“Atlantis Buried Outside”: Muriel Rukeyser, Myth, and the Crises of War

Abstract

In 1968, Muriel Rukeyser wrote a poem called Myth, responding to Moreau's 1864 painting Oedipus and Sphinx:MYTHLong afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was Sphinx. Oedipus said, want to ask one question. Why didn't I recognize my mother? gave wrong answer, said Sphinx. that was what possible, said Oedipus. No, she said. When I asked, What walks on four legs in morning, two at noon, and three in evening, answered, Man. You didn't say anything about woman. When say Man, said Oedipus, you include women too. Everyone knows that. She said, That's what think.1Oedipus fails to recognize mother because he refuses to acknowledge feminine. He gives the wrong answer, revising entire story: patriarchal correct answer is refigured as a mistake, a blindness to female difference that is shown to be origin of Oedipus's misfortunes. The sphinx, meanwhile, both reclaims woman from hegemonic category Man and rejects presumptuous universalism of Oedipus's second-person pronoun. Rukeyser's version is an alternative explanation for Oedipus's blindness, but also a troubling of mythic origin itself: where Oedipus's victory over man-eating femme fatale made possible in original, his mistake has a doom-laden legacy here, in itself a counter to Old Testament origin myth of Fall through Eve, and perhaps even to narrative in general. Inverting and undermining Oedipus at same time as using his story to make a point distorts usually unsullied window onto human consciousness myth is assumed to be.This essay will sketch a movement in Rukeyser's career, which performs in miniature, from revision of individual myths, adapting their political content to demands of testimonial witness, toward an interrogation of my thopoeic itself, occasioned by loss of direct witness during Second World War. is a cheeky poem facetiously wielding Oedipus as a stick with which to beat lazy gendered language. Throughout her career from early 1930s to 1980, though, Rukeyser would insist on necessary energy of myth for writing of all political poetry, for articulation of everything possible. Her central statement on imagination ,The Life of Poetry (1949), written over a ten-year period in 1930s and 1940s, places myth at center of poet's proposed contribution to the future:If our imaginative response to life were complete, if we were fully conscious of emotion, if we apprehended surely relations that make us know truth and relations that make us know beautiful, we would be-what? The heroes of our myths, acting perfectly among these faculties, loving appropriately and living with appropriate risk, spring up at question. We invented them to let us approach that life. But it is our own lives of which they remind us. They offer us a hope and a perspective, not of past in which they were made-not that alone-but of future. For if we lived in full response to earth, to each other, and to ourselves, we would not breathe a supernatural climate; we would be more human.2Here myth functions as a reminder of desire and possibility: its resonances are not rooted in humanist universals, but are potentially temporary resonances of lives lived incompletely. Myth for Rukeyser was a central mode of passion, a powerful expression of struggle: when we see ourselves in myth, we do not see our uncorrupted, primitive being, but a common desire for a better world. Rukeyser allies myth to poetry as a type of creation in which we may live and which will save us.3 It comes from what Rukeyser called the lost, anonymous, dream-singers: myths are forgotten dreams rather than hidden qualities, and as such they are contingent. Myth is found in Indian tribes singing of how they would save themselves, and would rise and fight; and then, losing that promise, began to tell, to sing their dreams, fusing their wishful dreaming. …