James Merrill, Postmodern Magus: Myth and Poetics

Overture

t he publication of James Merrill’s Collected Poems in 2001 calls upon us to see his work as a whole. What Hugh Kenner once said of Yeats is equally applicable to Merrill: “He didn’t accumulate poems, he wrote books. It was the oeuvre, not the fragment, that held his attention” (13). Recurrent patterns of imagery and narrative permeate Merrill’s opus, conferring “shape and significance” upon the work as a whole that T. S. Eliot associated with “the mythical method” (“Ulysses” 16). Of these, the myth of the nekyia provides the central focus of this book. Nekyia is a Homeric term for the descent to the underworld. It is the single most important myth in Modern and Postmodern literature and is found in all the major works of the twentieth century. Broadly defined, the nekyia involves a hero journey cycle, taking us from a domestic to a demonic realm, followed by what van Gennep called a “life-enhancing return ” (33). It is a circular narrative, beginning and ending in the same or a similar place, with the trials, ordeals, and revelations of the descent in between . The basic structure of the nekyia is therefore that of the monomyth, popularly explicated in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book Merrill surely knew well, as he did the author, a sometime dinner guest of the poet’s and a mutual friend and mentor of Maya Deren, who figures so largely in The Changing Light at Sandover. Although Campbell has fallen out of favor among academics, his influence on Merrill and his generation is incontestable, and the hero journey is basic to an understanding of Merrill’s poetry. When the hero journey takes the form of a descent to the underworld, or land of the dead, we may call it a nekyia. The underworld may be variously configured; indeed, the literature of the Modern and Postmodern eras presents us with a dazzling variety of stories. For the purposes of sim- [overture] 2 Overture plification, I prefer to classify four fundamental conceptions of the underworld : it may be presented as an inferno, a crypt, a temenos, or a granary (or cornucopia). As an inferno, the underworld is a place of torment, suffering, sin, and crime. Merrill seems least interested in this view. He is far more interested in the traditional conception of the underworld as a crypt, the domain of the ancestral dead: Odysseus meets his mother in Hades, Aeneas his father, Scipio his grandfather. In Merrill, the dead father is a powerful presence throughout, but the poet’s primary engagement is with those great precursors of the literary tradition whose ancestral voices are invoked by the descent , particularly in The Changing Light at Sandover, in which the shades of Auden, Yeats, and many others figure largely. As a temenos, the underworld is a sacred space of death and rebirth, of revelation and transformation. It is the destination of the nekyia, where the archetypal energies of the soul manifest themselves in the form of powerful images. Merrill’s poems are dominated by innumerable variations on this theme. His journeys have a thousand destinations, and the temenoi to which they take us are infinitely variable, for the sacred space of revelation and transformation may be a bowl of water into which postcards are dipped, a pueblo in New Mexico, or a burned-out apartment in Athens. But the Modernist underworld is more than an inferno, a crypt, or a temenos: it is also a cornucopia, or granary, where the seed forms of the archetypal imagination are stored. The journey to the underworld catalyzes the revelation of those archetypal forms that confer shape and significance upon life and art. The Modernists employed a wide range of synonyms for the formal structures revealed at the climax of the nekyias so central to their major works. T. S. Eliot, for example, repeatedly uses the simple word “pattern” to define the shaping form revealed at the climax of the nekyia. In his psychological commentary on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, C. G. Jung refers to “the universal dispositions of the mind” that are “analogous to Plato’s forms (eidola),” revealed during the soul’s journey after death (“Psychological” 517–8).1 Other Modernists, like Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, proposed an elaborate diction of form associated with their own variations on the nekyia.2 In addition to this complex vocabulary of form associated with the climacticrevelationsofthenekyia ,thereisanequallycomplexanddiverseiconography of form—a wide range...