A Very Cursory Overview of Apparent Death

I had thought to make this final paper a bit longer, but that still would not have been enough. I will rather let these few, I hope well written, pages speak for what little I have been able to bring to the table in so short a time. I hope that any reader finds the material, if not enlightening, at least entertaining.

Apparent Death

Defining Death

            The concept of the “apparent death” reaches into every crack and cranny of the romantic ideal. Whether we look at the quick, and some would proffer shallow, tales of the first Greek novels or at the stories of the King and the Corpse and its cohorts from the tales of Hindu myth, apparent death finds its way into each of them, rearing its ugly head like some vast cosmological Titan bent on the destruction of the heroic ideal. At least, Death appears to take this form. The audience, after all, growing up in a world of brevity and eventual demise, would at first see the Death as the same dastardly figure that haunted their own lives, the same hooded, or more precisely, invisible personage that came for their parents, or worse their children, before finally coming for them. For most of us, as for those audiences, the specter of Death remains a frightening and mysterious concept that we can little understand. Death is the mystery that neither science nor mathematics has yet to understand, in spite of the fact that each has helped to define much of the known universe to this point. Science explains everything from gravity and the vast workings of the sun to the minutia of the atom and how the tiniest molecules of our beings work. Through mathematics, we can calculate gravity, the speed of an object, or how far away from our own Earth the nearest star might be. Yet, neither of these amazing constructs of man can penetrate beyond the veil of mortality. Neither can give us an answer of what happens when we die.

            The question remains however, a tantalizing morsel just out of our grasp, a dangling fruit that we long to take and eat. We have become, then, much like Adam and Eve, in search of a knowledge that it would appear is forbidden to us. We are Tantilus, doomed to reach for food that we can never have and drink that will never touch our lips, no matter how close either gets to our mouths. We long to taste, if only for a moment, the sweet nectar of understanding that would give us so much to work with, a lasting peace that we could at least embrace with finality even if it were not the answer we were looking for.

            Yet, perhaps we are looking in the wrong place. Perhaps science and math, in their infinite understanding of what they perceive to be the natural order of things have missed the most crucial of ingredients in the understanding of finality, of Death itself. It should be understood that Death is no more a vast cosmic working than we ourselves are gods on Olympus. Death weaves its fateful web about everything in its turn, yes, but it is in many respects a condition of what Paul Weiss calls the self[1]. The self, he argues, is beyond the physical. It comprises the innermost workings of the individual, built of no less than the most basic and fundamental components of the individual. The self cannot be measured. It cannot be seen, and yet it is there, as real and substantial, Weiss argues, as the physical body. The self is not limited to the workings of the body, however, and when the body dies, the self does not. It simply moves from that confining shell into a greater existence within the world.

            Weiss’s arguments are, though, while enlightening, not purely what we need to understand the complexities of the apparent death within Romance. As its name would imply, the apparent Death does not fall into any sort of physical demise as we so often see in the real world. Rather, it implies a sense of illusion, a sense that what we have seen is not the truth of the matter and that we must open our eyes in order to see what is truly happening. We must gaze upon the death and see it for what it really is if we are to understand its basic necessity within the arch of the story.

            Death, then, takes many forms in the myths, legends, and stories that our culture knows and thrives on. It can take the form of a disappearance, such as that of Haroun’s mother in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, where the person believed to be dead has quite literally left the family structure or group. As with Haroun’s mother, those who abandon the main characters are, for all intents and purposes, dead. They cannot be seen or communicated with, and so they have passed out of the realm of possibility into an unknown world, a world much like death, where the main character cannot follow lest he too become lost in the labyrinth of the underworld, or so he thinks. Thus our first understanding of the apparent Death comes simply as the belief that the loved one we cannot see is no longer with us, that they have somehow or other met with a terrible misfortune and are now not only physically beyond our reach but emotionally as well. Such fears pervade our every thought, invading our dreams and waking us in the middle of the night to call loved ones and make sure that our nightmares have not followed us into the waking world.

            This concept of dreams hits on a second understanding of death: simply put, the sleep. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” Prospero tells his audience in The Tempest, “And our little life is rounded with a sleep”. Thus Shakespeare gives us one of the truest understandings of death in this Christianized world that of the impermanent sleep. In Romeo and Juliet as well, he gives us a glimpse of this feigned death with a poison that allows the drinker to pass into such a deep sleep that he or she will appear to be dead. This play, however, does not end so happily, as Romeo, truly believing his Juliet dead due to some very unfortunate circumstances, kills himself, and she, in her own turn, commits suicide as well, this time no longer feigned. The motif remains, however, and the audience, or reader, can see other examples in texts from Callirhoe to Sinbad where characters are said to feint as if dead, falling into a stupor that the other characters see as a brush with death. Callirhoe contains a very violent understanding of this form of perceived death. When Chaereas believes that Callirhoe is unfaithful to him, the young man kicks his bride so hard that she passes into a state of near death. The family and the lover are appropriately aggrieved by the actions, and eventually the woman is laid in a tomb where her lover plans to join her.

            In both of these manifestations of death, we see a connection between what is perceived to be real and what the reality is. The stories leave us with an understanding that death is in the eye of the beholder. For Haroun, as long as his mother was gone, she was dead. When he slept later and flew to Earth’s second moon, he was also dead, but only in a sense that the outside world no longer existed to him. Thus perspective is very important to the concept of the apparent death, but still it feels as if we are only grasping at the surface of the lake, letting the waters pour through our fingers as we try to grasp concepts above and beyond our understanding.

            Perhaps the most subtle forms of apparent death, however, come as simply that: forms. That is to say that the apparent death, if we see it as a skewed perception of the actual reality, can also be personified, or rather interpreted, through the lens of the metamorphosis, or changes of the body into something that it is not. The reader may see the change as something as grand as the transformation of people into birds and trees, as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or they may see the same concept in the simple disguises that men and women characters wear in plays in order to deceive those around them into believing that they are of the opposite sex. The comic scene between Qamar al-Zaman and his wife Princess Budur certainly comes to mind as a wonderful example of this same idea. The point remains that, within this last concept of death, the characters within the novel or story still consider their significant other to be quite dead.

            So far, we have seen a physical representation of the apparent death, and for all intents and purposes, this death is indeed physical. Yet, there remains within it an aspect of the spiritual, a connection to the self, as Weiss would say. While most of the stories and romances conceive of the apparent death as a physical thing, or sometimes a lack of the presence of the physical, what we are most interested in is not the physical but the spiritual. As Northrop Frye notes… “From the beginning the poetic imagination has inhabited a middle earth. Above it is the sky with whatever it reveals or conceals… There are four primary narrative movements in literature… descent from a higher world… descent to a lower world… ascent from a lower world… the ascent to a higher world” (97). In other words, the major themes of romance deal in at least some particular way with either the ascent or the descent. This paper is more concerned with the latter.

Thus, the motif itself deals with an aspect of the descent, of the body or spirit, moving from this world, or even a higher realm of existence, into a lower one. The apparent death drops us from our prescribed place in the world into an alternate reality, one where we are not meant to be but where we must reside until we can find our way back to the place from which we came. Thus, though the apparent death can be seen as a simple image within the larger scope of the narrative, it is in fact much more profound than such a simple understanding of the motif would imply. That is, we must dig deeper if we are to understand the true meaning of Death within romance.

            Death, then, is no longer a physical manifestation but a spiritual struggle between us and the demons, or more eloquently desires, of a lower world. Death abandons us on the plains of Tartarus with only our harp as a weapon and demands that we make our way through the very gates of hell before we may climb back to the peaks of Mount Olympus. When we finally begin to comprehend the death, not as a physical manifestation of the events within the story but as a journey that the characters must undertake in order to reach the ultimate goal of understanding and enlightenment, we can begin to move from the first level of the knowledge of death into its murkier and more dangerous depths. Thus Orpheus’s journey to face the mighty Hades, Persephone’s own abduction by the same Hades, in fact, more stories than can really be listed in such a short paper, each harnesses the understanding of that same journey into the underworld as a loss of identity and a subsequent necessity to understand one’s identity more fully before the return.

            The apparent death we shall define, then, as a process by which the characters of the story are metamorphosed, not only physically but internally. Through their many journeys and close escapes, the characters that we first become transformed into newer and better representations of their former selves. Yet, the understanding of the apparent death cannot be defined so easily. Rather, we must take our own journey from the very beginnings of the heroes and heroines into their own understanding of a need for change and on to the paths of the dead before we can finally return to the concepts of death, change, and, perhaps the grandest and hardest of all to understand, immortality. It is my hope in this paper to start any readers that may read, on the road to understanding apparent death and its necessity within the larger scope of the romance, not simply as another contrivance necessary for the author to push the action along in order to give his characters something to do, but rather as the main catalyst that spurs the action on willingly, drawing the reader into a world from which they themselves cannot return unchanged.

            The important concept to understand, however, is that the reader, himself goes through a sort of death as he or she reads. The outside world slips away, and the person who picked up the novel or story no longer maintains a connection with the outside world if, like Haroun’s father, the story teller has the power to weave the magic tales that we so desperately desire. The death that we may be looking to comprehend, is none other than our own, the death we each face every time that we pick up a book and loose ourselves in the adventures of Haroun or Daphnis and Chloe or even Sinbad.

Meager Beginnings

            Whether we wish to believe it or not, the heroes that we meet in each of these stories are imperfect. While their outward appearances may reflect a perfection unequaled in this world, their internal structure leaves much to be desired. The King in the quite aptly titled King and the Corpse, is a man that believes his rule to be perfect. He imagines that he has nothing more to learn and that he is a benevolent enough king, deigning to listen to the pleas of the common folk each and every day, and therefore has no need for spiritual growth. Yet, soon he learns that all his perceptions were mistaken. First, he discovers that the fruit he has been discarding each day for the past several years is filled with diamonds. Later, when he has followed the apparent ascetic priest’s orders to come to a graveyard at night, he does so to find in short order that he is being deceived, and that the priest is really a necromancer bent on killing him and taking power from the underworld in order to rule the world of men. Only with the help of a possessed corpse is the king able to overcome these obstacles and truly become the king that he is meant to be.

            Zimmer in his book that bears the name of the tale I have just related, argues that “We are not we are not wholly or perpetually the kingly personage whom we present to the gaze of official circles” (219). Rather, our outward appearance is only a partial manifestation of our inward appearance. In another Hindu myth that I am truly sorry I could not find and quote for this paper, the god Krishna, disguised as a chariot driver for the mighty warrior Arjuna, tells the latter to fight his foes. Yet Arjuna has his doubts. He begins to question the need for such violence and bloodshed. In many ways, he is a respectable even admirable figure, questioning the edicts of his god. Any man can be certain of death for challenging their deities; yet Arjuna stands firm in his beliefs. It is only when the god reveals his true form, his ultimate inner being that the mortal Arjuna can begin to comprehend the vast complexities of a world that not only contains aspects of death but also requires it in much the same way that, as we will later see, death and life are intertwined.

            In a very similar way, the mortal King of The King and the Corpse must come to understand both the mortal and the divine within himself. It is to this end that the specter within the corpse challenges him to answer the riddles set forth one after the other as the two trek across the graveyard. It is no coincidence that such a place would resemble the paths of the dead because, in a way, that is precisely where the king has found himself, trudging back and forth along the lonely road of mortality, his earthly burden cast over his shoulder, trying to understand both himself and the purpose for which he is there.

            The corpse, despite its no doubt haggard and sinister appearance, remains a guide figure, much like the ghost of Virgil in Dante’s Inferno and Pergatorio. It brings to him, with no better way to say this, life puzzles that the man must either solve or remain silent. However, the threat of death remains because if he knows the answer but does not proclaim it, then his head will explode. This leaves the King in quite a precarious position, and, time after time, he answers the question that the corpse brings before him at the end of each story only to have the burden leave his shoulder and fly back into the tree. It is only once the corpse has completely befuddled him that the man is allowed to continue with his burden. Yet, this “lack” of understanding, hides within its core a fundamental truth that we can only begin to understand in the echoing vaults of silence. Zimmer puts it quite more eloquently saying that “[guilt] and innocence are rarely obvious. They are unapparent, interwoven intimately with each other in a marvelously convoluted design” (224). Only when he understood that the deepest and most profound concepts of human identity were beyond classification, beyond the simple strictures and designs that men could create, could he truly begin to understand himself and subsequently make the metamorphosis into something greater than he already was.

            The King is lucky, though. He did not at first recognize that he needed to change. Rather, that necessity was shown to him on his walk down the paths of the dead. He does not at first recognize his own lack, his own incompleteness; yet, the story moves him along anyways granting him that knowledge as he walks the lonely paths of the dead. For other characters in myth and story, the knowledge of their division comes far earlier.  I concur with what Northrop Frye labels this concept as, using the term “identity” (Structure of Romance). Much of what Frye says enlightens any half clever reader that can take only a fraction of what the man is saying to heart. Frye notes that “divine creation and human self creation are one” (157). I will be brave enough in postulating that, in this same sense, the hero and the heroine are one. Perhaps the artists and dramatists of earlier cultures did not know how to express such an enigmatic concept, and who could really blame them. Regardless, the fact remains that the male and female counterparts of the romance can, and should, be seen as two sides of the same coin. It is why they desire so desperately to be married, to be joined in one flesh, as the Bible and other religions profess that marriage accomplishes.

            Of course, such a realization of the happiness of unity cannot possibly come for the characters so early in a tale. After all, where would the story be without the tensions of a lost love? Love in this manner takes on the conception of a unifying force of the masculine and the feminine, or, in other stories, the secular and the divine. Once the characters understand that they are incomplete, once they finally see the wholes within themselves, they can begin to make amends, to move from the worldly, down through hell and on into a greater understanding.

            In much the same way that the characters are meant to understand their incompleteness, so too are the readers and audience members. Zimmer notes that we, all of us, are kings in our own right, confused, perhaps more accurately deceived, by the belief that we are other than our inner selves. The story, the novel, can be seen as the guide on our shoulder, the specter enchanted corpse probing us with story after story to try and make us understand that we are more than this shell, and we must find that part of us which is incomplete if we are to ever take the paths of the dead and return truly whole.

The Paths of the Dead

            Now, perhaps we begin to get to the meat, the crux, of the situation. In every ancient culture, in many modern cultures to be more accurate, the deaths are lead along their path to the underworld by a guide. We have seen corpses and books guide us into understanding that we must take this path, but we have not yet looked at the actual process of following the paths themselves. In Greek culture, Hermes guided dead souls to the cave down which they would descend. At the bottom of the chasm a ferry waited that, if you could pay the fee, would carry you over the river Styx and into the land of the dead. This is all rudimentary myth, yet, it brings us back to an important point. Why must we travel the paths of the dead in search of knowledge? Only three figures that I have read personally before this class have literally passed into Hades and returned. The first is Orpheus whom I mentioned a few pages earlier. The second is Heracles who was charged to tame and return with the three headed dog Cerberus to the world of men as one of his twelve labors. The third was Dante himself in the Inferno. Each of these men had either incredible skill or divine will guiding and protecting him along his way. That being said then, why would we be charged with traveling the paths of the dead, if it is impossible?

            The simple answer to this rather troubling question, and one that I am sure will anger no less than several of my readers, is that the paths of the dead are only a simple metaphor. Many of you now cringe, perhaps dreading the simple, logical answer; yet, it stares you in the face. I can only beg that each of you continue reading. We have already mentioned the descent as described by Northrop Frye. He does a fantastic job of painting a picture for each reader of a being either fallen from a heavenly realm down to this one, or a being from this realm who has fallen to a lower realm. For the purposes of this article, the first description seems to work best. That is, we will not look at a fall from our world into some nether realm but, rather, a fall from some higher state of existence into our own.

            Once again Zimmer seems helpful to our current objectives noting that “the human king is an avatar, an incarnation… of…god” (234). In other words, the king that we see in the story is little more than a piece of the greater manifestation of the divine. It is only because the divine cannot exist in its purist form in this lesser realm that the king is at all made flesh. Yet, this same concept does not really do justice to what is going on in the tale. The king, if we will remember, had forgotten who he really was. Only when the corpse had pealed back the layers of illusion hiding the inner from the external self, could the king recognize that he was more than he had at first appeared to be.

            In much the same way, though perhaps on a less profound note, Daphnis and Chloe deals with a very similar concept in that the two main characters, aptly named Daphnis and Chloe, find out at the end of the novel that they are, in fact, born of wealth and prestige. They had lived their entire lives believing themselves to be sheep and cattle herders when actually they were the son and daughter of rich merchants and local lords. Once again, though, it is the necessity of the revelation, the pulling away of the veil of mystery that allows the male and female to become who they were born to be.

            Interestingly enough we seem to have hit upon a pattern here. Both in the story of Daphnis and Chloe and in The King and the Corpse, we see a necessity for the revelation. In Daphnis and Chloe this newfound knowledge comes rather quickly, almost like the ripping off of a bandage. However, in the other example, we see a slow revealing as the corpse tells the man twenty-four stories until finally the truth is revealed. It is no coincidence, as has been noted before, that the man continually walked through a graveyard. He might as well have been sauntering along the same path that Dante took with Virgil. While on the path, the cobwebs and dust of confusion and secular normalcy are burned away leaving behind only the truth. The purpose of the walk down such a dreary road pertains, then, to the necessity for the destruction of all that holds us to this world, all that binds us, ironically Marley’s own chains bound him in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. We walk down the road to Hades, not because we wish to return with something of this world or that but because we want something grander and greater than we already know. We must, in Plato’s understanding, remember what we had forgotten.

            In much the same way that the hero and heroine must come to understand themselves better if they are to live, we readers must also achieve that goal. Our path lies not on a journey through a graveyard, hopefully, though we may perhaps be so lucky as to find a wealthy parent waiting in the wings to welcome us with open arms. Rather, we must move along the path down which the story takes us, guiding us, through the experience of the characters into a new understanding of ourselves. That we are the heroes and heroines of our own romances and that there is within each of us a spark of the divine that must be uncovered if we are to truly achieve the greatness that we so desperately desire.

Death and Metamorphosis and Immortality

            Once the paths of the dead have been crossed, once we have been stripped of all our preconceived notions and shadowy understandings we can begin the process of the transformation. While the previous section held the keys to our understanding how to get to such an apotheosis, this one, I hope will allow each reader to see that the ultimate goal of that long trek down the dark and cavernous paths of death was necessary only because it allows us to, much like the caterpillar. I know that those few people who have read my blog before will recognize the metaphor. Yet, I think it a good one. After all the caterpillar eats and lives based on its instinct for a particular amount of time before one day weaving a cocoon around itself. For all intents and purposes, that caterpillar is dead. Yet within just a few short days, the caterpillar emerges, no longer its earthbound grub eating former self. It now flies through the air and eats the nectar of flowers. Interestingly enough the concept of wings is, I believe, another concept of Plato who perceived that man had once had wings and, through knowledge and understanding, could grow those appendages anew. The other, and perhaps more convenient link for this study, is that both butterflies and the gods of ancient Greece consumed nectar. Thus we have almost a perfect representation of the apotheosis of the human, that is the reconstruction of the mortal into the divine.

            In The King and the Corpse the king, upon understanding his divinity sees the descent of Shiva and the other gods to the place where he stands. There they reveal to him the fact that at the end of his earthly life he will return to the heavens and rule the domain of the dead for many years afterward. It is this divinity that the man has, perhaps without knowing it, been searching for his entire life.

            In much the same way, we, as the readers, find ourselves woven into a story that we did not even know existed. Immersed in the story, we, if we are careful, can finally become aware that our wholeness, the unity of ourselves is not simply measured in the number of atoms that make up our physical being. Most of what we are comes from within. It is only when we open up the story that we can begin to see this reality, that we can finally understand that the ultimate road to immorality lies not in the cures of science nor the numbers of mathematics but in the ebbs and flows of the Ocean of Streams of Stories. Once we dive into its depths and begin to understand the vast panorama that surrounds us, for we can only truly begin to comprehend it, do we truly begin to understand the immense, immeasurable, immortal complexities of our own being. The story is a mirror of our internal selves, the glass that we hold up, the all seeing third eye of Shiva that burns away any identity we may have assumed for ourselves and leaves us with only the basic, true, and what can only be called divine aspect of our essential being. We die, as those in the stories die, “apparently” so that we may truly learn to live.

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[1] See Weiss’s discussion entitled Immortality to which much of the next part of my discussion is indebted.

Horror as Romance

In my previous post, I left you all, or at least any of you that found the post interesting, with a sort of teaser, promising to reveal my understanding of a horror film that I had watched the other day as romance. The example that I used was a rather poor movie called Dracula II: Awakening, but I think that by breaking this film down we can begin to see the pattern throughout each film and move on from there.

1) First the story, which is perhaps the easiest to explain. The movie is of course related to the book Dracula by Bram Stoker and, through that connection, allows the audience to place itself in the midst of the entire gamut of vampire stories modeled off the first. Each story brings to the tale its own characters and places, but they all weave through one another in a delicate pattern that provides more depth both for preceding and succeeding installments.

2) Remembrance. The rest of the details of the romance are hard to argue unless we look at them from the correct angle. Using a seemingly minor character from the beginning called Luke, we see him transform from an unsure EMT into a confident and self-assured individual that seeks to not only stop the other characters in their endeavors to control the vampire Dracula and use his blood to cure mortality. He is then revealed as a heroic figure, a man willing and able to step into the line of fire and fight the forces of evil.

3) Quest. Once again we must look at our friend Luke who is attracted to one of the other characters though she is in love with the man attempting to harness the vampire's power. We see the quest in the young man's attempts to alter her perceptions and later to save her from the disease that she is falling prey to.

4) Apparent Death. Though it is hard to see apparent death in a film that involves so much bloodshed and murder, if we look closely, the answer becomes apparent. There is a religious aspect to it, but the answer is there all the same. Each soul in the movie is absolved through the forgiveness of God, granting them, in the end, eternal life and not the death that we first thought. This even applies to Dracula.

5) Happy Ending. Perhaps the hardest to explain, especially considering that the hero does not get the girl (at least not in this film) and Dracula is not yet dead. Yet, the film ends with hope for the future. Neither Luke nor his new mentor is dead and the two have a mission to not only absolve the soul of the first vampire of all its sins and send it to its final rest, but Luke also seems determined to save the girl that he has always loved. Hope is always a happy ending.

I realize that this may not have been my best work, but it's not fair to do all the work for you guys. My challenge then is to watch some movies that you may have never thought or considered in the realm of romance and see if you can find the patterns lurking beneath the surface.

A New Perspective

I realize that I haven't written much of consequence in the past couple of weeks, and I'm not sure that this blog will be able to make up for that. But in the absence of any real inspirations, I thought that I might indulge myself in a kind of retrospective blog. Basically I've come to realize that I can no longer watch movies or read books without connecting each of them to the concepts of romance that we have been discussing in class. Every time I turn on the television or work my way through the pages of a story, the five keys of romance pop into my head and I begin to analyze the film or text for each of them. Is there a revelation? Is there a happy ending? Is a story told? Is there a quest and, most important to my own perspective recently, is there an apparent death? To my surprise and, I have to be honest, somewhat to my discomfort, everything does indeed contain romance. That is not to say that I dislike the fact of romance within everything. I find it refreshing that so much hope can be unearthed in even the seemingly most despairing.

Today, for example, though I am not completely proud of this fact, I watched three different movies from what would be considered three different genres. The first was a romantic comedy and can be stricken from the record of examples simply because of its category. We expect such things from a romcom as it were. The second, I cringe in typing this, was The Matrix Revolutions. Watching that movie through the lens of romanticism that I am now able to apply allowed me to see not only the path of death which the hero had to travel, but also the revelation, the happy ending, and even the apparent death. All were present in some form or another. Yet the movie that caught my attention most was probably Dracula II. As anyone who has seen the movie, or anyone who is familiar with the genre, will attest, the ability to argue for this version of Dracula as a romance is nothing if not a stretch. Yet, if we look at the appropriate characters, the romance becomes apparent. I will not bore you with the details now. Suffice it to say, I'm tired, and I just got done typing an eight page paper for another class, but I hope to prove in my next blog that a film that many people would label as "horror" is nothing more than romance in disguise.

Ramblings through 'Kubla Kahn'

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

This is the poem "Kubla Khan" in case any of you are interested. I remembered that Sexson had set us a challenge to see if we could find the romance within the poem itself. To begin with, it may be easiest to note that only once within the 55 or so lines is a form of the word romance actually used: "that deep romantic chasm." That being said I will try in the next few paragraphs to at least pull together a semblance of an answer to the question of what makes "Kubla Khan" a romance. Not to say that my answer is the definitive solution, or that I have come in any sense close to what the true meaning or "answer" to such a query might be, but I will make my own stunted attempt and leave the judgement of its worth to my readers.

Let us begin then with the beginning. "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea". The very start of the poem brings us to a magical land far away, a world of the faerie where anything is possible. It is, perhaps, the same world that Gawain traversed in his search for the Green Knight and that Conn-eda wandered through with his pony companion. But this Kubla Khan character is new, a Kingly figure, perhaps a fisher king. Whatever his origins he has ordered the construction of a "stately pleasure-dome." From the lines that follow in the second stanza, the reader can almost see a paradise, a world that had not fallen into sin at the choices of Adam and Eve.

It is a beautiful place to be sure, a land, as it were, in perpetual spring. Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of this landscape comes in the third line of the poem with the "sacred river" Alph. What to say about the river? To begin with let us start with the most obvious reference to the Alpha, the first letter of the alphabet in Greek and perhaps a reference to the very foundations of life in a place where "forests [are as] ancient as the hills". Yet it also echoes words from the Bible with a God that is both Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end," for the river travels from the land of plenty into a world that can only be described as barren and dark "a sunless sea" reflecting the chaotic void at the beginning of the bible before God spoke the world into creation.

As the play continues Kubla constructs his utopia, and the perfection of it is described for us in the next several lines. Finally, we arrive to what I consider to be the "meat of the matter" that is to say the third stanza, for not only is it here that we, for the first and last time, hear the word romantic: "That deep romantic chasm" we are told, and for the life of me I could not decipher what the poet could have been talking about. He had, after all, just finished recounting to us the splendor of the court of Kubla Kahn. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I came to think that this chasm referred to the river Alph itself, for we know already that it is sacred from the first stanza. The "holy" aspect in the third stanza would seem to strengthen this case. It is also interesting that the poet uses the term enchanting, a word that seems to denote the presence of magic. Within the next few words we are told of a woman and her "demon-lover" and the remainder of the stanza up to the point that begins "Five miles" seems to describe almost a playful aspect of the river, jumping up in a fountain. Yet soon the river makes its way down to the caves and to a "lifeless ocean." I will only argue here that the river seems to have made a full course, from the beginning of its life to the frivolity and happiness of youth, to the long meanderings of age, and finally to the vast halls of death to which we all must go in the end.

At this point then, it would seem that the river is nothing more than a representation of each of our paths along the road of mortality. Yet, that does not make it romantic For, as Dr. Sexson has pointed out to me on several occasions, there can be no death in a romance, only apparent death, which I will eventually argue is nothing more than a path that the hero must take on a road to metamorphosis in order to achieve his ultimate goals. But I digress. We must look then for something deeper, and perhaps it is hinted at in the next stanza where a "miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice" is put before us. In my own opinion this seems to reflect the very duality of the concept of life and death that we have been dancing around throughout the entire semester. That is to say, we can see from the image that Coleridge places before us at once a world of both light and dark, heat and cold, happiness and sadness, demons and lovers, the beginning and the end.

Without going into too much depth, for I do not wish to spoil any points that I may find particularly useful for my final paper, I will say only that I believe that the poem "Kubla Khan" is romantic because it contains within itself the quintessential dualities that must exist in order for a romance to function. There must always be opposites weaving in and out of each other, supporting one another in the enormous web of life that breeds such stories. In Coleridge's poem we have it all.

In the end, it is the narrator's journey into this other world, this land of magic and faerie, his desire to find something deeper, that leads him to what he has written. There he finds all manner of dualities, these coexisting opposites that bring about his verse. He has made his quest. And yet that quest continues further into the land of the dead, where Alph meets the lifeless ocean. The narrator does not die, however, but rather sees for the first time the intricacies of a far subtler world than he imagined. He returns from his journey a man changed into something other than what he was. He has "drunk the milk of Paradise" and returned from those far lands to tell his story to the world. Here then we have all five aspects of the romance for within the narrator's return is a sense of the happy ending. He has already seen Paradise and knows that he may one day return there. As he tells his tale to the reader, however, he is transformed into an otherworldly being for he has, in a sense, found the nugget of his own immortality within the mortal flesh of his being. Thus, even his return to this world is much like that of the King in "The King and the Corpse" for both are here only so long as their allotted time to humanity remains. Then the narrator will, it can be assumed, return to paradise.

I sincerely hope that my ramblings have not been too confusing at any point during this entire blog. If so I apologize in advance. The more I wrote about this subject, the deeper I wanted to go, and I think that is dangerous before my final paper. I will say in parting that if there was anything at all helpful or enlightening to any one of you that read this, then I will consider my attempts a success.

A Kind of Adventure

It's interesting that not twenty minutes after class today, I was asked if I would like to go to an "art talk." Since non of you will really understand what that means to me personally, let me just say that I've never really been much of what you would call an "art person." It's not that I despise the stuff. I simply have never taken the time to really connect with the part of my brain that can find more interest in works of art than a simple acceptance of the skill that it takes to produce a piece. Thus, in spite of its less than adventurous tone, I found myself faced with the prospect of either opening the door and letting my anima in. To my surprise, not only was the acceptance and embracing of this surprising event worthwhile, but it gave me a somewhat different perspective on what we have been discussing in class throughout the semester.
The talk was given by an an artist who, within the first couple minutes of her talk, claimed to be enthralled by a romanticized view of nature. The use of the "R" word had my ears perking up quickly, and I found myself drawn deeply into a topic that had seemed, at first, a painful experience that I would have to endure. She spent much of the rest of the presentation talking about her artwork itself, and I was very surprised and pleased to learn that much of what she dealt with was erosive in nature, that is to say a descent, if I may be so bold as to put words in her mouth. I found myself looking at each image that she showed as a kind of pictorial representation of our own studies in literature. From shadows and reflections, to natural formations that were themselves eroded, each picture reminded me more and more of our class.
There is not much more for me to add to that. I found the topic enlightening and refreshing and will now probably return for more.

The Journey of Gawain

After finishing the three tales of Sir Gawain in The King and the Corpse, I thought that I would share some thoughts about my own interaction with the text. I realize it’s been more than a week since I last posted so hopefully anyone who thought that my posts were worth reading have not migrated to greener pastures. Either way here goes.

For those of you who don’t know, the tale of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is rather simple, at least on the surface, and elaborates on a challenge set forth by a strange green man to the men of Arthur’s castle. The challenge is that whoever is brave enough should step forward and, with the axe that the Green Knight holds, strike the large man one blow. The stipulation is that the next New Year the man should find the knight at the Green Chapel and receive one blow in kind. Gawain takes up the contest in order to protect the honor of his lord and delivers a blow that knocks the head from the Green Knight’s shoulders. Problem solved right? Wrong! The giant then picks up his head, gore dripping from the wound (I imagine he blew the larger debris and germs off as well, because who wants to reattach their head to their body  only to get an infection from some unseen piece of detritus.) The allotted year passes and Gawain goes in search of the Knight. Nearly dead, he prays to God and Mary for a safe place to stay the night on Christmas Eve and lo and behold a castle appears. Being the trusting man that he is, Gawain enters the castle and is greeted as a great lord. He learns that the Green Chapel is not far from his current location and agrees to stay the remainder of the time before his appointment with the Lord and Lady of the realm. The next three days involve a wager set between Bertilak and Gawain that the former will go out and hunt and whatever he catches he will bring to Gawain whiled the latter remains at rest within the castle. Gawain agrees and the first two days go by smoothly, each with one more kiss from the Lady to Gawain which the knight promptly bestows upon the Lord. It is on the third day that Gawain breaks his vow for the Lady, attempting to bestow upon Gawain a token that will somehow bind him to her, gives to Gawain a girdle of green cloth that protects the wearer from harm. Thus Gawain, withholds the belt from Bertilak and, though he is troubled by the deceit, goes on his way the next morning to the Green Chapel. There he is confronted by the Green Knight who, after two feinted swings, the first of which makes Gawain flinch and the second to test his resolve to remain still despite impending death, makes only a small cut in the other man’s throat. It is after this trial that the Green giant is revealed to be no other than Bertilak himself, and the man also reveals that Gawain has been tested for the last three days, failing only slightly in that he took the belt from the mistress of the castle. In the end, however, Gawain is permitted to go on his way and chooses to wear the belt as a sign of his newfound knowledge the rest of his days.

This is the story, in quite a hurried fashion, as told by Zimmer. The man does an excellent job of not only passing on the tale but then unburying many of the secrets that lay beneath. I had not thought, for example, that the Green Knight was death incarnate, but the knowledge now makes since. It is also interesting to note that, though this may be true, there is another, more obvious guise that the transformed Bertilak assumes, that of the well named Green Man. The Green Man in Celtic lore was a fertility god. He was of the Otherworld, and thus only interacted with people on the most menial of bases, only coming forth from his evergreen kingdom when men or women needed to learn a lesson. What Zimmer does not add to the axe in the tale is that the man also held a bundle of holly, important in that it is the only plant native to England that grows green in the depths of winter. Zimmer does state later that he sees a union between life and death in the marriage of the Lady of the Castle to her husband Death. Yet I would take the metaphor one step further and say that the Green Knight himself is a unification of both the aspects of life and death. He is, in other words, what Gawain may seem to become at the end of the poem (though we will come to that shortly). Thus it is the wielder of death, the carrier of the axe who is also, in many ways the one who offers life in the depths of winter, apparent death in its physical manifestation.

As Gawain sets out, we come across another form of apparent death, for to all eyes that witness the departure, even to Gawain himself, the brave knight is going to his death. He made the wager with the demon specter and so must go to pay his due, and the only outcome that can be seen by the party is that he will never return from his quest. Thus Gawain has essentially become the walking dead, a figure whose last days are numbered. As Gawain journeys into the wilderness, he is assailed by the world around him, caught in the storms of the wide world which he must overcome in order to make his final destination. Yet, near death, the flame of his life nearly spent in a quest that has lead him across the vast landscapes of England to no avail, Gawain finds himself in a dark forest and prays for deliverance if only for the night that he might worship Christ on the eve of the Lord’s Mass (Christ-mass). Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, a castle looms before him. No doubt weary and not thinking straight, Gawain enters the castle with little regard as to from where it might have come. 

It is here that Zimmer makes the second error in his abridgements from the tale, for when Gawain passes into the realm of Bertilak, he is instantly stripped of his armor. As a knight, this is much the same as stripping the man of his identity. The images of death are all about us now. Gawain has, as in the later story of his journey into another castle, crossed into the land of the dead (though at one time it would have been Otherworld, the land of the faeries, but that is a topic for another argument and blog altogether). Here he makes a final descent and loses his very identity, an occurrence that greatly interests Northrop Frye who sees the loss or stripping of identity as one of the tell-tale signs of a fall or descent from a higher plane of existence to a lower one. Thus, Gawain, though he may not yet know it, is charged with literally finding himself again, with rediscovering who and what he is.

Here enters, then, the Lady of the Castle, charged, in no small part, with seducing Gawain, with testing the virtues to which he so adamantly clings. Despite all of her efforts, Gawain remains faithful to his lord, his duty, and, perhaps most importantly, to his host. Yet, he is not completely immovable, and when the Lady offers him a token that could perhaps save his life, the young man takes hold of it, sensing, no doubt, an opportunity to thwart death and return from his once seemingly final quest. The belt, as we learn, is nothing more than a final rouse to tempt the doomed man, a spider web dangling above a cavernous pit that offers to pull the doomed man to safety if he will but reach out and grab it. Bertilak, is none other than the Green Knight himself, and it was his test that the young knight fails. 

Yet, all is not lost for Gawain, as Zimmer notes, for he is eventually given the very belt that offers protection, a symbol of his journey through death into immortality. I am somewhat loathe to argue with a figure such as Zimmer, who no doubt has forgotten more than I will ever know on the subject about which now I type, yet I cannot help but see the belt as not an image of the gained immortality that Gawain first sought, but still as nothing more than the spider web. In other words, I would argue that the belt was nothing more than a gift from the Lady that would make Gawain forget the one thing that he was supposed to remember, his faith in God. Though this may be an uncomfortable subject for some, still I cannot help but see an indictment of any attempts to circumvent the natural order of things. Gawain, in leaving for the Green Chapel is given back his arms (on the inside of his shield by the way is the Virgin to whom he prayed for relief from his suffering before entering Bertilak’s castle. It is to this figure of womanly virtue and to her son that Gawain is supposed to look for comfort in a world of death, and, yet, his faith is marred by the addition of a green girdle that offers no more safety than the strand of web over a chasm. Gawain returns home, not with a mark of immortality, but with a brand that he will ever wear in shame, a reminder that his faith wavered in the face of utter annihilation.

As I write this, however, I am struck by the fact that the man’s faith did not go unanswered. He was saved from the very brink of death by an otherworldly power that he could not comprehend. Who is to say that this power was not in league with his faith? What then can we learn from Gawain, or what were the poets attempting to convey as they concocted such a story? Gawain passed through the fires of death into the very domain of the thing which he sought to avoid only to pass out again later, marked for all time as one who stood in contest with death and was rewarded for his bravery. There can be no doubt that he was transformed, utterly, as marked by the green belt later worn as a sash and reminder of his time within the halls of Life and Death.

In romance, at least, we can see the necessity for the hero to pass through perils that would destroy other men, to brave the deepest darkness in search of some truth that has eluded so many. It is only once he has finally emerged from all these trials, changed from what he once was, that the hero can take up his role and live, in the end happily ever after, but that is a story for the next blog.

The Necessity of "Apparent" Death

While reading the stories of "The Pagan Hero and the Christian Saint," I came across, to my very great surprise, the answers to the questions that I had been trying to comprehend for the last few weeks in class. Why was it necessary for men and women to "die" in romances? Why did the heroes and heroines of the stories have to fall from grace, become as if dead, in stories that are supposed to have happy endings? It is not enough to say that the perceived death spurs the plot along, for there are many other devices that the authors could use if they so desired. Pirates and witches, pits and marriage all provide ample material that could keep a plot going. It would not be very profound, true. But there is so much material that can be added to the story-arch of romance that the apparent death seems at first glance a peripheral thread much like the marriage or the pirates. In the hopes of finding an answer, I first looked at "Beren and Luthien" another of my blogs which anyone is welcome to read. As I wrote, I noticed the beauty of the sacrifice of Luthien's immortality so that she might be with Beren, and they could die together. I felt that the greatest part of the romance came when the two came together to live in the brief brilliance of mortality that made the gods envious. My analysis, in other words, was that the apparent death of Beren was postponed by Luthien's sacrifice, and through that Christ like action, to steal an idea from Frye, I saw the greatest form of Romance. It was my belief that the apparent death was merely another obstacle which the hero and heroine had to overcome in order to show their true love for one another.

To my shame, I must now admit that I was wrong, as Dr. Sexson has pointed out, but I was wrong in a way of which I could not have, at the moment, even imagined. In reading "The Pagan Hero and the Christian Saint," I came across what I now believe to be the true answer for the necessity of apparent death, and the poetry of that moment is magnificent. Zimmer states of pg 44 sating that "[destruction]--death--is but an outer mask of transformation into something better or something worse, higher or lower." He goes on to say that the "unconscious intuitive forces" that guide us through life "understand that death, the dolorous sundering, is a prelude to rebirth, transmutation and reunion... they know, namely, that there is no death" (45). In other words, what we see as death in these stories is nothing more than the caterpillar slipping into a cocoon to become a butterfly. For all apparent intents and purposes, the creature is dead, unable to move or eat, oblivious to the world around it, buried alive in a tomb if you will. It  is only once the caterpillar emerges from its long slumber as the beautiful butterfly (for fun see here any connections you wish to Psyche and the soul) that we understand that the death was necessary for the transformation.

Zimmer is specifically referring to Conn-eda, and goes on to make the same general connections to the Christian St. John. His main argument being that the two innocent individuals, devoid of any amount of evil, needed to experience death in order to become the truly perfect leaders that they were meant to be. Conn-eda must understand the dangers of the world, of treachery and betrayal, and be able to make hard decisions in order to be the powerful ruler he is destined to be. John must understand sin and all that it implies before he can truly absolve people of their own dark deeds.

While this is true of the two characters in the stories that Zimmer puts forth, in order to truly understand the necessity of apparent death in romance, I have tried to use the same logic for each of the stories that I have read so far for class. The hardest, perhaps, is the first, that is to say The Ephesian Tale does not have much apparent death except that the two lovers consider the other lost. My only argument for the power of death as transformation would be the somewhat farfetched idea that a separation of two lovers early in their union, before they can even consummate the marriage if I remember correctly, is to test their love for one another, to drive home the understanding that chastity and fidelity are important characteristics of the individual that will lead the two to a long and happy life. It thus transforms their love from a spark that may catch fire for a moment and burn bright, only to die as suddenly as it sprang up, to the fiery embers that burn slow and hot throughout their lives.

In Daphnis and Chloe, the apparent death comes when the children are left in the pastures to die. Eventually they are returned to their parents and live lives of splendor and grandeur that they could never have imagined. I would argue that the apparent death comes as necessary in this story because it gives the two a taste of the purity and innocence of the pastoral world that helps to define their lives, and their love, in the urban community of which they later find themselves a part. On another, side note, it is only after Daphnis has learned the art of love from the widow that he can truly be the lover he wishes for Chloe. Interestingly enough, the little death (see orgasm) comes only after sex, and could therefore be seen as a type of death from which Daphnis emerges wiser in the world. (Just a fun fact some of you might enjoy.)

In Callirhoe, I would argue, the apparent death is quite obvious, though the lesson that we are supposed to learn from it may not be. If we remember, however, the events that lead to Callirhoe's apparent death, the answer may come more easily than we originally anticipated. After all, it is Chaereas's anger at his new wife's apparent infidelity that causes a reaction, he kicks her so hard she seems to die, that leads to the burial and Chareas's subsequent trial. It is only after the rest of the story that we see the change the death has caused in Chaereas. Threatened by the King of Persia, Chaereas is ready to go to battle with the man, but listens to his newly returned wife Callirhoe and instead acts wisely, giving the King his possessions back and returning to Syracuse with his resurrected bride.

Lucius or The Ass is also difficult, mainly because we do not receive from the shortened version the lesson that The Golden Ass proffers at the end. In trying to remember the lesson, I believe that it is the concept of man falling from his lofty position into the form of an ass, for all intents and purposes dead to those around him, that teaches the man the error of his lecherous ways and puts him on a path toward divine understanding to which he would have been blind otherwise.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is perhaps the most like "The Pagan Hero" in that Haroun, dead through the state of dreams, learns the importance of both silence and storytelling, that both light and dark have their merits, much as Conn-eda learns the importance of both the kindness he holds throughout his life and the ability to kill in necessity, to be hard when the moment calls for it.

Interestingly enough it is only Abu Kasim who does not learn to change, and it is this inability to alter himself that leads to his ultimate destruction.

Thus, we come to the end of this long, and often rambling tale. I hope that the brief survey that I've just outlined goes in some way towards being helpful to anyone who, like myself, wondered at the importance of a death that wasn't even true to the larger narrative scheme of a romance. In the little while since I read "The Pagan Hero" my own perspective has been considerably altered. I now see death not as an obstacle to be overcome, a fiery hoop through which the hero must and does pass unscathed, but rather a fire that must singe and burn either hero or heroine or both in order to lead them to their ultimate goals, to make them the characters that they were born to be. They come through the fire singed and burned, altered beyond repair, but it is a repair that is unnecessary for in passing through the flames, they have burned away the fat so to speak. Scarred, yet somehow stronger for the experience, the moth emerges from its cocoon to the light of a new day, unfurls its wings and flies, seeing the world from a different perspective yet never forgetting its time as the caterpillar.