October 28, 2022
We approach the three-day festival during which the land of the living and the land of the dead become open to each other. The English version of this festival is, or was, known as Allhallowtide. In its Christianized version, October 31 is All Hallows Eve, or Hallowe’en; November 1 is All Saints Day; and November 2 is All Souls Day. Everyone knows about Halloween, and if you grew up Catholic you might know that All Saints Day is a “holy day of obligation,” which means you have to go to Mass. Looked at imaginatively, the three days reflect the three realms of the Catholic Christian Otherworld: hell, heaven, and purgatory. Halloween has infernal associations, which is why children may dress up as ghosts, skeletons, witches, and the like. All Saints celebrates the blessed, especially the martyrs. And All Souls is the day in which people are encouraged to pray for the souls in purgatory.
The Christian festival has most likely taken over some of the features of the Celtic Samhain, a festival marking the end of the harvest and the beginning of the winter, and the American tradition of trick-or-treating has had an older English counterpart in “souling,” in which children went from door to door begging for “soul cakes” in exchange for praying for the souls of the giver’s dead relatives. This week’s newsletter is about being grounded through tradition in one’s ancestral roots, which is one reason I was drawn from an early age to traditional folk music. As a teenager, I knew about souling because I knew by heart the traditional song “A Soulin’” as sung by Peter, Paul, and Mary back in the 60’s:
A soul, a soul, a soul cake Please good missus a soul cake An apple, a pear, a plum, a cherry Any good thing to make us all merry One for Peter, two for Paul Three for Him who made us all.
That is from memory, a memory almost 60 years old, which is how tradition works. Also, during this liminal period of time, it was said that the dead might return and ask for hospitality, so that people set out empty places at the table for them.
But the festival is not limited to a commemoration of ancestors, nor to the idea of salvation. We may wish to speak to the dead because they know things we don’t. We may wish to learn some of the wisdom of the elders, whoever they may be. Yeats has a poem called “All Souls Night” in which he sets out two glasses of wine on All Souls Night, one for himself and one for each of three dead friends. His character sketches of the three are vivid, delightful, and sometimes humorous, because all three were in fact occultists who harked after secret wisdom while they were alive, and all three were eccentrics. Of the third, MacGregor Mathers, he says, “I thought him half a lunatic, half knave, / And told him so, but friendship never ends.” The twist of the poem is that rather than seeking wisdom from the dead, Yeats has wisdom he wishes to impart: “All Souls Night” was originally the Epilogue to Yeats’s visionary prose book A Vision. But he is wryly aware that, for such wisdom, finding an audience is going to be a problem, at least in an age before Substack, so you may have to content yourself with imparting it to the dead:
“I have mummy truths to tell / Whereat the living mock, / Though not for sober ear,” he says, implicitly acknowledging that he himself is one of the eccentrics.
I do have Substack, and assume my audience members are not ghosts, although, hey, everyone is welcome. But nonetheless I choose to summon the dead, in order to explore the mummy truth that we are all members of a community that includes both the living and the departed, who may not be departed after all. The latter may include ancestors and friends, but also kindred spirits and complete strangers. It is a strange reality we live in, and there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Horatio’s philosophy, as Hamlet said on the verge of being visited by one of his own ancestors. Yes, I do seek wisdom: in another poem Yeats calls wisdom “a property of the dead, / A something incompatible with life.” He should know: as one of the great dead now himself, perhaps he realizes that, while living, he was often not very wise, and that some of his foolishness consisted of idealizing the ancestors in the wrong way, of romanticizing the aristocracy and “tradition” in a way that tilted him towards the Irish version of fascism. If that is all that ancestry and “blood” signify, what my students have learned, rightly, to call “privilege,” we are better off without them.
But what if the wisdom we may learn from the dead is neither some kind of hidden knowledge nor some kind of pride in an elite lineage but the example of how to be a good human being? We need such wisdom because it is so hard these days, at a time when we seem near enough to destroying ourselves several times over, to retain any kind of faith in the human race. There are times when the seemingly boundless selfishness and cruelty that is sweeping the world provokes a despairing anger that risks turning into the cry of Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “Exterminate all the brutes!” God would have spared Sodom and Gomorrah if he had been able to find just one good person in them. That is why I think now of Rachel Denham, who died on August 25, 2022, and who was one of the truly good human beings that I have known. Rachel was an artist. One of her prints hangs in my living room, and by good chance was visible in the background of the photo of me holding my first copy of The Productions of Time. It is titled, with deep significance, “Canaan Valley.” Rachel’s artistic gifts were matched by her warm humanity. She was the wife of my friend, fellow Frye scholar, and collaborator Robert D. Denham. That marriage lasted 62 years, which means it began when I was 9 years old—and I am now 71. I cannot wish for a final apocalypse wiping out the human race like the vermin that so many of them are when I think that it holds, however rarely, people like Rachel.
I have my actual ancestors, of course, starting with my parents. My birthday is in the spring, the season of rebirth, but my ancestry is autumnal: my mother was born on October 25 and my father on All Soul’s Day, November 2. It is perhaps appropriate for my dad to be linked to the time of praying for souls in purgatory, for my dad’s life was a kind of purgatory in which he tormented himself in various ways, trying to expiate a sense of guilt that caused him to be endlessly self-destructive. But although his self-destructiveness sometimes drew others into its wake, he did many good things as well. If not for his inheritance I would not own this house that I have so mythologized and hope never to leave until it is time to join the ancestors myself. My mother is, like Rachel Denham, one of the best human beings I have known. When she died at the age of 92, the outpouring of warm feelings and memories at her memorial service caught me by surprise, although it shouldn’t have. In her last years, I got used to members of the nursing home staff coming up to me and telling me how much they thought of my mom—one of them even came to her memorial service. I owe her far more than maternal care, though there was plenty of that. My grounding in the imagination is a grounding in the feminine, a subject that will become a newsletter in itself some day. For now suffice to say that I get my love of the arts from her, clear back to her reading us bedtime stories night after night. If we are speaking of salvation, it is that grounding that has saved me.
Neither my brother nor I had children: there will be no more ancestors. But there are spiritual ancestors and spiritual offspring, using “spiritual” to include everything non-literal, whether supernatural, psychological, intellectual, or literary. The ancestors of the spirit are non-biological. They are mentors who in fact lead us outside of both the biological and the social: they initiate us into an expanded world beyond the practical world, beyond family loyalties, beyond our social conditioning. As readers of this newsletter will be aware, my spiritual ancestors are Northrop Frye and C.G. Jung. Everything I try to do as teacher, as writer, goes back to their example, the way they led me out of the Plato’s-cave of a very limited upbringing, showing me that the limits were largely the limits of my own “mind forg’d manacles,” as Blake put it.
I do not, incidentally, think of these as symbolic father-son relationships. I think our culture is far too obsessed with father-son relationships even on a social level. Importing such Oedipal authority relations into the realm of the imagination reduces imagination to the level of power relations. When that happens, there are only two choices. One may become the “good son,” defending and upholding the truth of the father, or the “bad son” who rebels and ends by trying to kill the father. Frye’s most famous follower—though Frye repeatedly said he did not want followers, and meant it—was the critic Harold Bloom, who began as Frye’s evangelist but in mid-life rebelled and, following Freud, began preaching an anti-Frye theory called the “anxiety of influence,” in which “strong” writers become strong by deliberately misreading the work of their mentor-precursors, “killing” them in the sense of subverting the precursors’ visions in order to validate their own. Otherwise they would be reduced to the role of weak imitators. It was utterly clear, despite Bloom’s denials (Frye noted it himself in one of his private notebooks) that the precursor that Bloom was trying to “kill” was Frye himself, about whom he grew more and more aggressively negative the older he became. Bloom’s theory has its value in describing a kind of intellectual neurosis (and there are female critics and creative writers who have spoken just as aggressively about the need to symbolically kill the father and stop being a “good girl”). It also explains the “good son” dynamic, the disciples who orbit around a major intellectual or creative figure like moons around a gas giant. In the community of Frye scholarship, these were sometimes referred to as “small Frye.” Because he tried, unlike Frye, to create a movement, Jung was even more plagued with the kind of hanger-on disciples that give any movement a bad name. But, as a general theory of the imagination, Bloom’s theory is reductive and inadequate: it is a theory of the failure of imagination.
In an essay called “The Search for Acceptable Words,” Frye himself characterized his own sense of the role of mentors or imaginative-spiritual guides in a remarkable passage in which he says that “I think it advisable 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 sort 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” (15). In one of his central essays, “Expanding Eyes,” which has given me the title for this newsletter, though he himself borrowed it from his preceptor Blake, he is even more direct: “In the study of literature the element of personal authority, surrendering one’s own imagination to that of some master of it, cannot be eliminated, and the relation of master and disciple always remains at its centre” (103). And yet, within a page, he deliteralizes it: “However it operates, there is always a sense in which criticism is a form of autobiography, implicitly dedicated to a guru or spiritual preceptor, even if the guru is the Anonymous who wrote the great ballads, or a cultural composite like ‘Augustan’ or ‘Romantic,’ or a series of writers forming a psychological ‘tradition’” (104). This is not just a contradiction, for, as Frye goes on to explain, “the conception of ‘personality’ in the study of literature, or the further practice of it, moves its centre of gravity from the ordinary to the poetic personality, from the actual man to the body of what he has written, or what was written in his age” (104).
In other words, what is necessary is to grow up inside a vision, an imaginative revelation, so vast that it breaks through the narrowness of personal upbringing and social conditioning that we are often not even aware of until one day something happens to wake us up—and, with a writer, that “something” is likely to be the discovery of a touchstone text or author. With Frye, it was William Blake. But the story Frye tells, in “The Search for Acceptable Words” and elsewhere, about his decisive encounter with Blake, is more complicated. It occurred when, as a student, he was up in the middle of the night trying to write a paper about Blake’s relationship to his spiritual preceptor, which was Milton. In an epiphany that determined the rest of his career, he realized that the relationship between Milton and Blake was that both poets were trying to recreate a common vision that they found in the Bible. The real preceptor or ancestor was not a personality but that vision.
Mind you, in Blake’s case the Biblical vision was mediated by Milton’s interpretation of the Bible, which Blake felt was at once partly profound and partly inadequate. After all, it was Blake who said that, in Paradise Lost, Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it. Blake has an extraordinary long poem called Milton, in which Milton himself comes to be so dissatisfied with his interpretation of the Bible in Paradise Lost that he leaves Eternity, the realm of the ancestors, and descends to the fallen world. His way is blocked by a Jungian-style shadow figure who represents the errors of vision that remained in Paradise Lost, the errors that caused Milton to “justify the ways of God to men” by affirming the authority of an arbitrary sky-god who is really only a projection of the “mind forg’d manacles” that keep the human race imprisoned. In a scene that only Blake would have the audacity to perpetrate, Milton wrestles with that shadow on the banks of the same river on which Jacob wrestled with his angel. Victorious, he reaches Blake and descends into him via his left foot, after which he becomes a kind of muse dictating Blake’s own poetry, this time with the errors of vision clarified.
Frye says that what he learned from writing that student essay was “the principle of the mythological framework. The Bible had provided a frame of mythology for European poets” (17). However, we have to be careful, because in the very next paragraph Frye makes clear that he means the opposite of the reduction of European literature to some kind of Biblical allegory. Instead, the Bible expands into “Biblical mythology,” which in turn expands to include much that “orthodoxy" was suspicious of or actively disapproved of:
Further, Biblical mythology had not remained static, but had grown with a catholicity greater than that of the Church itself, annexing the whole of Classical mythology, and the erotic or “Courtly Love” literature as well, as contrapuntal descants on its own theme. The fact that one mythology could absorb another indicated that all mythologies were imaginatively much alike. (17)
Or, as Blake put it, “All religions are one.” This led eventually to the central principle of the Anatomy of Criticism, that all texts form a total “order of words,” not because they agree with one another but because they all grow out of the same mythological framework. The fact that mythologies are imaginatively much alike does not, however, keep them from being ideologically in conflict. The most famous preceptor-disciple relationship in literature is that of Virgil to Dante in the Divine Comedy. Virgil is quite literally responsible for Dante’s salvation, and by the end of their journey together Dante and Virgil address each other as “my father” and “my son.” That does not keep Dante from consigning Virgil to hell because he is a pagan—nor does it keep him from damning his old teacher Brunetto Latini for being gay. This is another kind of anxiety of influence than the personal power-trip kind described by Bloom, and it occurs often enough. C.S. Lewis does not consign his mentor, the fantasist George MacDonald, to hell, but he does write a whole book, The Great Divorce, for the purpose of dragging MacDonald on stage to recant his heretical belief in universal salvation.
What in a traditional culture is sometimes described as a cult of ancestors is in a modern culture the reverence for, or at least the revolving around, a body of texts that express that culture’s sense of its own identity and purpose. What is valid in the reverence for “the classics” or “the great books”—and there is much that is quite invalid—is an intuition that, beneath their time-bound limitations, there is within them, and potentially within all books, some kind of universal “wisdom of the ancients” capable of transforming and redeeming not merely our own culture but humanity itself taken as a total community. The ancestors in our time take the form of what is sometimes called “the canon,” but Frye expands the canon from its elitist sense of an ideologically privileged body of texts to the entire order of words. The mythology and literature of the past are the ancestral spirits. In psychologizing the literary tradition, Harold Bloom gets one thing right: despite all the academic talk of signifiers and structures, a book is what Milton in Areopagitica said it was: a living thing, the distillation of a human being. In the Paradiso, Dante shows the spirits of the blessed uniting in the image of the “heavenly rose,” a symbol of total community. As I said in The Productions of Time, the imagination has a dual form of a vision of order and a vision of love. The literary and mythological tradition is potentially—not actually but potentially—a vision of love, “the universal form, / the fusion of all things” (Paradiso 33.91-92). It is the divine vision itself, of which Dante says beautifully, “I saw how it contains within its depths / all things bound in a single book by love / of which creation is the scattered leaves” (Paradiso, 33.85-87, Mark Musa translation).
Mystical high talk, yes, and we are not on high but in a fallen world. Dante knows that: he learned it the hard way. At one point, he describes his journey as having been “from Florence to a people just and sane” (Paradiso 31.39)—in which “from Florence” should be pronounced with the sound of someone spitting. In cantos 15-17 of the Paradiso, Dante converses with his own ancestor, his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida. The wisdom of the ancients? Careful what you wish for. Cacciaguida says to Dante: you know those vague rumors you’ve been hearing in the course of your journey? What they mean is that your city of Florence is going to exile you next year, not out of justice but as a purely political move. But Cacciaguida also tells him that he must go back and write the book he has contemplated writing, even though, yes, it will infuriate the powerful. Your poem will hold in a balance the ideal vision of the community of the dead in eternity with a denunciation of the corruptions of time, especially by the false community of Florence. Both are necessary. As for the latter, he counsels,
let what you write reveal all you have seen, and let those men who itch scratch where it hurts. Though when your words are taken in at first they may taste bitter, but once well-digested they will become a vital nutriment. (17.128-32, Mark Musa translation)
If war is politics by another means, literature is also politics by another means. What is universal and enduring in the cultural tradition, in the order of words, is a vision of love. But that vision is darkened and corrupted at every point by ideology, by the will to power, so much so at times that it is invisible, buried like Troy, waiting for a Schliemann to arrive, equipped with faith and a spade.
We have become intensely aware of how all the productions of time are pervaded and betrayed by ideological distortions born of the will to power. Much, perhaps most, of the literary and cultural criticism of the last half century has been obsessed with exposing the dirty secrets on which Western culture has been founded. A history of recent literary criticism reads like the plot of A Long Day’s Journey into Night, an endless, relentless, angry dragging of all the family skeletons out of the closet. What is new to some extent in recent years is the spreading of this iconoclasm from academic high culture to the general population. The wisdom of the ancients? It is by now undeniable that our “great tradition” was formed on the basis of the exclusion of all members of the community except for heterosexual white males, the alternative to being “disappeared” and made invisible being to be stereotyped and caricatured. Most of the formerly heroic figures of American history, from the Founding Fathers forward, are now known to have been ideologically flawed: racist, sexist, elitist, religiously bigoted. Moreover, the iconoclasm is “progressive” in the sense of moving forward at an increasing pace. It is not just the old idols that have been knocked off their perches but the advocates of social change of just a few years ago have been to a degree demoted. The feminists of the 90’s are now seen as self-absorbed white heterosexual women indifferent to the plight of women of different races and social classes. The gay and lesbian activists of even more recent times have been knocked off balance by the issues of non-binary sexuality (and asexuality) and by the trans controversy. No one knows what terms to use for anyone anymore because they are changing so rapidly that no one can keep up, and there is no consensus anyway.
Such rhetoric usually heralds a conservative manifesto about returning to the good old days and the good old ways, but make no mistake. I have not recanted, and remain a progressive—if for no other reason than that I was there for the good old days and ways, and they were not good at all. We need to think, and rethink, about all kinds of differences in race, ethnicity, gender, and social class, and it is not going to be pleasant, because release of repression also releases pent-up anger. That said, it is true that self-righteous accusation can all too easily become a power trip disguised as a crusade for social justice.
Animals have the order of nature hard-wired into them in the form of instincts that govern their behavior in survival-oriented ways. Having lost such instincts, human beings have created an order of culture, of which Frye’s order of words is a part, a map of meaning, values, and proper behavior that is our substitute for instinct. But what happens when the order of culture can no longer orient and guide large numbers of people, when it is seen as discredited and irrelevant? It is now a century since the Modernist writers began worrying about this, and their all-too-frequent solution, an abandonment of democracy in favor of some kind of authoritarianism that will quell the chaos by imposing order, by violence if necessary, has trickled down to the grass roots—to the right-wing political parties who are presently planning some kind of takeover. But what is the alternative on the left?
There has always been the temptation of what Jacques Barzun called abolitionism. Western culture is fading, and, in its decline, gripped by a death wish. The best thing we can do would be to abolish it, without proposing anything to replace it, for any replacement would merely partake of the corruptions of the old order. Sometimes the abolition is intended literally, as with those who advocate abolishing Classics departments because the classics are nothing but “white supremacy.” A greater temptation, however, is the reduction of literary study to ideological critique: the canonical works are studied only to reveal their errors. I am not a conspiracy theorist about this: while there are no doubt a minority of fanatics out there who believe in nothing but a fierce revisionism, I think most professors of literature still find much of value in older works in addition to their errors, and they have many students whose feelings are similarly mixed in a positive way. But the positive side of the critique tends to be a diffident and undercover operation. I have been teaching the old canonical works through a long career, and I do not minimize their ideological blind spots. The Iliad glorifies what we now call toxic masculinity and reduces women to being “war prizes.” But it also shows its hero’s greatest moment as the time he steps outside his culture’s value system, affirming a universal humanity through compassion for the enemy king. There is a part of the Iliad that deserves to be abolished, or cancelled as we now say. There is also a part that transcends its own ideological blindness and begins a long tradition of re-defining what a heroic act really is, one that reaches a turning point in the Romantic movement, in which a heroic act becomes an act of imagination that potentially remakes both self and world, and thus provides a program for a kind of social activism that is less passive than a mere “do no evil,” a motto that after all did not serve Google very well.
William Kennedy’s Ironweed won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, was included in Harold Bloom’s book The Western Canon, and is canonical to me personally. Taking place over the three days from Halloween to All Souls Day, and having an epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio, it recounts the return to his family of Frances Phelan, 22 years after he fled and became a homeless wanderer out of guilt for having accidentally dropped and killed his infant son. In the opening scene, Francis has a job digging graves in the cemetery in which his son Gerald is buried. In a novel that contains almost unbearably realistic portrayals of the plight of homeless people, we are given, without explanation, a description of Gerald, who is alive, not in some transcendent heaven, but here and now, active and caring about his father: “In his grave, a cruciformed circle, Gerald watched the advent of his father and considered what action might be appropriate to their meeting” (17). Frances does not perceive Gerald: it is Frances who is in fact the dead man walking and Gerald who tries to help him out of his inner purgatory:
Gerald, through an act of silent will, imposed on his father the pressing obligation to perform his final acts of expiation for abandoning the family. You will not know, the child silently said, what these acts are until you have performed them all. And after you have performed them you will not understand that they were expiatory any more than you have understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me. (19)
What is Gerald? Are we to take him literally? What does that even mean? At the other end of a novel that has seven chapters corresponding to the seven levels of Dante’s purgatorial mountain, Frances “sensed for the first time in his life the workings of something other than conscious will within himself: insight into a pattern, an overview of all the violence in his history.” A little later, “Francis’s hands, as he looked at them now, seemed to be messengers from some outlaw corner of his psyche, artificers of some involuntary doom element in his life” (144-45). Both Gerald and his violence-working hands are manifestations of a corner of his psyche beyond his conscious will. Hamlet came to believe that there is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will. But Frances is no passive figure puppeteered by grace. He chooses—his heroic act is to reject the temptation of his own guilt, to throw off the neurotic guilt that is his version of Blake’s “mind forg’d manacles”: “for the guilt he felt was not worth the dying. It served nothing except nature’s insatiable craving for blood. The trick was to live, to beat the bastards, survive the mob and that fateful chaos, and show them all what a man can do to set things right, once he sets his mind to it” (207).
Ironweed takes the wisdom of the ancestors, in this case Dante, and transvalues it, discards the obsession with guilt and damnation but affirms the symbolism that points to a death-and-rebirth process in which we live and move and have our being. It is this kind of double movement, of simultaneous repudiation and affirmation, that I have tried to advocate, in my teaching, in The Productions of Time, and in these newsletters. In “Little Gidding,” the last of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, the speaker meets a “familiar compound ghost” who represents all of Eliot’s own preceptors, including Dante. There are echoes of Dante’s meeting with his teacher Brunetto Latini in hell, but in fact the fire symbolism that pervades the poem is purgatorial: “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.” As for ideological battles, the ghost says, “These things have served their purpose: let them be. / So with your own, and pray they be forgiven / By others as I pray you to forgive / Both good and bad.”
There is an image that passes from the Odyssey to Virgil’s Aeneid to Dante’s Purgatorio. Odysseus, in the underworld, tries three times to embrace his dead mother, but his arms close upon air. That image is repeated when Aeneas tries three times to embrace his dead wife Creusa amidst the burning towers of Troy. And Dante tries on the shores of purgatory to embrace his dead friend Casella. The image represents the continuity of tradition, an image repeated across centuries, each time in a different context. During the festival of the dead, we summon our ghosts, the ancestors, our collective mythology or tradition. We cannot hold on to them, and may come to doubt whether they are even there. But they continue to haunt us nonetheless, and if we ignore all their foolishness, all their obsolete ideological babble, we may be able to hear beneath it the sound of an ancestral wisdom that may help save us from our own foolishness, telling us across a span of centuries that we are not alone.
References
Frye, Northrop. “The Search for Acceptable Words” and “Expanding Eyes.” In Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society. Indiana University Press, 1976. 3-26 and 99-122 respectively.
Kennedy, William. Ironweed. Penguin, 1984.