Philo-Aesthetic Digest 11/30/2024

White Goddesses, William Blake, and Cormac McCarthy

Hi! sorry for the tardiness with this week’s digest, it will happen again.

The journey through the works of William Blake continues apace, somewhat complicated by needing to revisit Milton. Returning to Songs of Innocence and Experience I was strangely reminded of A.A. Milne’s books of children’s poetry. I’m not sure if there’s a direct influence there, but it seems somewhat likely.

One of the most interesting things about Blake’s theology from the perspective of someone like myself who is fascinated by heterodox Christianities is that he’s not a body/spirit dualist. He doesn’t think as most demiurgists (and a fair few nominally orthodox thinkers do) that the trouble is the body, without which we could return to the Father and a beneficent existence as pure spirit.

Blake’s cosmology sometimes feels very, very old: he sometimes reminds one of Marcion, Mani, or the Cathars, but this feels genuinely new, something quite modern. I have not had recourse to dip into Northrop Frye yet, but I’m sure that will change before this adventure is over.

Great Mothers and maimed sons: Robert Graves’ The White Goddess

I recently acquired a copy of Robert Graves’ 1948 cult classic of mythopoetic analysis The White Goddess.¹ All true poetry, according to Graves, is the product of the veneration of a neolithic European mother-goddess submerged within classical myth and the poetry of medieval Europe, particularly that of the non Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the British Isles. Graves draws extensively on a corpus of Welsh and Irish poetry I am mostly not familiar with in an exhaustively numerological and alphabetic quest to derive the original myth of the goddess and her son and sometimes rival, the earthly king turned Apollonian divine child (assuming I absorbed the right story from the truly bewildering mass of mythological detail Graves musters.)

There is an unconscious hankering in Britain after goddesses, if not for a goddess so dominant as the aboriginal Triple Goddess, at least for a female softening of the all-maleness of the Christian Trinity. The male Trinity corresponds increasingly less with the British social system, in which woman, now that she has become a property owner and a voter, has nearly regained the position of respect which she enjoyed before the Puritan revolution. True, the male Trinity antedated the Puritan revolution but it was a theological not an emotional concept: as has been shown, the Queen of Heaven with her retinue of female saints had a far greater hold in the popular imagination between the Crusades and the Civil War than either the Father or the Son. And one of the results of Henry VIII's breach with Rome was that when his daughter Queen Elizabeth became head of the Anglican Church she was popularly regarded as a sort of deity: poets not only made her their Muse but gave her titles-Phoebe, Virginia, Gloriana which identified her with the Moon-goddess, and the extraordinary hold that she gained on the affections of her subjects was largely due to this cult.

At some point between the 1970s and the 90’s they stopped letting you do this kind of wild eyed, Charlie Day at the cork board everything-is-connected style of analysis. Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae is the last really major example I can think of, and it owes an enormous, clear debt to Graves’ work while also being quite different in that it’s clearly grounded in post-New Critical academic literary criticism. On that point of comparison, here is Graves on men’s relation to women and divinity:

It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his single person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year he is always jealous of his wierd, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year, and vice-versa; he cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that destroys his humanity, and this is the fundamental defect of the Apollonian or Jehovistic cult. Man is a demi-god: he always has either one foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld, or on this earth. Man envies her and tells himself lies about his own completeness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she is not even a demi-goddess—she is a mere nymph and his love for her turns to scorn and hate.

Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man's dependence on her for life. She is passionately interested in grown men, however, because the love-hate that Osiris and Set feel for each other on her account is a tribute to her divinity. She tries to satisfy both, but can only do so by alternate murder, and man tries to regard this as evidence of her fundamental falsity, not of his own irreconcilable demands on her.

The occasional invocation of Attis and his divine partner Cybele throughout the book is an interesting one which Paglia will run with Sexual Personae, going farther than Graves to make the argument that romanticism is in part a return of the archetypal mother central to her thesis about gender and modern art.²

Graves is a much stranger figure, occasionally coming close or simply fulfilling the oft-memed “it was revealed to me in a dream” citation of the ancient historian. It’s my understanding that the thesis of the book was derived in part from Graves’ personal life and poetical practice, that he had a succession of female partners whom he worshipped in a religio-sexual sense, and this was crucial to his creative method. There is a chapter dedicated to determining the name of the antichrist, and another written as a sort of Socratic dialogue between two early Imperial aristocrats in Rome. I more or less agree with Grave’s assertion partway through the book that the real poet can’t be held to history sacred or scholarly, can’t be expected to limit himself, but at the same time I regard The White Goddess more as a very good story which expresses something perhaps true about poetry and myth and the European mind in the 20th century than as a work of scholarship or truth.

The Goddess is no townswoman: she is the Lady of the Wild Things, haunting the wooded hill-tops —Venus Cluacina, she who purifies with myrtle', not Venus Cloacina, 'Patroness of the Sewage System', as she first became at Rome; and though the townsman has now begun toinsist that built-up areas should have a limit, and to discuss decentralization (the decanting of the big towns into small, independent communities, well spaced out), his intention is only to urbanize the country, not to ruralize the town. Agricultural life is rapidly becoming industrialized and in England, the world's soberest social laboratory, the last vestiges of the ancient pagan celebrations of the Mother and Son are being obliterated, despite a loving insistence on Green Belts and parks and private gardens. It is only in backward parts of Southern and Western Europe that a lively sense still survives in the countryside of their continued worship.

No: there seems no escape from our difficulties until the industrial system breaks down for some reason or other, as it nearly did in Europe during the Second World War, and nature reasserts herself with grass and trees among the ruins.

The closing chapter reminded of Jung’s Answer to Job, which was written around the same time. Less cautiously optimistic than the Swiss psychoanalyst, Graves seems to think that the return of the goddess would require some kind of global catastrophe or civilizational collapse . It’s my understanding that this is a popular book amongst the more esoterically inclined members of today’s literary right avant-garde, and sounding a bit anticipatory of accelerationism one wonders if that vision appeals for that reason? In any case The White Goddess is worth your time- you might even get more out of it than I did.

Shameless indulgence of literary gossip: the Britt/McCarthy/ Affair

The literary scandal of the last week and a half or so has revolved around the publication of a Vanity Fair article by Vincenzo Barney chronicling Cormac McCarthy’s illicit relationship with a teenaged Augusta Britt in the 1970s, and the subsequent inspiration derived thereof for his novels post-Suttree.

I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters. But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse.

There have been a flurry of responses, thoughts about McCarthy’s legacy, dunks on the writer’s style, meditations on the fact that Britt found the author here on Substack, etc. Personally I thought the prose was a little florid and not how I'd have written it, but on the whole the profile is fine, not really any worse than the average magazine writing. I liked

BDM

’s very brief thoughts on the matter, which capture quite well how very mundane and squalid the story is when removed from either the context of McCarthy’s body of work or the romantic saga conveyed by Britt and narrated by Barney.

But also… McCarthy’s actions in the piece are boring. Like Alice Munro picking her husband over her daughter, McCarthy seeing an abused and vulnerable teenager and categorizing her as a sexual prospect is just cliche. Escalating the relationship into a sexual one through his letters—cliche. The way he hangs around, vulture-like, for the rest of her life—cliche.

Put this way it reminds me of a story my mother (who is around the same age as Augusta Britt) once told me about a father of a classmate having an affair with a teenaged babysitter rather than any sweeping love story. But this is the dilemma, Britt does seem to see her story as romantic in that way: intriguingly it’s McCarthy’s literary appropriation of her life, the status as muse, that seems to bother her in the profile, the sense that perhaps her relationship with him was after all more transactional than it seemed. Who can say? Life is complicated, and if we agree as I think we can, that it is wrong for a 42 year old to pursue a 16 year old, what is to be done about this particular case?

Cards on the table, Cormac McCarthy is the Great American Novelist of his generation I feel least secure in my grasp of: I’ve read just about all of Toni Morrison give or take a few lesser books, Pynchon and Roth I’m missing a few major works from but I nonetheless feel that I basically understand them, about half of DeLillo is unread but the middle period stuff is what you really need and I’ve got most of that. With McCarthy I don’t quite feel that I get him, and yet I also don’t think that he’s the sort of author whose legacy is damaged irretrievably by something like this. We still read people who did worse. Last week I wrote about one of them.³

The artists and thinkers who tend to be damaged by revelations like these are the moralists, people like David Foster Wallace or Susan Sontag. When one sets oneself up as an arbiter of right and wrong, the revelation of misdeeds is a seismic event, and one winds up dead and buried with a plume of coffee tables thrown or girlfriends emotionally neglected suspended always above and slightly behind the work. The accusations stick because deep down we resent people like that, we desire to deface their eminence, to pull them down from perfection into the filth with the rest of us. This impulse to smash the idol speaks to both the highest Good and the evil principle that lives in the heart, the desire to ruin that which we can never have, can never be. Too much of McCarthy's work was about that evil principle for this to apply, methinks.

1. I’m a believer in synchronicity if only in what I find at the bookstore, and this was something I stumbled across after church on Sunday, followed about a half hour later by the discovery of an inexpensive copy of The Faerie Queene

2. I can’t remember how explicitly Paglia spells this out, (and she may never explicitly do so, because she unlike Graves is repulsed by the great mother and sees male genius as a crystalline Apollonian intellect in flight from femininity) but according to a harmonized account of the two, the reason the post romantic poet is a “psychic transsexual” is because he is a galli, a eunuch priestess of the great mother and her son. To briefly indulge these two systems in which I do not believe, the awareness of something like this in the midst of a century of masculine revanchism in literature is likely part of why so many great male novelists of the mid to late 20th century were so famously inadequate to the task of writing convincing women characters. The masculinity they sought to preserve and project was incompatible with the androgynous sensibility of the true novelist, and so they failed because to write a woman well would be an acknowledgment of the female principle within themselves, and this was unacceptable.

3. This is a rhetorical flourish, I am not interested in debating the relative morality of fascism and statutory rape.