Provocations

by Camille Paglia

  If one were to judge by the women’s studies curriculum at most American colleges and universities over the past three decades, motherhood seemed permanently relegated to that distant past when the only roles open to women were wife or nun. The symbiosis of mothers and daughters was addressed in early women’s studies because of its potential transmission of negative stereotypes; analysis was generally confined to social dynamics, with little or no consideration of biological factors. Contemporary motherhood faded completely in post-structuralism, which ideologically excludes nature and biology from its discourse and which sees nothing impinging on human life except oppressive political power. By the late 1980s and ’90s, with the arrival of queer theory, an offshoot of post-structuralism, gender itself was declared to be entirely fictive, nothing but a series of language-mediated gestures.

  Jungian approaches have regrettably played no role whatsoever in high-profile academic feminism. Principal reasons for this include Jung’s religious orientation (his father was a Protestant minister) and his passion for nature. British and American academic feminists took up French Freud via the pretentiously convoluted Lacan instead. But Jung belongs in any humanities program that claims to be teaching “theory”: his archetypes constitute the universal tropes and basic structures of epic, drama, folklore, and fairy tale. Erich Neumann’s work, above all, assimilates or smoothly dovetails with major literature and art. Post-structuralism, on the other hand, which is predicated on the Francocentric linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, can claim success only with self-reflexive literature—that is, writing that is self-referential or self-canceling in the ironic modernist way. Post-structuralism has nothing useful to say about the great religious and mythological themes that have dominated the history of world art.

  There has been heavy Jungian influence on feminism outside the academy, however. Jung is a cardinal progenitor of the New Age movement, which developed from two important strands of 1960s thought—the back-to-nature imperative (which can be classified as vestigially Romantic) and multiculturalism, notably relating to East Asian and Native American religions. (I would identify my own work as New Age in this sense; I am an atheist who reveres the symbol systems of world religions.) Part of the Jungian legacy is the feminist goddess cult, an almost entirely off-campus phenomenon that may have peaked in the 1980s but is still flourishing less visibly today.

  The goddess has attracted different degrees of belief. In some cases, she is a metaphor—a symbol for “the goddess within,” the liberated female spirit. Leading examples of this approach are Sylvia Brinton Perera’s Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women (1981), which celebrates the Sumerian goddess Inanna-Ishtar, and Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Goddesses in Everywoman: Archetypes in Women’s Lives (1984; 20th anniversary edition, 2004). In other cases, the goddess is literally worshipped, through witch-cult or druidism, as a pagan substitute for the patriarchal judgmentalism of main-line Judeo-Christianity, with its anti-nature and anti-sex biases. One liberal theological branch of feminism has attempted to correct or reform Christianity by implanting it with female paradigms (“Our Father” becomes “Our Mother”).

  Goddess feminism went seriously wrong in accepting and promoting an error first made by the Swiss writer Johann Jakob Bachofen in his 1861 book, Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right). The worldwide ubiquity of prehistoric goddess artifacts led Bachofen to wrongly conclude that early societies were matriarchies, literally governed by women. His theory received wide circulation via the great British scholar of classical antiquity, Jane Harrison, who taught at Cambridge University from 1898 to 1922. I love Harrison’s books and have been specifically influenced by her theme of the chthonic (I say “chthonian”), an uncanny motif of earth cult. But she was simply mistaken about the existence of prehistoric matriarchy, for which no evidence has ever been found.

  When the matriarchal hypothesis resurfaced in Jungian feminism, it had turned into Arcadian soap opera: once upon a time, there were peaceful, prosperous, egalitarian, goddess-worshipping societies, happily thriving for eons until they were viciously overthrown by men—those greedy aggressors who invented violence, war, oppressive social hierarchies, and the unjust economic disparities we suffer from today. This naïve view of political history was promulgated in innumerable feminist books over two decades (and is still detectable in some ecofeminist denunciations of the capitalist exploitation of nature). Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade (1987), for example, has achieved near-canonical status despite its partisan sentimentalism and flimsy historical claims. It may even have influenced Dan Brown’s internationally bestselling mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code (2003), which alleges a suppressed tradition of woman power in early and medieval Christianity.

  A principal evangelist for matriarchy was the Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, who taught at UCLA. It is unfortunate that Gimbutas took as her Jungian mentor not the scholarly Erich Neumann but the popularizing Joseph Campbell, who had been a colleague of Neumann’s in the Swiss Eranos conferences and who edited six volumes of the Eranos Yearbooks. A teacher for thirty-eight years at Sarah Lawrence College, Campbell became known to the public through his 1949 bestseller, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (which evidently inspired George Lucas’ film saga, Star Wars), and through a 1988 public television series, The Power of Myth, where he was interviewed by Bill Moyers. Campbell encountered Bachofen’s theory of matriarchy in Jane Harrison and uncritically adopted and transmitted it. Later, Campbell officially endorsed Gimbutas by writing the foreword to her 1989 book, The Language of the Goddess. Both are deceased, but their alliance is memorialized today in the Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas Library at California’s Pacifica Graduate Institute.

  The ancient Great Mother was a dangerously dual figure, both benevolent and terrifying, like the Hindu goddess Kali. Neumann saw this clearly, but Campbell and the goddess’s feminist boosters did not: they sanitized and simplified, stripping away the goddess’s troublesome residue of the archaic and barbaric. Neumann cited and praised Bachofen’s pioneering work in prehistory but was careful to note that the latter’s idea of matriarchy (as Neumann puts it in The Great Mother) must be “understood psychologically rather than sociologically.” While quoting Bachofen in The Origins and History of Consciousness, Neumann insists that the matriarchal stage “refers to a structural layer and not to any historical epoch.” Such fine distinctions are precisely why I admire Neumann—because he scrupulously tempers speculation with evidence. This vexed issue of matriarchy, which remains one of the most dubious strains in feminism, is of special importance to me because it provoked some of my earliest public clashes with fellow feminists when I began teaching in the early 1970s.

  I would propose that Erich Neumann is the key for a future incorporation of Jung with academic feminism. But gender inquiry is only one aspect of Neumann’s work. I regard him as an accomplished culture critic whose synthesis of art, history, and psychology offers a more promising direction for culture studies than the current approved academic models, which are mainly derived from British or German Marxism (such as the Frankfurt School). Authentic cultural criticism requires saturation in scholarship as well as a power of sympathetic imagination. Neumann’s manipulation of material is improvisational rather than schematic, though he does draft illustrative psychic graphs that will inevitably seem quirky or bogus to the non-Jungian. But there is neither moralism nor a political agenda operating in his work.

  Because of the deftness with which he deploys archaeological and etymological evidence, Neumann belongs, in my view, to the 150-year-long dynasty of German scholars following the idealizing Winckelmann, such as Hermann Usener, Werner Jaeger, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who bitterly warred over the character and methodology of classical studies. I would call Neumann a historicist, except that the term “historicism” has been tainted by German nationalism and imperialism, with which the Zionist Neumann obviously had no connection. In his gravitation t
oward Hellenistic and Oriental (that is, Near Eastern) studies, which began to boom in the late nineteenth century, Neumann is in the line of Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, who had controversially expanded the definition of Greek culture beyond serene Athenian high classicism.

  Neumann always has a keen sense of historical context even as he weaves his eclectic details into a dense tapestry. He appropriates but not to fragment and destabilize, in the postmodernist way. In resituating facts, he retains their historical weight and gives them a psychological aura. Neumann accepts chronology and acknowledges cause and effect in history—which post-structuralism does not. But he also perceives deep cycles and repetitions, as do Vico, Nietzsche, and Yeats, so that history and nature become dimly analogous. I found this hybrid perspective in Neumann very appealing. I strongly believe in a mensurable time line, but it is not ascendant and progressive, in the Victorian way. My book, Sexual Personae (the title of which invokes Jung’s concept of “persona,” that is, the social mask), portrays art and history as an unstoppable, near-compulsive sequence of growth, loss, and revival.

  Neumann’s meshing of European with world cultures continues and extends Jung’s enterprise, whose syncretistic anthropology can be traced to Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Frazer’s epic work, published in twelve volumes from 1890 to 1912, had a huge impact on the first generation of modern writers and artists, the most famous example being T. S. Eliot’s apocalyptic 1922 poem, The Waste Land. I would call Neumann’s philology Frazerian. Like Frazer (whose “mass of ethnological material” he cites), Neumann creates a vast, dreamlike prose-poem, with startling and sometimes bizarre material floating in and out.

  Neumann’s scholarship is an art form partly because it emanates from his deep knowledge of and intimacy with the arts. He is the supreme exemplar of the Jungian flair for the visual image. Freud, in contrast, saw language as primary: he characterized the contents of the unconscious as entirely verbal; hence his device of the interminable “talking cure” to unravel neurosis. In Freud’s linguistic analysis of dreaming, every detail resolves into wordplay, whereas Jung treats dreams as visions, which may be symbolic but are potent in their own right.

  Neumann found revelation and inspiration in art. In his essay, “The ‘Great Experience,’ ” he says that effective art provides “a streaming moment, as flowing and ungraspable as the vitality of life itself”: “The infinite abundance of the art of humanity presupposes a corresponding abundance of human responses.” He speaks of “human openness and readiness to receive ‘great art’ or alternatively to remain closed and unmoved by it” (the latter being dismayingly rampant in recent academe).

  With notable catholicity (rare at the time), Neumann embraced both classical and avant-garde modern art. His essays teem with allusions to the visual arts of every period—Giotto, Bosch, Grünewald, Titian, Rembrandt, El Greco, Goya, Hokusai, the Impressionists, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Rousseau, Picasso, de Chirico, Klee, Chagall, Giacometti, Dalí. Also conversant with music, Neumann devotes an essay to Mozart’s The Magic Flute and elsewhere cites such composers as Bach, Beethoven, Verdi, and Wagner. His literary taste is similarly cultivated—Shakespeare, Cervantes, Goethe, Balzac, Poe, Baudelaire, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Zola, Thomas Mann, James Joyce.

  For Neumann, art exists as form, materials, and technique and not just content—to which art has too often been reduced in Freudian interpretations. Freud’s analysis of the psychodrama of the modern bourgeois family was unsurpassed, but his discussions of art were uneven. Although he collected archaeological artifacts, Freud had little feeling for the visual arts or for music, and he tended to read the art work as a neurotic symptom. Neumann’s article, “Leonardo da Vinci and the Mother Archetype,” pays due homage to Freud’s important 1910 essay on Leonardo but is in fact a vigorous rebuttal. Neumann disputes Freud’s account of the “pathological” genesis of Leonardo’s art and asserts that Freud distorted facts about Leonardo’s childhood. For Neumann, Leonardo is “a Western phenomenon,” like Goethe an example of the titanic Western artist properly raised to “hero” status, as in Michelangelo and Beethoven. In the Jungian way, Neumann sees the creative man as “bisexual,” even “feminine,” because of his high “receptivity.” Neumann wonderfully evokes Leonardo’s “loneliness” and compares it to Nietzsche’s. This essay alone would be enough to establish Neumann’s virtuosity as a culture critic.

  Freud’s adoption by Lacanian post-structuralism compounded his basic problem—that is, his overestimation of language in our neurological makeup. The brain has many chambers: Homo sapiens also thinks in flashing images, which have become primary in what I have elsewhere called our modern Age of Hollywood. Erich Neumann was exquisitely attuned to the evolution and permutations of artistic style; he also had an awareness of the spirituality of art as well as a sophisticated understanding of the creative process—a subject too much neglected today. Furthermore, Neumann’s time frame vastly exceeds that of post-structuralism. Foucault, for example, was focused on the Enlightenment and its sequelae in Europe and North America; he knew little about world cultures or even about European classical antiquity until late in his career.

  Any major theory of culture must begin with prehistory and the development of agrarian society out of the nomadic. Here is where the Jungian approach, with its attentiveness to nature, demonstrates its superiority to the strict social constructionism of post-structuralism. The deletion of nature from academic gender studies has been disastrous. Sex and gender cannot be understood without some reference, however qualified, to biology, hormones, and animal instinct. And to erase nature from the humanities curriculum not only inhibits students’ appreciation of a tremendous amount of great, nature-inspired poetry and painting but also disables them even from being able to process the daily news in our uncertain world of devastating tsunamis and hurricanes.

  A passage from Erich Neumann’s superb essay, “Art and Time,” displays his scope and quality of mind:

  How can the individual, how can our culture, integrate Christianity and antiquity, China and India, the primitive and the modern, the prophet and the atomic physicist, into one humanity? Yet that is just what the individual and our culture must do. Though wars rage and peoples exterminate one another in our atavistic world, the reality living within us tends, whether we know it or not, whether we wish to admit it or not, toward a universal humanism.

  This is a stirring manifesto for a new, comprehensive scholarship, a marriage of art and science as well as an enlightened multiculturalism.

  While writing this lecture for the Mainzer Series, I found (through the magic of the Web) a rivetingly detailed article on Erich Neumann’s life and career by the Israeli journalist Aviva Lori which was published earlier this year [January 28, 2005] in the daily newspaper Ha’aretz. It was commissioned to coincide with a symposium held at Kibbutz Givat Haim Ihud to honor the centenary of Neumann’s birth. To my surprise and delight, a conference about Neumann, sponsored by the Austrian Association of Analytical Psychology, was also held in Vienna last August to mark that centenary. It appears that the Zeitgeist—a force that Neumann says drives creative artists—is preparing the way for a Neumann revival.

  * [A slightly expanded version of a lecture in the Otto and Ilse Mainzer Lecture Series, sponsored by Deutsches Haus at New York University, November 10, 2005. Published in Arion, Winter 2006.]

  57

  SLIPPERY SCHOLARSHIP*

  JOHN BOSWELL, SAME-SEX UNIONS IN PREMODERN EUROPE

  In 1980, John Boswell came to attention with a long scholarly book, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, which won the American Book Award. Even those who did not read it may have been aware of the controversy over the appearance of the contemporary word “gay” in a book about the Middle Ages, a usage criticized by some as anachronistic and tendentious.


  As the first openly gay professor to win tenure at an Ivy League university, Boswell made history. Many substantive questions raised about his work have been eclipsed by his general celebrity in a period when gay studies began to enter college curricula. Since his big book, Boswell has published The Kindness of Strangers (about the medieval treatment of children) and been awarded the A. Whitney Griswold Professorship of History, as well as chairmanship of the history department at Yale.

  In his new book, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, Boswell, conceding to his scholarly opponents, abandons his earlier reliance on the word “gay.” This retreat has scarcely been noticed in the extraordinary notoriety the book has inspired even before publication. Boswell’s thesis—that homosexual marriages were sanctioned and routinely conducted by the medieval Catholic Church—was aired on network television, publicized nationally in the Doonesbury comic strip, and promoted in a full page of a major magazine by his commercial-press editor, who is hardly qualified to vouch for the book’s arcane scholarship.

  Evaluation of serious academic books does not normally occur in such an atmosphere of highly politicized pressure. Boswell states that Same-Sex Unions is directed toward “readers with no particular expertise in any of the specialties” in which he claims “mastery.” But no one without special knowledge could be expected to absorb, or even comfortably read, a text so crammed with labyrinthine footnotes and ostentatiously untransliterated extracts from ancient Greek and Old Church Slavonic.