Isis and satori: An interpretation of Ted Hughes's Gaudete

Abstract

Established Hughes critics have been reluctant to offer interpretations of Gaudete. Their caution is understandable, for Gaudete does not fit the patterns of Western thought. Its frame of reference is Oriental, more specifically Buddhist. Once its Oriental background is recognized, Gaudete appears to be a fairly straightforward work, even in its lyric part. The strong influence of several non-Christian religious and mythological systems on Hughes has received due stress in critical studies of his work, but the impact of Zen Buddhism on his thinking has excaped most critics’ attention. Scigaj (1977) does emphasize the role of Zen Buddhism in Hughes’s then (in 1977) recent work, but offers no interpretation of Gaudete.’ My interpretation of Gaudete supports Scigaj’s assessment of the increasing role of Zen Buddhist thought in the poet’s work around 1975. Gaudete conveys a cure for a cultural disease affecting the modern Westerner. The disease interferes with spontaneous action and causes frequent outbursts of violence. It can be cured by an act of understanding the inner nature of things, by the sudden insight known in Zen Buddhism as satori. Recovery brings a new relation with Nature, which becomes an Isis-like, double-faced goddess, the “you” to whom the sequence of lyric poems at the end of Gaudete is addressed. The disease to be cured is diagnosed in the Prologue by means of the image of a mass-grave. The image symbolizes the outbursts of violence characteristic of Western civilization. The Western tendency to violent action is again represented in the main story, “Gaudete”, in the preparations for and the actual perpetration of a lynching. The disease of which violent action is the most striking symptom is defined in “Gaudete” as an outgrowth of a sexual conflict. The protagonist, Lumb, is a tool to identify the sexual nature of the disease. He is the personification of sex. Wherever he turns up he brings out the symptoms of the disease. He tests people’s control mechanisms and shows up their ineffectiveness. Thanks to him the mechanism that leads to violence comes to ligt: inhibition causes the frustration of desire, frustrated desire causes what Hughes has called “crossovers” and “possession by Shiva”, exemplified in “Gaudete” in Hagen and the dog who embodies his animal nature (pp. 34-35).* As the disease affecting the West has impaired psychic control systems its cure must improve or restore control. The long dream that constitutes the Prologue hints the solutions to the problem of control. The most important hint is contained in the request made to Lumb to heal the baboon-faced woman. What the healing is going to involve is then indicated in the continuation of the dream, in the passages suggestive of pagan rites, with their tree and bull images.