Mrs. Muir

"I SAW MY HEAD LAUGHING, ROLLING ON THE GROUND": ORPHIC TRADITION AND THE GHOST STORY

The founding archetype for the figure of the poet in Western myth comes to us as a figure in a ghost story. Orpheus is the model singer, whose skill with the lyre has no human parallel. But he's in love, of course, and his beloved dies, and being human he cannot accept his loss. Predating modern lyric strategies by millenia, he turns to his art to transmogrify bereavement, and because of his genius, Prosperpine, Queen of the Underworld, allows him to strike the deal all eulogies aspire to. He will sing his love out of death. He will journey across the Styx, through the mists and shades of Hades, to claim Eurydike and lead her back above to earthly realms. He crosses over. He passes through the halls and caverns, trekking among the dead. It's chilly. Wind blows from unseen gaps; there's that weird faint tuneless ululating in the background. He stumbles on her finally; she glances up, and for a moment he stares into her pallid, longed-for face. He beckons; she follows soundlessly, and they start the upward climb. He knows he is forbidden to look back. The tunnels are dark and jagged. It's taking a long time. There are no landmarks. He can't hear anything of her behind him, no footsteps or breathing, no tremor in the air, no warmth. A prickle along his back, a seeping dread that he's been duped . . . A sudden frenzy seized Orpheus unwary in his love . . . He stopped, and on the very verge of light, unmindful, alas! and vanquished in his purpose, on Eurydike, now his own, he looked back! (Georgics, IV, ll. 485 ff.) There she is. In the gloom, in her night-colored clothes, a cowl draped over her face. She's right there, close behind him, almost touching, but turning now, drawn backward. She fades. She's gone. The O of regular daylight is in front of him, and he has been too hypnotized to notice-- The post-heartbreak Orpheus becomes, as Allen Grossman explains,1 an epic rather than lyric force, "charming the tigers and making the oaks attend his strain." The rocks weep, etc. but he never sees Eurydike again; the social and historical, "masculine" services performed by the epic supersede those private expressive potencies of the lyric. In Grossman's view, the lyric principle is "feminine," and its originary figure is Philomela. Raped, with her tongue cut out, she weaves the story into a tapestry her sister reads. Together they punish Tereus, the rapist, by killing his children and feeding them to him. Both sisters, in the end, are turned into nightingales, lyricism's mascot and avatar. It seems that ghost stories and horror stories, like lyric and epic, are language-patterns whose uses are related, but not identical. Although, consider Orpheus's end: maddened by the beauty of his song, the Thracian women tear him apart. His severed head upon the ground--like the classic unkillable bogey man--keeps singing. This, in turn, suggests the third Greek trope for the origin of poetry, namely the beheaded Medusa, from whose cut neck Pegasus leaps forth. Striking the ground with his hooves, Pegasus opens the Peiran spring from which poets drink inspiration. In all three stories, Orpheus, Philomela, and Medusa, female power--and the patriarchal ancients' antipathy toward it--functions as a secondary plot-line, a self-defining source of the fearsome. Because Orpheus figures the artist, rather than "art," he is mortal, but his lineage is divine. His name, Grossman explains, derives from the same etymological source as "orphan." But he is also the son of the Muse Calliope, making him a grandson on his mother's side of the Titan Mnemosyne with Zeus--in other words, poetry derives from the marriage of Memory and Power, filtered through Music. The ghost story, like the ballad to which it is related, is easy to memorize because Memory is the grandmother of verse. The Power of the ghost story, like that of pre-literate or bardic poetry, comes from delicious repetition to an audience who already knows what will happen. Eurydike will not re-enter daylight. The white dress will appear at the top of the stairs. The boyfriend will go for help, leaving the girlfriend waiting in the stalled car on the lonely road, where she will hear a tapping, tapping on her window. Rain? Of course not. Version a): the psychotic killer's hook. Version b): the fingers--or the blood--of her dead love. The killer has hung him in the tree . . . The poet relates to the bogeyman because he or she is a bearer, a channel, of scary stories--given the proper conditions, a chilling tale will emanate, uncanny, from the poet's body. Poems that deal with haunting often employ what literary theory calls prosopopoeia: "a figure of speech in which an imaginary or absent person is represented as speaking or acting." In a way, this is an odd concept for criticism to have bothered with--the told narrative is automatically a representation, and so every person figured metaphorically is absented or imagined by at least one degree. Still: all things written are ghostly, but some are more ghostly than others. Find at least two friends. Turn off the lights and read by candle-light: