Healing Fictions: Assorted Essays on Literature & Art

Healing Fictions

Assorted Essays on Literature & Art

Alison Armstrong

Copyright © 2019 by Alison Armstrong.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2018913264

ISBN:              Hardcover              978-1-9845-6384-2

                        Softcover                 978-1-9845-6382-8

                        eBook                       978-1-9845-6382-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

KJV

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover photo: Alison Armstrong

Author photo: Neil Hickey

Rev. date: 01/23/2019

Xlibris

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

786427

CONTENTS

Introduction

Acknowledgements

Healing Fictions

Visual Literacy/Literary Vision

Explorations In Light Affinities Of Color And Music

When Craft Meets Art

Richard Upjohn & His Contemporaries In The Hudson

Highlands

Attitudes Toward Death

The Dun Emer Workshops & Cuala Press

Prosecutors Will Be Violated

It Is Myself That I Remake

William Butler Yeats & The Noh

Deja Dit Et Deja Vue—The Already Said, The Already Seen In The Art Of William Anastasi

Foods Fit For Gods, Heroes, & Anti-Heroes In Homer’s

Odyssey & Joyce’s Ulysses

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

End Notes

INTRODUCTION

Diverse interests over a span of four or five decades, augmented by the stimulations of teaching a variety of courses in various colleges, reviewing books and art exhibitions, and long spans of time sitting still and staring into the wilderness of Boar’s Hill or Port Meadow in Oxfordshire, coastal Maine on Mount Desert Island, the Hudson Highlands between Garrison and Beacon, the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania, or the Hudson River itself from the Hudson River Park, Christopher Street to the George Washington Bridge…in other words, strong emotion recollected in tranquility, somehow resulted in essays and talks, some of which are contained here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks are due to colleagues and professors during my years of research:

Anna Balakian, Maurice Beja, Jerome Bruner, Doris Eder, Richard Ellmann, Bernard Fleischman, Dame Helen Gardner, Geoffrey Hartman, Maurice Harmon, Alan Hausman, Andrew Parkin, Steve Parrish, James Pethica, Fritz Senn, Francis Utley.

I owe gratitude for friendship and mutual interests enjoyed with Bruce Arnold, Pieter Bekker, Richard Brown, I. Christopher Butler, Anita Feldman, Suzi Gablik, Stephen Gill, Ian Hamilton, John Harrington, Tanya & Henry Harrod, Neil Hickey, Tim Hilton, Hiromitsu Morimoto, Robert Lowery, John & Diana Matthias, Gwynyth & Guido Mislin, George Quasha, Ken Wade, and my son Edward Armstrong Nice.

I am duly grateful to David Rhodes, President, School of Visual Arts, and to Maryhelen Hendricks, Chair of the Department of Humanities & Sciences, who granted a sabbatical during Autumn semester 2018 that enabled me to devote time to compiling this volume and planning the next.

Most of these essays have been previously published or were initially delivered as talks. Healing Fiction, the introductory essay, was originally a seminar talk in the Department of Comparative Literature at N.Y.U. in 1983. American Arts Quarterly published the following: Visual Literacy (Summer 2007), Explorations of Light (Winter 2009), When Craft Meets Art (Summer 2008), William Butler Yeats & the Noh (Winter 2011). Richard Upjohn in Philipsetown was published in the 1990s in Nimham Times, a journal devoted to Putnam County, New York, that ceased publication in 2001. Attitudes Toward Death was given as a lunchtime talk at Hastings Centre for BioEthical Research in Garrison, New York (February 1998). The Dun Emer Workshops & Cuala Press was published (Fall 1984) in Irish Literary Supplement. Prosecutors Will be Violated appeared in an earlier version in Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (December1983). It is Myself that I Remake was delivered to the WB Yeats Society at the National Arts Club (January 2010) and, in a revised version with Powerpoint, at the International Yeats Conference at The New School (October 2017). Deja Dit et Deja Vue—the Already Said, the Already Seen: FW in the Art of William Anastasi was originally a slide talk, December 11, 2004, at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia during a critical symposium on the influences on conceptual artist Anastasi. Foods Fit for Gods, Heroes, & Anti- Heroes in Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses—Eating, Reading, Cooking, Writing, was developed for mediAzioni 22 (Unibo.it) from my talk on a panel chaired by the late Professor Rosa Maria Bolitieri-Bosinelli during the Conference on Food and Culture in Translation (FaCT) held at Bertinaro, Italy (May 2014).

—A.A., New York City, November 2018

HEALING FICTIONS:

THE INNER ALCHEMIST AND THE PRACTICAL SCIENTIST

…we can no longer dispense with the freedom

from falsehood that true science confers upon us.

—C. Kerenyi ¹

…the gods have become diseases.

—C.G. Jung ²

Science and myth are terms that imply two mutually exclusive attitudes, one rational, conscious and cerebral, the other irrational, unconscious, emotional. Yet we are given a notion of a Science of Mythology by Carl Kerenyi and Carl Jung (as well as Bruno Bettelheim, Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Propp, Giambattista Vico, et alia). Can it be that there is also a mythology of science? The implications of myth, that which is a myth, or old story, or mythological (as in fantastic), have to do with what is assumed to be contrary to fact.

Myth for many people implies fiction as falsehood or exaggeration. Yet the experience of myth, as in reading literature about universal human experience, and as idiosyncratic physical and mental symptoms (in madness, dreams, phantasy, or artwork as symbols —the logic of myth) is very real. In a fiction such as Sophocles’ tragedy, Oedipus Rex, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet we can experience the individual, the idiosyncrasies, of our individual experiences. Subjective reality is no less an object for scientific inquiry than it is the source of art.

Literary art and written accounts of scientific inquiry are not, in fact, diametrically opposed. Both use the medium of exchange called language—an approximate system at best that lends itself to imagery even in the objective users.

1] to recount (and analyze) a reality observed to be either a cause-and-effect process, like the sex-cycle of ferns or mantises, in the perceivable world or, 2] to express or imitate a mental state: emotional, intellectual, moral (such as Antigone’s or Hedda Gabler’s or Jonah’s) or a physical situation (such as in the midst of a battle, cooking a meal, giving birth). Since both uses are linguistic—analytic discussions or expressions that recount observations of life situations—we must ask: What is the difference between a literary work of art and a scientific report or psychoanalytic case study? Both may seem to define and illustrate a problem, form an hypothesis, review evidence from observation and experimentation, or derive from a theory. Both seem to be aimed at evaluation of the world, at seeking out causes and cures. Oedipus, after all, was a detective. But artistic literature uses language as a poetic medium, while scientific language is primarily informative, metaphor-free. The scientific inquiry, the validity of a theory is based upon data gathered inductively from controlled experiments that are repeatable. Yet, in reading Aristotle’s Poetics (e.g., section B.4) we learn that the dramatic author ideally chooses certain types of noble characters (from myth) and places them within a set of constraining circumstances. Given the man (however good he has a character flaw) in a given situation (that unfolds as increasingly convoluted plot) it is not possible for him to have made choices other than he does — and must — make in the perfect tragedy (e.g., Oedipus Rex). Character is thus shown to be destiny. And the circumstances are shown to have arisen from two sources: Fate and the character’s own (apparently free) will. We take delight, as Aristotle informs us, in the formal relationship: how this is that, and thereby we learn from example, a movement of the soul, through mimesis [not Platonic imitation] about Chance, the world, and our place is it. Oedipus or Creon or Willy Loman—if the characterization is true to type, acting morally (given the character’s type as a good man with a flaw or mole of nature to use Hamlet’s term) as he is bound to do—is doomed to stubbornly repeat characteristic choices…until he sees the truth too late. As a paradigm for a rarified human situation (applicable through the centuries down to Eliot’s Becket and to Samuel Beckett) the classical tragedy is as instructive in its repeatability as is the laboratory scientist’s ability to grow a specific culture or to condition rats in a maze.

The point of departure for the literary author as for the scientific author seems different. The emphasis of the scientific author’s effort is to direct attention toward a notion of striving for an absolute truth that has only to be revealed in Nature; the literary author’s is toward one of a multiplicity of approximate truths (on the surface) and universal relations (in the deep formal structure) already derived from experience of the archetypal elements of the human condition. Both science and literature have the same goal: healing through conscious understanding.

The science of mythology, including Freud’s psychoanalysis and Jung’s analytical psychology, is conscious of this similarity between subjective literature and objective science. The manner or method of coming to understand is the variable, as is the set of assumptions from which the writer or scientist is working. The mode of presentation [manipulation of narrative technique, tone, metaphor, puns, etc.] is another variable. If we contrast the apparent objectivity of a Freud, a Darwin, Marx, Jenner, or Einstein with the apparent falsehood in a folk tale, a surrealist novel, a Biblical story, or our own attempt to retell a dream, we nevertheless find that all are telling a story. None can be a first-hand account. All are fictional and yet valid means for reconnecting with the perceived world. As Aristotle puts it, we take delight in and are instructed by mimesis, the cognition of making a significant connection: How This is That. I am not speaking of one-to-one copies, but of formal analogy. A : B :: C : D.

The Universe, according to William Blake, has a human form; we can neither perceive it nor discuss it outside of our being in human creature-hood as well as the emotional and intellectual normative experiences that both delimit and make possible perception, description, and reflection. Despite the heroic imagination of ancient myths and folklore or modern science fiction, we know that the universe is both an extension of our selves and yet beyond full comprehension; we intuit the implicit extension of a reality beyond description. The 20th century existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, in La Nausee, wrote a gem of a novel; Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex and Antigone are perfectly crafted tragedies. They all exemplify the most fruitful of situations: the loneliness of one who must confront the self caught between two Rights (to use Hegel’s comment on Antigone). The internal movement of coming to an inevitable recognition is similar in all three; the specific types of choices differ, as is appropriate to their historical contexts. The personal mythology, implicit in Jung’s Individuation Process, we can recognize in others when presented in an artistic medium, although in each specific case the details are unique.

The difference, then, between a literary work of art and a scientific report would seem to be fundamentally that the first offers a paradigm of universal human experience, one the reader (or theatre-goer) can plug into thus enriching his own life in the world as well as the reading (and re-reading) of the work. The second is a specific process observed and recorded from which general laws, hypotheses, or axioms may be derived. Literary art generally seems to work inductively from the specific to the general (or public or universal); scientific enquiry often works inductively as well, but the inferences of that process, the new information, can become the major premise of a new deductive syllogism. Yet, the descriptive report of the analytic experiment is not the experiment but a recounting of information, a summary, a code, whereas the fictional story is the story (the myth is the myth at the manifest level yet with a parallel sub-text or latent content). And the case history as written by Freud is a plotted story to which a method of decoding can be applied and the process of discovery transmitted to his audience. ³

Science itself may be a myth because there is no absolute or motivated connection (as Saussure would put it) between experience (including observation) and the language that purports to represent, that is, convey it. The trap of the absolutizing of language (as Derrida calls it) is especially prevalent in the scientific uses of language (an unmotivated or abstract system of signs, as Saussure tells us). One does well to judge by appearances all the nuances and possible connotations, puns, mixed metaphors and so on that occur at the surface of language. We must not be blind (or deaf) to the play of language, even objective informative language. It is not adequate for the task of pure objectivity. A writer is determined either to prove or to express a specific experience, as specific logical point, or a certain assumption, to verify. First perceptions of language use may be the truest because multiple, untroubled and undisciplined by either hypotheses or wishful thinking in that moment before analysis or screening out of contradictions begins. The proof of a given hypothesis can be convincingly—and validly—made but should be accepted in the knowledge that it is a displacement of other possibilities, alternatives provided in the language itself which may lead to alternative modes of seeing the world and drawing conclusions about it.

So how does knowledge progress beyond old assumptions? One way is by organ speech. Psoriasis is thought to be a result of leaky gut syndrome in which the skin tries to rid the body of toxins that the lower digestive tract cannot handle. But, we should then ask, what is the reason for the leaky gut? What is it that the sufferer cannot stomach? For, yes, the literal reading of a metaphor utilized by the Unconscious reaps understanding as Freud teaches us in the Interpretation of Dreams.

If there is a Science of Mythology, then there may also be a Mythology of Science. In these latter days of scientific revolution, we view certain phenomena differently than we would if we were living in pre-scientific age, before Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler, when alchemy reigned, and the four humours, four elements, great chain of being as God’s plan, and the ancient paradigm of a Ptolemaic earth-centered universe were generally accepted. We still base our activities and enquiries according to those sets of correspondences through which we view the universe. The answer to much philosophical, religious, and scientific enquiry is, as Kant has told us, implicit in the questions we ask. Assumptions are crucial (as Gaston Bachelard points out in The Psychoanalysis of Fire) ⁴ . The degree to which conscious or unconscious assumptions are taken as a priori truths and met, or not, by one’s experiences determines everything with regard to reality—the success of one’s life—as much as any scientific experiment.

For example, Jenner’s assumptions and Job’s assumptions about the causes and cures of skin disease are vastly different. What is the true science that frees us from falsehood (as Kerenyi put it) when science itself must always be willing to progress by changing its theories as the new evidence requires? As Jung rightly pointed ⁵ out religion is static because it presumes to have all the final answers, whereas science (which is humble and therefore superior) must be willing to accommodate itself to new truths. Can we heal ourselves by sheer force of will? No, not without certain insights. But the language of the body that speaks in the form of symptoms may lead one to the necessary understanding that produces a specific cure. This is acknowledged by the Science of Mythology itself in bridging the gap between pure subjectivity (including superstition) and objectivity (or rationality), which is the difference between a holistic approach that sees the organism as responsible for its own state, and an objective fragmented approach by specialists who see the organism as a collection of parts to be treated in isolation from one another, with the patient as passive non-participant in the cure.

From Job’s boils to the pustules of cow-pox and small-pox observed by Jenner to the skin that seems to melt from Roquentin’s face in Sartre’s Nausea as he gazes in the mirror while his self-image becomes depersonalized, to the extreme burnt appearance of Dennis Potter’s Philip Marlowe in The Singing Detective, the skin as the intermediary organ between Self and Other, between man and God, bears messages of a moving finger that writes, not mene mene tekel, etc., but a more accessible message if one has eyes to read the signs and the wit to interpret them. This is true of the inner alchemist as for the objective scientist.

The belief that the world is understandable justifies itself by its results. We find the world strange, but what’s strange is us. It seems to me that we don’t yet read the message properly, but in time to come, we will see it in some single simple sentence….we’ll say, ‘Oh, how beautiful! How could we have missed it, all that time’? ⁶

This reaction of a contemporary scientist, one active in physics, hints at an element of awe which implies that alethea (revealed truth) can be brought forward by scientific inquiry, whereas once it was the task of the spiritual metaphysical poet in the Renaissance and before him, the ancient philosopher.

Briefly, I want to examine the function of myth at a personal level in the story of Job: how a personal myth, when consciously lived, can lead to self-healing. The Science of Applied Mythology, one might call it, has been advocated in popular books such as Jane Roberts’ The Nature of Personal Reality; Wayne Dyer’s The Sky’s the Limit; and R. M. Alexander’s The Resurrection of the Body. ⁷ Job’s Old Testament story teaches, as do these best sellers, that each of