June 16, 2023
This newsletter, with startling synchronicity, will appear on Bloomsday, June 16. Bloomsday is the day on which James Joyce’s Ulysses transpires; Joyce chose it because it is the day on which he met his wife Nora. Happy Bloomsday, everyone. The newsletter is about mentors, and is dedicated to my mentor, Theodore Harakas, who died on Thursday, June 8, at the age of 86. Ted taught Joyce to undergraduates during a teaching career of 45 years. Ulysses may well have been his favorite novel, and it is a novel that, among other things, is about mentors. The events and characters of Ulysses are paralleled with those of Homer’s Odyssey. Its two main characters, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, are Odysseus and Telemachus, father and son respectively. But the parallel is not exact: Bloom is not Stephen’s biological father but rather a father-substitute, which means he is doubling for another character in the Odyssey, the goddess Athena, who shows up at Telemachus’s door in disguise and later takes on the role of Mentor, an older man who mentors a young man whose father has been absent his whole life. It is from Athena’s cover story that we get both our word and our concept of a mentor.
Which leads to the question: what is a mentor? Does everybody need one? Mentors are often substitute fathers, and it is appropriate that Father’s Day this year is two days after Bloomsday. Dumbledore plays this role for the orphaned Harry Potter, Obi wan Kenobi and Yoda for the orphaned Luke Skywalker. Telemachus is not exactly an orphan, since his father is still alive, but his father is absent. We are reminded of the most significant figure with two fathers, Jesus, who has an earthly and a heavenly father. This doubling is actually a motif in the myth of the hero as set forth by Otto Rank and Joseph Campbell. Somehow, the adolescent creators of Superman knew to give their hero a double parentage. Clark Kent has earthly parents, Ma and Pa Kent, but he also has a heavenly father, the great scientist Jor-El from the doomed planet Krypton.
The mentor may step into the role of paternal substitute if the biological father is inadequate, as Stephen Dedalus’s alcoholic ne’er-do-well father Simon is in Ulysses. The inadequacy, however, may be only situational: the real father mentors his children in the sense of initiating them into the adult world of the community, but a second figure may be necessary to break the young adult out of the confines of the ordinary community and ordinary life into a wider realm of experience. The most frequent paradigm is that of a figurative rather than literal father-son relationship, but there are plenty of father-daughter mentor relationships in both literature and life. There can also be mother-son, more often grandmother-son, as well as mother-daughter and grandmother-daughter mentorings. We note the fact that the original Mentor in literature is in fact a woman, Athena. More on this later.
Telemachus needs to learn how to become a warrior, and although we do not see Athena mentoring him in this way, it is appropriate that his mentor is a warrior goddess. Mentors in the context of physical prowess still occur in the military, in athletics, and in musical performance. The emotional bond between athlete and coach, between musician and teacher, is often very deep. But it is the task of other mentors to expand their charges’ mental horizons, and by doing so liberate them from rather than initiate them into their ordinary social roles. It is the function of teachers, especially in the humanities, to show young people that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of by their community, by the job world, by Career Services, even if those teachers also spend a good amount of time writing recommendations to help their students get jobs. ‘Twas always thus: one of the most moving cantos of the Divine Comedy is Inferno 15, in which Dante meets his old teacher, Brunetto Latini. Despite the fact that Latini is damned for homosexuality, the love between the teacher and his greatest pupil is evident, and deeply moving. Mentors are most common for those who have a special vocation. At the other end of the poem, in heaven, Dante speaks to his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, who urges Dante to remain true to his gift for poetry, despite the fact that, if he tells the truth in his poem, he will anger many powerful people. But of course Dante has a third mentor, the most important of them all. Virgil is Dante’s role model as epic poet, but he is also Dante’s guide and protector on the quest through hell and purgatory. It does not take long before the two are addressing each other as “my father” and “my son,” and it is wrenchingly sad when Virgil has to depart and return to hell. We note in passing that Virgil’s own epic hero has female mentors: in the Aeneid, Virgil’s guide through the underworld is the Cumaean Sibyl, but he is also guided and protected by his mother, the goddess Venus.
Dante is fond of the theme that the mentor may be a savior even while being unable to save himself. Virgil saves not only Dante but another poet named Statius, who tells Virgil that he converted to Christianity after reading Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, long taken to be an unconscious prophecy of the coming of Christ. Yet Virgil himself is consigned to Limbo, not because he was sinful but because he lacked baptism, which was deemed necessary for salvation. I suppose that something of the same is true of me and Ted Harakas. In a story that I often (perhaps too often) tell, one day in 1970, when I was taking Ted’s course in the Romantics, Ted handed me a copy of Northrop Frye’s book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry, and said, “Here, being what you are, you should read this.” Maybe I am falling into unconscious self-mythologizing here, but that’s what I remember him saying. So I took it back to the dorm, thinking, “What the hell does that mean? What am I? Now I have to read the damned book to find out.” I did, and it was what I always call my conversion experience. My vision was expanded simultaneously by Frye and by Frye’s own mentor Blake, who wrote a poem about his own mentor, Milton. I would not have written The Productions of Time, and I would not be writing this newsletter if not for that moment. Ted understood Fearful Symmetry in its full depth and profundity, no mean feat because Blake is one of the most demanding of poets. And he responded to it deeply—yet in the end, drew back into a kind of skepticism that nothing could shake. He had good reason for his darkness: I have always felt that his skepticism provided a detachment that enabled him to endure stoically the loss of so many people in his life, all of them dying prematurely: two close friends and a wife much younger than he, who should by all rights have outlived him by many years. I remember him telling the story of his father’s last words on his deathbed: “Big mistake!” Ted would usually recount such anecdotes only after a quantity of wine—a great quantity, because he was a huge man with a powerful frame and could drink a lot.
But make no mistake: Ted’s darkness was not the kind of ironic reductionism that became more or less mandatory during the years of “high theory” in the humanities. Ted was the spirit of life itself, with a huge vitality and a huge laugh, thrower of legendary parties with excellent wine and excellent food. He was my Zorba, my Greek spirit of affirmation in the teeth of despair. In the film Zorba the Greek, which I saw on TV in high school, the young writer who is the fictionalized version of Nikos Kazantzakis, who wrote the novel, says to Zorba about a romantic difficulty, “It’s too much trouble.” Zorba replies, “Trouble? Boss, life is trouble.” That has been a touchstone of mine since I was 17, and Ted exemplified the attitude behind it. He taught the Odyssey (and the Divine Comedy) before I did, and there was much in him of Odysseus himself, that Trickster figure who inherited his wiliness not from his languishing father but from his grandfather Autolycus, who was a thief, and beloved by the god of thieves, Hermes, himself a Trickster figure. Mentors need to initiate their charges into something more than a one-sided idealism. As Jung—another of my mentors—put it, we enter into vision only through the valley of the shadow. Jung’s own mentor was the Goethe of Faust. Faust is an academic who is suicidal in mid-life because he has never lived, and his mentor is Mephistopheles himself, the spirit of negation who nonetheless takes Faust by the scruff of the neck and hurls him headlong into life and thus into a succession of big mistakes. In “A Prayer for Old Age,” Yeats prays to be saved “From all that makes a wise old man / That can be praised of all.” Instead, he prays “That I may seem, though I die old, / A foolish passionate man.” I read that poem while still young, but now I’m working on it.
Mentorship does not always work out so well. It can, on the one hand, turn into cultism. The line of descent in depth psychology turned into a soap opera worthy of the television show Succession. Most of the early psychoanalytic circle revered Freud as a mentor and father figure, which led to sibling rivalry and undignified bickering among the followers, but also to a series of dramatic breaks with Freud. Freud had this coming, because of his demand for total loyalty from all his followers, as his unconscious knew if he did not: his obsession with the theme of killing the father was a projection of his own life. The biggest break of all was with Jung, whom Freud had designated as the heir of the psychoanalytic movement. But Freud was always accusing Jung—or rather, Jung’s unconscious—of having a death wish against him. The final break was explosive, and Jung was propelled by it out of the psychoanalytic movement altogether, having to found his own movement, analytical psychology. Warned by example, he tried hard to ward off the cultism among his own disciples, but did not entirely succeed. Those who break with the mentor father-figure become rebels whose theories may reflect a kill-the-father complex.
Frye, who always said he wanted no disciples, attracted one anyway. The early books of Harold Bloom, who said that he had read Fearful Symmetry 50 times and half-memorized it, were studies in the Romantic tradition very much in Frye’s spirit. But he went through a strange mid-life crisis that resulted in the publication of a series of books about what he called the “anxiety of influence,” a theory in which every major poet forms an identity by means of symbolically killing, through misreading, a poetic Precursor who is a symbolic father-figure. There is little doubt—Frye noted it himself in his unpublished notebooks—that the main father-figure Bloom needed to kill was Frye himself. Yeats had contrasted Christ, who appeased the Father, with Oedipus, who killed his father. Freud of course made the antagonism to the father the basis of the Oedipus complex, and Bloom, who was Jewish and suffered during the 1950’s from anti-Semitism at Yale, where one “colleague” told him he could never fit in because English literature is Christian, was in a negative sense returning to his Jewish roots. The center of Frye’s theory is that of a vision inherited from a precursor, which writers try to pass along, clarifying and adapting it for their own age as they do so. Frye inherited this vision from his own mentor, Blake, who wrote a long poem called Milton on how the spirit of Milton was reborn in him. Milton was in turn recreating the vision of the Bible. This vision of recreation—one of Frye’s key terms—is hopeful and progressive; Bloom’s anxiety of influence is tragic and regressive, each generation not only misreading a previous misreading, so that the message is garbled as in a game of “telephone,” but dwindling in stature.
There have also been feminist critics of Frye who followed the pattern of apostasy, self-professed father’s-daughter figures who broke with the father, ironically by misreading him. What some critics still do not understand is the difference between the literary “canon,” an in-group of “great works” selected according to ideological principles, and Frye’s “order of words,” to which all literary works belong. In the order of words, all literary works are united, not by their ideologies, which may violently disagree, but by an imaginative underthought expressing “primary concerns” common to all humanity. Given the irrationality of the human race, nothing is commoner than for a literary work’s ideology—which may be vicious and destructive—to contradict its own underlying imaginative vision of concern. It is part of the task of the critic to distinguish the genuinely imaginative from the merely ideological. Unfortunately, in these ideologically-crazed times, there are many critics who seem to recognize nothing in a work except its ideology, whether they are blind to its imaginative substrate or deny it out of bitterness. Bloom's anxiety of influence is a pathology of the ego, which is an ideological construct. But authors’ egos may not have the slightest understanding of their imaginations. Ezra Pound’s Cantos, to choose an obvious example, flickers unpredictably between luminous vision and anti-Semitic ranting about “usury.”
Where this is leading is towards the concept of a deeper, hidden identity below the level of the ordinary personality. If we think of it as a creative process and a power, we may call it, with the Romantics, the imagination. But in myth, literature, and dreams it is often personified as the larger identity that Jung called the Self. It is the Self that is the true mentor, the mentor within, of which human mentors are projections. Socrates had his daimon, a voice inside him that whispered secrets and gave advice. Of the many analysts that Jung mentored, one of the most astute, Marie-Louise von Franz, says of the Self:
In the dreams of a woman this center is usually personified as a superior female figure—a priestess, sorceress, earth mother, or goddess of nature or love. In the case of a man, it manifests itself as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature, and so forth. (208)
She goes on to cite an Austrian folk tale in which a soldier threatened by black magic is rescued by “an old guitarist who is our Lord himself” (208). As a folk guitarist, I am very much charmed by this. In the 1960’s, young white teenagers sat at the feet of old black acoustic blues guitarists such as the Rev. Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt and were mentored by them both musically and sometimes spiritually. Perhaps this is the archetypal meaning of Picasso’s image of “The Old Guitarist,” and of Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” that was inspired by it. Stevens’ figure is a personification of the imagination itself: “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.” I might add that Françoise Gilot, who just died at the age of 101, painted a female counterpart: “Paloma à la Guitare” (1965, Gilot, "Paloma"), who is not only also blue but has a totally cool hat.
In our culture, patriarchal as it is, the Self is best known as the Wise Old Man: Gandalf, Dumbledore, Obi wan, Dr. Strange’s Ancient One, and so on. But the Self is a paradoxical boundary-concept and, like everything liminal, a shapeshifter. Von Franz notes: “These paradoxical personifications are attempts to express something that is not entirely contained in time—something simultaneously young and old” (209), citing a dream in which the Self appears as a young man, what Jungians call the Puer: “This youth signifies the self, and with it renewal of life, a creative “élan vital, and a new spiritual orientation by means of which everything becomes full of life and enterprise” (209).
But the Self is not only beyond time but beyond gender. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) has a whole section on “Supernatural Aid” that in fact begins with a catalogue of female guides and mentors:
The helpful crone and fairy godmother is a familiar figure of European fairy lore; in Christian saints’ legends the role is commonly played by the Virgin….[The Native American] Spider Woman with her web can control the movements of the sun. The hero who has come under protection of the Cosmic Mother cannot be harmed. The thread of Ariadne brought Theseus safely through the adventure of the labyrinth. This is the guiding power that runs through the work of Dante in the female figures of Beatrice and the Virgin, and appears in Goethe’s Faust successively as Gretchen, Helen of Troy, and the Virgin. (71)
Only on the following page does Campbell arrive at a catalogue of male guides and mentors:
Not infrequently, the supernatural helper is masculine in form. In fairy lore it may be some little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd, or smith, who appears, to supply the amulets and advice that the hero will require. The higher mythologies develop the role in the great figure of the guide, the teacher, the ferryman, the conductor of souls to the afterworld. (72)
He then goes on to mention Goethe’s Mephistopheles and Dante’s Virgil, summing up with this resonant passage:
Protective and dangerous, motherly and fatherly at the same time, this supernatural principle of guardianship and direction unites in itself all the ambiguities of the unconscious—thus signifying the support of our conscious personality by that other, larger system, but also the inscrutability of the guide that we are following, to the peril of all our rational ends. (73)
The Self is thus androgynous, and there is a gender ambiguity about some mentor figures. Athena in her role as mentor to both Telemachus and Odysseus was a father’s daughter in about as direct a way as possible, springing full grown and in armor from the forehead of her father Zeus. As mentor of both father and son, she typically disguises herself as a male figure—as two old male figures in a row to Telemachus, as a young shepherd to Odysseus. Ted Harakas used to speak jokingly of "Athena in drag," but it may well be more than a joke. The revelation that Dumbledore is gay is another instance of the mentor figure’s gender ambiguity, and in the Dr. Strange movies, the role of the Ancient One, male in the comic version, is played by an androgynous-looking Tilda Swinton. For women as for men, the mentor figure may be a necessary substitute for an inadequate biological or legal mother—as the fairy godmother is for the wicked stepmother in the Cinderella tale. In Pixar’s Brave, the actual mother is transformed by a curse into something worse than a wicked stepmother, a hostile bear, whom Merida has to redeem back to her true form singlehandedly, having to be her own self-reliant mentor figure, given that everyone around her is either evil or an idiot.
To use my own terms, the mentor figure is both decreative and recreative, a figure that facilitates a passage through a process of, first, death to an old self and, second, birth to a new and larger one. This often means a widening of horizons, a decreative breaking out of an old, restricted, often stiflingly conventional life into a world of possibility. The old world has to be cracked like an eggshell so that a new self can be born from it: it is not for nothing that Socrates called himself a midwife in his role as a teacher of young men. Do we choose a mentor figure, or does the mentor choose us? The real answer is no doubt “both at once,” for the mentor is a personification of our destiny, and in that sense we are predestined, and our destiny is inescapable, even if we try to escape it, as Jonah did by running in the opposite direction. The mentor is a symbol of our vocation, our calling—but, nevertheless, the call has to be voluntarily answered, and many are called, but few choose to respond. To choose a mentor, which is to choose a myth to live by, is perhaps the crucial decision of one’s life. At the age of 60, which seemed to signify to him the arrival at the age of official eligibility for the title of Wise Old Man himself, Northrop Frye wrote an essay titled “The Search for Acceptable Words.” He speaks of his choice, while still in his 20’s, of Blake as a mentor, of choosing to take ten years to write a book on a figure that most critics dismissed, more than a century after his death, as at best minor and at worst mad. Then he says this:
[T]he question of personal authority is relevant to the humanities in general, and literary criticism in particular. I think it advisible for every critic proposing to devote his life to literary scholarship to pick a major writer of literature as a kind of spiritual preceptor for himself, whatever the subject of his thesis. I am not speaking, of course, of any kind of moral model, but it seems to me that growing up inside a mind so large that one has no sense of claustrophobia within it is an irreplaceable experience in humane studies. Some kind of transmission by seed goes on here too. I am venturing on an area which so far as I know has been very little discussed, and what I say is bound to be tentative. Keats remarks that the life of a man of genius is a continuous allegory, which I take to mean, among other things, that a creative life has something to do with choosing a life-style. I think the scholarly life has something to do with this too, and one chooses a preceptor among the poets who has something congenial to oneself in this respect. I notice that, at the age of sixty, I have unconsciously arranged my life so that nothing has ever happened to me, and no biographer could possibly take the smallest interest in me. The reason for this unconscious choice has been that, for me, an obliteration of incident was necessary to keep the sense of continuity in the memory that fostered the germinating process I have spoken of. And it is clear to me, though not demonstrable to anyone else, that this has been imitated, on a level that consciousness and memory cannot reach, from Blake, who similarly obliterated incident in his own life, and for similar reasons. One who found Byron more congenial as a preceptor would doubtless adopt a different life-style. (321)
I began with the question of whether everyone needs a mentor, or only someone with a special vocation, like a writer or scholar. I have written a newsletter on vocations, and my answer echoes my conclusions there. Every life should be a vocation in a broader sense of being lived according to a sense of meaning and purpose, whether or not it has a special activity as its axis. That meaning and purpose may be practical, may be mundane in all senses, but it should be lived according to a perspective and sense of values far wider than “success” or “power.” The things we do are all mundane, no matter how exalted our calling. If we are a parent, we change endless diapers. If we are an athlete, we grind ourselves with endless practice. If we are a teacher, we grade endless papers. The sacred, or the transcendent, is always grounded in the profane: that is the whole point of Joyce’s Ulysses, that the ordinary and sometimes tawdry events of a day in Dublin “mean the world.” As Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band put it, “These are the mythic times.” We do what we do, live our lives as we do, with a sense that our every act has a larger significance, and we monitor ourselves, judge ourselves, as if our lives were ever in our great Taskmaster’s eye, as Milton put it in a sonnet about his own life and vocation.
To acquire a sense of the larger significance within which the ordinary finds its place in the cosmos, a word that means a beautiful design like a jewelry ornament, we may need a mentor in the liberal arts, which exist to liberate students, as the root meaning of the word implies, from the self-centered life, the life motivated only by greed, fear, and the will to power. Teachers act as mentors to thousands of students in a career. Almost none of them are going to go on to become creative writers or scholars themselves. That is not the point of teaching. The reason students remember, and may even still be friends with, their English or philosophy or art history professor 30 or more years after graduation is because their teaching, and their existence as role models, as witnesses, inspired them and made life seem pregnant with both meaning and possibility. We thank our mentors for giving us a new universe to live in. This may be just as true if the mentor is a book rather than a living human being.
Ted Harakas changed my life by handing me a book to read. I went on from Baldwin Wallace to the University of Toronto in order to study directly with Frye, and ended by becoming not only his student but his research assistant and, after his death, the editor of some of his writing, both published and unpublished, for the Collected Works of Northrop Frye. I dedicated the first volume that I edited to Ted. We knew each other for 54 years, and it is strange that that should not be enough. I have lost my mentor, one of the best readers of these newsletters. My last communication with him was three weeks before he died, a one-line note saying that he was still reading and enjoying them. There is grief, and a sense of absence, of loneliness. At the same time, there is the feeling expressed by Dylan Thomas in a poem about his father: “Until I die, he will not leave my side.”
References
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen, Princeton University Press, 1949.
Frye, Northrop. “The Search for Acceptable Words.” In ”The Critical Path” and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1963-1975, edited by Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner. Volume 27 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2009. 310-30.