
Hall’s groundbreaking tum-of-the-last-century interdisciplinary research, both played prominent roles in my synthesising of ideologically driven science and assumptions from cultural inheritance. Other myth theory proved useful for understanding myth in collective unconscious as expressed by art, including works by Claude Levi-Strauss,
Bronislaw Malinowski, Walter Burkert, Arnold Van Gennep, and Mircea Eliade. These works contributed to my research, respectively, the idea of the bridging of contradictory oppositions with possible solutions, the practice of culture as the satisfaction of survival needs, the theory that myths are action programs necessary for survival, the mythic function as occurring in a liminal phase, and the vital theme of the recapitulation of myth due to the uncertainty of recent centuries.
I returned to modern poetry to elaborate on its usefulness as an artefact of cultural context, arguing that it is capable of achieving complex and conflicting transmissible thought patterns attuned to its cultural milieu. I reiterated Burt’s thesis that modem poetry exhibits the “forms of youth,” and recognised adolescence as a distinct and 226 significant phase of life. I added that myth might also be an informing force in modem poetry, co-emerging with adolescence and developing fixed codes of meaning and expectations now commonly associated with adolescence. Finally, I introduced the
Bildungsroman, and its changing format and function. I followed its history from
Goethe to the post-colonial age, and focussed on the modernist Bildungsroman as the self-critique, self-destruction, and self-perpetuation of the genre.
I began chapter II by explaining the conversion of the mythic, heroic exemplars of the rites of passage into the modem individual through the works of Erich Auerbach and
Charles Taylor. With Frederic Jameson and Norman Holland, I assembled the preconditions for master narratives in the novel, the interplay between text and reader, and between text and culture. I then initiated my poetic and literary analysis in earnest, pairing poetry of A.E. Housman and Thomas Hardy with the two major
Bildungsromane of Goethe— Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and The Sorrows of
Young Werther—to contrast classical Bildungsroman philosophies of success and failure. Success, I concluded, is the integration of the self into a greater philosophical, cultural, and societal whole, whereas failure is the abnegation of responsibility to the self and to others.
Next, I examined Gustave Flaubert'sSentimental Education after explicating
D.H. Lawrence’s “How beastly the Bourgeois Is.” In Flaubert, I saw the initial departure from the traditional coming-of-age myth as the narrative of a ritualised survival mechanism. I saw in Sentimental Education evidence of myth lived by for the sake of myth, rather than for its purpose and associated rituals, as well as a generation of expansion from the individual selfishness of Werther into a sociocultural one. In the story of a generation in post-revolutionary France, there are the beginnings of the turn 227 toward the liminal trap in late modernity, bom of the rootlessness of the individual when he or she is wrested from constructive systems of tradition. I expanded on this theme with Franz Kafka's "The Judgment,” as foregrounded by Walt Whitman’s Song o f Myself as it reaches dramatic psychological heights. I then broached adolescence as a refuge from psychological trauma in Virginia W oolf s Jacob's Room as paired with
Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” concentrating on the aftermath of WWI on culture and literature.
Moving into mid-twentieth-century with J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and
Dorothy Livesay’s “Lorca,” I surveyed the results of the failure of support from authority, as well as the general distrust thereof, that was encroaching even in times of conformity and relative prosperity. I consider these in light of WWI and WWII, as well as the growing resentment, mostly in the United States, of the conformity that had descended since the inauguration of the nuclear age. Finally, I reflected on racial, ethnic, and sexual discrimination in James Baldwin’s Another Country and Claude
McKay’s “America,” in which the record of prejudice against outsiders turns people not only against others, but also against themselves, stunting their and their culture’s development.
In my final chapter, I came full circle in identifying coming-of-age in stories that would, according to the classical Bildungsroman genre, actually be stories of its failure; here readers are supposed to arrive at a full appreciation of Castle’s negative dialectics.
In E.M. Forster’s Maurice, introduced by W.H. Auden’s “Lay Your Sleeping Head, My
Love,” I found romantic desire overshadowing or ignoring societal pressures against homosexual relationships. Even so, they acknowledge the unrealistic nature of the
“happily ever after” relationship, given the external and internal forces at play against 228 and in a minority population. Traditional coming-of-age might not take place for these individuals, but they do endure a period of struggle and sacrifice that renders them prepared for a lifetime of the same.
Similarly, I found in Alice Munro’s The Lives o f Girls and Women, as paired with H.D.’s “Mid-Day,” a critique of a dominant sociocultural order that constantly attempts to usurp the power of the minority. Despite the bucolic, peaceful setting and supportive family in Munro’s story, the protagonist feels alienation from her community because of the limited (and limiting) expectations of women in her sociocultural context. Her development as an artist liberates her from these expectations in a trial-by- fire, and although she does not come into her own as a participant in her birth context, it is strongly implied that she will leave for other opportunities as soon as they are afforded.
Then, in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, as introduced by Wallace
Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” I wrote how the failed adulthoods in the children of failed adults, all wrapped in the confusing, multilingual, multicultural metropolis of Toronto, could find creative and artistic aspects within themselves as an alternative to falling into the liminal trap. Finally, I ventured into the relatively new field of cognitive disability fiction in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident o f the Dog in the Night-time, aptly preceded by Stevie Smith’s scathing critique of misunderstanding in human communication, “Not Waving But Drowning.” Its protagonist struggles to comprehend metaphor or any experience unknown to him through direct action or encounter, yet obliquely employs fiction as an experimental realm in which to approach these same metaphors and hypothetical or indirect experiences. Ultimately, a revisionist myth of coming-of-age serves as his salvation as he ventures into London in search of his 229 mother and the truth, both of which could not be apprehended by the teleological and instrumental logic of reason alone.
In the conclusion of the final chapter, I offered my thoughts on Douglas
Coupland’s Generation X, both because of its broad impact on the scholarly and popular discourses about coming-of-age, and also because I wish to draw distinctions between his assessments of the plight of young people and mine. Namely, I distance myself from the temptation to broadly sweep his characters into the liminal trap, preferring to diagnose them as willingly-participating victims of survival shock who see a future neither in what contemporary nor ancient beliefs have to offer. Coupland’s littering of his novel with definitions seems to support his characters’ willing participation, since they wish to set themselves apart in a “lifestyle vocabulary” that is unlike any that came before. They seem to be a special brand of nihilist, preferring to adhere to anything and nothing rather than even attempt their culture’s flawed liminal trap, to say nothing of its myths. I closed by proposing that myth, as adaptive as it is to cultures in transitions and internal or external conflict, has the potential for resolving cultural clashes and generational clashes, and might establish collaborative guidelines for individual developments and cultural expectations. Perhaps it could establish new traditions without hierarchical authority or strict teleology, both of which have, as has the classical
Bildungsroman, failed to serve the intended population without radical alteration and resistance.
Overall, 1 am not surprised at the state of myth and adolescence today given that they are among many traditions challenged by accelerating social change. However, rather than collapsing and being replaced by some other phenomenon, either novel or pre-existing, myth has continued to adapt and even thrive, albeit in a guise, although 230 closer to its classical and aboriginal roots than the mythic forms with which we are now familiar, we might nonetheless not recognise. The adage that “everything old is new again” might even apply to the positive aspects of mythic adaptation, and, indeed, novelty is the enemy for myth to be able to function as a sociocultural corrective and instructive.
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