Literature in our Lives

Talking About Texts from Shakespeare to Philip Pullman

Richard Jacobs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367189310
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429581328
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book recreates in written form seventeen of the most popular, frankly personal and engaging lectures on literature given by the award-winning teacher Richard Jacobs, who has been working with students for over forty years. This is a book written for students, whether starting their studies or more experienced, and also for all lovers of literature. At its heart is the conviction that reading, thinking about, and writing or talking about literature involves us all personally: texts talk to us intimately and urgently, inviting us to talk back, intervening in and changing our lives.

These lectures discuss, in an open but richly informed way, a wide range of texts that are regularly studied and enjoyed. They model what it means to be excited about reading and studying literature, and how the study of literature can be life-changing - perhaps even with the effect of changing the lives of readers of this eloquent and remarkable book.

1 The Myth of the Fall and its Impact

Pullman, Lewis and Others

A very warm welcome to the first lecture in this series and this book. It’s rather longer than almost all the other lectures because, unlike the others apart from the lecture at the centre of the book on ‘fallen women’, it ranges quite widely across texts many of which I think you’ll know. The other lectures are almost all focused on single texts which are widely studied and enjoyed.

My starting point here is the biblical story of the Fall and its impact and cultural significance. I approach it in terms of myth as a way of discussing it in the context of a rich sampling of literary texts and in the light of psychoanalytic ideas. And I’ll add that the final lecture on Milton’s treatment of the Fall in his great Paradise Lost means that the beginning, middle and end of this book make up one of the threads that connect these lectures in ways that I hope you find productive in your reading-lives.

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Myths serve to relieve anxiety. They start from a difficult question or problem and guess backwards with a narrative that ends with ‘explaining’ or ‘answering’ what was otherwise inexplicable, relieving the anxiety caused by the original problem. The myth of the Fall, and the subsequent loss of Eden, has such a tentacular reach and power to suggest that the anxieties to which it ministers are the most urgent and elementary of all. There are some pressingly specific anxious questions that the myth ‘answers’, like why are women’s child-labours so painful, why do men ‘rule’ over women, why do we wear clothes and feel shame about our private parts – oh, and why do we have to die? But there are more generalised but just as pressing anxieties at stake. Why am I not happy? Why do I not get what I want? Why does what I want, when I get it, not make me happy? Why is desire bound to fail to reach its object? Why have I lost what I had? And what am I being punished in this way for? Why can’t I stay with mummy, at her breast, in her bed?

Why are you not happy? You were, but Eve (and then Adam) contrived to make sure you’d never be, any more, properly. The anxiety of unhappiness is narrated as a myth which relieves the burden: a myth in which there is an othering of good and bad, Eden and Fall. Gerard Manley Hopkins calls it, and his sweetly poisonous poem, ‘Spring and Fall’ and in it he addresses a child who is weeping over leaves falling in Autumn. He tells her that the ‘springs’ for all sorrows are identical and reside in the ‘blight man was born for’, the Fall that is death, her own death for which she unknowingly weeps. The blight man was born for. Why are you going to die? You weren’t, once. I’m reminded of the moment Alice returns to her world from Wonderland and her sister is brushing dead leaves off her face: her journey started at the height of summer so, in a subtly muted way, the year has fallen and died, intimating a kind of death for Alice herself. But that makes sense because, for Carroll, Alice growing into a mature woman (in what he pointedly calls the after-time) is a kind of death, certainly for him and even for her.

The root anxiety which the Fall myth most elementally answers to is our collective need to believe in guilt itself – it being preferable (to paraphrase Elaine Pagels) to feel guilty than helpless, better than subsisting in a void of meaninglessness. To believe in guilt is to believe that things were better once, that we were happy once but that something happened which is my fault or someone else’s fault, or everyone’s, and that things now, like gardens, aren’t what they used to be, before we grew up, before language, before daddy. The myth of the Fall is everyday pathology. This is what the post-Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan realised in his ideas about the infant having to negotiate a series of wounding separations after losing the primal and nurturing illusion that its world consists exclusively of one unified entity, infant-plus-mummy. Separation from the breast, from the bed, the recognition that mummy has needs focused elsewhere, notably on daddy – these are the psychic losses of the child’s garden, of Eden. Garden is mother. What Freud and Lacan had to say about the infant’s negotiation of mother-loss and its subsequent insertion in forms of exile and deferred desire is, in this sense, just the story of Adam and Eve losing their garden told in a grown-up way or, an example at random, the story of David Copperfield now barred by the padlocked gate and the high fence from the garden where ‘fruit clusters on the trees, riper and richer than fruit has ever been since, in any other garden, and where my mother gathers some in a basket’ (Chapter 2). We are exiles from that garden/mother.

Hamlet knows this as painfully as anyone when he describes his post-Edenic and fallen world, where his mother has in effect exiled him from her love by marrying a hated brute, as ‘an unweeded garden / That grows to seed; things rank (= disgusting) and gross in nature / Possess it merely’ (= completely: his hated uncle’s grossly complete possession of his mother). He now feels that his own flesh, as well as what was the beautiful garden of a world, is ‘sullied’ (= fouled; Act 1, Sc. 2. Reading supplied from second quarto). Before this evidence of his mother’s sexual appetite Hamlet fed off (as all children do) an idealised family romance where he, mother and (first) father were the Edenically unsullied unit. Old Hamlet (as ghost), describing the official account of his murder in the Edenic garden (‘sleeping in my orchard’) as the work of a ‘serpent’, pointedly colludes in this fantasy-romance when claiming that his love for Gertrude was of a chaste and simple purity: ‘what a falling-off was there’ is his phrase for Gertrude then choosing Claudius (Act 1, Sc. 5).

When Alice falls into Wonderland she wants to and can’t get into the most beautiful garden – she’s either too big or too small – and when she does eventually get there it’s a nightmare world of cardboard cut-outs with a pseudo-mother wanting to decapitate her (and everyone else). The opening fall down the rabbit-hole itself is a death-fall (into the underworld) and birth-fall (down the birth-canal) combined, as well as a flying-penetration-orgasm-fall, and therefore none of these; the same may be said of the other child-fantasy or adult-nightmare scenes (according to how they’re read), like Alice in the White Rabbit’s house, which is at once the child small enough to play in the doll’s house, the terror of claustrophobia, the foetus constricted in the womb, the vagina about to be penetrated by Bill the lizard (whose pencil Alice famously deprives him of in the trial scene). The garden which Alice longs to enter functions equivalently, attracting multiple connotations which, somehow, float into each other, neutralising their forces. It’s Eden as mother, Alice wanting to go home, Carroll wanting his mother and to be her mother, the womb, the place where we’re always too big or too small to enter (or re-enter), the ‘real’ Eden we’re all locked out of, the ‘real’ world Alice wants to grow into, the Deanery garden in which, from his rooms, Carroll can get glimpses of Alice at play.

Too big or too small: the wonderful 17^th-century priest-poet George Herbert, wanting to be an orange-tree in his poem ‘Employment’, reflects bleakly that he can never reach God to offer back his fruit: ‘But we are still too young or old; / The man is gone / Before we can our wares unfold: / So we freeze on / Until the grave increase our cold’. Why do I not get what I want? Why does what I want (like Alice’s garden), when I get it, turn out so wrong? Desire never reaches its goal, as Lacan also said about language. Meaning like desire is always deferred. In effect the garden disappears as soon as Alice enters it, in the way that all objects of desire turn out to be not the ones we thought we wanted. That itself is not the least of the falls intimated in these stories, the garden that collapses into playing-card world.

Our attempts to love are acts of recovery from these wounding psychic separations. That’s why it’s impossible to read Cathy and Heathcliff’s love as anything other than as constituted in and structured by separations and loss – for, in effect, they are each other’s lost mother. (More on this great novel in the third lecture.) The novel insists that loss is the principal fact of our psychic lives, and Emily Dickinson notices this more than once in her poems, one of them even suggesting that her first moment of consciousness was of being bereft, having lost something – but not knowing what.

The need to believe in guilt is also the need to believe in significant events, significantly connected, to believe in narratives. The pre-Fall Eden, like the infant’s earliest bonded bliss with the mother, by definition cannot be narrated. Adam and Eve are happy, for ever. That is not narrative. Narratives are by definition fallen as they end in closure, which is death. The Fall narrative is narrative at its most elemental or pure – perhaps the only narrative we have to tell. Eden/happy/forever; temptation; fall; punishment/exile/death. The need for narrative may in turn be related to the most primitive moment of the infant at the breast. Hunger > satisfaction > sleep. This meta-narrative is as close to the Edenic non-narrative as we can get. Related perhaps also is an equally urgent need, that of the infant’s later need for the bed-time story. Tell me a narrative > the narrative is told > sleep. Hunger for food and hunger for story > satisfaction > sleep is also the narrative of desire: desire > sex > orgasm. And if pre-Fall Eden is hunger > satisfaction > sleep in an endless cycle in what has been called time as mythos, the Fall is hunger > satisfaction > death where food is sex and death is punishment, in what is called time as chronos, time as linear.

And if there is this psychic connection between need for food and need for story, in that for the infant they both lead to the desired sleep, that might suggest why, in Philip Pullman’s dazzling His Dark Materials trilogy, Mary Malone is told to play Satan, to awaken the budding sexuality of Lyra and Will’s desire for each other, and she does so by telling them a story of her own first sexualised love, with its own context of significantly charged eating. She feeds them her story and they fall. And it was good.

The need for narrative may account for the fact that we prefer, and tend to know much better, the story of Adam and Eve’s creation in Genesis 2 and 3 rather than the one in Genesis 1. In terms of sexual politics the difference is vital. In Genesis 1 ‘God created man in his own image … male and female created he them’, in effect simultaneously and equal. In Genesis 2 and 3, Adam is created first and superior and Eve is only secondarily created from Adam’s rib as ‘an help meet’ for Adam as ‘it is not good’ for Adam to be alone. But Genesis 1, God the workman working then resting, is only a linear narrative in the sense that he stops working and we prefer the narrative action of the Fall in Genesis 2 and 3 – which incidentally was written much earlier than Genesis 1 (and their writers were different). The former earlier narrative (the Fall) was apparently written to warn the Jews not to be too complacent; the latter later narrative was written to console them in their captivity.

Northrop Frye notes that the story of the Fall seems originally to have been one of many ‘sardonic’ folktales explaining how mankind was cheated out of immortality by malign deities. He also points to a strange moment at Genesis 3.22 in which God ‘seems to be telling other Gods that man is now “as one of us” and in a position to threaten their power unless they do something about it at once’ (Frye 1982: 109). But the early Christian church fathers would have had no time for such sceptical reflections on the origin of their founding myth. It’s those church fathers whose readings of Genesis 2 and 3 set the pattern for all the later repressive and misogynistic doctrines that have so disfigured Western culture and which Milton and Pullman rebel against – and, I would add, Blake. (Mind you, the early fathers disagreed about the reason why Eve and Adam fell: was it because they were children, because they were gluttonous, because they were lustful?)

The Judeo-Christian tradition is unashamedly misogynistic. Orthodox Jewish men still thank their God for not being created women. Clement of Alexandria said that every woman should blush at the thought that she was a woman. For Thomas Aquinas women are defective. In Leviticus a woman who gives birth to a son is considered unclean for 40 days; in the case of a daughter’s birth the unclean period is 80 days. Earliest human cultures had believed that creation was the work of earth-goddesses and that everything in life was sacred because of its place in that matriarchal wholeness. This world-view was replaced by the Hebrew invention of a single male God; myths across many cultures have stories telling how matriarchal systems were destroyed by a new order led by a dominant male God. The radical change in world-view has been put down to a biological shift from the right side of the brain (imagination, wholeness) to the left side (order, reason, logic).

The move to patriarchal power needed justification in the form of reading Genesis 2 and 3 in a way that emphasised the primacy of Eve’s fault and the justness of the most aggressive of the three punishments, hers. She’s punished with the pains of childbirth and, in a much discussed passage, with a future in which ‘your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you’. This was and is taken to mean that women’s desire is not hers to dispose on herself but a desire only real in the sense that it’s subject and subservient to male desire.

Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ has a moment that’s very pertinent here, especially as his women are generally more sensible and practical than his men. I’m not sure if its unpleasantness has been recognised very widely. This is when Emily, who wants to remain a virgin for her entire life rather than be anyone’s mistress or wife, but now faced with two men who confidently expect her hand, asks the goddess Diana to turn their hearts away from her so that the fire of their violent loves will ‘be queynte’ (quenched) and her ‘maydenhede’ be preserved. And Diana’s response? The two fires on her altar behave in a very ‘queynte’ (curious) way. One of them ‘queynte’ (quenched) and then ‘quiked’ (started up) again while immediately the other ‘was queynte and all agon; / And as it queynte, it made a whistelinge’ followed by the running of many drops apparently of blood.

The terrified Emily has no idea what this means. It means that one suitor will be defeated but survive (‘quiked’), and one bloodily won’t, but those five intrusively obvious repetitions of ‘queynte’ (curious; quenched) can’t but be read as an ironic reply to her wish to stay a maiden all her life (and why shouldn’t she?) with the love of both men ‘queynte’ (quenched) – but also as very aggressively punning on a third sense, which Chaucer uses elsewhere, ‘queynte’ as female genitals (‘grabbed her by the queynte’ in ‘The Miller’s Tale’ – this worried me very much when I was a fifteen-year-old at school – and as later in Marvell’s ‘your quaint honour’ in his ‘Coy Mistress’ poem which I’m sure many of you know). So Diana’s reply to Emily’s wish to conserve her maidenhead is, in effect: sorry, no – men are going to take your virginity, whether you like it or not. And the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Myth of the Fall and its Impact: Pullman, Lewis and Others
• 2 Claribel’s Story: A Few Thoughts on Gender, Race and Colonialism in The Tempest
• 3 Wuthering Heights: Myth and the Wounds of Loss
• 4 Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: Transforming Lives
• 5 Great Expectations: Intertextualities, Endings and Life after Plot
• 6 Emily Dickinson: ‘And Then the Windows Failed’
• 7 Emma: Rhetoric, Irony and the Reader’s Assault Course
• 8 Dorian Gray: ‘Queering’ the Text
• 9 The Fallen Woman: Emma Bovary and (Many) Others
• 10 Two Transgressive American Women: Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• 11 Hamlet/Lear: Realism/Modernism
• 12 John Keats: Three (or is it Two?) Poems and Thoughts on ‘Late Style’
• 13 Republicanism, Regicide and ‘The Musgrave Ritual’
• 14 Jean Rhys: Her Texts from the 1930s
• 15 Twelfth Night: Dream-Gift
• 16 Please Read Proust
• 17 Paradise Lost: Radical Politics, Gender and Education
• Index