Abstract
Review Essay
We hope you enjoy the reviews of the two novels and of Tim Roth's powerful film The War Zone, recommended for holiday consideration.
With best wishes, for the festive season,
Jo Beaston
In the mid-1980s I became fascinated by a book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes [1], and this led me later to write a paper on the link between poetry and weeping [2]. In focusing now on Dorothy Porter's book what a piece of work, I will content myself with a brief summary of Jaynes's ideas and how they blend with my own notions on the nature of poetry.
The language of the poem, as I understand it, is the language of the body-self and of dreaming. It is the oldest language. In every race and culture, before the advent of the written word, stories were passed on not as linear prose narratives, but in rhythmical forms that were chanted rather than spoken. Considering the time that has passed since our species evolved, the alphabet is a very recent development. Prose as a developed form of communication is even more recent, in European and Semitic cultures perhaps 2500–3000 years old.
In a highly speculative essay, Jaynes proposes that human consciousness, that is self-consciousness, the awareness of an ‘I’ at the centre of my narrative and my actions, is also a relatively recent development. He notes how ubiquitous are the accounts in ancient days of the gods speaking directly to men, such as God instructing Moses from the burning bush. Jaynes writes of the characters in Homer's Iliad who [1, p. 72]
do not sit down and think out what they do. They have no conscious minds such as we say we have, and certainly no introspection. It is impossible for us, with our subjectivity, to appreciate what it was like. When Agamemnon, king of men, robs Achilles of his mistress, it is a god that grasps Achilles by his yellow hair and warns him not to strike Agamemnon. It is a god who then rises out of the grey sea and consoles him in his tears of wrath on the beach by his black ships, a god who whispers low to Helen to sweep her heart with homesick longing, a god who hides Paris in a mist in front of the attacking Menelaus … It is the gods who start the quarrels among men that really cause the war and then plan its strategy … In fact, the gods take the place of consciousness.
Jaynes suggests that the non-dominant equivalent of Wernicke's area, that is, the auditory association cortex, provides the neurophysiological substrate for the divine hallucinations before the advent of human consciousness. He speculates that in human prehistory, before the evolution of consciousness, this non-dominant area could ‘speak’ the guiding admonitions of the gods across the anterior commissure to the dominant hemisphere. He refers to this structure as the ‘bicameral mind’. The city-states of prehistory were all small theocracies. Jaynes writes [1, p. 205] that
in the bicameral era, the bicameral mind was the social control, not fear or repression or even law. There were no private ambitions, no private grudges, no private frustrations, no private anything, since bicameral man had no internal space to be private in and no analogue ‘I’ to be private with. All initiative was in the voices of the gods, And the gods needed to be assisted in their divinely dictated laws only in the late federation of states in the second millenium
This system would become unworkable with the increasing size and complexity of communities and the ever-increasing contact, both peaceful and warlike, between such communities. The learning of that we today call, ‘linear thinking’ would have been an essential response to these historical forces. This involves a consciousness of self, that there is an ‘I’ who is responsible for my actions, not the gods or demons or ancestors. It involves the learned acquisition of what Freud called ‘secondary process thought’, and the functions of one cerebral hemisphere becoming dominant over the other. The prophet of this new age of consciousness, in western culture, was Socrates, with his incisive question: ‘What do you mean when you say …?’
Consciousness thus involves an awareness of one's own separateness and inner privacy. Just as Jaynes speculates that human culture took centuries to develop this awareness, so we know from psychoanalysis and infant studies that this is a gradual developmental task for each individual. The separate identities of child, mother and father are established in the Oedipal phase of development. Jacques Lacan, elaborating on Freud, referred to this separateness as the Oedipal Law [3].
Language arises from this process of ongoing separation. It is when the child knows that it and the mother are not part of the one mind that it needs to invent a name for her, and hers is the first name it will shape. When there is significant derailment of separation-individuation, as in childhood psychosis and symbiotic states, the child may never learn to use words at all or, if it does, may have great difficulty grasping the significance of personal pronouns. How is it that you are ‘I’ while you are ‘you’ to me, and I am ‘I’ to me, but ‘you’ to you?
This separation remains forever incomplete, and we will always need other people to function to some degree as part of our own subjectivity, or as ‘self-objects’ to use Heinz Kohut's term. Moreover, separation involves mourning, and if language cannot exist without separateness then there is a basic sadness at the heart of words. Poetry, as the language of the unconscious and of dreaming, has its roots in primary process language and is closer to the primordial union with the mother than the secondary process language of prose. The poems that move us most deeply are those which evoke the poignancy of that lost union. The poem then becomes, in T. S. Eliot's words [4],
Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts.
I think it is this quality which gives poetry and music the power to move a listener to tears, even when the manifest content of the poem may have nothing to do with loss. Linear and logical progressions of thought belong to prose, which is the proper medium for philosophical discourse, for law, government and commerce. Poetry lives in tactile images of the body and the sensual world. The associations do not proceed in an orderly manner, but leap about, sometimes gently as with Wordsworth and the Romantics, and sometimes frenetically as in surrealists like Pablo Neruda or Federico Garcia Lorca. Shelley said that poets were the ‘unacknowledged legislators of mankind’, but he referred rather to their intuiting ‘the before unapprehended relations of things’. Poetry reaches experience earlier than Oedipal Law.
There is a depth and a necessary regressive quality experienced in reading a poem, and also in writing one, which is of a different order from ordinary conversation or the reading of prose. Another experience I find very similar is the deep empathic contact that can occur in a good psychoanalytic session, when one unconscious is speaking directly to another.
In an address during his recent visit to Australia, Los Angeles psychoanalyst and neurologist Allan Schore noted that brain imaging studies had located linear, secondary process thinking in the dominant hemisphere, while non-linear, or lateral, thinking was processed in the non-dominant hemisphere, which for most of us is the right. It is through the functions of this hemisphere that we experience rhythm and other musical patterns. The emotional, preverbal communication of mother and infant is right hemisphere to right hemisphere, as indeed is all deep contact, including what Kleinian psychoanalysts call projective identification. Perhaps this is what Julian Jaynes called ‘the god-side of our ancient mentality’ where rhythm counts for more than logical explication, so it is also the natural home of poetry. Interestingly, developmental studies show that the right hemisphere is actually larger than the left at birth, and the left does not really predominate until around the age of three and a half. This is also the time of the Oedipal phase, the culmination of separation-individuation and the beginnings of symbolic language.
How can we relate all this to Dorothy Porter's fine narrative poem what a piece of work? Well, for a start, it is a narrative poem and thus has to confront certain difficulties from the very beginning. Among the earliest poems in our literature are the two great epics of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, based on events around the 13th century
In our more self-conscious age, narrative is more likely to be claimed by the prose novel. There hasn't been a major epic in the English language since Paradise Lost and I'm fairly sure Dorothy Porter never wanted to emulate Milton anyway. Robert Browning brought the dramatic monologue in verse to a level of perfection and, over the last century, American poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson and Robinson Jeffers have composed book-length narrative poems, highly praised in their day, but no longer read now.
Dorothy Porter's technique is altogether different. She offers us a series of brief dramatic monologues that together comprise the story, like pointillist splashes in an Impressionist painting. Her models are the minimalist Oriental poets, not the writers of classical English pentameters. Here is an episode from early in the relationship between her protagonist Dr Peter Cyren and his girlfriend Fay:
The water sleeps sleek
in the sun
as a tiger.
Would falling
from a tipsy ferry
be like
falling
into a bottomless
soft mouth
bristling with light?
What we have is a kind of interior epic in lyric form, without any narrative longueurs, where the titles of the individual poems indicate the direction of the story. It's a style she has pared down even further than in her earlier verse novel The Monkey's Mask. I find it an impressive achievement.
Having said all that, what response can we make to the story Dorothy Porter offers to us? Because it has the complication of having among its central characters people who are recognisably based on actual persons. Dr Peter Cyren, her central character, has much in common with the late Dr Harry Bailey. Bailey was indeed at one time the superintendant of Callan Park, the psychiatric hospital where this poem is set. He acquired an impressive reputation as a reformer during this period. It was in his later career in private practice, at Chelmsford Hospital, that things went horribly wrong. Bailey, like Dr Cyren, was known to have had an affair with a patient who died of a drug overdose and left him a lot of money. Dr Cyren too starts impressively before unravelling into perversity.
Moreover, another important character in the poem is a schizophrenic poet called Frank. And it is fairly well known that a great Australian poet, Francis Webb, suffered from chronic paranoid schizophrenia and spent a number of years (1965–1969) in Callan Park. I knew him personally at the time and often used to visit him there or bring him to my home. I've discussed him more recently in a paper, ‘The nameless father in the poetry and life of Francis Webb’ published in this Journal [5]. Like Frank in the poem, Francis Webb was preoccupied with paranoid ruminations about the Communists. But Frank in the poem is also a hater of women and at one point, when a woman enters the room, exclaims, ‘Get that stupid cunt/outa here.’ I can't imagine the real Francis Webb ever saying that. In all the time I knew him he was unfailingly courteous to my wife and there were a number of Australian women poets, especially Nan McDonald and Rosemary Dobson, with whom he maintained long and devoted friendships. He was godfather to one of Rosemary Dobson's children. My only concern here is that some people might assume the character of Frank in the poem is truer to Francis Webb than is actually the case, which is not fair to Webb's memory and might be distressing to surviving family and friends.
I have no such concern about Bailey who destroyed his own reputation many years ago. I suppose my response to the poem is very much influenced by my knowledge of those two people and the way both of them impacted on my own life. Francis Webb was a poet I revered and a friend whose suffering and dignity compelled admiration and sorrow. I never met Harry Bailey, but I was affected by him, as many of us were, because of the way he besmirched our profession. Dorothy Porter has based her fictional characters loosely upon these two, using them as starting points for her imagination. That is her privilege, though, as you see, I have my reservations.
There are some anachronisms in the poem. It is set around 1968 and Dr Cyren is described administering insulin coma and also unmodified ECT. I believe insulin coma had long been discontinued by that time. I worked in Parramatta Psychiatric Centre, nowadays Cumberland Hospital, between 1968 and 1972 and never saw it given. And I never witnessed unmodified ECT.
These are small details and don't detract from Dorothy Porter's central metaphor, a reverse alchemy where gold inexorably turns to base metal and her psychiatrist, a man of apparently high ideals, gradually reveals deepening layers of perversity. Sigmund Freud once remarked that he pursued his psychoanalytic studies from curiosity about the human mind, not out of any deep wish to help people. He added that he did not believe he had a great deal of sadism in his character, and so had less need than most people to react against this by doing good. It's a quirky remark, and perhaps Freud was being disingenuous in his self-analysis. But it does confront us with the degree of sadism and omnipotent grandiosity that can lie just beneath of the surface of our wish to help our patients. Indeed this becomes the central theme of Dorothy Porter's book, a dark theme of disturbing power.
Healing is a furnace.
I know when to push.
I know when to shut the door.
I know how to live
with my own scorched hands.
As a one-time public psychiatrist now in a private psychoanalytic practice, I confess to some concerns about the contemptuous remarks on private practice and private patients scattered throughout the book:
Would a week in Callan Park
cure this spoilt bitch?
Play it again, Samantha.
You're my whining goldmine.
Or Peter Cyren's meditation on leaving the public sector:
yes, I've said to
the chocolates
yes
to the big bunch of flowers
I'm going to invite him in
for a nocturnal coffee
I'm going to spread my legs
as wide as they'll go
I've given the green light
to that tall dark stranger
that most persistent of seducers
Mister Private Practice
These words are spoken by the perverse and self-loathing central character. They're what one might expect such a person to say. But I'd be concerned if, in addition, they represented any kind of authorial voice, because such attitudes are not far from the denigration of private, especially psychotherapeutic, practice that one hears in some sectors of the College and, worst of all, from government. It's worth bearing in mind that most patients seen in private practice are indeed people in real pain. Those who went to Harry Bailey deserved better treatment than they got.
These are my reservations, but what about Dorothy Porter's achievement? For me, that lies in the poetry itself, and the highly individualistic way she has been able to reclaim the narrative for poetry without compromising the lyric essence. Poetry is essential to life because of its capacity to restore us to the primordial depths of ourselves, but it has become increasingly marginalised in modern society. Dorothy Porter's work, with its sensual immediacy and narrative flair, has begun to attract an unusually wide audience. This is obviously good for Dorothy Porter, though no more than she deserves. It's also good for poetry.
When the popular movie Four Weddings and a Funeral was shown several years ago, you might recall in the funeral scene one character spoke the beautiful W. H. Auden elegy, ‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone’. Afterwards booksellers reported an enormous demand for Auden's collected poems. When those words came across the movie soundtrack, people experienced a depth and wonder they did not realise existed, and they wanted more.
Dorothy Porter writes a vivid and accessible poetry that people who already love poetry can enjoy. She also has a story-telling gift that can draw people who would ordinarily never go near poetry. And who knows where that may lead?