Orpheus Emerged

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Orpheus Emerged Page 18

by Jack Kerouac


  to afford him salvation. Wagner was as

  famous for his grandiosity, extreme egotism,

  nationalism, and controversial social and

  political positions (including overt anti-

  Semitism). He had a strong influence on

  many writers, including Baudelaire, Mann,

  Joyce, and T. S. Eliot.

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  Shostakovich. Russian composer

  Dmitry Dmitryevich Shostakovich (1906-

  1975) wrote popular orchestral works early in

  his career, but then incurred the disapproval

  of the Soviets for what was seen as Western

  decadence. His Symphony No. 5 (1937)

  regained official approval. His late work,

  Symphony No. 13 (1962), aroused consider-

  able controversy because the text (by Russian

  poet Yevtushenko) described the Nazi slaugh-

  ter of Jews at Babi Yar, and referred to contin-

  uing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

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  Thomas Mann. Mann (1875-1955)

  wrote fiction and essays that delved into the

  artistic temperament. His work is informed

  by the conflict between the bourgeois world of

  his family and the spiritual realm of art. This

  dualism --between Geist ("spirit") and Leben ("life"); between the world of art, imagination,

  and the decadent artistic personality on the

  one hand and that of everyday reality, the

  "straight" world of conventional society on the

  other – is the driving conflict of Mann’s writ-

  ings. The notion that true artists need to reject

  the restrictions of "ordinary" life reflects the

  influence of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and

  Nietzsche.

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  Burroughs.

  William Seward

  Burroughs (1914-1997) was a student at

  Columbia University when Jack Kerouac met

  him there. The scion of a rich family, he

  became a heroin addict and based his first

  novels -- Junk (written as William Lee and

  published in 1953, then reissued as Junky in

  1964) and Naked Lunch (1959) -- on his drug-

  related experiences. Burroughs’ writing is

  characterized by biting and hilarious satire of

  contemporary society, and disjointed, phan-

  tasmagorical prose.

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  Prometheus. The Greek god who

  stole fire from heaven and gave it to man. As

  a punishment, Prometheus was chained to a

  mountain; an eagle ate his liver every day, but

  it grew back each night. He was eventually

  rescued by Heracles.

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  Blake.

  English poet, engraver, painter,

  and mystic William Blake (1757-1827) was a

  visionary: he bypassed organized religion and

  experienced God directly; his personal visions

  formed his idiosyncratic mythology. His most

  famous works are Songs of Innocence, Songs of

  Experience, and The Marriage of Heaven and

  Hell.

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  Prometheus. The Greek god who

  stole fire from heaven and gave it to man. As

  a punishment, Prometheus was chained to a

  mountain; an eagle ate his liver every day, but

  it grew back each night. He was eventually

  rescued by Heracles.

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  Text

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  Orpheus. In Greek mythology, Orpheus

  was a beloved musician, the son of the muse

  Calliope and Apollo, and a follower of Dionysus

  (the god of wine and fertile crops). He married

  Eurydice, but she was killed by a snake while

  fleeing the advances of Aristaeus. Orpheus

  descended to Hades to find her. His playing of

  the lyre so delighted Hades himself that Orpheus

  was permitted to take Eurydice back with him,

  provided that he did not look at her until they

  arrived in the upper world. When they were

  nearly there, however, he no longer heard her

  behind him, and he looked back. Eurydice

  returned to Hades. He could not get over the

  loss of his love, and the women in his home of

  Thrace were so outraged that they tore him to

  pieces during a bacchanalian orgy. The pieces of

  his body were collected by the Muses, and buried

  at the foot of Mt. Olympus; but his head was car-

  ried out to sea and eventually came ashore on

  the island of Lesbos, where it became an oracle.

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  Prometheus. The Greek god who

  stole fire from heaven and gave it to man. As

  a punishment, Prometheus was chained to a

  mountain; an eagle ate his liver every day, but

  it grew back each night. He was eventually

  rescued by Heracles.

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  Goethe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  (1749-1832) was a poet, playwright, novelist,

  and research scientist. His early works,

  including the poem "Prometheus" and the

  short novel The Sorrows of Young Werther,

  were associated with the pre-Romantic Sturm

  und Drang school. Informing these works

  was the theme that man must believe not in

  gods but in himself alone. Goethe is perhaps

  best known for his play, Faust (Part I, 1808;

  Part II, 1832).

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  Yeats. The works of the Irish poet and

  dramatist William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

  are characterized by the three major concerns

  of his life: art, Irish nationalism, and occult

  studies. He was a founding member of the

  Pre-Raphaelite Rhymer’s Club (pure poetry

  and aesthetics), and created the influential

  Abbey Theatre in Ireland. His late poetry is

  considered his greatest work, including

  "Byzantium," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Easter 1916," and "Leda and the Swan."

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  Orpheus. In Greek mythology, Orpheus

  was a beloved musician, the son of the muse

  Calliope and Apollo, and a follower of Dionysus

  (the god of wine and fertile crops). He married

  Eurydice, but she was killed by a snake while

  fleeing the advances of Aristaeus. Orpheus

  descended to Hades to find her. His playin
g of

  the lyre so delighted Hades himself that Orpheus

  was permitted to take Eurydice back with him,

  provided that he did not look at her until they

  arrived in the upper world. When they were

  nearly there, however, he no longer heard her

  behind him, and he looked back. Eurydice

  returned to Hades. He could not get over the

  loss of his love, and the women in his home of

  Thrace were so outraged that they tore him to

  pieces during a bacchanalian orgy. The pieces of

  his body were collected by the Muses, and buried

  at the foot of Mt. Olympus; but his head was car-

  ried out to sea and eventually came ashore on

  the island of Lesbos, where it became an oracle.

  RETURN TO PREVIOUS

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  Cocteau. Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

  was at the center of modernism, and at the

  vanguard of nearly every experimental artistic

  movement of the first half of the 20th Century,

  especially Cubism and Surrealism. (He was

  closely associated with Picasso and

  Stravinsky.) He was an innovator in many art

  forms, including ceramics, murals, compos-

  ing, poetry, drama, film, and fiction. Through

  all his works runs the theme of the poet-angel,

  defier of destiny and guardian of the divine in

  man, who risks being lost in the disorder of

  the modern world. One of his theatrical pro-

  ductions, Orphee (1926), was based on the

  Orpheus myth; this play was the basis of a

  later film written and directed by Cocteau in

  1950. (Other notable films are The Blood of

  the Poet, Beauty and the Beast, and Les Enfants Terrible.)

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  Joyce.

  Irish novelist, poet, short-story

  writer James Joyce (1882-1941) is best known

  for his revolutionary novel, Ulysses. His initial collection of stories, Dubliners (1914), is set in

  the beloved/despised homeland he left in

  1902 at the age of twenty. His first novel, the

  autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a

  Young Man (1916), describes his rebellion

  against his Jesuit upbringing, Catholicism,

  and Irish nationalism, and the development of

  his artist sensibility. He followed the sensa-

  tional publication of Ulysses (1922) with the

  experimental and complex Finnegans Wake

  (1939), characterized by the use of a unique

  language of invented words, puns, and

  obscure allusions.

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  Nietzsche. German philosopher, clas-

  sical scholar, and poet Frederich Nietszche

  (1844-1900) is noted for his theory of the uber-

  mensch (“superman”). Nietszche set himself

  against the systematic philosophy of the first part

  of the 19th Century, particularly that of Hegel.

  He tried to go beyond the rational to the irra-

  tional, human level. He rejected Christianity

  because he felt it directed human thought away

  from this world and into the next, thereby ren-

  dering man incapable of coping with the reality

  of everyday life; he said that Christianity teaches

  men how to die but not how to live. He went

  insane in 1889, and remained so until he died a

  year later.

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  Dos Passos. The American writer

  John Dos Passos (1896-1970), along with

  Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings,

  went to Europe during World War I to serve in

  the Ambulance Corps. This experience went

  into his first successful novel, Three Soldiers.

  His next important novel, Manhattan Transfer

  (1925), asserted the role of the artist as social

  critic, and utilized experimental devices like

  "newsreel," stream of consciousness, and cin-

  ematic techniques. His next three novels --

  The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money –

  were published together as U.S.A. (1937).

  This trilogy is noted for its use of "camera

  eye," newsreel sequences, free association,

  and other innovative techniques. U.S.A. is

  considered Dos Passos’ masterwork: a vast

  portrait of American life, with the nation itself

  as protagonist.

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  Henry James. American novelist,

  short-story writer, and critic Henry James

  (1843-1916) was a major contributor to the

  great tradition of the novel, and a master

  craftsman of prose. He brought his finely

  honed intelligence and perception to bear in

  the development of his main themes: the rela-

  tionship between innocence and experience

  (as exemplified by the contrasts between the

  uncultured but vibrant Americans and the

  cultivated but played-out Europeans; the

  dilemma of the artist in an alien society; and

  the difficult but crucial journey to self-knowl-

  edge. His artistic output was prodigious,

  including most notably the novels The Portrait

  of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.

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  Saroyan.

  Born in California of

  Armenian parents, William Saroyan (1908-

  1981) wrote short stories, novels and plays

  about the spiritual rootlessness of the immi-

  grant. His tales exalt personal emotion and

  freedom, and put forth kindness and brother-

  ly love as human ideals. He won early renown

  with his story collection, The Daring Young

  Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), and his

  play, The Time of Your Life (1939) won the

  Pulitzer Prize.

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  Rimbaud. French symbolist poet Arthur

  Rimbaud (1854-1891) wrote hallucinatory

  verse that strongly influenced the surrealists

  and modern poetry in general. His best-

  known works are Les Illuminations (1886), Le

  Bateau ivre (1871), and Une Saison en Enfir ( A Season in Hell) (1873) – a spiritual/psychological autobiography in prose-poem form. He

  broke away from a poor, religious, provincial

  childhood and fled at age fifteen to Paris,

  where he studied occult writings, Plato, the

  kabbala, and Buddhism. He deliberately

  debauched himself in order to reach a tran-

  scendent world through sin and suffering. He

  wrote all his published poetry before the age

  of twenty.

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/>   Nietzsche. German philosopher, clas-

  sical scholar, and poet Frederich Nietszche

  (1844-1900) is noted for his theory of the uber-

  mensch (“superman”). Nietszche set himself

  against the systematic philosophy of the first part

  of the 19th Century, particularly that of Hegel.

  He tried to go beyond the rational to the irra-

  tional, human level. He rejected Christianity

  because he felt it directed human thought away

  from this world and into the next, thereby ren-

  dering man incapable of coping with the reality

  of everyday life; he said that Christianity teaches

  men how to die but not how to live. He went

  insane in 1889, and remained so until he died a

  year later.

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  Wolfe. Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) was a

  novelist from North Carolina whose autobio-

  graphical works – Look Homeward, Angel, Of

  Time and the River, The Web and the Rock, and You Can’t Go Home Again – are characterized

  by intense individualism, exuberance of spirit,

  extravagant rhetoric, and the mystical cele-

  bration of youth, sex, and America. His four

  novels – powerful, lyrical, informed with an

  intense longing for some kind of faith – com-

  prise an American epic.

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  Gide. Like his contemporary, James

  Joyce, French writer Andre Gide (1869-1951)

  rebelled against his religious (Protestant)

  upbringing, and his reaction against the pro-

  hibitions of revealed religion informed his life

  and work. He gained notoriety for his open

  discussion of homosexuality and promotion of

  unabashed indulgence in the pleasures of the

  flesh. He was preoccupied with the question

  of man’s will, and agreed with Dostoyevsky

  (a strong influence) that it is subject to good

  and evil impulses, not related to love, hate, or

  self-interest. This led to his development of

  the concept of the acte gratuit ("gratuitous act") – a seemingly inexplicable action, motivated solely by a personal need to assert one’s

  individuality, and thus the only human behav-

  ior that reveals one’s essential character. (In

  the novel, Lafcadio’s Adventures, Gide pres-

  ents a murder as an acte gratuit.)

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