Hart Crane's Poetry by John T. Irwin

Author:John T. Irwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

§ 25

Three Structures; the Visualization of the Womb Fantasy in The Last Judgement; the Transumptive Relationship

Looking back over the whole of The Bridge, we can see that the work was built around three distinct but interconnected structures: First, the Eliotic “mythical method”—the layering, beneath the narrative of a contemporary action, of one or more older narratives whose actions resemble in significant ways the contemporary one such that the resemblance and/or disparity between the two becomes an implicit commentary on the present state and possible future of the contemporary world. Second, the pictorial structure Crane proposed for his poem when, in his letter to Otto Kahn, he compared the relationship of the poem’s individual sections to that of the Sistine paintings. And third, the psychological structure that is inevitably woven into any long-labored, major work by its author’s emotional life and personal history, a structure influenced in Crane’s case by his troubled relationship with his parents, his sexual orientation, his inability to hold a job, his alcoholism, and so on, a psychological structure that, as I argued earlier, evokes the quester’s return to origin, and thus to original power, as a return to the womb on the son’s own terms.

We noted earlier the connection between the mythical method and the pictorial structure: that Virgil’s Aeneid and the paintings in the Sistine Chapel are, respectively, the verbal and visual gathering together of images of origin from the two great empires centered in Rome. This connection is acknowledged in the Sistine paintings by the presence of the Cumaean Sibyl among the Sibyls and Old Testament prophets depicted on the chapel’s ceiling and by the presence of the boatman Charon ferrying souls into hell in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, not to mention the Raphael fresco (in the nearby Borgo stanza), with its detail of Aeneas fleeing the burning Troy accompanied by Anchises and Ascanius, a connection of the Aeneid to the Sistine paintings reinforced by Dante’s use of Virgil as his guide in the Inferno. But we should note in this regard that Crane’s continual invocation of constellations in The Bridge (besides being an allusion to their importance in the voyage narratives layered beneath his work and to the notion of stellar translation in ancient literature) is also a subtle evocation of one aspect of the poem’s pictorial structure: a reference to the movement from a three-dimensional body to its two-dimensional outline considered as a figure of body transcendence, and thus to the notion of superimposing one two-dimensional image (such as a shadow or geometrical outline) upon another as a figure of the containment of one body within another (the goal of the womb fantasy). For, of course, the ancient constellations are traditionally depicted as two-dimensional, geometric schemata that are, in effect, transparent, allowing other objects to be seen through them, just as the modern constellation Pons Brooklyniensis allows other constellations to be seen through its openwork pattern of cables at night.

What we must now consider is the link between, on the one hand, the

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