January 12, 2024
The inspiration for this week’s newsletter is a new book by J. Edward Chamberlin, Storylines: How Words Shape Our World. I would recommend this book, or indeed any of Chamberlin’s many books, even if he were a total stranger, yet in fact he is anything but. I have known Ted for something like 40 years, since he was the director of my doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto. His own dissertation director in turn had been none other than Northrop Frye. The connection may seem inevitable, but was actually a lucky accident—extremely lucky for me, because I was desperate. No one was willing to advise a dissertation on Dylan Thomas, a quite unfashionable figure, and, when I had finally found one, Colin Chase, he tragically died when I was only halfway through. Despite the Frye connection, and despite his many accomplishments, I had never heard of Ted, but he was kind enough to take me on—not only kind but kindred, I might say, for I quickly realized that I could not have found anyone with a perspective more congenial to my own.
Ted’s horizons are, however, far larger than mine. He is a true Renaissance man, with knowledge and interests that are remarkably wide ranging. Among his books are Come Back to Me My Language: Poetry in the West Indies (1993), Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations (2006), Island: How Islands Transform the World (2013), and—most closely related to Storylines—If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground (2003). His books are richly informed, enlivened by a sly, probing intellect, sheer pleasure to read, warm, lucid, witty—and entertaining in the best way, for Ted is quite a storyteller himself. One of my special memories in 34 years at Baldwin Wallace University was when we extended a double invitation to Ted and his wife Lorna Goodison, the eminent Jamaican poet. On the first night, Ted delivered the Marting Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities, and on the second night Lorna gave a poetry reading. Ted, who clearly has infinite energy, has also been an activist: a former Senior Research Associate with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, he has worked on native land claims in his native Canada, the United States, Africa, and Australia. If the humanities had been structured to encourage and nurture scholars to become more like Ted, perhaps they would not be backed into their present corner, trying to justify their existence, as discussed in the previous newsletter. When students ask me to recommend a good book to read, I tell them, for reasons that have nothing to do with friendship, anything by J. Edward Chamberlin.
Some say there are no universals, but it is hard to imagine a society without storytelling. In the beginning, there were true stories and imagined or fictional stories. Myths were the true stories, and folktales were the made-up stories told for entertainment. Certain changes in society, facilitated if not caused by the advent of literacy, shifted authority towards the factual and logical, away from the revealed and traditional, so that a word like “myth,” which in Greek is mythos, narrative, came to acquire negative connotations—“That’s just a myth” we say about some common falsehood. Socrates advocated expelling the poets from his ideal state for being liars. New forms of thought arose, such as philosophy and history, whose vehicle was discursive prose, and whose content, to use Northrop Frye’s terms, was thematic rather than fictional. Yet in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it began to be recognized that anything in words is still a narrative, and therefore storytelling—and therefore suspect.
History may gather and interpret evidence according to scientific principles, but when the evidence is cast into narrative form, it is shaped according to principles that are imaginative rather than scientific. Frye’s stock example is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in which the history of Rome is recounted as a tragic drama with Rome as the great but flawed tragic hero. The historiographer Hayden White wrote a book called Metahistory (1973) that classified historians according to the four fundamental forms of narrative laid out in Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism: romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. Historians are at times suspicious of “narrative history” for the same reason that avant-garde filmmakers are suspicious of narrative film. Both are “popularizing.” Narrative wants to please the audience with a good story at the expense of the truth. Philosophy might seem to be in a better position since it deals with ideas rather than events, but arguments too must be cast into a narrative form. Philosophers may try to hide this by making their prose abstract to the point of impenetrable, but the most influential philosophical work of the 19th century, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, is a comedy in which the lowly hero, the unassuming “concept,” evolves through history until it reaches its happy ending and discovers its identity as Absolute Spirit. The school of analytical philosophy in the 20th century, in its attempt to establish the criteria for a true statement, moved further and further from language altogether, developing the quasi-mathematical discipline of symbolic logic.
But in a short excursus (67-74), Chamberlin shows how even mathematics offers no safe haven. It may not be directly storytelling, but mathematics is a language, a set of symbols whose relationship to reality becomes questionable. Types of numbers discovered in the last two centuries, such as irrational and transcendental numbers, do not seem to “correspond” to anything in physical reality but to exist in a purely mathematical realm of their own. In other words, they resemble myths and other products of the imagination, a fact that has greatly disturbed some mathematicians. In a poem called "Description without Place,” Wallace Stevens declared that “It is a world of words to the end of it,” of words or the symbols of some other kind of language such as mathematics. Another way of expressing the same insight is to say that there is no reality that is not a story. Chamberlin puts it this way:
I am often asked by family and friends and politicians and taxi drivers what we do at the university where I taught for much of my working life. “We tell stories,” I always say. Old stories—about the origin of species and the decline and fall of empires, about big bangs and small particles, about justice and freedom, supply and demand, economy and efficiency. And we make up new stories. We call the old ones “teaching.” And the new ones “research.” (37)
Those who dismiss this as the escapism of the academic ivory tower are themselves in the grip of a story that says there are two kinds of people, airy fairy intellectuals with their heads in the clouds and materialists who have their feet planted firmly on the hard ground of the real world. Which, as the physicists will tell them, is largely fields of energy and empty space.
My intellectual awakening came when, at the age of 19, I read Northrop Frye’s study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, and learned about how two stories competed in the late 18th century. One was exemplified by the philosophy of John Locke. It said that there is a given world apart from the mind. The mind did not create that “objective” world: it only perceives it in a passive way. The mind is a tabula rasa or blank slate upon which sense data write. The world is “out there,” independent, indifferent to our feelings and desires. “Maturity” is coming to realize that we are not gods and do not create reality, and have to accept our limitation, along with the fact that reality cares nothing for our wishes. People who do not accept this are narcissistic, and, at the greatest extreme, sociopathic. The other story is that reality is mentally created, though on a level of the mind beneath ordinary consciousness. This does not mean mere wish fulfillment or the power of positive thinking: I cannot “create” an elephant in the front yard by thinking it. This story was called Idealism, and was held by such philosophers as George Berkeley. It was rejected by those hard-headed materialists we were speaking of, such as Samuel Johnson, who kicked a stone and said, “Thus I refute Berkeley,” meaning that the pain in his toe assured him that there was an objective world out there, whose objects stubbornly persist, and resist. But the great version of this story was the Romantic theory of the imagination, and its profoundest expositor was Blake. Thus, two roads diverged when I was young, and I chose the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. To be honest, I only came up with a “motto” for this newsletter because Substack demanded one, but I am satisfied with “The imagination as the home of human life,” which indicates that my allegiance is with Blake. Chamberlin’s premise that we live our life by stories is a version of the same allegiance. When Frye throughout his work says that the basic units of the imagination are myth and metaphor, he means “myth” as mythos, narrative, story, a pattern that moves in time, akin to music. There is another kind of unit, metaphor, a pattern that builds up a spatial structure akin to the visual arts by connecting or identifying two or more images. Stories and images, myths and metaphors in a larger sense, create both self and world, and we are never outside of them.
But of course it is more complicated than that. Chamberlin’s early work was on the poet Wallace Stevens, an inheritor of the Romantic tradition of the imagination, but one whose work polarizes the imagination against a “reality” that resists it. Yet Stevens’s “reality” is not merely a negation of the imagination. Rather, Stevens attempts to see the imagination and reality as what Blake called Contraries, “without which is no progression.” Frye himself seems to have been drawn towards such a view in his later work. In the Preface to Spiritus Mundi, a collection of his essays, one of which is on Stevens, Frye calls Stevens
a useful counterweight to the sometimes exclusive radicalism of the tradition that is embryonic in Milton, fully developed in Blake, and, perhaps, already decadent in Yeats. Traditionally, God is the creator, man is a creature, and man’s creative power is confined to second-hand imitations of nature, which, according to Sir Thomas Browne, is the art of God. For Blake and Yeats, on the other hand, there is nothing creative except what the human imagination produces. Stevens polarizes the imagination against a “reality” which is otherness, what the imagination is not and has to struggle with. Such reality cannot ultimately be the reality of physical nature or of constituted human society, which produce only the “realism” that for Stevens is quite different. It is rather a spiritual reality, an otherness of a creative power not ourselves; and sooner or later all theories of creative imagination have to take account of it. (xii-xiii)
When I read this upon its first publication in 1976, I was spellbound by it, though I did not understand it. When I wrote a brief thank-you letter to Frye for the inscribed copy of Spiritus Mundi that had been procured for me by my father-in-law, I mentioned that passage as especially significant to me, little dreaming that I would soon be his student, then his assistant. I am still trying to understand that passage, and I think Frye was as well: it leads directly towards his two late books on the Bible and literature.
What gives Storylines its vitality is that it does not shy away from the complexities that ensue when we say that “words shape our world.” Yet another of Chamberlin’s enthusiasms has been Oscar Wilde, whose famous essay “The Decay of Lying” wittily insists that literature turns away from the real world: it is a form of lying. Hamlet notwithstanding, it does not hold the mirror up to nature. Art is “for art’s sake” and is not in service of the truth, or reality. This seems deliberately contrarian, just a pretentious way of poking people. Mind you, this is the man who said, “The first duty in life is to strike a pose. There is no second duty.” But Wilde was doing more than striking a pose, though, yes, he was doing that too. We tell stories about things in order to understand—it is how we navigate through life. That makes us needy: we need to believe in the truth of our stories, or we are lost. Of belief, Chamberlin says,
It underpins representation, and it enables storytelling. Whether it came before or after words and images, belief was—and still is—a fragile intellectual and emotional instrument of enormous power. Fragile because it is always accompanied by doubt. And powerful because we want to believe. After all, believing is at the heart of storytelling, and storytelling is at the heart of what we know, and what we need to know, of the material and spiritual world. Which means we need to believe. (6)
Belief is always accompanied by doubt because, even as we tell the stories, a part of us admits with Wilde that they are not true. But it is not either-or: that does not mean that they are false. However, because we need to believe lest we do not know who we are and what the world is, those who are trapped in an either-or mentality (which Blake calls a Negation) become literalists: they insist that the stories they are committed to are true and nothing but true, and if you doubt that, you are a heretic or a godless atheist or a liberal, and you must either recant or be burned. But how can a story be both true and false? How can we believe and not believe at the same time? Is this not just a hopeless relativism in which those not strong-willed enough to insist on the literalist position are trapped?
The very first story Chamberlin tells is about how he was asked to help organize a conclave of Rastafarian elders in Jamaica to reason over theological interpretations. The person asking was Ras Kumi, Bob Marley’s spiritual advisor, who, at the outset, said to him, “Brother Ted, there’s something you should know. There are people here who think the world is round. And people who think the world is flat.” Then he smiled and said, “Same people” (1-2). Now that’s my kind of spiritual advisor, one who would be quite comfortable with the exuberant outrageousness of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Chamberlin’s point, however, is that such a paradoxical position is not exclusive to Rastafarian elders: “We are the people Brother Kumi talked about, balancing truth and belief in stories we live by every day—and with whose contradictions we are comfortable” (2), even without the help of ganja. As Frye often says, what we believe is what our actions show that we believe, not what we say or affirm intellectually—and we believe we are walking on flat, unmoving earth, not on a swiftly spinning ball. But we believe in the ball as well. This is not quibbling: as Chamberlin goes on to say, physicists insist that light is both a wave and a particle, that Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead until somebody checks on it, and they mean it.
I begin The Productions of Time by trying to answer the question of why I would want to write a 450-page book about myths when myths are simply superstitious illusions, as Freud said they are. Many years ago, I began trying to come up with a reasonable answer to this reasonable question by refusing to accept the assumption that people who believe in a mythology—which means most people outside of certain educated Westerners from the 18th century forward—have been naively superstitious. I don’t like to throw words like “ethnocentric” and “colonialist” around because they are temptations to self-righteousness, but, after all, are we saying that all those people were just stupid? Chamberlin cites a well-known book by the French classicist Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? and quotes Veyne’s answer: “legendary worlds were accepted [by the Greeks] as true in the sense they were not doubted, but they were not accepted the way everyday reality is” (14). The Greeks were not alone. On the island of Majorca, the traditional formula for beginning a story, comparable to “once upon a time,” is “it was, and it was not” (4).
Well, in what way, then, are myths accepted, if not as literally true? This takes us back to Stevens, who on the one hand has some ironic poems about the imagination. In “The Motive for Metaphor,” the motive is a “shrinking from / The weight of primary noon,” seeking to evade with metaphor’s constant changes “The vital, arrogant, fatal dominant X” of reality. Reality may be “vital,” but it is “fatal.” In some of his prose writings, Stevens speaks of the almost unprecedented pressure of reality in our time. If we call the objective world contemplated by an isolated, alienated subject “reality,” we are tempted to despair, because in that case the only recourse is a kind of stoic endurance, facing up, without being too self-pitying about it, to the fact that life’s a bitch, and then you die. But Stevens’s poems contradict themselves—as Yeats did, he writes poems out of differing moods and perspectives. As Shakespeare did: the “arrogant, fatal dominant X” of King Lear contradicts the beauty and affirmation of the imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with no way of “reconciling” them. For that matter, comedy as a genre contradicts tragedy: they are the forms of imagination and reality respectively. Shakespeare created a third genre, “tragicomedy,” in his final four plays, but that did not so much transcend the contradiction as internalize it within one story. At other times, in other poems, Stevens assumed the mantle of his full Romantic heritage and spoke of the decreative, recreative power of the imagination (I stole the word “decreation” from Stevens, who stole it from Simone Weil). In “Oak Leaves Are Hands,” he creates a “figure of capable imagination,” Lady Lowzen, “For whom what is was other things.” Stoics notwithstanding, we need the imagination to contradict reality. As Chamberlin eloquently puts it, “It is through our imagination and a belief in the truth of stories and songs—their genuine truths, however momentary—that we can successfully resist the pressure of those seeming realities that haunt and harry us, and we can push back with a creative energy we have been given by storytelling” (13).
The moment in which that happens is the moment that Chamberlin repeatedly calls “wonder,” a word that echoes throughout Shakespeare’s final plays, as I am sure he knows. The imagination breaks through in what he calls “moments of grace,” which “keep us in a state of wonder, a ceremonial moment of release from the tyranny of reality into the freedom of the imagination” (15). We hardly dare admit how much we long for this release—we are told relentlessly that we are not supposed to want more than what is “realistic,” and there are plenty who are ready to be outraged if we risk asking for more gruel. But Chamberlin is a human rights activist, and Storylines is not just literary. It has a chapter called “Resistance and Survival” in which the imagination confronts the “real” world of political power and violence. That chapter has a passage I find unforgettable:
During the 1970s I listened to a young Argentinian tell about the mothers of the disappeared in his homeland, and how they gather into three groups: One groups asked for the names of the disappeared to be known and remembered. Another group wanted the bodies of the deceased back, so they could be buried in a proper ceremony….But it was the third group of mothers whose cry was itself a song. They wanted the dead back, alive again. That was their unequivocal claim on the past, and on reality. They want the imagination to change the world, to make night into day, to make silence into song….They are living in hope of something they know is hopeless. But they also know such knowledge is as uncertain as anything else. So they keep on hoping. (98)
One of the greatest lines in all of poetry is King Lear’s agonized cry that his dead daughter Cordelia will “Never, never, never, never, never” come again. But in one of those final tragicomedies, The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare contradicts himself. A man’s “dead” wife, for whom he has been mourning 16 years, though—as a sop to concerns about “reality”—she has not really died but been concealed, comes back to life. She pretends to be a sculpture on a pedestal, but comes down off the pedestal and comes to him. I have tried all my life to read the scene without weeping, and failed every time. In fact, I’m getting worse. This week I begin teaching an Honors course about mythology, and we begin with the myth of Orpheus, the lover who is also a musician, an artist, who dares go to the Underworld itself to bring back his dead love Eurydike. In the famous versions, he fails, and the tale is a tragedy: the reality principle wins against the power of the imagination, represented by music.
But there are other versions. A medieval version, “Sir Orfeo,” translated into modern English by J.R.R. Tolkien, transfuses a Greek tragedy with Celtic magic. Orfeo’s lady has been taken, not by Death but by the fairies, and he goes to their realm and rescues her successfully. This recreates the myth according to the pattern of one of the greatest of all the Child ballads—that is, the traditional English and Scottish ballads collected by Francis Child. In “Tam Lin,” Child #39, it is in fact a daring woman, Janet, who rescues her lover from the queen of the fairies. Child #19 is a ballad version with the same plot as “Sir Orfeo,” though their relationship seems uncertain. A “comic” or happy ending version of the Orpheus story? Because writing fixes language into a permanent form, a preoccupation arises with the “authentic” or “definitive” form of a story. But in the oral tradition, there is no such thing. There is one more link to this thematic chain, one that demonstrates how Jungian synchronicity, or significant coincidence, rules my life. Last night I went to see the animated feature The Boy and the Heron by the Japanese master of animation, Hiyao Miyazaki. In it, a boy goes into an extraordinary dreamlike Otherworld and ends by rescuing his own mother, who had died in a fire during the Second World War. I saw the film on Twelfth Night, January 6, the birth of light in darkness, and discovered that I had seen it one day after Miyazaki’s birthday, January 5. He is 83, and still dealing with the grief and the loss of his own mother in early life, doing so through the story of a kind of successful Orpheus. Most critics say that tragic stories are greater than comic ones, because tragedy is born of the adult wisdom that death and loss are final. Tolkien insisted that fairy tales must have a "eucatastrophe" or happy ending—but those are for children, or so it is said. They are also, however, for those who refuse to lose their innocence, even if that innocence might be tried and transformed through life’s ordeals.
The distinction is sometimes made between the childish and the childlike. The former is ignorance, the latter apparently some kind of wisdom, since Jesus said that we must become as children again. This wisdom may be connected with Frye’s distinction, explained in the previous newsletter, between primary and secondary concerns. Secondary concerns are those of ideology, the self-interested values of both the individual and the social group, concerns that are a manifestation of the will to power. Primary concerns are the universal concerns of all human beings, concerns of food and drink, safety, love and connection, freedom and autonomy, and ultimately life itself. It is considered the mark of toughminded adult maturity to say that, whatever idealists think, ideology by necessity takes precedence over primary concerns. That’s just how it is. When ideological obsession takes hold of literature, it demands stories that are committed to the cause, engaged, socially activist. But while literature does always have an ideological level, the imagination’s basic allegiance is to primary concern. It is the wisdom of the child to see that primary concern really is primary, and that secondary concerns are those weird obsessions of adults that drive them mad and make them violent. Thus, the goal of the imagination is not art for art’s sake but, as Jacques Barzun used to say about Romanticism, art for life’s sake. I think that is why so many “children’s classics” are favorites of adults. Despite a lifetime of activism, Chamberlin quotes the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano:
The literature that is most political, most deeply committed to the political process of change, can be the one that least needs to name its politics…Literature that shrinks the soul instead of expanding it, as much as it might call itself militant, objectively speaking is serving a social order, which daily nibbles away at the variety and richness of the human condition…From this point of view, a love poem can be more fertile than a novel dealing with the exploitation of miners in the tin mines or workers on the banana plantations. (110-111)
Because, again, of preparing to teach about Orpheus, I am reminded of the controversy over the 1959 film Black Orpheus, set during the carnival season in Brazil. Initially, it was an enormous hit and won all sorts of awards, But later, a critical backlash set in. Because the characters were poor, yet seemed so joyously alive, so vital even in the midst of tragedy, the film was accused of promoting a sort of Brazilian version of the "happy darkies" stereotype of the American South, glamorizing their poverty and therefore betraying the cause of the class war. I even came across a remark by Barack Obama dryly regretting that Black Orpheus was his white mother’s favorite film. And yet, to use Galeano’s phrasing, is it no contribution to the political process of change to enthrall a world audience—in 1959!—with a film whose entire cast was Black, none of them name actors, and whose content was joyously erotic in an era when married couples in American comedies still had to be shown sleeping in twin beds? It was a film about the primary concerns of love, death, and art (especially dance), and it connected people across the boundaries of race and social class. No, it was no Killers of the Flower Moon, but not every film has to be. The favorite film of my high school years was Dr. Zhivago, and one of the things that has stuck with me most vividly over many years is the outraged bafflement of the ideology-crazed maniac Strelnikov at Yuri Zhivago’s refusal to take part in the glorious revolution, preferring instead to sit in an isolated house writing poetry and being in love with Julie Christie. In Anais Mitchell’s version of the Orpheus myth, the award-winning musical Hadestown, Eurydice leaves Orpheus for the Underworld boss Hades out of concern for money and survival, while Orpheus sits around writing and playing love songs. Yet it is the love songs that soften Hades’ heart and make him remember what it is like to love, and in the end it is Orpheus’s silly songs that come close to inspiring a social revolution. Yes, I know. My hippie sentimentality is showing. If you want realism, read Henry Kissinger.
This semester I am also going to teach Othello, a tragedy whose lesson is, “Be careful what stories you believe. But also be careful of the stories you disbelieve.” Desdemona falls in love with Othello by listening to his stories about the hardships of his past. Yet she was not wrong to believe in those stories, for they were true stories told by a good man. Othello is wrong listen to Iago’s ugly, vicious stories about Desdemona, which manipulate his hidden insecurities about race, class, and age, until, choosing those lies over the evidence of his own experience, he becomes demonically possessed and destroys both himself and the woman he loves. Othello is sometimes slightly demoted in rank among the “great tragedies” because it is said to be a merely domestic tragedy, without a social and political dimension. But it can be read as a political parable for our present moment. Trump is exactly like Iago, a spewing firehose of malicious lies, so many that they cannot be kept track of, let alone refuted. Most of the stories do not even appeal to ideology but to sheer visceral hate. Some of Trump’s followers, like Othello, believe the stories, and are thus taken over by their Jungian shadows. Others, including the entire Republican party, do not believe the lies but use them tactically, flooding the environment with so much misinformation and contradiction that people become demoralized, begin to doubt the very concept of truth, and therefore simply give up and shut down. No. We must not give in to the power of their meaningless noise, their anti-stories suggesting the meaninglessness of life itself. At the beginning of Chapter 4, “Resistance and Survival,” Chamberlin quotes Bob Marley: “With music, mek we chant down Babylon” (83), and calls it “A storytelling alternative. That alternative is to chant it down, to sing songs of his people’s spirit, and of home. To survive” (84). We must believe in our stories—“If the Sun and Moon should doubt / They’d immediately go out,” says Blake. Yet there is also such a thing as a “saving doubt,” a doubt that keeps belief open-minded, always willing to change, to evolve. Another contradiction, but “right now, we need the comfort with contradiction that storytelling offers” (3). What we need is “The grace that is wonder. And the balance that is wondering…The grace of balance” (3). Lord, above all gifts, grant us balance, as the grounds shift beneath our feet.
References
Chamberlin, J. Edward. Storylines: How Words Shape Our World. Douglas & McIntyre, 2023.
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Knopf, Canada, 2003.
Frye, Northrop. “Preface.” Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Indiana University Press, 1976.
Tolkien, J.R.R., translator. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. George Allen and Unwin, 1975. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books.