Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Longing for perfection’: history and utopia in Louis Zukofsky
- 2 ‘Atlantis buried outside’: Muriel Rukeyser, myth and war
- 3 Slipping the cog: Charles Olson and Cold War history
- 4 Husky phlegm and spoken lonesomeness: poetry against the Vietnam War
- 5 ‘You can be the music yourself’: Amiri Baraka's attitudes, 1974–80
- 6 Figures of inward: Language poetry and the end of the avant-garde
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - ‘Atlantis buried outside’: Muriel Rukeyser, myth and war
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Longing for perfection’: history and utopia in Louis Zukofsky
- 2 ‘Atlantis buried outside’: Muriel Rukeyser, myth and war
- 3 Slipping the cog: Charles Olson and Cold War history
- 4 Husky phlegm and spoken lonesomeness: poetry against the Vietnam War
- 5 ‘You can be the music yourself’: Amiri Baraka's attitudes, 1974–80
- 6 Figures of inward: Language poetry and the end of the avant-garde
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1968 Muriel Rukeyser wrote a poem called ‘Myth’, responding to Gustave Moreau's 1864 painting Oedipus and the Sphinx:
MYTH
Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, ‘I want to ask one question. Why didn't I recognize my mother?’ ‘You gave the wrong answer,’ said the Sphinx. ‘But that was what made everything possible,’ said Oedipus. ‘No,’ she said. ‘When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn't say anything about woman.’ ‘When you say Man,’ said Oedipus, ‘you include women too. Everyone knows that.’ She said, ‘That's what you think.’
Oedipus fails to recognise the mother because he refuses to acknowledge the feminine. He gives ‘the wrong answer’, a revision that changes the entire story: the patriarchal ‘correct’ answer is refigured as a mistake, a blindness to female difference that is shown to be the origin of Oedipus's misfortunes. The sphinx, meanwhile, both reclaims woman from the hegemonic category Man and rejects the presumptuous universalism of Oedipus's second person pronoun: the you that speaks of Man, she tells Oedipus, is only your you, and certainly not me as a woman. Rukeyser's version is an alternative explanation for Oedipus's blindness, but also a troubling of mythic origin itself: where Oedipus's victory over the man-eating femme fatale ‘made everything possible’ in the original, his mistake here has a doom-laden legacy, in itself a counter to the Old Testament origin-myth of the Fall through Eve, but perhaps also refusing the Oedipus narrative in general. Inverting and undermining Oedipus at the same time as using his story to make a point distorts the usually unsullied window onto human consciousness myth is assumed to be.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Crisis and the US Avant-GardePoetry and Real Politics, pp. 43 - 65Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015