June 21, 2024

So, frankly, I’m a bit nervous. For this coming fall semester, I was invited to teach the British Literature Survey, part 1, a course that, oddly enough, I have never taught before, so all this summer I will be busily preparing for a daunting task.  “Survey” classes in most English departments are historical, and British literature Surveys are typically divided into parts 1 and 2.   Part 1 spans well over 1000 years of British literature, encompassing three historical eras—medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment—and three forms of the English language—Old English, Middle English, and Modern English.  The Old English and some of the Middle are given in modern translations, but there is still plenty of archaic language to intimidate some students.  And many of the texts demand knowledge of a historical background turning on political and theological conflicts likely to be both unfamiliar and meaningless to contemporary students.  We have 15 weeks to accomplish this, twice a week for 75 minutes.  There is no more challenging course in the department.  And yet I am delighted and honored to be extended the invitation. 

Clearly, the wrong way to teach such a course is as a random sampling of heterogeneous works, giving the impression that the course is a catch-all, a lumber room for dead wood used to store works of supposed Historical Importance, simply out of nostalgia for works that were once for some reason taken seriously.  In fact, I have a confession to make.  That is the attitude I had when I took ENG 241 about 55 years ago as a freshman in the same English department.  Being what I was, of which I am not proud, I wrote an essay on it called “The Care and Feeding of Sacred Cows,” arguing that most of this stuff was a waste of time.  I had no call to be doing so, for the course was not taught by some fossil—dead wood venerating dead wood—but by my mentor and favorite professor Ted Harakas.  The actual course was not my real target but some inadequate teaching in high school, and the real dead wood was the chip on my shoulder.  I hasten to add that my present department is not seeking poetic justice by offering me the course (“Here, see how well you can do it”).  Everyone is too nice, and anyway no one is left to remember how immature I was at a time when many of them had not even been born.  Still, irritating as I was, I was asking a legitimate question about the present value of canonical works, and Ted Harakas met it with grace and audacity:  he read my essay to the class and made a response to it part of the final exam. 

Historical surveys are well-nigh universal, but why?  Why design a course that has swallowed half the works of British literature, then demand that the students swallow them as well?  There is in fact a rationale.  The first thing incoming students learn to do, in Introduction to Literature classes, is to do close readings of works, image by image, line by line, grounding their interpretation in what is actually in the text and not speculative or dragged in from outside.  Survey classes reverse the perspective, from the microscopic to the macroscopic.  The point is not to read all those works in exquisite detail—if you did that, you’d deserve to graduate on the spot, assuming you had not died of exhaustion or switched majors long before.  The point is coverage—surveys are always heavy-reading courses—flying over a large number of works quickly from a high altitude, so to speak, in such a way that it begins to be evident that what looked like a landscape littered with unrelated Monuments is in fact one Big Picture, that all works in a literary tradition form part of what Northrop Frye called an order of words, just as all natural phenomena form part of a total order of nature.  It is all one vision, however riven by conflicts, one common realm of the imagination that is the home of human life.  It is “The Story of All Things.”  That is the title of the first chapter of Northrop Frye’s book on Milton, The Return of Eden.  Frye explains that he took the phrase from a complimentary poem by Samuel Barrow affixed to the second edition of Paradise Lost:  “When you read this wonderful poem, he says, what do you read but the story of all things?  For the story of all things from their first beginnings to the ultimate ends are contained within this book” (4).   On the opening day of my class, I am going to tell students that we are going to learn to see British literature historically as The Story of All Things. 

There are two ways in which literary works can be unified into a single world, a single vision:  the imaginative and the ideological.  Each of these tendencies is active in every work of literature.  Imaginative unity is primary. Students are frequently attracted to works or series of works that take place in a single imagined world.  Imagination is a guilty pleasure in a society like ours, that often regards it with suspicion or contempt, so that much of what science fiction calls “world building” takes place in the marginal area of popular genres.  There, we see how powerful is the impulse, by no means confined to young people, to escape from ordinary reality into a realm of the imagination.  On the most grass roots level are the comic book superheroes, the place where my own imagination began.  The early history of Marvel Comics reads like a game Stan Lee played with himself to see how many new heroes and villains he could invent each month, although I suspect that it was the game that played him, as a powerful, uncontrollable imagination burgeoned with images.  But it did not take long for the superheroes to break from the confines of their own titles into crossovers and continuing story lines, eventually into a whole Marvel Universe and, now, Multiverse.  DC Comics followed suit.

In the realm of literary fantasy, the setting of tales within a common “secondary world,” as they were at times called, goes back to the early 20^th century with the Oz books of Frank R. Baum and the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs.  After them came Tolkien’s Hobbit  and Lord of the Rings, where we witness world building at its most elaborate.  We now know that Tolkien’s works are a massive demonstration of creation by power of the word.  Being a philologist, he began by creating languages, which led to imagining the different species who were their speakers, then to the elaboration of an earlier, mythological age before the heroic age of his published works.  Soon after came the Narnia books by Tolkien’s friend and colleague C.S. Lewis, thence to Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea books (possibly the greatest imaginary world after Tolkien’s), and the Harry Potter books.  Science fiction abounded in series set in common universes from the Skylark series by E.E. “Doc” Smith, beginning as early as 1928, later followed by his Lensman series.  These are the kinds of so-called “space operas” that are being affectionately parodied by the first Star Wars trilogy.  Star Trek was an attempt to depict an imagined world that was nevertheless a real possible future rather than a dreamlike wish-fantasy, and I have by now lost track of its various sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and riffs.  James Cameron is attempting something similar with his Avatar films, as are the Dune films based on the series of books by Frank Herbert and his son. 

The charge of escapism is always upon the lips of critics determined to preserve the high seriousness of literature, who are frequently condescending to science fiction and fantasy, and we won’t even talk about superheroes.  At times, the loudest sneering has been from the practitioners themselves, in particular those associated with the British and American New Wave of ironic, postmodernist science fiction writers in the 1960’s and 1970’s, including the reviews and critical writings of Michael Moorcock, Thomas Disch, and Barry Malzberg.  Although not a critic, M. John Harrison’s various series read as an attempt to rewrite Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, whose theme is that the worst enemy of the human race is imagination, which tempts people to believe in the possibility of happiness based on some imagined wish-fulfilment. 

But the impulse to create an alternate reality, even if it looks a lot like the one we live in, is common in the tradition of the modern realistic novel as well.  Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels do not in fact share the same setting and characters, yet they did in a way create an alternate world—the world of history read as a vast epic romance.  His achievement was imitated in the United States by James Fenimore Cooper, “the American Scott,” as he was called, whose five Leatherstocking novels did follow the life of one character, Natty Bumppo the frontiersman, as he aged and moved further and further West in the course of his life, creating another epic romance of history.  Jane Austen’s novels are not overtly connected, but collectively create the kind of imaginative alternate world signified by the phrase “Regency romance,” a world so enticing that it has become a 21^st-century category of popular romance novel.  Balzac’s Comédie Humaine in France and Trollope’s Barsetshire and Palliser series of six novels each in England allowed readers to bask in a shared world, a pattern followed by Faulkner in the 20^th century. 

Moreover, the Victorian 3-decker novel, especially those of Dickens, allowed readers to live within a novelistic world week after week through serial publication:  collected as 3-volume novels, they are typically 900 pages long, providing a means of being “lost in a book” for a long period of time.  Alternate worlds to not appeal to readers because they are more idyllic and placid than ordinary life.  Quite the contrary:  serial publication pushed Dickens towards plots with regular cliffhangers for his characters, making them endure all sorts of hardships and survive all kinds of threats repeatedly.  Dickens picked up the cliffhanger technique from the melodrama of 19^th-century theatre, as did early silent films such as those by D.W. Griffith.  The cliffhanger technique survives in early comic strips such as Flash Gordon.  In all these works, characters suffer more than most of us ever will—yet somehow we envy them, because their sufferings have meaning and usually result in the triumph of good over evil.  We find it difficult to believe that our ordinary lives have any shape, let alone a meaningful and triumphant one.  The triumph of good means the triumph of what Northrop Frye calls primary concern, universal human needs and desires, and that triumph gives us hope, sometimes even when the ending is tragic.  Those of us who love reading, whose idea of heaven is to spend our lives immersed in books, are being drawn into a realm of imagination in which life is recreated in terms of human desires and fears.  

When I teach my course as The Story of All Things, I will begin where Frye did, via his reference to Paradise Lost, which, like all works in the Western tradition, is based directly or indirectly on the cosmology derived from the Christian Bible, not because of religious ideology—we will get to ideology later—but because the imaginative cosmos that was somehow created out of 66 books of varied authorship, quality, and ideological slant—created at times in defiance of the chaotic and sometimes offputting textual surface—informs Western culture even now (despite frequent declarations of its demise), and for a reason.  The Bible—which for our purposes means not just the Biblical text itself but what tradition has made out of it—provides the paradigmatic Western version of the mythological axis mundi, the vertical axis of the universe, usually on four levels from top to bottom:  the spiritual, paradisal, fallen, and demonic levels of being.  In Christian terms, these are heaven, Eden, our middle earth, and hell.  This axis is clearer in Dante’s Divine Comedy than in Paradise Lost, Milton having to deal with the complications involved in the replacement of the old Ptolemaic cosmos with modern astronomy.  Frye taught this axis in book after book, but sums up the enormous number of mythological and literary analogues to the four levels in the second half of Words with Power, one chapter for each level. 

Ideologically, medieval and Renaissance culture treated Classical mythology as a dim and distorted foreshadowing of Christian truth, but imaginatively as a supplement providing a source of imagery that the Bible lacked or actively repressed, especially in the areas of nature and the feminine.  It is hard to think what European literature would have done without Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which shapes over 200 Greek and Roman myths into a form roughly resembling the Bible, beginning with Creation and moving through tales of the gods to tales of the heroes, including summary versions of the Homeric epics, down to Ovid’s age, the inception of the Roman Empire, but from a point of view that gave much more prominence to two powers that the Bible regards with deep suspicion:  nature, seen as a process of continuous metamorphosis, and sexuality, the desire that drives and is driven by natural metamorphoses.  Two famous works, E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture and C.S. Lewis’s The Discarded Image, are valuable compendiums of the patterns of imagery that by the high Middle Ages had been elaborated from a Biblical and Classical foundation:  the 7 planets and 7 metals that correspond to them, along with other astrological lore; the 4 humours that control human temperament, the orders of angels, the types of elemental spirits, and so on.  These can be supplemented by two works of art history:  Emile Male’s The Gothic Image, on the encyclopedic imagery of the Gothic cathedrals, and Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance, on the Neo-Platonic and Hermetic symbolism of Renaissance painting.  Such lore is fascinating, as lore is always fascinating: the lore of Pokémon, of Star Wars, of superheroes, attracts enthusiasts.  Medieval and Renaissance lore has helped create a nostalgia for those periods: the imagery decorates the world tree like the ornaments of the Christmas tree that is a model of it.  Celtic and northern mythology have also been subsumed into the Western world picture, though more marginally. 

The cosmological lore of four vertical levels of being has a horizontal counterpart, a narrative that is a recreation of history into imaginative form.  The Biblical form of mythologized history is called typology.  In it, the events of the Old Testament prefigure the events of the New Testament in an intricate pattern, a pattern that will culminate in the end of the world as depicted in the Book of Revelation, in which the decreation and recreation of the world follow a 7fold pattern that parallels the 7 days of Creation.  As I tried to show in The Productions of Time, Biblical typology has a Classical counterpart, the vision of historical progress and redemption shown most definitively in Virgil’s Aeneid, a vision that made it the most influential work of Classical literature, especially because Virgil’s vision of a divine providence bringing the Roman Empire into being out of the destruction of Troy was incorporated into the medieval and Renaissance view of history.  Virgil is Dante’s guide in the Divine Comedy for many reasons, but one of them was that the Roman Empire was regarded as part of a divine providential plan, the creation of a matrix in which Christianity could be born and grow into a world religion, ultimately a catholic or universal religion.  Then, as I will show in my course, British literature pegged onto that.  Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (1136) provides the most influential version of the story that Britain was originally settled by another refugee of the fall of Troy, a man named Brutus after whom Britain is named.  And from Britain came King Arthur, whose Camelot and Round Table provided another vision of the civilizing of barbarism through noble and heroic effort.  Elizabethan propaganda capitalized on the supposed Welsh origins of the Tudor dynasty, so that in Spenser’s Faery Queene, Elizabeth is symbolized by the Fairy Queen whose marriage to Arthur would have been the climax of an epic so huge that Spenser died of exhaustion before he could complete it. 

Elizabethan propaganda is, however, is an example of the second force that pervades all myth and literature and attempts to shape them for its own purposes, that of ideology, which is always driven by the will to power.  Some critics see the imagination as merely a tool of the will to power, a way of indoctrinating people with one ideology or other, or else of transforming them into passive Lotus Eaters.  In such an ironic vision, imagination is not a lifegiving escape or transformative power but an opioid, a happy-making drug like soma in Huxley’s Brave New World.  Such critics are not big, to put it mildly, on the imagination as a manifestation of the pleasure principle.  As such, the imagination creates false paradises like that of Acrasia’s garden of earthly delights in the second book of The Faerie Queene.  The only thing to do with such paradises is what Sir Guyon, the knight of Temperance, does with Acrasia’s, tear it down.  Ironic critical theory is valuable in reminding us that literary works cannot be interpreted from a purely aestheticist or formalist point of view cut off from what Yeats called the fury and the mire of human veins.  Literary works do not exist apart in a purely ideal, Platonic realm of Forms, or at least not entirely.  They are caught up in what the title of a famous composition text called great issues and enduring questions.  Moreover, the controversies of a particular historical era are part of an ongoing conversation that evolves through time, not always peaceably.  There is a Big Picture whose dimensions are both imaginative and ideological, and students need to know it, not just to interpret literary works in a way that is not simply naïve but to know that they are themselves caught up in something larger not only than their lives but in the fate of their culture, perhaps of the whole human race. 

Thus, a historical survey course is the opposite of a field trip through an antiquarian museum.  It is a battlefield briefing.  The professor is in the position of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, appearing to Arjuna on the battlefield to convince him that he has no choice but to plunge into the battle because there is no place to flee.  The battle is really history itself.  Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus says that history is a nightmare from which he is trying to awake, but Finnegans Wake, the work that Joyce wrote after Ulysses, is in fact a vision modeled on the cyclical vision of history in Giambattista Vico.  Finnegans Wake is a vision of history as a dream of the entire human race, and none of its characters awakes from it.  But Joyce’s point is that it is the task of what he called “the ideal reader suffering from ideal insomnia” to remain awake and thus detached from the nightmare. 

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance, and the ironic skepticism so common in modern literature, meaning since the Romantics, derives from an eternal vigilance against ideological subversions of the imagination.   One form taken by that vigilance is skepticism about the very idea of a Story of All Things.  A story is a verbal structure, and a structure is by definition coercive.   Human life is made into a story by being given a structure—it is whipped into shape by what the philosophical theory called deconstruction calls “the violence of the letter.”  The shape may be linear, as with an Aristotelian-type plot with beginning, middle, and end—a satisfying form that does not occur in life.  Or it may be simultaneous: the various aspects of the story are unified by being related to a central theme, as all the points on a circle are united by being fixed in relationship to the circle’s center. 

To speak of the violence of the letter, of writing, is not overdramatic exaggeration.  When any form of writing, literary or nonfictional, is in thrall to ideological motives, the story is shaped in such a way as to exalt the figures of authority and, at the same time, either demonize or disappear any characters or forces that resist authority or are obstacles to its agendas.  “Imperialism” is a story, the story of heroic white conquerors who dominate and rule over other people, usually non-white, but for a noble cause.  In the myth of the West, the white pioneers were made to represent the heroic spirit of America, and the Indigenous people were most often either evil or ignorant, malevolent or simply savages that had to be conquered and civilized for their own good.  The story is forced into an authoritarian shape—which can lead very  easily, and is in fact designed to lead, to the coercive exercise of authority, including violence, in real life.   The violence of the letter may include violence against other letters, so to speak.  Indigenous people had their own stories, not only myths but tribal histories, yet time after time in courtroom trials to determine land rights, white judges serving the interests of government or white landowners simply denied the existence of those stories, often on the grounds that they were oral, and an oral story is an invisible story.  Show us the text, was the demand, the letter of the law.  At stake was the ownership of the land itself. 

That is why so many traditional stories that old folks like me grew up reading and being enchanted by their imaginative content are now, right and left, being subverted, debunked, sometimes outright abandoned.  It is understandable that some bewildered people feel that there are no noble, hopeful, genuinely heroic stories left.  Everything seems reduced to some ugly hidden motive like “white supremacy.”  I do think that the revisionism sometimes goes too far and becomes just bitter, even borderline nihilistic.  But there is a reason for it, and sometimes there is an ethical demand for revisionism, for an ugly truth may need to be honestly confronted.  The modern age did not invent revisionism.  Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is a nasty, caustic treatment of the Trojan War.  There is no hero and no heroism.  The only decent character is Troilus, and he is duped and then dies.  The character Thersites plays the role of a chorus commenting on the action from the sidelines.  In the Iliad, Thersites is a minor character, possibly not an aristocratic warrior with a private army but a common soldier, a grunt, who dares interrupt the noble solemnity of an assembly with a complaint that this war is senseless and he wants to go home.  He is portrayed as bow-legged and lame, just so we know that he is not worthy of respect.  Odysseus whacks him with the staff used to conduct assemblies, Thersites bursts into tears, and that is the end of that uprising.  In Troilus and Cressida, he cries out, “Wars and lechery; still wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion:  a burning devil take them!” (5.1.13-14, Bevington edition).  He is cynical, but he is right. 

Romanticism brought into literature a new type of character who has been popular ever since, the antihero.  Antiheroes can been arranged along a spectrum from those who are noble but “anti” because they are rebels against a corrupt society, like the “Byronic hero”; to those who are a fascinating mix of good and evil, but impress us because they are larger than life, such as Heathcliff and Captain Ahab; to those who are genuinely evil but compelling in their very twistedness, like the Joker or Hannibal Lector.  The greatest antihero is perhaps Faust, especially Goethe’s version of him.  He falls into the middle category, as does Thomas Mann’s modern version of him, the doomed, damned genius composer Adrian Leverkühn, a high culture version of the antihero played by various singers and rock musicians.  There is also the antiheroic antihero, the hapless schlemiel, as Thomas Pynchon calls the type, the hapless, hopeless victim, like the characters of Kafka and Samuel Beckett.   Goethe constantly undercuts his Faust’s vaulting speeches yearning for godlike transcendence, mostly by showing what Faust actually does when Mephistopheles gives him the power to fulfill his wishes—like seducing and abandoning a poor country girl while he goes off to orgies at a witches’ s Sabbath on Walpurgis Night.   Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein closely resembles him in his pretensions, although he uses electricity rather than Faust’s alchemy to gain the secret of life, abandoning his “monster” as Faust abandons Gretchen.  The monster and Gretchen are in fact nobler than the both of them.  In popular culture, the third Star Wars trilogy revises the lighthearted space opera of the first trilogy, becoming dark and edgy and death-haunted, though also reaching beyond aliens and robots to include people of color and heroines who do more than get rescued in skimpy outfits.  The later fantasies of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series revise the original trilogy in a feminist direction.  And women fantasy writers have practically made a new genre out of the revisionist fairy tale.  It is important to note that revisionism may take a positive form of inclusiveness, balancing the negative form of satiric subversion.  The Story of All Things has reached progressively in our time towards being the story of all people—all people, not just white, heterosexual people.  One of the admirable things about contemporary literature, both popular and mainstream, has been its aspiration to a genuine pluralism inclusive of all races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations and types of ableness.  Science fiction, which has always been fascinated by the strangeness and wonder of the “other,” has been in the forefront of this movement, despite the trolling of some reactionary fans.  At its best, its motto might be, “Nothing alien is alien to me.” 

But there is also an epistemological aspect to modern revisionism.  We have said that a story is a structure of order:  there is a difference between a series of events and a “plot.”  But modernity has come to have its doubts about whether shaping experience into the well-made structure of a plot isn’t just a form of lying.  Hence another invention of modern literature, the story that does not resolve into any final coherence but remains ambiguous.  Hamlet is a precursor of such a story.  If there were any way to resolve Hamlet into something coherent, surely some critic would have found it by now.  T.S. Eliot called it a failure, and it is possible that Shakespeare, having inherited an intractable revenge plot that makes no sense whatsoever, simply ran with it and covered up its more nonsensical aspects with glorious language and unforgettable characters.  But it is equally possible to read Hamlet as a play about the ambiguous nature of human life.  There will always be more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of by Horatio's philosophy, or anyone else’s.  It is a straight line from Hamlet to something like Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, whose conspiracy-theory plot in fact contains a hilarious parody of a Jacobean revenge tragedy.  We never find out whether the conspiracy that its heroine is tracking down really exists or is the product of her own obsessions. 

Since the aptly-named Romantic era, romance has become practically the quintessential modern genre because it is the least well-made and Aristotelian.  Instead of having a designed beginning, middle, and end, not to mention observing various “unities” of time, place, and mood, the more popular forms of romance are episodic, telling a new tale every night, like Scheherazade, or like our dreams.  More sophisticated romances tend towards a pattern that has been called “interlace,” after the endless-knot patterns of some medieval Celtic art.  Spenser’s Faerie Queene does not progress:  it complexifies, sends out narrative shoots in all directions and not only lacks beginning, middle, and end, but also a governing center.  Anywhere you are in such a narrative is a center, which is always in medias res.  The natural metaphor in “narrative shoots” suggests that such narratives are “organic” rather than “artificial.”  They are not “well crafted,” but grow.  In his book on romance, The Secular Scripture, Frye says there is a line by Alexander Pope that exists in two forms:  “A mighty maze of walks without a plan” became “A mighty maze, but not without a plan.”  Romance is the maze without a plan, and that perhaps fits how we think about life in our ungovernable time. 

There is a pervasive feeling in our time of a cultural order dissolving back into original chaos, for which Thomas Pynchon borrows the concept of “entropy” out of physics.   The historian Jacques Barzun’s magnum opus, published at the age of 93, was titled From Dawn to Decadence, and we are increasingly wondering what the phase after decadence may be.  We have a strong inclination to model cultural experience on individual experience, and individual human life does begin in chaos:  a baby lives in the flux of sensory experience that William James characterized as a “blooming, buzzing confusion.”  We never stop living in that confusion—we only learn to impose a disciplined, orderly life on top of it.  The literary technique called stream of consciousness attempts to capture the protean shifting of our inner life, in which one second we are remembering the taste of coffee, the next second being stabbed by a random itch, the next moment randomly remembering a moment from childhood, heaven knows why.  But in truth we do a good deal of pretending about our external life as well, much of which is quotidian, eventless or taken up by trivial occurrences, banal.  In 1975, Samuel R. Delany published a novel called Dhalgren, which is 800 pages long because it attempts to relinquish “plot” in order to truthfully capture the texture of ordinary experience.  In one way, it should be boring:  not much is happening most of the time.  But in another way, Dhalgren shows us how much of in-the-moment experience we tune out:  the grain of oak woodwork caught in a momentary beam of bright sunlight,  the feeling of indigestion that we try to ignore while caught in a conversation.  The descriptions of sex are startling because they record much more of what really goes on, making us aware that most such descriptions are highly stylized—ideas about the thing rather than the thing itself, as Wallace Stevens would say.  Dhalgren’s predecessor in the endeavor to capture life as we really live it is Joyce’s Ulysses.  Conventional critics excoriated Ulysses as nihilistic anti-art, but, like much Modernist art, it was an attempt to break out of old habits and formulas and to see what is really there.  Dhalgren looks forward to such phenomena as reality TV, webcams, and social media, as well as diaries and journals—it actually contains excerpts from the main character’s journal. 

But Dhalgren is more than a stream-of-consciousness novel.  Its protagonist has amnesia, does not remember his name or identity, and so goes by the name of Kid or the Kid.  In the first pages, he enters the city of Bellona, which has suffered some strange disaster that is never explained, leaving it partly in ruins and largely unpopulated.  Delany has said that Bellona was modeled on the gutted, half-abandoned inner cities of the time, in other words on a scenario of what may come after decadence during the decline of the West.  But this is not a work of realism:  uncanny things happen in Bellona, such as a second moon in the sky one night, and they are never explained, just as we never learn for sure whether the Ghost in Hamlet is really Hamlet’s father, a demon from hell, or a mass delusion.  This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but in the state that a previous newletter called the liminal, in which the rules structuring ordinary reality break down.  Much of the most advanced contemporary fantasy, such as the type called “slipstream,” is an exploration of the liminal state in which nothing is but what is not.  The civic breakdown of Bellona is paralleled with Kid’s mental disturbance, modeled on a breakdown that Delany had some years before, spending some time institutionalized and in group therapy.  We are never sure how much of Bellona—maybe all of it—is a product of Kid’s mental state.  He loses track of time, from a few hours to a few days, and also suffers from the kind of disorientation in space that Delany suffers because of severe dyslexia.  No answers, and the book swings back, in its final sentence, to its beginning, an Ouroboros serpent that swallows itself.  Indeed, “Dhalgren,” a name Kid finds in a notebook, may be a reversal of Grendal, Beowulf’s monster.  Kid is a kind of hero with a thousand faces, and yet  he has no face, no identity he can be sure of.  In that he is like all of us. 

Frye has said that the descent quest is the paradigm for post-Romantic literature as the ascent myth was for traditional literature such as the Divine Comedy.  Where does the descent end?  One possible answer is King Lear’s:  in nothing, in the abyss.  It is also possible that, at the point of nothingness, we pass through what Blake called a Vortex, a reversal of perception from our ordinary subject-object perspective to something that can hardly be characterized because it transcends the categories of both perception and thought.  Such a mode of being can only be expressed as a series of paradoxes, of a kind not uncommon in Eastern philosophy and religion though unfamiliar to the rationalistic West, which typically condemns such speculations as heretical.  At the end of the Story of All Things, instead of The End, we may find The Beginning.  We sense that the modern world is on the verge of something.  It may be final destruction.  But it also may be passage through what in science fiction has come to be called the Singularity, a black hole to ordinary perception, yet to the imagination a womb/tomb out of which a greater spirit may be born or resurrected.  The Singularity may be a portal through which we pass—the back of a wardrobe, the wall of a train station, a looking-glass.  If we do so, we will no longer be reading the Story of All Things, but living in it.  No one knows what that means, but maybe we will in the end. 

Reference

Frye, Northrop.  The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics.  University of Toronto Press, 1965.  Also in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, edited by Angela Esterhammer.  Volume 16 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, University of Toronto Press, 2005.  35-131.