UNIVERSIDAD DE COSTA RICA SISTEMA DE ESTUDIOS DE POSGRADO GALWAY KINNELL'S JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVERY IN THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES Tesis sometida a la consideración de la Comisión del Programa de Estudios de Posgrado en Literatura para optar por el grado y título de Maestría Académica en Literatura Inglesa ELIZABETH QUIRÓS GARCÍA Ciudad Universitaria Rodrigo Facio 2019 Dedication I dedicate this thesis to Juan Pablo, Mari, José, my mother and my departed father. ii Acknowledgements I thank my family for being with me, believing in me and always loving me. Thanks to Ph.D. Norman Marín Calderón for all his support, advice, patience, and work and to Dra. Sandra Arguello Borbón for her unconditional collaboration. To Máster Martín Arguedas Núñez for his encouragement and to Sra. Lilliana Retana Campos for listening to me. iii iv TABLE OF CONTENT INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................... 1 1. Justification ........................................................................................................................ 1 2. Statement of the problem ................................................................................................. 2 3. Scope of topic ................................................................................................................... 6 4. Objectives .......................................................................................................................... 9 A. General objective .............................................................................................................. 9 B. Specific objectives ............................................................................................................ 9 D. Methodological framework ............................................................................................ 10 CHAPTER I .............................................................................................................................. 13 ANTECEDENTS TO THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES ........................................................ 13 A. Review of literature ...................................................................................................... 13 1. The poet: His life and work ........................................................................................ 15 2. Simplicity in the natural world and the primitive ...................................................... 19 3. Parenthood and marriage ........................................................................................... 25 4. Politics and society ...................................................................................................... 27 5. Ephemerality and eternity of life: Mortality and/in The book of nightmares ......... 33 B. Theoretical and referential framework ...................................................................... 38 1. Jung’s analytical theory of symbols, archetypes, and images ............................... 41 The individuation process ............................................................................................... 42 Archetypes........................................................................................................................ 47 2. Joseph Campbell and his theory of the monomyth ................................................. 51 Defining myth and mythology......................................................................................... 54 Myth as ideology .............................................................................................................. 57 3. Northrop Frye’s mythical criticism ............................................................................. 59 Mythoi theory .................................................................................................................... 60 4. Structuralism, deconstruction and main theorists: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida and Jonathan Culler .............................................................................................. 64 Literary structuralism ....................................................................................................... 66 CHAPTER II ............................................................................................................................. 74 UNDERSTANDING THE FUNCTIONS OF MYTH THROUGHOUT ................................ 74 v THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES ............................................................................................. 74 A. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 76 B. The functions of myth ..................................................................................................... 78 1. The mystical function .................................................................................................. 79 2. The cosmological function ......................................................................................... 91 3. The sociological function .......................................................................................... 101 4. The pedagogical function ......................................................................................... 119 CHAPTER III .......................................................................................................................... 132 STEPPING INTO THE JOURNEY: THE HERO IN THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES ... 132 A. Introduction .................................................................................................................... 132 B. The archetype of the hero’s journey........................................................................... 135 A. Separation or departure ........................................................................................... 138 2. Trials and victories of initiation ................................................................................ 147 3. Return or reintegration with (to) society ................................................................. 177 CHAPTER IV ......................................................................................................................... 193 THE USE OF NATURAL IMAGERY IN THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES ....................... 193 TO UNDERSTAND THE LIFE-DEATH BINARY OPPOSITION ..................................... 193 A. Introduction .................................................................................................................... 193 B. Symbols and their context in The book of nightmares ......................................... 194 C. Natural imagery and the resolution of binary oppositions ....................................... 197 1. The stones ................................................................................................................. 198 2. The trees .................................................................................................................... 204 3. Insects and other animals ........................................................................................ 211 The bear ......................................................................................................................... 214 The hen ........................................................................................................................... 220 The fly and the flea ........................................................................................................ 225 Classical elements of nature and the resolution of binary oppositions ...................... 228 Fire .................................................................................................................................. 231 Water ............................................................................................................................... 233 Air .................................................................................................................................... 237 Earth ................................................................................................................................ 239 vi CONCLUSION(S) .................................................................................................................. 247 BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................................... 252 vii RESUMEN Este trabajo de investigación se basa en un análisis del poemario The book of nightmares de Galway Kinnell utilizando como base teórica el enfoque mítico. Con este fin, se utilizará el aporte de Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell y Octavio Paz principalmente; así también, se discutirá el trabajo de Claude Levi- Strauss, Jacques Derrida y Jonathan Culler para estudiar el concepto de estructuralismo y el de opuestos binarios. Esto con el objetivo de analizar el viaje que el yo lírico realiza para comprender que la vida y la muerte son una unidad indisoluble. Es así como, el yo lírico inicia un viaje de auto-descubrimiento durante el cual comprende las diferentes funciones del mito en la vida de los individuos, su necesidad de completar ciclos que permitan su desarrollo dentro de una sociedad y, finalmente, comprender que hay elementos concretos que proporcionan al ser humano la oportunidad de descubrirse en la naturaleza. viii ABSTRACT This thesis presents the analysis, from a mythical and archetypical stance, of the hero’s journey in Galway Kinnell’s The book of nightmares. Hence, the scholarly contributions of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and Octavio Paz will be mainly utilized; likewise, the work of Claude Levi-Strauss, Jacques Derrida and Jonathan Culler will be considered and discussed to study the concept of structuralism and binary oppositions. All this with the objective of analyzing the journey of self- discovery of the persona to understand that the binary oppositions of life and death are a unit. Also, the quester learns about the different functions of myth in the development of individuals as well as their need to complete cycles in life that will allow them to grow emotionally and psychologically. Hence, the hero will comprehend that concrete natural elements may provide human beings with the opportunity of learning about themselves. ix x 1 INTRODUCTION 1. Justification Galway Kinnell is one of the major North American contemporary poets although his work is unknown to many. Kinnell is “one of our most accomplished poets, a fact that is one of the best kept secrets among contemporary writers, known only to a select group of poets who recognize his skills” (Calhoun 1992, p. ix). Kinnell sculpts the words of life because, when experiencing his poetry, “[i]ntelligence becomes less cerebral and involves the heart and other old caves of the body, and poetry resists becoming what someone has called ‘upper-brain-roof-chatter’ and dwells, among earthly things, and consciousness deepens, running in the deeper passages of life” (Nelson 1987, p. 1). In fact, Kinnell succeeds in making poetry a work of the everyday life: objects, animals, feelings, and diverse situations that make people participate of the action of living. The aim of this study is to analyze Kinnell’s The book of nightmares from a mythological approach. While there have been different approaches to reading Kinnell’s book-length poem, their primary concern is Kinnell’s work in relation to other poets of his generation rather than the analysis of the book-length poem as a unity in which archetypes, myth, and dichotomies intersect. Hence, there are very few works that analyze the poem from an archetypal stance and the aim is to contribute to scholarship with this research. Therefore, for the purpose of this study, the Jungian archetypal approach will be assumed as well as Campbell’s pattern of 2 journey of the hero. Moreover, the analysis of how this latter archetype is present in the poem will be studied taking into consideration the use of natural imagery to be able to understand the binary opposition of life and death. 2. Statement of the problem For decades, some critics (Aristotle1, St. Thomas de Aquinas, Locke, Ortega y Gasset, Gould, to mention the most prominent) have believed in the widespread idea that the human mind is a blank slate and that its structure surfaces from the processes of socialization humankind goes through, such as religion, family, and school. In contrast, others (Pinker, Jung) deem true that the human mind is not a blank slate and there are undistinguishable psychic structures (archetypes) that are common to every person inhabiting the world. Carl G. Jung (1903-1955) belongs to the latter group. For him, the symbolic elements of cultures around the world can be very alike because they materialized from the archetypes that are shared by humankind. Consequently, the primeval past, shared by all, develops into the foundation of our psyche prompting us to act in accordance to not only to what 1 For Aristotle poetry. “is a more philosophical and higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular” (in Butcher 1951, p. 35). Moreover, according to Butcher (1951) the object of poetry in Aristotelian thought is “as of all the fine arts, [is] to produce an emotional delight, a pure and elevated pleasure” (p. 221) 3 humanity considers characteristic of a specific time and place but to some knowledge of a disremembered past that echoes the present. According to Jung (2006) in his book The undiscovered self, “by exploring our own souls, we come upon the instincts and their world of imagery should throw some light on the powers slumbering in the psyche, of which we are seldom aware so long as all goes well” (p. 107). As he states, there is much more in our psyche than we know, and regarding art, poetry being one of its genres, Jung affirms that “great art till now has always derived its fruitfulness from the myth, from the unconscious process of symbolization which continues through the ages and which, as the primordial manifestation of the human spirit, will continue to be the root of all creation in the future” (p. 110). If these universal patterns that seem to revolve around cultural products as well as the unconscious realm have an impact on our behavior, there is another more detailed archetype, delineated by the scholar Joseph Campbell (1938-1987) who, utilizing the works of Jung, Freud, and Gennep, built a model of the hero in the literary text and his/her journey. This journey is referred to as the “monomyth,” a cyclical journey that is carried out by the hero; indeed, for Campbell, there is a primary structure in all mythology that focuses in three general stages: separation or departure, the trials and victories of initiation, and the return and reintegration with society. According to Campbell (2004b), in The hero with a thousand faces, “everywhere, no matter what the sphere of interest (whether religious, political or 4 personal), the really creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world; and what happens in the interval of the hero’s nonentity, so that he comes back as one reborn, made great and filled with creative power” (p. 28). For this scholar, the journey of the hero becomes a means to study what life is about and the responsibilities that individuals, as members of a community, may have. Another vital element found in Campbell’s theory is the existence of a duality, not just in humankind as Jung states (anima and animus), but in every aspect of life. Accordingly, for every representation a person may find in the world, concrete and abstract, there will be another representation that is opposite but equal; and this duality will allude to all things being one and the same. Additionally, Campbell discusses the element of the “cycle of life” (cosmogonic cycle) in which the hero goes on the journey to achieve enlightenment. And it is this latter what the hero in Kinnell’s book-length poem The book of nightmares seeks. Subversion found in Kinnell’s literary piece consists of a journey of self- discovery for which the acceptance and experience of death through a life cycle, in which living involves death and death living is not only necessary but essential. Most human beings have been taught to have living as the center of their interests and fear death. Though, for Kinnell the latter starts at the moment of birth; it is a paradox that when we start living in the world we also start dying. In other words, “living life” is accepting death as our companion; besides, according to Kinnell’s vision of the world, both are part of a necessary cycle to become one with nature. Octavio Paz 5 (1995) in his book El laberinto de la soledad, confirms this revelation when he states that ¿Quizás nacer sea morir y morir nacer? Nada sabemos, todo nuestro ser aspira a escapar de esos contrarios que nos desgarran, pues si todo (conciencia de sí mismo, tiempo, razón, costumbres, hábitos) tiende a ser de nosotros los expulsados de la vida, todo también nos empuja a volver, a descender al seno creador de donde fuimos arrancados. Y le pedimos al amor – que, siendo deseo es hambre de comunión, hambre de caer y morir tanto como de renacer – que nos dé un pedazo de vida verdadera, de muerte verdadera. No le pedimos la felicidad, ni el reposo, sino un instante, sólo un instante, de vida plena, en la que se fundan los contrarios y vida y muerte, tiempo y eternidad pacten. Oscuramente sabemos que vida y muerte no son sino dos movimientos, antagónicos pero complementarios, de una misma realidad. Creación y destrucción se funden en el acto amoroso; y durante una fracción de segundo el hombre entrevé un estado más perfecto (p. 343)2. 2 “Perhaps being born is dying and dying is being born? We know nothing, our whole being longing to escape opposites that tear us apart, if everything (consciousness of ourselves, time, reason, customs) belongs to us, those expelled from life, everything pushes us forward to go back too, to descend to the bosom of the creator from which we were pulled out. And we ask love – that being desire is hunger for communion, longing to fall and die just as to being reborn – to give us a piece of true life, true death. We do not ask for happiness, nor for rest, but for an instant, one single instant of complete life in which the opposites, life and death, and time and eternity, merge and come to an agreement. Obscurely, we know that life and death are but two movements, antagonistic but complementary of the same reality. Creation and destruction merge in the loving act; and during a fraction of a second, man has a glimpse to a more perfect state” (my translation). 6 Like Paz, Kinnell believes that humanity denies itself the deepest experience of real life: there has to be a reconciliation of binary oppositions3. As Paz states, people look for an instant to complete life and this can only be achieved when polarities come together and become one in ephemeral flashes. 3. Scope of topic Considering the reading of The book of nightmares through an archetypical approach, myth is essential. Thus, from the many differing theoretical approaches to myth and archetypes, those of Northrop Frye, Carl Gustav Jung, and Joseph Campbell are favorable for this particular study due to the fact that these scholars work with the mythical and archetypal position. Consequently, these theoretical frames will offer the approach for reading the book-length poem aiming to converge on the relation between the content and context of the text with the theories chosen for the analysis. Accordingly, the theories of Jung and Campbell will be interrelated in that they develop a critical basis for discussing the concept of myth and the archetype of the hero’s journey. Jung (2006), in The undiscovered self, indicates 3 According to Selden (1989), “’Binary oppositions’ (BO’s) are fundamental to structuralist thought. They also appear to be fundamental not only to human thought in general but even in some cases to the natural order itself. Forms of binarism are present in human thought from the earliest tunes. Dualisms in philosophy and religion (subject and object, God and man, mind and the external world, organic and mechanical, temporal and eternal, and so on) are the very foundations of entire world- views. The concept of ‘privatives’ is also important in this context. We can describe the world in terms of the absence of certain qualities. Darkness is the absence of light; the iron is cold when it lacks heat; an object is still when it lacks movement. (…) Structuralists have argued that binary oppositions are fundamental to human language, cognition and communication. We use BO’s to mark differences in an otherwise apparently random sequence of features, and thus to give shape to our experience of the universe” (pp. 55-56). 7 that an archetype “when represented to the mind, appears as an image which expresses the nature of the instinctive impulse visually and concretely, like a picture” (p. 81). It is through the reading of The book of nightmares from a mythical and archetypal stance that the function of the hero’s journey will be analyzed, alerting readers to specific and precise constructions of the journey to attain the resolution of binary oppositions (life-death) when “one/ and zero/ walk off together” (Kinnell 1971a, p. 73). In Kinnell’s The book of nightmares, the three main phases of the monomyth will be analyzed as follows: 1. Separation or departure: a classic situation in which the hero faces his call and needs to enter the dark forest, find the great tree and the chatting brook besides underestimating the façade of the carrier of the power of fate. These elements can be found in poems I, II, and III. 2. Trials and victories of initiation: this second traditional phase in the monomyth represents the movement forward into a hazardous journey that may be physical or psychological, premeditated or accidental. And so, it happens in The book of nightmares. Poems IV to VIII lead the persona into an unknown world where he listens and sees symbolic elements of life and death and when he feels trapped in the face of life as a fly may feel trapped in a spider’s 8 web, feeling alone for he “has no one to turn to because God is my enemy. He gave me lust and joy and cut off my hands” (Kinnell 1971a, p. 30). 3. Return and reintegration with society: after undertaking different ordeals and learning his lesson, the hero needs to bring back to society the knowledge acquired throughout the journey. In poems IX and X, the hero returns, positioning himself “On the path winding/ upward, toward the high valley” (Kinnell 1971a, p. 65). As a final point, regardless of the classification of Galway Kinnell as a postmodernist, neoromantic, and imaginative poet, most of the criticism on his writings deals with the interpretative approaches to his poems and his distinctive style and themes, but no analyses seem to have been done in terms of this research. Consequently, utilizing both, the mythical and archetypal perspective, poses a commendable opportunity to demonstrate that this theoretical approach is still a valuable means for literary texts. 9 4. Objectives A. General objective To analyze, from a mythical and archetypical stance, the function of the hero’s journey in Kinnell’s The book of nightmares as a process of self-discovery throughout the celebratory resolution of the binary oppositions of the life-death cycle. B. Specific objectives 1. To examine the different functions of myth in the poem-book. 2. To characterize the archetype of the hero’s journey in the ten-part poem. 3. To analyze the use of natural imagery in The book of nightmares to acquire understanding of the resolution of the life-death binary oppositions. 10 D. Methodological framework The present study aims at analyzing, from a Jungian archetypal perspective and Campbell’s mythological patterns, the function of myth and the archetype of the hero’s journey in Kinnell’s The book of nightmares as a process of self-discovery throughout the celebratory resolution of binary oppositions of the life-death cycle. In other words, this research concentrates on the persona’s inner process of exploration and the resulting acquisition of self-knowledge as two opposites, life and death. This theoretical approach will consider the poem’s persona as a mirror to trace myth and symbols as recurrent byproducts of humanity’s collective imagination. For the purpose of this analysis, the conceptualization of archetypes will be utilized on the literary text, for as scholar Edinger (1972) asserts, Jung’s most basic and far-reaching discovery is the collective unconscious or archetypal psyche. Through his researches, we know how the individual psyche is not just a product of personal experience. It also has a pre-personal or transpersonal dimension which is manifested in universal patterns and images such as are found in all the world’s religions and mythologies (p. 3). These archetypal images present in Western culture, which many times refer to primitive phenomena, activate features of life, death, birth, and heroes, among others, in all kinds of texts. Thus, to be able to complete the research objectives, this thesis will be divided in four main stages, being the first, an introductory chapter in which the reasons for discussing Kinnell’s poem-book will be presented as well 11 as the statement of the problem and scope of topic. Secondly, a chapter will be devoted to the review of literature that will present the work of Galway Kinnell being discussed through the works of different critics and writers; moreover, the theoretical framework that will sustain the analysis of the book length poem will also be presented. In this case, the work of Carl G. Jung, Joseph Campbell and Northrop Frye, mainly, will be examined to understand the journey of the hero in The book of nightmares. Outlines of the theoretical positions of the different theorists will be offered and the relevance of each in relation to reading myth and archetype will be demonstrated. Nevertheless, there will also be a segment on structuralism and its scholars, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), and Jonathan Culler (1944-) specifically to discuss the concept of binary oppositions, interpretation, ideology and semiotics. Thirdly, the discussion and analysis of the poetic work will be divided in three chapters, one that will examine the different functions of myth in the poem-book; another will characterize the archetype of the hero’s journey in the ten-part poetic work; and the last one will analyze the use of natural imagery in The book of nightmares to expose the resolution of the life-death binary opposition. The final stage in this investigation will consist on the conclusions reached after completing the analysis of Kinnell’s work. Hopefully, this last section will propose that this approach for analyzing postmodern poetry can provoke further 12 critical inquiry in the field of poetical studies through a mythical and archetypal stance, even though different theories and approaches materialize continually. 13 CHAPTER I ANTECEDENTS TO THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES A. Review of literature Some critics have designated Kinnell’s poetry as an example of postmodernist4 poetry5 for it embodies two conspicuous traits of this movement: the poem appears to be personal and it also resembles spontaneous speech. Mills (1970a), quoting Dickey, asserts that: Perhaps to a degree more than is true for other poets, Kinnell’s development will depend on the actual events of his life… for what we encounter as an essential ingredient in his work as it grows is not only the presence of the poet as a man and speaker but his identification, through thematic 4 According to Davik Mikics (2007), in his work A new handbook of literary terms, “Postmodern artists deviate from the monolithic purity incarnated by the International Style in architecture and Abstract Expressionism in painting (both popular in the mid-twentieth century). Frequently, they use a mixture of styles, contaminate the visual with the verbal, or play jokes on the idea of artistic greatness that modernism took so seriously. Alan Wilde writes that, while the defining feature of modernism is its urge to repair, or else rise above, a disjointed, fragmented world, “postmodernism, more radical in its perceptions, derives instead from a vision of randomness, multiplicity, and contingency: in short, a world in need of mending is superseded by one beyond repair. Modernism spurred by an anxiety to recuperate a lost wholeness in self-sustaining orders of art or in the unselfconscious depths of the self . . . reaches toward the heroic in the intensity of its desire and of its disillusion. Postmodernism, skeptical of such efforts, presents itself as deliberately, consciously antiheroic” (p. 241). In other words, postmodernism is tolerant of, and even revels in, the waste land of contemporary chaos that Eliot, Yeats, and Pound protested against. For this reason, postmodernism is sometimes accused of being merely ‘affirmative’ rather than ‘critical:’ aping the trends of the surrounding culture in a piecemeal, unreflective way.” 5 Calhoun (1992) affirms that “David Perkins identifies the forms of recent poetry as a mixture of the old and the new, with a preference for the freer forms: ‘traditional and free verse in narrative, dramatic monologue, long meditation, list, catalogue, and lyric, including sonnet, song, chant, litany, spell and mantra’” (p.10). 14 recurrences, repeated images revelatory of his deepest concerns and most urgent feelings, with the experiences his poems dramatize… we shall try to see how Kinnell, using the considerable imaginative and linguistic powers at his command from the beginning, explores relentlessly the actualities of his existence to wrest from them what significance for life he can (p. 67). Besides being a postmodern poet, Kinnell makes of his life and experience his poetry, and as Young, in Nelson’s (1987) On the Poetry of Galway Kinnell, affirms “the poet presents himself as the protagonist of his poem, moving through a natural setting” (p. 140). Somehow, Kinnell becomes a poet who communicates, simultaneously, in a “simple” but also “elaborate” way his vision of life. Tuten (1996) asserts that “Kinnell explained that as poetry moves away from ‘formal beauty,’ it is better able to ‘discover the glory of the ordinary.’ His is a ‘poetics of the physical world,’ devoted to the ‘most ordinary thing, the most despised’ that, like Emily Dickinson’s fly, ‘may be the one chosen to bear the strange brightening, this las moment of increased life’” (p. 1). Kinnells’ poetic work is distinctive in that he moves from a more structured form to attain the postmodern arrangement of a freer pattern. Kinnell's poetical work has also been dedicated to an extraordinarily reliable assortment of interests such as his concern for the natural world, the common humanity of man/woman, death, politics, and the primitive. In terms of the means used to communicate his aim, he concentrates on the physical to transcend human life. Though much literature dealing with Kinnell’s work contemplates the possible 15 meaning/interpretation of his poems and the influence of other poets on his work, the following section will describe Kinnell’s growth as a poetic creator to consecutively focus on his poetry and the associated topics. Principally, this review of literature will thematically recapitulate the symbols and archetypes in the creation of his poetic work like the simplicity of the natural world and the primitive drives of humanity, the ephemerality and eternity of life, and the role that poetry may have in the social and political realms of life as studied by scholars and literary critics. 1. The poet: His life and work Galway Kinnell was born on February 1, 1927, in the United States of America, Providence, Rhode Island and died on October 28, 2014 in Vermont. His parents were both immigrants to the United States from the United Kingdom. From 1933 to 1943, he attended public school in Rhode Island, until he received a scholarship to attend Wilbraham Academy in Massachusetts for his senior year. In 1948, as Calhoun (1992) affirms, he graduated from Princeton where “he was a brilliant student, graduating summa cum laude;” in 1949, he received an M.A. in English in the University of Rochester; from 1951-55 he lived in Chicago “working as a supervisor of the liberal arts program at the University of Chicago’s downtown campus.” Kinnell is considered one of the major North American poets of the XX century and is depicted as “one of our most accomplished poets, a fact that is one of the best kept secrets among contemporary writers, known only to a select group of poets who recognize his skills” (Calhoun, 1992, ix). 16 At Princeton, he was influenced by W. S. Merwin, poet and critic. He introduced Kinnell to the work of other poets like Yeats and Eliot. After graduating from Princeton, he received his master's degree from the University of Rochester and started his creative writing teaching career in Europe and the Middle East. Many of his works mirror his experiences of the world. Kinnell was awarded different prizes, like the Pulitzer Prize for Selected Poems in 1983 and the MacArthur Foundation Grant for Creative Work in 1984. His honors include the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Shelly Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Brandeis Creative Arts Award, and the Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Furthermore, he taught in different places as a poet-in-residence, in countries like Iran, France and Australia. He returned to the United States in the 1960’s and took action in some political movements, including his poetry readings against the Vietnam War; moreover, he worked in favor of racial equality, as for him, it seems that a segregated humanity was not the way society should have evolved. He worked on voter registration and workplace integration in Louisiana for those African-Americans who had been discriminated against because of skin color. Kinnell wrote primarily poetry and a novel: Black light (1966). Some of his poetry books are What a kingdom it was (1960), Flower herding on Mount Monadnock (1964), Body rags (1968), The book of nightmares (1971), The avenue bearing the initial of Christ into the new world: Poems 1946-64 (1974), "Saint Francis 17 and the sow" Broadside Series (1976), Walking down the stairs (a collection of interviews) (1978), Mortal acts, mortal words (1980), Selected poems (1982), How the alligator missed breakfast (1982), The past (1985), When one has lived a long time alone (1990), Imperfect thirst (1996), A new selected poems (2000), and Strong is your hold (2006). Tuten (1992) asserts that “[w]hile Kinnell’s verse may seem to follow a Platonic pattern, moving from the real to the ideal, more accurately it should be described as discovering the mysterious within the things of this earth” (p. 137). In fact, his poetry, in general terms, deals with life and his experiences as a person that is exposed to “mortality as all breathing creatures are” (Calhoun, 1992, p. 6). This understanding of the impermanence and humanity of each person is portrayed in his book-poem The book of nightmares in which there is some sort of mystical journey where the persona accepts his/her death, along with the death of other creatures, as a process that every person should accept in his/her life. Interestingly enough, this acceptance of mortality materializes when his children are born. This text commences with the birth of Maud and completes its journey with another birth, Fergus. “Lastness” is the last poem that completes the persona’s journey full circle through the use of elements like the imagery presented in the first poem: “Under the Maud moon.” There is polarity and cycle, the two major movements of myth as stated by Joseph Campbell in his theory. 18 Zimmerman (1987) alludes to Kinnell when he says that he invokes his children, Maud and Fergus, because “they live with death almost as animals do,” with a “natural trust in life’s rhythms” (p. 154). This text, The book of nightmares, is structured as a journey poem in which there is acceptance of death as part of humanity’s mortal existence along with that of other beings. Another vital characteristic of this text is that it is inhabited by binary oppositions. There is life and death, father and children, a howl and a song, a “Don’t cry” and an “Or else, cry.” Moreover, there are recurring images like the tramp, whose shoes the persona puts on to walk down the road, the “path of vanished alphabets” (Kinnell, 1971a, p. 50). And it is from this alphabet that other images come into being: reading and writing. It seems as if life were an experience in which we write our moments of happiness and pain and from which we interpret other people’ life moments. There is also the bear and the hen. The former is portrayed as a witness for all humanity while the latter is presented as a metaphor for men and women; the hen lives and dies but in it there is the gift of life. It stops being itself when it dies but it then starts again as part of the cosmos as when it becomes one with humanity when being consumed. Another essential image portrayed in the poem-book is that of a hug, “the snap / and re-snap of the same embrace being torn” (Kinnell, 1971a, p. 3). There seems to be a yearning for communion, a desire for achieving completeness that mirrors the loneliness felt by humankind, the idea of a man/woman made to love and share but incapable to do so. 19 Finally, this review will focus on four general topics discussed by Kinnell’s critics: 1. Simplicity in the natural world and the primitive; 2. Marriage and parenthood; 3. Politics and society; and 4. Ephemerality and eternity of life: mortality and/in The book of nightmares. The decision to make this categorization of topics originates from the major themes discussed by Kinnell in his literary work and also related to the path of analysis. Many of Kinnell’s poems deal with nature and becoming one with it; moreover, he examines marital life and children in some of his work; for example, in The book of nightmares, the reader is introduced to his children: Maud and Fergus. Another topic that is essential in this poet’s work is politics and its impact in society; it seems that for him being part of nature also positions him politically to defend and fight for what he considers valuable and he does it in a peaceful way through reading and writing. Finally, one of his concerns as a human being is the duality life-death that he discusses in several poems and The book of nightmares is one of them. 2. Simplicity in the natural world and the primitive The poetical world of Galway Kinnell is inhabited by nature and the physical world. Keane (Tuten, 1996) declares that his poetry is “an elementary poetry – a poetry of dark woods and snow; of wind and fire and stars; of bone and blood. His subjects are perennial: love illumined and made more precious by the omnipresence of death” (p. 77). As Keane emphasizes, Kinnell’s poetry mirrors the simple moments experienced in life and for him, the “moments of epiphany and 20 transcendence occur only by our becoming deeply familiar with the world” (Tuten 1996, p. 86). It seems that the natural world and the basic instinctual drives of humankind mean to be one with the self and with nature. “Earthly” experiences and objects become his source of inspiration. Nelson (1987) asserts that “very few contemporary poets care or dare or are able to communicate the peculiar pleasure of words on the tongue as vividly as Kinnell” (“Introduction”, p. 6). Kinnell’s poetry began as relatively formal and structurally intricate texts, but he moved to a simpler diction and to an overall freer structure. Diction and structure in his poems mirror life as a simple moment of transcendence into the universe, and as the writer himself has declared, poetry, in general, pursues wholeness when the person in the poem is any person and as the poem develops, this person morphs into an animal and the animal keeps on morphing until it becomes a stone and if the stone could utter a word, that would be its language. In other words, silence is also language. Indeed, the “animal world,” the primitive, is a subject that is significant in the poetry of Galway Kinnell. Many of his poems deal with the instinctive nature of animals and even when some of his poems do not, they present animal imagery as part of the holistic vision of the poet. In the poetics of the physical world, Kinnell (1971b) discusses his position towards the “natural” in contemporary poetry: Why does it see, in the modern poem, that the less formal beauty there is, the more possible it is to discover the glory of the ordinary? I think of 21 Donatello’s statue in wood of Magdalen: her body ravaged, her face drawn with suffering, her hair running down her body indistinguishable from her rags. She is in ruins. Yet her feet remain beautiful. The reason they are beautiful is that they have touched the earth all their life. In the same way, in the bedraggled poem of the modern, it is the images, those lowly touchers of physical reality with remain shining (p. 116). It is in the experience with the simple elements of everyday life (feet touching the earth for example) what makes people experience transcendence. In “The Poet as Healer,” Edelman (1981) sustains that Kinnell approaches language as being part of the “natural” world in the sense that words are used to communicate knowledge, emotions, and feelings (p. 218). Moreover, Nelson (1987) asserts that it is “clear that for him words are alive. He thinks of them, for example, not as becoming obsolete, but extinct: ‘When I encounter an old word on the verge of extinction, which seems expressive, I feel excited. I can’t help entertaining the possibility of rescuing it…” (p. 5). Kinnell appears to embrace not just objects, concrete and abstract, but their means of communication: language. Even words seem to be alive in his poetical world for he takes words no longer used in contemporary communication or used in different intellectual realms and gives them the opportunity of rebirth and signifying in his work; as a result, words like carrion, orts, fenks, and sordes can be found in his book-length poem giving the reader the 22 opportunity to experience them as part of the life of the persona when discovering his path. Likewise, Taylor (in Tuten 1996), emphasizes that “many of Kinnell’s poems are about exploration, discovery, and vision. Most often they concern the poet’s exploration of the natural world, of ‘primitive’ nature (mountains, unsettled plains, sea coasts, deserts, fields, and woods in snow)” (p. 163). Therefore, his work is devoted to life in what has been accepted as “natural” and “primeval.” For Nelson (1987), the way in which Kinnell sees and experiences life is connected to how language is also experienced; his poetry demands the use of all senses to be understood, making the written words “alive” through the receiver of the message. The poet himself affirms that the intersection of language and communication goes beyond the transaction of meaning through the use of words. Meaning is achieved from the moment a baby is born; and it is through sound and emotions that children unconsciously manage to communicate and understand others; thus, we could extrapolate that humankind may communicate better if we take into consideration the connotational elements of words to signify. For example; the most basic and primitive act of communication, as that of the mother and the child, fosters an exchange of meaning without the interference of the spoken word. In Kinnell’s poetic work, the primeval is emphasized. Susan Weston (Tuten, 1996) declares that “now I realize that they [some verses from Kinnell’s poem]6 occurred as a comment on 6 “And she who is born, / she who sings and cries, / she who begins the passage, her hair / sprouting out, / her gums budding for her first spring on earth, / the mist still clinging about / her face, puts /her 23 our loss of critical innocence: we can no longer take childlike pleasure in the text – put our hands in the poet’s mouth – for the song has become not a physical thing but an intellectual formulation” (p. 205). Suddenly, poetry is to be felt and experienced to develop a cognitive lecture; Weston shares the poet’s preoccupation with the overthinking phenomenon that somehow affects our relationship with others and the world limiting our way to see “clearly.” On his part, Mills, Jr. (1970a) affirms that a significant number of Kinnell’s poetic work takes into consideration the natural world that offers him infinite possibilities for his “imaginative meditation.” These natural images range from creeks to more primitive and basic needs in life like food and shelter. It is through this entrance to the natural world that the critic and reader can also encounter a threshold “into a primitive state of identification with the nonhuman (p. 54)”, as Aseel Abdul-Lateef Taha (n.d.) states, in The allegorical use of rituals of hunting in Galway Kinnell’s “The bear.” It seems that in his poetry, the acknowledgement of humankind’s primitive and archaic drives may lead to a moment of liberation and harmony with life itself. It is then when the primeval is portrayed as essential of the human experience of life. And it is within the primitive that Kinnell expands this experience with the symbolic constituent of fire, as a basic element in life cycles of constant hand / into her father’s mouth, to take hold of his song” (“Under the Maud moon,” Kinnell, 1971a, p. 5). 24 transformation and an infinite process of death and resurrection. Howard (1980), in Alone with America: Essays on the art of poetry in the United States, affirms that there is agony in knowledge and that in order for life to exist, life itself must be consumed, “must be reduced to ash in order to be redeemed – gives Kinnell’s poetry its astonishing resonance, the accents of a conflict beyond wisdom as it is beyond pity” (p. 260). It is this paradox that makes Kinnell’s poetry so attractive, just as humankind is permeated with unresolved polarities. Moreover, Williamson (Bloom 2010) in “From language against itself: The middle generation of contemporary poets” states that poets “as few others, must live close to the world that primitive men are in: the world, in its nakedness, which is fundamental for all of us – birth, love, death, the seer fact of being alive” (p. 170). And this is what Kinnell does in his work, that is, he takes the readers back to their most rudimentary beginning to make meaning of life. On his part, Mills Jr. (1970a) affirms that in his poetry, Kinnell faces “himself and the conditions of the world simultaneously, without mediation or disguise. It should be said, however, that Kinnell employs other means than nature for cutting to the bone of existence, though intimate acquaintance with other living creatures and with the earth is of primary importance to his work” (p. 68). Definitely, in his poetry, there is a robust connection with nature that allows the reader to appreciate the natural world: earth, trees, flowers, animals, and even rocks; however, his work is not subjugated to these. Moreover, Atlas (in Nelson 1987) affirms that Kinnell is so “close to his subject, the natural world in all its tyranny and 25 splendor, that his sympathies are readily translated into the richness of cadence and language that poetry should always have” (p. 97). It is Kinnell transmuting ordinary experiences of babysitting, cooking, traveling and the sort into extraordinary every day happenings that become a source of inspiration and revelation through his poetic work. It is an undeniable fact that Kinnell’s poetic work deals with the natural world to such an extent that it borders the most primordial elements of humankind. Being one with nature is a central subject matter that he has developed in most of his works. Moreover, he is unrelenting in trying to tell his readers that it is through nature that we may come to understand who we are. Alan Williamson (in Nelson 1987) declares that in Kinnell’s poetry the “truly important educative experiences become, then, experiences of unlearning: empathy with animals, primitive and peasant cultures, the wilderness; a reacclimatization to solitude in nature” (p. 170). Kinnell’s poetic work blooms in nature and its elements to make the words and the poem as a unit intensify the reader’s experience of the world; making the reader understand that s/he also belongs to the primitive, to the instincts that tend to be hidden by different social masks. 3. Parenthood and marriage This family theme traverses Kinnell’s poetic world and in The book of nightmares, it is still more evident for the poem starts with the birth of his daughter Maud and concludes with that of his son Fergus. Calhoun (1992) emphasizes this 26 last appreciation when he declares, discussing The book of nightmares, that “there is, significantly, another difference in this book, proceeding from his care as a parent of his children” (p. 73). Moreover, Tillinghast (in Tuten 1996) asserts that “The book of nightmares, especially, is Kinnell’s gift to his children. I can think of no more moving statement of a parent’s heart-breakingly illogical hope of shielding a child from the death he accepts for himself” (p. 113). Even when for him, in order to achieve eternity a mortal death needs to be experienced, the thought of his children suffering makes the persona want to protect them. Davis confirms Tillinghast assertion when he declares that the first poem in The book of nightmares is “a personal ceremony in praise of the birth of the poet’s daughter” (p. 62). Moreover, Davis (in Tuten 1996) affirms that “The nightmare vision is passed on from generation to generation. As the father dies into his son so the son is born into the vision of nightmare which the father has lived through” (p. 67). Hence, the father knows what is going to happen in the future and, somehow, would like to prevent his children from suffering and grief. The aforementioned first poem can be experienced as Kinnell’s gift of love to his children, reaching afar his own impermanence. Additionally, Calhoun (1992) sustains that Kinnell’s poetry is This poetry written by a poet who is aware he must now accept his responsibilities as a family man. Consequently, form the rituals of childcare, there are moments of realization, epiphanies that transcend the lonely 27 sensibility of the persona. Now possible is an actual fraternity with others – not just through love for his children, but a new relationship with his wife… (p. 74). Consequently, Kinnell’s discussion of family life not only depicts his concern for his children but it also circumscribed to the care and love felt for his wife. Discussing marital life and sexuality, Tuten (1992) asserts that “[s]exuality is, for Kinnell [and Whitman], the most sacred dimension of human physicality and the ultimate means of communication between two individuals” (p. 139). Moreover, this scholar affirms that “[h]e shares with Whitman the desire to remind humanity of the sacredness of sexuality” (p. 136); and it is this sacredness that he portrays in some of his texts. 4. Politics and society Besides nature, as well as family life, politics and social problems is another topic explored by Kinnell’s critics. For instance, M.L. Rosenthal & S. Gall (1983) discuss the fact that poetry is part of the political arena and writers’ work; moreover, these critics declare that politics belong to humankind since civilization belongs to humankind, It is the politics of shared awareness and urgency; and the world of the sequence is one of adult intelligence and candor, of a truthfulness about oneself and one's views that need not be forced, because it is simply a condition of existence. All the issues of empirical politics – war and peace, 28 sexual and racial repression, ecology, atomic energy – seem to enter these sequences naturally, as part of their awareness, just as they do in one's intimate personal relationships (p. 417). In consequence, Rosenthal (1973) declares that “political awareness, experientially rather than just ideologically conceived, is consciousness of one's present moment as a focal point of history” (p. 418). Furthermore, Tuten (1996) affirms that “the turbulent decade of the sixties was important for Kinnell both professional and personally” (p. 4); moreover, Calhoun (1992) asserts that during “1963, with the outbreak of civil rights protests in the South, he became a social activist, working in the registration campaign for the Congress of Racial Equality in Louisiana” (p. 4). This personal historical moment exhibited in “The last river” is a reflection of Kinnell’s involvement with politics in that it is a poem that speaks up about the race/segregation problems and his experience in the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1960´s. Moreover, during the eighties, “Kinnell’s political activities began afresh with a new target: nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. He organized an antinuclear reading, Poets Against the End of the World, at Town Hall, in New York City in 1982” (Calhoun, p. 5). Consequently, all his efforts to share his political standing and preoccupation are presented in some of his major works. As a matter of fact, capitalist society focuses on maximizing the purchase of objects and services to make human kind forget about growing older, suffering, 29 aging and dying, as if death were independent from life. In fact, to help individuals reconcile with their future annihilation may be one of the most difficult tasks there is. A reconciliation of this kind involves coming to terms with oneself and diminishing anxiety, a challenging task indeed. Powell (2000) affirms that many a times, “… the poet becomes both a reader of history and ultimately its victim. This solution takes as a given the inevitability of death, in fact, it supposes death as the only remaining certainty. Death and the invariable decay of the body, in some perverse sense, the new divinity. Death as an inevitable progression recues history from chaos” (p. 24). One of the moments all living creatures will experience is death, this is the sharing of life, maybe not tonight or tomorrow but someday. Being mortality life’s twin, all the differences that may exist while breathing will become simple surface details. Likewise, Atlas (in Nelson 1987) in his “Autobiography of the present” acknowledges the fact that this poem to which Mills refers to mirrors Eliot’s sense of spiritual disintegration in modern cities, and “like Eliot’s, Kinnell’s is a religious poem, in which the chaotic forces of survival (in this instance, the turbulent, jumbled life of New York’s lower East Side; along Avenue C) ultimately preside over the terror latent in our late stage of civilization” (p. 96). For Kinnell, human beings have deteriorated so much that the place chosen as setting is New York, Avenue C, where the passerby can see different types of people, especially Puerto Ricans, African Americans and Jewish people, at different tasks in different shops and street vendors that make the city even noisier. As Rowland (in Tuten 1996) declares, “His 30 ability to make us glimpse the wonder of being repeatedly transforms the rubble and slums of New York’s Avenue C” (p. 43). This is not the avenue of the bistros or nice cafes neither the most “dangerous” one but the “crazy avenue,” just as New Yorkers state when saying: “Avenue A, you’re all right. Avenue B, you’re brave. Avenue C, you are crazy. Avenue D, you’re dead.” However, Nelson (1987) affirms that this poem is Kinnell’s supply of an unsuccessful bombardment of mythical, biblical, and literary references that turns his “pathos into Camp sentiment and his avenue into a Hollywood set” (p. 188). Nelson (in Nelson 1987), when discussing Kinnell’s poetic work and quoting critic Terry Comito, affirms that “all the swarming multiplicity of the scene only emphasizes the ceaselessness of a dissolution in which human life seems to share the fate of what it feeds upon, but Kinnell will not confront the way his descriptions of decay challenge is vision” (p. 189). In a way, Kinnell longs in desperation for a way of life in which all humanity would attain back the lost dignity and respectfulness of a “mythical” past. Probably Lévi-Strauss’s (1978) same concern when he affirms that “We are now threatened with the prospect of our being only consumers, able to consume anything from any point in the world and from any culture but losing all originality” (p. 7). Consumerism has trapped humankind making them forget who they are. Williamson (Nelson 1987) affirms that “poets, as few others, must live close to the world that primitive men are in: the world, in its nakedness, which is 31 fundamental for all of us – birth, love, death; the sheer fact of being alive” (p. 170). For him, poetry written under such premises, the personal self is underplayed not out of shame, or an Impersonal Theory, but because it is seen – as in Rimbaud – as internalized history… To transcend the ego is to go beyond society as well… The truly important educative experiences become, then, experiences of unlearning: empathy with animals, primitive and peasant cultures, the wilderness; a reacclimatization to solitude in nature; the evocation of a Jungian collective unconscious through meditation or surrealism… Most of these poets share that view that language is one of the most powerful agents of our socialization, leading us to internalize our parent’s, our world’s definitions, and to ignore the portions of our authentic experience – the experience of the body and the unconscious – that do not express themselves directly in verbal terms. (The poets I have in mind are James Wright, Robert Bly, W.S Merwin, Snyder, and Kinnell…) (p. 170). As Williamson affirms, it is through language that humankind experiences life and paradoxically language prevents people from experiencing life at its fullest for as humanity seems to technologically and scientifically advance their capacity to communicate with others seems to recede. Moreover, he acknowledges the fact that Kinnell is part of the first generation of poets “to confront concentration camps and the atomic bomb, the fully revealed destructiveness of civilized man” (in Nelson, 32 1987, p. 171). Thus, Kinnell takes a position against mainstream pro-war American culture and moves forward to criticize humankind and its interest in annihilation and obliteration of the other. Kinnell will present his interest in preserving life, liberty, and equality. Moreover, Rosenthal & Gall (1983), when discussing Kinnell’s The book of nightmares, make distinctive emphasis on the thematic of war in this text, “[t]he war specifically the Vietnam War. The mad speaker of the second part tells of obsessively shooting down the ‘little black pajamas jumping / and falling,’ whether or not they are ‘friendlies’” (p. 471). Regarding this war and the political focus of Kinnell regarding this political-civil conflict, Zimmerman (1987) argues that certainly “one imagines that artists, like Kinnell and Bly, who denounced the Vietnam War were more interested in contacting the unconscious than were President Johnson and General Westmoreland” (p. 82), looking for this repository of disremembered recollections of a more peaceful and egalitarian world. Moreover, Calhoun (1992) states that for Kinnell, the major reason for writing political poetry responds to being human and part of a world (p. 21). Hence, Kinnell’s portrayal of the world and its conflicts (social, political and/or economic) through his poetical texts search for the best inner qualities humankind has to offer to themselves and other living creatures on earth: solidarity among people, freedom and its implications, and a more egalitarian society for all. 33 5. Ephemerality and eternity of life: Mortality and/in The book of nightmares The topic of death and life as inseparable polarities is part of Kinnell’s poetic footprint. Calhoun (1992) affirms that Kinnell “belongs to a tradition in American poetry that accepts death as an important subject” (p. 22). It seems that for the poet, death portrays attributes that represent the extinction that human beings fear and simultaneously what many people desire, that is being one with the universe; in other words, death becomes a paradox: avoiding it but yearning to belong. It is because of this internal struggle that he wants to expose and discuss, through his poetry, that there may be as a solution: the acceptance of death as part of the life continuum. Davie, quoted by Mills Jr. (1970a), states that, regarding Kinnell’s perception of the life-death cycle, that he is “left to explore ‘relentlessly the actualities of his existence to wrest from them what significance for life he can” (p. 19). This critic goes further into affirming that this poet yearns for the spiritual and even though he has tried to reach this aspiration, his efforts have been unsuccessful (p. 159). However, Molesworth (in Nelson 1987) asserts that as Kinnell suggests, “death represents the last absolute perspective; its very finality makes it a magnificent possibility, or rather, the source of magnificent possibilities” (p. 49). Indeed, humankind cannot escape death; however, if accepting death and learning to live with it there is the likelihood of experiencing life in a singular way for at this revelatory moment, each moment of life will be appraised differently. In other words, 34 when an individual realizes that life depends of death and vice versa, there is the hope that every second lived will be enjoyed at its fullest. Furthermore, for Nelson (1987), “Kinnell’s poetry represents in large part an extraordinary four-decades-long and still ongoing meditation on time and mortality” (p. 12). Calhoun (1992), on his part, asserts that the poet “belongs to a tradition in American poetry that accepts death as an important subject… Kinnell’s attitude is almost one of gratitude for having found a universal subject that restrains him from being ‘self-absorbed’ and introspective, personal and confessional… it is a topic that does not allow him to be niggardly interested in his own experience to the exclusion of everybody else’s” (p. 24). As a matter of fact, Kinnell’s poetry circumscribes the understanding of death to every single living being, not only people. As has been discussed, for Kinnell, death becomes an instant that human beings must face; Toskar (1981) declares that Kinnell’s subjects that interlace “through his work are the most basic to human existence: that a man must suffer and die in a brutally dehumanized hostile world… It is then no surprise that a man so infused with his own mortality might look about himself at the world of physical objects with renewed intensity” (p. 363). Thus, as for the poet, being aware of this binary opposition, life-death, he can apprehend his inner and outer experiences through the objects that surround him. Mills Jr.(1970a) states that “death, suffering, the will to elude the body’s mortality, and the brute facts of the actual world: Kinnell’s imagination turns these 35 themes over and over, dwelling on the insoluble enigmas of life’s significance or lack of it as these emerge in the process of his own living (p. 72). As Mills Jr. discusses, Kinnell’s poetry deals with the subject of mortality as he, himself, experiences it; moreover, Nelson (in Tuten, 1996) asserts that “Kinnell is an elegist who finds consolation and a measure of glory in the fact of mortality itself. It is because we die, and because we know that his in unavoidably so, that human life is worthy of a unique intensity” (p. 101). Accordingly, Kinnell’s vision for humankind is that of acceptance of mortality and death as a means of experiencing life. It is this juxtaposition of opposites that makes his work so enticing and intriguing since human beings are made up counterparts and it is not until we understand this duality that life offers and that not everybody can apprehend and own. Death is an experience that one day will materialize and the only hope Kinnell, essentially, grasps is our continuation with and within the universe and all its inhabitants. Knowing this, Kinnell takes his poems to translate his own knowledge of the life-death process just as Nelson affirms: “Kinnell is also drawn to abstractions, discursiveness, the direct expression of ideas, and even didacticism in his poetry. The description which evokes and celebrates the sow, for example, is preceded by a sort of lesson on the often-forgotten beauty that even the lowliest things contain” (p. 102). Somehow, Kinnell’s poetry reaches beyond the aesthetic pleasure of poetry to lead the reader into an understanding of simple everyday 36 moments that help humanity rise above their mortality for in the simple moments of life is where transcendence is met. From the moment I started reading this book length poem, I could not stop thinking about life at its best: in simple everyday moments and in how death has been erroneously perceived, for death is the fact that makes life possible and vice versa. Our death, all people’s deaths, and Kinnell’s own death are ultimately described in his work which some may consider a morbid undertaking for the living are not expected to discuss death; however, Kinnell’s interpretation of this natural event challenges the vision of most westerners. When encountering death, each earthly being belongs to an infinite continuum in which life and death not only juxtapose but also overlap. Kinnell presents a constant involvement with the reality of death and the impermanence of all living things. Furthermore, his work presents a strong play of polarities, he, himself, in Lee Zimmerman (1987) states that from “one point of view, the book is nothing but an effort to face death and live with death” (p. 73). Death is the most probable happening of life so, Kinnell’s call is to learn to admit that the “wages of dying is love.” The major influential studies on Galway Kinnell’s The book of nightmares discuss the leading idea of the book-poem as well as its symbols and images in general. Scholars and critics have predominantly questioned and discussed this poet’s “obsession” with death and the use of nature and natural imagery in his work. Nonetheless, though vastly associated to these arguments, previous studies have 37 not considered the reading of The book of nightmares from both, a mythical and archetypal stance. Therefore, this present study intends to fill this theoretical gap, consequently, enriching the analysis of the text and offering a fresh reading of and through, mainly, Jung and Campbell’s theoretical frameworks. 38 B. Theoretical and referential framework Since the present study seeks to analyze the particulars of the function of myth and the archetype of the hero’s journey in The book of nightmares by means of examining the resolution of the binary opposition of the life-death cycle; this section will mainly examine the theories developed by preeminent scholars Carl G. Jung (1875-1971), Northrop Frye (1912-1991), and Joseph Campbell (1938-1987). Specifically, the selected corpus of theory will predominantly concentrate on Jung’s analytical psychological approximation to the myth of the hero and Campbell’s archetype of the quest. As the endeavor to better support Jung’s and Campbell’s propositions, the works of other scholars like Jonathan Culler, Jacques Derrida, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, and Octavio Paz will also be included in this section. Finally, the present theoretical framework will thematically include four vital subjects, closely related to the aim of the study; first, the idea of the conscious and unconscious realms of the mind, second, the theory of myth and archetypes; third, the process of individuation (the path to self-knowledge) along with their diverse complementary topics; and fourth, an overview of structuralism and key terms for this research as binary opposition, interpretation, ideology, and semiotics. In the XIX century, the scholar J.G. Frazer published The golden bough, book in which he studied religious rituals and myth from different cultures around the world. According to Nandi (2016) and based on his analysis of archetypal patterns “Frazer argues that the death-rebirth myth is present in almost all cultural 39 mythologies and is acted out in terms of growing seasons and vegetation. The death-rebirth myth is symbolized by the death (i.e. final harvest) and rebirth (i.e. spring) of the god of vegetation (p. 58). Consequently, it can be asserted that Frazer’s approach to mythology is based on the concrete elements of the physical world and his central motif is the archetype of resurrection, specifically the myths describing the assassination of the divine sovereign while Jungian criticism on its part aims at understanding the literary work and its connection with the collective unconscious7. Taking into consideration these common elements, Jung worked and developed the concept of archetypes. According to Maduro & Wheelwright (in Sugg1992), “Jungian theory holds that the mind is not a tabula rasa at birth but that there is an archetypal ground plan built into the structure of the human brain” (p. 182). Hence, humankind shares immaterial content in their psyche and the primeval representations that Jung sees that repeats is what he addresses as archetypes. According to Jung, there are repetitive patterns that stem from structures in the human mind that are considered common to people from all around the world; these patterns are motifs, themes, narrative organization of the text, characters, and 7 Gras (1981) cites Jung when defining the collective unconscious: “… to the degree that human brains are uniformly differentiated, the mental functioning thereby made possible is also collective and universal. This explains, for example, the interesting fact that the unconscious processes of the most widely separated peoples and races show a quite remarkable correspondence, which displays itself among other things, in the extraordinary but well-authenticated analogies between the forms and motifs of autochthonous myths. The universal similarity of human brains lead to the universal possibility of a uniform mental functioning. This functioning is the collective psyche” (p. 472). 40 images that are found when analyzing a work of literature under the lens of archetypal and mythical criticism. Consequently, much of the aim of this research will be to look for an understanding of these universal patterns in Kinnell’s book- length poem. Another scholar who influenced archetypal literary criticism is Maud Bodkin (1951) with her book Archetypal patterns in poetry; she affirms that, when reading poetry and considering Jung’s understanding of the human psyche, “the special emotional significance possessed by certain poems – a significance going beyond any definite meaning conveyed – he attributes to the stirring in the readers’ mind, within or beneath his conscious response, of unconscious forces, which he terms ‘primordial images,’ or archetypes” (p. 1). She rejects the notion that archetypes are inherited in the structure of the brain; instead, for her, archetypes are persistent cultural symbols that are passed through generations via folklore, myth and literature. That is why, when analyzing poems, she affirms that “to bind associations together, the words within the haunting rhythm must play their part unaided, holding attention while the forces of feeling and attendant imagery negotiate in the antechambers of the mind” (p. 309). On the same token, Abrams (1999) declares that Archetypal literary criticism was given impetus by Maud Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (1934) and flourished especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Some archetypal critics have dropped Jung's theory of the collective 41 unconscious as the deep source of these patterns; in the words of Northrop Frye, this theory is ‘an unnecessary hypothesis,’ and the recurrent archetypes are simply there, ‘however they got there’" (p. 13). Archetypal criticism, considering Jung’s position on the collective unconscious and his analysis of universal patterns, developed during the second part of the XX century influencing different scholars as Campbell. In brief, mainly, the positions of Jung and Campbell on mythical and archetypal criticism will be studied as the theoretical basis of this research. Campbell’s pattern of the monomyth will be contemplated in the discussion for the movement in The book of nightmares is “forward,” its journey is that of acquiring self-knowledge and rediscovering life; in other words, it is about understanding that life is to be experienced. Moreover, Frye’s approach to myth and archetype will also be considered, when necessary, due to the fact that his and Jung’s positions on the definition of archetypes offer an accurate background to understanding how myth is structured as well as what its relation to ideology is. 1. Jung’s analytical theory of symbols, archetypes, and images Carl G. Jung was part of the psychoanalytic movement of the beginning of the XX Century. In the first years of his career, he became a disciple and follower of Sigmund Freud; moreover, he shared with the latter a common identification with the nature of the unconscious and its importance in trying to understand the human psyche. However, the understanding of the nature of the unconscious by Jung 42 diverged from Freud’s position. Jung’s vast contribution to the field of psychology is indeed related to the concept of the psyche, term coined to signify the soul or spirit and that at the turn of the XX century it increasingly came to refer to mind. When analyzing the structure of the psyche, Jung characterized four psychological functions that link every individual to the world, and which are: 1. Sensation: this function will tell the individual that “x” exists. 2. Thinking: its role is to say what something is. 3. Feeling: its task is to determine the worth something has. 4. Intuition: it allows to see the possibilities in the situation faced or the object. Moreover, in Jungian psychology, one person’s psyche can be seen as their total personality and it may circumscribe to a person’s behavior, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. Consequently, if the mind is in control of who a person is, Jung’s outmost concerns was to find paths to understand it. Hence, he divided the mind into three main realms that are the consciousness, the persona unconsciousness, and the collective unconscious, all of them in a dynamic interplay that will lead into potential growth and change: the individuation process. The individuation process First, the conscious realm of the psyche can be described as one’s field of cognizance which consists of the psychic contents a person has access to. At the center of this field of awareness, Jung locates the ego that is understood as an 43 individual’s personality, just as the person is conscious of it. The ego forms the center of the field of consciousness and becomes the subject of all personal acts of consciousness. Therefore, the ego constitutes the filter for the different actions, considering the contents of experience are reflected in consciousness and which other are repressed, eliminated, or ignored. Acting as a filter, the ego becomes a cornerstone to the personal unconscious. In relation to the term of the ego and according to Freudian theory, it refers to the psychic structure that is going to intervene between society’s laws (superego) and the primitive and instinctual drives (the id). In the case of Carl Jung, the ego is considered as a more dynamic and complex representation of the self which is composed of a conscious and unconscious aspect, and the same time it is collective and personal. Regarding those elements that may have been disqualified and omitted from the ego, due to any kind of disapproval, being it social, cultural or familiar (parents), Jung circumscribes them to the shadow. However, even when the shadow may represent negative characteristics of a person, it might also embrace positive characteristics that were unable to be developed by the subject. On the other hand, the term persona, in Jungian terminology, reveals the characteristics that a person decides to hide or exploit. Hopcke (1989) states that “Jung saw the persona as a vital sector of the personality which provides the individual with a container, a protective covering for his inner self” (p. 141). As a result, an individual can have 44 different personae that will act according to the environment in which s/he works, studies or lives (professional and personal life). Furthermore, the personal unconscious8 refers to those events that an individual has not consciously been aware of; in other words, they have remained under the threshold of consciousness and have been absorbed subliminally. Following Jungian model of the personal unconscious, there may be many events that the ego represses or disregards for different reasons (stressing, deemed insignificant, simply forgotten). These events do not disappear completely from the psyche but occupy the personal unconscious and may have the potential to later influence unconsciously the individual’s personality. The personal unconscious is not simply a receptacle of forgotten memories but the conscious and unconscious realm of the mind of a person where both dynamically interact and play an integral role in his/her life. One example of how the personal unconscious influences the life of an individual through behavior is via what has been defined as “complexes.” For Freud, complexes arise due to childhood traumas; for Jung, instead, the root of complexes resides in a deeper and more fundamental level of the psyche than the personal unconscious, level that he defined as the collective unconscious9. Jung’s 8 According to Campbell (Sugg, 1992, p.79), the personal unconscious “is composed largely of personal acquisitions, potentials, and dispositions, forgotten or repressed contents derived from one’s own experience, etc.” 9 Rodríguez (2009) asserts that “la mente del niño no es una tabula rasa, libre y pura como suponía el empirismo ingenuo; sino más bien, una estructura mental configurada desde el nacimiento y desarrollada a través de las experiencias de la vida en compleja interacción con otras personas, con el medio y con la propia madurez neuronal del sujeto. Implica, por supuesto, un largo proceso evolutivo” (p. 73). 45 idea of the collective unconscious is one of his most important contributions to the field of psychology. He proposes that in addition to the personal unconscious that is mainly composed of the individuals’ lives experiences, the collective unconscious will conform from universal elements that are inherited and that all human beings share. Jung’s invention of the collective unconscious was stimulated by far-reaching analysis of the unconscious material of his patients such as their dreams and fantasies as well as his studies of comparative religions and mythology. Jung found out mysterious similarities in his patients’ dreams but there were also uncanny similarities in major mythological motifs and religious symbols around the world. Hence, in the first part of the XX century, Jung (1961) did an extensive process of self-analysis defined as “confrontation with the unconscious” (pp. 170-199) and it is in this period that he defined and described the structures of his theory on archetypes and the collective unconscious, among others. According to Jung (1934), in his work Archetypes and the collective unconscious, from the unconscious realm […] there emanate determining influences which, independently of tradition, guarantee in every single individual a similarity and even a sameness of experience, and also of the way it is represented imaginatively. One of the main proofs of this is the almost universal parallelism between mythological 46 motifs, which on account of their quality as primordial images, I have called archetypes (p. 58). Consequently, the concept of “archetype” is distinctive of Jung’s terminology. As Jung’s research continued, he realized that many symbols form part of mythology, stories, fairy tales, and all kinds of artistic and creative human productions which he unified in the concept of the collective unconscious. In the light of this reading, all human beings have access to an infinite experiences and knowledge of the human condition that lies below the personal unconscious. Samuels (1985), in his book Jung and the Post-Jungians, affirms that Jung begins from the human interaction in analysis or from observation of life, develops a theory which is then illustrated by comparative material or further observation. Only then could the mass of imagery and data from many sources be organised. The organisation itself then helps to understand one aspect or other of human behavior. Thus, the process is circular: human material - theory - illustration - application to human behavior (p. 5). Accordingly, Jung’s theory develops into a continuum in which human experience becomes the source of knowledge that is then clarified and contrasted to other resources and as a result knowledge about human behavior is attained. On his part, in Man and his symbols, Jung (1964) affirms that 47 Man uses the spoken or written word to express the meaning of what he wants to convey. His language is full of symbols, but he also often employs signs or images that are not strictly descriptive… What we call a symbol is a term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar in daily life, yet that possesses specific connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning. It implies something vague, unknown, or hidden from us (p. 3). Therefore, the words used by humankind are not as simple as a dictionary entry; on the contrary, words are filled with meaning, within a connotative realm, based on the person’s usage of word(s). Hence, even when all people relate to the denotative meaning of a word, the latter may have a different representation in the psyche of the person that is using it. He goes further affirming that due to the fact that there are incalculable “things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend… Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams” (p. 4). Thus, the realm of meaning, through which people try to understand the inner and outer self and the world around, goes beyond what can be explained logically. Archetypes As the world is populated by many different kinds of people in dissimilar places, one way to attempt to understand humanity is through a comparative method that can be utilized to reach a possible understanding of mythology and its 48 particulars. Consequently, it is through a comparison exercise of certain repetitive patterns in different cultures, separated by time and distance coordinates, that recurring models are discovered. Jung defined these patterns as “archetypes,” which etymologically come from “arche” that means primordial and “typos” that means typical. These archetypical images will circumscribe to the most primordial elements of human existence and experience; they manifest in people as influential and vigorous images that have repeated through time, from thousands of years ago to today. Moreover, there are other patterns which give rise to specific motifs, as common in all mythology as in any individual's life. They are often discussed in terms of personifications which appear in dreams, but they can also be seen in themes of stories, mythological or lived. According to Adamski (2011) the “most important archetype is the self, which symbolizes the fullness of personality… archetypes that have the strongest impact on the human being are persona, shadow, anima/animus. They are so strong that they should be treated as separate and distinct elements of personality” (p. 565). These five main archetypes can be explained as follows: 1. The Self: this archetype is symbolized by a circle, especially if it is divided in four quadrants; and it signifies the coherent whole, in other words the unconscious and the consciousness reunited. 2. The Shadow: this pattern is part of the unconscious mind and represents the weaknesses and primeval instincts of the individual. 49 3. The Anima: this model is an element of Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious; moreover, in the male unconscious, it represents the feminine inner personality. 4. The Animus: this archetype can be understood as the opposite of the anima; in other words, it represents the male inner personality in the female unconscious. 5. The Persona: this pattern is the “face” that individuals decide on presenting to the world; each person will choose his/hers in order to make an impression on others. The same phenomenon will occur with other innate dispositions from which the unconscious emerges through basic symbolic representations like: 1. The mother: it represents an idealized version of a woman who is a nurturing mother; therefore, this pattern will represent what people have come to believe they want or see in a mother figure. 2. The child: this archetype is usually characterized by an individual or a god who is pondered an innocent without corruption. A character like this will generally represent hope and will provide the knowledge that develops from his innocence. 3. The maiden: as the “the child,” this archetype will embody purity, innocence, and naiveté. 50 4. The hero: represents a pattern that faces danger and adversity but that displays courage and the will for self-sacrifice and morality. 5. The wise old man: it is typically represented as a kind and wise father-type figure. He would use his knowledge to offer guidance; besides, he may be presented as “foreign.” 6. The trickster: the archetype of the trickster, the dishonest person (fraud), refers to that individual that has the ability to be a master shapeshifter and a master of lying. It is fundamental to assert that besides these aforementioned characteristics, the trickster even when they question and mock authority, may also bring new knowledge. Furthermore, all of the above are described as helpful and dangerous at the same time. Similarly, the rebirth psychic pattern discussed by Jung (1970a) is subdivided in five different categories that are: 1. Metempsychosis: it refers to the idea that humankind experiences different existences, so life is prolonged. 2. Reincarnation: this idea of rebirth affirms that life is continuous, and individuals may have access to memories lived in previous existences. 3. Resurrection: this concept refers to the return of human life after facing death; moreover. 4. Rebirth: this concept refers to the idea of improving and healing without changing one’s essential nature. 51 5. Participation in the process of transformation: this stage is considered an “indirect rebirth;” in other words, the individual experiences change when s/he participates in a ritual (takes place outside the person). As Jung revealed, in every person underlies the collective unconscious and with it different archetypes that connect individuals to the world of the urges, signs and patterns of thinking and behaving that are inherited from our predecessors. On the same token Bodkin (1951) asserts that archetypes are “experiences which have happened not to the individual but to his ancestors, and of which the results are inherited in the structure of the brain, a priori determinants of individual experience” (p. 19). Hence, these primordial images, aforementioned, belong to a collectivity but are experienced individually. 2. Joseph Campbell and his theory of the monomyth J. Campbell is widely known for his vast research on the importance of myth. Moreover, he is also a prominent scholar who influenced literary criticism in the second part of the XX century. In his book The hero with a thousand faces, he analyzes the omnipresent story of the hero to which he ascribes psychological universal meaning. Consequently, Campbell endeavored to develop the theory of the monomyth which is essentially a story that underlies myths from throughout the world. But before starting this discussion, it is crucial to consider that, throughout the monomyth, symbols and archetypes can be discussed and analyzed in an attempt to understand humankind and its deeds. According to Campbell (2004b), 52 the monomyth is "a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation, initiation, return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth" (p. 23) and according to Phillips (1975, p. 2) can be presented as follows: Figure 1. Description of the monomyth or journey of the hero according to Phillips (1975). Campbell (2004b) declares that in order to understand the diagram we must take into consideration that The mythological hero, setting forth form his common-day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark… or be slain by the opponent and descend in death. 53 Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father- creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again – if the powers have remained unfriendly to him – his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir) (p. 211). According to Campbell, the hero quest happens to exist in many cultures around the world and throughout time this pattern has prevailed with some minor differences. This model can be approached as the manifestation of humankind to represent its dilemmas and trying to understand the happenings in their lives. Rodríguez (2009) affirms that human beings belong to a 54 Mundo de signos, símbolos, mitos y metáforas. Sin ellos la especie humana se hubiera extinguido hace milenios, porque parece incuestionable que el mito desempeña un papel esencial en la vida cotidiana y en el intercambio social; está en los fundamentos de la cultura y en la forma cómo contemplamos el mundo. Desde el mito se define nuestra acción o inacción, así como nuestro lugar en el universo” (p. 66)10. Consequently, the hero’s journey, macro o micro, will be experienced by every single person around the world, because this voyage is about progression and learning in any realm of life. Rituals are performed every day in life among different audiences. As members of society, individuals face moments of separation from family, friends, or colleagues, to encounter ordeals through which they might achieve more knowledge to learn about themselves. There might be people who consider this reading of how human beings’ lives are interpreted as very positive for, as its premise, you can find the notion that we can improve life, enrich the relationship with others, and then grasp understanding of the self and experiencing life. Defining myth and mythology 10 “A world of signs, symbols, myths, and metaphors. Without them, humankind would have disappeared millenniums ago, it seems unquestionable that myth performs an essential role in everyday life and social exchange; it is in the fundamentals of culture and in the way in which we perceive the world. Our action of inaction is defined from myth likewise our place in the universe” (my translation). 55 In general, the term “mythology” represents an insightful evidence of humanity’s belonging to a past, present, and future time. Barthes (1999) in the book Mythologies affirms that “It is not any type: language needs special conditions in order to become myth…But what must be firmly established at the start is that myth is a system of communication, that it is a message. This allows one to perceive that myth cannot possibly be an object, a concept, or an idea; it is a mode of signification, a form” (p. 109). Defining the term myth can be laborious work in the sense that, depending on the approach used, the term might have responded to different interests. Usually, for the majority of people without an academic background in the field, a myth is an ancient story of gods and goddesses that foster a sense of community. These stories are then not “real” but a fabrication of the human psyche. Halpé (2011) in “Between myth and meaning: the function of myth in four postcolonial novels” affirms that Myths are, by nature, both untrue and true. What separates a myth from any other kind of narrative is a peculiar affective quality or narrative potency that carries its ideological matter in disguise. This “affect” elevates myth above ordinary speech and aligns it with the rhetoric and matter of sacred narrative. As such, mythical narrative requires a collective investment from its author and audience that elevates speech and story to the status of a myth (p. 3). 56 It is fundamental to consider that myths must be approached symbolically as to reveal “truths” about the humankind psychic existence and that myths exist today; or as Barthes (1999) affirms There are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have a historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things (p. 110). Consequently, myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its material, for any material can arbitrarily be endowed with meaning: for instance, the arrow which is brought in order to signify a challenge is also a kind of speech. Besides defining the term myth, it is also critical to state its purpose; consequently, Campbell (2004b) affirms that “it has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back” (p. 7). As he asserts, humankind requires rituals and representations to function in society. Thus, even when people might not be aware of myth and rituals as part of their lives, he affirms that they do participate in rituals through simple and everyday acts like eating. As a matter of fact, meeting new people, greeting friends or acquaintances, or performing any activity, we all follow rituals that make us who we are, developing individual and 57 communal mythologies. Campbell (2004a, pp. 104-108) enumerates four main functions of mythology: 2nd function: "Serves to present a universe within which 1st function: "Awakening in the the mystery as understood will individual a sense of awe and be present, so that everywhere mystery and gratitude for the you look it is, as it were, a holy ultimate mystery of being" (104). picture, opening up in back to the great mystery" (105). 4th function: "Gives a way to 3rd function: "Gives you laws connect the inner psychological for living within your own society" world to the external world of (107). phenomena." Figure 2. Functions of mythology as presented by J. Campbell (2004a) As presented in the previous figure, mythology is part of the individual as well as the society to which the person belongs. Myth as ideology In order to fully understand ideology as a key to understand humankind, it is essential to remember the two levels of signification: the denotative and the connotative. The first one is seen as fundamentally representational and relatively self-contained. The latter mirrors the values which are associated to the sign. However, there is a third level of signification that is often “forgotten” and that is: myth. Myth reflects the variable and cultural concepts that support the structure of a 58 specific worldview. The reference to the term myth takes readers to fables and legends of gods, semi-gods and heroes that work as primordial types in a primitive view of the world. Nevertheless, for Barthes (1999), myths are the dominant ideologies of the world that display a message. Thus, this message, does not only refer to oral speech or written discourse but to other types of texts of life like publicity, photography, films, cartoons, and comic strips. Hence, the “message,” as this theorist affirms, refers to “any significant unit or synthesis, whether verbal or visual” (p. 111). As stated before, if any significant unit or sign belongs to a construction of an ideological process, then myths become shared ways of conceptualizing a sign within a culture. How does this process occur? Who are the ones that lead the process of signification? As part of a myth, people become defenders of an ideology and they compare and contrast themselves in terms of other myths reinforced by the canon, for example: beauty, suffering or joy. Since poetry is a signifying practice of a given time and a place, it can reflect or reject the myths culture has come to accept as “true.” Paz (1995) states “En el mundo moderno todo funciona como si la muerte no existiera. Nadie cuenta con ella11” (p. 192). For Paz, as we will see for Kinnell, everything suppresses death: “las prédicas de los políticos, los anuncios de los comerciantes, la moral pública, las costumbres, la alegría a bajo precio y la salud 11 “In the modern world everything works as if death did not exist. Nobody counts on her” (my translation). 59 al alcance de todos que nos ofrecen hospitales, farmacias y campos deportivos12.” Paz, like Kinnell, affirms that the world has made people believe that death is not part of life but its punishment (p. 192). Paz (1995) affirms that “la criatura – el ser en su inocencia animal – contempla lo Abierto, al contrario de nosotros que jamás vemos hacia Adelante, hacia lo absoluto”13 (p. 197). For him people are frightened and do not dare to see death as what it is, a unity that has death in it; and “[L]o abierto es el mundo en donde los contrarios se reconcilian y la luz y la sombra se funden14” (p. 197). Life and death complement each other; one cannot exist without the other. In ancient cultures, death was part a continuation of life and the corpses were buried with their belongings for their life would continue after this; nevertheless, it seems that this reading of the world has changed for this contemporary society. 3. Northrop Frye’s mythical criticism When discussing mythical criticism in the Twentieth Century, Frye is one of the most influential critics. In 1951, he published the article “The archetypes of literature.” In this article, he not only discussed primitive rituals but also nature myths that he patterns on the seasonal cycles. This test was the also precursor of Anatomy 12 “the speech of politicians, commercial advertisements, public morality, customs, cheap happiness, and the promise of everyday health offered by hospitals, drugstores and sport courts” (my translation) 13 “The child – the being in its primitive innocence – stares at the Open, contrarily to what we do, us who never see beyond, towards the Absolute” (my translation). 14 “The Open is the realm where the contraries reconcile, and light and darkness become one” (my translation). 60 of criticism (1957), book that develops an elaborate critical theory that is based on archetypal literary genres; most specifically, he discussed the role of archetypes and myth when creating meaning in literary texts. For Frye (1971), an archetype is “a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience. And as the archetype is the communicable symbol, archetypal criticism is primarily concerned with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communication” (p.99). Frye defines the archetype as an image that is so recurrent in literary texts that is likely to be recognized by the reader as an element of an individual’s literary experience. Frye analyzed different scholars like Freud, Blake, Frazer and Spengler besides studying as a source The Bible; however, Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious seems to have been particularly important in his analysis (Sugg, 1992, p. 21). Jung’s ideas offer Frye a counterpoint to his analysis and construction of archetype. It is important to consider that Frye takes Jung’s notion of the archetype as a source for his Anatomy of criticism; however, he will differ from Jung’s standpoint. For Frye, myth will be mediated and adapted to individual specificities while for Jung myth responds to a phenomenon in which all myths will eventually return to a point in the psyche. Mythoi theory For Frye (1951), rituals are part of individuals’ life and when they are performed their meaning is underlying the act itself. Moreover, he asserts that “[t]he 61 myth is the central informing power that gives archetypal significance to the ritual and archetypal narrative to the oracle. Hence, the myth is the archetype” (p. 104); moreover, he affirms that “[i]n the solar cycle of the day, the seasonal cycle of the year, and the organic cycle of human life, there is a single pattern of significance, out of which myth constructs a central narrative around a figure who is partly the sun, partly vegetative fertility and partly god or archetypal human being” (1951, p. 110). It is then that he establishes four different phases of the myth (myth as genre) and that are: 1. Comedy: the mythos of spring, dawn, and birth phase. 2. Romance: the mythos of summer, zenith, and marriage or triumph phase. 3. Tragedy and elegy: the mythos of autumn, sunset and dead phase. 4. Irony and satire: the mythos of winter, darkness, and dissolution phase. It is then that Frye proposes that literature exemplifies the repetition of the life cycle through nature’s phases of being born, growing, maturing, declining and dying, and then resurrecting (rebirth and the reiteration of the cycle). Frye aligns comedy with the mythos of spring because this genre is differentiated by the birth of the hero, renewal and rebirth; moreover, spring embodies the conquest over winter and darkness. Summer is paired with romance because the former is the culmination of life in the seasonal calendar, and this genre will usually culminate with marriage and triumph. The tragedy genre is linked to autumn since it represents the fall or demise of the protagonist. Finally, satire is paralleled to winter for it is dark genre which 62 conveys a disenchanted and mocking form; moreover, satire will foster a return to chaos and to the downfall of the hero. Most of Frye’s interest is in “the function and effect of archetypes” (Nandi, 2016, p. 59), and he affirms that “[t]he archetypal critic studies the poem as part of poetry, and poetry as part of the total human imitation of nature that we call civilization. Civilization is not merely an imitation of nature, but the process of making a total human form out of nature” (Frye, 1971, p. 105). Thus, it is in this juxtaposition of realities that one mirrors the other. Accordingly, the context of the genre will govern how an image should be decoded; hence, Frye defines five natural domains: 1. Human: this realm can be tragic or comedic. For the former, the human world will be understood as community centered and wish-fulfilling; on the other hand, the latter will resemble a world of separation and a fallen hero. 2. Animal: depending on its focus, comedic or tragic, animals would be attained as docile and gentle or rapacious and predatory. 3. Vegetation: nature will be divided either in a pastoral and green flowery gardens and places (comedy) or barren and dangerously wild vegetation (tragedy). 4. Mineral: the mineral will be comprised of rocks, temples and buildings representing the comedic or deserted places and in ruins that will exemplify the tragic. 63 5. Water: placid rivers and brooks will characterize the comedic while the deep seas and floods will embody the tragic. Frye takes the different phases of myth and parallels the natural domains that individuals experience in life and the rituals that may associated with them. Thus, literary myth criticism, considers that for humanity, rituals have a special implication for they are not performed as nature develops its natural process but, a human ritual “seems to be something of a voluntary effort (hence the magical element in it) … a ritual being a temporal sequence of acts in which the conscious meaning of significance is latent” (Frye, 1951, pp. 103-104). On his part, Beltrán (2009) affirms that Lo que hace grande a Frye es su disposición a dar alguna respuesta al gran problema que plantea el acontecimiento literario en su conjunto. Esta disposición se funda en la certeza de que no son posibles las respuestas parciales (de ahí su reivindicación de “toda la literatura”) y de que tampoco son demasiado útiles las propuestas que conciben el acontecimiento literario como un reflejo o consecuencia de otro fenómeno (sea antropológico, psicológico o político, entre otras posibilidades)15 (p. 55). 15 “What makes Frye great is his disposition to give an answer to the problem that literature poses. This disposition is founded on the certainty that there is no room for half-answers (that is the reason why he discusses literature as a whole) and that the proposals that consider literature as mirroring or responding to another phenomenon are not useful (be it anthropological, psychological, political, among others)” (my translation). 64 Fletcher (1975) backs up his idea when affirming that “Frye apparently loves poetry for its own sake, a quality not always present even among the most brilliant critics” (p. 742). However, Frye’s position regarding literary studies did not come to be proven correct for he could not achieve the liberation of literary texts from other disciplines as today literature is usually studied under different theoretical approaches and archetypal criticism analyzes literature as a multidisciplinary genre. It is this last characteristic the one that leads this research into valuing elements from structuralism and post structuralism as fundamental to understand myth, archetype and the monomyth. 4. Structuralism, deconstruction and main theorists: Claude Lévi- Strauss, Jacques Derrida and Jonathan Culler Even when the overall aim of my research is to analyze, from a mythical and archetypal stance, the function of the hero’s journey in Kinnell’s The book of nightmares in order to attain self-knowledge of the life-death cycle, it is fundamental to consider other scholars’ approaches to the understanding of texts, in this case Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and Culler will be studied for a better understanding of the term binary oppositions and sign. Lévi-Strauss was an anthropologist who established a profound self-criticism trying to make a balance between the civilized and the primitive (considering an ethnocentric point of view). He coined influential terms that are now used like cultural diversity and multiculturalism terms that emphasize the importance of always 65 respecting the differences among the different groups of people. He defines his field of study as structuralist anthropology; for Lévi-Strauss (1978) there is nothing more than that in the structuralist approach; it is the quest for the invariant elements among superficial differences. (…) what we call structuralism in the field of linguistics or anthropology, or the like, is nothing other than a very pale and faint imitation of what the hard sciences, as I think you call them in English, have been doing all the time (p. 2). Thus, for him structuralism is a system in which every element in a group would only be understood by its relation to other elements for they are all part of a larger structure. Likewise, in the late 40’s, Derrida, an underprivileged student due to his origin (Algerian and Jewish) moved to France to continue his studies; in the late 1960’s he started developing ideas that dazed the world. The term that most people associated him with is deconstruction; this term in its most basic sense implies the disassembling of an extreme allegiance to an idea and learning to see the aspects of the truth that may be buried in its opposite. Meaning, for deconstruction, is not a product but a process that makes it impossible to favor a fixed center/origin in the construction of meaning. Similarly, in the mid 70’s in the United States, Culler became the voice of structuralism in this part of the world. According to his position, there is a need to return to Ferdinand de Saussure’s to do more research on langue, the shared system of language in a society. Moreover, 66 Culler believed in literary competence16, giving readers an internalized set of rules that govern the act of interpretation; consequently, there should be a different shift in terms of interpretation, from the text to the reader. Furthermore, if all the underlying structures of meaningful events and practices could be analyzed, the result will reveal patterns that characterize the systems that make these practices possible. In brief, the positions of these three intellectuals in regard to binary oppositions, interpretation, and ideology, within the realm of semiotics, will be studied to attempt to understand the underlying structures of signification in terms of binary oppositions and signs in Kinnell’s The book of nightmares. Literary structuralism Literature, as a social product, has been studied through different approaches and literary structuralism is one of those. However, before analyzing what it means, it is important to consider that for structuralists language does not exist in isolation but only in a system; consequently, meaning is produced through the analysis of the interacting elements of the social/cultural context from which it develops. This critical 16 Lazar (1993) discusses Chomsky's notion of 'grammatical competence' and in regards to literary competence affirms that “[t]his is the idea that all speakers of any language possess an internalised grammar which allows them to produce and understand utterances which they may not have heard before, provided that these utterances conform to the grammatical rules of the language they are speaking. In the same way, some theorists, in particular Culler, have argued that effective readers of a literary text possess 'literary competence', in that they have an implicit understanding of, and familiarity with, certain conventions which allow them to take the words on the page of a play or other literary work and convert them into literary meanings” (p. 12). 67 position assumes that there has to be a specific order as Lévi-Strauss (1978) affirms: To speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing; and if we look at all the intellectual undertakings of mankind, as far as they have been recorded all over the world, the common denominator is always to introduce some kind of order. (…) the need probably exists because there is some order in the universe and the universe is not a chaos (p. 4). Hence, within the scope of structuralism, meaning will be created through the examination of the interrelating elements of the social/cultural framework from which it arises. Moreover, for structuralists, the work of the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure, at the beginning of the XX century, has been profoundly influential. Selden & Widdowson (1993) affirm that he “makes a fundamental distinction between langue and parole – between the language system, which pre-exists actual examples of language, and the individual utterance” (p. 104). Thus, langue becomes the shared system of language in a society and parole the single speech acts of people; as a result, language is perceived as being passively assimilated by the persons and it is not private. Moreover, for Saussure, signs can exist only in opposition to other signs since their meaning depends on their value relationships to other signs (binary oppositions – BO's). Selden (1989) asserts that structuralists “have argued that binary oppositions are fundamental to human language, cognition and communication. We 68 use BO's to mark differences in an otherwise apparently random sequence of features, and thus to give shape to our experience and to the universe” (p. 56). The term binary is used due to the fact that when identifying phonemes (the smallest meaningful unit of sound), individuals will make use of different binary oppositions to discriminate between otherwise alike sounds. It should be noted that for Culler, distinctively, binary oppositions are a tool used by the reader to assign meaning to literary texts; Culler (2011) declares that “[t]o read something as literature is to consider it as a linguistic event that has meaning in relation to other discourses: for example, as a poem that plays on possibilities created by previous poems or as a novel that puts on stage and criticizes the political rhetoric of its day” (pp. 33-34). Hence, individuals create meaning through a comparison-contrast experience that leads to interpretation. It should not be forgotten that for Culler, the literary act is a response/reaction of culture and its products; consequently, when writing a text there will be a need for reading and it is in this last phase that meaning will be analyzed. When considering the act of interpretation, for structuralism, the sign is composed of the signifier and the signified: S S 69 Figure 3. Signified and signified. Saussure assigns two characteristics to the sign: 1. Arbitrariness: there is no natural bond between the signifier and the signified. There is nothing that logically links a particular sound image to a concept. 2. Linearity of the signifier: the signifier exists in time and that time can be measured as linear (not being able to utter or write two words at the exact same time). Language is a sign system that many value as fundamental and it is ruled by arbitrariness and linearity. For structuralists, language presents the following characteristics: 1. Language structures the perception of the world; in other words, individuals make sense of the world through language. 2. Language is understandable as a system of signs. 3. Literature is thought as a manifestation of sign systems. 4. No sign system is completely understandable, each capture part of a sign’s meaning. If language is a system that is comprehensible within its signs, being it a system, its analysis is based on the field of semiotics, the study of sign systems. It is the philosopher C.S. Pierce (Selden & Widdowson, 1993; Eagleton, 1996) the 70 American founder of semiotics. He distinguished three different types of signs: the icon, the index and the symbol. In general, we can affirm that while the icon will be present when the sign resembled, in some way, what it stood for; when the sign is associated with its referent, there is an index; and the symbol will have an arbitrary or conventional link in relation to its referent. Semiotics is a field that is both communication and a signifying process. It is a transformative reading of “reality” that awakens a state of alerting in the readers opening gates for the generation of different meanings, for different reader-writers with the same text. Eco (1980), in his book Tratado de semiótica general, states that “un Proyecto de semiótica general involucra una teoría de códigos y una teoría de la producción de signos” (pp. 25-26)17. The first refers to semiotics as a signifying practice while the latter deals with the communication process that takes place every time there is communication. Semiotics as a science emphasizes the role of the sign systems, in every person and culture, for the construction of a subjective and/or communal reality. This is a science that can help people be aware that many times what they consider a “normal” or “common” decision or situation is not so innocent. For, although everything around us exists, either if addressed or not as a sign, we get to know and experience life through signs. People cannot see beyond what their 17 “A general semiotic project involves a theory of codes and a theory of the production of signs” (my translation). 71 sign system allows them to see. As a result, the concept of an objective reality does not exist. That is just a mere illusion of contemporary society. What is decisive in semiotics is that it provides a unifying framework for working with different signifying practices in which all can be read including painting, sculpture, writing processes, body language, photography, literature, and speech, among others. This is how people can get to know that what seems “natural” and/or “universal” or “normal” has been generated by the sign system that surrounds them. For Zeledón & Pérez (1995), El principio de cualquier discurso ideológico es el "sujeto" dirigido y construido a través del discurso; las interpelaciones (políticas, religiosas, familiares) coexisten articuladas en un discurso ideológico de relativa unidad. Como "sujeto", cada persona recibe - a través de los procesos ideológicos - una identidad social. Como resultado, es imposible renunciar a una ideología personal sin perder la propia "personalidad", es decir, omitir las características del sistema al que se pertenece (p. 3)18. 18 “The principle of any ideological discourse is the ‘subject’ addressed and so constructed through the discourse; the interpellations (political, religious, familiar) coexist articulated in an ideological discourse of relative unity. As a “subject,” every person receives – through the ideological processes – a social identity. As a result, it is impossible to resign to a personal ideology without losing the own “personality;” in other words, omitting the characteristics of the system to which one belongs” (my translation). 72 With time, this system becomes, according to Dodd (1995) more homogenized through the media that are believed “to create changes in economics, values, tastes, languages, families, and institutions” (p. 237). Consequently, he states that the media: Dominate our perceptions of an even, since it is precisely through some medium that we become aware of many events in our world. To put it loosely, we become the recipients of those scenes that the director selects, the reporter pens, and the gatekeeper for the news service allows to go through the wire. Should error exist, listeners have no way to check reality since the medium has, in a sense, become the reality (p. 240). However, if studied through semiotics any sign is a construction of the ideological process in specific time and space coordinates. People believe that common sense suggests that they are unique individuals with a unified identity and ideas of their own. Through semiotics we can get to know that is the sign system of every culture the one that creates and maintains a sense of identity. The sense of “self” emerges from conventional and pre-existing conventions that we did not create. We cannot say that we are pre-determined for this or that kind of life but what we can affirm is that we are shaped by our system of signs. Nevertheless, it cannot be forgotten that there are many inconsistencies, incoherencies, and gaps in life that offer a chance for social change. And, most importantly, that the role of 73 ideology is to suppress all these instances in the interest of the dominant groups, so that there is no trembling of the status quo. Either it can be felt or seen, the construction of reality is part of a struggle between those in power and those who are not, but who might likely switch positions to see the world through different glasses. Consequently, this study will examine the field of myth and archetypal criticism in relation to the book-length poem by Galway Kinnell, The book of nightmares. Positions by Carl G. Jung and Joseph Campbell, Octavio Paz, Northrop Frye, and Roland Barthes will be provided to demonstrate the relevance of each in relation to analyzing this long poem. The first discussion chapter will be devoted to the examination of the functions of the concept of “myth” in the text. It must be recalled that humankind has been bestowed upon former knowledge and wisdom to understand the world not only denotatively but also connotatively, and the access to this information can be done through symbols and archetypes; and it is this undertaking the one that will be seized in the study of this book-length poem. 74 CHAPTER II UNDERSTANDING THE FUNCTIONS OF MYTH THROUGHOUT THE BOOK OF NIGHTMARES The book of nightmares is a vers libre poem that has been considered by many scholars as Galway Kinnnell’s masterpiece due to its unity and powerful message about humanity. For some other critics, like Donald Davie, “Galway Kinnell is a man who hungers for the spiritual, who has no special capacity for spiritual apprehensions, who has been culturally conditioned moreover to resist the very disciplines that might have opened him up to the spiritual apprehension he hungers for” (in Nelson 1987, p. 159). It is a fact that nowadays people hunger for spirituality and that many label themselves “seekers of truth;” however, this is not the case with Kinnell’s poetry. It can become a problem, as Kinnell himself states, “that readers, especially those trained in universities, tend to look straight off for a symbolic interpretation” (Kinnell 1978 p. 61) His poems are about life and about all that he has experienced because his verses stop “telling what once happened to this or that person, and turn to the reader and try to generalize about what happens to us all” (Kinnell 1978, p. 42). He works with life and what it entangles. Supporting this thesis, Denise Levertov declared that: I read the whole Book of Nightmares to my class at our final meeting, a grand farewell, and everyone, including me, thought it magnificent. “A universe,” 75 said one, after the last words and a long silence. It encompasses within the breadth of it both political rage and satire, and the most lyrical tenderness, and holds them together: coheres (in Nelson 1987, p.135). Hence, in The book of nightmares, Kinnell thrives in discussing life as a matter of everyday experience; even though its title may generate some apprehension in the readers. The nightmares discussed in this poetic text are the situations humankind may dread to face, as walking in “dead shoes” (p. 19), facing death, there is no other road. Jung (2010) affirms that “[t]o discuss the problems connected with the stages of human development is an exciting task, for it means nothing less than unfolding a picture of psychic life in its entirety from the cradle to the grave” (p. 95) and so does this poem. Moreover, Kinnell believes that humanity denies itself the deepest experience of real life: there must be a reconciliation of binary oppositions. This collection of poems opens with a verse that celebrates a baby’s birth, Maud’s; and as she is starting to come out into the world, she “press[es] a knee or elbow / along the slippery wall, sculpting / the world with each thrash – the stream / of omphalos blood humming all about you” (p. 5). There is a mother delivering a baby that “skids out on her face into light, / this peck / of stunned flesh / clotted with celestial cheesiness, glowing / with the astral violet / of the underlife. / And as they cut / her tie to the darkness / she dies a moment, turns blue as coal, / the limbs shaking” (p. 6). The moment of birth also becomes the moment to start experiencing death because “she dies a moment.” People look for an instant of 76 complete life and this can only be achieved when polarities come together and become one. In this poetic collection, Kinnell speaks to Maud and Fergus – his children; however, this fact does not constrain the poem to be enjoyed by others, as Nelson states “[A] poem expresses one’s most private feeling; and these turn out to be the feelings of everyone else as well … The poem becomes simply the voice of a creature on earth speaking” (8). There is not a unique addressee but an idea that Paz portrays in many of his texts: that of an atemporal temporality. Consequently, this study examines the field of myth and archetypal criticism in relation to the book- poem by Galway Kinnell, The book of nightmares, as well as the reconciliation of binary oppositions. To achieve this purpose, positions by Carl G. Jung and Joseph Campbell, Octavio Paz, Northrop Frye, and Roland Barthes will be provided to demonstrate the relevance of each in relation to reading myth and archetype in this book-poem. A. Introduction When defining myth, denotatively or connotatively, and acquiescing with such explanation, has usually presented a difficulty for humankind. Henderson (1995), trying to understand the term, states that today the historical accounts of humanity are regaining life through the symbolic images and myths of a distant past that emerge in the artistic expressions present in the world’s ancient treasures, from small artifacts to old languages. It cannot not be thought-provoking to consider that 77 the mind, still not totally understood, preserves hints from earlier eras of development that at a conscious level are ignored; however, at an unconscious level, most people respond to them without being aware. Campbell (2004a), on his part, asserts that “myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through with the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestations” (p. 1). For Campbell, myth becomes the source of knowledge and creativity that decant into life. On his part, Barthes (1999) affirms that myth “is a system of communication, that it is a message ... Myth can be defined neither by its object nor by its material, for any material can arbitrarily be endowed with meaning: the arrow which is brought in order to signify a challenge is also a kind of speech” (pp. 109-110). Consequently, the language that is spoken transmutes into Campbell’s “human cultural manifestations” that societies experience every day. Just like Campbell and Barthes, Jung affirms that myth morphs into a metaphor for human corporal practices and activities. Moreover, for Jung, the archetypes represent elemental psychic patterns that all humans have in common and through and into which people organize their personal experiences. Considering the previous discussion of the word myth, and the limitations that a single definition may present, a categorization of its purposes will be presented. Campbell (2004a) works on recording the different functions that concur in myth: 78 1. the reconciliation of consciousness to the preconditions of its own existence with gratitude and love; 2. the understanding of life and existence to an individual’s consciousness, maintaining a sense of mystical awe; 3. the validation and maintenance of a sociological system, the rights and wrongs according to a particular group of people; 4. the psychological learning members of societies go through in the different stages of life individuals’ experience (from birth to death). It is through the analysis of these functions that this chapter will be developed in search of a better understanding of each in the book-length poem, The book of nightmares. For the aim of the literary analysis of this poem, this chapter will focus on the complete text as a unit and not on specific poems or sections of poems. Consequently, Campbell’s proposal on the functions of myth in society will be utilized as its guiding principle. B. The functions of myth Joseph Campbell was a scholar who dedicated his professional life to the study and analysis of the mythologies of different cultures and at the same time he tried to apply this knowledge to the lives of contemporary individuals. Hence, for him, mythology offers a guiding rod to understand the place of the people in the universe; furthermore, it is through this set of rules that society may flourish into purposeful communities. For this scholar, each of these functions provides a model 79 for human beings on an individual level and that is probably why Campbell (1991) asserts that “[a] ritual is the enactment of a myth. By participating in a ritual, you are participating in a myth” (p. 103). 1. The mystical function Campbell’s first function of myth is the metaphysical or mystical function that focuses on “evoke[ing] in the individual a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence” (Campbell 2004a, p. 6); for this scholar, the mysteries found in life and the universe comprise those that connect to the existence of the divinities and human experience. An example of this type of mythology is what Campbell identifies as “The Great Reversal.” This myth recounts the story of humankind and how it fell from the grace of the gods (depending on the culture being analyzed) and it looks for some kind of reconciliation, for trying to understand the reasons why life presents difficulties, like facing death, and for instilling mystery in the cosmos. It is Campbell (2004a) who affirms that “life lives on life (…) This business of life living on life – on death – had been in process for billions of years before eyes opened (…) The organs of life had evolved to depend on the death of others for their existence” (p. 3). And this being the first function of myth, he declares that “[t]he only way to affirm life is to affirm it to the root, to the rotten, horrendous base. It is this kind of affirmation that one finds in the primitive rites” (p. 4); rituals that Kinnell summons in his work in order to understand the preconditions of its own existence. 80 Remarkably, The book of nightmares has been considered Kinnell’s autobiographical poetic piece for it confronts directly the rhythms of existence from birth to death. This book-poem invokes the poet’s relation to his own self as a parent, husband and individual as well as his finding of who he is and what the life-death continuum may offer. In “Under the Maud moon” and “Lastness,” first and last poem respectively, Kinnell convokes his children, Maud and Fergus, to acknowledge a characteristic feature of this life-death cycle; it seems that for Kinnell, to come into being also involves dying to what has been experienced before, even at the moment of birth. In the first poem, the tropes of birth, death, nature and madness guide the reader into understanding how through living death is also experienced. Nevertheless, before starting the discussion of this first section, it is essential to analyze its title. The moon’s name is Maud, a feminine German name that translates as “powerful battle;” furthermore, it is also vital to notice that the events in the poem will happen at nighttime as the title signals: “Under the Maud moon.” It is at this time when the baby, that is “powerful in battle,” is being born and so does the speaker emphasize when he depicts the moment of delivery and states that Her head enters the headhold which starts sucking her forth: being itself closes down all over her, gives her into the shuddering 81 grip of departure, As the baby is born, the professionals in charge of her delivery have to hold the baby’s head out of the womb until she is born; it is at this moment when as experiencing life, the baby simultaneously experiences death as the “(…) the slow, / agonized clenches making / the last mold of her life in the dark” (p. 6). The imagery presented in this previous line echoes a painful moment for the baby, physically and emotionally, for she is taken from life to death, into that “grip of departure,” and vice versa in an endless continuum. For the speaker, it is in this moment when Maud is born that, “the old lonely, bellybutton” is being emptied to start life from the dark into dark “[a]nd as they cut / her tie to the darkness / she dies / a moment / turns blue as coal;” this baby girl dies a moment in order to live. Her “limbs shaking / as the memories rush out of them (p. 6);” those memories that the baby has had in the womb disappear to re-start her life in society. Indeed, the life-death infinite course is invoked in the imagery presented. When a baby is born s/he also dies to darkness as s/he comes to “the light” because in the concrete world individuals share life with death, which is the only constant. The trembling extremities of the baby mirror the embrace he proclaims as a torn one that in its defectiveness achieves perfection. Furthermore, Kinnell’s constant involvement with the reality of death and the mortality of all living things is further depicted when, as the delivery of the baby takes place, the doctors “hang her up / 82 by the feet,” and as “she sucks / air, screams / her first song – and turns rose” (p. 6). As the persona signals baby Maud’s birth, the first position to take in life, after being delivered, is that of an inverted cross that may signal future grief and pain for the baby. Furthermore, as she breathes air for the first time, she is awaken into what is known as life and it is at this moment when her “slow, / beating, featherless arms / already clutching at the emptiness” (pp. 6-7) resemble the desolation in life the speaker has formerly felt when his “held note / remains – a love-note” that twists “under [his] tongue, like a coyote’s bark, / curving off, into a /howl” (p. 4). H his voice transforms into a cry of desperation that cannot be understood. Just as the baby’s “slow” wings cannot take off to fly, the persona is not able to sing but to moan. It is in this primitive and ritualistic moment of birth when humankind is faced with death, humanity’s other side of the scale; because, like animals, babies trust the natural rhythm of life, they do not wonder or question, they confide in the mystery of life. Moreover, Campbell (1991) affirms that as members of a society we think we “seek a meaning for life;” however, he states that what we are “seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel that rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all about, and that’s what these clues help us to find within ourselves” (p. 5). Besides, Campbell (2004a) affirms that for a person to understand the first function of myth, the sense of wonder towards the inscrutability of existence must be experienced, just as the old traditions of the world 83 have accepted it as it is, realizing that life is something that consumes itself (p. 104). As this scholar declares, for life to be, it should nourish on life; thus, in the second section of the book-length poem, “The hen flower,” death will be summoned exactly at the moment of the death of the hen: When the ax- scented breeze flourishes about her, her cheeks crush in, her comb grays, the gizzard that turns the thousand acidic millstones of her fate convulses: ready or not the next egg, bobbling its globe of golden earth, skids forth, ridding her even of the life to come (p. 12). Like human civilization, nature is involved in the binary opposition life-death and this perception of the speaker is depicted in the imagery of the hatchet presented –a tool for carving – that becomes a metaphor for dying that as is simultaneously murdering and being perfumed by the breeze. This seemingly contradictory illustration is reiterated when the comb turns gray, as it loses its bloodstream; and the gizzard, that has ground the hen’s food, convulses. However, 84 it is in “the next egg, bobbling” that life may be found and even though the hen is “rid” of it, humankind is not, for it feasts on the hen. Thus, it is through approaching death that life keeps going. As with other poems, Kinnell chooses the hen as a totem animal to show, like in the moment of his daughter’s delivery, that life leads to death but that in death there is life. Such statement may be read as contradictory; however, it is this fact that makes the persona amaze in the mystery of the universe. This “impermanence” of life has been a subject of abundant works through time, and death has become its undeniable companion. In section seven of this poetic work, “Little sleep’s- head / sprouting hair in the moonlight,” Kinnell portrays a view of life in which even though there may be sorrow and evil in the world there are also moments of awe. Through the presence of the father’s experiences and the daughter’s innocence, the persona leads the reader to a destination where in order to experience life, you have to go beyond, embracing sorrow and bliss, life and death altogether, to make life worth living. In the first part of the poem, Kinnell presents a father and a daughter clinging to each other: “… you cling to me / hard / as if clinging could save us (p. 49).” They are holding each other tightly for a moment that may seem, to the speaker, eternal; however, it is finite. Kinnell’s idea of his daughter clinging to him and the speaker to her seems to reflect on the need for filling in the emptiness that may be present in the life of an individual. This emptiness, and it can be affirmed this loneliness he feels, a missed connection that the persona senses is presented in the metaphor of 85 his “broken arms” (p. 49) that are cured as he embraces his daughter. Feasibly, the hero’s awareness of the emptiness is that of not understanding the life-death binary opposition because for him there only seems to exist one of these two: death. Moreover, he seems to be distressed and wonders he about his child as he states: … I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars The quester ponders on what the child might be thinking, and he sees in him the shadow of mortality, just as the image of smoke that may be strongly perceived for some moments vanishes as time elapses or stars that are not commonly experienced as being. This thought is reinforced as the hero moves forward and takes courage to face the child and tell her: Yes, you cling because I, like you, only sooner than you, will go down the path of vanished alphabets, the roadlessness to the other side of the darkness (p. 50). 86 The affirmation in the first line of this vers libre displays an imaginary conversation with the daughter in which he confronts his fears and accepts his death, earlier than his daughter’s; moreover, the metaphor of the “path of vanished alphabets” confronts the reader with another apparent contradiction for this path has no road, it is “the roadlessness” that leads to its concurrent other that is not its opposite but its reflection: “the other side of the darkness.” Moreover, this section of the poem seems to ponder on how people live in a puzzling world that can be wonderful and awe-inspiring but also a terrifying place in which “life lives on life” (Campbell 2004a, p. 3). Thus, life should be experienced every single moment; Jung (2010) affirms that “[t]o discuss the problems connected with the stages of human development is an exciting task, for it means nothing less than unfolding a picture of psychic life in its entirety from the cradle to the grave” (p. 95) and Kinnell broadens this perspective when he declares in The book of nightmares that “the wages of dying is love” (p. 53) Somehow, humanity has tried to create an “empty” illusion of clinging to others in order to be “saved” from the life they may live. However, they can only radiate “the permanence of smoke or stars, / even as my broken arms heal themselves around you” (Kinnell 1971a, p. 49) and lasts only for a while. Kinnell’s reference to this empty or torn embrace is present all through The book of nightmares portraying the image of the inability to preserve affectionate relationships among people; moreover, this characteristic of the poetic text is 87 highlighted in section VII. For the quester, individuals soon forget those who die, all their deeds, sorrows, joys, loves, hopes, and fears. Sooner or later everyone “…the roadlessness /to the other side of darkness / your arms /like the shoes left behind, / like the adjectives in the halting speech / of old men, / which once could call up the lost nouns” (pp. 50-51). The ultimate end for humankind is oblivion; however, for Kinnell, individuals have to attain pleasure in the experience of living because sooner or later, they will simultaneously encounter their demise, death, and their beginning, like the hen in section III of the poem when after killing the animal, the speaker finds life as “the next egg / bobbling /its globe of golden earth, / skids forth, ridding her even / of the life to come” (p. 12). The hen has been denied of seeing the life that may come from her death and the quester is confronted with an inverted scene in which death leads to life through the metaphor of “golden earth globe” symbolizing fertility, resurrection and a potential bearer of life and creation. More importantly, its color, golden, can be considered a metaphor of the sun and this light comes from darkness as the persona has seen: (…) by corpse-light, in the open cadaver of hen, the mass of tiny, unborn eggs, each getting tinier and yellower as it reaches back toward the icy pulp 88 of what is, I have felt the zero freeze itself around the finger dipped slowly in (p. 13). Paradoxically as it may seem, progression at this moment of the poem is moving backwards into the darkness to reach light that “mass of tiny / unborn eggs” that the rearward they are, the yellower they become. At this moment of the quest, the hero seems to have trespassed the boundaries between life-death to experience a puzzling moment of a perceived contradiction of the life-death binary opposition. Consequently, this incident will affect the speaker as he, in section VII, and as the poem progresses, the persona envisions his daughter as an adult, with the person she loves, in Paris, at the end of the Pont Mirabeau19, enjoying time together, experiencing life as it comes for which the persona tells her: “If one day it happens / you find yourself with someone you love / in a café at one end / of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar /where white wine stands in upward opening glasses” (p. 51) be careful not to make the mistakes he made: and if you commit then, as we did, the error of thinking, one day this will only be memory, learn, as you stand 19 A French monument. 89 at this end of the bridge which arcs, from love, you think, into enduring love, learn to reach deeper into the sorrows to come – (pp. 51-52). For him, these moments of joy are part of life, but individuals have to be aware that life abridges itself into what has been experienced, physically and emotionally, for at the end all that has been lived “will only be memory.” At “the end of the bridge that arcs,” a metaphor of a transformation, he summons his daughter to “learn to reach deeper” as he did at the “opened cadaver / of hen” (p. 13) so that she could “touch / the almost imaginary bones / under the face, to hear under the laughter / the wind crying across the black stones” (p. 52). He beckons her to learn to see the coexistence of two realms, life and death, and he lures his daughter to understand this inner dichotomy that lies on humankind as portrayed in how “under the laughter” the wind also cries. He tells her to comprehend that as she may caress someone’s flesh, the face, she is concurrently caressing the bones, death, underneath the skin, that when there is bliss (the laughter) there is also pain that life is to be lived. So, he exhorts his daughter to (…) Kiss the mouth which tells you, here, 90 here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones. The still undanced cadence of vanishing (p. 52). The poem’s life-death binary opposition is present in these last verses when the persona encourages his daughter to kiss the person next to her and feel the “temple bones,” the metaphor or the word “temple” revealing the divinity within people’s mortality. The metaphor of the temple is of outmost significance as, traditionally, it is in temples where god is worshipped and individuals attend it in their search for the holiness. However, in Kinnell’s poem, eternity and divinity lies within humanity’s imperfection as well as mortality. For the hero, to see a face and touch those bones that cannot be seen – the skull underneath, — to hear the laughter as well as the pain and to know that there is a undanced “cadence of vanishing” that one day will come to be met, are Kinnell’s advice to experience all that is fundamentally human. It is through oppositions, laughter-cry, temple-bones, sorrow- love, that life is comprehensible, but individuals have to be aware of this veiled contradictory truth. Furthermore, the setting in this part of the poem becomes an allegory to the life-death experience for as the bridge bends, it signals humanity’s life cycle. However, this cycle more than feared should be welcomed for underneath the external features of a countenance there are bones, and beyond the resonance of a laughter there may be pain, puzzling enough, humankind is made up of opposites and even if we are not yet facing death “we will walk out together among / the ten 91 thousand things, / each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages / of dying is love” (pp. 52-53). Furthermore, mortality for Kinnell is not an isolated moment in time but an incipient element of the phenomenon that has been defined as “life.” Hence, his everyday life-death experience is everybody’s experience, it is through and his own sense of wonder and acceptance of this antagonistic equation that he resolves this misunderstood continuum. 2. The cosmological function Linked to the mystical function of myth, the cosmological one “present[s] an image of the cosmos, an image of the universe round about, that will maintain and elicit this experience of awe [or]…present an image of the cosmos that will maintain your sense of mystical awe and explain everything that you come into contact with in the universe around you” (Campbell 2004a, pp. 7-8). In the past, cultures of primitive people created myths to understand natural phenomena; consequently, the elements of nature that they could not understand were explained through these myths. Nowadays, even when science has transformed and built on knowledge and reason, there is still mystical awe when new questions arise from scientific erudition. To summarize, it can be said that the cosmological function offers an image of the concrete world that will act as the means for metaphysical thought. Campbell’s cosmological function then serves to present a cosmos in which the sense of awe in the individual is fostered. 92 In The book of nightmares’ section I “Under the Maud moon,” the reader is constantly presented with such a universe even when the poem relates to simple and everyday life tasks and decisions. The first encounter for the persona and the reader is “[o]n the path, / by this wet site / of old fires- / black ashes, black stones, where tramps / must have squatted down” (p. 3). This setting seems to display a damp place where old fires have burned and have left ashes and stones, both black, both mysterious, like the vagrant that will wear the shoes of wandering to find out that the path has been walked by others and that his experience is individual and communal for s/he besides sitting by the path “gnawing on stream water, / unhouseling themselves on cursed bread,/failing to get warm at a twigfire– ” (p. 3); this is a speaker who is in despair, empty-handed, and desolate who fails to get warm. After this saddening picture of a reality, the persona stops to “gather wet wood, / cut dry shavings” (p. 4), and he does it all thinking about his baby girl “whose face / I held in my hands / a few hours (…) only to keep holding the space where she was” (p. 4). The connection that exists between him and the infant is so intense that even when she is not with him, he senses her presence in her absence; for him, the fact of his daughter not being with him makes him comprehend what it means to be with her. As the persona advances in his quest, the scene morphs from the enigmatic and lightless beginning to a glowing one; the persona ignites a fire in the rain. Fire and rain, opposites, become one and unite: “I light / a small fire in the rain” (p.4). 93 This paradoxical image offers the speaker the possibility to experience that through the elements, the metaphysical is accomplished. Suddenly, the experience becomes personal and as in an alchemical dream, the four elements in the natural world are present: water, fire, earth, and air; consequently, it is a moment of facing life as it is, death’s companion, for “(…) the deathwatches inside/ begin running out of time, I can see/ the dead, crossed limbs/ longing again for the universe” (p. 3), because humanity will move towards its ending and beginning, like the totem hen. This latter emblematic animal directed him to realize that life is and endless cycle and that death is its cohort. The life found in the hen is also present when the persona “can hear/ in the wet wood the snap/ and re-snap of the same embrace being torn/ The raindrops trying/ to put the fire out/ fall into it and are/ changed: the oath broken” (p. 4), for death does not conquer life or vice versa, they are both elements of a continuum and “the oath sworn between earth and water, flesh and spirit, broken,/ to be sworn again,/ over and over” (p. 4). This metaphor of a contract seems to be an endless cycle that is unceasingly sworn in which the reader is presented with a fact never thought of before, for life and death depend on each other; moreover, this endless promise is attested “in the clouds, and to be broken again, / over and over, on earth” (p. 4). These two opposite realms where the oath is perpetually sworn, heaven and earth, are traditionally symbolic of mortality (earth) and eternity (heaven). The moment an individual understands his/her moment on 94 earth, s/he will understand that death is life and vice versa, there cannot be one without the other. This apparently contradictory opposition, flesh-spirit, is comprehended better in little children, for they live within the primitive, in terms of the co-existence of the life-death experience of binary oppositions. Infants display no knowledge of what culturally has been defined as “death” or “life,” they simply live life. Consequently, they exist in the most primeval stage possible and that is why the speaker meditates Maud’s words: “I have heard you tell/ the sun, don't go down, I have stood by/ as you told the flower, don't grow old, / don't die” (p. 49). But, in “dead shoes” (p. 19) is a metaphor of the life-death cycle that will continue to be lived and experienced and what is termed life will lead individuals towards death, there will be fire but there will also be “raindrops trying / to put the fire out” (p. 4); thus, life-death should be lived every single moment. To strengthen this position, the hero wishes he could spare his daughter from the grief that life-death bring: I would blow the flame out of your silver cup, I would suck the rot from your fingernail, I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light, I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones, I would help death escape through the little rib