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(Over the coming weeks, I plan to serialize an essay I wrote in spring 1994 entitled “Whose Ass Do I Kiss?”  By permission of the University of Maryland, I was then a full-time Visiting Student for a year at Gallaudet University, the only liberal arts university in the world for deaf people.  Using sign language, I gave an abbreviated version of this essay as a talk to a sociology class made up of deaf undergraduates at Gallaudet.  I am hearing.)

“Morality has nothing to do with it.  It’s about lack of balls.

So they’d come to the Mafia.”  (Joe Gallo)

“Whose Ass Do I Kiss?”  Because the question is not an academic one.  Do I kiss a real ass?  Do I kiss a mother’s ass, that puffy mound of gluteus maximus, that cellulite-pocked mass of jelly musculature, which stretches like a string of paper cutouts across a refrigerator door?  Or do I kiss only a figurative ass—a boss’s, a friend’s, a father’s, or even—even an idea’s, a religion’s, a country’s:  whose ass do I kiss?

What does it mean to kiss an ass?  To me, the phrase goes up like an aroma or sinks like a greasy stench.  It has one primary meaning and multiple secondary meanings.  To flatter, unquestionably accept or support another person because of that person’s power or potential to influence the outcome of one’s future, is the primary meaning.  The content actuality of the powerful person’s ideas or beliefs is of no importance.  Whether one agrees or disagrees, the only important component of the other person’s reality is not the person but the person’s power.  One flatters what one does not find flattering, one supports what one does not agree with, one praises what one does not find praiseworthy and one holds in very high esteem each chosen ass that’s bared and held up to the lips for the proffered kiss.

Kissing ass is an American disease.  Why?  Because power is so decentralized in American culture—a lot of it is spread around.  Get-what-you-want psychology, although in and of itself not responsible for kiss-ass, is still an important contributor to it.  In much the same way that prejudices and periodic scapegoatings within religion (the Inquisition) and outside of it (Nazi Germany) are in no way to be identified as a part of any religion’s founding ideology or dogma, they are a part of religion, just as scapegoatings within psychology—involuntary commitments, AA interventions, and the like—are a part of psychology.  Kiss-ass often seems to be a way of escaping them.  It has parallels in the hysterical behavior that led to witch hunts in Puritan New England.  If you don’t kiss ass in American culture, you are in danger of being burned at the stake.

Now from a certain point of view, the deaf are a highly dependent and in many ways helpless people in society.  They should be ass-kissers par excellence, but are they?  They are not.  Why?  At least, they are not from the point of view that they kiss the hearing world’s ass, no.  Sure, within their own community they play their favorites.  They have their leaders who inspire uncritical devotion.  But the fountains of true power are so far removed from them that even their leaders are not able to rise much higher than elders or peers.  They do not have the necessary or requisite power to make ass-kissing either necessary or profitable.  “Be yourself!” they say.  With this philosophy, which is the opposite of kiss-ass, they could not possibly achieve that self-destroying inversion of the ego that the members of the hearing world go through to get ahead.

Actually, there is a laboratory-type environment for testing the phenomenon of kiss-ass:  where?  Nowhere else but the arts!  For in the hearing world, it is said that true skill, true worth, true value in art will be recognized by merit alone.  Is this true?  It would seem to be an impossible hypothesis to test, whether it is true or not, for the arts are always held up to all as apart from science, an ivory tower, that is, the true chalice or receptacle of the human spirit.  If an artist or writer sleeps around, goes to wild parties, fights with his wife and marries and divorces several times, having several illegitimate children, none of this is looked upon as a reason for his success.  It is in no way looked upon as any form of hidden or concealed agenda in the performance of the public role: artist. 

If this performance has the result of putting him in every desirable woman’s bed, or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, in the sanctuary of every church or synagogue across town, none of this social conformity or role-playing is looked upon as kissing ass.  Yet, if skill were the only and deciding factor in the judging of great art, why is it that the deaf, who in theory should excel at least in a visual art like painting, are virtually absent from the rolls of society’s great artists?  Why is this? Granted that Goya became deaf at the age of forty, when he was already famous, I know of no other great deaf artists, not a single one.

There may be some objectors that the absence of deaf artists from the rolls of great artists is not due to their refusal or inability to kiss ass at all, but only to their inability to communicate with others well enough to get their paintings sold.  This theory would not contradict the most important point being made here—that true value, true worth, of art will be recognized, if not at first, then eventually, for surely there would be some well-known, if not world-famous, deaf artists, at least after they had died.  If this principle were true also, however, the case for good communication in contrast to kiss-ass would likely have been made.  We would then expect to find that universities would have encouraged artists to develop good communication skills as a regular part of majoring in art. 

Since this has plainly not been the case, and art majors, like math and English majors, have traditionally been encouraged to concentrate only in the subjects thought to be directly relevant to their field, that is, in the development of specific skills like painting, drawing, sculpture, and so on, we can effectively consider that the logical choice of having artists become skilled interpersonal communicators in the business world turns out to be no choice at all.  Instead, society all but ignores the whole possibility.  The social stereotype of the artist as a rebellious womanizer, social buffoon, still stands before us; what are we to do with it?

(To be continued . . .)

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic novel available as an eBook from Smashwords at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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Beginnings:  My Introduction to Northrop Frye

I discovered Northrop Frye in the spring semester of my junior year of college at the University of Maryland.  The year was 1975.  I read Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism:  Four Essays.  The choice had been mine.  I selected Frye’s Anatomy from a list handed out by the professor in my “Theory of Literary Criticism” class.  I had no idea at the time that understanding Frye and applying his ideas in my own criticism would become a passion for me.

In fact, I went on to base my MA thesis at George Washington University on the application of Frye’s description of the romance form of literature to the structure of Herman Melville’s great encyclopedic romance, Moby-Dick.  Never once did I stop and think:  how popular is Northrop Frye?  What do other people think of him?

His credentials were impressive:  he had an MA from Oxford, he was an ordained minister, and he was a professor at the University of Toronto’s VictoriaCollege.  His book The Secular Scripture was a publication of the lectures he gave as a visiting professor at Harvard University.  Of course, I realized that Frye’s views were controversial, even anathema to many.  I realized that much.  In 1976, the year of the publication of The Secular Scripture, Anatomy of Criticism was 19 years old, that is, published in 1957, it had been out for 19 years. 

Yet I did not stop to think:  where was the scientific study of literature advocated by Frye as based on his four levels of meaning:  literal and descriptive, formal, mythical (archetypal), and anagogic?  Was anyone putting his ideas into practice, especially with regard to archetypal criticism, which is the core to his whole approach to literary criticism?

When researching my thesis, I came across no Fryeian archetypal criticism of any of Melville’s works.  And this was 1977, or 20 years after the publication of Anatomy.  Yet I remained lost in my own fascination with trying to figure out how to apply Frye’s ideas myself.  After graduate school, I read every book by Frye I could get my hands on, buying many of the books from Amazon.com in paperback or second-hand as hardcovers.  My whole journey and challenge was to understand the man so I could incorporate his ideas, mainly in my own creative writing, but also in any literary criticism I might write.

 The Public’s Rejection of Archetypal Criticism

According to Frye’s theory, archetypes are symbols and patterns from mythology which form the basic building blocks of all stories.  The archetypes are as if embedded in a story through what Frye calls displacement, which means “some form of simile:  analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the like.”[1]  The more realistic the story, the more likely the displacement of the archetype will make the archetype seem even more hidden in the text.  As Frye says, “the association becomes less significant and more a matter of incidental, even coincidental or accidental imagery.”[2] 

As the years passed, it never seemed to bother me, at least consciously, that I could find not even a single critic who was putting Frye’s style of archetypal criticism into practice.  But it does occur to me now almost forty years after I first read the man.  Frye’s theory of archetypes is not and has not been accepted, at least not in the way, or on the scale, he would have liked.

The Library of Congress

The evidence I have before me is simple.  Had Frye’s ideas been accepted on the scale he foresaw, and I envisioned with him, the Library of Congress would surely by now have a subject heading for “archetypal criticism,” for it would be taught that way in schools, from elementary school to college and afterward.  There is no such subject heading.  The heading appears to be “archetypes in literature.” And there are only 35 titles under that exact heading, only seven of which are in English.  Not what you would expect from a society—indeed a world—that had accepted Frye’s systematic, scientific study of literature as advocated in Anatomy and other of Frye’s books.

Compare the 387 titles in 16 categories grouped under “archetype (psychology)” with the 38 total titles in the three categories of “archetypes in literature.”[3]  Jungian archetypes have been accepted in the systematic study of psychology while Frye’s literary archetypes, which differ importantly from Jungian archetypes, have not been so widely accepted in literary criticism.  In fact, not having examined the books under the “archetypes in literature” subject heading, I cannot say for sure whether any of the books under the heading deal with Fryeian archetypes at all.  Certainly none of Frye’s books can be found under this heading.

College Courses at Two Local Universities

In addition, course descriptions from the online catalogs from both the University of Maryland and The George Washington University, the two universities I attended for a BA in English (1975) and MA in American Literature (1978), respectively, indicate that neither university offers a single class exclusively devoted to either Frye or archetypal criticism.

That alone should be enough for me to make my point.  My two other indicators for the failure of Frye’s ideas to gain currency, however, are more subtle.  They have to do with the pricing of his books on Amazon.com and the lack of Kindle editions for all but one of his books. 

The Pricing of Frye’s Books

I’ve noticed that when demand for a book drops on Amazon.com, the price of the book goes up.  The higher the price, the less demand for the book.  I can give two good examples:  a book (Calalus) by the historian Cyclone Covey and one of my own books (Portraits Deep in the Castle).  Both books were self-published and subsequently picked up and sold by used booksellers at the outrageously high price of around $80 a copy.  Why? 

Because they were quality books which the booksellers obviously believed to be scarce.  I know Covey’s book was scarce because I wrote to him, and in so many words, he told me so.  (He gave me a copy of Calalus in exchange for a copy of my novel Other World.)  Portraits Deep in the Castle must have appeared to be scarce because it took me a long time to get around to putting the book on Amazon.com, long after I had begun to circulate copies of the book, some of which fell into the hands of booksellers.  (Once I put Portraits on sale myself at Amazon.com, the price came down at the booksellers.)

The Collected Works edition in hardcover of Anatomy of Criticism on Amazon.com is $73.37 (marked down from a list price of $109).  Similarly, Frye’s first book, Fearful Symmetry:  A Study of William Blake, goes for $73.37 in hardcover, also marked down from a list price of $109.  The Secular Scripture is not even available in hardcover from Amazon.com itself, but has to be purchased from sellers on Amazon.com:  only three copies of the hardcover are available from the sellers at a price new from $65.71 to $73.28.  One hardcover anthology of Frye’s writings in the Collected Works does include The Secular Scripture.  It sells for $114! 

Kindle Editions of Frye’s Books

Finally, another sign of high demand for a book is the presence on Amazon.com of an eBook edition of the book.  All books for which demand is high are being made into eBooks.  So you can even find a free eBook edition of Thoreau’s Walden.  But Frye’s books?  The only eBook edition of any of his books I could find on Amazon.com was for his Words with Power, and the price?  A whopping $60.79 for the Kindle edition!  Not what you would expect for an eBook.  What are in my opinion his two greatest books—Anatomy of Criticism and The Secular Scripture—are not even available in Kindle editions. 

Northrop Frye in 1984. From Wikipedia, s.v. “Northrop Frye,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Frye (accessed May 4, 2012).

Frye as the Marx to My Ho Chi Minh

In 1984, I met Frye, that is, I shook his hand and said to him:  “You are the Marx to my Ho Chi Minh.  I am very happy to meet you!”  I wanted to use an analogy to tell him how I felt about him, and I had prepared what I would say ahead of time, in case I got the chance to meet him.  And I did get that chance:  the occasion was a wine and cheese reception at the Library of Congress, where Frye had just given a lecture on myth and metaphor. 

What I realized, then and now, was that there has been no Lenin for Frye, no man of action to put his ideas into practice.  If I were Ho Chi Minh, I was putting his ideas into practice, but where?  In my own tiny country (my own unpublished writing) on the other side of Frye’s Earth (Frye’s world renown), but not in America, not even in Russia! 

By likening myself to Communist figures so despised in America, I believed I had thereby demonstrated the freedom I had achieved within myself from what Frye would have called the mythological conditioning that would have limited me to a strictly American point of view.  What was important to me, and what I wanted to communicate to Frye, was just as Ho Chi Minh must have loved Marx, so I loved Frye, not that I agreed with either Ho Chi Minh or Marx.  That was another matter entirely.

Now Frye is sleeping the big sleep.  He died in 1991.  But I am confident that on that night I met him, almost 30 years ago, I got my point across.  My quest to understand Frye’s ideas and apply them in my own work has gone on.  Have a look at my blog posts from mid-December, beginning with “There’s Got to Be a Morning After,”and ending in mid-April with “Born on the Fourth of July and the Myth of Perseus.”  And look for the publication in the coming months—as an eBook from Smashwords—of my Illustrated Northrop Frye for examples of my own brand of Fryeian criticism. 

You can also now download my epic novel Other World as an eBook from Smashwords at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153. Eighteen years in the writing, Other World presents a displacement of the archetype of Christ’s death and resurrection in the story of Moody Santo, an ostracized anti-superhero, who suffers, dies, and rises again in another world before ultimately returning to this one. 

Close:  Following Blake’s Golden String

Frye wanted to be a popular critic, not in the sense of wanting to win a popularity contest, like being popular in high school, but in the sense of having his idea for a systematic and scientific study of literature put into practice.  As I witness the chance for Frye’s work to achieve that kind of popularity diminish, I find myself in the curious position of being among the few converts to his majestic, all-comprehensive perspective on literature and the literary or mythological universe.

 As Blake said: 

I give you the end of a golden string,

Only wind it into a ball;

It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate

Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

Frye has passed the string to me, a string he appears to have picked up and followed from Blake.  It seems I have only to wind it up now myself to reach the gate that will admit me onto the hallowed grounds of my own identity with the master I have so long followed and admired, studied and meditated on, at the very end of a very long journey, to a place where Frye has already arrived, within the holy city of the self.

Notes

[1] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism:  Four Essays (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1957), 137.

[2] Frye, Anatomy, 137.

[3] The three categories are:  1) “Archetypes in literature”; 2) “Archetypes in literature—Comic books, strips, etc.”; and 3) “Archetypes in literature—Congresses.”

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The archetypal symbolism of Born on the Fourth of July (1989), a film directed by Oliver Stone from a screenplay by Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic, appears to rely upon symbolism from the myth of Perseus.  The myth may be sketched in brief as presented in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, then as displaced, to use a term from the literary criticism of Northrop Frye, into Born on the Fourth of July.

The Myth of Perseus

In the myth of Perseus, the oracle at Delphi prophesies that Perseus will grow up to kill his mother’s father.  To escape the prophecy, after Perseus is born, this grandfather has his daughter and grandson shut up in a chest, the chest being cast into the sea.[1]

A fisherman in a distant land, where the fisherman’s evil brother happens to be the ruler, finds the chest.  Growing to manhood, Perseus offers to kill the Medusa, one of the Gorgons, terrible monsters with snaky hair, the sight of which will turn the viewer into stone.

To find out where the Medusa is, Perseus goes to three old women who share the use of one eye among them, the three hags passing the eye back and forth and popping it in and out of their head.  Perseus grabs the eye from them.  To get it back, the women agree to tell Perseus how to find the nymphs of the North, who apparently know where the Medusa can be found.

Two important gods favor Perseus:  Athena, goddess of wisdom, skills, and warfare, and Hermes, the messenger god.  Athena gives Perseus a shield in order to be able not to look at the Medusa directly but only in the shield’s reflection.  Hermes gives him a sword which cannot be bent or broken

The nymphs of the North live among the Hyperboreans, a joyful people always engaged in festive celebrations, and these people bestow three additional gifts on Perseus:  winged sandals, which will enable him to fly; a magic wallet, which can accommodate an object of any size; and a cap, which can make Perseus invisible. 

With the aid of these gifts, Perseus slays the Medusa, not looking at her but only at her reflection in his shield, cuts off her head with his magic sword, and carries the head back with him in his wallet, putting on the cap to make himself invisible in order to escape pursuit by the Medusa’s two sister Gorgons.

On his way home, Perseus rescues Andromeda, a beautiful maiden set out to be devoured by a sea serpent.  Perseus slays the serpent and marries Andromeda, bringing her home with him. 

On arriving home, Perseus participates in a great athletic contest, accidentally hurling a discus into a crowd of onlookers, once of whom happens to be his grandfather.  In fulfillment of the prophecy, the discus hits the grandfather and the grandfather dies.

The Myth of Perseus in Born on the Fourth of July

In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye says archetypes—mythical symbols and patterns—are displaced into stories “by some form of simile:  analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the like.”  He goes on to say:  “In more realistic modes the association becomes less significant and more a matter of incidental, even coincidental or accidental, imagery.”[2]

In Born on the Fourth of July, the Medusa is the Vietnam War itself, which partially turns Kovic into stone, paralyzing him from the chest down.  We see the Medusa at work inside the hut where Vietnamese women and children villagers have been massacred by Marines, their exposed entrails like the snaky hair of the Medusa, their dead bodies as if turned to stone. 

The shield Athena gives to Perseus to help him kill the Medusa becomes the Marine superiors who reflect back on what happens as if to shield Kovic, excusing Kovic from the massacre of the villagers—“It wasn’t your fault, goddamnit!  They [the innocent villagers slain in the hut] got in the goddamned way!”—and from what happens later when Kovic accidentally shoots and kills Billy Wilson, a fellow Marine.  (A Marine major, to whom Kovic confesses the crime, denies that Kovic was responsible.)

The entire myth of Perseus proceeds from the grandfather’s attempt to escape the prophecy that Perseus will grow up to kill him.  The death of Wilson becomes a symbolic vertex in the development of Perseus symbolism since it unites Wilson’s death with the accidental killing of Perseus’ grandfather. 

In the film, Wilson is as if obscured by the bright disc of the sun as Kovic confusedly shoots him, mistaking him  for the enemy, much as in the myth Perseus accidentally hurls a discus into a crowd of onlookers and just as accidentally ends up killing his grandfather.  We learn later that this grandfather symbolism is present in the long line of forefathers from the Wilson family who, according to Billy’s father, have fought “in every war this country has ever had,” a line of tradition that would seem to come to a kind of end with Billy’s death.

On the way home from Vietnam—not the home of his post-war life, but the home of his idyllic life before his service in the war—Kovic travels to Mexico where in highly attenuated, and thus very shadowy, symbolism, he meets a prostitute, here a representation of Andromeda who is as if being devoured by the sexual serpent of prostitution.  Kovic apparently even marries her, though he only brings the memory home with him.

If we look closer at Born on the Fourth of July, we can see the hags of the Perseus myth who lead Perseus to the nymphs of the North in the girls Kovic runs into at the A&P.  The hags, the nymphs, and the Hyperboreans, all become symbolically identical in these girls.  The old women’s eye becomes the retainer Kovic pops out of his mouth just before he singles out Donna among the girls.  She says she cannot go to the prom (festive occasion) with Kovic, but will be going to Syracuse University, which is far north of Massapequa.  Kovic tells Donna he is headed straight for the front lines of Vietnam.

Perseus receives a magic cap from the nymphs of the North/Hyperboreans which enables him to become invisible.  As a little girl, Donna presents Kovic with a New York Yankees cap.  When packing for Vietnam, Kovic, alone in his room as if invisible to others, and especially to Donna, who dances with another boy at the prom, plays a little with this cap.  Kovic packs a trunk for Vietnam, the trunk being symbolic of the chest in which Perseus’ grandfather has Perseus and Perseus’ mother shut up and cast into the sea.  When we arrive in Vietnam, we find Kovic in a Vietnamese village by the sea where North and South Vietnamese, figuratively brothers like the good and bad brothers of the Perseus myth, are at war.

Perseus’s winged sandals appear as the wheelchair Kovic uses to carry on his struggle against the war after returning home to the United States.  By the time Kovic is about to address the Democratic Convention of 1976, the Vietnam War is over.  The Medusa is dead, with Kovic having participated (from his wheelchair) in protests that help to bring about this end.  Just as Perseus was surrounded by the prophecy that he would one day kill his mother’s father, a story that concludes the Perseus myth, so in the concluding scene of Born on the Fourth of July, Kovic fulfills his mother’s prophecy that he would one day speak before a large audience and say great things.

The Medusa and Oliver Stone?

Curiously enough, a director with the name of Stone (Stone is also a Vietnam veteran) directs Born on the Fourth of July, winning an Academy Award as best director.  It might be said that we are all thus partially as if turned to stone, like Kovic himself, by the shocking images of the Vietnam War that we experience—not so much, however, that we are not still able to celebrate the artistic victory that the film represents.

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic novel available as an eBook from Smashwords at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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Notes

[1] This summary of the myth of Perseus relies upon the presentation of the myth in Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York:  New American Library, 1940), 141-48.

[2] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism:  Four Essays (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1959), 137.

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Born on the Fourth of July (1989), the movie directed by Oliver Stone, with a screenplay by Oliver Stone and Ron Kovic based on Kovic’s autobiography, Born on the Fourth of July, presents a quintessential view of America during the 1960s. 

I was a boy during the 1960s as Kovic was becoming a man.  Like Kovic, I lived in suburbia.  Like Kovic, I participated in high school sports, like Kovic’s father, my father fought in World War II, and like Kovic, yes, I even worked at an A&P. 

By the time I registered for the draft, the Vietnam War was virtually over.  I could have enlisted, of course, like Kovic, however, like Kovic, I ended up marching against the war.  By that time, there was little worry that I would be sent to Vietnam.  No one I knew was being taken by the draft.

The War in Vietnam was an undeclared war that ended disastrously in April 1975 with the fall of Saigon to the Communists who ruled North Vietnam and who were represented in the south by the Viet Cong, “Cong” being short for “Communist” in Vietnamese.[1]  Of course, U.S. military involvement in Vietnam came to an end in August 1973, or a matter of months after I registered for the draft.[2]

Born on the Fourth of July is about the life of Ron Kovic, a native of Massapequa, New York, from the age of about ten to that of about 30.  The film begins in 1956 with Kovic playing army in the woods with friends one beautiful summer’s day.  A Fourth of July parade in Massapequa follows.  Kovic was really born on the fourth of July—hence the title, so the opening scenes include a little celebration at the parade where Kovic receives a New York Yankees cap from his friend Donna.  He also gets what looks like a first kiss from Donna during the fireworks later that night.

We next see Kovic hit a home run in Little League Baseball, with his father jumping up and down in jubilation, cheering wildly, and Donna, now accompanied by another boy, cheering, and the entire team converging on Kovic after he slides safely into home plate.

As the opening credits continue to unroll, Stone continues our journey through the late 1950s, early 1960s.  We see suburbia as the idyllic destination of middle class post-World War II America.  Followed by his trusty dog, Kovic threads his way over verdant lawns, across lush back yards, and under hanging laundry to join his family.  Gathered together around a TV, they watch a broadcast of John F. Kennedy’s famous inaugural address of 1961.  In that address, Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”[3]

This speech actually occurred in January, that is, winter 1961, although Stone presents it as having occurred in the fall.  I saw the speech myself on TV and remember how cold it was that day in contrast to the autumn, jacket weather in which Stone presents it.

Next, Kovic is in high school, and on the wrestling team, with the coach off camera sounding the litany of sports inspirational talk for that era:  “You want to win?  You gotta suffer!  You want to be the best?  You gotta pay the price for victory!  And the price is sacrifice, sacrifice, people!”

Kovic comes to suffer, and intensely, for in Vietnam, he is wounded, almost fatally, and left paralyzed from the chest down, unable to have sex or sire children.  There are several scenes in the film’s opening sequence in Massapequa that ominously foretell such suffering:  Kovic gets as if killed while playing army; a veteran without arms looks ominously toward Kovic while passing in the parade; Kovic loses a championship wrestling match in high school;  and Kovic doesn’t go to the prom with Donna.  Going off to Vietnam, he loses the idyllic world of his youth, becoming a cripple as a young man.

In The Secular Scripture:  A Study of the Structure of Romance, Northrop Frye describes the archetypal or mythic pattern behind the romance form as a quest that begins as a descent from a higher idyllic world symbolically above the level of this one, into a struggle with death, sometimes symbolized by a dragon, within a lower demonic night world symbolically below the level of this one, and ending with the hero’s triumphant ascent back to a higher idyllic world.[4]

The idyllic world of late-1950s, early 1960s America dominates the opening of Born on the Fourth of July, an idyllic world Ron Kovic loses through a descent into a struggle with death in Vietnam, where he actually kills a fellow soldier, one of his own men, in the confusion of battle, later himself becoming paralyzed from the chest down as result of being hit in the upper chest by a Communist bullet that pierces his spine.  He ascends from this lower, demonic world through a series of stages in his personal growth which eventually lead him to protest the war and gain recognition as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention of 1976 in fulfillment of a prophecy spoken by his mother.  When he was a boy, his mother said she dreamed she had seen Ronnie speaking before a large crowd and saying great things, just like John F. Kennedy.

The idyllic America of the movie’s opening scenes, an America of boys playing army, a Fourth of July parade, Little League Baseball, high school wrestling, heroic Marine recruiters, and the prom, reappears in several flashbacks—to Ron hearing his mother’s prophecy, kissing Donna at the prom, and hitting a home run—from the 1976 Democratic National Convention where Kovic is to be a speaker and where Kovic says, in answer to a reporter’s question, that he finally feels as if he is “home.”

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Notes

[1] Infoplease, s.v. “Viet Cong,” http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0850864.html  (accessed March 29, 2012).

[2] Wikipedia, s.v. “Vietnam War,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War (accessed March 29, 2012).

[3] Historic Documents, “Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You,” http://www.ushistory.org/documents/ask-not.htm (accessed March 29, 2012).

[4] Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture:  A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1976), 53-54 and 121.

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The primary meaning of the word “riddle” is “a mystifying, misleading, or puzzling question posed as a problem to be solved or guessed.”  The secondary meaning is “something or someone difficult to understand,” with a synonym being “mystery.”[1] 

In Story a Day May (stories), Morgen Bailey seems either to recast the meaning of her stories with an often puzzling twist finish or withhold information of the most obvious kind, so that only through careful review can the often strange, or simply different, perspectives on what actually happens in the stories be understood.

Take “A Military Couple (part one).”  It would appear that the information being withheld in this story is that Laura’s husband, a military man of some kind, has been killed somehow during some training maneuvers.  Death is never mentioned, however.  The story at first seems instead to be about the military man’s—John’s—suspected infidelity.  It is not till the end of the story that the reader realizes, and this is not entirely clear, either, that John has not come home, not because he has left Laura for another woman, but because he has died.

Hence the visit by two men who appear to be from the armed services, one of whom Laura knows “from John’s 30th,” the other from “earlier in the day” when she was waiting at the port for her husband to come home.

To clear up the mystery a little further, Bailey has a second story on John’s death later on in the collection:  “A Military Couple (part two – A Different Perspective).  Once again, death is never mentioned, but this time the perspective is from one of the two men who comes to Laura’s door.  He admits he hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to John, whom he calls Johnnie.  It turns out that the narrator of part two is the man “she briefly met at a birthday party.”  As much as is said about Johns’ death is: “It was terrible, breaking the news.”  But once again, death, accident, or anything of the kind is never mentioned at all.

The reader has to piece together the information given in each story.  Like a child who has overheard a conversation among adults, the reader faces the question:  OK, now what happened?

In stories with a twist finish, the twist can be a happy one as in “May the Fourth Be With You” and “Ghost”—happy stories cluster around the first half of the book and include “Norman the Conqueror,” “Do It Right Or Get Off the Horse,” and “Whatever You Say.”  In the second half of the book, the twist tends to be a puzzling one as in “The Case that Sherlock Couldn’t Crack” or “The Lake at Dusk.”

The twist can be new information supplied at or toward the end of a story that seems to change the entire story’s meaning, as in a story like “Man Overboard.”  The twist can also simply be a provocative turn in thought, as in “She Suspects” or “Sparkly Blue.”  Sometimes the twist can be confusing, but still provocative, as in “The Houseguest” or “The Big Game.”

Now Northrop Frye has said that the underlying form of stories takes shape from archetypes.  These archetypes are mythical symbols or patterns that are displaced, to use Frye’s term, into stories “by some form of simile:  analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the like.”[2]  The more realistic a story is, the more subtle will be the presence of the underlying archetypes, so that “In more realistic modes the association becomes less significant and more a matter of incidental, even coincidental or accidental, imagery.”[3]

The myth that seems to give form to Bailey’s collection, which is, on the whole, one within the more realistic modes, is the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx.  Nowhere is either mentioned in the book, however.  In the myth, the Sphinx proposes a riddle to wayfarers who cross its path somewhere near Thebes much as Bailey as if presents a series of riddles to readers who cross hers wherever they might be.[4]   

Curiously enough, a displacement for the Sphinx itself would seem to appear in Bailey’s story “Alternate Reality.”  The Sphinx was a composite animal “with the head and breasts of a woman, body of a dog, tail of a serpent, wings of a bird, paws of a lion, and a human voice.”[5]

Similarly, the creature Bailey describes in “Alternate Reality” in a story of only three paragraphs is a composite animal.  It seems to have the head of a human attached to a nonhuman body.  The creature has six green eyes with “incredibly long matching eyelashes” along with “ten foot concertina-style legs.”  The creature is a male but could have been any of four possible sexes and, most importantly, the creature can speak with what appears to be a human voice, for with cryptic humor, it says, “I’m sorry Sophie, it’s not you, it’s me.”

The placement of the story, right in the middle of Bailey’s collection, is also significantly between two stories about death and disappearance:  “A Story for Amelia Earhart” (Amelia Earhart, a famous aviator, disappeared in 1937 somewhere near Howland Island in the Pacific during an attempt to fly around the world) and “A Scientifically Unexplained Occurrence” (a story about a writer who is writing about the Bermuda Triangle, “a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean where a number of aircraft and surface vessels are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances”).[6]

The importance of death in these stories as well as in other stories of the collection, including near death, suicide, and possible death (“Holding Her Hand,” “Man Overboard,” “She Suspects,” “Sparkly Blue,” “Feeling Like a Child Again,” and “The Lake at Dusk”) would seem to be a displacement for the way the Sphinx would destroy each person who couldn’t answer its riddle.  Oedipus solves the riddle posed by the Sphinx, the answer to which is “Man,” and in the final story of her collection, Bailey as if clears up any remaining mystery as to what happened to “the threadbare girl” in the second part of the story by that name. 

The title of Bailey’s collection itself presents a kind of riddle:  what does Story a Day May mean?  The title seems to be a playful way of saying Bailey may be able to write a story a day, but that the stories aren’t really complete until they’ve been read.  Just as Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx, so the reader, in puzzling over the meaning of Bailey’s stories, comes to share something of a hero’s sense of achievement, unraveling the riddles the stories present.

Morgen Bailey’s Story a Day May is available as an eBook from Smashwords for $1.49 at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/104670.  These 31 stories were written in 31 days from prompts given by http://storyaday.org.  You can also buy a version of these stories entitled 31 stories – An Author’s Challenge, which contains the stories along with the prompts as well as additional comments by the author for $1.49 from Smashwords at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/104672.

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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Notes

[1] Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition, s.v. “Riddle.”

[2] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism:  Four Essays (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1957), 137.

[3] Frye, Anatomy, 137.

[4] For the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, see Edith Hamilton, Mythology (New York:  New American Library, 1940), 257.

[5] J.E. Zimmerman, Dictionary of Classical Mythology (New York:  Bantam Books, 1977), 246.

[6] Ameliaearhart.com, “Amelia Earhart:  The Official Website – Biography,” http://www.ameliaearhart.com/about/bio.html (accessed March 16, 2012) and Wikipedia, s.v. “Bermuda Triangle,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermuda_Triangle (accessed March 16, 2012).

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Toby Neal’s mystery novel Blood Orchids opens at the site of a small pond in Hilo, Hawaii, at what turns out to be the crime scene of a serial killer’s murder of two young girls, who apparently have been drowned.  Policewoman Leilani Texeira (Lei), a native Hawaiian of mixed Portuguese, Hawaiian, and Japanese heritage, along with her male Hawaiian partner, Pono, finds the two girls.   

If many people see the police as bullies, perhaps the police have good reason to be—because they’ve been bullied or abused as children.  Not that Neal says that.  But Lei’s mother’s boyfriend rapes and molests Lei over a period of six months when Lei is nine, and her father is sent to prison for dealing drugs.  Her sexual abuser pronounces Lei as “damaged goods,” and Lei, internalizing this, finds it almost impossible as an adult to enjoy sex or be in a serious relationship with a man. 

Enter Detective Michael Stevens, who is assigned to the “campsite murders.”  The victim of abuse as a child from an alcoholic mother, Stevens, who gets special permission for Lei to help him solve the case, gradually finds a way around Lei’s defenses as the two work together to solve the crime.  To complicate matters, Lei finds herself being stalked by a stalker who may or may not be connected to the serial killings.

According to the World Book Encyclopedia, only 9 percent of the population of Hawaii are of Hawaiian (Polynesian) ancestry, 25 percent are of European ancestry, 15 percent are of Japanese descent, and 25 percent belong to two or more ethnic groups.[1]  As can be seen, Lei is a mixture of the three main groups (European, Hawaiian, and Japanese), Stevens, who is from Los Angeles, is obviously of European descent, Pono, Lei’s partner, is obviously Hawaiian, and Stevens’ partner, Detective Jeremy Ito, also on the case, appears to be Japanese.

At least, the name Ito sounds Japanese.  Neal describes Ito as a “local boy” and also as an “Asian.”  Wikipedia claims that Ito is the sixth most popular Japanese family name.[2]  In fact, in Japanese, the noun ito apparently means thread, yarn, or string—interesting, for Lei in Hawaiian means a wreath of flowers strung or woven together, [3] and, using a key ring, the serial rapist and killer strings together hanks of hair from his victims.

The chief suspect of the serial murders is James Reynolds, the stepfather of Kelly Andrade, one of the two girls found naked and murdered in the pond.  Without revealing who the killer is, Neal details the killer’s grisly method of murder, which involves drugging his victims, sexually assaulting them, and then drowning them. Reynolds appears to have an airtight alibi.  At the time of the campsite murders:  “He was at work, witnessed by a dozen people”; at the time of the disappearance of another victim, Mary Gomes, a friend of Lei’s:  he was with his wife.

Tom Watanabe is a neighbor of Lei’s whose creepy awkwardness makes him Lei’s chief candidate for the stalker.  But whether the serial killer and stalker are one and the same person is all part of the mystery Lei and her partners have to solve.

Using the term romance in a different way from that of booksellers, in The Secular Scripture:  A Study of the Structure of Romance, Northrop Frye says that one of the chief characteristics of the romance form of literature, which would include mysteries, is its tendency to present a polarization of ideal and abhorrent worlds.[4]  In Blood Orchids, this polarization appears in the opposition of virtuous policemen, with some twists, of course, and a hideous serial rapist and killer, who may also be a stalker.

According to Frye, there is “an inherently revolutionary quality” [5] in the romance, and in Blood Orchids, this revolutionary quality emerges in the way Lei, who is on the one hand feminine, is on the other able to prove herself immensely capable in the very masculine world of policemen and violent crime.  Establishing a fresh range of action and behavior for Lei’s character, Neal overturns the stereotype of the traditional, romantic heroine, who is likely to be somewhat passive, without also embracing the role’s opposite, that of an aggressive, over-masculine bitch.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye says, archetypes—mythical symbols, patterns—the building blocks of stories—are displaced into stories “by some form of simile:  analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the like.”[6]  If we stand back from Blood Orchids, we can see the presence of shadowy archetypes from the myth of Artemis (Diana), as goddess of the hunt, and Actaeon, himself a hunter, whom Artemis changed into a stag or object of the hunt for seeing her bathe in a pond—a stag subsequently torn to pieces by his own dogs.[7] 

The pond shows up in the opening of Blood Orchids.  Having waded into the pond to retrieve the bodies of the two murdered girls, Lei is unwittingly discovered by Stevens and Ito to have somewhat disturbed the crime scene.  And, all the way up to the novel’s climax, in her hunt for the murderer, Lei is closely identified with her beloved “police-trained dog,” Keiki, which means baby or child in Hawaiian.[8]

Blood Orchids is available from Amazon.com as an eBook for $2.99 (Amazon Prime members can read the eBook for free) and as a paperback for $11.99.

 

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

 

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 Notes

 [1] World Book Online, s.v. “Hawaii:  People,” http://proxy.montgomerylibrary.org:2113/pl/infofinder/article?id=ar248660&st=Hawaii (accessed March 5, 2012).

[2] Wikipedia, s.v. “Ito (name),” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%C5%8D_(name) (accessed March 5, 2012).

[3] Wikipedia, s.v. “Ito (name)” and Merriam Webster, s.v. “lei,” http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lei (accessed March 5, 2012).

[4] Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture:  A Study of the Structure of Romance  (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1976), 53.

[5] Frye, The Secular Scripture, 139.

[6] Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism:  Four Essays (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1957), 137.

[7] For the myth of Artemis and Actaeon, see Edith Hamilton, Mythology:  Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York:  New American Library, 1940), 255-56.

[8] Wikipedia, s.v. “Keiki,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiki (accessed March 9, 2012).

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The inhuman practice of using leather restraints to tie a patient down to a bed is, or at least has been, standard practice on psychiatric wards and in psychiatric hospitals.  That’s why it comes as something of a surprise to hear a psychiatrist, namely, the author of Chasing Backwards:  A Psychological Murder Mystery, express outrage in his novel that such a practice should be employed to correct the behavior of a patient who happens to be a mentally healthy six-year-old child. 

The victim of this abuse is Joe Belmont, a 23-year-old med student, whose repressed memory of this traumatic event from his childhood appears to be the cause of recurrent nightmares.  Joe is a victim of Legg Perthes Disease as a child—the disease is a physical, not a mental malady, and affects the hip joint, not the brain—a victim of the loss of his father, who dies when Joe is seven; a victim of poverty while growing up in Philadelphia’s Little Italy; and, as the novel opens, a victim of an unlikely murder plot which claims his mother and uncle and means to claim him also.

According to Northrop Frye’s Secular Scripture:  A Study of the Structure of Romance, some of the building blocks of the romance form of literature include a polarization or very clear delineation of ideal and abhorrent worlds and black-and-white characters like pieces in a chess game.[1] 

In Chasing Backwards, we have the idealistic world of medical school, education, and compassion for others, especially children, and the abhorrent world of poverty, both emotional and monetary, murder, and fraud, including corrupt police officers and ruthless hit men.  This abhorrent level seems to exist on another level, a morally lower level, or hell, in relation to the ordinary world.  In this world of violence and fraud, Joe is like a prisoner in a cage.  “My whole life is a damn cage,” he says at one point.  At another point, he says, “I’m a criminal.  I mean I’m not a criminal, but the whole world thinks I’m one.”

In one of his recurrent nightmares, Joe “is in a cage, my arms and legs wrapped in leather.”  It is only by trying to analyze his nightmares that Joe is able to unravel at least part of the mystery that compels the story:  who is trying to kill him and why?  The leather turns out to be a dream symbol for the leather restraints that bound him as a six-year-old boy.  The bed in which he was bound was like a “jail bed” and also a “cage.” 

Joe learns from the nurse who befriended him when he was at the hospital as a boy—her name is Sally Monero—of the strange and tragic story of the seemingly mentally ill nurse who abused him and of his parents’ last-resort attempt at an intervention with the help of an organized crime figure.

The author, Arthur Smukler, wants us to live in is a world of friendship, pick-up basketball games, coffees and scones at Starbucks, sweet-smelling fruity perfumes, love between one man and one woman, making love rather than having sex, and being trustworthy to neighbors and children.  The world Smukler doesn’t want is a world of violence, guns, deception, dishonesty, abuse, including child abuse, and disease.  In fact, it would seem that the untreated mental illness of the nurse who has Joe bound as a child—her name is Sarah—sets in motion the entire chain of murders that leads up to Joe’s own fight to stay alive.

And so we have the polarized world of starkly defined characters that Frye noticed to be characteristic of romance.  On the good side, we have Joe, Karen Levine (Joe’s true love), Lieutenant Barneggi (a good cop), Sally Monero (the good nurse), Jeff (Joe’s “best and oldest friend”), and by the end of the story, as if redeemed, Joe’s mother and uncle.  On the evil side, we have the policemen who attempt to assassinate Joe, the “Redhead” and “Wild Tie” hit men, the evil nurse, Sarah, and Tim Stevens, the organized crime figure, who appears to be behind all the gangland-engineered accidents and murders.

As Frye explained in The Secular Scripture, literature presents an illusion of logic and causality in the progression of one scene to another.  This illusion is of minimal concern in the romance form, which tends to be sensational, moving from one discontinuous episode to another.  In a romance, the action proceeds mainly by a simple “and then” logic while a more realistic story would attempt to supply more logic and causality, turning the transition from one episode to another into a “hence” progression.

The point is that the more true to the archetypal romance form a story is, the more episodic it is likely to be.  And if the story contains all the building blocks (archetypes) that have proved to make the form popular with readers over centuries, then the story should be successful in winning over a ready audience. 

As Frye says, “a sequence of archetypes, traditional fictional formulas or building blocks, has an interest in itself, however poor the logic or ‘hence’ narrative connecting them might be.”  So, we can accept much that would at first glance appear implausible on the strength of the way Smukler relies on the inherent power of the romance form itself to develop plausibility.

Which is what Frye appears to have meant when he said that “in the criticism of romance, we are led very quickly from what the individual work says to what the entire convention it belongs to is saying through the work.”  For this reason, as readers of romance, including mysteries, we are eager to root for the hero and see him or her emerge victorious.  Romance is not about losing but winning, solving the mystery, and returning to our true home and true identity, innocent as a child’s, in an idyllic world of safety, health, and wish fulfillment.

Arthur Smukler’s Chasing Backwards is available as an eBook for $2.99 and as a paperback for $9.99 from Amazon.com; Northrop Frye’s Secular Scripture is available as a paperback from Amazon.com for $26.00. 

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[1] Quotations from Frye’s work are from Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture:  A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1976).  See especially pp. 48, 50, and 60.

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If you happen to live outside the circle of violence which the characters of Marita A. Hansen’s Behind the Hood inhabit, a circle like a circle in Dante’s hell, then even the hero, Nike Daniels, looks spooky, for in the back story of the novel, he beats the villainous Tama Harris with a baseball bat.

Nike had beaten Tama apparently for having sex with Nike’s girlfriend at that time, for after Nike found out about the sex, Leila, the girlfriend, had cried rape, provoking the fight.  In the fight, Tama had stabbed Nike in the arm with his switchblade.

Later, Tama commences to harass Nike’s younger sister, Maia, for sex, even though Maia is no older than 14 and wants nothing to do with him.  As the novel opens, Tama and Mikey, a 14-year-old gang member with a crush on Maia, pursue her in an attempt at rape.  Just as she is about to get away, Tama stabs her in the back.  The police show up before Tama is able to consummate the rape and Maia is taken to the hospital.

Behind the Hood is not exactly a congener to the wild American West novels of a writer like Louis L’Amour, but it would seem that Hansen would like us to understand Nike and his episode with the bat much in the way we would understand a L’Amour hero like Sackett in the novel of that name when Sackett says, speaking to Ange, a woman he wants to make his own:

“No, Ange, if the folks who believe in law, justice, and a decent life for folks are to be shot down by those who believe in violence, nothing makes much sense.  I believe in justice, I believe in being tolerating of other folks, but I pack a big pistol, ma’am, and will use it when needed.”

The villain of Behind the Hood, Tama, is a highly sexed, doped up, highly psychotic 18-year-old gang leader who carries a switchblade and uses it. The narrative closely follows his sexual exploits with one available woman after another, including a virgin, as he comes around to the obsession of seeking sex with Nike’s wife, all the while under the delusion that she actually desires him.

Pornographic actors probably know each other better than the characters who clash together in sex after a few moments’ meeting in Hansen’s book.  And just about all the characters get to know Middleton Hospital well, either as visitors or patients, not for STDs, but for the various betrayals (mostly sexual) and reprisals (mostly beatings) that occur.

According to the World Book Encyclopedia,New Zealand “is a beautiful country of snow-capped mountains, green lowlands, beaches, and many lakes and waterfalls.”  But this is far from the New Zealand Hansen portrays.  Her story is set in Claydon, a suburb of Auckland, which, the World Book says, is “New Zealand’s largest city and chief commercial center.”  Hansen says:  “Claydon, the shithole, was one of the most policed areas of Auckland.”

According to the World Book, “Nearly a third of the nation’s people live in the Auckland metropolitan area.” The Maori are descendants of Polynesians from the middle of the South Pacific who settled in New Zealand around 1200 AD, British immigrants arriving in the early 1800s. There are thus two main ethnic groups in New Zealand, the Maori, who make up about 15 percent of the population, and people of European ancestry, who make up roughly 70 percent of the population.

In Behind the Hood, we find ourselves in an environment where it is difficult to tell which people the characters belong to, white or Maori.  A character might have a “wide, flat nose” or wear an “afro” or have “lily white legs,” but that is as much as an indication of race as we get.  Nowhere does Hansen appear to come right out and say that a character is of Maori ancestry, or even European ancestry, for that matter. 

Hansen herself looks white, as we know, from her picture on Twitter.  But it would be difficult to tell that from the way Behind the Hood is written.  The style is journalistic.  Hansen appears to avoid metaphor, preferring to narrate from each character’s point of view in the way each might talk, it would seem, in ordinary conversation. 

Each chapter in the book is written from one of the characters’ point of view.  There are more chapters from Tama’s point of view than any other character, and the book’s cover appears to be a portrait of Tama, for the cover depicts what appears to be a Maori boy with a distinctive tattoo on his head.  As described by Maia, “He’d shaved off his hair recently, replacing it with a curved pattern called a moko.  Usually the tattoo adorned the face, a sign of a Maori warrior—something to be proud of.”

The story builds toward Nike’s revenge on Tama for the stabbing of Maia and Tama’s deluded quest to have sex with Nike’s wife, Jess, a quest Tama stubbornly pursues when he just as well might have sought safety somewhere, “up north,” for example, where his uncle happens to be in prison.

For Americans, such a character as Tama might well call to mind a shadowy figure from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.  Melville’s description of this character does not fit Tama, of course, as well as a hoodie and jeans:

Ahab’s demonic harpooneer, Fedallah, “was such a creature as civilized, domestic people in the temperate zone only see in their dreams, and that but dimly; but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent—those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations . . .”

Behind the Hood is the first book in a series.  The next book, due out in 2012, is Behind the Tears.  Behind the Hood is presently available as an eBook for $2.99 or a paperback for $12.99 from Amazon.com.

Garden Urthark is the author of Other World, an epic mystery in five parts available for a limited time as a free eBook from Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/51153.

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Oscar Sparrow’s I Threw a Stone is the record of an urban poet’s encounter with a largely ugly, and even incomprehensible, environment.  The innocence and beauty of childhood have been lost to the almost pornographic ugliness of adulthood.  A boy throws a stone as if into a pool “while strangers bedded down together / in an underwater place.”  Throwing a stone represents a child’s innocent impulse to explore the natural world and to play in such a world.  Nature continues to be beautiful for Sparrow, nature as presented in such poems as “Bluebells,” “Conkers,” and “The Meadow.”

As Sparrow says, he has “dog-rolled / in a cow dung of love.”  Dirty, rough, animalistic perhaps, love is still the opposite of that ugly, puerile lust that fascinates him in the picture he draws of “breasts, erotic gaping lips / damp silky gussets, / and sundry porno clefts” in “Gallery.”

Sparrow has “no Faith,” he claims in “Bavarian Cemetery.”  For Sparrow, Faith, religion, is like a label or brand that advertises itself as if from a store shelf of crass materialism.  The trouble with materialism, and the reason that goes with it, is that too much of experience makes no sense, especially in the adult sexual world which can become like an “alley” where “a trembling bitch / fucks a pack of sperm rage dogs.” 

In “Bargain Bin,” the poet picks up or attempts to pick up a woman as if in a bargain store like Walmart where, as the poet says, “I too come cheap.”  The impulse to pick up a woman in such a scenario contrasts sharply with the desire to pick up and throw a stone, since the pickup of the woman is done in “desperation” and throwing a stone is not desperate, but the opposite, “careless.”

Love must be snatched like a stone from the shore of nature, not from the shelf of commercialism.  Love is there for the taking if it can only be recognized for what it is, a spontaneous expression of play, a kiss in a meadow “where the iris blaze their summer / whoever you are / wherever now the meadow.” 

Hence to gather bluebells is as if “to snatch a prisoner,” the prisoner of “any labeled plan” like religion, say, which cannot adequately account for “the rhythm of this Earth— / this soul of blueness.”  Yet the bluebell is a “mortal flower,” however “rooted in our winters past.”

The mystery of death confronts the poet throughout the book.  He stands perplexed before Oscar Wilde’s grave, unable to pay proper homage, unable to “make some remark / about an after-life.”  He even speaks in “L’Importanza di Essere Oscar,” the name he gives to this poem, of his “brand of love,” using “brand,” a pejorative term for him, as if even he is unable to escape the pollution of his own inmost and most reverent self by the commercialism he despises.

In “Conkers,” Sparrow finds a tragic peace that engenders a “sudden surge of joy, and tears” as he contemplates the tree in his garden that has grown from a conker he planted ten years before.  Unlike the crows in “Beak,” the blackbird that perches to sing in this tree does not threaten to make him a Promethean hero.  “Know it. / It has always known you,” Sparrow cries out like Prometheus in “Beak,” with the “Beak of Time / wheedling in / to inner thinner spaces, / the bone and tendon places.”

Sparrow values tears.  His view of nature and humanity’s place in nature is tragic.  The singer Edith Piaf’s “each sadness” creates “a longing for tears.”  Yet there are no tears in his steadfast view of the raindrop that can “kiss away its path of life/ on the lips of a dying rose,” here a Blakean rose on which Blake, as we remember, found a worm. 

Each one of us must thus find the compassion to reach down “within the bucket of self” for the “melancholy rag” that can “wipe the mouth” of the “soul,” way down as Yeats once put it, “in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”  Would it not be appropriate in ascending to what Northrop Frye called the archetypal level of symbolism to ask if the others that “speed by / down the Damascus Road” in another poem, “Engine Management Light,”  are on the same Damascus road that Paul once traversed when experiencing his conversion, “facing the question –  / my question”?

The poet gives the name of ELTON to someone who has died without a name, and who thus represents an alter ego for any author or any person who fears to leave this world without having achieved some level of fame, that is, by making a name for himself or herself.

Elton, whose animalistic nature, like that perhaps of a fish, is alive in the “turn of tail” and “flick of eye” that characterize him, speaks with a “silent movie mouth,” as if making no sound because he is also importantly, like the strangers abed together in “I Threw a Stone,” underwater, and thus like any storyteller or poet in this life a “raconteur in bubbles,” seemingly unable to really communicate. 

By having received a name, however, Elton is also able to leave, as we know from Christian mythology that only Christ and Peter could do, a “footprint in the water.”  Maintaining our focus on the archetypal level of symbolism in these words, we recall that Christ not only called on Peter to walk on water, he gave Peter his name, which is a round about way of coming to the idea that it takes faith of a kind that borders on religion to be a poet, like God to give names to people and things, and like Jesus, who is also mythologically the living word, to accomplish miracles, if not in fact, at least in language.

I Threw a Stone is available for $4.99 as an eBook from Amazon.com along with a free audiobook of the poet reading his poems.

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Emma Calin’s Knockout:  A Passionate Police Romance is a mix of relentless, buff sexuality, uncompromising, idealistic, romance, and sassy, police detective mystery.  The unexpected always happens, and the main character, Anna Leyton, is ashamed to admit she’s a policewoman, a detective actually.  A knockout herself, she lies to her beautiful man, boxer Frederic (Freddie)La Salle, who himself is knockout beautiful.  She meets him when fighting for a taxi, which by chance the two end up having to share. 

Her identity as cop just does not seem to fit the possibilities for a romantic relationship which begin to unfold in the cab, and so Anna commences to lie about her true identity as the beautiful man comes on to her:  “She smiled at his smoothness.  He was deceiving her, she was sure of that.  She was paying him back in kind.”

As the story unravels, Freddie turns out to have secrets of his own to conceal.  If one stands back from the story, one can see the shadowy containing form of the myth of Cupid and Psyche.  Both Cupid and Psyche were knockout beautiful.  Cupid did not want Psyche to ever see his true beauty, however, for fear she would no longer love him in the right way.  To use a term from Northrop Frye’s style of archetypal criticism, this theme of Cupid’s desire to conceal his true identity is displaced mainly into the character of Anna, though it is also still present in Freddie’s character.  Anna fears that if Freddie ever finds out she is really a cop, he won’t love her. 

There are other parallels with the myth of Cupid and Psyche in the novel.  Like Cupid’s palace, Freddie’s world is a world of wealth and abundance.  But Freddie is not only wealthy materially, he is sensually wealthy as well, not to speak of being well read, the son of a poet, and fluent in English and French.

Freddie is the ultimate turn-on and Anna has no trouble in coming to multiple orgasms with him.  But the sex is not just a matter of technique.  Freddie has it all, the complete package, from wealth to wisdom to six-pack abs.  With Freddie, Anna felt “separated and safe.”  Safety is a feeling Freddie, the champion boxer who is also an owner of a restaurant and a vineyard, provides Anna in full, a very physical as well as emotional safety.

Granting the wealth of evidence that exists on the elusiveness of orgasm for many, possibly even most, women during sex with a man, there is no question that with the many depictions of perfectly synchronized sex Anna achieves with Freddie in Knockout, we are finally at home among the gods. 

In the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Psyche transgresses Cupid’s wish that she never see him.  For betraying his trust, Cupid leaves Psyche.  To get him back, Psyche undergoes a series of trials set for her by Cupid’s mother, Venus, goddess of love and beauty, the last of which involves a trip to the underworld.  Psyche accomplishes this task but ends up overcome in a spell-binding sleep.

In Knockout, everything comes down to the fight with Billy “The Boulder” Brennan, a “dangerous street fighting brawler.”   The Mob, also known as the underworld, is behind Brennan, and the mob gets hold of Anna as a kind of hostage.  She falls into the hands of hit man Mauro Tondelli, who puts her to sleep with a chemical like chloroform when he captures her, that is, after Freddie discovers he has been betrayed and ends up leaving Anna. 

In the myth of Cupid and Psyche, Cupid rescues Psyche and, feeding her ambrosia, turns her into an immortal.  “So all came to a most happy end,” as Edith Hamilton wrote:  “Love and the Soul (for that is what Psyche means) had sought and, after sore trials, found each other; and that union could never be broken.”

Does Calin’s story have a happy ending like the myth?   You’ll have to read Knockout to find out.  Knockout is presently available as an eBook from Amazon.com for 99 cents.