Primitivism and Myth

Primitivism

• Primitivism involves seeking lifestyles that oppose technological advancements and their related consequences.
• It spans anthropology, psychology, and art.
• Anthropology and psychology challenged traditional understandings by suggesting that savagery resides within the unconscious rather than distant lands.
• Artists like Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso experimented with primitive art forms, drawing inspiration from African and Oceanic masks and figurines.
• These artists found magic atmosphere in the simplicity of forms, leading to experimentation like Art Nègre, which is considered primitivism.
• Conventional boundaries like reason vs. unreason and metropolis vs. colony became fluid and shifting.
• Colonized cultures influenced the development of modern British culture and its self-perception.

D.H. Lawrence

• D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) sought a new form of religiousness and criticized capitalism, leading him to explore primitivism.
• He traveled to countries like Mexico, Taos, Sri Lanka, and Sardinia, which were less affected by civilization.
• Lawrence was fascinated by the instinctive forces displayed in primitive cultures but felt challenged by his inability to dominate or control them. His paintings and novels, such as Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Women in Love (1920), illustrate primitivism.
• Lawrence critiqued the formalization of primitive art, viewing it as a form of degeneration of civilization.
• In Women in Love, characters discuss primitive art, specifically African statues that evoke expressionist art studios.
• The art evokes an utter physical stress, complete truth, ultimate physical consciousness, mindless and utterly sensual.
• The statues remind some characters of a foetus, wonderfully conveying the extreme of physical sensation beyond mental consciousness

Voyaging in and Voyaging out

• Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), a New Zealander, wrote short stories about the Maoris.
• Both Lawrence and Mansfield focused on indigenous populations, making them central to their views on characterization and narrative perspective.
• Both were social outsiders: Lawrence due to class, and Mansfield as a settler colonial, contributing to cultural relativity in their work.
• Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) in Heart of Darkness portrays indigenous populations as enslaved and used for background, with primitivism/violence as a contagion and a need to civilize savages.
• An example of a captain killed over hens highlights the irrationality and violence of colonial encounters.

Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

• Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) in Brave New World contrasts a civilized world with a primitive reservation.
• The civilized world lacks values, while the primitive society embodies traditional virtues and morality.
• The uncivilized world is filled with family, mothers, fathers; therefore filled with "every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts–full of madness and suicide"
• In the reservation, the inhabitants still maintain marriage, families, monstrous superstitions, Christianity and totemism and ancestor worship, extinct languages, such as Zuñi and Spanish and Athapascan, pumas, porcupines and other ferocious animals, infectious diseases, priests, and venomous lizards.

William Golding – Lord of the Flies

• William Golding (1911-1993) in Lord of the Flies depicts a reversion to primitivism that signifies the breakdown of civilization.
• Jack uses face paint as a mask to hide behind which liberates him from shame and self-consciousness.
• The boys chant "Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Spill her blood!"
• The killing of the pig provides them with knowledge they had outwitted a living thing, imposed their will upon it, taken away its life like a long satisfying drink.

Doris Lessing - The Fifth Child

• Doris Lessing uses primitivism in The Fifth Child to expose hidden fears.
• The Lovatts, who focus on traditional values, are undone by desires that are a throwback to earlier times.
• The protagonist thinks of her child, Ben “He's not human, is he?”
• Doctor Gilly comments “How do we know what kinds of people - races, I mean – creatures different from us, have lived on this planet?

Primitivism in Postmodernism

• Postmodernism rewrites earlier texts about savages, often from the perspective of the savage.
• Examples include J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (1986), rewriting Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs Caliban (1982) or Tad Williams’s Caliban’s Hour (1994), rewriting William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
• Postmodernism gives voice to the margin/periphery.
• It includes negotiation between colonial and native systems and admissions of doubt.
• Settler and native intellectuals and artists, though educated in colonial systems, challenge cultural assumptions by citing native traditions, reintegrating these threats into a European frame of reference.

Myth

• Myth is viewed as primordial, universal, and not modern.
• Modernity and Modernism are present and geopolitically particular.
• The Enlightenment viewed myth as superstition, credulity, and ignorance, while Vico saw myth as felt and imagined.
• Romantic writers like Friedrich Schlegel sought a reawakening of mythopoeic sensibility and remaking of myth.

Anthropology

• The rise of anthropology, exemplified by E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) and J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), shifted the view of myth.
• Myth lost its central position as contemporary tribal peoples were seen to preserve survivals of primitive belief.
• Understanding primitive culture was deemed necessary to interpret myth.
• Modernist culture aimed to establish modern myth, drawing from ethnologists, mythographers, and psychologists.

James Frazier – The Golden Bough (1906-15)

• James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough is an anti-mythological source book.
• Frazer proposed that human culture evolves through three stages:
  • Magical
  • Religious
  • Scientific
• Magical: Belief in controlling the world through manipulating relations of likeness and association, representing an imperfect scientism.
• Religious: Operations of nature seen as controlled by supernatural beings; magic is unreliable. Here, the world is ruled by the caprice of the gods.
• Scientific: A movement away from superstition towards enlightened freedom.

Influence of Frazer and Nietzsche

• W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and D.H. Lawrence were influenced by Frazer’s The Golden Bough, focusing on patterns of resonance between myths and practices, interpreted through a Jungian (not Freudian) lens.
• Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1871) influenced the reading of myth, highlighting the conflict between Apollonian and Dionysian principles in Greek culture.
• Nietzsche argued that founding myths had a dark underside, revealing savage impulses beneath modern life.

William Golding – The Lord of the Flies

• Golding uses the taboo of the old life to reinforce civilization through parents, school, policemen and the law.
• Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilisation that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.

T.S. Eliot – the Mythical method

• T.S. Eliot wrote “Ulysses, Order and Myth” about James Joyce and his mythical method to control, order, and give shape to contemporary history.
• Eliot suggests this method controls and orders and gives shape to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.
• The psychology, ethnology, and The Golden Bough made this method possible.
• Eliot applied this mythical method in Waste Land (1922), by using a cross-historical and transnational/ European kaleidoscope of images, murmurs and lamentations suggesting a crisis of degeneration and disconnection and an urgent longing for some spiritual transformation and revelation.

Psychology

• Psychoanalysis, used by modernist writers saw myth is connected to the unconscious.
• Freud studied parallels between neurotic illness and primitive belief.
• Myths are unconscious in that they lack obvious authors or conscious intent.
• Freud saw myths as revealing preoccupations otherwise hidden.
• Jung saw myth as a positive force, the language of the unconscious, and that the entire realm of psychic life was mythical, using myth to tell the story of integration.

Literary Theory

• Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, applied comparative mythology to literary criticism to create a universal typology of literary modes.
• Jung used archetypes to reference myth via the collective unconscious.
• Myth became a positive form of self-making, constructing man’s relation to the world and the world itself.
• After World War II, Postmodern myth updated Modernism’s anti-modernity.
• Modernism sought a single, universal truth in myth, while Postmodernism embraces its multiplicity.

Literature

• James Joyce (1882-1941): A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922) use Stephen Dedalus as a foil for Icarus and Leopold Bloom as a foil for Ulysses.
• T.S. Eliot (1888-1965): Waste Land (1922) ends with "Shantih" from the Upanishads, symbolizing peace beyond understanding, suggesting another cultural universe among many fragments within the poem.
• W.H. Auden: Musee des Beaux Arts
• W.B.Yeats: Leda and the Swan
• These writers use myth systems to assert certainties crumbling in the world, using the mythical method at a formal, metatextual level to order chaos.

T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land

• The hyacinth girl story from T.S. Elliot's Waste Land references the Greek myth Hyacinth, a beloved companion of Apollo. When the two engaged in a discus- throwing contest, Apollo’s discus inadvertently killed his friend. Where drops of Hyacinth’s blood touched the ground, a purple flower miraculously arose, resembling a lily. Apollo inscribed his grief upon the flower, which was said to have marks which looked like the letters AI, ancient Greek for a cry of woe. The story is told in Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 162–219.
• [I was neither / Living nor dead]: Perhaps an allusion to Dante, Inferno XXXIV, 25. Dante recalls his state of mind when he first saw Satan at the very bottom of the Inferno:
  Com’ io divenni allor gelato e fioco / nol dimandar, lettor, ch’ i’ non lo scrivo, / però ch’ ogni parlar sarebbe poco. /Io non morì, e non rimasi vivo.
  This can be translated as: “How chilled and faint I turned then, / Do not ask, reader, for I cannot describe it, / For all speech would fail it. /I did not die, and did not remain alive.”

T. S. Eliot - The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

• Mentions mermaids singing, emphasizing the distance and unattainable nature of mythical elements in modern life

W.B. Yeats - Sailing to Byzantium

• Explores themes of aging and the desire for transcendence, contrasting the vitality of youth with the monuments of intellect

W.B. Yeats – Leda and the Swan

• Depicts the violent encounter between Leda and Zeus in the form of a swan, symbolizing the fusion of divine and mortal realms, with profound historical consequences (the Trojan War, death of Agamemnon).

W.H. Auden - Musée des Beaux Arts

• Auden shows everyday life continues despite the disaster, emphasizing the indifference to individual suffering and the broader human condition.

Ted Hughes - from Crow – A Childish Prank

• Uses dark humor and grotesque imagery to reimagine the creation myth with Crow's intervention, biting the Worm of God's only son and stuffing it into human bodies to cause pain and awareness.

Christopher Reid - Stones and Bones SECOND GENESIS

• Inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book I, this poem reflects on the origins of humanity from stones thrown by survivors of a flood.