Читать книгу The Myth Alive - Don Gutteridge - Страница 9

After ten years of writing poems, mainly on Canadian historical subjects, I discovered that, like all serious poets, I had been a maker of myths. This should have come as no surprise to me and yet it did. Perhaps I was just too busy writing the poems to worry about such larger critical and affective aspects of the literature to which I was annually contributing. But events in this country during the past five years have compelled me (and many others) to think more carefully about the significance of our literature in relation to Canada as an emergent "nation".

Myth, of course, is an elusive word, one that has been used, willy-nilly, to bolster the arguments and underpin the hypotheses of critics, psychologists, sociologists, historians, poly-sci enthusiasts, ad-men, and politicians of every blush and hue--each in his own way, perhaps, questing for the golden key to our lost identity. In fact, this quest has become the national pastime, the Canadian quiz-game with myth as the secret word. I have no intention of reviewing or commenting upon the many-splendoured meanings of myth nor the dreary uses to which they have been put. I wish merely to define, as precisely as I can, the way in which myth operates for me as a poet, and mention some of the significant ways in which, I feel, it bears upon the question of our identity, both personal and public.

One "myth" (to use the word in its most common and least fortunate sense) which should be swept aside at the outset is the mistaken notion that we have no identity, or at best a very nebulous one, and therefore, instead of discovering it or bringing it to consciousness, we must somehow create one--and fast, before the nasty Americans or the upstart Quebecois overwhelm us with their own clearly delineated cultures. It is this silly notion which has diluted our collective energies and distorted our national goals for the past two decades. To put the record straight, and quite simply, we have an identity because we are and have been. We are and have been occupying this space called Canada for three centuries; for over a hundred years we have referred to ourselves as a nation, and have, more or less, behaved as if we were one. What kind of nation, what sort of people, what forms underlying our national purpose, our common pursuits, our destiny--these are legitimate questions, even yet, one hundred and four years after the official natal rites. However, as I suggested, this country, at least its English-speaking portion (and I suspect, despite the ruder noises, the French-speaking section as well)--seems gripped with an anxiety approaching hysteria and manifesting not a little paranoid-schizophrenia, a blind and self-defeating fear that maybe, after all, we don't exist. Our mirror is a window. Well, it just isn't so. We have existed, and we do.

To argue this point fully would require a separate (and longer) paper, but let me just mention several pertinent points at this stage. Northrop Frye has noted that this kind of anxiety over identity leads to the creation of a social mythology. And much of our identity-hunting in Canada has been of this variety--with all its inherent dangers: self-delusion, commercialization, and ultimate loss of true identity. For our true identity can only be realized, as it has been in each of us as individuals, by questing within, not without, by moving below the surface patterns of our everyday life to that area just beneath consciousness, where the forms of our feeling are known to lie, and where we can apprehend them, free from the pressures and the mirages of the chaos above. This is precisely what the adolescent, what each individual who seeks to be uniquely human, must do. It has its dangers, no doubt, for both individual and group. But one of the dangers is not that we will find nothing. What we will find are the myths, the blueprints which have given and will continue to give our lives, separately or collectively, their unique curve of meaning. We may not like what we see, but it exists, and is real enough.

The second point to be made here is that the arts, and literature in particular, have traditionally been the repository for myths, the myths of the individual writer fashioning his work of art and through it the myths of the society out of which and for whom he is writing. (I will elaborate on this further on.) In brief, the mark of a nation, or society, or civilization, as Kenneth Clark reminds us, is its culture, its myriad art-forms. Canadians have had a literature, of some kind, from the very beginning. This literature has steadily grown in magnitude and quality; and because it is literature, it does contain myths, which because of their peculiar nature will tell us what we were, where we thought we were going, what we are, and might become.

But how? What is myth in this restricted literary sense? In what way can it provide us with forms of identity? Northrop Frye has dealt extensively (and accurately, I feel) with literary myth in what I would call the critical or general sense. I would like to come at the problem from the inside, from the point of view of the poet who "makes" myths, in order to clarify some crucial points about their nature and the manner in which they operate in literary works.

For the poet, there are three areas of concern ("levels" if you will) in the making of poem: 1) words and rhetorics, 2) symbols, and 3) myths. He begins with words, with what they can express, and what they can be made to do rhetorically. Rhythm and logic and grammar and sound and genre come into play. In a sense, the identity-game begins here. In the quest for words and their rhetorical patterning, the poet is seeking to define in himself what heretofore has been indefinable, or merely vague or shapeless or inchoate. But words, as rudimentary symbols, give back as much meaning as they give off. For the poet this is always a symbiotic process: the self and the language of the self, not identical but identifying. Rudimentary word-symbols, grammars, rhetorics--all move easily into the area of literary symbolism. There is no difference here in kind, only of intensity, focus, portability and the potential for interaction. A symbol is a cluster of minor "symbols" (metaphor, character, action, etc.) but more than the sum of its contributors. Consequently, it will say more--will give off more meaning and give back more than the poet expects. At both levels, word and symbol, the aim is to create a rhetorical brilliance, in which the penumbra carries the meaning out as well as in. In each instance, the poet is identifying in himself what has been only potential. And, of course, at this point, there are really no clearly marked "levels".

It must be stressed here, too, that this process is exploratory. In the best poems, the true poems, words and symbols have a way of "choosing" themselves. It is more accurate to say that meaning is found or discovered rather than created. Identifying, or knowing one's identity, is an act of discovery, of disclosure. The meaning is there: to be revealed, not promulgated.

I emphasize this point because when the poet moves toward myth the exploratory nature of his work is heightened, becomes infinitely more subtle and "mysterious" (i.e., less easily definable). Myth, in the poem, is the deepest shape of meaning, the point of closest identity between the self and its defining language. It can only be reached (revealed, discovered) through the other two layers or textures of the identifying process. Which is to say that the poet must find his words first, he must make them mean so deeply that they take on new configurations and become symbols for him to be re-worked until they too are brilliant filigrees of meaning. At this point, if he is lucky enough and good enough, the myths will reveal themselves. For, in one sense, myth was the pattern that was there all along (or seemed so), that was influencing, that was ordering the configurations underlying the rhetoric at both levels. Seen from another angle, it is the pattern created by and yet creating the complex of word and symbol. (Which comes first is a question much debated for centuries and, for the poet at least, not really relevant.)

The general point I'm driving at here is that the poet cannot start with myth. He does not choose it; he works toward it, and finds it. ("Bad" poets and "bad" poetry will probably not conform to the rule, but this is a separate, if not less interesting, problem.) The reader of poems re-enacts the process, beginning with the surface rhetoric and working in and out, back and forth. Thus he is able to identify, through the language of identity, the myth and all its meaning. He is able to recognize a sense of self "other" than his own, and insofar as he is affected by the poem, may identify elements of his own self. If the poet belongs to the reader's own culture, or nation, the common elements of the symbol-patterns (the mythology of the poem) may be more numerous and recognizable than otherwise. Besides the universally human nature of the myths discovered, there will be a level of identification which can only be described as nation-al. For what is a nation but a collection of othernesses, some of whose elements are mutually felt and understood by its individual members?

Let me illustrate the foregoing by reference to some of my own recent work. I have to date written poems about Dollard, the Jesuits, Hudson, La Salle, Champlain, Riel, and Hearne. These figures, for me, have served the function of symbols. They have been able, through the poems I have built around and out of them, to tell me things about myself. This is the prime motive for writing--the self seeking a language of identification. But I did not choose these personages in any literal sense. I have always read widely and erratically in Canadian history. Certain figures would hold my interest more than others. If this interest seemed inexplicable to me in ordinary terms, I would try writing a poem. There was something to be explained, discovered. Always I began with the poem, the words. I could tell after a few lines or one or two sittings whether or not the words had any brilliance to them. If they did not, I abandoned the work. Certain figures, despite several attempts, yielded nothing; e.g., Sir Guy Carleton, an adolescent idol of mine; or Brébeuf, whose place as eventually taken in my "Coureurs de Bois" by a fictional priest who seemed more compatible. Five years later, I was able to write a quite different poem about the great Jesuit ("Brébeuf on the Cross"). What I am saying is that the symbol cannot be chosen consciously, and that the serious and honest poet can determine the integrity of his symbols by testing them operationally at the level of word and rhetoric. They must be revelational not expository. When the words begin to come easily the symbol takes shape through them, and the basic rhetoric of the poem asserts itself; e.g., mode, genre, line-length, rhythm, tone. At some point during this initial stage of writing, the symbols feel "right" and the poem proceeds, with the poet working at both levels simultaneously, making the minor symbol-clusters come together, and glow through the words asserting them. Riel, for example, begins to work against the backdrop of prairie, Metis pantheism, Catholic mysticism and the set of counter-symbols represented by Sir John A., the Orange order, Ottawa politics, etc., and the whole design begins to emerge. At this point, the underlying myths may begin to be felt--like shadows, tensions, mirrors within mirrors. Seen from afar, their outline is simple, as Frye suggests: a quest, a tyrannical father over-thrown, the rape of innocence, a prideful fall. To see myth in these general, critical terms is a useful activity, providing the reader with a framework for his reading which is as wide and as deep as the human psyche itself, and a backdrop for those myths which he will encounter "live" within the work of art.

For what I have been trying inadequately to describe above is the poet's discovery of the myth alive and the reader's re-discovery of these identifying symbols as he reads. In its living state, the myth is not simple in substance or in outline (though an outline is visible and can be generalized); it is web, and filigree, and labyrinth--where the spaces mean as much as the lines. It is the structure on which all the rest has been built, and yet can only be felt through the flesh it gives shape to. But to call it structure is not wholly accurate, for it has force, and power, a potentiality for movement, for generation. So that the poet, even as he feels his poem close around the myth and reveal it, is aware that the "structure" is but a temporary arresting, the live myth caught and held, for the moment.

Let me illustrate again from my poem Riel: A Poem for Voices. As I read the story of Riel in several source books, I knew I had to write a poem about him. Even as I read I could see images coming up at me, could hear words and phrases rehearsing themselves in my head, could even sense the broad outlines of symbolic patterns, a glimpse of the myths lurking below. So the poem began, not at the beginning, but in the middle and moving toward either end. As the words came and the form coalesced (dramatic/narrative, individual voices, long line modulating to short line and first-person lyrics, etc.), and major symbols developed, the poem took its own final shape--which turned out to be quite different from what I had initially envisaged. What I asked myself, on more than one occasion as the poem neared completion, was "How do I know when it is finished?" (I had long ago written Riel's "last" speech), "What force or pattern is governing the selection of materials at this late stage?" Near the beginning of a work, after the initial groping, you feel that you are making some conscious decisions, but as it progresses, you seem to work more blindly and yet less arbitrarily, feeling your way, though the way is not necessarily more difficult. Well, Rielended when the last piece was fitted, and I sensed for the first time what the whole thing was about (characters, incidents, images, words, rhetoric, etc.). I felt those myths which had given my poem shape; that were, in the deepest sense, its meaning. And even now, I have to go back and re-read the poem myself if I wish to feel its original power. You can't seem to carry live myths very far. We have suitcases full of dead ones.

What has the foregoing got to do with Canadian mythology and nationalism? Just this. The myths in genuine literature are honest. They are deep identifying symbols. Our literature, and the mythology it embodies, is thus a repository of "national" symbols. It will help to explain what we are. It will not create an identity for us, but will reveal the one we already have.

To be more specific about how this works: each symbol in a poem is at first a private one, subsumed by the personality and words of the poet. But it is also public, just as language itself is both personal and social, relative and absolute. The words are the poet's, but they belong to others as well, as they mean in ways beyond his control. By the mere act of identifying himself through the medium of language, the poet has made his work and that part of himself involved in it, public property. In this light, the discussion between public and private symbols is irrelevant; they are merely more or less recognizable. The point here is that the works of our poets are public documents to be read so thoroughly that the myths shine through. Secondly, the poet, as person, is one of us, part of this nation, having shared the same environment, the same values, the same history, the same schooling; thus, his person, or self speaking the language of the self, will be other than us, but an other more like us than we might suspect or hope. His words, his symbols, his myths will be identifiable and identifying in the only way that humans have of sharing experience and defining themselves as a social group. Our literature is there, and it is important.

The myths which it embodies are significant in at least two ways. First, a wide reading in our literature, set against a background of the best in English literature, will reveal the kinds of myth common to our time and place (past and present); that is to say, that out of the whole range of possible human myths, Canadian writers have chosen these kinds. For example, can we not learn a considerable amount about ourselves by discovering that pastoral myths have always been of prime interest to our poets and novelists? Or that, as Frye and others have noted, there is a distinctly apocalyptic tendency in our best literature? Journeys and quests abound. On the other hand, we don't find many Ulros or neon jungles (not yet). In brief, this kind of criticism, in which myth is generalized for the sake of analysis and comparison, is a valuable way for a nation to begin to discover its "lost" identity.

But the second way is much more significant and valuable, and is the one I am particularly promoting. It involves coming at the myth alive and experiencing it both emotively and intellectually. Any analysis of such myths would entail comparing the subtle and elusive differences between this pastoral myth and that one--the pastoral quality or feeling of Sunshine Sketches and, say, the peculiar urban-rural tension of Souster's poetry. Or the particular nature of many of our quests which are essentially different from their American counterparts; where the enemy is more likely to be space, the nothingness of north, where the dominant feeling may be a sense of estrangement from the mother-culture, and the illumination at the end no more than an existentialist glow. It is at this level of reading and criticism that literature will yield to us its identifying icons, where the myth alive is felt through the individual work, and compared, both instantaneously and in retrospect, with other works of similar scope and power. For here one comes closest to touching the meaning sought after by both poet and reader. Here one catches the unique identity of the individual poet in the very act which makes that identity a public and universal artifact. I may have "chosen" Louis Riel as a private symbol and worked him into a poem in order to discover certain things about myself, but the language I was compelled to work in, indeed the symbols themselves (Riel, Sir John A., the events of 1870-85), belonged from the outset to the people of Canada. So the poem is at once intensely private and hopelessly public. As a Canadian of a certain type, what I discovered about myself is also what is there for each Canadian to discover, or rediscover, for himself.

Before this starts to sound overly pompous, let me just say that what one finds in the literature may be trivial or important. It depends on the work. But all serious literature will yield information of some significance. Let us once and for all set aside the irrelevant arguments about "quality"; let us temper our paranoic inclinations, and seek to eradicate the neo-colonialist sensibility within each of us; in brief, let us get on with the job of taking our literature seriously, of reading it deeply and widely, of developing a genuine critical tradition in which mythology is given its just due. And since criticism, as Frye has noted, is ninety per cent concerned with teaching, let us promote our literature and its mythology throughout the school system. Let us teach it until it speaks for itself.

The country we discover will be our own.