The Modern Debacle: And Our Hope in the Goddess:
A Literary Testament

By John O’Meara

The period covered in this book ranges from the early part of the 20th century right through to its end-roughly from the death of Chekhov to that of Ted Hughes. The question is raised whether the vision of the modern world that opened up to the authors of this period does not still apply in our own time.

The book's main theme is the finality of modern nothingness. What remains that is superhumanly possible, despite all appearances that nothing more and nothing new is left to man to break through with? Civilization for these authors had become denuded of all of its vital forces, and it is as if when faced with the prospect of hopelessness, they would have to invoke the help of the one Power on Whom humankind can rely to see them through the worst.

This is the Great Mother or Goddess Who is directly associated with the experience of Nature as this comes down to us from before the straitened confines of the 20th century.

It is the experience modern man would deny at the risk of cutting himself off from the one life-giving source that he has.

Front Cover Illustration:

From Jerome Robbins' 1963 Broadway production of Mother Courage, with Anne Bancroft as Mother Courage and Zohra Lampert as Kattrin.

Back Cover Photo by A.F.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 19, 2007
• ISBN: 9780595891740

John O’Meara

Born in Montreal, Canada, John O’Meara received his Ph.D in 1986 from the University of East Anglia. He taught for over 20 years in the English departments of the University of Toronto and the University of Ottawa.

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Copyright © 2007 by John O’Meara

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ISBN: 978-0-595-44851-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-595-89174-0 (ebk)

Quotations from Sartre from Nausea, tr. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964). All quotations from Beckett from The Collected Works (New York: Grove Press, 1970); from Hemingway from The Short Stories (New York: Scribner, 1995); from Eliot from the Collected Poems (London: Faber, 1974); from Williams from The Glass Menagerie (New York: New Directions, 1999); from Chekhov from The Plays of Chekhov (New York: Illustrated Editions, 1935); from Miller from Death of a Salesman (New York: Viking, 1971); from Brecht from Mother Courage and Her Children (New York: Grove Press, 1963); from Hughes from Birthday Letters (London: Faber, 1998) and from the Collected Poems (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003); from Plath from The Colossus (London: Faber, 1972) and Ariel (NewYork: Harper and Row, 1966); from Graves from the Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2003); from Yeats from The Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1977).

Am I yielding to the meanness of our times, to naked trees and the winter of the world?

But this very nostalgia for light is my justification: it speaks to me of another world, of my true homeland.

—Albert Camus

Prometheus in the Underworld

FOR

ALL LOVERS OF

LITERATURE, NATURE, AND THE GODDESS

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1       Eliot’s Route Through the Debacle and the Comparison with Beckett and with Hemingway

Chapter 2       Opposing Nature to Modern Economics/The Struggle of the Goddess in Modern Drama: Williams, Chekhov, Miller, Brecht

Chapter 3       Plath and Hughes: A Comparative View of Their Poetry Through the Goddess-Theme

Chapter 4       Graves and the Goddess

Chapter 5       The Visionary Bitterness of Yeats

Afterword

Endnotes

List of Works Covered

Preface

I have subtitled this book A Literary Testament because the literature I cover one could say is now behind us, so that what it has to offer, by way of a view of the modern world, today may seem more in the nature of a testament out of that time, and with an application strictly to that time. The period covered ranges from the early part of the 20th century right through to the end of the 20th—roughly from the death of Chekhov to that of Ted Hughes. But, with this testament we may feel haunted by what has come down to us, and wonder if the vision of the modern world that opened up to these authors does not still apply in our own time. I found myself consequently involved, when presenting this literature, in a use of we, our and us, as if this literature were present to us the way it was to the readers of that time and as if we felt that it applied to us still.—Perhaps it will be felt that it still does, that we are still living in the throes of what I have called the debacle.

I otherwise speak of a literary testament because the focus in these pages is on what this literature is saying almost strictly out of itself, as a comprehensive digest and record of that time. I assume that the reader will be more than ready to be reading through many poems, a few short stories, and some plays as if it mattered that we did look very carefully at what the language of these works is presenting. Ideally, the reader will have just come from a fresh reading of the work that is treated and have that work opened up to the right page, to see for her/himself how the readings I propose arise from it. The terms of my exposition are, consequently, those that arise from the work itself, so that how the mind comes into it, or what form or forms thinking takes, at any stage of my exposition, will be in relation to how these terms suggest themselves from the author’s own concern with them as expressed through the detail of the writing. I have not sought theoretical justification for these terms outside the work of these authors, so that my method suggests close reading, but with an eye to bringing out the inner visionary direction these works take.

My idea of modernity is thus bound up with how these authors are making an approach to it from inside the work they are fashioning. This assumes an idea of the relation between history and literature the inverse of that propounded today. It is to go too far to say that literature is creative of history; it is to fall short of the method suggested here to say that literature offers only its own history. Rather, literature provides the great authors with their medium for saying how history—in broader epochal terms—is actually unfolding (notwithstanding the fashionable ways in which we suppose history is unfolding). These authors do so, what’s more, out of inward senses that are their own evidence, without the further impulse to dictate social-historical form. It thus remains for us to gather what we wish to make of the inner vision these authors bestow upon us—whetherwe wish to pursue these matters any further with ourselves, OR move on from them unchanged though perhaps the more vulnerable for it.

John O’Meara

Introduction

Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead could equally have been spoken by T.S. Eliot somewhere in the course of his writing of The Waste Land. Somewhere along the line Eliot would have come to recognize that the world of Revelation, which had provided so many prophets and artists with their inspirations over the course of long Tradition, could no longer be accessed—that, it had, in a word, shut its doors. His subsequent recovery of that world—achieved through the very intricate process he describes in Ash-Wednesday and in the Quartets—we must see, accordingly, as one of the extraordinary feats in the spiritual history of the twentieth-century, especially as that century was generally moving in a diametrically opposite direction—towards inevitable social secularization. Even so, Eliot found himself, in spite of his superhuman achievement, progressively coming to terms with the fact that the world had altered decisively and seemed to be drifting into a no-man’s land of terminal metaphysical inconsequence.

Hemingway, although a radically different writer and of radically different background, had come, over roughly the same period, into the same perception of utter metaphysical inconsequence, which he likewise experienced as a final alteration in the state of the world. Hemingway’s inspiration derives not from a form of residual connection to Revelation as in the case of Eliot but from a peculiarly American susceptibility to the environment of Nature that is connected initially with the Native American Indian experience of Nature as the good place. Starting from such radically separate inspirational origins, both authors nevertheless meet in the same post-war environment that would come to proclaim the ultimate reality of modern nothingness.

It is of course tempting to think of the phenomenon of modern nothingness as dictated strictly by the effects of the 1st World War and its dark aftermath, but the evidence points to the fact that we come into a whole new world with its own defiant laws of space and time—laws that are entirely self-referential. Hence, the irrelevance of all past realities that Sartre is proclaiming in the ground-breaking novel, Nausea:

The true nature of the past revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all, not in things, not even in my thoughts.

Nor could one attribute any consequence either to one’s thoughts in the present world or to that world itself:

I exist—the world exists—and I know that the world exists. That’s all… Now I knew: things are entirely what they appear to be—and behind them … there is nothing…

The period of l’entre deuxguerres is dominated by this irreversible, so-called existential event, and it was to be drastically added to by the forces of social-economic history that, coming out of the past, continued to work themselves out relentlessly, bringing in the further catastrophe of the 2nd World War.

As far back as 1922, W.B. Yeats, in responding to the events of the Irish Civil War, could already anticipate the inexorable course that the century would take again towards World War. At least Yeats could see that