Beowulf is a Christ-like figure both in this revision and the original epic, sacrificing himself for the good of the people but not before, as Gilgamesh would say, his name was stamped on bricks. Yet, while he did vanquish Grendel in the film, he gave in to temptation as that young hero (you have to see the film). His attempt to atone for his sin as an older king does free his people, but brings down his son, and by implication, his way of life as well. With the death of Beowulf and his son (you have to se the film), the age of heroes comes to a close. A new king has been crowned and the old ones must pass into legend.

I’m reminded of the end of John Boorman’s Excalibur: Arthur kills his son Mordred, but sacrifices himself in the battle. Both Kings (Beowulf and Arthur) are left without heirs, so their reins must come to an end with their respective deaths. Both kings, too, are laid to rest on boats, but while Arthur is destined for Avalon and perhaps a return some day, Beowulf sinks beneath the waves as his ship becomes his pyre. Boorman and Zemeckis both tell the stories of the end of epochs — not the demise of patriarchy, but a change — perhaps with one superstitution being replaced with another.

Zemeckis’ film deals with the guilt of the father. The human women are chattel, as one would expect in an epic, but they are sympathetic and strong, demanding respect from the heroes. (There is a scene where one of Beowulf’s men — who we know is married — tries to have his way with a girl. She says “no” and struggles out of his grasp, delivering a final slap across his face before leaving. Cool.) Grendel’s mother is the most interesting: she is the demon of a heroic age (I can’t help but think of Circe, the sirens, Helen, Eve, Medea, Dido…) that has a magical influence over even powerful men. She desires a son, too, like a king — an heir to her kingdom. She represents disorder to the patirarchs Beowulf and Hrothgar, but she also has a potency that neither can resist.

The end of the film is fascinating. It’s a transition, but one that’s bittersweet and ambiguous. I didn’t think I’d like this film very much; I’m not a fan of the go-motion animation. However, this one is provocative and exciting, both in a viscreal and a thoughtful way.

It makes me want to go read Beowulf again.

Zeus, the king of the gods, demanded that strangers be treated graciously. Hosts had a religious duty to welcome strangers, and guests had the responsibility to respect hosts. The tight interconnections and mutual respect in this host-guest relationship are reflected in the fact that the word zenos in ancient Greek can mean both “host” and “guest.” The relationship is often symbolized in the Odyssey by the presentation of gifts. Alcinous, the king of the Phaeacians, for example, gives Odysseus a magically swift ship to get him home.

What happens when the host-guest relationship is abused or otherwise breaks down? In Homer’s epic songs of the Trojan War, the Iliad and the Odyssey, this happens at least three times. The first occasion caused the war itself: Paris, prince of Troy, ran off with the beautiful Helen from Sparta while he was a guest of Helen’s husband, Menelaus. For the Greeks, this insult to xenia (hospitality) was at least as serious as Helen’s unfaithfulness, and it meant that Zeus would, in the end, allow the Greeks to triumph in the long war.

The second example of violated hospitality has its humorous and ironic side. In the Odyssey, the Cyclops is monstrous not only because of his huge size and brutish appearance. He is set apart from civilized beings precisely because of his barbaric outlook on xenia. When Odysseus begs the Cyclops for hospitality and warns that Zeus will avenge an injured guest the Cyclops replies that he and his kind “care not a whistle for . . . Zeus.” With dark humor, the Cyclops uses the word xeineion (Greek for “guest-gift”) when he tells Odysseus that he will have the privilege of being eaten last. The poetic justice of the Cyclops’s blinding would not be lost on Homer’s Greek audience.

The final example of a breach in the law of hospitality underlies the entire plot structure of the Odyssey: Back in Ithaca, the suitors year after year abuse the hospitality of Odysseus — an absent “host” — and threaten to take away his wife. The bloody vengeance that Odysseus takes on these suitors should be understood in the context of their outrageous violation of religious law. The suitors have turned hospitality into a crude mockery. Perhaps it is not accidental that just before the battle Odysseus invokes the host-guest relationship when he quietly gives his son, Telemachus, the signal to fight:

1. Birth Myth — magical, divine conception; born through and by unusual circumstances (like a virgin birth); exposed to nature (like Achilles dip in the Styx) or a conflict with nature.
2. Child Hero — urge to realize himself through useful exploits; demons, monsters, authority challenged.
3. Education — apprenticeship or preparation; hero’s withdrawal from society to discover his identity or potential (internal quest); sometimes there is a teacher or guide.
4. Trial and Quest — essence of life, immortality, home, etc.; suffering always accompanies the hero — usually the death of a friend or loved one
5. Death / Scapegoat — literal or metaphorical death; underworld experience and resurrection; often there is a dominant presence of a woman; promise of a new life; sacrifice of a king (Phoenix) who must avoid becoming a tyrant; positive and negative; the hero accepts the responsibility so that the individual members of the society do not have to.
6. Descent — to the underworld; returns to the earth for more education; rite of passage; night journey and retrieval of parts of the self; pilgrimage to see lost family.
7. Resurrection and Rebirth — apotheosis; a freedom, unity, and transcendence of humanity, time, and space; the hero loses himself to find himself.

Lord Rank, in his essay “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero,” states that many ancient cultures ostensibly share similar legends about the birth and education of their national heroes. This fact in itself does not seem too fascinating, but seeing that these civilized nations probably had no contact or sharing of cultural ideas, Lord Rank speculates on the reasons why these fledgling nations all have these stories. He suggests three likely explanations:

1. The existence of elemental ideas, or a Jungian-like collective unconsciousness on the scale of all of humanity in which humans share similar ideas at similar stages in their development. Therefore, they produce similar stories based on these elemental ideas.
2. The existence of an original community that developed in a favorable locality and eventually spread producing diverse social orders that kept the kernels of their foundational myths intact.
3. Migration and borrowing of stories developed by a particular civilization to others that adopt them as their own. These stories are passed through an oral tradition in commerce and traffic or through early literary influences.

While these theories may or may not be correct, Rank writes that none address the origin of the birth of the hero.

In manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more than the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own, independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe that Mr. Yeats to have been first contemporary to be conscious. Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythic method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art. –T.S. Eliot, from Ulysses, Order, and Myth (1923)

Eliot defines what he exemplifies in The Waste Land — i.e. the “mythic method” — in his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” The mythic method looked to the past to glean meaning and understanding for what has been lost or destroyed in the present. This method emphasizes the underlying commonality of ostensibly disparate times and locations by employing a comparative mythology to transcend the temporal narrative. By stressing the mythical, anthropological, historical, and the literary, this method becomes at once (1) satirical by showing how much the present has fallen; (2) comparative to highlight similarities structurally; (3) historically neutral to escape the present to a revived future; (4) confused in its fusion of the realistic and the phantasmagoric; (5) ordering in its approach to morality and imaginative passion. The mythic method does not offer an escape to a better past, but an entry to a confusing present.

This method highlighted the reader’s participation, by diminishing the authoritative voice of the poet. The voices of the past mingle with fragments of modern life that the reader must then interpret and order. The reader must structure the discontinuity and make her own connections within the text in a sort of quest, rather than being lead by the narratorial voice. The Waste Land‘s thematic quest is then linked with the reader’s own understanding and coupling of the discontinuous fragments of Eliot’s polysemous style. The Waste Land is indeed a language experiment, refreshing and renewing in its random flow of verbal associations that disrupt the controlled and precise poetry of the Victorians. It echoes musically and free, like the flow of the Thames to the sea, not constrained by stifling literary conventions and traditional expectations. This is what makes Eliot difficult, but rewarding.

The Waste Land disrupts many of our expectations, especially on a first reading, and resists our attempts at a unified reading. First, its genre seems confused, more of a poem of the not-yet than one that we can comfortably inhabit. Indeed, Eliot seems to capture the modernist zeitgeist: i.e., that of crisis and rupture — the sheer absence of one, totalizing view of the world. One voice will not provide answers for all. Eliot shows the impossibility of one stable voice by mixing wit and humor even in the face of horror. The Waste Land is anti-heroic and unromantic, nightmarish and fantastic, realistic and dreadful, mundane and otherworldly. Even while we catch glimpses of the comfortable, Eliot never lingers long, confronting the reader with new multiplicity.

While the poem seeks stability, it does end that way. It does end with hope, but also with confusion and uncertainty, and a sense of alienation. We all have a choice, it seems, to set our own lands in order, to shore those fragments against our ruins. However, those fragments and voices will always echo, allowing only brief comfort, if any at all: shantih is peace beyond understanding, and the modern Wastelanders seem still to not understand. Perhaps this is the beginning of the myth of the twentieth century, one we still seem compelled to follow.

—Regina Derieva (trans. Alan Shaw)

Rich says that it is exciting to be alive at a time of “awakening consciousness” when women are starting to question the myths about them in the canon of the past. She says that re-vision is an “act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” This is more than just a new outlook but an act of survival “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.”

This act of revision is stated very clearly in “Diving Into the Wreck.” The woman-diver-poet has come to the scene of the wreck with her book of myths to view for herself “the wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth.” Rich is looking into the past, before patriarchal control, and creating her own reality in an androgynous being that is capable of strength and love. This new myth sets the stage for the ultimate truth and understanding without the dichotomy of male and female. Only together can they understand the mistakes of the past and re-write history that can include the names of women in their proper places and perspectives.

As Rich grew as a poet she started seeing herself in a different way. Her earlier poetry was defined by the craft she learned from the men she had studied. As she examined this earlier work she began to see an obvious maturing and was

startled because beneath the conscious craft are glimpses of the split I even then experienced between the girl who wrote poems, who defined herself in writing poems, and the girl who was to define herself by her relationships with men. (2050)

Rich goes on to discuss her life and how it was defined in the patriarchal society. There was a conflict between her relationship with her family and her poetry. Her final answer to her conflict was freedom and that “to be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination.” Rich stresses the word traditional as it is defined by the patriarchal society and she believes in the need to unify the “energy of creation” with the “energy of relation.” She needed to think for herself and come up with her own understanding and conclusions that are unaffected by society.

In the poem “Myth,” Muriel Rukeyser examines the patriarchal society in the Oedipus plays of Sophocles. Oedipus is himself a victim of a society that he helped to create. Communication, or lack of, is the problem in this instance where Oedipus believed that “man” was an all-encompassing word for all of humanity. This myth, which he helped to create, brought his tragic degradation. The dichotomy that man created between men and women, separating the aspects of each, has ironically wrought doom upon Oedipus.

Margaret Atwood takes a strong position against the patriarchal society in her poem “Circe/Mud Poems.” Communication and the relationships between men and women are her motifs and focuses. She metaphorically shows the victims of society who refuse to conform to tradition as having their limbs ripped and cut from their bodies. They are the “silent ones” who refuse tradition and the mythical roles placed on them by society. Atwood has stripped away the faÁade of society to get down to reality, even if it is not pretty. “Around me everything is worn down, the grass,/the roots, the soil, nothing is left but the bared rock,” the rock of truth and reality that cannot be hurt or influenced by society. Atwood also elaborates on the image of women as it is literally created by men. This “perfect” woman was just the torso and sexual organs of a woman; a woman who could not think or argue but only perform sexually for her creators. Circe says

Is this what you would like me to be, this
mudwoman? Is
this what I would like to be? It would be so
simple.

It would be simple, but unfulfilling — existing, but not living. Circe is eventually left by Odysseus in the myth. In effect, by Odysseus visiting her island he created her, and by leaving he destroyed her. Is this true, Atwood questions, would life cease to exist for Circe, or does it become unimportant and trivial now that the men have left?

Rich compares the contemporary woman’s verse to a blues song: “a cry of pain, of victimization, or a lyric of seduction.” She states that of womens’ poetry today is full of anger for these very reasons that are “everywhere in the environment, built into society, language, the structures of thought.” The anger has justification and seems to be a method of uniting women to take a look at the past and re-define love, and re-write what it means to be a woman.