Escape Into Chris - Father's Day Special

June 20, 1993 – Father’s Day

Loving, living, and giving are three gifts which you continue to give me each day. A blanket, you are, which holds me at night and frees me in the day, and this is important because a holder is not a keeper. You will hold until I grow up, the greatest gift I could ask for. And this seems odd, because I ask for too much. You are my sun, you are my star, you are my everlasting thoughtful leader. My wishes are to give you more, for I have given you so little, you have given me so much. My words mean nothing on page but in life they mean everything. Thank you father on this father’s day I could not attend.

Chris

Lost Illusions by Honore de Balzac

5. Lost Illusions, by Honore de Balzac

What I love most about Balzac's novels, and there's much to love, is that you are grounded in the specific details of time and place. The fictional world is created in full, and you can easily enter that world. We are talking about France in the 19th century. Every aspect of society is penetrated by Balzac's historical realist style, and unlike the novels of Charles Dickens, good and evil are not so neatly separated. We find shades of grey in Balzac's world, and we also find characters who are deftly interwoven into a historical and cultural tapestry.

If you've never read anything by Balzac, read this novel. Lost Illusions tells the story of a young provincial poet making his way in Parisian society during the 19th century. It records with precise historical detail the gritty environs of Paris and the upper class drawing rooms. Lucien and his adventures will pull at your heartstrings. As one reviewer puts it, "Endlessly fascinating, but what a painful experience it is to read this book."

Balzac's contribution to the history of literature is immense. As the grandfather of French Realism, he wrote 92 novels for a project he called The Human Comedy, which charts the lives of recurring characters in self-contained fictional universe. He compared himself to a scientist in this project, or what today we would call a "social scientist," documenting the customs, politics, and mores of Parisian society.

Balzac's Human Comedy greatly influenced future writers, and his realist style continues to pervade literary conventions despite the many schools that have come and gone. A generation after Balzac, in France, Emile Zola followed a similar method of introducing recurring characters into a grand opus, except he would pay more specific attention to genealogies. In America in the 1930s and later, William Faulkner staged many of his novels in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, employing a similar motif.

The social-historical style of Balzac aims to provide every detail about a character, their family background, appearance, dress, behaviors, as well as their thoughts. This can sometimes be challenging to a modern reader who may have little patience for the gradual development of a story. These stories are in fact "histories," however, and reading them you learn just as much about Paris in the 19th century as if you were reading a historical account. Balzac aims to fill in this universe in all its facets, and this feat alone places his fiction on another scale.

For example, at the beginning of Lost Illusions, we learn about Jerome-Nicolas Sechard, the father of David Sechard, who is Lucian's best friend. While David Sechard is a major character of the novel, his father is not. Nevertheless, we get a detailed report of his father's life in the printing trade, with all sorts of facts about the press industry in the 19th century. We also learn about his character, which is similar to many characters you will read in Balzac's novels; he is what may be called the Balzac prototype; a greedy, miserly old man who is obsessively preoccupied with money. Balzac had so much insight into this type of obsessive character that it seems at times the animal nature of man is revealed. Balzac himself may have reflected this kind of character in his extraordinary literary output, the obsessive quality is also the author's.

At any rate, Jerome-Nicolas Sechard pressures his son, David, who is studying to be a chemist, to buy his printing press. This is a clear loss for David because the printing press no longer earns any profits, is run down and poorly managed. But David acquiesces to his father, and buys the printing press at a loss.

David saw that it was no use arguing with his father. He must take it or leave it--it was a question of yes or no. The old bear had included in his inventory the very cords on the ceiling. The smallest job-chases, wetting boards, paste-pots, rinsing-trough and brushes, were valued with miserly exactitude. The total amounted to thirty thousand francs, including the printer's license and the good-will. David wondered whether the thing was feasible or not. Seeing that his son remained silent about the total, old Sechard grew uneasy, for he preferred a violent argument to a silent acceptance. In dealings of this sort, bargaining proves that a customer is capable of looking after his interests. "A man who agrees to everything will pay you nothing," old Sechard was thinking. While he was trying to fathom his son's mind he went over all sorts of worthless odds and ends needed for running a country printing-house. He led David now to a glazing-press, now to a cutting-press used for the work of the town, pointing out its usefulness and good condition.

The irony is that even though David agrees to buy the printing press, his father still doesn't trust him. Lucian, meanwhile, David's best friend, and the central character of the novel, is a poet. He has literary ambitions and a dreamy, idealistic nature. After receiving some attention in Paris for his poetry, Lucian convinces David to steal away with him to the metropolis.

What follows is Lucian's mostly inept attempts at becoming well-known, famous, or fashionable in Parisian high society. For awhile he entertains the drawing room of wealthy patron, Mme de Bargeton, and then falls in love with her.

There is a rhythm in Lost Illusions that makes the book hard to put down, mounting hopes and aspirations, and sudden free-falls. Provincial life is contrasted with city life, and here Balzac paints an indelible portrait of Paris with the main character lusting for the attention of the upper class, all the trappings and illusions of fortune. But instead Lucian finds himself at the other end of the spectrum, not among the aristocracy, but among beggars and prostitutes.

This post is part of the series 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius

The Obscene Bird of Night

4. The Obscene Bird of Night, by Jose Donoso

The epigraph of the novel, The Obscene Bird of Night, is taken from a letter by Henry James Sr. to his two sons.

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

The novel opens with a stately funeral procession for Mother Benita, the Mother Superior of La Casa del Ejercicios Espirituales de la Encarnacion.

The Casa is a huge, gothic convent with labyrinthine hallways, "endless courts and cloisters connected by corridors that never end," many of them being boarded up now that the building is no longer used as a convent. Instead, it has become a refuge for a horde of old women who inhabit the dark, sequestered rooms.

Much of the story takes place inside this ghastly building. The narrator's description of the convent is so meticulous and repetitive, almost like a refrain, that the setting is impressed upon the reader's mind.

The narrator of The Obscene Bird of Night is practically an enigma, moving between the voice that opens the novel--holding an endless, open conversation with Mother Benita--and various other narrative voices in the first person.

Reading the novel for the first time can be an exhilarating but also somewhat confusing experience. Only after my fifth reading do I feel confident in saying I understand the logic behind the panoply of narrative voices.

You may think there are several narrators of this novel. For example, there is Mudito, a mute who lives in the Casa and is ordered around by the old women; a nun who is indistinguishable from the other nuns; and Humberto Peñaloza, secretary to the wealthy landowner and politician at the center of the novel.

But in fact all of the narrators are the same person, the various guises of Humberto Peñaloza, who, later in the story, we also learn, is a writer assigned by Don Jeronimo de Azcoitia (the wealthy landowner) to write "the history of Boy's world" . . .

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

As a writer myself, The Obscene Bird of Night endlessly fascinates me for its subtle and intricate construction. The tense shifts, point of view shifts, and various story arcs, all contribute to the grand illusion of Jose Donoso's unique magical realism.

This quantum fiction is geometrically precise, laid out like concentric circles around a common theme. Three or four narratives overlap each other, each with characters that act as doubles, or doppelgangers, to the characters in the other stories.

Beyond this literary pattern-making, Donoso's fictional world acquires its strangeness from absorbing an abundance of genres, including legend, fable, fairy tale, detective story, memoir, Modernist novel, and Realist novel. It also serves as a veiled critique of the ruling class in Chile, and a handful of other South American countries which operate similarly. But the critique never becomes too literal because the novel adeptly weaves in and out of a myth-like story with fabulous creatures and unlikely characters.

It is also a novel about a colony of monsters.

Don Jeronimo de Azcoitia must produce an heir for the continuation of his family line. Here is his uncle urging him, as a young man, to marry:

You can't go, Jeronimo. Listen to me, son, be reasonable. You're the only one left . . . and I had to take it into my head to become a priest, may God forgive me for saying it. You're the last one who can hand down the family name. You don't know how I've dreamed about an Azcoitia playing an important part once more in the country's public life! I waited for you so anxiously, assuming your obligations while you were enjoying an immoral life in Paris. But you're here now, and I'm not going to let you go.

Jeronimo falls in love with the "prettiest, most innocent girl who frequented the social salons at the time, a distant cousin with many female Azcoitia ancestors behind her".

After he proposes to her, he has a vision of perfection about the two of them. He sees their union as a "stone medallion", part of an "eternal frieze" of more medallions that carry the family name. We read, "He merely took pains to see that the magnificent legend of the perfect couple was fulfilled in both himself and his bride-to-be."

Jeronimo kissed her into silence. The womb heaving against his body would open to procure immortality for him: through their sons and grandsons, the frieze of medallions would extend forever.

There's only one problem. Ines has a nursemaid she's had since childhood who Jeronimo rejects. When Ines was young, she had a stomach illness that almost killed her. Peta Ponce, the nursemaid, preformed a miracle which removed the stomach illness from Ines by transferring it to Peta, the healer. Ever since Peta made this sacrifice, Ines has shown a fierce loyalty towards her.

Jeronimo believes that Peta Ponce is a witch, and he may be right. Trying to get her husband to overcome his fears, Ines takes him to the place where Peta lives. The grotesque setting, full of strange odors, large crates, and old clothes, repulses the aristocratic Jeronimo.

The heap of rags gathered itself together in order to give human reply to Ines's call. The old woman and the girl embarked on a conversation Jeronimo wasn't prepared to tolerate. The scene didn't fit into any medallion of eternal stone. And, if it did fit into any, it was into the other series, into the hostile legend that contradicted his own: the legend of the stained and the damned, who writhe on the left hand of God the Father Almighty. He had to pull Ines out of there immediately. To prevent her from taking part in this other series of medallions, the ones linked to servitude, to oblivion, to death. Ines was only a child who could be contaminated by the least little thing.

Ines's relationship to her nursemaid separates her from Jeronimo even in marriage. We are also told that "the heir began to take longer to arrive."

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

A prolonged waiting period ensues, with Ines spending more time with Peta Ponce, and Humberto becoming closer to Jeronimo in his duties to protect him. Each character is a double of the other--Jeronimo and Humberto, Ines and Peta. On the one hand, Jeronimo could be said to represent the light, and Humberto, the darkness. The same goes for Ines and Peta.

But Jose Donoso, in his Jungian intellectual and artistic vision, wishes to invert the simple, fixed equation of light and dark. And so, he blurs the characters and their interactions to create an alchemical reaction, an inversion of light and dark, good and evil, beauty and ugliness.

In the middle of the novel, after Jeronimo has been married to Ines for some time but has not produced an heir, a sexual act takes place. You have to read the novel to understand how ambiguous this part of the story is. We never really learn what happens. There are only possibilities, speculations, hypotheses. Either Jeronimo is finally able to impregnate his wife; or his secretary, Humberto Penaloza, impregnates her; or--and I believe this is the most likely of the three possible story-lines--the narrator impregnates Peta Ponce.

Whoever the child's parents are, the outcome is an heir for Don Jeronimo de Azcoitia. Jeronimo's vision of perfection, symbolized by the stone medallion, "one section of the eternal frieze," is at last a reality.

And here's when the story really starts to get interesting:

When Jeronimo finally parted the crib's curtains to look at his long-awaited offspring, he wanted to kill him then and there; the loathsome, gnarled body writhing on its hump, its mouth a gaping bestial hole in which palate and nose bared obscene bones and tissues in an incoherent cluster of reddish traits, was chaos, disorder, a different but worse form of death.

This post is part of a series of posts on "25 Profound Works of Literary Genius".

The Man Without Qualities

1. The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil

This book expanded my understanding of what a novel can do. As a writer, there has been no greater influence.

I've read it three times from beginning to end, and I return to passages regularly. The Man Without Qualities is a three volume work, left unfinished at the author's death. The serial chapters continually open up the novel to new possibilities and new story-lines. Musil calls this the "open architecture" of the book.

The titles of the chapters read as follows:

From which, remarkably enough, nothing develops

If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility

In a weak moment Ulrich acquires a new mistress

A chapter that may be skipped by anyone not particularly impressed by thinking as an occupation

The chapters are short, often digressive, and typically witty. The plot is less important. More important is the vivid characterization and the novelistic treatment of "history".

This reviewer sums up the novel quite nicely:

On the one hand, Musil offers a highly entertaining satirical portrait of Austria-Hungary right before the First World War. His detached hero Ulrich meets all kinds of bizarre people, who happen to be members of the ruling class of the country. Like a vivisecteur, Ulrich analyzes the philosophies and ideologies of his time. On the other hand, he dreams of a kind of new mysticism, an emotional purity that is opposed to the dross surrounding him; together with his sister he embarks on quest for 'the other state of being'.

The narrator of the Musil's opus, Ulrich, a mathematics professor with a bent for philosophy, has a charisma and intelligence that is hard to resist. He's the supreme objective observer and the supreme subjectivist at the same time. You feel as though you are listening in on the thoughts of the most brilliant man on earth.

Musil's motto was "Soul and Precision." This statement applies to life and art, and it implies the harmony and synthesis of the logical, analytical faculty of the mind, and the emotional, spiritual soul of the individual. "Soul and Precision" runs through the three volume work as a motif in the narrative and as a philosophy behind the writing about the writing.

While the work contains elements of satire, there is a real force of sincerity and earnestness about it. The narrator is not merely mocking the ruling class of Austria-Hungry, but also seriously trying to understand people's motives and eccentricities.

The world, according to Ulrich, may be absurd; but it is not worthless. There is still a mystery to be sought after, a spiritual reality. . .

Deep philosophical reflection is embedded within highly-visual, almost hallucinatory scenes. These scenes are filled with lively characters and charged by a kinetic, quasi-mystical language.

Here is an example from the chapter entitled, "Clarisse and Her Demons":

The next instant, Clarisse and Walter were off like two locomotives racing side by side. The piece they were playing came rushing at their eyes like flashing rails, vanished under the thundering engine, and spread out behind them as a ringing, resonant, marvelously present landscape. In the course of this ride these two people's separate feelings were compressed into a single entity; hearing, blood, muscles, were all swept along irresistibly by the same experience; shimmering, bending, curving walls of sound forced their bodies onto the same track, bent them as one, and expanded and contracted their chests in the same breath. In a fraction of a second, gaiety, sadness, anger, and fear, love and hatred, desire and satiety, passed through Walter and Clarisse. They became one, just as in a great panic hundreds of people who a moment before had been distinct in every way suddenly make the same flailing movements of flight, utter the same senseless screams, their gaping mouths and staring eyes the same, all swept backward and forward, left and right, by the same aimless force, howling, twitching, tangling, trembling. But this union did not have the same dull, overwhelming force as life itself, where this kind of thing does not happen so easily, although it blots out everything personal when it does. The anger, love, joy, gaiety, and sadness that Clarisse and Walter felt in their flight were not full emotions but little more than physical shells of feelings that had been worked up into a frenzy. They sat stiffly in a trance on their little stools, angry, in love, or sad, at nothing, with nothing, about nothing, or each of them at, with, about something else, thinking and meaning different things of their own; the dictate of music united them in the highest passion, yet at the same time it left them with something absent, as in the compulsive sleep of hypnosis.

It's clear from this passage that Robert Musil had a gift for conjuring the emotional states of human beings, and with his remarkable command of the language, he approaches metaphysical description, the territory between feeling and God (or spirit).

The translation by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike is the authoritative one, but I'd like to add that I first read a translation of The Man without Qualities by a translator who I no longer have the name of, but found the same, incandescent experience while reading--and in some cases--more profound. I wish I knew the name of this translator. It's been said that Musil translates well into English, but the original language is German, and there is probably a major gulf between the poetry of the original and the translated versions.

If a three volume work seems too daunting, you might want to check out Musil's first novel, Young Torless. This is an easier book to read, more compact and digestible.

This post is part of a series of posts on 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius.

Image Credit: Musil Illustration

25 Profound Works of Literary Genius

I'm about to embark on a series of posts that introduce 25 Profound Works of Literary Genius.

Originally, I planned to provide readers with an enormous list all at once; and I had 50 works on the list instead of 25!

As I started to think more deeply about these books, and write about them, I realized there was too much material for one post.

As Thoreau wisely remarks:

The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.

And so, regaining some perspective on the project, I've decided on a manageable 25. If the posts are a success, and I'm still passionate about my undertaking, I may do another 25.

About the list:

I've specifically chosen works that have affected me deeply. In some cases, these works altered my reality, life, or existence in general.

Many of the books and short stories, I've read more than once. This is literature that can be both enjoyed and appreciated for its aesthetic value.

I'm also avoiding works that tend to show up on every great books list. You will recognize some of these titles, but hopefully not all of them. The purpose of the list is to introduce some lesser known masterpieces.

With that said, the first profound work of literary genius is Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.

Note: This series of posts will be interwoven with my usual posts on art, culture, and life.

The List Thus Far

1. The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil

2. The Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin

3. The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu (transl. Edward G. Seidensticker)

4. The Obscene Bird of Night, by Jose Donoso

5. Lost Illusions, by Honore de Balzac

Image Credit: Rejean Pellerin

The Kindly Ones: The Anti-Hero is Us

The real danger for mankind is me, is you. And if you're not convinced of this, don't bother to read any further. You'll understand nothing and you'll get angry, with little profit for you or me.

The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell

As many of you know, my writings are preoccupied with the question of innocence. The question of innocence inevitably begs the question of guilt. As a perceptive reader, Mark Kerstetter noted in my post about Michael Jackson, "I do believe he desperately and tragically sought innocence. It's an inexhaustible theme: how is an adult innocent?"

When the reviews and appraisals of Michael Jackson's life flowed into cyberspace after his death, I thought for sure this man is a perfect example of my theme. A larger-than-life entertainer who strove for innocence and yet lived in dangerous proximity to its opposite.

Also, I've been researching the new culture of self-medication, and wanting to write an article on the topic. Can a culture consumed with self-medication really be so naive? Aren't we all just looking to cover up the pain somehow?

Strange is life when you open the mind to associations, parallels, and linkages . . . I went to Borders today to have my coffee and read the Times. This is not unusual for me; I go to Borders nearly every day. But today I did not read the Times. Instead, I wandered up and down the aisles, glancing at the latest hardcovers.

You haven't read any book reviews of mine because I haven't read many books lately--or at least finished them. The newspapers take up all my time and attention. As a writer, they do fairly well to fuel my inspiration. (Disclaimer: this is not exactly a book review--a book preview, rather)

In my article, "Is the Internet Killing Culture?" I discuss how I abruptly stopped reading "serious" literature. I read literature for nearly ten years, inside and outside of college, covering large swathes of French, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Austrian, and Italian literature.

At the time, I read few contemporary novels, even fewer American contemporary authors. I read what excited me, what boggled my mind, what catapulted me into writing. The dearth of American literature in recent decades was not something I cared to scrape the bottom of--there were plenty of incredible and delicious novels written by French and Russian authors in the last two centuries.

Today I opened up a big book. Causally, capriciously, I opened up The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell. Whether a novel is full of brilliance or entirely lacking the scaffolding to hold it together, I always stop to look at those monsters approaching the thousand page mark. Why? Because I am in awe of any author who can discipline their life to write such a long tale. The editorial process is maddening enough, let alone the dedication it takes to sustain a level of productivity for five to ten years.

So this book that I looked upon was large. By the cover I could see it was written in French and translated into English. A cursory examination of the side flap and back cover taught me that it had won France's most acclaimed literary prize, Prix Goncourt, the same prize Proust won for Vol. 2 of In Search of Lost Time in 1919.

But none of these things usually matter to me more than the first paragraph. When I read the first paragraph of a novel, I generally know enough to know if I want to read more of it. So I stood over the Goliath in the middle of Borders with people flooding into the store and breezing all around me. I began reading:

Oh my human brothers, let me tell you how it happened. I am not your brother, you'll retort, and I don't want to know. And it certainly is true that this is a bleak story, but an edifying one too, a real morality play, I assure you. You might find it a bit long--a lot of things happened, after all--but perhaps you're not in too much of a hurry; with a little luck you'll have some time to spare. And also, this concerns you; you'll see that this concerns you. Don't think I am trying to convince you of anything; after all, your opinions are your own business. If after all these years I've made up my mind to write, it's to set the record straight for myself, not for you. For a long time we crawl on this earth like caterpillars, waiting for the splendid, diaphanous butterfly we bear within ourselves. And then times passes and the nymph stage never comes, we remain larvae--what do we do with such an appalling realization? Suicide, of course, is always an option. But to tell the truth suicide doesn't tempt me much.

The "bold" lettering is mine. You can see now why this novel caught my attention. It was the voice of the narrator who instantly seduced me into wanting to know more about his particular troubles and woes, but even more than that I believe it was the narrator's self-knowledge that compelled me to pick up the book and bring it over to the small tables in the cafe where I set down my coffee and continued reading.

The title comes from the trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies, The Oresteia, written by Aeschylus. It refers to the Furies who were vengeful goddesses that tormented anyone who murdered a parent. In the story by Aeschylus, the Furies are transformed into merciful goddesses instead of spiteful ones by the goddess Athena. They are renamed the Eumenides or "The Kindly Ones"(1).

What this has to do with the book I have no idea. I am simply mesmerized by the complexity of the narrator's thoughts, his intelligence, and humanity. The voice of the narrator in fact recalls to me reading Proust, whose narrator seduced me much the same, although the temperaments of the narrators are probably nothing alike. But that too, I can't confirm yet . . .

How can one not identify with this?

Ask yourselves: You, yourselves, what do you think of, through the course of a day? Very few things, actually. Drawing up a systematic classification of your everyday thoughts would be easy: practical or mechanical thoughts, planning your actions and your time (example: setting the coffee to drip before brushing your teeth, but toasting the bread afterward, since it doesn't take as long); work preoccupations; financial anxieties; domestic problems; sexual fantasies. I'll spare you the details. At dinner, you contemplate the aging face of your wife, so much less exciting than your mistress, but a fine woman otherwise, what can you do, that's life, so you talk about the latest government scandal. Actually, you couldn't care less about the latest government scandal, but what else is there to talk about? Eliminate those kinds of thoughts, and you'll agree there's not much left.

This is a controversial novel. If I previously thought that Michael Jackson was the supreme archetype to my theme of innocence, then Littell has just upped the ante. In the clever guise of a memoir, the novel tells the story of a former SS officer who witnessed the massacres of the Holocaust. He also, we would assume, took part in these massacres; and gave the orders to carry them out.

To be sure, we are now on the opposite end of the spectrum regarding my theme. The narrator's innocence should not even be in question. Of course, he's guilty of his crimes. This point seems so obvious we shouldn't have to debate it. Then again, maybe innocence or guilt is not the point after all . . .

Once again, let us be clear: I am not trying to say I am not guilty of this or that. I'm guilty, you're not, fine. But you should be able to admit to yourselves that you might also have done what I did.

I'm not even finished with the first chapter when a troubling philosophical thought arises. If this narrator is the quintessential anti-hero--a Nazi--then how is it possible that I identify with him as a man?

He's neither psychotic, nor a sadist, but he's committed these crimes against humanity and I haven't. If not for his fundamental evil, what separates us?

A rare author elicits this kind of recognition in her audience. Literature has the power to bend reality with language. I believe Jonathan Littell has done just that.

Browse The Kindly Ones on Harper Collins Publishers

Buy the book on Amazon

Read more of my essays on Escape into Life

By Way of Introduction: Part Two

In the second part of my introduction, I discuss what my "Book Chats" will be about. I discuss the Novel of Life and the Book of Innocence, and authors who have influenced and inspired me.

By Way of Introduction: Part One

Northrope Frye

For constructing any work of art you need some principle of repetition or recurrence: that's what gives you rhythm in music and pattern in painting. A literature, we said, has a lot to do with identifying the human world with the natural world around it, or finding analogies between them. In nature the most obvious repeating or recurring feature is the cycle. The sun travels across the sky into the dark and comes back again; the seasons go from spring to winter and back to spring again; water goes from springs or fountains to the sea and back again in rain. Human life goes from childhood to death and back again in a new birth. A great many primitive stories and myths, then, would like to attach themselves to this cycle which stretches like a backbone through the middle of both human and natural life.

Mythologies are full of young gods or heroes who go through various successful adventures and then are deserted or betrayed and killed, and then come back to life again, suggesting in their story the movement of the sun across the sky into the dark or the progressions of the seasons through winter and spring. Sometimes they're swallowed by a huge sea monster or killed by a boar; or they wander in a strange dark underworld and then fight their way out again . . . Usually there's a female figure in the story.

Northrope Frye, from "The Educated Imagination"