The Triple Archetype: The Presence of Faust in The Bridge

JOHN T. IRWIN The Triple Archetype: The Presence of Faust in The Bridge* , UR analysis of the five sections of "Powhatan's Daughter" illustrated the way the poetic equivalent of lateral foreshadowing in painting superimposes an afterimage, in effect casts a shadow outline, from one ofthe poem's sections upon an image from an adjacent section in order to build up a composite figure such as the triple archetype of virgin-mother-whore. Given the importance in The Bridge of both the womb fantasy and the fantasy of the primal scene as respectively the individual psychological versions of the return to origin and the proleptic vision of that return, I would argue that the superimposition of images implicit in the poem's visionary-pictorial structure (and particularly in its images of the object of desire [the mother]) represents a formal embodiment of these fantasies on the level of poetic technique. *The following is an excerpt from a book entitled "Apollinaire Lived in Paris. I Live in Cleveland, Ohio. ": Essays on the Poetry of Hart Crane presently being completed . Though my involvement with Crane's work dates back to my doctoral dissertation on The Bridge, it was only in 1980 when Joe Riddel asked me to give a paper on modernist poetry at the English Institute that I began turning my research on Crane into a book. This was not the first time Joe had interested himself in my work (he had been one of the two readers for the Hopkins Press of the manuscript of my first book), nor was it the first of his many kindnesses over the years. I remember Joe as a man of enormous talent and intellectual generosity, a man one was always happy to see because people always enjoyed themselves in his company. The profession is diminished by his loss, as are the lives of his friends. Arizona Quarterly Volume 50 Number 1, Spring 1994 Copyright O 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 52John T Irwin Which is to say that if the fantasy of a total return expresses the desire for the complete containment of one three-dimensional body within another, a desire thwarted by the passage of time that makes the child's adult body physically incompatible with a total reincorporation into the mother's, then the superimposition of images—the placing ofone transparent , two-dimensional (disembodied) image upon or within another— represents the sublimation, the idea-lization within the visual register, of this desire for reincorporation. It symbolically, not to say schematically , acts out the desire as the superpositional merging of images. Earlier, in discussing the poem's opening section, "To Brooklyn Bridge," I suggested that Crane's description of cinemas as "panoramic sleights/ With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene/ Never disclosed "1 was an allusion to Plato's allegory ofthe cave from The Republic, an allusion that characterized the cinema as an inauthentic visionary medium in American life in contrast to the prophetic vision ofnational origin symbolized by the dawn-illuminated arc of the bridge.2 And it is precisely in the context of Plato's allegory of the cave, that crucial moment in the history of the Western representation of mental images, that we must consider the way the poem's implicit superimposition of images constitutes an idea-lization of the womb fantasy. It requires little imagination to see that Plato's "subterranean cavern"3 with its fettered inhabitants is a figurative telluric womb, particularly since this same trope lies behind the famous passage from the Theaetetus in which the Socratic method of leading people from the cave of shadow images to the realm of intelligible objects is compared at length to the art of midwifery practiced by Socrates's mother, with Socrates remarking that his art is to assist "the soul that is in travail ofbirth" (Plato 855) . It requires, however, somewhat more imagination to see that the realm of intelligible objects, of Platonic forms considered as reified ideas, represents an intellectual transfiguration or sublimation of the womblike cavern of shadow images. In the allegory of the cave, Plato figures the relationship between a three-dimensional object and its ideal form as being like that...