On Sylvia Plath
In the
following essay, Hughes comments on Plath's struggle to transcribe her private
anguish into the fiction of The Bell Jar. According to Hughes, Plath's
difficulty stemmed from her effort to produce a novel with both mythic
aspirations and cathartic ritual based in reality.
Sylvia Plath's intense ambition to write a novel
provides one of the main and most distressful themes of her early journals. Her
inability to start--or worse, her various attempts to start--brought her
repeatedly to near despair. She agonized about style, tone, structure, subject
matter.
Throughout that same period, her poetry struggled
into being against only slightly less resistance. Plenty of poems survive,
perhaps because each of her convulsive efforts to break through the mysterious
barriers by way of verse sufficed to complete a short poem--which could then be
sold for cash and bore comparison with what other poets were publishing. But
she knew these poems were not what she wanted. She valued them far more highly
than her prose, because at least they reflected, often very beautifully, the
obsessive inner life that made her write them. But though they reflected it,
she felt they did not contain it, did not release it.
These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
("Stillborn")
Her prose, however, seemed to her not even to
reflect it. As far as her difficulties with narrative prose went, in retrospect
one can see a glaring mismatch between the great dreams of her novelistic
ambition and the character of her actual gift. Her high-minded, academic
passion for classic novelists combined with the priorities of her own
sophisticated poetic talent made her think of the ideal narrative prose as
something densely wrought, richly charged, of all-encompassing, superfine
subtleties, with James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James prominent in the
pedigree. This is where most of her attempts to get her novel going foundered.
They foundered because her vital inner creative life was not in them. Her
heart, in other words, pulled her in the opposite direction--through Lawrence
and Dostoyevski. On the evidence of The Bell Jar one
could say, maybe, that her writer's distress might have had less to do with her
conscious failure to add another thoroughbred to that classic stable of
stylists than to her unconscious horror at being dragged remorselessly towards
what she did not want to face--even though her true gift was waiting there to
show her how to face it.
Her breakthrough came--by the backdoor. Spring
1959, in a moment of seemingly no importance, like a gambler, playful and
reckless, out of the blue she wrote her short story "Johnny Panic and the
Bible of Dreams." This first-person narrative is composed in a voice that
approximates the one she would find for The Bell Jar--a voice, that is, rather
than a style. It whirls in a high-trapeze glitter of circus daring around one
of her most serious terrors: her experience of the electroconvulsive shock
treatment that jumped her out of the torpor in which her attempted suicide had left
her.
Perhaps "Johnny Panic" was the divining
work that located and opened the blocked spring. Change of home and travel
prevented her from writing anything more till late fall. Then almost at once,
with a place and a few brief weeks to concentrate, she made the first big
breakthrough in her poetry. "Poem for a Birthday" returns to that
stony source, but now lifts the shattered soul reborn from the "quarry of
silences" where "men are mended," and where her "mendings itch." And the voice of Ariel can be heard
clearing its throat.
Immediately after that, her writing was once again
disrupted by physical upheavals: change of country, home-building, birth and
infancy of her first child, all these interposed a full year, during which time
that new voice, with the story it had to tell, stayed incommunicado. But in the
spring of 1961 by good luck circumstances cooperated, giving her time and place
to work uninterruptedly. Then at top speed and with very little revision from
start to finish she wrote The Bell Jar.
In this narrative the voice has perfected itself.
And what it has to tell is the author's psychic autobiography, the
creation-myth of the person that had emerged in the "Poem for a
Birthday" and that would go on in full cry through Ariel.
The Bell Jar is the story, in other words, from
behind the electroconvulsive shock treatment. It dramatizes the decisive event
of her adult life, which was her attempted suicide and accidental survival, and
reveals how this attempt to annihilate herself had grown from the decisive
event in her childhood, which was the death of her father when she was eight.
Taken separately, each episode of the plot is a close-to-documentary account of
something that did happen in the author's life. But the great and it might be said
profoundly disturbing effect of this brisk assemblage is determined by two
separate and contradictory elements. One of these operates on what could be
called an upper level, the other on a lower.
The first, on the upper level, is the author's
clearly recognizable purpose in the way she manipulates her materials. Her
long-nursed ambition to write an objective novel about "life" was
swept aside by a more urgent need. Fully aware of what she was doing, she modeled the sequence of episodes, and the various
characters, into a ritual scenario for the heroine's symbolic death and
rebirth. To her, this became the crucial aspect of the work. That mythic schema
of violent initiation, in which the old self dies and the new self is born, or
the false dies and the true is born, or the child dies and the adult is born,
or the base animal dies and the spiritual self is born, which is fundamental to
the major works of Lawrence and Dostoyevski, as well
as to Christianity, can be said to have preoccupied her. Obviously, it
preoccupied her in particular for very good reasons. She saw it as something
other than one of imaginative literature's more important ideas. As far as she
was concerned, her escape from her past and her conquest of the future, or in
more immediate, real terms her well-being from day to day and even her very
survival, depended absolutely on just how effectively she could impose this
reinterpretation on her own history, within her own mind, and how potently her
homemade version of the rite could give sustaining shape and positive direction
to her psychological life. Her novel had to work as both the ranking of the
mythic event and the liturgy, so to speak, of her own salvation.
The very writing of The Bell Jar did seem to
succeed in performing this higher function, for the author, with astounding
immediacy and power. And the role of each episode and character, as they
operate on this level in the book, has been a good deal discussed.
The main movement of the action is the shift of the
heroine, the "I," from artificial ego to authentic self--through a
painful "death." The artificial ego is identified with the presiding
moral regime of the widowed mother. The inner falsity and inadequacy of this
complex induces the suicidal crisis. With the attempted suicide it is
successfully dislodged, scapegoated into the
heroine's double, Joan Gilling, and finally, at the
end of the book, physically annihilated when Joan Gilling
hangs herself. Simultaneously, the authentic self emerges into fierce rebellion
against everything associated with the old ego. Her decisive act (the
"positive" replay of her "negative" suicide) takes the form
of a sanguinary defloration, carefully stage managed by the heroine, which
liberates her authentic self into independence. On this plane, the novel is
tightly related to the mythos visible in the plots
and situations of the poems, which here and there share a good deal of its
ritualized purpose. It can be read, in fact, as the logbook of their
superficial mechanisms and meanings. To a degree, the novel is an image of the
matrix in which the poems grew and from which they still draw life.
Without undergoing the psychic transformation of
self-remaking, which she accomplished in writing this scenario, the author
might not have come so swiftly and so fully, as she did, to the inspiration and
release of Ariel. She might not have got there at all. As it is, a reader can
chart her progress from the completion of the novel (late spring, 1961) to the
first true Ariel poem ("Elm," mid-April 1962). More physical
disruptions--holidays, changing homes, etc.--help to account for the absence of
the new voice in the four or five poems ("Insomniac,"
"Widow," "Stars over the Dordogne," "The Rival,"
"Wuthering Heights") produced between late spring and mid-September.
But in September she was able to settle once again to concentrated work,
beginning with the ominous piece, "Blackberrying." Three more strides
("Finisterre," "The Surgeon at 2 a.m.," "Last
Words") towards the land of the dead brought her to "The Moon and the
Yew Tree," where her father lies under the roots and her mother mourns in
heaven:
The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in
particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the
face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and
wild.
And the message of the yew tree is
blackness--blackness and silence.
Further exploration was disrupted by the birth of
her second child in January 1962. But she was back on the path, in the depth of
her vision, on the 4th of April, and found herself again in the same place,
confronting the yew tree--which now consists of terrible music and opens to
admit her. This is exactly as if she had entered her father's coffin.
Empty and silly as plates,
So the blind smile.
I envy the big noises,
The yew hedge of the Grosse
Fuge.
Deafness is something else.
Such a dark funnel, my father!
I see your voice
Black and leafy, as in my childhood,
A yew hedge of orders,
Gothic and barbarous, pure
German.
Dead men cry from it.
I am guilty of nothing.
The yew my Christ, then.
Is it not as tortured?
And you, during the Great War
In the
Lopping the sausages!
They color my sleep,
Red, mottled, like cut necks.
There was a silence!
Great silence of another
order.
I was seven, I knew nothing.
The world occurred.
You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.
Now similar clouds
Are spreading their vacuous
sheets.
Do you say nothing?
I am lame in the memory.
I remember a blue eye,
A briefcase of tangerines.
This was a man, then!
Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.
(from "Little
Fugue")
The actual yew tree of the poem, as she saw it from
the door of her house, stood in her sunset, on the opposite side, due West. Due East, filling her dawn sky as
she saw it from the back of her house, stood the Elm.
The fascinating thing is what now unfolded between
the 2nd and the 19th of April. As it happened, the 2nd fell in the dark phase
of the Moon (which emerged new on the 5th) and the 19th fell on the first day
of the Full. On the 2nd, as I say, she had entered her father's coffin, under
the yew tree. On the 4th she wrote "An Appearance," her point-blank
portrait of the presiding genius of her false ego--that she was about to escape
from at last. She then went on, through the 4th, 5th, and 7th of April, to
write her three most purely beautiful, most free-spirited, most delicately
elated poems--"Crossing the Water," "Among the Narcissi,"
and "Pheasant." What she was actually doing became clear only on the
19th! The real Pheasant, as in her poem, flew up into the real Elm. A few days
before the 19th she had started a poem about the Elm itself. This had settled
early into a constricted series of rhymes, in which one can see her groping for
the new bearings with the old instruments. After twenty-one pages of struggle,
the new bearings suddenly burst in on her, she finds the new instruments in her
hands, and the voice of Ariel emerges fully fledged in "Elm." It
emerges as a bird, "a cry":
Nightly it flaps out,
Looking, with its hooks,
for something to love.
In other words, between the 2nd and the 19th, she
has been traveling underground ("Crossing the
Water"), just like Osiris in his sun-boat being transported from his death
in the West to his rebirth as a divine child (himself reborn as his own divine
child in the form of a Falcon) in the East. And as can be seen, "Elm"
recapitulates the ritual scenario of The Bell Jar:
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my
great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and
stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught
her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks,
for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its
malignity.
Through an apocalyptic disintegration, the Elm
remains as the physical continuity of the speaker, as did Victoria Lucas in the
novel.
The Moon, as always, corresponds to the nucleus of
the artificial ego in its matriarchal regime, while the "soft,
feathery" thing, the dark fierce bird that inhabits the tree, is the voice
and spirit of the authentic self--the new voice and spirit of Ariel, with its
deeper story still to be told.
It should not be surprising that the novel and
poems are so closely related. They were not only gestated in the same
imagination (utilizing a genetic code of symbolic signs that has few equals for
consistency and precision), they were delivered, so to speak, in parallel.
Though The Bell Jar had been finished by late spring, 1961, the publication
process dragged on throughout 1962, and the book emerged to the public eye only
on January 14th, 1963 (four weeks before her death). In late 1962, while the
Ariel poems were being written, she corrected and sent off the novel's proofs,
and worried over questions of possible libel. The last Ariel poem, "Sheep
in Fog," came on December 2nd. This was also the last poem she wrote
(except for the unfinished "Eavesdropper") until after the novel was
published. It was then the first poem she picked up, on January 28th, when she
made the correction that revealed it as the elegy and funeral cortege for the
Ariel inspiration. Whereupon it became the first (three more written that same
day and all eleven within the next week) of the final group, the true
death-songs.
It is the curve of the mythic drama within the
poems that directs a reader's attention back to the positive aspect of the
rebirth ritual in the novel. I made the point that this ritual operates on an
"upper level." With the help of the poems, one can see that the
"positive" aspect of that ritual holds good only on that upper
level--where her shaping will is the control, where the ritual magic is
choreographed according to plan, and the rebirth is hopeful.
On the lower level, where what I called the second
element makes itself felt, things are different. Her materials were the real
explosive experience of her own life and attempted suicide. Her bid to
refashion these materials ritually, to recreate her history and remake herself,
is brilliant with a kind of desperation, lit with the dazzling powers of an
all-out emergency. Everything depended on her bringing about a genuine
alchemical change in that uranium. And for a time, the triumph seemed real--it
enabled her to write Ariel. But it proved to be temporary. The reality of her
materials was susceptible to her magical coercion--but only so far and for so
long. In its true nature it remained stubbornly what it always
was--inaccessible to manipulation. Inaccessible, at least, to
that first, brave attempt. This helps to explain the raggedly imperfect
art of a novel that nevertheless feels like a vital work, a work of existential
emergency. In effect, two different books are fighting for the one story. While
she tries to impose her positive, self-protective interpretation and nurse that
germ of an authentic rebirth, in her stage-managed nativity ritual, the
material itself is doing something else. It is disinterring its own actuality
for the first time, and dictating its own document, telling the simple truth of
what was, is being, and will be suffered. This, then, is the second element in
The Bell Jar: the unalterable truth, the past and future reality, of her basic
materials.
On this lower level, the symbolism discloses a
pattern of tragedy that is like a magnetic field in the very ground of her
being: that unalterable truth to the reality is her voice's deeper negative
story. Because in each episode of the novel this deeper pattern contradicts the
ritual on the upper level, everything on the upper level, every step of the
ritual dance that is trying to compel "the good things to happen,"
acquires a tragic shadow. The poems, meanwhile, wear that ritual purpose more
lightly and declare the deeper pattern more openly--sometimes shockingly so.
The reader is bewildered because each level speaks in the
equally-real-or-symbolic terms of the other. This simultaneity of the two
levels is what makes the novel, the poems, and the author herself truly tragic.
Ted Hughes, 1994
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