From Literature to Song Three Cases of Intermedial Transposition
Diplomarbeit
zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Magisters der Philosophie
an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
vorgelegt von Michael Franz LANG
am Institut für Anglistik Begutachter: Ao. Univ.-Prof. i. R. Mag. Dr. phil. Walter Bernhart
Graz, 2009
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION...... 4
2. MUSIC: MCKENNITT, WORDS:TENNYSON – “THE LADY OF SHALOTT”.... 6
2.1. Introduction...... 6
2.2. Overview of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” ...... 6 2.2.1. Victorian Society ...... 6 2.2.1.1. Rise of the Industrial Age...... 6 2.2.1.2. (Dis)Trust in Modernity ...... 7 2.2.1.3. Tennyson and Victorian Social Values...... 8 2.2.1.4. Science vs. Religion ...... 9 2.2.1.5. The Gothic Revival (Victorian Medievalism and Historicism)...... 10 2.2.2. Tennyson’s Career ...... 10 2.2.3. Tennyson’s Reputation ...... 11 2.2.4. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood...... 12 2.2.5. The Poem: “The Lady of Shalott”...... 12 2.2.5.1. Form ...... 13 2.2.5.2. Outline...... 13 2.2.5.3. Interpretation/Readings ...... 14
2.3. The song...... 14 2.3.1. Formal Structure of the Song ...... 14 2.3.2. Harmonic and Melodic Structures ...... 15 2.3.2.1. The D-major-stanzas ...... 16 2.3.2.2. The B-minor-Stanzas...... 19 2.3.3. Interpretation...... 20 2.3.3.1. Tonality ...... 20 2.3.3.2. Present vs. Past ...... 21 2.3.3.3. Stasis vs. Dynamics...... 24 2.3.3.4. The Role of Women ...... 27 2.3.3.5. Artist vs. Public ...... 30
2.4. Summary ...... 32
3. PUTTING A RIME INTO A RIME, AGAIN: “THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER” ...... 34
3.1. Introduction...... 34
3.2. The Rise of Romanticism ...... 34 3.2.1. Characteristic Features of Romanticism ...... 35 3.2.2. Coleridge and Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads ...... 36
3.3. Coleridge’s Approach to Poetry ...... 37 3.3.1. Coleridge on Imagination...... 38 3.3.2. Coleridge and the Supernatural...... 39 3.3.3. Coleridge and Morals...... 40
3.4. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” ...... 41 3.4.1. Form...... 42 3.4.2. Outline ...... 42 3.4.3. Interpretations / Readings ...... 43
2 3.5. The Song by Iron Maiden ...... 46 3.5.1. Musical Form...... 46 3.5.1.1. Part One...... 46 3.5.1.2. Part Two ...... 47 3.5.1.3. Part Three ...... 48 3.5.1.4. Part Four...... 48 3.5.2. Lyric Form ...... 48 3.5.3. Close Analysis of Music and Lyrics ...... 50 3.5.3.1. Part One...... 50 3.5.3.2. Part Two ...... 55 3.5.3.3. Part Three ...... 57 3.5.3.4. Part Four...... 58 3.5.3.5. Part Five ...... 60
3.6. Summary ...... 64
4. FROM LITERATURE TO FILM TO SONG: HEART OF DARKNESS ...... 67
4.1. Introduction...... 67
4.2. Joseph Conrad ...... 67 4.2.1. Conrad’s Time ...... 69 4.2.1.1. Historical Background and Politics ...... 69 4.2.1.2. Literature and Art ...... 70 4.2.1.3. Philosophical Tendencies ...... 72 4.2.1.4. Cultural and Social Issues...... 73 4.2.2. Conrad’s Literary Style...... 74 4.2.2.1. Early Period...... 74 4.2.2.2. Middle Period...... 76 4.2.2.3. Later Period ...... 78
4.3. Heart of Darkness ...... 80 4.3.1. Outline ...... 80 4.3.2. Interpretations ...... 82
4.4. Adaptation to a Movie: Apocalypse Now...... 85
The Song: Grave Digger, “Heart of Darkness” ...... 88 4.4.1. From Heavy Metal to the Teutonic Metal of Grave Digger...... 89 4.4.2. Structure of the Song...... 91 4.4.3. Close Analysis of Music and Lyrics ...... 91 4.4.3.1. Intro ...... 91 4.4.3.2. The Concept of “Madness”...... 94 4.4.3.3. “Heavy Lyrics”...... 96 4.4.3.4. “Bridge”...... 97 4.4.3.5. “Heavy Lyrics” 2...... 98 4.4.3.6. ‘Refrain’ ...... 99 4.4.3.7. “G Part 1” and “G Part 2”...... 99 4.4.3.8. Orchestral Middle Part ...... 101 4.4.3.9. Guitar Solo ...... 103 4.4.3.10. “Heavy Lyrics 3”...... 104
4.5. Summary ...... 105
5. CONCLUSION ...... 106
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 109
3 1. Introduction Emerging from studies on interart relations, intermediality has become a field of research enjoying ever growing popularity. In current debates, the very terminology and typology of intermediality, transmediality, intermedial turns, intertextuality, and similar terms have yet to be agreed upon, so in fact there is no clear definition of these (not only) modern-day phenomena (cf. Huber 2007: 1). Regardless of the not yet standardised use of these terms, it is commonly agreed upon that “[i]ntermedialities stand for the thematic and/or formal links between individual art forms (literature, music, painting, photography, film, television, the internet etc.)” (ibid.). These links have always been present in any era of artistic activities, from Greek drama through Italian opera, Renaissance emblem books, Wagner’s ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, nineteenth century photography, film and television, the rise of popular music up to the new medium of the internet. Ever since Coleridge’s first use of the term “intermedium” in 1812 (to distinguish between person and personification in narrative allegory), however, these interactions between the different forms of art have gained in speed, volume and intensity (cf. ibid.); in fact it is not unusual at all today that “[t]he arts are characterised to a large degree by intermedialities” (ibid.). Concerning literature, there can be observed a far-reaching blending and interaction with originally separate media from the twentieth century onwards, and this “intermedial turn” (cf. Wolf 2002: 15) has been under interdisciplinary debate ever since, and Wolf’s definition of ‘intermediality’ or ‘intermedia studies’ is much more detailed: “[B]e it in the broad sense of all kinds of phenomena that involve more than one conventionally distinct medium of expression, or in the narrower sense of a specific quality of individual artefacts or texts in which more than one medium participates in their signification” (ibid.). As studies in intermediality are a relatively new field of research, definitions, classifications, typologies, functional analyses, and methodological questions are still being worked on (cf. ibid.: 16), with researchers from different scholarly areas applying these new findings on the relations between literature and other media like film (for example, “For Your Eyes Only: Some Thoughts on the Descriptive in Film” by Klaus Rieser; cf. Rieser 2007), music (“The ‘Destructiveness of Music’: Functional Intermedia Disharmony in Popular Songs” by Walter Bernhart; cf. Bernhart 2002), photography (“Descriptive Images: Authenticity and Illusion in Early and
4 Contemporary Photography” by Susanne Knaller; cf. Knaller 2007), theatre (“Intermediality in David Mamet’s The Water Engine ” by Johan Callens; cf. Callens 2007), internet (“Internet, E-Learning and Critical Distance” by Guiseppe Martella; In: Punzi 2007) and many more.
This paper concentrates on literary intermediality between literature and music; three songs from the field of popular music which are based on literary works are being analysed, the primary research question being: “What is the purpose of the intermedial transposition of the literary source text to a target song text?”, or more simply: “What can the music tell us additionally that the text as such can not?” English female pop singer Loreena McKennitt has set Alfred Lord Tennyson’s early poem “The Lady of Shalott” to music; since she writes and performs her music to fixed lyrics, the focus of analysis will be on the effects of her composition, arrangement and instrumentation and the functional qualities of her vocal performance. Whereas McKennitt’s song is a soft and sensitive pop version of Tennyson’s poem and can thus be analyzed by more traditional and academic musical parameters, the other two songs come from the genre of Heavy Metal, and we have to take other forms of musical and functional analysis into account for them. Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Grave Digger’s “Heart of Darkness” are lengthy Heavy Metal epics, whose lyrics are influenced by the poem with the same name by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the novella by Joseph Conrad, respectively. The term ‘Heavy Metal’ as such “is now used to designate a great variety of musical practices and ideological stances” (Walser 1993: 20), and when analysing it, it is extremely important to carefully work “between the levels of specific details and generic categories toward social meanings” (ibid.). Furthermore, by approaching this musical genre under the analytical notion of discourse, analysis and interpretation of these songs will not only be based on structural and formal elements but to a larger extent on the common denominators of the inherent Heavy Metal concepts of typical stereotypes, symbols, and characteristics and their mutual agreement upon by insiders such as musicians and fans concerning the interpretation of these works. A note for copyright reasons: all graphics and noted musical transcriptions were created by the author of the present study.
5 2. Music: McKennitt, Words:Tennyson – “The Lady of Shalott”
2.1. Introduction
Whereas the poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson is a widely known work in English literature and, accordingly, in literary history and research, the setting of the poem to music by Loreena McKennitt has not enjoyed a similar amount of widespread success and critical acclaim. Nevertheless, her song is an interesting piece of intermedial transposition and her style of composing and playing seems to fit extraordinarily well to the whole piece of art by Tennyson concerning setting, mood and more (literary) elements.
2.2. Overview of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”
As already mentioned, this poem is – along with “Ulysses” and In Memoriam – one of the most famous poems by Tennyson. The reason for the success of this rather sad and pessimistic poem can be explained when we take a look at the temporal, social and art-related setting it was composed in.
2.2.1. Victorian Society Although Queen Victoria ascended the throne of the British Empire several years after the poem’s first publication (1833), what would later be called the Victorian Age was already foreshadowed in society and affecting its view on the world. Despite Tennyson’s love of the past and his contemporary view as a modern poet, he is nevertheless considered a typical Victorian poet because almost all the main nineteenth-century characteristics are reflected in Tennyson’s work (cf. Turner 1976: 1).
2.2.1.1. Rise of the Industrial Age The Industrial Revolution had just begun its huge impact on society, its whole structure being transformed by it. With the doubling of the population of England and Wales in the short period of fifty years from the beginning until the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the mechanisation of the industry, masses of labourers migrated from the country to the towns. The industrial centres of the UK, Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and Glasgow, more than doubled their sizes, and soon for the first time in history more than half of the population of England was living in urban areas (cf. ibid.). This, however, does not go
6 along with improvements in society due to a rise in prosperity and capital profit. On the contrary: working and living conditions were very bad and there existed no adequate health system. Dense concentrations of desperate, poor and illiterate people and the absence of a police force made riots and mob violence highly probable, causing the ruling class to meet these situations with a repressive regime (cf. ibid.: 2). As Turner puts it: “England in Tennyson’s youth was thus a highly explosive mixture of ignorance, poverty, commercial exploitation, popular discontent, repressive government, progressive theorizing and reforming zeal.” (Ibid.: 3) Alfred Tennyson was born on August 6, 1809, in the tiny village of Somersby, Lincolnshire, where he spent most of his childhood and adolescence; his father, a rector and vicar, oversaw his education carefully, and until 1827, when Tennyson went to Trinity College, Cambridge, he lived in a more or less secluded family environment detached from the enormous social changes of his time (cf. ibid.: 1&4). Therefore, his education and view on the world were largely based not on contemporary literature but on that of the past, mainly classical and that of the eighteenth century. It was not until he went to college at the age of eighteen that he became confronted with the social and political changes in his country. Although he disliked the methods and violence used by rioters fighting for their rights, he felt great sympathy with them and celebrated the first Reform Act, which was passed in 1832, granting the right to vote to householders and giving representation to the new large- grown districts. The Act, however, did practically nothing for the working classes and tensions remained (cf. ibid.: 5) Tennyson’s first two volumes of poems, Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830) and Poems (1833), showed a lack of interest in these subject matters and were strangely remote from his contemporary world, this being “one of the reasons for their poor reception” (ibid.). They only appeared modern in style and eccentric versification, but not in their themes, yet they helped in forming new outlines of what then modern poetry should be like. (cf. ibid.).
2.2.1.2. (Dis)Trust in Modernity Unrest continued among the working classes and culminated in widespread rioting in 1839 after the rejection by the parliament of an immensely popular petition, bringing England to the verge of civil war. One of the factors that helped to save the country from the threat of revolution was “the mood of hopefulness created by sensational advances in technology” (ibid.: 6). Tennyson’s poems of 1842 showed
7 increased concern with issues and problems of the modern world, thereby even celebrating new scientific achievements and showing fascination for the new technologies (cf. ibid.: 8). Even though Tennyson on the one hand was interested in improving the situation of the working classes and in reforming society – which in his understanding could only be achieved gradually and by constitutional means (cf. ibid.: 5) – by a blend of Evangelical moral ethics and values and a more Utilitarian type of logic (although he tended not to base conclusions on strictly logical utilitarian calculations but on emotion or intuition; cf. ibid.: 3f.), he on the other hand denied the same ‘blessings of modernity’ to women. In “his first large-scale attempt to treat a contemporary theme” (ibid.: 9), The Princess (1847), he showed a rather reactionary point of view towards granting women the same rights of education, profession and in legal and social matters. However, he even treated the subject more than two decades before the first serious feminist statement of an established male author was published, thereby showing progressiveness and a certain sense for pressing social issues (cf. ibid.). Tennyson’s ambivalent attitude towards his age, which characterised his whole life and work (most notably in “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After” from 1886, where he lets an old man express his horror of the contemporary world; cf. ibid.: 17), might best be seen by his moving to his Aldworth house near Haslemere in Surrey: on the one hand he sought solitude and distance from the age of industry and machines, on the other hand he enjoyed its benefits such as a bath with hot and cold water laid on (cf. ibid.: 15) or himself reciting some of his own poems into the phonograph sent him by Thomas Edison shortly before his death (cf. ibid.: 17).
2.2.1.3. Tennyson and Victorian Social Values This is a highly complex topic and a huge number of publications has been written about it. A close analysis of this would be much too extensive, so I will quote Paul Turner in order to sum up at least the most important issues: The accession of Queen Victoria (1837), with whom Tennyson was later to form a warm friendship, inaugurated a new social ethic, of respectability and domesticity. After her marriage to Prince Albert in 1840, the Royal Family came to epitomize that glorification of home, and that horror of sex, which are considered so typically Victorian. The cult of respectability may be regarded as a secularized version of the Evangelical emphasis on moral behaviour. As for the devaluation of sex, it may, perhaps, best be seen as a desperate effort to build a stable society in circumstances which constantly threatened a relapse into barbarism and chaos; and also as a response to Malthus’s highly 8 influential Essay on Population (1797). This attributed most social evils to the tendency of human beings to reproduce faster than food supplies could be increased. Contraception he rejected as ‘vice’; so the only solution was ‘moral restraint’. (Ibid.: 7)
“Tennyson never seems to have doubted the soundness of this ethic, which he expressed with full conviction in his poetry” (ibid.). This can be seen in a number of poems, for example in Idylls of the King , where adultery leads to a downfall of civilisation, and the celebration of domesticity in the highly popular work Enoch Arden , which Tennyson at first wanted to call Idylls of the Hearth (cf. ibid.: 8). However, Tennyson never wants to educate or tell people how they had to live their lives; he eventually “is attempting to make his readers think about social questions in an unprejudiced way by presenting artistically some of the beliefs and ideals of their age” (Palmer 1973: 20).
2.2.1.4. Science vs. Religion Originating in the values of the Age of Reason of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century confronted people with a completely new scientific approach to the ‘mysteries of the world’, thereby challenging long established ideas and values. Tennyson was highly interested in the then radically modern ideas of evolution, finding that the theory of ‘Progressive Development’ fitted well with his own ideas (see 2.2.1.2.) (cf. Turner 1976: 9). He had closely studied Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33) and was also fond of Darwin’s ideas in the much more famous The Origin of Species (1859). These scientific approaches to the world, however, caused in many people of that time the inner conflict between the deductive findings of science and the account of Creation in the Bible, which had always been a major influence in the education, moral and ethic of society. Turner calls this “one of the period’s greatest problems: how to retain faith in a personal God, and in an after-life, in spite of the scientific evidence to the contrary” (ibid.: 9f.). Tennyson treated this fundamental dilemma of the nineteenth century most notably in In Memoriam (published 1850), which brought him widespread recognition, and the masterly description of the conflict between faith and science the whole society struggled with gained him the Poet Laureateship as the voice of British society (cf. ibid.: 10). In his essay on “Tennyson’s Religious Faith and Doubt”, John D. Jump identifies Tennyson’s constant struggle between faith and doubt as exemplary in his
9 poems “Supposed Confessions of a Second-Rate Sensitive Mind” (1830) – in his view, a poet who casts his doubts profoundly in the title of a poem, must struggle hard within himself – and “The Two Voices” (1833), where one sceptical voice of suicidal despair is challenged by a second voice encouraging the reader to hope and to rejoice (cf. Jump 1973: 89f.).
2.2.1.5. The Gothic Revival (Victorian Medievalism and Historicism) The turn to historic and mythical themes in the Victorian Age might be seen as some sort of relief from the contemporary situation. As Roger Ebbatson puts it, “Tennyson lived uncomfortably in an unheroic age, his brand of Christianized humanism at odds with much that he saw around him” (Ebbatson 1988: 11). Whereas a ‘Gothic Survival’ has already taken place in the early eighteenth century, a part of society, including Tennyson, now sought to find their vanishing manners, conventions, rules, morals etc. in a revival of medieval forms. As D. J. Palmer puts it in his analysis of “Tennyson’s Romantic Heritage”, this affection for Arthurian themes “demonstrates Tennyson’s extraordinary skill in using the material of legend to make poetry out of his deepest self-conflict” (Palmer 1973: 43), thereby granting him relevance despite the use of (out-)dated subjects. And more, this style of legendary, myth-making symbolism served as a kind of a focus: “[The poems] reinforce our direct attention to the ‘subject’ by dealing with another reality which will create emotional and intellectual responses in its own right” (Waterston 1969: 113).
2.2.2. Tennyson’s Career With his first publication at a very young age, Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830 at age 21; cf. Palmer 1973: xii), Tennyson earned respect among critics and fellow writers. His early poetry can be described as “that of aesthetic rather than moral imagination” (ibid.: 24), and “The Lady of Shalott”, which first appeared in his second publication Poems (cf. ibid.: xiii), is held in this ‘tradition’ of describing and narrating. Critics, however, saw that Tennyson had improved in depth and quality and investigated “a new dimension of narrative” (ibid.: 41): action is more or less detached from the Romantic tradition of feeling and thus becomes an important element in the poem (cf. ibid.). Sadly the breaking out of the ‘Lady’ from the world of shadows into reality ends tragically, and this is true for the reception of this collection of poems and Tennyson’s life as well: after several rather bad reviews by critics and – much more of a tragic impact on his life – the death of his beloved friend Arthur 10 Hallam, the poet developed an inner depression which led to his ‘ten years’ silence’ wherein he did not publish, but nevertheless continued to work on his later masterpieces such as “Ulysses” and “Tiresias” (cf. Ricks 1972: 175). In 1842, Tennyson met immediate success with the publication of a ‘revised’ edition of his Poems . This edition consisted of two volumes whereas only the second volume included previously unreleased poems; the first volume contained revised versions of some of his earlier poems, which critics found to be “much better than the originals” (Turner 1976: 74) concerning style and metre. One of the most important changes directly affects “The Lady of Shalott”, where Tennyson replaced the final stanza which since its publication had been considered as being a rather weak conclusion to this great poem (cf. ibid.). The (in its first edition anonymous) publication of his elegy to his dead friend Hallam, In Memoriam (1850), brought about even greater fame, and in this very same year he was appointed Poet Laureate in succession of William Wordsworth (cf. Palmer 1973: xiv). This most honourable title and the widespread acknowledgement and praise of him as the Queen’s Poet, in addition to the publication of another epic piece of work, the Idylls of the King (1859), fortified his position as one of the leading poets and lyricists at his time (cf. ibid.).
2.2.3. Tennyson’s Reputation Even though he claimed that “’[m]odern fame is nothing … I shall go down, down! I am up now’” ( Memoir , vol. 1, p. 513. In: Turner 1976: 183), thereby alluding to himself being attached to the revolving ”Wheel of Fortune” (cf. ibid.), Tennyson was regarded as one of the greatest poets ever during his lifetime. His fame reached well into the ‘New World’, America, where one of the most famous poets, Nathaniel Hawthorne, even used the word “‘Tennysonian’ as a term of praise” (ibid.), and America’s ‘national poet’, Walt Whitman, praised Tennyson’s work and character and summed them up as him being “the true friend of our age” (qtd. Jump 1995: 349). The rise of modernism, however, brought Tennyson’s reputation to a quick and decisive decline, especially in the 1920s after the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ; Tennyson’s love of the past and his typical Victorian manner and neuroticism did not fit well into modern literary ideas. Nevertheless, his reputation has experienced an ever-growing rise up to the present, with such famous authors like W. H. Auden seeing in him “the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet” (qtd. Turner 1976: 183).
11 2.2.4. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed around the middle of the nineteenth century in England and mainly concentrated itself around the painters William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Its members promoted an anti-academic approach to art and sought to combine messages of a rigid moral system with direct realism; they regarded academic art as being too artificial and looked back to the time of early Italian art where themes such as pure beauty, unaffected grace, true and/or tragic love were the subjects of art (hence the name of the brotherhood, which goes back to Raphael, one of the earliest Italian Renaissance artists) (cf. Mariotti 2004). This movement is important in connection to Tennyson because the artists found many elements they based their art upon in Tennyson’s poetry, especially in “The Lady of Shalott”, which was subject of many paintings by both male and female artists. Although Tennyson did not really like the paintings to his own poem (cf. Nelson 1985: 15f.), the subjects the artists sought to depict will be discussed in the analysis of the song because they seem to have affected the singer Loreena McKennit’s approach and interpretation of the poem.
2.2.5. The Poem: “The Lady of Shalott” “The Lady of Shalott” was published in two editions, in 1833 and a revised one in 1842. The overview and analysis of the poem will be based on the latter, since this seems to be the edition Loreena McKennitt is using for her interpretation. It is a poem taking up an Arthurian theme so typical of Tennyson, and although it is one of his earlier poems, it incorporates many of ‘Tennysonian’ features which G. M. Young praises as “[an] abundance, a vast profusion of poetic learning, of ornate phrasing and verbal music” (Young 1969: 27). In addition to this art, Tennyson strives between the idealising theories of Francis Bacon and the mimetic theories in the tradition of Aristotle. Describing the difference between them as “the rival claims of imagination and the imitation of nature” (Shaw 1976: 20), Tennyson is caught up in “the great Victorian synthesis, to keep the revolutionary Romantic and the conservative eighteenth-century elements in balance” (ibid.: 22), the first being of imaginative nature, the latter standing for imitation. Also a certain influence of Percy Bysshe Shelley can be found considering “The Lady of Shalott”, in respect to the poetic theory as well as the figure of the maiden used in the poem:
12 “To a Skylark” (P. B. Shelley. In: Stevenson 1969: 126f.)
Like a poet hidden In the light of thought, Singing hymns unbidden, Till the world is wrought To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not:
Like a high-born maiden In a palace tower, Soothing her love-laden Soul in secret hour With music sweet as love, which overflows her bower.
Moreover, Tennyson seems to have based the maiden figure on the figure of Elaine of Astolat found in Malory’s Mort d’Arthur (Book XVIII, Chapters 9-20; cf. Stevenson 1969: 129), and the Italian medieval novella of “La Damigella di Scalot”, which, however, had no tower, tapestry, mirror or curse; furthermore, Tennyson omitted the lady’s name and introduced the Romantic element of the supernatural. The story itself is subject to a number of different interpretations because the author does not give any explanations as to why a curse is laid upon the lady or why she has to die because of it (cf. ibid.).
2.2.5.1. Form It is a poem divided into four numbered parts with isometric stanzas without exception. While the first two parts consist of four stanzas each, the last two parts consist of five each. Furthermore, each stanza contains nine lines, the rhyme scheme being AAAA B CCC B. A lines and C lines are always tetrameters, B lines trimeters. Some formal elements strike the reader: • The B in line five always stands for “Camelot” and only once “Lancelot” (at the beginning of part III), and in line nine for “Shalott”, again with the exception of “Lancelot” (at the end of part III). • The syntax is line-bound; the vast majority of the phrases and syntactical meaning units does not surpass the length of one single line in the poem. • Interestingly, each of the four parts ends when the presentational voice of the poem changes to direct speech.
2.2.5.2. Outline In short, the poem tells the story of a Lady who lives mysteriously isolated from the outside world in a tower on the island of Shalott. There she is engaged in
13 weaving the “shadows of the world” ( Tennyson 1842: line 48), which are reflected into her room by the mirror, into “a magic web with colours gay” (ibid.: line 38). Her only problem is that she cannot look at the real world directly because a mysterious curse is to come upon her if she does so; the reader is not told about the nature of this curse or why it is laid upon the lady. When the glittering figure of Lancelot, a knight at Camelot, comes riding by the island and is reflected in the mirror, the lady falls in love with this image and rushes to the window in order to look directly at the object of her desire. But by doing so the curse finally comes upon her and she is doomed to die. She leaves her tower, finds a boat, writes her own name on it and floats down to Camelot, “singing her last song” (ibid.: line 143). She dies on the voyage and the boat with her dead body enters into the town, mystifying the gathering crowd and Lancelot at her sight (cf. Psomiades 2000: 27).
2.2.5.3. Interpretation/Readings The poem and its contents have long been in the center of discussion in literary criticism. While the first academic and profound ‘New Critics’ in Modernism treated it as a bad example of superficial and artificial Victorian poetry, it began to be appreciated from the 1950s onward, with a number of possible readings in the fields of literature, representation, literary tradition, society, gender, sexuality, psychoanalysis, deconstructivism, post-structuralism, etc. Each of these different readings brings up issues about the functions of Tennyson’s characters, settings, actions, symbols, etc. They are far too diverse to be listed, let alone explained here (cf. Psomiades 2000: 25-45) and will be featured and referred to directly in the interpretation of the song (cf. 2.3.3.).
2.3. The song
2.3.1. Formal Structure of the Song The song opens with an intro consisting of eight bars of which the first four bars are repeated without any variation to melody or harmony. It is set in rather slow tempo in binary metre which stresses each crotchet. When the singer starts with the first verse, the melody line of the voice is set in semi-quavers and quavers, causing the effect of doubling the tempo of the song. In order to make the notation of the song more readable, it is noted in alla breve metre in all the following graphic notation examples, thereby changing crotchets to half
14 notes, quavers to crotchets and semi-quavers to quavers; this also alludes much more to the dancing character of the song. The four-bar structure is then extended to an additional fifth bar in analogy to the poem’s five-line stanzas. In analogy to the next four stanzas the even four-bar structure is brought back. This structure is the same for all verses except for the last, in which a 2/4 bar is squeezed in between the first and second halves of the verse. In between verses there is a never-varying interlude consisting of four bars the first time it appears and extended by a 2/4 bar in all the following times of its appearing.
The following graphic shows the complete structure of the song
Intro Verse 1 Verse 2 Verse 3 Interlude Verse 4 Verse 5 Verse 6 8 bars 9 bars 9 bars 9 bars 4 bars 9 bars 9 bars 9 bars
Interlude Verse 7 Verse 8 Verse 9 Interlude Verse 10 Verse 11 4 bars + 2/4 bar 9 bars 9 bars 9 bars 4 bars + 2/4 bar 9 bars 9 bars
Verse 14 Interlude Verse 12 Verse 13 Interlude Outro 4 bars + 2/4 bar 9 bars 9 bars 4 bars + 2/4 bar 9 bars + 2/4 bar after first 5 stanzas 8 bars
2.3.2. Harmonic and Melodic Structures The song is written in D major diatonically, which is a bit striking because it is not the usual tonality for one of its main instruments, the harp, which is usually tuned in C flat (cf. Michels 2001: 45); this peculiarity will be referred to in the interpretational part. The first three stanzas change between this main D-major tonality (the first five lines) and its parallel B minor (the second four lines), whereas after the first interlude the next three stanzas are completely in B minor. The music then alternates between stanzas in D major and B minor, the function of which will be discussed in the interpretation. The vast majority of the harmony consists of plain triad chords in major and minor. The accompanying instruments and the melody line of the voice do not interfere with that except for two points:
15 In the second bar of each stanza, which is in the main D-major tonality, there is an additional ninth (note a) added to a G major triad, but only in the voice and only for the duration of a quick quaver. And also in the bar before the first full cadence in the additional fifth bar in the four-bar structure (see 2.3.1.), the third of the dominant chord A major is replaced by the fourth, thus cleverly turning the function of the dominant chord, which should lead back to the tonic, to a preparation for the following complete cadence subdominant-dominant-tonic (G major – A major – D major). Nevertheless, a chord consisting of more than three voices is nowhere to be found in the whole song. The melodic structure of the song is in close connection to the harmonic structure. It seems that Loreena McKennitt has managed to create the music to the stanzas in major as well as the stanzas in minor according to the respective first verses of each (“On either side…” and “There she weaves by night and day…”, respectively), but at the same time making them fit to the other stanzas as well, though not so perfectly as to those after which they are modelled.
2.3.2.1. The D-major-stanzas Of course one will never be completely sure, but judging from basic musical, compositional and arrangement techniques, it is highly probable that the melody of the complete stanzas in major are modelled after the first stanza of the poem:
The jumping of a fifth d’-a’ in bar 1 may suggest the two sides of the river, since it is not so common to begin a slow and moving song with a rather wide jump like this; nevertheless, the resolution of the fifth jump is set rather classically in more
16 or less even steps downward (bar 2), which may suggest the slow steady movement of the river. Bar 3 repeats bar 1, and in connection with the long notes and wide intervals of bars 3 & 4 (fifth up plus third up plus second up to octave of d’’) one can easily imagine the “long fields” of grain in the landscape. The fields then “clothe the wold” via the repeating of bar 4 in upward movement and ‘”meet the sky” when they meet in the line of the horizon in analogy with the long interval jumps down in the melody. In a not so wide upward movement of a fourth and the steady downward movement, the road is depicted, marking its turns “thro’ the field” by the double use of syncopation from bar 7 to bar 8. Cleverly sound painted is the melisma in bar 9 to underline the “many” towers of Camelot; in addition, the melody goes up a fifth again (g-d’) in order to suggest the height of the towers in the city. From the point of arrangement, this is a completely standard if not trivial way of harmonising this smoothly flowing melody; but by keeping the harmonies very simple, the melody and – far more important – the lyrics come out much more clearly. The harmonisation starts with a full cadence (tonic-subdominant-dominant), whereas the subdominant is no real IV but a mixture between IV (G major) and its substitution of II (E minor), creating a softer effect and weakening the clear direction of the cadence. The same is true for the different bass note F# in the dominant A major chord in bar 4, which leads into a deceptive cadence in the parallel B minor. Bars 5 and 6 feature an extended version of a cadence (subdominant-tonic-dominant-tonic) whereas the second tonic, again, is replaced by the parallel minor in another false cadence. Bars 7 and 8 seem logical to conclude the stanza, but since the composer has to stick to Tennyson’s form of an additional fifth line, she starts a long double cadence of G major to A major where she replaces the third of the dominant by the fourth (A sus4), thus creating a preparation and suggesting the inclusion of the following ‘extra line’, which she concludes with a perfect cadence (subdominant- dominant-tonic).
The key then changes to the parallel B minor; it is not just a temporary shift but the whole second four-line stanza is set in the minor tonality:
17
The minor part of the first stanza starts with an up to now unusual limitation of the melody line to a single note, d’. Although the lyrics say “up and down”, the melody is on a single note; maybe the singer wants to avoid being too obvious by colouring “up and down” directly with notes moving up and down. She does so, however, in bar 2, when she lets the “people go” “up and down” by climbing a step up to e’ and a minor third down to c#’. Nevertheless, she does it quite undemonstratively by using only a small range of intervals. Bar 3 starts as a repetition of bar 1, but the notes move up to f#’ instead of falling down. This is accompanied by a small cadence to the original D major in bar 4, which has the effect of broadening the sound and lighting up the harmonies; in German, a sound technician would say, “Das geht auf”, meaning something like ‘the sun rises now’. It helps the listener imagine the splendid sight of a field full of lilies wavering in the breeze in perfect bloom. Bars 5 and 6 are repetitions of bars 1 and 2, whereas astonishingly the sound painting of the island “below” with the step up and the minor third down, works here, too. The second part of the stanza ends with a typical standard medieval-like progression of the melody in B minor. Harmonisation is even more simplified in this second part. It never extends beyond simple triad harmonies and often repeats itself. B minor-A major-F# minor is repeated three times, whereas at the second time F# minor is replaced by the original D-major chord. The last two bars suggest harmonic movement by the melody line, but the accompanying instruments rest on the B-minor chord thus avoiding a too obvious allusion to the medieval ‘cadenza’.
18 2.3.2.2. The B-minor-Stanzas Firstly occurring after the first interlude, the key of the fourth stanza and the two following ones changes to B minor completely; the second part of the stanza is the same as the B-minor part in the D-major stanzas, whereas the first part is changed from major to minor:
Judging from the poem, we do not know yet whether the lady likes her occupation and isolation or not, but the composer indicates with the shift to the parallel minor tonality, which sounds much more sad and weary than major, that she might not be happy with her situation; when listening to the song, one gets the impression that the lady is gloomily depressed by her dull occupation. This means that the composer takes control over the individual thoughts and interpretations of the listener and manipulates them towards a negative direction. Here we have an example of the music telling us more than the text, at least at this point: it anticipates the future mood of the lady, which in the poem is in fact only clear with the lady saying, “I am half sick of shadows”, a full three stanzas later. Concerning melody and harmony, this minor part of the song is constructed as a simplification of the minor part in the major stanzas; it works a lot with repetition and nearly the same ‘medieval’ cadence. The sound painting is seemingly not really modelled after phrases or single words but after the mood of the whole stanza, which she tries to put emotions into. The second part of the minor stanzas is exactly the same as the minor part in the major stanzas.
19 2.3.3. Interpretation
2.3.3.1. Tonality The first thing which is striking when analysing and interpreting the song is the choice of the original tonality, D major. As already mentioned, one of the most important instruments is the accompanying harp (the function of which will be discussed later), which is originally tuned in Cb diatonically. It is possible to change the root tonality of the harp with the pedals attached, but nevertheless it may lose some of its characteristic tonal features when it is not tuned in its original pitch. So why then does Loreena McKennitt choose the key of D major? She has a flexible female voice and could interpret the song a minor third down without any problems. One reason for choosing a ‘standard’ tonality like D (Cb is not standard at all) may be the tuning of the other instruments used; maybe the flute is tuned in D, and the accordion similarly. But when we take a look at the symbolic meanings and key colours of different tonalities since the medieval start of written music, we come across a striking hint: In a lecture on the characteristics of different intervals and keys, Urs Probst quotes musical critics and composition teachers from earlier musical periods, like Heiner Ruland, who describes the function of D major as ‘victorious clarity’, the composer thereby stating: “Ich trete kraftvoll aus mir heraus, genieße die Welt und ergreife frisch von ihr Besitz” (Probst 1994: 240; transl.: ‘I step out of my inner self with power, I enjoy the world and seize upon it with all my newly found spirit and energy.’) Leemann even conceives of D major as “pompös und rauschend; der Ton des Triumph’s, des Hallelujah’s, […] des Siegesjubels. Daher setzt man die einladenden Symphonien, die Märsche, Festtagsgesänge und himmelaufjauchzenden Jubelchöre in diesen Ton“ (ibid: 244; transl.: ‘A pompous and lavish celebration; it is the sound of triumph, of Hallelujah, and of the chants of victory. Therefore the inviting symphonies, marches, choirs of joy rejoycing to the skies are set in this tonality.’). Famous examples of this are Marc Antoine Charpentier’s “Te Deum” (signature tune of ‘Eurovision’) or Ludwig van Beethoven’s world famous “Ode to Joy” from his Ninth Symphony (‘Hymn of Europe’). Today, with modern instruments and modern recording technology, the unique characteristics of different keys and tonalities have more or less become obsolete, since there are not so many differences between them as there were some centuries ago; even though research claims that even in tempered tunings people can hear
20 differences (cf. Probst 1994: 232-238). A nineteenth-century critic claimed that in tempered tuning it would make no difference whether a piece of music were set in F minor, E minor or G minor, and Beethoven answered, “[…] ich nenne es einen Unsinn, wie die Behauptung, daß 2 mal 2 fünf ist” (qtd. ibid.: 236; transl.: ‘I think that pure nonsense, like claiming that two by two make five.’) Nevertheless, Loreena McKennitt may have some knowledge of this old symbolic system and its meaning and she could have chosen D major on purpose as an allusion to the lady’s waking up and stepping out from the world of shadows into reality.
2.3.3.2. Present vs. Past A. Dwight Culler demonstrated that “the great Victorian debate about science, religion, art and culture always had a historical dimension, always was concerned with the relation of the present to the past” (Fraser 2000: 115).This conflict between the present and the past can be found in Tennyson’s poem, in its different interpretations, and in the song by Loreena McKennitt. Tennyson uses material of myth and legend to help him create emotions and allusions, although the topics he deals with are deeply rooted in the social changes of his lifetime environment in the nineteenth century. Thus, the lady in the poem is obviously modelled after an ideal high-born maiden of King Arthur’s time, yet she serves the purpose of presenting gender-related issues and discussions about the role of women in Tennyson’s own time (cf. 2.2.4.). This social conflict is in one way indicated by the use of the present tense when the story of the mysterious lady weaving there night and day since old times is presented; on the other hand, the poem shifts to the past tense at the very moment when something starts to happen and things get interesting. This may go along with the song’s use of instruments, sounds, technology, etc.: the melody line is constructed rather classically, even sounding like medieval music, when we take the final cadences of the stanzas, and the harmonies are kept simple. In addition, the setting of the poem in old times is intensified by the use of mysterious-sounding, panoramic and eerie keyboard sounds, like a ‘wall of sounds’, which immediately helps to create an esoteric atmosphere, like in modern interpretations of Celtic tunes. Nevertheless we have an abundance of sounds, not of instruments: harp, flute, accordion and double bass are sufficient, along with the keyboard sound modules. All this serves as a kind of trigger for our emotions and state of mind: the melody line is fluent, very consonant and easy to follow even during the first hearing;
21 there is not a single dissonant note in the whole song, which lasts more than eleven minutes. The harmonies are very common to us and allude to our sense of classical form, harmonisation and compositional technique. The instrumentation is kept scarce (despite the extensive use of keyboards) and each instrument is easily traceable. So the consequent effect of all this is that we are not surprised or disturbed by ‘modernity’, which we often associate with disharmony, cacophony and emotional turmoil; on the contrary, we are appeased by the elegant and innocent world of the lady, her island, her tower and the landscape and people surrounding them. Everything is perfect, nothing seems to be at odds; there is no hint that anybody might not be content with all this charming beauty. Yet on the other hand, there cannot be heard a single original ‘old’ instrument in the whole song. Even though the Celts may have known early versions of instruments such as the harp, the flute or even the accordion, Loreena McKennitt completely ignores the issue of playing ‘old’ music with ‘old’ instruments; instead she relies on the highly modern technique of the broad ‘major pop sound’, modern instruments and modern high-end recording technology. When using original ‘old’ instruments, one gets the original sound, yet this sound may have some disadvantages in modern music: the instruments cannot be perfectly tuned and played without any wild noise. Many people argue that such instruments carry the spirit of beauty which consists of slight analogue imperfection rather than perfect digital technology. It seems, however, that here we have a more or less ‘sterile’ version of a song which tries to evoke old spirit via modern technology. This can only work because we are familiar with the vast collection of (pseudo-)esoteric recordings that are presented to people in order to help them relax, meditate, get rid of their everyday stress etc. No-one asks how this music is produced, whether these songs are versions of old tunes or new compositions, whether they are played on original instruments or not, whether there are any connections of whatever kind to the historical or mythical times and places they are referring to. Loreena McKennitt certainly is part of that ‘esoteric wave’, yet she always manages to maintain a constantly high level of authenticity in musical as well as in lyrical terms. Nevertheless, she relies on the allusions immediately evoked in peoples’ minds as described above when they hear her music, and she cleverly uses them for her own good.
22 Of course, Loreena McKennitt is breathing life into the seeming perfection of the production of the song by the charm of her voice, but there we have the conflict of past vs. present again, this time between the voice and its accompanying instruments: the bass serves as a base, constantly creating typical bass movements we have always been used to; mostly the bass line serves to bring a sort of pace into the otherwise free-flowing sounds that lack percussion and clear rhythm. The harp, accordion, flute and keyboards create the flowing sound that encircles the bass and melody in some sort of old bordun-like fashion, even though they do not really serve as a pedal point in the original definition but move with the bass and melody; but they manage to give a small impression of a medieval pedal point. All this represents the past, the traditional way of accompanying a singer, like in an aria. The singer herself sticks to the tradition of interpreting the story in close identification with the high-born maiden in the tower, since she always keeps her manners (always sings in consonant tune), does not overact in her displaying of emotions (the volume level of the voice is steadily kept low) and no real desire to escape her occupation (she sticks to the tempo of the song and the limitation of a tenth as the widest interval). But when we take a closer look at her interpretation, we find that she does not really sing the melody line as it is supposed to be sung according to classical or medieval composition techniques and conventions; on the contrary, even though she manages to do it quite fluently and more or less unnoticeably if one does not listen closely to it, she sings the melody in a very much syncopated melodic rhythm, which is a highly modern and up-to-date approach when singing pop songs and which can not really be transcribed in the traditional notation system (cf. Josefs 1996: 127f.). Loreena McKennitt always tends to sing the notes and words in anticipation, thus gaining momentum and intensifying the significance of what she interprets, which can be seen as a subliminal way of rebellious attitude of the lady towards the strict conventions and limitations she is in. Josefs calls these anticipations before the beat “pushes” (Josefs 1996: 128), which also helps in identifying the constant dynamics and striving of the lady below the surface of the ostensible conformity. But again, we have the music influencing the reader more than the text itself does until the clear showing of the lady’s real emotions (“I am half sick…” at the end of part II of the poem) by confronting the listener from the beginning onward with the constant struggle between past and present issues. The poem itself does not take side for or against the lady until the point described, whereas the singer does so from
23 the first stanza onwards; and even if the singer cannot be directly identified with the lady in the tower in person, it is at all points tempting and easier to do so, which hints to a highly probable intention of Loreena McKennitt.
2.3.3.3. Stasis vs. Dynamics “One effect of so insistent a rhyme scheme is to isolate lines as independent units of sense, and we might single out the first of these lines as a condensation of the Lady’s history to date: in her web she still delights. She repeatedly chooses an art, and an exclusively aesthetic emotion, that fail to move beyond themselves.” (Tucker 1988: 107f.) What Tucker is describing so elegantly here, fits perfectly to the musical setting and the flow of Loreena McKennitt’s composition and leads us to one of the poem’s most striking features, which may not be traced at first reading but by having a closer look at it: the conflict between movement and standstill, that is, stasis vs. dynamics. In fact, Loreena McKennitt does not use the complete poem for her lyrics but leaves out some stanzas; the ones left out are mostly of descriptive nature, so McKennitt already removes an element of stasis, giving more room to ‘action’ stanzas and thus, creating dynamics. Moreover, when reading Tucker’s quote closely, we can dissect ‘insistent’, ‘isolate’, ‘repeatedly’, ‘aesthetic’ and ‘move’ from it and adapt these units of meaning as a basis of interpretation of the words set to music. The rhyme scheme of “The Lady of Shalott” is what Waterston calls “the usually choppy ballad metre” (1969: 118), but Tennyson as well as McKennitt manage to maintain an astounding musical quality in both, the words as well as the music, respectively. Like the poem never changes in metre without exception, so does the song concerning metre, tempo, structure and general mood. Although the music changes between major and minor keys and is sometimes loosened up in its structure by several instrumental interludes, the song is always kept in the same dynamics for more than eleven minutes. This serves both, as an element of stasis in its repeatedly re-occurring scheme, as well as an element of dynamics in its ever- flowing quality. Dissected into some sub-divisions, the composition by McKennitt reveals several of stasis-vs.-dynamics elements. The first striking hints are given away by the arrangement of instrumentation: we can find static instrumental arrangements, like the keyboard layers (‘wall of sounds’; cf. 2.3.3.2.) and the pedal-point-resembling elements, as well as dynamic, namely the arpeggiated harp chords or the pace-like
24 bass line. All these, however, very cleverly serve several purposes at the same time and deserve some closer analysis. The keyboard layers are arranged and played rather statically, yet they evoke allusions to the flowing elements in the poem, such as the river, the lady’s weaving, the barley fields flowing in the wind, etc.; therefore they are set rather ambiguously and serve the purpose of constructing illusion of movement and progression in a rather static environment (which also alludes to the issue of the ‘Role of Women’ discussed in the following chapter). Pedal-point-like elements such as the accordion- played bordun line in the introduction of the song also suggest standstill, although the melodies of the flute and the voice sweep cheerily above this, which again resembles this ambiguity. The use of the harp and the bass, on the other hand, suggests motion and movement from their very basic use as arpeggiating triad chords and accompanying them, respectively. However, the allusion of the harp to the flowing element of the river also bears some immanent ambiguous elements: despite its ever flowing movement, the same pattern of chords is always repeated without alterations throughout the whole song with its more than eleven minutes, thus creating an impressive element of stasis in the dynamics. In addition, the bass line never really ‘moves’ in equal paces but always rests for some beats before and after moving on, which also helps in undermining movement and progression, thus turning them into mere aesthetic illusions. This may be linked to Tucker, who alludes re-occurring elements to a “Romantic metamorphosis of the self; they imply that we can love only what we have learned to love by having loved it before” (Tucker 1988: 113).
So all in all, the whole instrumentation, arrangement and musical performance of the song take side for either static or dynamic elements at first hearing, but through closer analysis they reveal a huge undermining ambiguity. Tucker states another interesting fact related to this ambiguous reading, namely that the curse on the lady is in its very essence ambiguous: isn’t the lady enduring the curse on her by avoiding it and therefore enclosing herself in complete isolation (cf. Tucker 1988: 108f.)? Additionally, Waterston asks: How does Tennyson force the reader to recognize larger meaning in his poems? Not by adhering to a rigid system of symbols. […] Partly by enhancing the mood with rhythm and tonal qualities, especially by the unique achievement of a slow-moving line, even in the usually choppy ballad metre,
25 so that dignity and seriousness of movement suggest significance in the subject. (Waterston 1969: 118)
This may be an explanation for Loreena McKennitt keeping the song at a constantly low level of dynamics: she sticks to her ‘slow-moving’ melody line, which in fact is moving very smoothly and pleases the ear of the listener (element of dynamics), but at the same time this melody is again unchanged, un-altered and kept at the same low level of dynamics and emotions throughout the whole song (element of stasis). The reference to dignity and seriousness may be true for the poem, but Loreena McKennitt is undermining this via the setting and arrangement of the melody and her accompaniment, thus forcing us to see more ambiguity in the text than Tennyson my have originally intended, and so manipulating the reader without changing a single word in the text or specially marking a single figure in the music.
Other elements of dynamics in the poem are the entering of Lancelot, the lady’s rush through the room in order to look out of the window and by this making the curse come onto her, her fleeing from the tower, and her final voyage on the river to the town of Camelot, which are also kept in this unclear compositional and interpretational manner. The artist Loreena McKennitt obviously sees no need to emphasise these crucial events; in the poem they help in gaining momentum and pushing the story forward, yet the singer and the music show no signs of pointing these out to the listener. On the one hand, one might argue that this is part of her reserved style of interpretation (which will be discussed more closely in the following chapter and which, in fact, may be seen as an element of ‘dignity and seriousness’ in itself); on the other hand, one could include the interlude into the interpretation: it moves in rather quick harmonic steps to a very fluent melody line of the flute and accordion, and it is also strikingly prolonged by a rather ‘un-even’ 2/4 bar; the composer and interpreter may suggest the significance and ‘dignity’ of the events in these interludes, which in fact serve the purpose of accelerating the pace of the song and bringing a new arrangement of harmonies and melodies. Interestingly, another form of ambiguity und unclearness by McKennitt can be found: the approach of McKennitt to the song with regard to style, rhythmic quality and mood of the music can in a way be labelled as some kind of ‘esoteric Romantic’, but whereas Wordsworth in his famous preface of 1815 claimed that “[the] law of long syllable and short must not be so inflexible […] as to deprive the Reader of all voluntary power to modulate, in subordination to the sense, the music of the poem”
26 (qtd. Prins 2000: 91), Loreena McKennitt obviously seems to ignore this ‘Wordsworthian warning’. Instead she chooses to remain in her sublime mode of low- voice repetition and thus depriving the listener of potentially arising emotions of the individual, thereby again manipulating the listener by her way of interpretation.
2.3.3.4. The Role of Women This is subject of a huge field of contemporary research and discussion, and only some hints and germinal ideas without further close academic discussion can be presented in this paper. Nevertheless, an exclusion of the topic is not justifiable since many elements of feminist and gender-related discussions can be found in both the poem and the song.
Marion Shaw brings up the issue that the problem with the reception, analysis and interpretation of Tennyson’s works lies in seeing in him a universal, established, traditional, even classic authorized Victorian, thereby completely ignoring the fact that, in short, he was a male writer. She asks for not taking him for a human absolute but instead enforcing his maleness as an author and, thus, judging his view on things as being the perspective of an intellectual male writer influenced by the patriarchal and de-sexed Victorian society of the nineteenth century (cf. Shaw 1988: 1-10). Above all, Shaw sees Tennyson as “a poet of love; what seems his most characteristic writing, when he is most Tennysonian, is when he is writing about a kind of love that is obsessive, total, idealistic and sublimatedly erotic: romantic love” (ibid.: 14). There is a lot in this statement that can be found in the poem, “The Lady of Shalott”, and in its musical interpretation by Loreena McKennitt. For example, the juxtaposition of erotic, bodily love and idealised courtly love can be found in the song when one takes a look at the composition and interpretation of the melody line: McKennitt tells us more in the song than Tennyson because she clearly takes side by her soft, subliminal rendering of the poem; one gets the idea that the unaffected, pure and innocent high-born maiden herself is singing the song and thereby the words by Tennyson, which, however, may not have been the original intention of the author. It seems that Tennyson rather wanted to show the conflict between an idealised version of romantic love, which brings the lady to throw caution to the wind in her affection for the bold knight Lancelot, as opposed to the more realistic version of love where few things are ideal and one always has to face ambivalent consequences when entering a partnership.
27 McKennitt may even be in opposition to the source text with her interpretation because, according to Shaw, the moral intentions of Tennyson’s love poetry lie in “a search for stability, domestic contentment and social legitimacy yet their emotional charge depends on hopelessness of the lovers’ predicament” (Shaw 1988: 14); this would mean that romantic love is always doomed to fail before it can be stabilised, yet McKennitt nevertheless continues her singing with the same intonation, mood and structure throughout the whole song.
It may, though, as well be that this whole form of interpretation is an ingenious ‘gimmick’ well enough devised, on the one hand, to bring up the issue of this conflict but, on the other hand, adding an element of irony to it, because it is a highly contemporary and dangerous topic of discussion. McKennitt may tell the listener not to take this conflict too seriously and not to put too many emotions into it, following the argumentation of Tucker, who states that “[s]elf-conscious irony also informs the Lady’s readiness to make of herself what her art and desire have made of the world, an aesthetic image” (Tucker 1988: 115). The issue of domesticity is also highly attractive when taking a look at the (male) reception of the female role model in Victorian society. Although he links them more to Charles Dickens, Shaw’s observations of the reception of the female in Victorian literature are true for Tennyson’s writing to a huge extent as well: the “ideal love relationship is one in which the female is de-sexed, and what remains of her femininity is her caring and self-sacrificing regard for the male” (Shaw 1988: 15). This brings up the ambivalent situation of the female, which is “economically and legally of no consequence, educationally inferior, and sexually fallen” (ibid.), yet “they nevertheless occupy a position of the greatest imaginative significances as images of succour and purity” (ibid.). This can be found in the Lady’s isolation in the tower on the island, which in this context may not be seen as the artist’s isolation from the real world, but the female isolation from public social life into her domestic realm. Tucker discovers a biological isolation (tower, island) as opposed to a cultural isolation, which is the ritualised daily social life, like the funeral she observes in her mirror (a death ritual) or the newly-wed couple (a life/sexual ritual) (cf. Tucker 1988: 109). Loreena McKennit’s interpretation is ambiguous enough to be read in this way as well, so that the Lady’s monotonous singing and the never-changing pace and structure of the song mirror both kinds of isolation of the female in her own four walls,
28 only catching glimpses of the real outside world without being allowed to take an active part in it.
The conflict about the domestic isolation of females, their individual desires on the one hand and their social responsibilities on the other, is also a re-occurring element in Pre-Raphaelite paintings: the Lady “perfectly embodies the Victorian image of the ideal woman: virginal, embowered, spiritual and mysterious, dedicated to her womanly tasks” (Nelson 1985: 7), thus becoming a great model for the desired topics of tragic love, pure and beautiful women and their deaths. Therefore the male painters depicted her as either an aggressive person who hastily steps to the window to look outside and thus takes the curse upon her (Hunt), or an idealised beauty in a sentimental and romantic mood (Waterhouse); some paintings do not take side for or against the Lady at all (Meteyard) (cf. Mariotti 2004). The striking and much more interesting fact is that female painters, however, depict the Lady quite differently: unlike the male painters, who included elements of ornamentation, decoration and details not described in the poem – which is one fact why Tennyson did not like the paintings (cf. 2.2.4.) – the female painters, like for example Elizabeth Siddal and Inez Warry, accurately stick to the poem. Lacking the lavishness and intensity of the versions of their male colleagues, their paintings appear much more simple and straight-forward (cf. Frauenhofer 2003). This goes along with Loreena McKennitt’s whole style of composition, arrangement, instrumentation and interpretation: melody, accompaniment and chords are kept simple and easy; an undemonstrative and mysterious, yet appealing mood flows throughout the whole song; the melody line is also flowing and light, yet the voice is kept low and simple, avoiding unnecessary details; and, most striking, the song never strives towards a crucial climax. In concordance with this, Siddal’s and Warry’s paintings also show no sign of distress or emotional turmoil; the Lady always appears entirely composed with a sense of calm, she always keeps her dignity upright (cf. Frauenhofer 2003). All in all, we can summarise that the depictions of the Lady by female painters do not emphasise her sensuality and/or distinct sexuality but are concerned with gender issues on a much lower emotional level, and Loreena McKennitt shows her affinity by keeping her style on the same low level, thus marking her solidarity with her fellow female artists.
29 2.3.3.5. Artist vs. Public “[The] high mimetic artist attains objectivity at the high subjective cost of alienation from the world that art labors to mirror.” (Tucker 1988: 107) This claim by Tucker sums up one of the central approaches of interpretation since the first publication of the poem: the struggle between the artist and his/her relation to the public, the main question being: How much isolation from the real/normal world is required for the artist in order to let nothing influence his/her art? In the poem we find many symbols and events which help in bringing up this question, for example the passive lady in her tower copying the active world into an image, her isolation on her island and in her tower, the curse, etc. But how is this conflict transported into the music? Oddly, one way of Loreena McKennitt transporting this conflict into the music is by not addressing, or at least not signifying and emphasizing it. When Lancelot appears, the key of the song changes from the parallel B minor back to the original D major, thereby creating a broadening and brightening effect in the music. But that’s it, basically: the entering of a splendid and shining character is only a little emphasized by this change from weary minor to sparkling major, but nothing else is changed. Pace, rhythm, dynamic and melodic range, instrumentation, all of these remain at their original levels. Kathy Alexis Psomiades sees the inclusion of Lancelot in the poem as an important part of creating a link between the then contemporary poetry of Tennyson and the literary tradition of his (Romantic) predecessors: “the poem claims both a relation to and a difference from the traditions of Arthurian legend and epic poetry” (Psomiades 2000: 34). Yet she admits that Tennyson strategically places him on the periphery (cf. ibid.). This may go along with McKennitt’s way of interpretation, which connects ‘traditional’ esoteric and/or Celtic elements with a modern pop style. Her not emphasising it prominently, however, links up with Tucker’s reading of Lancelot as being “no presence but pure representation: a man of mirrors, as hollow as the song he sings” (Tucker 1988: 112). This complex conflict between the real world, which in fact may as well be hollow and emotionless, and the Lady mimicking it in her tapestry, which in an odd twist may indeed breathe life and feelings into her work mirroring hollow reality, can be explained by what Tucker calls the “human figures” (1988: 107): Regardless of their liveliness and emotions, or the lack of them, there is a difference between those figures which are bound to each other and/or bound to their occupation – which are represented by the reapers and lovers and other figures that the Lady watches 30 through her mirror – and those who are engaged in their solitude, like the Lady herself weaving her web as a mimicry of true life; this links us directly to the conflict of the isolation of the artist from the real world.
As stated above, there cannot really be found any major changes in the song, in its pace, its structure, etc. that would emphasise this conflict. We can, however, have a look at the song in its structural wholeness, where we can find some signifiers which Loreena McKennitt uses to point to the artist vs. public conflict in a very subliminal way. What Wordsworth called “the bonds of affection” (qtd. ibid.) and which are meant to refer to a connection of the artist to ‘common life’, McKennitt may represent in her distinct use of very simple and therefore common chords. The melody is a little more ambiguous: it is also kept very simple and flowing, referring to the flow of daily life and time itself, but it is also very atmospheric and esoteric, allowing for the impression that the singer identifies with the isolated artist. In addition to these elements, Tucker tries to identify the difference between the artist and the real world and also comes across those ‘bonds of affection’ which, to him, “suggest a spectrum of emotion that the Lady notably lacks” (ibid.: 107). This seems to go along with the already discussed more or less emotionless interpretation of the singing voice (see 2.3.3.3.): by ‘draining’ the voice of emotions, Loreena McKennitt takes side in the conflict, which the poem itself clearly avoids; she seems to manipulate the listener in such a way as to make him/her think that the artist should not be isolated from the real world too much in order to avoid losing one’s connection to ‘common life’ and the ‘spectrum of emotions’ it offers, thereby maybe stating that art without emotions may be the work of genius but as a consequence would not be appreciated by common people as such. This goes along with a highly contemporary statement of a female pop singer/songwriter who is very much in the tradition of Loreena McKennitt, albeit without an affection for Celtic and historical themes: American-born Tori Amos answers to the question concerning the links between her latest album and the political Bush era: “Ein Stück Kunst ist nie von der Zeit zu trennen, in der es entstanden ist. Ich kann mich nicht von der Welt loslösen, die mich umgibt.” (profil 2009: 114; transl.: You can never separate a piece of art from the time of its composition. As an artist I cannot separate myself from the world surrounding me.’)
31 In contrast to this, however, Stevenson states that “[a]s soon as emotion touches her [the Lady] personally through her interest in Lancelot, she defies the curse, and enjoys her brief hour of genuine life, even though she knows it will be her last” (Stevenson 1969: 130). One can also read McKennitt’s interpretation in juxtaposition to this statement: by keeping the same level of the emotional state – regardless of the quality of the emotions – she may claim that the Lady has never been completely void of emotions, that she has always had them because, despite of her isolation, she is living in this world and thus has never been completely isolated – which may also be a reason for the low but constant quality of emotions in the singing voice. And more, by taking side for one position McKennitt identifies herself even more clearly with the Lady as an individual artist in the context of the world: because the Lady signs the boat she does not only grant herself an identity within the real world but is at the same time signing a piece of art, which in fact she becomes herself, for the whole world to notice: “Helpless but no longer quite passive before circumstances, she generates the remaining events of her legend” (Tucker 1988: 115).
2.4. Summary
Even though Loreena McKennitt is using a fixed form of lyrics to which she sets her music, she is able not only to reproduce Tennyson’s poem in a musical form, but also to add or fortify certain elements, themes and motifs of the poem. “The Lady of Shalott” has been subject to a great number of interpretations on the textual basis, and Loreena McKennitt seems to have integrated many of these interpretative approaches into her own musical version of the story. The choosing of a special key and instrumentation helps in creating a medieval-like mythical atmosphere that Tennyson might have well approved of, and the way she sets her music and her vocal interpretation to the lyrics reveal some elements of the poem that may not have been subject to discussion so far, yet she also pays homage to some interpretations by highlighting them inconspicuously on a more subliminal level.
What we are faced with is the case of a talented songwriter and singer who is much aware of the great variety of approaches to interpretation and discussion of the chosen text. McKennitt therefore carefully constructs an unobtrusive musical version of Tennyson’s poem, sometimes highlighting personal interpretations, sometimes
32 discreetly presenting parts for discussion. All in all, Loreena McKennitt manages to tell the listener in certain parts more than the poem itself may do, only by the quality of her musical interpretation.
33
3. Putting a Rime into a Rime, again: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
3.1. Introduction Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is one of the best known and most famous poems in English literary history. Despite its length and Coleridge’s numerous changes and further editing it had a huge impact in the field of poetry and is still widely known and appreciated in today’s culture. It can be traced in countless references throughout the media circus, ranging from the first illustrations of the poem in the nineteenth century via intertextual references in literary texts to appearances in modern media such as television and radio. One of the less famous, but by some even more appreciated, adaptations of the poem will be analysed in this paper: the song with the same title by British Heavy Metal band Iron Maiden, first appearing on the studio album Powerslave in 1984 (cf. Iron Maiden 1984). This version, which with its more than sixteen minutes in length is the longest composition of the band so far, was never destined to become something like a hit song or evergreen; yet the song has enjoyed such a popularity that, despite of its long and epic dimensions, it remained in the set list of the two years’ world tour the band underwent after the release of this album, and people were, and still are, eagerly awaiting the song show after show. How has Iron Maiden managed to bring “The Rime” to a broad audience with such huge success? Did the band adapt the poem with or without risking the loss of Coleridge’s original elements and features? Which concessions had to be made to transport the messages of the source text via the conventions of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music to the target lyrics? These and more questions will be addressed in this part of the diploma thesis.
3.2. The Rise of Romanticism In order to be able to understand the broad reception and huge success of “The Rime” we should first take a look at the literary situation at the time of the rise of Romanticism. Of course, a thorough analysis of elements and ideals of this period would be too ambitious for this diploma thesis, so only those elements and ideals which affect the text and interpretation of “The Rime” more or less directly will be treated.
34 Emerging from a questioning of the perfect “divine symmetry” (Sanders 2004: 337) and a re-estimation of the concept of a completely “rational world-order” (ibid.) of eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a series of young and forward-looking artists sought to rediscover sensation, feelings and emotions in a reasonable and rational world. Inspired by the first moves of the French Revolution of 1789 they radically tried to turn the literary world upside down, to sweep away the too scientific approach of their predecessors and replace it with a turn towards the emotional side of the craft of writing. In short and in abstract terms, “Romanticism may be regarded as the triumph of the values of imaginative spontaneity, visionary originality, wonder, and emotional self-expression over the classical standards of balance, order, restraint, proportion, and objectivity” (Drabble 2003: 554). The period of Romanticism in Britain is generally dated to begin with the later works of William Blake from the 1780s onward, through the ‘first generation’ of the Lake Poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey, to its high point in the 1810s and 1820s with the ‘second generation’ of Byron, Shelley and Keats. The end of Romanticism, however, cannot clearly be dated, as retrospections to this period have always enjoyed popularity, from the high Victorian literature through modernist and post-modernist revivals up to the rebelliousness of contemporary (rock) music lyrics (cf. ibid.: 555).
3.2.1. Characteristic Features of Romanticism Arising from a period of turbulence, uncertainty and instability, supported by revolutionary events (American and French Revolutions) and thus a turn to individual and national rights, Romantic writers saw themselves, unlike the writers of the preceding Augustan age (during which writers were socially more integrated), as outcasts of society, which is perfectly reflected in their hermit figures outside a respectable society: Wordsworth’s vagrants and pedlars, the typical Byronic Hero and, of course, Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner (cf. ibid.). Romantics tended to rediscover and revalue their local vernacular traditions instead of taking the classical ideal of neo-classicist and Augustan writers as a common ground of art; they appreciated individual personal feelings and emotional experience over the strict rules of formal style which they saw as “polished […] shallow, heartless, and mechanically bound by artificial ‘rules’” (ibid.). Hence the ‘Romantic turn’ to seeing the human mind as originally creative and to regarding
35 nature as a living mirror to the individual’s soul rather than dead matter which can be dissected and studied after completely rational, scientific conventions (cf. ibid.). Furthermore, Romantic writers searched for truth and beauty in what they called the ‘simple minds’. A poet should not write for an overly academic audience but, in Wordsworth’s terms, should be “‘a man speaking to man’” (qtd. Ibid.), and this call for simplicity is manifested in the Romantic cultivation of nostalgia and primitivism in the tradition of Rousseau, who contrasted the ‘natural’ man with the hypocrisy and corruption of modern calculating society and together with Wordsworth proclaimed the innocent child as ‘father of man’ (cf. ibid.). In this philosophy we find the reason why Romantic poets preferred a rural life of “dignified simplicity” (ibid.: 555) to a life in condemned urban civilisation. (Shelley once remarked, “’Hell is a city much like London.’” Qtd. Rogers 2001: 276) In spite of the turn to the many different national vernacular traditions and various individual experiences, Romanticism in general produced an up to then unknown emotional intensity in new fields of experience such as “joy or dejection, rapture or horror, and an extravagance of apparently egotistic self-projection” (ibid.).
3.2.2. Coleridge and Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads First published in cooperation in 1798, this work immediately became “a landmark of English Romanticism and the beginning of a new age” (Drabble 2003: 390). At first being subjected to criticism and even ridicule, the expanded editions of 1800 and 1802 included Wordsworth’s famous “Preface” and shaped the new Romantic style of ‘low’ language and subjects, banality and seemingly primitive repetitions (cf. ibid.). The two of them, however, decided to assign separate topics and ways and methods of approaching them to each other: Wordsworth would deal with ordinary people and simple life whereas Coleridge was to supply poems that deal with the more mysterious and supernatural side; as described above, both are important elements in the then upcoming Romantic movement (cf. Rogers 2001: 285). In his famous “Preface” to the 1800 edition, Wordsworth explained the ‘new’ approach of poetry to the readers, and this strikingly ‘new’ practice may best be read via his own words: “The principal object then which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature…” (Qtd. Ibid.) The ‘tracing’ of the ‘laws of nature’ was nothing new at that time and had already been practiced
36 by the writers of the preceding Augustan Age, yet the important new factor is to trace them in ‘common life’. This is very much against the then practiced ‘poetic diction’, which Wordsworth thought of as having become much too superficial; in opposition to that he proclaimed “’a selection of the language really used by men’” (Qtd. Ibid.). This goes very much along with Coleridge, whose major contribution to the Lyrical Ballads , “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, is written in simple language and plain ballad metre. Yet their views on nature differ from each other: whereas they both agree on the importance of nature, Wordsworth regards nature as a more autonomous force than Coleridge, who proclaims a certain ‘Almighty Spirit’ which is in control of both, man and nature (cf. ibid.: 290).
3.3. Coleridge’s Approach to Poetry Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 as the youngest son of a vicar. His father saw him pre-destined for the church, sending him to Christ’s Hospital school in London for his education. After this he attended Jesus College in Cambridge, where a career in classics was diverted by his interest in the French Revolution, heavy drinking and a tragic love affair. In complete inner turmoil he met Robert Southey and they both decided on inventing a scheme for a perfect society in England called Pantisocracy; in their attempts to finance this idea they both gave lectures in politics and collaborated on a verse drama, The Fall of Robespierre . After the simultaneous marriage of two sisters, they separated in conflict and Coleridge retired to a cottage where he edited a radical Christian Journal, The Watchman , and published poems (cf. Drabble 2003: 133). The partnership with Wordsworth began in 1797, and Coleridge, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived in close neighbourhood for fourteen years. Coleridge composed some of his best work in the first years of their intense partnership, including a series of conversation poems, “Kubla Khan” and, at Wordsworth’s suggestion, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; a selection of their work was published as Lyrical Ballads in 1798, achieving “a revolution in literary taste and sensibility” (ibid.). After a trip to Germany, Coleridge studied German writers like Kant, Schiller and Schelling (he translated Schiller’s play Wallenstein into English and adapted Kant’s criticism to his own theory of ‘Genial Criticism’) and moved with the Wordsworth’s to the Lake District after his return home. His marriage, however, and
37 his health began to decline: he left his wife for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law and his use of opium led to complete addiction (cf. ibid.). Though ill he gave famous lectures on Shakespeare in the early 1800s, and after a spiritual and physical breakdown he turned to even more religious and moral issues in his later philosophical work, and his aim was to bring together and not to separate and diffuse matters (cf. Sanders 2004: 370f.). Coleridge died in 1834 as a highly controversial person; for his admirers he was “poet, philosopher, theologian, critic, journalist, and playwright” (Rogers 2001: 291), whereas for his critics he was accused of simply being “a political turncoat, a drug addict, a plagiarist, and a mystic humbug, whose wrecked career left nothing but a handful of magical early poems” (Drabble 2003: 134). Nevertheless, today he is regarded as “one of the two great progenitors of the English Romantic spirit” (with Wordsworth; ibid.), and his critical ideas on (poetic) imagination are generally accepted.
3.3.1. Coleridge on Imagination For Coleridge, “imagination promises release both from the imprisonment of nature and from one’s own burden of self-consciousness” (qtd. Lockridge 1977: 87). This view on imagination is also influenced by Schiller, who sees imagination as a necessary means for the recipient to create and first experience freedom in the phenomenal world; the difference between Schiller’s view and that of Coleridge, however, is that whereas Schiller tended to rely on the so called ‘aesthetic or play impulse’ (‘Spieltrieb’) as a gate to individual freedom, Coleridge found his way through humanisation which should be conceived more generally: “The imagination gives form to that which is alien and formless and creates within the prison of nature a liberating human context.” (Ibid.) In a notebook entry of 1811, Coleridge describes what happens if the human mind and perception work without imagination: the lesser we perceive actively and imaginatively, the fancy “may not inaptly be compared to the Gorgon Head, which looked death into every thing” (qtd. ibid.). This means that natural objects (including human beings) are perceived as dead if we look at them as shapes only and not, as he calls them, as ‘forma efformans’ (true form), and it also shapes the Romantic approach of breathing life into natural objects as opposed to the pure rational and empirical approach of the Augustan predecessors (cf. ibid.: 88). Thus, Coleridge sees no excuse in dealing only with outward symbols and visible signs; he links the dead perception of an onlooker directly to a dead and
38 imprisoning physical world. Therefore imagination makes us gain freedom from this imprisonment in a dead world: it is “the fusing power, that fixing unfixes & while it melts & bedims the Image, still leaves in the Soul its living meaning” (qtd. ibid.). And not only the artist but every active human being is capable of using imagination in Coleridge’s definition; set alive by imagination, nature becomes “lovely shapes and sounds intelligible” (ibid.), thereby freeing the human mind from the world of dead objects. In his later years, however, Coleridge turned to a more religious and moralist view of imagination, which he then often equated with ‘reason’ or even ‘faith’; he thought that these two are of a higher spiritual power and are thus able to even triumph over nature. While the young Coleridge believed in the freeing power of imagination, the older Coleridge seemed to have learned that imagination may lose this power because its energies might be misdirected: it “diverts moral energy from human relationship into a tyranny of natural objects” (qtd. ibid.: 97). Perhaps Coleridge’s most evident legacy concerning his complex philosophy of literature is his distinction of imagination: what he sees as ‘primary Imagination’, or ‘Fancy’, is in fact a reflection of the mind of the Spirit or the Creator himself, “’a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’” (qtd. Sanders 2004: 370); this is opposed to ‘secondary Imagination’, through which the perceived natural objects are grown, selected and shaped in the individual mind to new wholes (cf. ibid.).
3.3.2. Coleridge and the Supernatural Triggered off by the ‘bargain’ with Wordsworth in their Lyrical Ballads – that Wordsworth would deal with ordinary people and simple life whereas Coleridge was to supply poems that deal with the more mysterious and supernatural side (see 3.2.2.) – Coleridge was at first sceptical of the supernatural; yet he found himself quite impressed by the emotions and experiences such supernatural visits might cause to appear in an individual (like, in our case, the Ancient Mariner): “’Real in this [i.e. dramatic] sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency’”. (Qtd. Watson 1966: 91) Dealing with the supernatural per se, however, was nothing uncommon in Coleridge’s time. On the contrary, by the 1790s, the so-called Gothic novel was very much en vogue and had come near to being the dominant form of popular literature
39 in the first years of the Regency Period (cf. ibid.: 111). The young Coleridge even reviewed many of them in his Critical Review , thereby identifying the more genteel stories of Mrs Radcliffe, where the horrors seem to be supernatural but in fact have natural causes, as his favourites; but in a way he also appreciated the more shocking stories like M.G. Lewis’ Monk , where readers were taken on a horrifying ride through the novel’s depiction of scenes of torment, dissection, war cruelty, etc. (cf. ibid.: 112) Coleridge more or less linked these elements together in his ‘Gothic’ poems like “The Rime” and “Christabel”, where on the one hand he manages to chill the reader’s spine by constantly describing the haunting effects of the presence of a sublime but truly supernatural power, and on the other hand he depicts images of death and terror in such a way that they literally appear directly in the reader’s imagination (cf. ibid.: 113). And he also uses the technique of presenting a series of unanswered questions to the reader in order to create suspense and a mysterious atmosphere; in “The Rime”, for example, the reader knows nothing about the Ancient Mariner and, like the wedding guest, is spellbound to hear his story “of the strange things” that are already brought up in the title.
3.3.3. Coleridge and Morals Coleridge’s morals and his distinctiveness as a moralist most likely resulted from his father, a clergyman, and from his studies of German moral philosophy. He was deeply influenced by Kant’s criticism, but also by the works of Jacobi, Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel and Schelling, which are reflected in his views on freedom, duty and self-realization, and he was also a critic of the then popular British moral schools of hedonism, egoism and utilitarianism, all of them descended from Hobbes, he thought (cf. Lockridge 1977: 200). For the young Coleridge, we are all destined to live with existential guilt. He directly links the above-mentioned egoist and utilitarian ways of being to elements of moral corruption, yet he considers evil as a manageable problem (cf. ibid.: 201-205). This is highly important when analysing and interpreting “The Rime”, which is full of symbols of immoral deeds, disrespect for the creation, but also atonement and penance. Also Coleridge’s reflections on the nature of evil and the sinner differ hugely from that of the British moral tradition; whereas writers like Butler, Shaftesbury or Paley shaped the concept of the ‘wet sinner’, who knows of his evil doings and tries to repent but fails from weakness, Coleridge introduces a new type, the ‘dry sinner’,
40 who actively and malignantly wills evil (cf. ibid.: 205). The Ancient Mariner can be seen as a blend of these two types: he actively commits an evil deed on purpose (the shooting of the albatross) but he does so without explanation and ignorant of the consequences. By this character Coleridge also presents his view on evil as a problem with a solution: even though we may not comprehend the circumstances for a sinner to turn to evil, be it through physical force or a divine plan, this evil is no “absolute principle emanating from the corrupt will” (ibid.: 206) but is contingent. This also shapes the slightly and sublimely optimistic tone of “The Rime”. Coleridge’s (and Wordsworth’s) influence on Romanticism is also closely connected to his emphasis on the role of sensibility. He doubts that reason can be the only way to direct the moral life and gives great concern to the importance of an active sensibility and thus, what he calls, a “’GOOD HEART’” (qtd. ibid.: 207). In considering himself as being in possession of such a good heart he emotionally argues against the slave trade, a motif used, of course in a modified way, in the “The Rime”, when he describes the horrors happening on the ship after the shooting of the albatross.
3.4. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” After his conversation poems (and partly already in them), Coleridge’s style of writing poetry turned to symbolism, and with three of his most famous poems, “The Rime”, “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan” he plunged deeply into it (cf. Watson 1966: 85). “The Rime” is generally seen as Coleridge’s most complete and beautiful work (cf. ibid: 86) and truly observes the pact with Wordsworth (see 3.2.2.). Whereas many of Coleridge’s poems remain unfinished (like “Christabel”) or even in fragments only (e. g. “Kubla Khan”), “The Rime” is a completely round-off work despite its length. Coleridge began working on the poem in late 1797 shortly after having become neighbour to Wordsworth and after much serious inspirational advice by the same (cf. Watson 1966: 86). Romanticist ideals and foundations seem to have been submitted to arrangement and composition, which took Coleridge months to realize and even years to revise, going together with the inclusion of marginal notes in later editions to make the events more understandable to the reader (cf. Walsh 1967: 112f.). In fact, the world of “The Rime” is a product of Wordsworth’s hints and suggestions, Coleridge’s own reading of ship voyages and of literature of conversion, influences of Percy’s Reliques and medieval religious patterns of sin and punishment
41 (cf. ibid.: 112). Additionally, there is the element of supernatural and unconscious forces in it, of which Coleridge said: “’In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external and the internal, the conscious is so impressed on the unconscious as to appear in it. […] He who combines the two is the man of genius; and for that reason he must partake of both. Hence there is in genius itself an unconscious activity: nay, that is the genius in the man of genius.’” (Qtd. ibid.: 113)
3.4.1. Form The poem is written in seemingly plain and simple ballad lines in an alternation of four and three beats; additionally the stanzas are divided into two separate phrasal units (cf. ibid.). The ballad metre makes it in fact the only poem in the Lyrical Ballads that is a ballad in that sense. The rhyme scheme generally is x a y a, although there are several extended stanzas with an addition of two lines rhyming x a y a z a and other exceptions. Coleridge seems to be imitating medieval ballads which had been made popular in the eighteenth century by the aforementioned Percy, Bürger’s Lenore, and Scott’s The Chase and William and Helen ; this is even more emphasised by the mock-medieval spelling in the first edition of its appearance: “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere” (cf. Watson 1966: 87). The problem of identifying a single basic form of the poem arises because there exist so many different versions of it; Coleridge thoroughly revised the text, adding and cutting out several lines, leaving some eighteen versions of it (cf. Woof 2006: 21). When taking a closer look at the song version by Iron Maiden, it is highly probable that the band used the third version of the poem as a basis for the lyrics. This version appeared in Sibylline Leaves in 1817, and Coleridge added eighteen new lines, deleted nine, and introduced a major new element to the poem: he added a marginal gloss of eight hundred prose words which were meant to help the reader understand the events and happenings in the poem more clearly (cf. Watson 1966: 89); the writer of the lyrics seems to have based his words more on these marginal notes than on the actual poem.
3.4.2. Outline “The Rime” might best be described as “a mini-epic” (Woof 2006: 3) in seven parts. It features an old sailor telling a story of a ship voyage to a wedding guest who is headed for a marriage feast and stopped by the old man.
42 The poem is packed with historical information right from the beginning because, on the one hand, its ballad form is associated with late-medieval Scottish ballads and, on the other hand, the voyage described may be seen as undertaken after Christopher Columbus’ voyage of 1492, yet before the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan in 1522, as the Mariner recalls the sailing around the tip of South America into the Pacific ocean as them being “the first that ever burst into that silent sea” (ll.105f.; cf. Watson 1966: 89). Due to a storm the ship of the Mariner and his fellow crew mates is driven across the “Line” (as the marginal gloss calls it; it refers to the equator) towards the South Pole, where an albatross joins the crew of the ship. The bird is regarded as a good omen and brings good luck because when the ship is surrounded by ice and the bird is landing on the ship, the helmsman manages to steer the ship in a good breeze which drives them again northwards. Inexplicably, the Mariner suddenly shoots the bird of good omen, which brings a curse unto the ship and its crew. They are driven North into the Pacific as far as to the equator, where the ship is becalmed in tropical seas under the burning sun. The albatross is hung around the neck of the hated Mariner when a skeleton ship approaches. On board of this ship, Death and Life-in-Death are playing dice for the life of the Mariner and the crew, and when Life-in-Death wins him the whole crew, except for him, drops dead and the skeleton ship disappears. The Mariner has to dwell for seven days and seven nights among the rotting corpses before he finds himself being able to pray again. He blesses the beauty of the water snakes surrounding the ship in the moonlight, and by this act the curse is lifted, the albatross falls from his neck, and the ship is sailed into her home harbour by her dead “zombie” crew. The Mariner is finally saved, but for a penance he is condemned to roam the world and tell his tale for the rest of his life, “to teach by his example love and reverence for all God’s creatures” (Drabble 2003: 17).
3.4.3. Interpretations / Readings Originating from a not-so-serious competition with Wordsworth about who of the two would be able to create a better example of the set subject of ‘Cain’, the Ancient Mariner had been interpreted as being such a Cain-like figure; Cain is the first murderer in the Holy Bible, he kills his brother Abel and is doomed to roam the world and wear the mark of Cain (cf. Sanders 2004: 369). This story is closely linked to the
43 myth of the ‘Wandering Jew’, yet the Mariner is not so much a pilgrim as an outcast, so typical in Romantic writings, and witnesses “an invisible action which interpenetrates the physical world” (ibid.). The philosophical, moral and supernatural issues represent Coleridge’s counterpart to Wordsworth’s domestic and commonplace poems (cf. Watson 1966: 87). The use of the supernatural was for Coleridge a “technique of psychological revelation” (Rogers 2001: 292), with which it was possible for him to depict the otherwise hidden forces in the world and in the individual’s mind, the predominant one in the poem being ‘guilt’ (cf. ibid.). In fact, “The Rime” is a literary work about the biblical issue of ‘crime and punishment’, yet Coleridge adds a new dimension to this: whereas it is a story about sin, punishment, transgression and finally retribution, Coleridge provides no motives for the initial sin. The Mariner arbitrarily kills the albatross without a motive, and he also blesses the water snakes unaware, which therefore results in only partial restoration; the Mariner remains a frightening figure and an outcast of society (cf. ibid.). Many allusions to superstition, Aristotelian science and Christian theology can be traced in the text. The Mariner is also widely interpreted as a poem of a moral guideline for the reader, as it is explained in the marginal gloss: “And to teach, by his own example, love and reverence to all things that God made and loveth.” (Coleridge 1817: 759) This openly-stated moral solution brings the poem to the verge of being a Christian allegory about salvation. In his later years Coleridge himself felt that he had put too much of a moral message into the text, thereby nourishing those readings of the poem which take it as a simple autobiographical allegory of his marriage, or even of his life; to a complaint of Mrs Barbauld, who thought that the poem was “’improbable, and had no moral’” (Watson 1966: 94), Coleridge answered, “that in my own judgement the poem had too much [moral]; and that the only, or chief fault, if I may say so, was the obtrusion of the moral sentiment so openly on the reader as a principle or cause of action in a work of such pure imagination” (qtd. ibid.). Yet it has to be mentioned, as Wordsworth had already remarked, that the figure of the Mariner himself is a stunningly passive character. Most of his overt actions are purposeless and he seems to lack the ‘Almighty Spirit’ Coleridge regarded as immanent in man and nature; he is much more directed by another force, maybe fate (cf. ibid.: 95f.).
44 To come back to the images of Cain and the Wandering Jew, the poem can easily be seen as an allegory about sin and redemption. But we have to be careful: only the punishment of both bear relation to one another, not the actual sin. Whereas Cain had a more or less convincing reason of committing murder on his brother – the Lord did not accept his offerings but privileged his brother’s –, the Mariner’s deed is, as already explained, entirely purposeless. The idea of the punishment, however, is the same: the Lord sets a mark upon Cain so that no man would kill him, thus being doomed to wander with his guilt for the rest of his life; this is very similar to the Mariner, around whose neck the albatross is hung like an overt mark of Cain; its function is later taken up by the curse that prevents him from dying and lets him wander around to teach his tale as an example (cf. ibid.: 96). The fact that he is partly saved due to an act of the supreme Christian virtue of charity does not change the Mariner’s continuing retribution. On the contrary, it brings forth an argument against seeing the poem as this overt parable of Christian faith and virtues: not the Mariner sins and repents, but sin and repentance are visited upon him (cf. ibid.: 97). This means that the Mariner does in no way feel morally responsible for his actions, which in fact would be an undeniable precondition for penance and absolution; the attractive reading of the poem in a solely Christian dimension, therefore, seems too superficial, leaving out too much evidence.
So, what is the poem ‘really’ about? Keeping in mind the objective facts, it is basically “a ‘lyrical ballad’ and a product of collaboration, however Coleridgean in the intense and elaborate erudition of its form and style” (ibid.: 100). Watson argues that, despite its Christian symbols and allusions, the poem is basically autobiographic: “Coleridge knows what it is to lose, and he knows that no imaginable recompense will do” (ibid.: 101); through that he enters deeply into the psychological world of interpretation, which states that the Mariner’s individuality and consciousness have gone, and that even through a virtuous and repentant life they cannot fully return. This reading Coleridge strengthens with the epitaph written by and for himself:
That he who many a year with toil of breath Found death in life, may here find life in death! (Qtd. ibid.)
Watson sees all this in connection with other works in the Lyrical Ballads that deal with this kind of infinite “loss of appetite and youth” (ibid.: 104).
45 3.5. The Song by Iron Maiden
3.5.1. Musical Form As already mentioned, this song is Iron Maiden’s longest composition, lasting about sixteen minutes. This fact alone disqualifies the song from being a hit song in the traditional sense, yet it has enjoyed, and is still enjoying, huge popularity not only among the band’s fans but also among Heavy Metal fans in general. It can of course only be a guess, but the fact that despite its length, the over-stretching of the traditional verse-chorus song form with its simple harmonies and concord voice and the absence of a hook line that immediately sticks in the mind of the listener, this song may have become some sort of a ‘secret hit’ as it makes clever use of the listeners’ imagination by playing with the equally important elements of “prosody and contrast” (Josefs 1996: 18), which trigger off important ideas in the individuals’ minds; this is in close connection to Coleridge’s views and ideas and shows at least some understanding of them by the songwriter. The musical form can loosely be described as a verse-chorus form in four different parts; these parts differ from one another in tempo, rhythm, melody, instrumentation, and emotional mood. The instrumentation is in standard Rock line- up, which is constituted by drums, bass, two guitars and one singer.
3.5.1.1. Part One The first part starts with a galloping beat in even four by four metre, which is so typical of the band’s style of playing Heavy Metal. The general groove pattern would look as follows:
Drums, bass and guitars play this pattern through whereas the latter two change the harmonies from e minor (3 bars) via C major and D major (1 bar) back to e minor again. This is a typical chord progression in Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music and can be traced from mainstream Rock hits (e. g., Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer”) through the moderate Heavy Metal of Iron Maiden songs to the most extreme and aggressive Black and Death Metal bands (e. g., Venom’s “Elisabeth Bathory”). Robert Walser links this chord progression to Heavy Metal’s constructed images of its fans and players being different from ‘normal’ society, instead forging their own reality of the ‘darker’ elements of being, like horror, power and an overly celebrated
46 masculinity; when analysing Bon Jovi’s mega hit, “Livin’ on a Prayer”, he finds that one of the reasons for its success lies in the acceptance of the song by both audiences, the common pop music listeners as well as the Heavy Metal fans, and he traces its success even back to this chord progression: Calling the C-D-Em movement “negativity, or oppression” (Walser 1993: 121) and “natural and inevitable, however cheerless” (ibid.: 122), he describes the closing movement of the song’s pre-chorus, C-D-G, as a “release and affirmation of the major” (ibid.: 121). And “we escape the murk that has contained us since the beginning of the song” (ibid.: 122). This, in fact, describes nothing less than the original intentions and goals of Heavy Metal: turning around the common social norms and values and embracing the darker elements of existence.
The musical origins of this chord progression can either be traced back to the classical element of the false conclusion, which is possible in respect to the disturbing nature of Heavy Metal – instead of a releasing and pleasing cadence closure the listener is misdirected into its darker parallel minor –, yet the classical rules for creating the desired effect of such a false conclusion – the omitting of parallel fifths and octaves as well as the doubling of the third for a more major-like and root-based sound in the target minor chord – are completely negated (most likely due to the fact that the vast majority of foundational guitar grooves and chords in Heavy Metal are based on such parallel fifths and octaves; the third is hardly used in rhythm and groove patterns). It is more probable that the chord progression emerged from the traditional Aeolian chord progression, which is inherent to more exotic musical systems rather than the Western European major-minor-triad tradition: “By building triads or power chords [= root + fifth (+octave)] on root, 7 th , and 6 th : i, VII, and VI – Am, G, F – the characteristic Aeolian chord progression, absolutely indigenous to modern rock/metal, is generated.” (Prominent teacher of metal guitar theory and technique, Wolf Marshall; qtd. ibid.: 47). In analogy to the inherent element of the turning around of social norms and values, C-D-Em is simply a reversion of this Aeolian cadence transposed a fourth lower.
3.5.1.2. Part Two The second part abruptly changes the metre from the binary 4/4 to a ternary 12/8 metre; this has the effect of nearly doubling the tempo and alternating the groove pattern to the following:
47
The band frequently makes use of this technique of switching from a binary to a ternary groove. The harmonies remain in the same key, yet are slightly changed; the major difference next to the metre alternation is the voice which changes from the quick syllabic pace of part one to longer notes, thus contrasting with the rhythm.
3.5.1.3. Part Three Part three is in total contrast to the preceding two parts. It dismisses the steady groove, clear harmonies and distinct vocal lines and changes the song to a tempo more or less ad libidum; the guitars play creepy chords and haunting melodies and a speaker recites original lines from the poem. The whole part is intended to break up the clear structure and to influence the listener’s imagination by strange sounds and uncommon chords, the functions of which will be discussed more thoroughly later.
3.5.1.4. Part Four In this part we again encounter a complete difference to the preceding parts: it is again in ternary metre, but the key changes to a brightening major. This is a harsh contrast to the first two minor parts and the third harmonically more or less indefinable part. The singer sings a common cadence-like melody that underlines the optimistic mood of this part telling of the Mariner’s repentance, the breaking of the spell and the dropping of the albatross from his neck.
After part four part one is repeated in rhythmic, harmonic and melodic identity.
3.5.2. Lyric Form The lyrics to the song are a ‘rime’ refashioned into a different ‘rime’, again, meaning that the band’s main songwriter, bass player Steve Harris, took Coleridge’s stanzas and marginal notes and combined them together in new rime schemes. In fact, it is best described by Nancy Isenberg, who calls it an “example of a substantial refashioning of the original verbal text” (2007: 196). The song lyrics consist of eighty-five lines which alternate with purely instrumental parts. Additionally, there are two direct quotes from Coleridge’s poem, which are in fact two whole stanzas from the poem. The rest of the lyrics seem to be
48 fashioned after the marginal gloss of the 1817 version, which appeared in Sibylline Leaves (cf. 3.4.1.), rather than the stanzas of the poem. It is not uncommon in Heavy Metal and Hard Rock music that the singer sings the lyrics in close connection to the rhythmical parts of an instrument, be it the drums, the bass or the guitars. In this case, all instruments more or less play the same groove and the singer joins them in the articulation of the lyrics. The majority of the lyric lines are set to the galloping binary and ternary groove patterns, yet with some alterations to make the listeners direct their attention to the voice. The tempo is rather fast, so in the first half of part one the singer sounds as if he were hastily trying to squeeze in as much information as possible; this changes in the second half of part one where the voice falls into a half time groove whereas the rest of the instruments keep their up-tempo groove. This distinct half time in the voice is in analogy to the lyrics which have been purely descriptive to that point (the voyage of the ship to the South Pole) and now change to ‘action sequences’ (the Mariner kills the albatross).
Part two is even a little faster due to the change of the binary to the ternary groove, yet the singer remains in his half time style, which sets the lyrics in quarter triplets, making him sound a bit like the blues singers who stretch the importance of their lyrics via this effect.
As already mentioned, part three is in free tempo, lacking groove and a melodic line and featuring a speaker instead of the singer.
The effect of the quarter triplets is also kept throughout part four when the key changes from minor to major, moderating the sudden change to a different tonality.
Part five is more or less a da capo of the form of part one.
49 3.5.3. Close Analysis of Music and Lyrics
3.5.3.1. Part One The lyrics start with the stopping of the wedding guest by the Ancient Mariner and directly go into action:
Hear the rime of the Ancient Mariner See his eye as he stops one of three Mesmerises one of the wedding guests Stay here and listen to the nightmares of the Sea
The listener of the song is addressed directly, as the wedding guest is addressed by the Mariner. This is a clever effect and resembles the spellbinding qualities of minstrels and bards telling their stories. The first two lines are fashioned after the first stanza of the actual poem, whereas line three is a rephrasing of Coleridge’s prose words in the marginal gloss. Line four is again a direct address to the wedding guest and the listeners, yet the songwriter foreshadows the events that have yet to come in the story by using the expression “nightmares of the sea”, which Coleridge never uses in this way. On the one hand, this may serve to attract the listeners and motivate them to listen on to the story, being little more than an audience catcher; yet on the other hand, ‘nightmare’ is a typical expression in Heavy Metal music. The term ‘nightmare’ has a rather negative, nearly terrifying quality (in contrast to the positive term, ‘dream’) that links directly to horror, and the concept of horror enjoys huge popularity in Heavy Metal lyrics; some argue that this affection for horror and gothic themes coincides with the time of the development and quick rise of Heavy Metal music in the late 1960s/early 1970s, a time of huge social, economic and political changes, which also brought along the up to then highest number of horror stories and films. “Not surprisingly, historians have noted that horror films are specific in the threats they evoke: most center on the family, children, political leadership, and sexuality.” (Walser 1993: 161) This is also true for Heavy Metal music, and more: “Both Heavy Metal and the horror film address the insecurities of this tumultuous era. Both provide ways of producing meaning in an irrational society; both explore explanations for seemingly incomprehensible phenomena.” (Ibid.) So this foreshadowing of the horror that is yet to come is most likely a direct concession to the conventions of Heavy Metal music and lyrics and the expectations of the listeners.
50 And the music plays on, as the bride passes by Caught by his spell and the Mariner tells his tale.
This part can musically best be seen as a bridge, or rather a pre-chorus. The problem with defining it as a bridge is that the bridge mostly occurs only once in a song and serves as a part to enhance the impact on the listener (cf. Josefs 1996: 10), but here it merely repeats a part of the verse harmonically. A pre-chorus, however, usually paves the way for the chorus harmonically and melodically; this is also true for this song, though in fact we have no ‘real’ chorus in the song (a chorus is usually repeated musically as well as lyrically; in this song, we have a musical but not a lyric chorus since the lyrics continually change in the chorus section; cf. ibid.: 9-10). If we look thoroughly at Coleridge’s text, we find that the Mariner begins to tell his story before he and the wedding guest see the bride and the minstrelsy pass by, which does not clearly come out in the song lyrics. It is also not really clear who is caught by whose spell, so we encounter some textual instability in the lyric reproduction. Furthermore, this stanza also seems to have been fashioned after the marginal notes rather than the poem itself.
Driven south to the land of the snow and ice To a place where nobody's been Through the snow fog flies on the albatross Hailed in God's name, hoping good luck it brings.
Musically a repetition of the verse, this stanza is a compound of the marginal gloss, the poem and some poetic creations of the song-writer. The expression “driven south” is a short version of the marginal notes, yet “the land of the snow and ice” is never mentioned by Coleridge in this form. The writer of the lyrics combines Coleridge’s marginal expression “the land of ice” with the second part of an original line from the poem, “And now there came both mist and snow” (l. 51). He brings in his own creativity: he only uses expressions by Coleridge but weaves them together poetically; furthermore, the inclusion of the article “the” before “snow” is most likely a concession to musical conventions because it helps pushing the rhythm forward. The second line, however, again shows some textual instability because Coleridge never says that nobody has ever been to this cold land; he just states that
51 the crew could spot no living thing other than themselves. The song-writer might have confused this part of the poem with the part shortly after the shooting of the albatross, when the ship is driven to the Pacific Ocean where indeed they “were the first that ever burst into that silent sea” (ll. 105-106). Line three is again a summary of the marginal gloss, yet Coleridge does not distinctly mention “the” Albatross at his first encounter in the poem, but just “an” Albatross. The song-writer seems to have mistaken the expression in the marginal gloss as being universally valid for the whole poem; in fact Coleridge uses a (pseudo- )didactic notion when he explains to the reader, “a great sea-bird, called the Albatross, came through the snow-fog” (Coleridge 1817: 746). The phrase in lines four and five is a combination of an original line from the poem (“As if it had been a Christian soul, We hailed it in God's name.” ll. 65-66) and the marginal notes. However, Coleridge uses the more dramatic and lyrical term “omen” instead of “luck”; the reason for the song-writer to choose the more modern expression “luck” might simply be that it only has one syllable and fits better to the fast-sung lyrics.
And the ship sails on, back to the North Through the fog and ice and the albatross follows on
Again we encounter the pre-chorus part, and again the chorus does not follow. Textually this is just a rephrasing of the marginal gloss, but again we notice the song- writer’s textual instability: it is not clear that the bird really brings the “good luck” desired and is the reason that the ship catches the “good south wind” (l. 87) and is driven northwards. Also we are not given the additional information in the poem that the bird does not merely follow the ship but is fed and played with by the Mariner himself at his own “hollo” (l. 74) for several days, which makes the following killing of the bird even more inexplicable and cruel. Additionally we are again reminded of the “fog and ice”, which – although Coleridge also mentions them – seems to serve as some sort of concession to the Heavy Metal concept of horror (see above); it seems that the listener should keep in mind that this is a “nightmare”, and this could also be the reason for not mentioning directly the “good luck” the bird brings.
52 The mariner kills the bird of good omen His shipmates cry against what he's done But when the fog clears, they justify him And make themselves a part of the crime.
These lines are a simple refashioning of the marginal gloss and contain elements and phrases of Coleridge’s notes taken over almost word by word. The whole stanza, sung to the musical form of the verse, sounds like a modern re-telling of the crucial events; the simple words and the plain language in a way degrade the importance of the happenings. Yet although the instrumental accompaniment is unaltered, the voice changes into half-time feel, which gives back to the story some of its lost significance and suggests it to the listener by this slight but very noticeable change.
Sailing on and on and North across the sea Sailing on and on and North 'till all is calm
Here we encounter for the first time the chorus, or at least what can be taken as being the closest element of this song to a chorus. The most striking element for identifying this part as the chorus, although it is musically, melodically and rhythmically to a great extent identical with the pre-chorus, is, according to Josefs’ definition, the repetitive element in the lines: “Although from time to time you will come across a song that has lyric variations in the chorus, at least the words of the basic hook […] will be repeated along with the melody and harmony.” (Josefs 1996: 9-10) A hook, by definition, is “the part of the song that is repeated frequently and therefore tends to remain in the mind of the listener” (ibid.: 15); or to explain the origin of the term: it is the part that you are left ‘hooked on’. The hook here is clearly the repetition of “on and on (and)”; it is not a really ‘powerful’ hook like in the big hit songs of the band – for example the highly memorable “Six-six-six” in their biggest hit, “The Number of the Beast”, or the hypnotic chorus line of “Fear of the Dark” –, yet it serves its purpose: the listener of this long song, so packed with condensed information, can finally rest his mind a little while humming along to the repetitions even when hearing them for the first time. It is a little confusing at first, however, that the chorus, which lyrically should be a bringing together of the different parts of a song and summarising them, focuses on the lesser important element of the constant motion of the ship. This may go along
53 with providing an ‘intellectual rest’ for the listener, and in a way it also serves as a prelude or anticipation to the content of the next chorus appearing later.
The albatross begins with its vengeance A terrible curse a thirst has begun His shipmates blame bad luck on the Mariner About his neck, the dead bird is hung.
Again musically in verse form and vocally in half-time, the first line of this stanza is constructed after the marginal gloss whereas the next two are the song-writer’s own words; line two slightly anticipates the upcoming events, and line three is a modern re-phrasing of the marginal notes. Line four seems to be taken from the original poem with slight alterations. It is interesting that the song-writer takes over and rephrases the different elements rather artfully, yet he makes one crucial mistake in his refashioning here: whereas the albatross in the poem is a passive element that is accompanied by luck, is then shot, and, according to the marginal gloss, “begins to be avenged” (Coleridge 1817: 747), it becomes an active first element in the song lyrics; one might get the impression that the albatross is the direct reason for, and the executing agent of, the curse and the thirst, which is fundamentally wrong, since Coleridge clearly makes (super)natural forces (a ‘Spirit’) responsible for these. This is important because the song-writer here reduces the impact of (super)natural forces to a minimum, which is in total contrast to Coleridge’s intention (cf. 3.2.2. and 3.3.2.). Also talking of ‘bad luck’ that the shipmates blame on the Mariner oddly degrades the (super)natural happenings in this section of the story. To define as simply ‘bad luck’ the cruel killing of a universally accepted symbol of good luck, the complete deviation from their voyage route into unknown waters, and an agonising heat and thirst, does not do sufficient justice to Coleridge’s concept of sin and (divine) punishment.
And the curse goes on and on and on at sea And the thirst goes on and on for them and me
The chorus is played here for the second time, and this time the hook line of ‘on and on’ becomes more powerful than when it is played for the first time; this is first, due to an additional repetitive element, ‘on and on and on ’ and second, to the iconic underlining of the long and terrible sufferings under the extreme heat and thirst. Yet it is not really clear why the song-writer insists on calling the events a “curse”. In
54 Coleridge’s diction they are clearly referred to as the vengeance and punishment by supernatural forces; maybe it is again an emphasis on the concept of horror because a dark and strange curse that befalls the crew is more powerful in modern gothic imagination than a (super)natural spirit.
Part one ends with the singer reciting the famous “Day after day” (ll. 115-118) and “Water, water everywhere” (ll. 119-122) stanzas from the poem as if they were his own song lyrics in the syllabic up-tempo fashion of the first part.
3.5.3.2. Part Two This part is changing from the original binary to a ternary beat, thus even more speeding up the tempo. The singer, however, gives up his syllabic setting of the words and goes for long notes and even two-voiced harmonies.
There, calls the mariner there comes a ship over the line But how can she sail with no wind in her sails and no tide.
In fact, the Mariner never cries the words in the poem; yet they form a proper retelling of the story combined with the marginal notes. By making use of the sudden change in metre and tempo the song gains in dynamics and more thoroughly catches the listener’s attention. Here we have the interesting combination of the lyrics sounding merely descriptive and rather harmless yet the singer creating a sense of horror by the use of his voice: it is the voice of the Mariner himself in this part, and the voice changes into some sort of overdrive when he sights the ship, producing a rather horrifying tone (cf. Isenberg 2007: 197).
See... onward she comes Onwards she nears, out of the sun See... she has no crew She has no life, wait but there's two
In this chorus of part two the word “see” is a two-voiced sound in the vocals, which appears for the first time in this song. It is a consonant interval sung very smoothly in a vibrating tone, thereby taking away some of the horror and also indicating that more than one man have noticed the haunting appearance of the ship.
55 It is very ambiguous, however, that whereas Coleridge even talks of the ship as a skeleton grate and the two crew members, the fleshless, grim reaper himself and a pale dead-looking woman, are described in all their haunting and terrible appearance, the song lyrics tell us nothing about them but their names. This might, on the one hand, avoid a too obvious stressing of the horror theme; on the other hand, the song-writer might as well avoid the horror in the lyrics in order to direct it to the musical accompaniment, which will be even more the mass medium of its transposition to the reader in part three.
Death and she Life in Death, they throw their dice for the crew She wins the Mariner and he belongs to her now.
This is a mere re-telling of the marginal gloss.
Then ... crew one by one They drop down dead, two hundred men She... She, Life in Death. She lets him live, her chosen one.
Here we encounter the chorus again, musically identical with the first one. An interesting point for analysis appears in the first line where we have a concession to a universally valid convention of setting Heavy Metal lyrics. Especially since the 1980s, many Heavy Metal bands have fashioned their lyrics in this rather odd style: discordant syllables simply arranged to one another, mostly serving as signal words with stereotyped content markers, instead of whole meaningful sentences with concordant messages; the listeners are expected to establish their meaning. Examples can be found in extreme Thrash Metal band Slayer’s “Altar of Sacrifice”:
Master the forces and powers of satan Controlling the creature's instinct Drawn to the castles that float in the sky Learn to resist the temptation
or biggest Heavy Metal band Metallica’s “No Remorse”:
War without end No remorse No repent We don't care what it meant Another day Another death Another sorrow Another breath No remorse No repent
56 3.5.3.3. Part Three This part works as the complete counterpart to the (despite some changes in rhythm) prosodic style of composition and arrangement up to this point in the song and serves as the equally important element of contrast. Josefs has a rather unconventional but nevertheless very effective way of making us understand the importance of contrasting elements in a song; he describes them via the quotation of a conversation of two highly popular cartoon characters of the MTV generation: Upon listening to the chorus of a full-on headbanging heavy metal tune on their MTV show one night, Beavis tells his partner, “Wow, this is cool.” When the song shifts to a more melodic verse, however, he says to Butthead, ”Ugh, this part sucks.” Butthead, in his infinite wisdom, then turns to Beavis and replies, “Yeah, but if they didn’t have a part that sucked, the part that’s cool wouldn’t sound as cool. (Josefs 1996: 21)
In Iron Maiden’s song the contrast is not of such a harsh nature as to make the rest of the song sound better or worse, yet it is very important to note that after the galloping rhythm of Part One and the floating melodic passages of Part Two, Part Three abruptly seizes with rhythmic and melodic prosody. The drums and bass stop their playing completely, and spherical and strange sounds are created by both, guitars and sound effects. After some seconds of fading reverberations of the last chord, the impact on the listener of the unexpected soft, nearly hushed tunes is huge (cf. Isenberg 2007: 197). By a special technique – the volume of the electric guitar is turned down to zero, then a note is struck and immediately after this the volume is turned up quickly but evenly again, thus creating a string-like sound like that of a violin – an underlying movement of chromatic rising notes is created in a ‘beat’ evoking the illusion of a very slow waltz; “muffled melodies are introduced and work over this, some suggesting the creaking of ropes on a tall ship, others the lapping of water against its sides” (ibid.). Over the whole sound creation a deep and rather silent voice whispers another eight famous lines of the poem, “One after one, by the star-dogged moon…” (ll. 212-219) These lines end with the dropping down of the dead bodies, which is in a way imitated by the waltz-like beat, on the other hand, the chromatic notes of this beat rise in contrast, which adds to the passage’s disturbing effect on the listener.
57 3.5.3.4. Part Four This part is again striking insofar as it brings back the rhythmic qualities of the first two parts, yet its key changes to major; the rhythmic patterns of the drums and bass are not as clearly defined, however, as they were in the first parts. So we may speak of a prosodic continuation of parts one and two, but with careful arrangement techniques in order not to create a too strong contrast to the already immensely contrasting part three. Although the major key marks a complete difference to the mostly indefinable key of part three, the clever restricted use of rhythm and the simply kept harmonic changes do not overchallenge the listener and are, as odd as it may sound, a logical further development of part three to a more melodic part.
The curse it lives on in their eyes The Mariner he wished he'd die Along with the sea creatures But they lived on, so did he.
Line one is a rephrasing of a marginal note whereas the rest of the lines are a simple yet effective re-telling of the events and the Mariner’s thoughts in the song- writer’s own words. Here he seems to put simple modern sentences over poetical- sounding ‘old style’ refashioning, maybe in order to make sure that the listener fully understands the happenings in the story. However, we are not given any information about the inner conflict of the Mariner and the causes of the curse, which Coleridge very well does (and which is the lament of the Mariner as to why his shipmates, all good men, have to die whereas the slimy rotten sea creatures are allowed to live and he along with them). The singer’s vocal line rises steadily up to a target note in a cadence-like easy melody which is repeated in each line; it is interesting that although the lyrics tell of creepy events and thoughts, the music and the vocals are in the almost cheerful major key. The explanation for this may be found in the following lyrics:
And by the light of the moon He prays for their beauty not doom With heart he blesses them God's creatures all of them too.
These four lines are a pure rephrasing of the notes from the marginal gloss. Whereas Coleridge beautifully describes the rising of the moon and the stars and the
58 unaware ‘conversion’ of the Mariner, the songwriter chooses this part to be purely retold in simple reporting style. This may be so because he wants to leave no doubt about the nature of what is going on; he even tries to connect the prosaic first two lines in an attempt at poetic style, thereby evoking one of the most important concept words in Heavy Metal, doom, which Coleridge in fact never uses. It is highly interesting that a passage of such enormous potential of different approaches to interpretation is left so redundantly and plainly. One of the most important and influential modern interpretations of the poem, by Robert Penn Warren (cf. Warren 1958 & Bostetter 1973), who argued for a symbolic approach, suggested that here it becomes evident that the good events in the story take place under the light of the moon, in contrast to the bad events under that of the sun; the argument is that the moon is identified with the imagination whereas the sun is linked to the understanding. This triggered off a lively discussion among literary critics who proceeded to further dive into the subject; some linked the moon and its imaginative powers directly to nature, and the sun with its knowing and understanding powers to God, others claimed to have discovered that for Coleridge all natural phenomena were of a Deistic nature and thus inherently ambiguous, now benign, now malign (cf. Bostetter 1973: 184-199). Also the descriptions of actions and events and of inner feelings, all of which lead to the Mariner’s penance, conversion and rehabilitation, are not mentioned in any detail in the song, although even Coleridge interestingly presents them in an ambiguous way when he lets the Mariner bless the creatures “unaware” and lets him talk of his “kind saint” who “took pity” (ll. 285-287) on him. All this remains an object of speculation and interpretation. Maybe Nancy Isenberg is again right when she states that in the song lyrics “[m]ost of the supernatural visitations have been eliminated” (Isenberg 2007: 197).
Isenberg additionally thinks that the song lyrics are “concerned primarily with social interaction and the crime-punishment-atonement theme” (ibid.), as we have already observed and will see in the following lines as well:
Then the spell starts to break The albatross falls from his neck Sinks down like lead into the sea Then down in falls comes the rain.
59 Line one is taken almost literally from the marginal gloss, whereas lines two and three are a prosaic refashioning of the original lines in the poem; although they are kept in nearly the same plain style as those of the stanza before, the songwriter manages to maintain Coleridge’s poetic voice in his own words. Line four is even his own poetic contribution by the songwriter; it is not fashioned after the poem or the marginal gloss, yet it shows that the songwriter is able to produce more substantial lines in sharp contrast to the stanza before. It seems that he never intended to dive into a more sophisticated presentation and interpretation of the poem and that he thus left the stanza before as plain as possible in order to suppress any digging below what is obvious on the surface and to draw the attention of the listeners to the following passage, where the lifting of the curse and the retribution of the Mariner finally start. The last line also marks a change of the musical parameters when the singer’s voice goes into high ‘overdrive’ (cf. ibid.), indicating the change to part five, which is in fact a musical return to part one.
3.5.3.5. Part Five As already mentioned, this part is a repetition of part one in rhythmic, harmonic and melodic identity. We return to the simple and typical Heavy Metal chord progression of C-D-Em and the galloping rhythm of the beginning of the song, in classical terms a da capo. The singer also returns to his quick syllabic singing style in concordance with the rhythm:
Hear the groans of the long dead seamen See them stir and they start to rise Bodies lifted by good spirits None of them speak and they’re lifeless in their eyes
The lyrics go back to the direct address of the listener to be found at the beginning of the song and also the poem. After the dramatically silent part three and the rather unconventional major tonality of part four we find ourselves again in what Josefs called “a full-on headbanging heavy metal tune” (1996: 21), a concession to both, the listening conventions of the common listener of music who needs formal logic in order to be able to listen on, as well as to the Heavy Metal fans who would expect some more musical action towards the end of such a long and exhausting piece of music. The songwriter continues to explore his poetic talent in the first two lines of this stanza when he refashions Coleridge’s original lines; lines three and four do not
60 sound as poetical as the first two, yet the listeners are given all the information they need in order to be gripped by the haunting but also relieving events: the songwriter summarizes Coleridge’s vivid and exuberant descriptions of the rising of the bodies, the descent of angelic spirits and the strange continuation of the voyage across the equator.
And revenge is still sought, penance starts again Cast into a trance and the nightmare carries on.
This is again a dense retelling of the events in pre-chorus form, but this time we are not given enough information as to why and how penance, revenge and the nightmare continue. Coleridge in a masterly way evokes the image of the ship being torn back and forth between the still revengeful spirit that had followed the ship from the South Pole in order to avenge the killed albatross, and the good angelic spirits that try to guide the ship into a safe harbour; the songwriter, however, has never addressed the existence and nature of the spirit that is so important in order to be able to understand a good deal of the poem and also fails to introduce him at this point. Thus the listener is forced to believe in the cursing and revengeful power of the dead albatross, degrading this mighty symbol of Coleridge’s creative imagination and inspiration (cf. Whalley 1973: 173f.) to a malevolent monstrous bird of prey not unlike those found in horror movies such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Birds . Why and how does penance start again? In the poem the Mariner slips when the back and forward motion of the ship ceases and the spirit finally lets go of the ship; he falls and bumps his head, falling into an uneasy sleep. One of the most remarkable sequences of the poem begins now when Coleridge lets two voices that discuss the pro and contra of the Mariner’s deed and punishment enter the trance- like state of the Mariner’s sleep; but is this the nightmare the songwriter mentions? Or is it rather the haunting scene when the Mariner finally awakens and is stared at by all his undead crewmates who still condemn him with their eyes? We are not given any of this crucial information, which may again be a concession to the return to standard conventional Heavy Metal which many critics (unjustifiably) label “simple, even ‘primitive’” (Walser 1993: 47).
61 Now the curse is finally lifted And the mariner sights his home Spirits go from the long dead bodies Form their own light and the mariner’s left alone.
All four lines are short rephrasings of the marginal notes, and the songwriter goes back to his plain reporting fashion. Like in the poem we are not told why the curse had finally been lifted from the Mariner. What is in a way remarkable at this point is that the songwriter chooses to take the marginal gloss as a basis for his lyrics rather than the actual poem, because the poem would provide the Heavy Metal lyricist with powerful lines: the famous “Like one, that on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread” (ll. 446-451) and the musically swinging “Swiftly, swiftly flew the ship” (l. 460) and “Sweetly, sweetly blew the breeze” (l. 462) would be first-rate lines in any Heavy Metal song concerning the evocation of a haunting atmosphere, and terrifying action with rhythmic quality. Yet the songwriter completely ignores these and seems to lead the listener directly to the end and, thus, to the moral of the poem, which he obviously thinks to be of great importance, as we shall see.
And then a boat came sailing towards him It was a joy he could not believe The pilots boat, his son and the hermit, Penance of life will fall onto him.
These are completely the author’s own words; he is retelling directly from the poem. We are given the information that the Mariner nearly jumps for joy because the harbour pilot has come to steer the ship safely into the harbour, and we are informed that he is accompanied by his son (a rather useless information) and a hermit; yet we are not sufficiently informed as to why the “Hermit of the Wood” would desire to come on board a ship and what his function is. Maybe the songwriter relies on the logical talent of the listeners to draw the conclusion that the hermit serves as a kind of priest to the Mariner, who would listen to his penance and for retribution force the “Penance of life” onto him, which will be explained in the last stanzas. Nevertheless there remains the impression that the lyricist has in no way understood – or, to judge more fairly, at least does not care about – the complex relationships, conclusions and allusions, symbols and motives of these later parts of Coleridge’s poem, where his creative imagination, complex moral philosophy and artistic use of poetic elements appear in their fullest beauty; it seems that in this last Heavy Metal part he has
62 offered them in exchange for a quick retelling of the events in the most plain words in order to get to the conclusive moral end of the poem. This is, however, to a certain extent justifiable given the conventions of a modern song which hardly allow the nearly ten minutes of epic music we are now at.
And the ship sinks like lead into the sea And the hermit shrieves the mariner of his sins.
Only now we are given the information that the hermit actually takes the Mariner’s penance and shrieves him of his sins, so we may have done injustice to the lyricist before: the information gap of the Hermit’s function may as well have been a clever move to intentionally confuse the listeners by just letting a hermit appear on a pilot’s boat next to his son without comment in order to draw their attention to the upcoming lyrics and to make them think a little by themselves towards the end of this long and exhausting song. This possibility is also strengthened by the fact that this additional and vital information is packed into the more significant pre-chorus form rather than in a ‘common’ verse.
The mariners bound to tell of his story To tell this tale wherever he goes To teach God’s word by his own example That we must love all things that God made.
This is nearly a word-by-word rephrasing of the highly moralistic statement Coleridge makes in the marginal gloss. Given the fact that the marginal notes were added, on the one hand, in order to inform the reader precisely of the events but, on the other hand, that they were kept in an ambiguous pseudo-scientific manner, and that Coleridge himself thought of having put way too much moral into the end of the poem (cf. 3.4.3.), it is very, very disturbing that one of the biggest Heavy Metal bands that published albums with Metal-stereotype titles like “Killers”, “The Number of the Beast”, “Powerslave”, and “Fear of the Dark”, and, even more so, song titles like “Be Quick or be Dead”, “Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter”, and “Judas be my Guide” would guide and push the listener so directly towards an openly Christian, virtuous moral of grace and charity and respect. Maybe the songwriter really wanted to include this moral as a counterpoint and juxtaposition to the inherent stereotypes and norms of Heavy Metal; on the other hand, the expression “we must” in the lyrics indicates an ironic tone, or at least ambiguity, in respect to that overly moral sentiment. This ironic inversion becomes
63 also more probable when we take into account that outsiders to the Heavy Metal community tend to misread those inherent stereotype images of violence, drugs, sex, death, and satanic allusions (like displayed in the song and album titles above) by taking them much too literally; “[t]hey have as a rule not recognized the interrogatory or even condemning attitudes expressed in the lyrics or implied in the music” (Isenberg 2007: 195). So maybe this is a very clever move of the lyricist: common listeners will take the nice moral statement for granted and find no offence in it whereas Heavy Metal fans know of the ironic character and quality of their inherent stereotype lyrics and also adapt them to this passage and get the message: ‘Do not take this too seriously, brothers!’
And the wedding guest’s a sad and wiser man And the tale goes on and on and on and on.
Although there is a small textual inconsistency in the remediation – the wedding guest is not “sad” due to the Mariner’s story but a “sadder” (“and a wiser”) (l. 624) man – the ending to the song in pre-chorus form is constructed immensely cleverly: it takes up the ever-returning lyrical pre-chorus “on and on…”, combines it with the chorus “on and on…” and concludes the song in that manner, thus perfectly suggesting the penance of the Mariner and the essence of the whole poem, both of which have to go “on and on and…”.
3.6. Summary As already mentioned, this song has enjoyed and is still enjoying huge popularity among the band’s millions of fans worldwide; in fact Iron Maiden continue to play it every now and then at their live shows. When we ask the question of how the band has managed to bring “The Rime” to a broad audience with such huge success, we need to take into account first of all the musical composition: Though epic in its dimension, conception and length, the song is divided into several parts which differ more or less significantly from one another; the band is thus eliminating the threat of losing the driving tension of Heavy Metal music, on the one hand, and creating suspense and maintaining it during this lengthy piece of music, on the other. So the conventions of Heavy Metal, modern popular song writing and sound experimentations have been observed, although temporally stretched to epic dimensions: standard inherent Heavy Metal harmonies, pushing rhythmic variations, interesting vocal melodic lines (hooks), and an interesting yet logical arrangement of
64 the song parts succeed in pleasing Heavy Metal fans as well as more pop-oriented listeners. Second, the band has chosen one of the most popular poems of English literature of all time. Even though the focus of the song lyrics is more on the social interactions of the poem and the theme of crime-punishment-atonement rather than the supernatural elements of Coleridge’s poem (cf. Isenberg 2007: 197), the crucial events and morals of the story have been preserved in the lyrics and the two direct quotations from the poem range among the best known in English literature and therefore support the lyrics’ success. The band seems to have chosen exactly the same approach as Gustave Doré in his famous illustrations to the poem of 1876: “In Doré’s vision of the poem, the Mariner’s journey takes place within both a gigantic elemental landscape [= the epic dimensions of the song] and a grotesque human drama [= the social component].” (Woof 2006: 58)
Some other reasons for the song’s success function on a more subconscious level: Maybe the lyricist’s omission of the Spirit from the South as the main driving force for avenging the Mariner’s crime, and his stress on the albatross himself carrying out this vengeance are in close connection to how Heavy Metal fans see themselves: the albatross, like many a Metal fan, is of a rare species, solitary, haunting a limited and strange evocative zone (cf. Whalley 1973: 173); this can be linked directly to the Metal fans’ belief in their individuality, their ‘otherness’ as a subculture from the traditional and accepted social community, finding their own ways among themselves of coping with a dysfunctional and corrupt world (cf. Isenberg 2007: 195-198). Moreover, the “haunting quality” (Whalley 1973: 161) of the poem, which was most likely a reason for the songwriter to choose it as a basis for his lyrics (and serving to him as a compensational means for his omission of the supernatural forces), results from Coleridge’s descriptions of “the most intense personal suffering, perplexity, loneliness, longing, horror, fear. This experience brings us, with Coleridge, to the fringes of madness and death, and carries us to that nightmare land that Coleridge inhabited, the realm of Life-in-Death.” (Ibid.: 161f.) In fact, this is exactly the world that Heavy Metal fans inhabit: Superficially speaking, Heavy Metal music and lyrics tend to “conjure up […] images of physical violence, drugs, crude sex, an obsession with death and suicide and a mysticism bordering on the satanic. The
65 pictures on the covers of heavy metal albums, the titles and lyrics of their songs, the backdrops for live performances do in fact offer strong evidence of such alienation from the dominant social logic.” (Isenberg 2007: 195) Even though these symbols tend to be over-interpreted and misread by outsiders, they function as common denominators among the Metal community all over the world and seemingly across media boundaries and time back to Coleridge’s world of creative imagination. A very interesting side-aspect may also be the parallels between Coleridge’s opium abuse, Richard Burton’s (who did one of the most successful performances of the poem by reading it on the radio in 1952: cf. Isenberg 2007: 185f.) health damaging consumption of narcotics and alcohol (cf. ibid.), and the bands excessive lifestyle of Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll, the dimensions of which are documented in the reports of their World Slavery Tour 1984-85 (cf. Iron Maiden 1984: booklet). All in all we may say that Iron Maiden did well in concentrating on just a few aspects of the poem because these aspects were seemingly chosen carefully in order to fit to the musical and lyrical conventions of modern music, and subject matter and lifestyle of the Heavy Metal subculture.
66
4. From Literature to Film to Song: Heart of Darkness
4.1. Introduction Widely acknowledged as an early modernist classic, Heart of Darkness is one of the most powerful novels ever written. It sums up many problems the transitive period between the Victorian Age and the time of Modernism at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century was confronted and concerned with, and it functions also as a more or less ambiguous bridge between traditional Victorian values and the new ideals of Modernism.
4.2. Joseph Conrad Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3rd , 1857, in Berdyczów in the Ukraine, a part of Poland then annexed by Russia. In 1862 his family was exiled to Northern Russia due to anti-Russian underground activities in Warsaw; here Conrad got lessons in his first second language, French. After his mother’s death in 1865 and subsequent private education by his father, Conrad often fell ill; in need of medical treatment, his father and he travelled a lot at that time. Having become an orphan after his father’s death in 1869, Conrad moved to his grandmother in Cracow (cf. Knowles 2000: xxif.). After unsuccessful attempts in gaining the Austrian citizenship, the young Conrad’s desire to go to sea overtook the warnings and arguments of his relatives and he left Austrian Poland in 1874 for French Marseille, where he hired on a ship headed for the Caribbean, first as a passenger, on later voyages as a ship’s boy. In 1878 he hired on an English ship and sailed to England, where he passed an officer’s degree and was bound for Australia, Bangkok and Singapore. After a dispute with the Captain resulting in Conrad’s discharge, he travelled back to England and successfully took his first-mate’s examination and two years later his master’s exam (cf. ibid.: xxiiif.). Now granted the British citizenship and attending long voyages to India, Singapore, Borneo and Celebes, he started collecting material for his literary works of fiction, like the port of Berau in East Borneo where he met one William Charles Olmeijer providing him with material for his first two novels where the port becomes Conrad’s fictional Sambir, and the gentleman the name-giving character in Almayer’s Folly (started in 1889) (cf. ibid.: xxivf.).
67 In 1890 Conrad was granted captainship on a Belgian expedition on the Congo River in Africa; his gruelling overland trek to Kinshasa, the trip to Stanley Falls and his becoming seriously ill from malaria there, and his slow journey homewards on the river provided him with material for one of his best known and highly acclaimed works, Heart of Darkness (cf. ibid.: xxv). After a long trip to Australia and back to England he ended his professional career at sea aged thirty-six in 1894 and turned completely to writing. The first script he finished was Almayer’s Folly , which after five years of writing was published in 1895, when he had almost finished his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands . After his marriage to Jessie George and the publication of some shorter stories (among them “An Outpost of Progress”) he began his first true masterpiece, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (published 1897); the ship by this name he had sailed on himself, and in this work he describes exactly, in his style of romantic realism, the voyage, the ship and the crew, often even keeping to the actual names (cf. Hoppé 1947: 7). Although he had not yet become renowned, let alone famous, Conrad became acquainted with great writers like Henry James, Stephen Crane and Ford Madox Ford. His next novel also got published in America; Tales of Unrest (1898) again recalls his experiences in the Malayan waters, as does Lord Jim (1900) (cf. Knowles 2000: xxvii). After writing The End of the Tether, Typhoon, Falk, Amy Foster , and the collaborative work Romance (all published between 1900 and 1902), he spent the next two years on his most ambitious work, Nostromo (1904). The serial publication of The Mirror of the Sea , The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes until 1911 was hugely troubled by Conrad and his family becoming seriously ill again and seeking relief and medical treatment in Italy, France and Switzerland (cf. Hoppé 1947: 16f.). Short stories for American magazines and the completion of Victory (1915) completely occupied Conrad for years, and in 1914 he decided on taking a trip to his native country, Poland, unfortunately stepping right into the declaration of war on Poland by Austria which foreshadowed World War I. After the war he went for a trip to America, but came back to England shortly after to finish his Napoleonic novel, Suspense , which he never came to finish: Joseph Conrad died of a heart attack on August 3 rd , 1924. At the time of his death his reputation as a novelist had risen to become second only to Thomas Hardy’s. (cf. ibid.: 2; 18f.)
68 4.2.1. Conrad’s Time During his lifetime, Joseph Conrad witnessed a turbulent era; the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was marked by wars, imperialist politics, revolutionary uprisings, economic highs and lows, industrialization and mechanization, scientific progress and technological advances, and the cultural issue of women’s rights movement influenced not only Conrad but a whole generation of writers, artists and philosophers (cf. Peters 2006: 19).
4.2.1.1. Historical Background and Politics To speak in modern terms, Conrad can truly be labelled a cosmopolitan. His Polish heritage, his French education and his first voyages on French ships, his English citizenship and his affection for Russia have shaped his perception of the world and, thus, his style of writing. Concerning France, Conrad was influenced by the events around the French Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. Under Napoleon, the larger part of Europe had shortly come under French rule, not to be conquered back until Napoleon’s disastrous campaign against Russia. Conrad was fascinated by this period, and in two novels and two stories Napoleonic France serves as a background for Conrad’s literary investigations of the relationship between the individual human being and the larger political issues (cf. ibid.: 20). After Napoleon’s defeat, Russia became the dominating land power in Europe, and her ambiguous society of monarchy-bounded defenders of autocracy and revolutionary democratic forces continued to fascinate Conrad, too. Additionally, Russia ruled the part of Poland where Conrad had been born and spent his childhood in, so Conrad had a natural affection for her politics, which can be observed in his revolutionary characters, the vast majority of which belong to either Anarchist or Socialist movements modelled after Russian political reality (cf. ibid.: 20f.). Although Conrad did not specifically write about his Polish home country, he was heavily influenced by issues that directly affected Poland and shaped his view on Russia, revolutions and politics in general. Political and revolutionary activities led to his family’s exile and, eventually, to the death of his parents, so Conrad remained suspicious of any political activity during his whole life; maybe even his skeptical, ambiguous, and largely pessimistic view of the world is rooted in these Polish and Russian experiences (cf. ibid.: 24).
69 Without doubt the biggest political issue of his time that Conrad’s work is most concerned with is the following: England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands had been engaged in colonial politics for several hundreds of years, but the unprecedented race for overseas territories triggered off by Germany, Belgium, Italy, and others resulted in a new quality of aggressive imperial politics. Trying to outdo one another in the race to divide up the non-Western world, this new European Imperialism was marked by speed, competition and insatiability; as a result, some 85 per cent of the world was under Western rule by 1914, further increasing the already high tensions in the complex European political climate (cf. ibid.: 25). Many of Conrad’s literary works deal with these imperialist politics and their consequences on the partaking societies and individuals; his own multi-national background and his first-hand experiences in European colonies in South-East Asia, Africa and South America, have granted him a much more objective view and new perspectives on these politics than most of his contemporaries. This highly aggressive imperialism was abruptly ended by the outbreak of World War I, which Conrad also experienced first-hand since he spent some time in Poland then, researching his own and the country’s history. Conrad passionately took side for his home country and lobbied on behalf of Poland, which finally became an independent Polish state by the end of the war in 1918. Conrad’s affection for the larger forces in the world also mark him as a writer most innovative from a Victorian viewpoint, but not as yet truly Modernist: whereas Modernism is characterized by focusing on the individual and his/her mind, more or less neglecting surrounding historical, political, and cultural issues, Conrad’s works are caught somewhere in the middle: “[H]e consistently focuses on the individual – but always in the midst of political, historical and cultural forces.” (Ibid.: 26)
4.2.1.2. Literature and Art Conrad himself strongly opposed the idea of associating him with a single literary movement, since he thought that this would restrict and devalue his work (cf. ibid.: 31); he preferred to be considered as including certain literary tendencies in his writing, many of which he was developing himself. Modernism was clearly one of the main sources of inspiration for Conrad, one of the most important being the idea of formal experimentation. Of course, such experiments have shaped literary works before, but they never before had taken such a prominent position. When closely looking at Conrad’s work, we can see that
70 although he experimented with many Modernist features – multiple and unreliable narrators, fragmented stories, a-chronological narratives, inconclusive endings, for example –, he did not really belong to the radical Modernists: Conrad shared the Modernists’ way of thinking that in a world where the traditional world order of the predominantly Western culture was beginning to be questioned, the traditional artistic forms have to be questioned either; yet he did not radically ‘make things new’, like Ezra Pound demanded, but adapted them carefully to the traditional style of novel writing (cf. ibid.: 32). Although the philosophical basis of his works is clearly Modernist, Conrad is, mainly due to his age and maturity when he began his writing career, deeply rooted in the nineteenth century: “Consequently, a tension exists between his realization of a Modernist world and his wish that it were otherwise.” (Ibid.: 33) However, one feature of Modernist philosophy that Conrad exploited very much in his writing was the denial of an absolute and objective truth and reality. His emphasis on the indeterminacy of knowledge, the uncertainty concerning traditional ‘truths’, and the recurrent theme of the alienation of the individual human being in an indifferent universe truly mark him as a Modernist writer (cf. ibid.: 32). Additionally, Conrad was highly influenced by the Romantic tradition, especially by Polish Romantic writers (among them his own father). He was attracted by Romanticism and repelled by it at the same time, making the inclusion of Romantic elements in his work rather ambiguous: for example, in Lord Jim , he speaks critically of actions motivated by Romantic ideals, yet at the same time he approves of them, causing people to strive beyond their abilities, somehow providing hope in a dark world (cf. ibid.: 34). Clever enough, Conrad also includes the reactions against Romanticism, i.e. Realism and Naturalism, in his writing. Instead of romanticizing and idealizing the world, Realism tried to present reality as it really existed, thus focusing more on observation than on imagination. Conrad is making use of the clear language and the avoidance of exaggeration featured in Realism, yet he counters the Realist and Naturalist objective view on the world with his focus on the subjective perception of the individual (cf. ibid.: 34f.). In contrast to this, Impressionism was also an important movement in the development of Conrad’s style of writing. He was fascinated by the Impressionist painters’ focus on atmosphere, light, sharply contrasting colours, and their evocative
71 brush strokes. Since these elements are difficult to include in traditional writing, Conrad adapted the Impressionist idea that the perception of “all phenomena filter through human consciousness” (ibid.: 35); the writer also makes use of this: “subject alters object, object alters subject, and both are influenced by the context in which they appear.” (Ibid.: 36) An example of this highly abstract notion would be that a murderer committing his deed may experience this act to have taken much longer than the actual passing of the time on the clock registers, as is described in The Secret Agent (cf. ibid.).
4.2.1.3. Philosophical Tendencies Conrad seems to have been familiar with the philosophical treatises of Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as with the predominant philosophy of his time, Positivism. Resulting from the exponential rise of scientific discoveries during the nineteenth century, many traditional ‘truths’ were shattered, and people increasingly turned to science and the certainty of knowledge directly linked to that, rather than to religion. This new prestige of science produced the philosophical tendency of Scientific Positivism, which was determined by the premise that all knowledge, and thus all certainty and truth, could be found by employing the methods of science (cf. ibid.: 30); Realism and Naturalism are direct products of this philosophy. However, a number of thinkers, from as early as Søren Kierkegaard to Friedrich Nietzsche, questioned the idea of employing scientific means to explain everything, particularly not phenomena like human beings and human social and moral behaviour. Like these prominent philosophers, Conrad, although he respected science, was highly suspicious of a system that claimed to be able to explain everything. By way of irony he reveals the true character and high-handedness of this all-encompassing Positivist model when he ridicules the Belgian doctor who measures the heads of his patients in Heart of Darkness , and also when he makes fun of one character drawing conclusions about another’s psychology based only upon her facial features in The Secret Agent (cf. ibid.: 30). Moreover, Conrad was also familiar with the philosophy of Schopenhauer, who argued that the physical world we live in and in and with which humans interact is merely a representation of reality, and not reality itself; furthermore, he refers to “Will as the reality that human beings cannot apprehend as phenomena” (ibid.: 31). But this Will in its desire to exist can only lead to despair, because it will always desire something it cannot reach. Therefore, according to Schopenhauer, there are only two
72 solutions to this dilemma: one is to find temporal refuge in art in order to detach oneself from this Will leading only to misery, the other and only permanent one is to lose all wish for existence and satisfaction through accepting one’s existence and the world as suffering. This pessimistic philosophy that human existence is merely an existence of pain and suffering is reflected in many of Conrad’s works, for example in the absurdity of events that destroy Razumov’s life in Under Western Eyes , or his stories of humans seeking temporal shelter from the hostile truths of an indifferent universe (cf. ibid.: 31).
4.2.1.4. Cultural and Social Issues By 1850, more than half of England’s population had moved to the cities, being employed in the industry to a huge percentage. The industrial revolution also brought with it huge social problems like poor housing conditions, poor sanitation, poor infrastructure, and extensive exploitation and pollution of the environment; along with those came low wages, disastrous working conditions and long work days. Although Conrad did not write novels of social conscience, he was deeply concerned with the side effects of mechanization and technology, which are alienation from society and de-humanization of the individual. The intruding of women into an until then purely male-dominated world via the women’s rights movement is also made subject of discussion in Conrad’s writing. For example, in Heart of Darkness , the women are ‘out of it’, meaning their place is far from the grim realities of the male world, thus resembling the traditional nineteenth- century view on women (cf. ibid.: 27). Furthermore, Conrad was aware that a good part of his reading public was female, and given the inclusion of melodramatic elements of love and romance in his later works, he seems to have deliberately aimed them at a female audience (cf. ibid.: 28). Another very important cultural and social issue was, as already discussed, that the belief in the superiority of Western culture, based on transcendental truths and sanctioned by God, had been put into question, and thus the whole system of Imperialism, which will be discussed more thoroughly below in the chapter on Heart of Darkness .
73 4.2.2. Conrad’s Literary Style Conrad’s fictions have been described as conservative, or as full of a rather melancholy liberalism, but they have affinities with Marxist thinking, not least in these concerns for the motivation of action, when faced with the loss of particular communal values, and the loneliness or arrogance of individualism within in global culture; and the possibility of some social recovery, resistance or innovation that is neither futile nor restrictive. (Jordan 1996: 21)
4.2.2.1. Early Period Conrad’s early period as a writer was thematically dominated by his powerful memories of the Malay Archipelago and the professional lives of sailors and people working in the maritime industry. Also influencing his early writing was that Conrad suffered not only from physical diseases but also immensely from emotional stress, so he was anxious that his writing in his third language, English, would not be well accepted; this fear was partly justified because though having been well received by his contemporary critics, the books simply did not sell well (cf. Peters 2006: 5; 37). Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly , can be considered the first of a trilogy. The book is more or less a Romance, yet the events do not end happily and Conrad avoids the dangers of overly romanticizing and sentimentalizing landscape, relationships and love, thus in fact creating a new kind of Romance fiction. Themes like the prejudices and arrogant high-handedness of Western civilization towards seemingly primitive indigenous South-East-Asian people are presented and undermined, Eurocentrism and Western values are criticized and an eroding of Western imperial rule is proposed. Conrad, however, does not really take side in his writing; he continues to maintain a strange ambiguity in questioning the way Europeans see themselves while at the same time keeping up these Western assumptions. As a matter of fact, Conrad radically undermines social conventions and norms of his time by including into his Romantic tales larger political, social and cultural issues, their impact on individuals and the exploration of a mixed-race, young, female, and unmarried character as the dominant force in the novel (cf. ibid.: 37-39.). His second book, An Outcast of the Islands , is again set around the fictitious port of Sambir in the Malay Archipelago; the events of this novel, however, take place before those described in Almayer’s Folly . What is remarkable about this novel is not that it is not considered one of Conrad’s artistic masterpieces; it is also not because of more or less the same themes of the questioning of European imperialism, or the turning around of the Romance tradition: the true innovation in this book lies in the
74 creation of perhaps the first true anti-hero as the central character in a novel, Peter Willems. This main character, through his moral degeneracy, his many betrayals, and his unjust belief in his superiority just because he is a European, serves as a vessel for Conrad’s investigation of the malevolent power of Western colonialism; hereby, the author demonstrated to his contemporaries that the right to live in any social community is not determined by one’s heritage but by one’s (moral) actions (cf. ibid.: 39-42). The third novel in the Malay trilogy, The Rescue , actually is difficult to place in Conrad’s career; most of it had been written in the 1890s, yet its final publication dates from 1920. It is Conrad’s second-longest novel and a highly pessimistic work. Again the focus is strongly on the East-West relationship, particularly on the two main characters, a European and a South-East-Asian, who, despite of their feelings of friendship and affection for one another, can ultimately not break through their inherited barriers of belonging to different races (cf. ibid.: 42-45). Supposedly the best work in Conrad’s early period of writing is The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, published as Children of the Sea in America; despite its rather repelling title, the book ranges among his most readable ones, partly because of its brevity, partly because of its qualities as an adventure story, and partly because of its undisputed literary qualities. It is also Conrad’s first novel to be set outside the Malay Archipelago: a story of a ship sailing from Bombay to England. In a masterly fashion, Conrad manages to mimic the world as a whole in the microcosm of the ship, the necessity of community and human solidarity in order to survive the hostile world of the sea to the sailors becoming the main message of that story. Nevertheless there remains the tension between the crew members and the Nigger in the title: although he is a full member of the ship’s community – everyone in the crew even risks his life to save him from death –, they all struggle with accepting his racial heritage. Conrad’s instability in his narrative technique – critics still quarrel over this being a mistake or deliberate – profoundly adds a new quality and slightly paves the way for modern(ist) story telling (cf. ibid.: 45-47). Conrad also published a collection of shorter stories, Tales of Unrest , wherein he deals with more or less the same issues as in his earlier works, which therefore seem very important to him. “An Outpost of Progress”, for example, explicitly questions and doubts European Imperialist ideas and activities, whereas “The Return” deals with human isolation and aloneness. Nevertheless of special interest is
75 “The Idiots”, in which Conrad introduces the narrative technique of ‘delayed decoding’: The purpose of this technique is, first, to take the reader directly to the position of the experiencing character viewing an event, and, second, to demonstrate that this experiencing perception is highly subjective, and thus knowledge, truth and reality are worth questioning in general (cf. ibid.: 47-51). This effect is similar to experiencing a psychological trauma: “[Y]ou’re made to experience something, in reading, which is only explained later. However, […] the unpredictable shock can be decoded and understood, which is not always the case with extreme disturbances to habits of life and perception.” (Jordan 1996: 3) Nevertheless, this is an important narrative innovation and is to appear again and again in Conrad’s later writings.
4.2.2.2. Middle Period During this period, which ranges from about 1899 to 1911, Conrad produced writing of large quantity, but even more of quality; his most frequently read and studied works date from this period. One of Conrad’s best short stories is “Youth” from the collection Youth and Two Other Stories , and it is also the first of four stories to introduce the chief narrator Charlie Marlowe, who also features in Heart of Darkness , Lord Jim and Chance . As the title of the story suggests, it mainly deals with the exciting and wondrous but also naïve and ignorant experiences made in one’s youth; but the tale also evokes certain bittersweet emotions as to the unconditional loss of these days. In a way this story also serves as a bridge from the nostalgic and sad retrospective of Victorian society to a future inevitably leading to death; yet without the bitterness of loss and old age (cf. Peters 2006: 52-54). Heart of Darkness is one of Conrad’s most dense and gripping stories and will be treated separately in a coming chapter. “The End of the Tether” introduces another theme in Conrad’s fiction: the frailty of human social and individual existence. On the one hand, people are constantly torn between their loyalty to a social code and loyalty to an individual, yet on the other hand, by one blow, be it by fate, the individual and also the social world can be unalterably changed (cf. ibid.: 62-64.). A virtuoso masterpiece in narrative manner can be considered Conrad’s next novel, Lord Jim . Via the use of multiple narrators and by letting those unreliable narrators tell their versions of the story a-chronologically, Conrad impressively confirms his status as one of the first modernist writers of fiction. The resulting
76 confusion over the true nature of events is in analogy to the moral confusions presented in the story, and the methodology of learning of an event only bit by bit in non-consecutive segments resembles how the human mind works (cf. ibid.: 64-69). “Typhoon” and Other Stories continues with this narrative technique, yet on a smaller scale. Moreover, Conrad again explores the psychological and sociological reactions of human beings caught in extreme and hostile surroundings on the verge of human existence. “Amy Foster” deals with intercultural misunderstandings and difficulties, and it is believed to be slightly autobiographical: Conrad, the foreigner with his strange behaviour and manners, and his English wife with her strict moral and social codes. A particularly delicate story is “Falk: A Reminiscence”, where Conrad lets the main protagonist tell a story about cannibalistic happenings on a ship; in fact, he explores in an even more radical way than in Heart of Darkness what happens when the thin wall of (Western) civilization falls and humans are forced to give up their value system in order to survive (cf. ibid.: 69-73). At this point in his life Conrad seems to have been driven not only to write stories, allegories, etc., but to openly declare himself a political person via his most ambitious work, Nostromo. Argued by many to be his best novel, Conrad creates a fictitious South American Country, Costaguana, complete with imaginary history, politics, diplomatic relations and society, a creation of magnitude and vastness. As a matter of fact, the novel is rarely read due to its complex and confusing plot written in Conrad’s fragmented narrative style. Though presented by a single omniscient narrator, we are only given segments of information on characters and events, thus getting the feeling that vital information is withheld. By this method Conrad openly shows how human relationships relate directly to political issues, where subjectivity and relativity demonstrate the uncertainty of knowledge (cf. ibid.: 73-79). Whereas Nostromo can be considered Conrad’s best and Heart of Darkness his densest story, The Secret Agent is perhaps his most perfectly constructed novel: “His control of language and scene, as well as the ironic distance he achieves, combines with powerful moral and political issues to result in one of Conrad’s finest works.” (Ibid.: 79) In this novel, Conrad investigates and criticizes London’s radical political underworld, yet he also demonstrates his disapproval of the Western established governments. Dealing with more or less the same issues as in Nostromo , Conrad now dares to shift the center of actions from poor developing countries to the
77 very heart of the most powerful Imperialist nation of his time, England, thus becoming even more openly political (cf. ibid.: 79-83). A Set of Six is a collection of stories in which Conrad further investigates and develops his narrative innovations, as well as the issues and subjects his works have dealt with so far (cf. ibid.: 83-88). Opposing human relations and feelings against fixed ideas, Conrad’s third and last openly political novel, Under Western Eyes , is also counted among his best. Primarily about moral and psychological conflicts, the novel again deals with the Western perception of the East, in this case, Russia. Having been written a few years before the Russian October Revolution of 1917, this story about autocracy and revolution oddly foreshadows the actual events (cf. ibid.: 88-94). Although Conrad has gained a high reputation and enjoyed ongoing approval among his contemporary critics and fellow writers, his financially most successful book up until that time became the collections of sea stories, ‘Twixt Land and Sea . Readers seemed to have approved of him writing maritime adventure stories again; the majority of the stories, however, only superficially focus on external events. As is often the case with Conrad, they dig deep into the internal and the human psyche (cf. ibid.: 94-98). This publication marks the end of Conrad’s most productive and important period, and critics still argue over why his later writings diverged so drastically from his earlier works.
4.2.2.3. Later Period Whereas some critics clearly argue that Conrad’s later works represent a decline in his quality as a writer, contemporary reassessment tends to revalue the divergence between the works of his earlier writings and those after 1911 as representing a shift in direction. Nevertheless, it is a fact that the writings of his later period are different to his earlier ones (cf. ibid.: 99). ‘Twixt Land and Sea being Conrad’s financially most successful collection of stories, Chance was his first novel of financial success. The book features the narrator Marlow for the last time and employs Conrad’s most complicated narrative techniques among his later novels; it does not manage, however, to make this formal complexity support its content. On the contrary, such prominent contemporaries like Henry James wondered “whether the novel simply privileges form over content” (ibid.: 100).
78 The follow-up, Victory, benefited from the commercial success of its predecessor, yet it is probably Conrad’s most discussed piece or writing. Despite some weaknesses in presenting romantic relationships and melodramatic elements, Conrad ventures more deeply than before into the human psyche and discusses the connection of human relationships, detachment from reality and the importance of the construction of one’s individual self. Additionally, he presents human solidarity, though fragile, as the only means to survive in the alienation of modern world society (cf. ibid.: 101-104). The stories of the collection of Within the Tides are valued for their narrative techniques rather than their content. Written during the writing of Victory , they feature similar plots and characters like the novel, yet they lack its sophistication. Nevertheless, they are interesting for critics because Conrad introduces a new kind of narrative technique in each story (cf. ibid.: 104-108). Whereas it is the most unusual among Conrad’s later works, The Shadow-Line has a lot in common with the works of his middle period and is therefore regarded as the most powerful in his later period. It is more or less an initiation story, telling of the transition from youth into manhood, but also of the necessity of human community and solidarity in order to escape hostile nature and the mysterious role of fate (cf. ibid.: 108-110). No other work by Conrad has distressed and dissatisfied his readers as much as The Arrow of Gold . Maybe this is to a certain extent due to the fact that Conrad dictated most of the novel instead of painstakingly handcrafting it himself, which resulted in a decline of quality. Yet the novel brings up an interesting gender issue about a woman who gets damaged psychologically because the men surrounding her only see her as an object of male desire and nothing else (cf. ibid.: 110-112). Conrad’s last completed novel is The Rover , in which he again presents his skepticism of both revolutionary power and established politics. Set during the time of the French Revolution of 1789, the novel is particularly interesting because of the parallels of Conrad’s own life and character and those portrayed in the protagonist Peyrol (cf. ibid.: 112-114). Tales of Hearsay is a posthumously published collection of stories which had already appeared in magazine form; Suspense was also published after Conrad’s death (in 1924), but he had never finished the novel. Conceived as his masterwork and begun as early as in 1902, Conrad put high hopes in this novel set in the time of
79 the Napoleonic Wars, yet the fragments allow no clear interpretation of this last work (cf. ibid.: 117-118).
4.3. Heart of Darkness As already mentioned, Heart of Darkness is one of Conrad’s best known works; it is “a dark, densely packed, and slow-moving story about a journey up the Congo River, in which Conrad investigates colonialism, self-knowledge, and the groundings of Western civilization” (Peters 2006: 54). The tale itself was also very important to Conrad himself, who notes in the “Author’s Preface” that the story “is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case” (HoD 1: 11); and, even more remarkably, he is reported to have claimed that “[b]efore the Congo I was just a mere animal” (qtd. Peters 2006: 54), an effect he probably intended to transmit to his readers.
4.3.1. Outline Heart of Darkness is a frame narrative. It begins with four men sitting aboard a ship on the river Thames; they wait for a changing of tides, so an unknown frame narrator recounts the tale that one of the men, Marlow, tells to the others. The rather introspective sailor had got commanded on a steamboat as riverboat captain for the Company, a Belgian enterprise entrusted with organizing trade in the Congo, the dark heart of the African continent; he was to meet the local station manager, Kurtz, presumably a man of idealism and great abilities. After having arrived at the Company’s Outer Station, he is confronted with widespread decay, inefficiency, and also brutality; native inhabitants of the region suffer from overwork and ill treatment in the Company’s service, where they had been forced into. The vast darkness of the surrounding majestic jungle, on the one hand, underlines these dark practices; on the other hand, it serves as a contrasting element, making the white man’s settlements appear like small islands in the ‘heart of darkness’. Marlow quickly travels on to the Company’s Central Station in order to take command of his steamboat there, but finds it sunk; he and his co-workers are forced to wait for several months until the ship is repaired. During that time he learns more about Kurtz, who is rumoured to be ill; but Marlow is not very fond of the people who
1 I.e.: Conrad, Joseph (1899): „Heart of Darkness“. In: Robert Hampson, ed. (1995): Heart of Darkness with the Congo Diary . London: Penguin Books. 13-124. 80 tell him about Kurtz and who seem to fear him: he finds especially the general manager of the station a corrupt individual, putting economical issues over morals. After having received the parts needed for repairing the ship, Marlow, the manager and other agents of the Company, who are referred to by Marlow as ‘pilgrims’ because of their strange habit of carrying long staves of wood, set out on the long voyage upriver. Furthermore, the accompanying crew of cannibals and the oppressive silence of the dense jungle make all the men on board strikingly nervous, putting them into a frenzy each time they pass a native village or hear the sound of drums. Finally, the ship arrives at a hut stacked with firewood; but when the crew takes the wood on board, everything is surrounded by a thick fog. The horror begins with the clearing of the fog, when Marlow and the others are attacked by a band of native warriors, killing Marlow’s African helmsman before being scared off by the ship’s steam whistle. Due to this raid, they believe the Inner Station to be destroyed, but to their surprise they find it perfectly intact. They also learn from a seemingly half- crazed Russian trader that Kurtz is not dead either, but that he has detached himself from all common people and rules as a god over the natives, using this position to brutally raid the surrounding jungle in search of ivory. Moreover, they find out that Kurtz had also ordered the attack on the steamer because he did not want to be taken back to an outer station. However, Kurtz is quite ill, and the manager brings him aboard the steamer. The Russian disappears by canoe because he fears punishment for revealing the secret that Kurtz had ordered the attack, so the next morning they set off down the river. But Kurtz’s health declines quickly during the voyage, and he entrusts Marlow with some personal documents before he dies during a stop for repairs, his last words being, “The horror! The horror!” (HoD: 118). Marlow falls ill, too, and barely manages to survive and travel back to Europe. More than a year after Kurtz’s death, he visits his fiancée, who still mourns over the loss of the man she had loved; but she had only known the idealistic and virtuous Kurtz, so Marlow cannot bring himself to tell her the truth about Kurtz’s last words. Instead, he tells her that Kurtz’s last words were her name, and then leaves.
81 4.3.2. Interpretations In a way, Heart of Darkness can be seen as serving as a mediator between traditional Victorian values and Modernist ideals, somehow providing a bridge. On the one hand, we have a story in the typical nineteenth-century adventure tradition: Marlow is a hero under constant attack and far from his home country (cf. White 1993: 100-115). Furthermore, we are presented the traditional Victorian role of domestic women sheltered from the man’s tough and dangerous world (cf. Peters 2006: 62). The crucial difference, however, between traditional stories of heroism and Conrad’s, and thus the Modernist’s approach, is that although the hero is constantly facing concrete dangers, like conspiracy and corruption, violence and physical illness, there also reveals itself a philosophical and psychological quality in terms of confusion and alienation, as well as profound and innermost doubt in the hero’s mind; in fact, though he is a seemingly tough, honest and able man, Marlow is in a way damaged, a broken hero, not unlike other famous heroes in Modernist writing, such as T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, or William Faulkner’s Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury . On the level of technique, Conrad implements his narrative innovations fully for the first time in this story: a frame narrative, multiple and more or less unreliable narrators, a-chronological sequence of events, and delayed decoding (cf. Peters 2006: 55). The effect of the frame narrator having a view on the events different from Marlow and the other narrators serves in underlining one of the novel’s purposes, which it is to present different information from different sources, thus learning as the reader that there is no single and objective truth of events and actions. Additionally, the illusion of Marlow seemingly telling of chronological events, which are in fact a- chronological because the sequence is not a sequence of actions but of Marlow’s thoughts and how they come to his mind, resembles, in Modernist fashion, how a human brain is believed to work (cf. ibid.); for example, Marlow does not include women in the story when they actually appear, but when he thinks of them. Finally, the revolutionary technique of delayed decoding supports this idea of a narrative resembling the way the human mind works; an example would be that, when the crew is attacked by the natives, Marlow sees sticks flying through the air, realizing only moments later that these are arrows and that he is under attack (cf. ibid.).
82
Interestingly enough, although literary critics usually praise the story as one of the masterpieces of early Modernist writing, Heart of Darkness was received by the contemporary reading public at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century as merely an uncontroversial adventure story. It was either read as a condemnation of that type of adventurer who too easily takes advantage of the imperialist system, like Kurtz does, or as a novel that sentimentally reinforces the domestic values the women in the story represent. Reasons for this may be first, the arrogant and non- reflecting views of typical members of British society portrayed in the character of Marlow’s aunt, whose naïve and illusory theories of the Westerners bringing civilization to simple savages perfectly describes the then contemporary attitude towards imperialist politics. Second, Conrad’s setting of the novel in a Belgian colony freed his contemporaries from guilt because they are Belgian and not British colonizers who perform the amoral crimes in the story; yet, this reception also reveals and reinforces the story’s central themes of hypocrisy and absurdity.
The main issue of Conrad’s criticism is of course Western imperialism. More or less anything in the novel is set before this background of Western white people’s economical, political and scientific interests in seemingly primitive cultures and their territories. Whereas Marlow is presented as a more open-minded and tolerant Westerner who at least tries to understand and value the different lifestyles and degrees of ‘civilization’, thereby adapting a modern view, Kurtz is seen as “an exemplar of a contemporary view of Victorian progress” (Hawthorn 1990: 172). Supported by the argument of superimposing Darwin’s theory of ‘natural selection’ and the ‘survival of the fittest’ onto economic, political and social matters (‘Social Darwinism’), science, and thus progress, served as an evolutionary argument to support the Western ideology of colonialist activities (cf. Watt 1996: 32-35): “Merely by occupying or controlling most of the globe, the European nations had demonstrated that they were the fittest to survive” (ibid.: 34), and further, “the exportation of their various economic, political and religious institutions was therefore a necessary step towards a higher form of human organization in the rest of the world” (ibid.); in this respect, the widely read and accepted author Rudyard Kipling called this missionary impetus the “White Man’s Burden”. Also the fact that Darwin himself spoke of ‘high’ and ‘low’ races, and ‘stronger’ and ‘weaker’ nations, confirmed Western people in these racial
83 doctrines of the inherent dominance of the white races and the inferiority (and thus justified destruction) of the rest of the world (cf. Watt 1996: 34). Putting together all these factors of scientific, political, philosophical, economic, and religious concerns, the remark that “all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (HoD: 83), although it is intended as an honest praise of the gentleman Kurtz then still believed to be idealist, shines in cynical ambiguity. However, the point that Conrad obviously is trying to make is that there is no such thing as an inherent sense of reason and civilization; in the middle of the hostile world of the African jungle, amidst the ‘heart of darkness’, when the thin wall of civilization breaks down and no solid foundation is at the back (Kurtz had “kicked himself loose of the earth” HoD: 107), all the benevolent intentions and ideals are corrupted by amorality and absolute power. Surprisingly, as a matter of fact, Marlow, the tragic hero, still sides with Kurtz because he believes him to be the lesser of two nightmares. Marlow much more detests the other European agents of the Company in Africa because of their neither moral nor immoral intentions or actions, but because of their utterly inhuman behaviour regarding the exploitation of natives. In this context, Kurtz is the lesser evil because he is a man of good intentions gone bad, whereas the others represent the decline in humanity as soon as the walls of civilization are shattered in the African wilderness, in the complete absence of a moral and social system (cf. Peters 2006: 60f.). Conrad’s strongest argument in this direction is that whereas the supposedly inherent civilized Westerners become completely corrupted in the absence of such a system, the cannibals, supposedly the most primitive and savage people in the story, do not attack the white people, although each of them is suffering from pangs of hunger on the voyage and although they dramatically outnumber the whites. Conrad presents them as the most civilized and rational-thinking, even the most humane beings, because they exhibit an internal restraint, as opposed to the Europeans, who only do so when they are confronted with external checks (cf. ibid.: 58-60).
However, there is a change of perspectives in the contemporary reception of Conrad, particularly Heart of Darkness . Whereas a Euro-centric approach clearly identifies the issues and themes of the hypocrisy and resulting madness of imperialism and the absurdity of a choice between two evils as revealing criticism of this system, Conrad is not free from being accused as a racist himself when viewed
84 from a non-Western perspective. For example, Nigerian-born writer Albert Chinualumogu Achebe identifies Africa as the counterpart or antithesis to Europe in Heart of Darkness , thus accusing Conrad of subliminal racism by implying that Africa is a place where civilization had not yet come to. He argues with the powerful symbols of the two rivers, the River Thames and the River Congo; the English river “has been one of the dark places of the earth” (HoD: 18) in analogy to the comparison of British imperialism to Roman conquest that Marlow tells of at the beginning of the story, but has overcome its darkness, whereas going up the River Congo “was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world” (Achebe 1988: 252), in fact, to the ‘heart of darkness’ itself. Furthermore, he reveals Conrad’s use of emotive words rather than plain descriptions when talking about the African continent, thereby devaluating it by showing no real interest in the country. Also his continuous, often degrading statements concerning African natives, which Conrad describes as being animal-like, prehistoric people, are constantly under discussion; Achebe thinks that describing people as if they were dogs or other jolly animals reveals a true racist bias (cf. ibid.: 251-261). Frances B. Singh analyses that Conrad does not only ironize colonialism but also his critical alter ego, Marlow, thereby making the criticism on colonialism rather ambiguous; she also identifies Marlow’s constant use of the distancing ‘them’ for the African natives as a dissociation from those people and thus as a sign of Conrad’s racism (cf. Singh 1978: 268-380).
4.4. Adaptation to a Movie: Apocalypse Now “One of a cluster of late-1970s films about the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now adapts the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness to depict the war as a descent into primal madness.” (Bozzola) This film is one of the most successful anti-war films, but also one of the most demanding; its 153 minutes runtime cost 40 million dollars in production, more than 34 weeks of exhausting shooting on location in the Philippine jungle, including problems like extreme weather, theft of filming material, and a heart attack of the main actor, Martin Sheen (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now and http://www.filmsite.org). The film is thematically based on Heart of Darkness , yet it does not follow its content outline but is transferred into the height of the Vietnam War in 1969; the River Congo becomes the Nung River, thus transferring the Central-African ‘heart of
85 darkness’ to the Cambodian Jungle, and Belgian Imperialism is replaced by the American belief in their sense of mission to bring democracy to Eastern Asia and to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist country: Vietnam, 1969. Burnt out Special Forces officer Captain Willard [Martin Sheen] is sent into the jungle with top-secret orders to find and kill renegade Colonel Kurtz [Marlon Brando] who has set up his own army within the jungle. As Willard descends into the jungle, he is slowly overtaken by the jungle's mesmerizing powers and battles the insanity which surrounds him. His boat crew succumbs to drugs and is slowly killed off one by one. As Willard continues his journey he becomes more and more like the man he was sent to kill. (Arndt)
To list the whole plot synopsis would be far too extensive here, since there are many surreal and epic scenes and events which are not really in connection to Conrad. Nevertheless, the basic themes, motifs and elements of Conrad’s novella have been incorporated by Coppola and his fellow screenplay writer, John Milius (who were both nominated for the Academy Awards 1980 for “Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium”; cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now and http://www.imdb.com). First, even though the character of Marlow is changed to a burnt-out US soldier, the character of Kurtz is thoroughly adapted from Heart of Darkness . In spite of him also being a US general, his depiction as a god-like figure who reigns over his own army as well as the local natives, perfectly resembles the picture of Conrad’s Kurtz; the story of a good man gone bad – in this case, a highly decorated US Army General – is in complete analogy to Conrad’s man of honour having become morally corrupted. Besides, Marlon Brando’s intense performance seems to be completely in Conrad’s tradition of the demonic and megalomaniacal mad demigod, who is capable of captivating people and making them follow him through a haunting quality. And further, Coppola’s extraordinary filmmaking skills even underline Conrad’s Kurtz: Brando is always “filmed in perpetual half-shadow, as if darkness is pouring over him in some black ooze” (Galloway 1996), and his compelling ruminations with Willard (Marlow) and his beheading of one of Willard’s soldiers in full camouflage make-up truly resemble the primitive native god. Second, the powerful symbol of the river is incorporated as a central element in the film as well. The soldier crew sails upriver, moving away from civilization, right into the ‘heart of darkness’, encountering madness and terror in the Vietnam War.
86 Third, many motifs and allusions from the novel have been adapted, among them the hypocrisy of imperialist behaviour (i.e. the ‘burden’ of America to bring democracy [= civilization] to Eastern Asia; Kurtz directly refers to this in the film: “We train young men to drop fire on people but their commanders won't allow them to write 'FUCK' on their airplanes because it's obscene.” Dirks: 5), the resulting madness of this behaviour (by including the discussion of this in the famous monologue of Kurtz, when he philosophizes that the question of “Who is mad?” only depends on the context, asking who is insane in the absence of a social system of norms and morals in the middle of a surreal and absurd war), thus climaxing in the absurdity of evil, where one has only the choice between two evils, the question being, “Can insanity and evil be judged as such by moral standards and social values?”, or inverting the argument, “Can insanity exist in an already insane world?” Furthermore, Coppola and Milius include many direct hints and quotes from Conrad; in fact, the two plots of the novel and the film, which do not have much in common during the first two thirds of the film (cf. Galloway 1996), start to blend together. After the coming of a thick fog – an important element in Conrad’s story as a sort of corollary to darkness –, the soldiers are once attacked with wooden spears and arrows, where, like in Heart of Darkness , one crew member, the black helmsman, is mortally wounded. Furthermore, the hyperactive and seemingly crazy character of a freelance photographer, played by Dennis Hopper, who meets the soldiers in the outpost of Kurtz’s headquarter and lectures them on Kurtz’s greatness and philosophical skills, clearly alludes to the half-crazed Russian in Conrad’s inner station (“The man’s enlarged my mind”; cf. Dirks: 4). Additionally, Kurtz lectures to the captive Willard on a poem by T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”; Eliot clearly stated that he was inspired for this poem by Heart of Darkness (cf. ibid.: 5).
Also some quotes can be identified, for example when Willard finds a note scrawled in red ink across a typewritten page in Kurtz’s compound, saying, “"Drop the Bomb - Exterminate Them All!”, which is clearly a paraphrase of the note of Conrad’s Kurtz which says in regard to civilizing African native inhabitants, “Exterminate all the brutes!” (HoD: 84). Finally, when Willard kills Kurtz with a machete in juxtaposition with a coinciding ritual slaughtering of a water buffalo by the natives to the sound of The Doors’ famous song “The End”, Kurtz dies lying on the floor, whispering the same words as he does in Conrad’s novel: “The horror. The horror.” HoD: 118; these words
87 are echoed repeatedly during the fade-out of the film when we see Willard and another soldier sailing away and fading into black.
The Song: Grave Digger, “Heart of Darkness” Considering Werner Wolf’s statement that “’[i]ntermedial is […] a flexible adjective that can be applied, in a broad sense, to any phenomenon involving more than one medium” (qtd. Huber 2007: 4), the problem is to specify its meaning, particularly in the following case of intermediality. Whereas the term ‘transmediality’ is obviously most commonly seen as a paraphrase of the term ‘adaptation’ (cf. Huber 2007: 6), we now encounter a slightly more difficult problem of terminology. Huber refers to a special case of intermediality, namely audiobooks, when he talks about transmediality; he uses the term among other approaches, such as questions of genre, and the role of audiobooks in the teaching of literature. He thereby places the term ‘adaptation’ in brackets behind the term ‘transmediality’, thus suggesting that they both mean more or less the same (cf. ibid.). This brings us to the problem of defining the special case of intermediality that is represented by the work to be next discussed.
The lyrics of the Grave Digger song are only influenced by Heart of Darkness and are not truly based on it, because one cannot – or at least it would prove very difficult to do so – put a whole novel into music word by word. So using Huber’s terminology, this is not an adaptation of lyrics like as in the case of Tennyson’s poem put into music by Loreena McKennitt, nor is it a poetical refashioning of its source text, like the “Ancient Mariner” case discussed. Nevertheless, literary (and other) critics use the term ‘adaptation’ when it comes to turning a novel into film, as is also the case with Heart of Darkness , which was turned into a film by Francis Ford Coppola as Apocalypse Now . So what is an adaptation and thus, a case of transmediality, and what is not? This question gets also much more complicated when it becomes clear that the song takes up not only the novel’s title, but also many motifs and symbols from it; yet it undoubtedly refers to the film to a large extent, more so than the novel. So, apparently we have the special case of a literary source text being put into a film, then the film influencing the setting and style of a song, which is at the same time going back to the source text to a certain degree; this could be labelled ‘double transmediality’, but if one equals ‘transmediality’ and ‘adaptation’, it becomes an
88 insufficient term, because this would mean that the adaptive movement only goes in one direction. In fact it would make more sense to use Evelyne Keitel’s explanation of “the intricate processes of exchange and dialogue […] between the poem and the TV […]” (qtd. Huber 2007: 7); even though she uses it as a kind of definition when analysing a poem by Poe and its adaptation in the TV series “The Simpsons”, it fits our needs here to a certain degree: While the setting of the novel is in the early twentieth century, the Age of Imperialism, the film transports its motifs and symbols into the American involvement in the Vietnam War (1959-1975). The song lyrics take up the Vietnam setting, but also try to bring in original elements from Conrad’s story, thus creating a kind of a dialogue between the book and the film and vice versa. In a way it may even serve the (didactic) purpose of preserving (the reception of) a literary classic for people who only know the film. Whereas some authors like Nicholas Negroponte in his work Being Digital (1995; cf. Punzi 2007: 12) fear near extinction of the book in its material existence and thus, literature itself, Maddalena Pennacchia Punzi regards intermediality as the guarantee of survival for the book: “Or is it rather the logic of intermediality – a logic that not only calls for the passage from one medium to another but also refers to the constant exchange between old and new media – that guarantees, specifically, the survival of the book?” (Punzi 2007: 12) Punzi’s arguments are that the book is in fact the “most traditional ‘literary’ medium”, but in fact it has today become “only one of the many possible information- storage devices” (ibid.). So the logic is that intermediality may serve as a medium of exchange and didactic turnaround to the original medium, and so finally it helps in the survival of the latter. Of course this inevitably leads to the discussion of what is ‘literature’ or ‘literary’ in modern definition; but Punzi cleverly argues that this point “has been the theoretical problem of the XXth century” anyway (ibid.: 10), passing the ball of this never-ending discussion on to all the literary critics in the world who are unable to agree on a common definition anyway.
4.4.1. From Heavy Metal to the Teutonic Metal of Grave Digger Heavy Metal band Grave Digger was founded in the early 1980s in Germany by singer Chris Boltendahl (by now the only founding member in the band), and is deeply rooted in the tradition of what in the metal scene is labelled Teutonic Metal, a sub group of the genre of True Metal, which is also often referred to as Power Metal
89 (cf. http://www.grave-digger-clan.com and http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_Digger). The origins of Power Metal cannot be traced back to one single group of artists; several influences of both, British (like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin) and American (Rush) bands contributed to this style of Heavy Metal. It is characterized by its move away from the blues and improvisation scheme of 1970s rock bands like Led Zeppelin, instead adapting European classical ideals for their music. As the author of a website called “History of Heavy Metal Music and the Metal Subculture” puts it, “[t]hese musicians used classical theory to give narrative context to themes which in the popular music style repeat through cycling short complementary phrases or riffs which center motives" (www.anus.com). This movement became known under the acronym NWOBHM, meaning New Wave of British Heavy Metal, underlining the modern approach as well as the focus on Europe, espousing “structure over improvisation” (ibid.). Its main protagonists were today’s still highly popular bands Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. The purpose of this newly developed genre was to mix a kind of back-to-basics ballad style with the epic power of Heavy Metal, thus creating a style that was “bold and far-reaching but accessible, both to fans and to those who would like to pick up their own instruments and emulate it” (ibid.).
Teutonic Metal bands simplified even these basics and, through their German heritage, included Wagner-like pathetic motives and structures, enforcing their apparently inherent sense of vast epic, triumphal and glorious undertone in the music. Hence, it is important to note that the simple structure of the Grave Digger song, its monotonous rhythmic quality, the seemingly primitive choice of words, and the aesthetically unsophisticated changes between the parts of the song, do not show a lack of musical skill and song writing but are merely stylistic elements which have already been discussed and which will later be referred to in the closer analysis of the song. The album of the same title as the analyzed song, Heart of Darkness , was the band’s seventh album, but it was the first to enter the German album charts (at position 73 in 1995), which is a great success for a German underground Metal band; all of the following albums charted, the biggest success being 1999’s Excalibur, which came very close to the best-selling top twenty (cf. http://www.musicline.de).
90 4.4.2. Structure of the Song In the booklet to Grave Digger’s full-length album with the title Heart of Darkness (cf. Grave Digger 1995) we are given not only the song lyrics but also some structural hints blended into the background behind the lyrics. In the case of “Heart of Darkness”, they tell us of the different parts of the song and are labeled as follows: “Intro” 1 and 2, “Heavy Lyrics” 1, “Bridge”, “Heavy Lyrics” 2, “Refr.” (= chorus), “G Part 1”, “G Part 2 (spoken words)” and “Heavy Lyrics 3”. This is more or less the structure of the song, yet some parts are repeated and some not, so the true structure of this nearly twelve-minute epic is shown in the following graphics:
4.4.3. Close Analysis of Music and Lyrics
4.4.3.1. Intro The music of the song opens with a strange sound that is obviously modelled through a so-called flanger effect. This type of tone and sound modulation became popular in the psychedelic era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, its effect on the listener being to create an alienated sound far off the norm, a literal ‘diving into another sound world’. The effect works in the following way: Flanging is created by mixing a signal with a slightly delayed copy of itself, where the length of the delay is constantly changing. This isn't difficult to produce with standard audio equipment, and it is believed that flanging was actually "discovered" by accident. Legend says it originated while the Beatles were producing an album. A tape machine was being used for a delay [a diminishing echo effect] and someone touched the rim of a tape reel, changing the pitch. With some more tinkering and mixing of signals, that characteristic flanging sound was created. The rim of the reel is also known as the 'flange', hence the name 'flanging'. (Lehman)
91 A less technical but useful definition for to imagining the sound of a signal sent through the flanger effect would be to describe it as a “‘whooshing’ sound similar to a jet plane flying overhead” (ibid.). This flanging signal is then sent through another modern effect, a tremolo effect. It has little in common with the classical aesthetics of for example a violin tremolo or vibrato, but instead works with different volumes of a signal. In this case, the tremolo effect is very intense, pushing the signal rapidly from zero volume to 100% volume. (This effect has already been discussed in 3.5.1.3.; here it works automatically instead of manually, and at a far faster rate.) In addition to all these modulations of the signal, it is also panned from left to right repeatedly, which creates the illusion of movement.
One may argue that this technical observation has little to do with a scholarly paper concentrating on the lyrics of a song. But this information is provided because this complicated signal modulation seems to appear to create an important effect and entry into the song: it reminds the listener of a helicopter flying through the air, which makes it undeniably clear from the beginning that the ‘story’ and mood of the song are based on the movie rather than on the novel of Heart of Darkness , because in Conrad’s time there where no helicopters whereas during the Vietnam war they played an immensely important role. An additional sound sample, however, is mixed into the helicopter sound just before the start of the music, which might allude to both, movie and novel, and which is the sound of a wave breaking on the shore, hinting at the powerful symbol of the river in the two stories. Moreover, this over-emphasis on an authentic creation of sounds instead of merely taking pre-recorded sound samples seems to go along with Coppola’s obsession with creating the highest level of authenticity possible, which is shown in his filming the actual, and not only fake, slaughtering of a water buffalo, or the (supposed) use of real dead bodies hanging from the trees (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now and Sellers 2009).
The actual music starts with eight bars of a creepy and gloomy arpeggiated guitar line accompanied by the constant beating of quavers in a rather slow tempo on the ride cymbal. This sets the haunting and uneasy mood of the song right at the beginning and corresponds well with the illusion of the helicopter flying soldiers to
92 war; moreover, it corresponds to the hypnotic state of soldiers who are only executing their commands without having a mind of their own:
These four bars are repeated several times and serve as accompaniment to a morbid choir of several male voices and one female voice, singing only the vowel ‘oh’ in a slightly out of rhythm line, assuring the haunting, nearly gothic atmosphere of the tune. It may be a marginal observation, but in this part and later in another choir part, we find the only evidence of female involvement in the whole song, which, however, is not surprising at all: whereas Conrad included women in his story only to state that they should be left out of it all, Coppola only shows them as playboy bunnies for the soldiers’ amusement, and Grave Digger only add one female voice in order to broaden the vocal range of the choir, thus degrading women to sheer objects for the desired effects. Robert Walser has proven that the subculture of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal has typical fixed stereotypes of gender behaviour, where men (not always and only, but usually) are powerful, masculine heroes who set out to conserve the innocent and calm world their female objects of desire inhabit; his essays in “Forging Masculinity: Heavy Metal Sounds and Images of Gender” (cf. Walser 1993: 108-136) deal with several musico-sociological issues from ‘No Girls Allowed’ through ‘Romance’ to ‘Real Men Don’t Wear Makeup’; this is in close connection to the nearly complete absence of women in the music of the song. Whereas one may be driven to believe that the main vocals will now set in with powerful presence, as in the Wagnerian tradition, they actually come as quite a surprise: they are fragile, unsure, nearly frightened, yet they perfectly suit the lyrics, which talk about good and bad, and madness in everyone’s brain. A rather uncommon use of the delay or echo effect again contributes to the dream-like, or better nightmare-like, and unreal atmosphere, mimicking a nagging voice inside the listener’s mind:
In every man there's good and bad Madness lurks in every brain Do you know what's deep in your head Are you a genius or insane
93 Sometimes the other side breaks through the wall Sometimes the borders deep in you just fall
General's gone mad in Vietnam Became a god a lonely one Once a soldier of great fame he was Now killing seems all the same in wars Sometimes the other side breaks through the wall
It is also interesting to notice the ambivalence effect created in the lyrics: on the one hand, one might argue that the lyrics are not well placed according to orthodox traditions teaching that the music ought to correspond to the words, phrases and moods of the lyrics. On the other hand, however, the effect of setting the phrases “Sometimes the other side breaks through the wall. Sometimes the borders deep in you just fall” to the most ‘normal’ and beautiful chords in the whole song is an intentional inversion of the common rules, undermining them and underlining the ambivalence not only of the song lyrics and the war but also of the whole world, recalling the powerful motif of the illusion of society, values and norms: what happens if these are not imposed on a group of individuals anymore? In these opening lyrics, the band manages to combine the novel and the film, and create a link between them that cannot be separated throughout the rest of the lyrics. They cleverly include Conrad’s themes and motifs – madness, the absurdity of evil, and the conflict of inner self and outside world – into the film’s storyline of the war in Vietnam; on the one hand, we are introduced to the psychological analysis of the human mind and society, which Conrad tried to explore, and on the other hand, this interior conflict is juxtaposed to the physical threats of the war.
4.4.3.2. The Concept of “Madness” Additionally, the band also in a masterly way links these themes to a grand stereotype concept in Heavy Metal which is almost omnipresent in any form and kind and which may be the reason why the band chose to make a song based on this novel/film: the concept of ‘madness’. Mysticism, horror, and violence have been central to Heavy Metal music ever since its beginnings. In accordance to the famous Roman rhetorician Quintilian, who told an allegory about a musician playing in the wrong mode during a sacrificial ceremony, thus causing the priest to go mad and jump over a cliff, Heavy Metal musicians have been accused of constantly playing in such wrong modes and tunes, 94 “causing madness and death” (Walser 1993: 137). This has largely been connected to the drug (ab)use of many Hard Rock and Heavy Metal bands. In terms of rock criticism, this hypothesis can easily be refuted when looking at the now canonical musical tradition of nineteenth-century romanticism, when artistic genius and drug taking were frequently believed to belong together: “[T]he viewpoint prevailed that genius and madness are inseparable” (Walser 1993: 140). Moreover, Walser does not see any difference between the concepts of masculinity, power, and violence in Heavy Metal on the one side and such same concepts in modern American society on the other side; he brings up the American fascination of war rhetoric and the glorification of aggressive capitalism, football games and Monster Truck races as examples (cf. ibid.). No-one is able to connect Heavy Metal directly to crime, suicide or satanism; the concept of madness, however, has become an inherent stereotype in Heavy Metal music. In fact, it ironically serves as the highly ambiguous statement to the critics, making fun of those outsiders who are ignorant of the complexity and sophistication of Heavy Metal (occult) symbolism and lyrics, taking them much too seriously (cf. ibid.: 151f.). An example of this would be the mystical and philosophical Iron Maiden’s hit song “The Number of the Beast”, whose lyrics critics often quote as demonizing and devaluing the music:
The ritual has begun, Satan’s work is done 666, the number of the beast Sacrifice is going on tonight
But the immediately following and less frequently quoted lines are much more revealing and complicate the simple statement above:
This can’t go on, I must inform the law Can this still be real, or some crazy dream? But I feel drawn towards the evil chanting hordes
So the superficial interpretation of these lyrics as celebrating satanic rituals is enriched with the presentation of a philosophical dilemma, exploring the tensions between dream and reality, power and its evil corruption (cf. Walser 1993: 152), much like in Heart of Darkness .
A revealing statement concerning the over-interpretation and literal- mindedness of occult symbolism is made by King Diamond, Danish singer of Merciful Fate and “heavy metal’s most infamous ‘Satanist’ […]: ‘Satan, for me, is not like the 95 guy with two horns and a long tail. I don’t believe in hell as being a place where you burn for eternity. That’s not what Satan is all about. Satan stands for the powers of the unknown, and that’s what I’m writing about.’” (Ibid.: 151) In a way, the concept of madness is very post-modern in its nature of inherent ambivalence and ironic in-depth-sophistication. If one takes a closer look, one can even encounter this ambiguity, for example, in another Iron Maiden song dealing with madness as some sort of a trope for thinking unconventionally, which is revealingly called “Can I play with Madness?” (cf. ibid.: 155). It seems as if the ‘mad musicians’ in Heavy Metal have taken over the function of the fool figure in literature, which always mirrors society because, as medical historian Roy Porter has observed in his studies of truly mad people, “[t]he mad highlight the hypocrisies, double standards and sheer callous obliviousness of sane society. The writings of the mad challenge the discourse of the normal, challenge its right to be the objective mouthpiece of the times.” (Qtd. Walser 1993: 155)
4.4.3.3. “Heavy Lyrics” After the Introduction the whole band in its complete Heavy Metal instrumentation sets in thunderously in a faster tempo; drums, bass and distorted guitar now construct (to use Josefs’ diction, again) “a full-on headbanging heavy metal tune” (Josefs 1996: 21), only this time they are much more powerful and straight to the face than in the Iron Maiden song. The (power)chords, however, are the same as in “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, they are simply reversed, from Em to D and C:
Nevertheless, these are standard Heavy Metal chords, so after the haunting and hypnotic Intro the band dives straight into its masculine territory of Power Metal, as do the lyrics:
You do your duty, just don't ask why Kill him with a cold heart, he's damned to die The river leads you all the way, you never stop You fight to live another day, can't ever stop
96 The first two lines are clearly taken from the film because the soldier without a free will, Willard, is on a clear mission in order to liquidate Kurtz; the voice speaking is no subconscious super-ego but the instructions that Willard gets from his superiors, who actually demand an effective killing in cold blood (the original command by the CIA operative is “Terminate with extreme prejudice”; cf. Dirks). The next two lines again cleverly link film and novel together because the river leading to Kurtz is powerfully present in both stories, and the everyday fight (for survival or sanity) is also picked out as a central theme in both. An interesting observation can be made when listening to the voice of the singer. He has now completely stripped off the unsure and fragile qualities of his speech singing in the Intro section and tops the band’s Heavy Metal power with a mighty voice; even though the singing line is rather high for a male voice, he manages to obtain a rough and fully masculine performance. On the one hand, this perfectly evokes the image of a military superior issuing his commands without opposition in the listener’s mind, yet on the other hand, this is also a clear reference to the stereotypes that Robert Walser identifies in Heavy Metal: power, gender and masculinity (cf. 4.4.3.1.). Again, we encounter the band’s clever ability of linking things together and use them for their own purpose of a powerful new whole.
4.4.3.4. “Bridge” According to Josefs’ definition, a bridge generally occurs only once in a song, and it is usually placed after the chorus (cf. Josefs 1996: 10); what we have here labelled as a “Bridge” is clearly a pre-chorus which normally paves the way, both musically and literally, for the following chorus (cf. ibid.: 10-13). This goes along with the changing of the chords in this section, which rise a fifth higher from E and change equally between the dominant, B, and the sixth, C. Additionally, the section ends with a rise from C to D, clearly leading to an upcoming chorus, which, however, does not yet appear; instead, we are taken back to the “Heavy Lyrics” section as the second verse. It may be for dramatical reasons that the chorus does not follow suit: we are kept under the tension of having to listen to the story going on.
We're fighting for freedom We're fighting for peace We're serving our country We're fighting for god
97 The lyrics then change the narrative perspective; they shift from the commanding superior to the obeying inferior soldier. A clever move is the use of the plural ‘we’, yet the voice is that of the singer alone; this paves the way for the chorus in which we now expect a mighty choir of several voices, yet without weakening it by the use of more than one voice before its first appearance. Furthermore the use of the informal clipping “We’re” shows the lower status of the speaking soldiers in the military hierarchy. This part undoubtedly refers to the film only because in Conrad’s novel we never find a hint of fighting for freedom or God; this is a clear reference to the American sense of mission to bring peace, freedom and democracy to the world in the name of God. Even more so, as the singer, who until now has stuck to a more British English with a German accent in his pronunciation, here uses the much softer American pronunciation. Strikingly, these pathetic phrases may also be in analogy to Coppola, who, in contrast to Conrad, chose his Kurtz to be an overweight massive figure representing the bloated American war machine: dominant, perverted and ideologically manipulated (cf. Galloway 1996).
4.4.3.5. “Heavy Lyrics” 2 As already mentioned, we are taken back to the musical form of the verse after the first occurrence of the pre-chorus.
You feel the madness, the jungle breeds It all seems useless, heroic deeds You understand the general more and more, you lose control Madness creeps into your deepest core, and in your soul
Again we encounter the concept of madness, and in a way it can be seen as an ironic twist at this point: after the patriotic and pathetic announcement of the noble motives of the soldiers in the pre-chorus, we are now taken back to the jungle and its breeding madness instead of to the culminating heroic battle expected to come in the chorus, thus revealing those moral and heroic ideas as resulting in madness, too. This is in very close connection to the highlighting of hypocrisies and double standards that Conrad had in mind, and it also links the song, the film and the novel together in the fact that Willard/ Marlow becomes fascinated and even obsessed with Kurtz, which comes out clearly in both, the film and the novel.
98 4.4.3.6. ‘Refrain’ After an exact repetition of the “Bridge” pre-chorus we are finally taken into the highlight of the song, the twice played chorus. As expected by Heavy Metal stereotypes, the tone of the lyrics, and the clever building of suspense, the chorus erupts in a Wagnerian pathetic line with several voices singing:
In the heart of darkness I see the fire in the eastern sky In the heart of darkness Soldiers fighting for a lie
Actually, it is only the phrase “In the heart of darkness” that is sung by the many voices. It is juxtaposed to the singular “I see” in line two and the observing statement in line four, making two ways of interpretation possible: The several voices can possibly be seen as resembling the authoritative function of a traditional chorus in Greek drama, where the chorus sums up events and emotions of the story up to that point and comments on them in a general way. It may, however, as well be another reference to the American involvement in the Vietnam War, because the “fire in the eastern sky” triggers off images of US napalm bombings in the South-East-Asian country, and the cliché of manipulated soldiers fighting for ends which are not clear to them is also a popular one in connection to this war; moreover, the fact that only male voices are singing the phrase – eventually they all sing the same single notes – support the latter view of soldiers chanting in war. And again, we can observe how well Grave Digger manage to link together all these issues with the common stereotypes and symbolism in Heavy Metal: The “fire” bombing can, on the one hand, again be linked to the concept of madness, being a perverse caricature of the Western image of ‘bringing the light of civilization’ to the savages; on the other hand, the opposing images of fire and darkness are nearly commonplace symbolism in especially Power and Teutonic Metal.
4.4.3.7. “G Part 1” and “G Part 2” Musically, “G Part 1” uses the harmonic elements on the dominant B as does the “Bridge” pre-chorus, but the rhythm section varies with semiquaver grooves in different accentuations, creating a confusing and out-of-sorts feeling, an atmosphere of being torn between two sides, which is perfectly underlined in the lyrics:
99 Man, you're crazy, believe me, you're not god Who's to say so, ain't we, all the same Man, you slaughter, it's useless, what's your game All is useless, war games, it seems insane
This is a typical call and response theme, which shows Heavy Metal’s blues heritage (cf. Walser 1993: 57f.) from Southern US plantation work songs, when the black lead singers would sing a line that was responded to by the rest of the slaves; again, this may be a small hint of criticism of the hypocrisies of (American) imperialist policies. The “G” in “G Part 1” obviously means that the General (Kurtz) is now talking to Willard/Marlow. Lines one and three, which represent Willard’s/Marlow’s point of view, are screamed at an unnaturally high pitch, expressing fear and desperation; the speaker wants to hint at the madness and amoral injustice that Kurtz is accused of. The General’s voice in lines two and four is a spoken voice. It is denaturalized by some vocal effects, making it sound menacing and pervasive, which is one of the qualities of Kurtz and which is why he could set himself up as a god to his men: although he is corrupted by power and amorality, he nonetheless is a learned and highly decorated man whose eloquence obscures the horror of his actions; he highlights the hypocrisies, double standards and absurdities of society by asking the central question of Conrad’s novel, namely that of who is mad in an already mad world, thereby arguing that insanity only depends on the context.
The music then moves via a short instrumental interlude back to the haunting and hypnotic chord progression of the Intro, only this time the drummer does not accompany the band with quavers on the cymbals but with a marching beat on the snare drum, thus enforcing the military character of the speaker of “G Part 2”:
I observed a snail creeping on the edge of a razor blade That's my dream, that is my nightmare To creep on the edge of the razor blade and survive
This monologue passage is not from Conrad’s novel but from Coppola’s film adaptation. Kurtz can doubtlessly be identified as the speaker here, and the lead singer recites these spoken words again through some vocal enhancement effects, making him sound like talking on air on the radio. Even though the band merged Conrad’s themes and motives with the film’s storyline, they deliberately mix up the film’s chronology of events here because Kurtz delivers this speech in a tape
100 recording that is played to Willard at the beginning of the film; Kurtz’s original words are these: I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream, it's my nightmare. Crawling, slipping along the edge of a straight razor and surviving....But we must kill them, we must incinerate them, pig after pig, cow after cow, village after village, army after army, and they call me an assassin. What do you call it when the assassins accuse the assassin? They lie. They lie and we have to be merciful for those who lie, for those nabobs. I hate them. I do hate them. (Dirks: 1)
Grave Digger are clever enough to thankfully accept the powerful metaphoric image of the snail crawling on the edge of the razor blade given by Kurtz, and leave it without comment; this creates room for interpretations and food for thought for the listener of what exactly Kurtz could mean here. When looking at Kurtz’s original speech, however, his intention is made clear by the question of the moral integrity of the assassins accusing the assassin, pushing the philosophical quality of the discussion in a certain direction; in contrast to that, the band lets the image stand alone without comment and is clearly non-didactic here, which is in analogy to Walser’s findings, in which he shows that Heavy Metal fans not only oppose outsiders taking their symbols and stereotypes too literally, but also to insider bands who try to act too didactically, leaving no space for different views on the same subject (cf. Walser 1993: 145-151).
4.4.3.8. Orchestral Middle Part To do Conrad justice, it has to be stated that although the metaphor of the snail does not appear in the novel, it is in close connection to its central themes of power, madness, absurdity and corruption. The sharp edge of the razor blade represents the thin border between sanity and madness humans inhabit during their lifetimes. If we are cut open by the razor blade, we are, like Kurtz, afraid of going back to civilization as an already marked ‘uncivilized’ individual afterwards (cf. http://www.collegetermpapers.com). Kurtz has no other choice but to stay in his constructed world where he is the savage god; any return to civilization would destroy him, and this is why he dies in the film through Willard’s hands because he wants to, and in the novel on the steamboat on the journey down the river. In both cases he dies with the famous words, “The horror! The horror!”, yet he has already arranged himself with that horror, as is shown in Marlon Brando’s famous monologue, where Kurtz states: “It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend
101 of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.” (Qtd. Dirks: 5) In analogy to that, the Intro part, now continued instrumentally, features battle noises like the shooting of machine guns and the rotary blades of military choppers in the background, while again the most ‘normal’ and beautiful chords in the whole song are played (cf. 4.4.3.1.), also musically depicting the small border between civilization and savagery. As a reference to the powerful film music, where, for example, during an aerial attack “Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries (from Die Walküre ) [is] blasting over the helicopter-mounted loudspeakers to scare the enemy” (Dirks: 2), a Wagnerian female voice opens the orchestral middle part, for which the vocal lines for the choir are introduced by an acoustic guitar:
The lowest string of the acoustic guitar is tuned down one whole step in order to make the very low D the root for the new key, d minor. Although we do not find a very sophisticated modulation from e minor to d minor, the effect is marked, since, on the one hand the music is becalmed by this rather beautiful melody, on the other hand, the transposition one step lower has a darkening and somber effect on the listener. The acoustic guitar anticipates the major theme of the following powerful choir that sings more or less the same lines as in the guitar melody on the dark vowel ‘ah’; the band accompanies the choir like a Wagnerian orchestra with powerful guitar chords and mighty drum and cymbal sounds. What we here experience is clearly a requiem in the classical sense: a falling melody in a soft minor key, lamenting the loss of the deceased in bars one and two, carefully and optimistically rising in bar three as to revalue the deceased, but never going as high as the beginning note of the phrase and also slightly suppressed at the end of bar four. The fact that the greater part of the song is in e minor is due to the fact of the standard tuning of the electric guitar in Heavy Metal with E as its lowest note, yet a classical requiem always is in d minor; Grave Digger – or at least the arranger and conductor of the choir, who is mentioned explicitly in the liner notes of the album (cf. Grave Digger 1995) – know this and make clever use of this
102 psychological effect of the d minor key, although they keep melody, harmony and structure very easy according to the ‘rules’ and stereotypes of their Power/Teutonic Metal clientele.
4.4.3.9. Guitar Solo A guitar solo has become somewhat mandatory in a Heavy Metal song. Since the electrically distorted guitar is capable of nearly indefinite sustain and compression, it is the perfect tool for incorporating and presenting the Hard Rock and Heavy Metal inherent symbols of power, masculinity and wild lifestyle (cf. Walser 1993: 41-44). After the down-to-earth blues-inspired pentatonic solos of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, a new style of guitar playing that looked back to the virtuoso works of composers of what today is known as ‘classical music’ emerged; on the one hand, this is due to the inclusion of more elaborate and interesting sounds in rock music but, on the other hand, it can also be seen as a strife for acceptance in the academic musical critics’ community, mainly for reasons of prestige (cf. Walser 1993: 58-63). In analogy to this, Grave Digger guitarist Uwe Lulis starts his solo part with a slightly classical sounding d minor chord arpeggio, paying reference to the orchestral conception of the middle part. As the solo continues, he weaves in more and more elements from traditional blues and pentatonic licks, thus pushing the song back to its initial Heavy Metal conception. It is remarkable that he does so without altering the underlying groove and harmonies of the rhythm section; he even manages to anticipate the transposing move back to e minor without making it sound too harsh. All in all, the guitar solo is a clever statement and instrumental link between the two worlds of academic classical virtuosity and down-to-earth emotional playing. In addition, this balancing playing between two musical worlds may be a reference to the image of the snail on the razor blade and its meaning, again ironically inducing the concept of madness. Ever since the emergence of rock music, critics have tended to evaluate and interpret this heart-felt intuitive music by means of intellectual sophistication, which of course can never be able to show the true emotive intentions of this kind of music and which can only result in judging the inherent symbolism and stereotypes like high volume, deafening drums and screaming vocals as some kind of madness; on the other hand, rock musicians tend to be suspicious of so much consideration in music rather than feeling, rejecting a too academic approach to their playing (cf. ibid.: 20- 41). This juxtaposition oddly mirrors the highly developed civilizations of British
103 Victorian society ( Heart of Darkness ) and American modern society ( Apocalypse Now ) (depicted by the classical influences) imposing their moral, intellectual and social standards on the less developed, more savage societies in Africa/South East Asia (represented by the ‘dirty brown’ blues playing style). In the guitar solo, the classical influences are played with a little tongue-in-cheek smile because they do not really fit in a Heavy Metal song (like British/American Imperialists and their values do not fit into African/Vietnamese settings and societies); the guitar player stresses the powerful and slightly out of tune blues notes much more and really delights in playing them with all his heart and emotions, thus in a way ridiculing the sophisticated academics and passing the question of madness back to them: in the context of the savage jungle, Western values seem at least as mad and out of place.
4.4.3.10. “Heavy Lyrics 3” Via a short interlude, the last part of the guitar solo changes the key back to e minor and the singer immediately joins the band in verse three:
You did your duty, the general is dead But you paid a high price, your mind's gone mad Somehow the general had his way, a point of no return The memories haunt you night and day, in your soul the burn.
These lyrics clearly allude to the film because in the novel Marlow does not kill Kurtz; he dies because of a sickness. “You did your duty” is double-referential: on the one hand, Willard has obeyed his superiors and finally killed Kurtz, as was his military duty. On the other hand, however, he could only kill Kurtz because Kurtz wanted to be killed, so it was also Willard’s duty according to Kurtz to kill him, because, as already mentioned, Kurtz could not go back into civilization anymore; even if Willard had not wanted to kill Kurtz, he would have had to kill him. In fact, Willard’s mind has not literally gone mad, but ever since he developed a fascination for Kurtz, he has become more and more like him in both novel and film. What the lyrics writer might have had in mind when talking about Willard’s madness is the constant struggle in his mind that the confrontation with Kurtz had brought about; Kurtz’s original words to Willard are: “I've seen the horrors, horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me - you have a right to do that - but you have no right to judge me” (qtd. Dirks: 5). This statement goes along with his initial statement of the assassins judging the assassin,
104 and it makes Willard really mad and helpless in his mind that he has to belong to either side of these assassins; the choice between two evils … Grave Digger manage to perfectly link together all the themes and motives from the film and the novel in this final stanza: hypocrisies and double standards of society, madness, the absurdity of evil, psychological insights conflicting with the outside world … They are even capable of linking them to inherent stereotypes of their Power/Teutonic Metal style with standard Heavy Metal symbolic words and cliché expressions like ‘dead’, ‘mad’, ‘point of no return’, ‘haunt’, ‘night and day’ and ‘burn’, thus fulfilling their listeners’ expectations at the end of this long song after the unusual classical-like middle part. Furthermore and interestingly enough, they have even created an open end in a way linked to the figure of the ever-wandering Ancient Mariner, who has to tell his story as penance for his deeds to all who he compels to listen.
Finally, the chorus is repeated four times, and in the last repetition the last line is altered to “Soldiers dying for a lie”, a lyrical echo of the final chords. Interestingly, the song does not end on an indefinable fade out as does Coppola’s film, but on a musical ritardando over the last line, ending with the word “lie” on the final chord, which then diminishes in a guitar feedback. Maybe this is concession to songwriting and arrangement conventions because after nearly twelve minutes, the listener would be too unsatisfied with a long fade out, so the band defines a clear final chord and lets only the distorted guitar fade out.
4.5. Summary Grave Digger’s version of Heart of Darkness is very similar in terms of epic song writing and arrangement to Iron Maiden’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Although Iron Maiden start with the heavy music right away whereas Grave Digger try to create a haunting atmosphere by a slow and soft Intro, the techniques of keeping up the suspense in the listeners’ minds throughout the more than ten minutes of each song are more or less following the same conventions: the mixture of Heavy Metal parts alternating with purely instrumental passages, quotes from the original literary or film works and interesting orchestral or film-music-like passages, all of which create a specific atmosphere and suspense to keep the listeners active. Grave Digger, however, have never enjoyed the popularity of Iron Maiden, not even by half; the band is never playing headliner shows of epic length and dimension
105 in front of hundred-thousands of people, as do Iron Maiden, but very often they play in smaller clubs or even as a support for more popular bands. As a consequence, the time on stage is not so long, and since the band has been existing for nearly thirty years now, they have many songs and ‘hits’ their fans want to hear, so a very long song like “Heart of Darkness” is only played at special occasions. Nevertheless, the album of the same title was their first entry into better-selling charts dimensions, so the song enjoys popularity among the band’s fans as more or less a cult song rather than a live hit. And even though Power/Teutonic Metal bands like Grave Digger – especially those with a background from outside English-speaking countries – are considered as simple, easy-minded, pompous noisemakers under Wagnerian influence, Grave Digger prove these critics wrong when taking a closer look at their music and lyrics. “Heart of Darkness” is a carefully researched, outlined and executed psychological study playing with themes and motives from Conrad’s novel as well as Coppola’s film, Heavy Metal symbols, stereotypes and conventions, thereby never acting too didactically, leaving enough room for interpretation to interested listeners; although not overloaded with intellectual arrangement and composition techniques, they manage to include some more sophisticated elements and symbols into their intuitive back-to-basics style, keeping the listener active throughout nearly twelve minutes of music. Also many of their other songs with typical Heavy Metal titles like “The Grave Dancer”, “Demon’s Day” or “Warchild”, which are all featured on the album Heart of Darkness , are not merely standard stereotype Heavy Metal songs but reveal references to William Blake’s “A Poison Tree” in the first, another treatment of the hypocritical nature of madness in the second, and approaches to a psychological and pedagogical analysis of the recruitment of fanatic children soldiers in war countries in the third example.
5. Conclusion All in all, the discussion of three literary works of different times and societies set to music in different musical styles and approaches has revealed a multitude of interpretative findings: Loreena McKennitt manages to craft a beautiful song in a mythical and medieval-like Tennysonian quality to lyrics of the same style, thereby revealing,
106 supporting, contradicting, and enhancing the poem with her interpretation and enriching “The Lady of Shalott” with new musical qualities. Iron Maiden in their epic song, on the other hand, have chosen to concentrate only on specific elements of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, thus including the carefully chosen elements into their own myth-inspired style of playing Heavy Metal. Yet, the band avoids forging a Heavy Metal stereotype horror story of ‘the nightmares of the sea’, instead adapting central elements of Coleridge’s lengthy poem for their own clientele of listeners and supporters, who to a large extent are regarded as marked outsider figures in contemporary society, providing them with a philosophical basis to their non-standard subcultural lifestyles. Finally, Grave Digger make use of inherent Heavy Metal stereotypes and present them in a postmodern ironic quality against the background of Joseph Conrad’s modern classic Heart of Darkness and of its film version Apocalypse Now . They dig deeply into the human psyche, providing their listeners with the themes and motifs of Conrad’s novel in a refreshingly non-didactic manner and leaving space for everyone’s own thoughts of interpretation of the subject matter.
So, according to these findings, the central research question asked by this thesis, namely “Does the music tell us more than the mere texts alone?”, may be answered in the affirmative, with caution, because when closely looking at songs we always have to be aware of the target audiences for the different musical interpretations: whereas literary or music critics may come up with totally different findings, we have to make clear that the songs were not written for the critics but for the artists themselves and their clienteles of listeners. In all three cases, the songwriters seem to be clearly aware of the sociological, philosophical and psychological conditions of their audiences, thereby constructing their musical versions of the literary works according to conventions and stereotypes of their musical worlds, and by doing so, they are able to present these literary originals to their listeners in their very own languages, symbols, etc. Concluding with a repetition of Punzi’s quote concerning the survival of traditional literature , “[o]r is it rather the logic of intermediality – a logic that not only calls for the passage from one medium to another but also refers to the constant exchange between old and new media – that guarantees, specifically, the survival of the book?” (Punzi 2007: 12), there is a powerful statement for the importance of intermedial transpositions of traditional literature on an internet discussion forum of
107 the academic website Pop Culture Interpretations of Romantic Literature, a Romantic Circles Scholarly Resource : “[…] Iron Maiden are the reason I got into Romantic poetry at all. After seeing the song live for the first time, and then listening to it on the album Powerslave , I went and got the actual poem, and from then on, I’ve been a die-hard Romantic […] The Rime is responsible for my getting into British Literature in general.” (Qtd. Isenberg 2007: 196)
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