It is not to be disputed that literary texts can sometimes be of great use to the anthropologist. It does not immediately follow from this that anthropological study can make in return any valuable contribution to literary criticism. The attention now paid by medievalists to the mythical and ritual origins (real or supposed) of the romances suggests a widespread belief that it can. I want to consider how far this is so.
It is clear that an anthropological statement (supposing it to be a true one) can often explain some detail in a text. Thus Gawain’s property* of growing stronger as the sun ascends can be explained as the last vestige of a myth about the sun-god. But let us be quite clear in what sense we are using the word ‘explain’. We mean ‘to account for causally’ (as in ‘we can easily explain his behaviour by the fact that he was drunk’). The word has a different meaning when we say that someone first ‘explained’ to us the Deduction of the Categories or the beauties of the Virgilian hexameter. To ‘explain’ in this second sense is to open our eyes; to give us the power of receiving, or receiving more fully, what Kant or Virgil intended to give us. The causal explanation of Gawain’s peculiarity ‘explains’, in this other sense, nothing whatever. That peculiarity remains, in Malory’s book, a complete irrelevance. Nothing leads up to it; nothing of any importance depends on it. Apart from it there is nothing divine and nothing solar about Gawain. All that he does, suffers, or says elsewhere would have exactly the same value if this odd detail had been omitted. The anthropological explanation may be true and it may have an interest of its own; but it cannot increase our understanding or enjoyment of one single sentence in the Morte.
I proceed to a more complicated instance. R. S. Loomis stresses the ‘astonishing disharmony’, the offences against ‘common sense and ordinary morality’, the ‘absurdities’, and the ‘irrational freakish features’, in the literature of the Grail. He concludes that ‘no procedure could be more reasonable than to seek the cause of the sanctification of the Grail legends in a series of misunderstandings’.* Now since the Grail (as distinct from various analogues to it in pagan stories) is fully sanctified in all the Grail stories we have, the ‘cause of the sanctification’ means the cause of its character in those stories—Chrétien’s, Wolfram’s, and the rest. We need not examine the theory that this is due to misunderstandings, for we are here concerned not with its truth or falsehood but with its literary relevance.
There are two ways in which we could interpret Professor Loomis’s procedure. One is that he is leaving the literary quality of these romances severely alone and is exclusively interested in the pagan myths from which he believes them to be derived. If that is so, then he is doing something which, however legitimate in its own field, makes no contribution to literary criticism. Alternatively, if we give full force to the charges of absurdity and freakishness which he brings, we could take him to be saying in effect, ‘Here is a great deal of shockingly bad fiction. I will explain how Chrétien and his fellows come to be guilty of it. They were led astray by blunders—mistaking cors (a horn) for cors (a body) or sang real for saint graal.’ I am myself very disinclined to believe that this is the correct account of Professor Loomis’s activity. Indeed, if he gave this account of it himself, I should venture to believe that he was misrepresenting his own experience and doing himself a grave injustice. The spectacle of a great scholar spending a lifetime of learning to discover why some bad literature was bad would be a portent that clamoured for explanation no less than the Grail itself.1 And if this were what he was doing, this also would have hardly any critical interest. It is, though far more complex, essentially the same sort of thing that a textual critic is doing when he explains a meaningless passage by dittography. If the Grail romances are nonsensical this fault is neither lessened nor aggravated by the discovery of its causes. Meanwhile the specifically literary problem remains untouched. What we want to know as critics is how and why these romances, with all their elusiveness and mystery, delighted so many medieval readers and delight so many today. Is it in spite of this character or because of it?
We must now make a distinction. The Celtic cornucopia, supposing it to be a source of the Grail, is irrelevant for literature because the inward side of the horn stories, their spirit and quality, is hardly at all present in the romances. How could it be, if the romances so misunderstood their sources that they mistook a horn for a body? Where the parallel between the Grail romance and the Celtic analogue is most striking, the abyss between them in atmosphere and significance may be most emphatic. The question ‘To whom shall this cup be given?’ in The Prophetic Ecstasy* is certainly in one way very like the question ‘Whom does one serve with the Grail?’ But the first question is answered. Its literary function is to introduce a list of the kings of Tara. It has much the same purpose as the vision of future heroes in Aeneid VI or the figures on the shield in Aeneid VIII or the phantoms in Macbeth (IV, i). The second question is not even asked. Perceval’s failure to ask it—which is the ganglion of the whole episode—leads to mysterious and almost illimitable disaster. If the medieval poet knew the Celtic story at all (which I need not deny), it has been to him merely a starting point from which he went on to invent something radically new, indeed incommensurable. That new invention, not its trivial and external similarity to some earlier thing, is the proper object of literary criticism.
But this is only one possible relation between a literary text and an anthropological background. There is another.
In the sagas, or Hamlet, the ethos of a society where revenge was not, as with us, a passion, but an obligation, is operative throughout. A certain attitude to the dead is similarly operative throughout the Antigone. To appreciate these works we certainly need to grasp these ancient outlooks. But that is because they have more than a merely causal connexion with the works. They are not antecedents but presuppositions, still immanent and alive in the completed product. The authors reckon on our understanding them. Not merely on our knowing them externally as historical curiosities, but on our entering into them with imaginative sympathy. And this fact usually enables us to dispense with anthropological study. The authors themselves, speaking from within the archaic ethos, recreate it in our minds. Anthropology might have told us that such and such customs existed. But the authors do not need to tell; they show, they infect, they constrain. It is they who bring the anthropology to life, not vice versa.
And surely this must always be so. It has been maintained that Bercilak in Gawain and the Green Knight ‘is’—that is, was influenced by—an eniautos daimon.* Let us suppose, for purposes of argument, that this is so. The question is which of the two, eniautos daimon or Bercilak, throws light on the other.
Bercilak is as vivid and concrete as any image I have met in literature. He is a living coincidentia oppositorum; half giant, yet wholly a ‘lovely knight’; as full of demoniac energy as old Karamazov, yet, in his own house, as jolly as a Dickensian Christmas host; now exhibiting a ferocity so gleeful that it is almost genial, and now a geniality so outrageous that it borders on the ferocious; half boy or buffoon in his shouts and laughter and jumpings; yet at the end judging Gawain with the tranquil superiority of an angelic being. There has been nothing really like him in fiction before or since. No one who has once read the poem forgets him. No one while reading it disbelieves in him.
But what is the eniautos daimon? It is a concept; something constructed from the actual practices of the ancient world and the conjectured practices of our own ancestors. I have never seen Jack in the Green. None of us have, as believers, taken part in a pagan ritual. We cannot experience such things from inside. We may sometimes know, and sometimes guess, that certain myths were told and certain rites enacted. We do not know what it felt like. That world-old religion, with its baffling mixture of agriculture, tragedy, obscenity, revelry, and clowning, eludes us in all but its externals.
To expect that the eniautos daimon should help us to understand Bercilak is to expect that the unknown should illuminate the known; as if we hoped that a man would learn more about the taste of oranges on being told that it is like the taste of some other fruit which he has never eaten.
The opposite process is the only rational one. Tell me that the unknown fruit is like an orange, and I have learned something. I learn nothing about the quality of Bercilak from being told he is derived from the daimon; I may learn something about the daimon. Perhaps this rumbustious, irresistible figure has preserved for me just what anthropology can never penetrate; has given me knowledge-by-acquaintance (connaître) where anthropology could give me at best knowledge-about (savoir). If this is so, then our poetic experience has helped us as anthropologists, but our anthropology has not helped us to read the poetry. When savage beliefs or practices inform a work of art, that work is not a puzzle to which those beliefs and practices are the clue. The savage origins are the puzzle; the surviving work of art is the only clue by which we can hope to penetrate the inwardness of the origins. It is either in art, or nowhere, that the dry bones are made to live again.
Mr Speirs maintains the literary relevance of such origins on two grounds. One is that they affect the poet; the other, that a knowledge of them affects the reader.
After quoting the place about the perilous fountain from Ywain and Gawain (352–42),* he connects it conjecturally with a rain-making ritual. He then very properly asks what difference this makes to the poetry; especially since the poets may have known nothing about the ritual origin. Part of his answer is that, whether they knew the origin or not, ‘they surely inherited with such episodes something of the traditional attitude of reverence towards them, a sense of their mystery, a sense too of the mystery of all life’.
Now our only evidence for how the poet felt is what he wrote. This passage apparently makes Mr Speirs feel reverence and a sense of mystery; he infers that the poet had felt it too. Mr Speirs, whatever else he may be, is a very honest critic; if he says that the passage makes him feel like that, we may be sure it does. But I am not equally sure that the consequences he wants us to draw will follow. For one thing, as I shall suggest presently, Mr Speirs’s sensation may not result from the quality of the poetry in the direct fashion he supposes; I can imagine a somewhat different process. But suppose it is the actual writing that has done the trick. And suppose, further, that the feelings an author arouses in a sensitive reader are always the same as he had himself. We could then say: ‘The author of this passage felt reverence and a sense of mystery.’ But where is the evidence that ritual origins are the only or commonest source of such feelings or that such feelings always result from (even a forgotten) ritual origin? Might not the poet equally well be awed and mystified by a mere unexplained magic fountain such as this purports to be? Might he not have believed in such things? Is it not more probable he believed in them than that he cared about rain-rituals? Or, even without belief, might not the idea of perilous adventures in enchanted forests have moved him deeply? It moved Milton.
This type of criticism which always takes us away from the actual poem and the individual poet to seek the sources of their power in something earlier and less known—which, in fact, finds the secret of poetic pleasure anywhere rather than in talent and art—has lately received a dolorous stroke from Professor Vinaver.* He has cured us, if we can be cured, of the bad habit which regards the finished romances as mere rubble left over from some far statelier, non-existent building. This is the reverse of the truth. The romance is the cathedral; the anthropological material is the rubble that was used by the builders. He has shown as regards one particular story that every step away from the dark origins is an advance in coherence, in suggestion, in imaginative power.
But I must now turn to the second part of Mr Speirs’s theory—or rather to his second theory, for the two are independent. Besides doing something to the poets, the ritual origins, or the knowledge of them, or the conjecture of them, does something to the reader.
The mere conjecture that the perilous fountain has something to do with rain-making means for Mr Speirs ‘that the episode is more serious than simply a sport of fancy’. It means ‘that we might have to correct our way of taking these episodes as if they belonged to something of the order of a boy’s adventure story—taking them, that is, too easily’.* Elsewhere he says that ‘anthropological facts, or even guesses’ may make the reader of medieval literature ‘alert to things in the poems which he might not otherwise have noticed’.*
This is where Mr Speirs’s honesty is invaluable. He lets us see what is really going on in the minds of some anthropologizing critics. But for anthropology ‘we’ should have taken the ferlies in medieval romance like trivial excitements in a boy’s blood. ‘We’ should have taken them ‘too easily’. Without anthropological preparation ‘we’ may leave some things unnoticed altogether.
I have no doubt whatever that this is true to the experience of Mr Speirs and of many of his generation. For them the garden of marvellous romance is—as it was not either for medieval or for nineteenth-century man—a walled and locked-up garden to which anthropology is the only key. They become free of it only if they carry the golden bough. This awakes in them a sensibility they otherwise lack. This being so, one understands for the first time why they value—why in a sense they are right to value—anthropology so highly. For if (to them) the only choice lies between taking the Grail as if it were a mere surprise-packet out of Boiardo or Munchausen and achieving an awed and solemn response with the aid of some Celtic cauldron, it is certainly well that they should embrace the second alternative.
With this, it may be said, I have conceded the whole position. Anthropology increases the sensibility, and even the attention, of certain readers. Therefore it does throw light for them on literature. I admit it. But let us be sure exactly what we mean.
Anything that helps anyone to read more sensitively and attentively is welcome. But there are helps of different kinds. On the one hand they may consist of knowledges or sympathies which enable the reader to enter more fully into the author’s intentions. History is often such a help. So is scholarship. So is experience; ceteris paribus we read love poetry and religious poetry more perceptively if we have had some experience of love and of religion. But there are other helps that have no intrinsic connection with the art or matter of the book but merely dispose us psychologically to be pleased. They are accidental in the sense that their necessity varies from one reader to another, and for the same reader from time to time, and the best readers need them least. Health, quiet, an easy chair, a full, but not too full, stomach, can all help in this way. Some approach a book receptively because it is recommended, others because it is forbidden. Children are attracted by coloured pictures, adults by fine paper and printing. One is attracted and another repelled by the knowledge that ‘everyone is reading this’.
To discover, exhibit, and supply helps of the first kind is critically relevant and useful in the highest degree. But helps of the second kind are more properly mentioned in an autobiography. They are facts about this or that reader rather than about literature. There seem to me grounds for assigning to the second, or merely subjective, class the help which Mr Speirs and his contemporaries derive from anthropology.
In the first place it is not universally necessary. At a great price (in the way of anthropological study) Mr Speirs obtains his freedom to respond deeply and solemnly to the romances; but earlier generations, including my own, were free born. We never thought of responding—never had power to respond—in any other way. The ferlies, simply for what they are shown to be in the texts, conquered us at once and have never released us. We stand amazed when our juniors think to interest us in the Grail by connecting it with a cauldon of plenty or a prehistoric burning glass,* for the Grail as Chrétien or Malory presents it seems to us twenty times more interesting than the cauldron or the glass. Apparently there has grown up a generation in whom, for reasons I will not discuss here, the direct response has been inhibited. They find that anthropology releases the inhibition. I congratulate them. But it merely restores to them powers which humanity often has without any such preliminary askesis. The insight into romance which it gives them is new to them, not to men in general. The fact that they needed such therapy is a fact about them, not about the literary quality of the romances. To regard their anthropological approach as a discovery in literary criticism is like regarding insulin as a discovery in gastronomy. I am very glad diabetics now have insulin. But it is a medical, not a gastronomic, discovery.
In the second place, it is clear that the therapeutic value of the anthropological askesis does not depend on the fact of ritual origins. The fact, if it is one, and if it produces literary results, must have been doing so before anyone knew about it, just as poison will kill or alcohol intoxicate us whether we know we have taken them or not. If a ritual origin worked that way, readers of the romances would receive its exciting effect without knowing its existence. If that were so, why should we need to learn of it before we can fully enjoy the romances? And indeed Mr Speirs does not think we need exactly ‘learn’ in the sense of ‘coming to know’. The connexion between the perilous fountain and a rain-making ritual is, on his own showing, a ‘conjecture’.* In ‘Maiden in the mor lay’ the reference to a well-spring merely ‘suggests the possibility’* that the poem is connected with well-worship. Obviously what does the therapeutic work is not the fact but the mere idea of ritual origins; the idea, as an idea, not known to be true, not affirmed, but simply entertained. The case is not like that of a man who gets sick from eating poison or drunk from taking spirits. It is as if a suggestible person felt sick or felt drunk simply at the idea of having done so. If he believes (however erroneously) that he has, or even if without belief he dwells on the idea, the vomit or the euphoria will follow. It makes no difference to the utility Mr Speirs finds in his anthropological ideas whether they are true or false.
Thirdly, the anthropological ‘softening’ is not the only one available. Others find their inhibitions similarly released by the idea that ferlies are Jungian outcroppings from the collective unconscious. Others, though not in academic circles, can enjoy them by thinking they are the hieroglyphs of an ancient, but still living, esoteric wisdom. Since all three exercises serve the same purpose, it is natural to ask what they have in common. The answer does not seem to me to be very difficult.
All are alike in suggesting that the ferly actually presented to us in the old poem or romance is the far-borne echo, the last surviving trace, the tantalizing glimpse, the veiled presence, of something else. And the something else is always located in a remote region, ‘dim-discovered’, hard of access. On this its value depends, I think, in all three exercises; almost certainly, in the anthropological one. Are ancient rituals in themselves—rituals that lie in broad, historical daylight and need not be groped after—so moving? I should be surprised if all those who are moved by the idea that the Grail story ‘is really’ a ritual respond with equal excitement to the full-length descriptions of ritual in the Aeneid or Leviticus. The whole pleasure comes from feeling, as they read of the ferly, that ‘more is meant than meets the ear’, that they have surprised a long-kept secret, that there are depths below the surface, that something which the uninitiate might pass over as a triviality is big with meaning. They must have the sense of descending to ‘the Mothers’. Who would bother to pluck the golden bough unless it led you to res alta terra et caligine mersas?
Now all these sensations are in my opinion pretty like those the authors meant to give you. The romancers create a world where everything may, and most things do, have a deeper meaning and a longer history than the errant knight would have expected; a world of endless forest, quest, hint, prophecy. Almost every male stranger wears armour; not only that there may be jousts but because visors hide faces. Any lady may prove a fay or devil; every castle conceal a holy or unholy mystery. The hero is a sort of intruder or trespasser; always, unawares, stumbling on to forbidden ground. Hermits and voices explain just enough to let us know how completely he is out of his depth, but not enough to dissipate the overall mystery. The hard, gay colours make this world very unlike that of Kafka, but it has some of the same qualities. You might call it inverted (or converted) Kafka; a Kafka who enjoyed the labyrinth.
Until our own age readers accepted this world as the romancers’ ‘noble and joyous’ invention. It was not, to be sure, wholly unrelated to the real world. It was invented by and for men who felt the real world, in its rather different way, to be also cryptic, significant, full of voices and ‘the mystery of all life’. There has now arisen a type of reader who cannot thus accept it. The tale in itself does not seem to him to provide adequate grounds for the feelings to which he is dimly aware that he is being prompted. He therefore invents new grounds for them in his own life as a reader. And he does this by building up round himself a second romance which he mistakes for reality. This second romance is a distorted version of the first one. It also is a quest story, but it is he, not Perceval or Gawain, that is on the quest. The forests are not those of Broceliande but those of anthropological theory. It is he himself who quivers at the surmise that everything he meets may be more important, and other, than it seemed. It is to him that such hermits as Frazer and Miss Weston, dwelling in the heart of the forest, explain the significacio of the ferlies. Prompted by them, he does not, like Perceval, omit to ask the all-important question.
And he has his reward. He gets in the end an experience qualitatively not unlike the experience the romancers meant to give. The process is very roundabout. He rejects the fiction as it was actually written. He can respond to it only indirectly, only when it is mirrored in a second fiction, which he mistakes for a reality. This is better than nothing. But it might do a good deal of harm to real literary and cultural history and even to anthropology itself if it were taken as a serious contribution to any of these disciplines. And to criticism it has already done some. Already there are students who describe as ‘enjoyment of medieval literature’ what is really the enjoyment of brooding upon things (mostly hypothetical) in the dark past with which that literature is, often so doubtfully, connected in their minds. Mr Speirs himself would reassure us by the proposition that in a poem ‘one cannot find what is not there’.* But the instances of thinking you have found what is not there are generally allowed to be pretty numerous. Is Mr Speirs himself quite sure that the allegory Fulgentius found in Virgil, or the philosophy Chapman found in Homer, were really there? Is he absolutely convinced that the Song of Solomon was really and truly about ‘The mutual love of Christ and his Church’? The forest is after all enchanted: mares have built nests in every tree.