Philip José Farmer and
the White Goddess
Casey Fredericks
Philip José Farmer's novel, Flesh, was inspired by the
mythological system which Robert Graves formulated over his long career
as poet, novelist, and critic, and which culminated in The White
Goddess--purportedly a non-fictional statement of his mythological
credo. Subtitled "A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth," Graves's book
1 is a massive, grotesque compilation of pseudo-scholarship, brimming
with random bits of folklore, imaginary natural history, arcane
religious rituals, and esoteric mythological erudition, ranging from
the Mediterranean to Northern European cultures, and from the
Paleolithic through the Mediaeval periods. This is, in fact, the
recording of a poet's private vision, on the order of Yeats's A
Vision or Pound's Guide to Kultur, and central to it a an
imaginative construct is Graves's self-announced "theme" of the Triune
Goddess who is an archetype of woman in her three life-phases of
Virgin, Matron, and Hag (or as bride, mother, and layer-out,
respectively). 2 Her male, counterpart, representing the poet himself,
is a Dying God, 3 merely an adjunct to the Mistress who is both
all-powerful Goddess and poetic Muse. All of this may be read as
another of Graves's many sorties against modern cultureI which are,
only half-serious and which often read like academic "put-ons. 4 The
author vacillates between deliberate mystery and barely comprehensible
irony in his tone, yet his overall intention is to advise us to restore
vitality and interest to daily modern living by substituting a
purposefully avowed primitivism, symbolized by female dominance and
matriarchal codes, for the sterility and boredom of scientism and
technocracy, thus making way for a rebirth of true poetry and free
imaginative creativity. The reign of the Mother will also mean the
victory of sexual expression, of the unconscious, and of instinct and
intuition. To deny Her, by rejecting the mythic, primitive, and
ritualistic, is to abandon our own animality, an intrinsic part of our
make-up, hence, to profane and desensitize our human potential. To
Graves's mind, there is just as much a human capacity for growth in
emotional sensitivity as in scientific understanding.
Although Graves's conception of the White Goddess is the
fictional hypothesis for Flesh, it really serves Farmer as a
point of departure for a different kind of speculation. Farmer
eschews the entire issue of poetry and the imagination so essential
to Graves and, instead, is concerned to portray an
entire futuristic world, alternative to our own, which worhips
the Goddess and preserves her fertility religion. The
critical dimension in this book, as in so much of Farmer's
other s-f, lies in its, juxtaposition of another kind of sexual
code and erotic sensibility with that native to our own time
and place, leading to the reader's new understanding of the
relativity of our own preconceptions about human love. Insofar
as Farmer identifies the sex drive as the foundation of human
culture, being latent in so many of our social rites and institutions,
he is more explicitly Freudian than Graves is.
After eight centuries of exploring the stars, an American
spaceship, the Terra, returns to Earth. The planet has, in the
interval, suffered an ecological disaster so complete as to
have ended our world altogether and ushered in a new era of
agricultural primitivism. The dominant religion is that of the
Great Mother Goddess under her three aspects of maiden (Virginia),
matron (Columbia), and Hag (Alba). This system of archaic
religious practices, taboos, and credos in many ways recalls
the primeval world of Frazer's Golden Bough, but the
world of the Goddess is a naturalistic one like our own, not a
supernatural one: we never see the Mother, only her human representatives
and the effect of her cult on the lives of humans.
Into this world of mother-right and female dominance the
Terra brings Peter Stagg, starship captain, who is captured
and biologically altered. Antlers are grafted onto his head, and he
becomes the Great Stag, the Sunhero, the living embodiment of
power and virility for the entire nation of Deecee. In reality,
the strange antlers are specially adapted organs; though Stagg
develops a tremendous appetite for food and drink, he is rewarded
with a correspondingly tremendous satyriasis that makes him
capable of inseminating the entire nation's women. His sexual
career in Deecee also traces the path of a solar myth, as he
moves north from Washington, D.C., in the direction of Albany,
N.Y., beginning the winter solstice of December 21 in the South
where he impregnates Virginia, and ending at the summer solstice
of June 21 in the North where Alba, the toothless hag,
will cut his throat and bury his remains to insure the fertility
of soil and crops. And in the next year the seasonal pattern
will recur all over again with a new Sunhero.
Stagg is really two people. His "nomal" self, deriving from
our world, dreads individual death when the end of the Dying
God will mean real, permanent death for him, but an even greater
source of horror is his loss of rationality, of control over
his own actions, and even of the entire conscious mind when the
antlers assert their overpowering needs for food, sex, and violence.
Five of the eight occurrences of the word "flesh" do, in
fact, refer to Sunherols loss of individual ego in the blind,
ecstatic, Dignysian frenzy generated by the rule of appetite
and emotion. 5 Ultimately, Stagg can reassert control over his
own body only by starving himself, thereby inhibiting his sex
drive. Only by self-inhibition, too, can the masculine, control
oriented "rational" values of our civilization reassert their
dominance. Stagg is thus a representative of the kind of Western
civilization that is depicted in the pages of Freud's
Civilization and Its Discontents, Marcusel's Eros and
Civilization, and Brown's Love's Body in simplest outlines,
this libidinal theory supposes that a progressive human culture is
made possible only by a process of sublimation--what is sacrificed
in individual sexual expression and free erotic activity
is regained, in displaced form, in the permanent, stable institutions
of society. In such a theory, civilization is regarded as the
byproduct of inhibited eroticism. And for their
part, Stagg, his crew, and the starship itself are the most
perfect representatives of the male-dominated, assertive,
power-oriented, and technology-based society that produced
them. On the one hand, we are told explicitly that the mission
of-the star8hip was to locate "virgin planets" (p.21). On the
other, there were no women on the Terra, and despite being
helped through the eight hundred year ordeal by suspended ani-
mation, Stagg is fairly screaming his sexual repression when he
returns to Earths "Eight hundred years without seeing a single,
solitary, lone forlorn woman! ... I feel like Walt Whitman when
he boasted he jetted the stuff of future republics. I've a dozen
republics in me!" (p. 22). The restraints placed on the
starmen in order to succeed in the highest enterprise of our
masculine civilization to-date--space travel--correspond in
their intensity, but in a reverse direction, to the demands
for libidinal release required by the Goddess's world.
However, it is most accurate
not to characterize New Earth
as either utopia or dystopia,
but as a fictional universe
that stands in an ambivalent
relationship to our own "real"
one. Simultaneously it offers
opportunities for greater creativity
and more violent destruction. Correspondingly, the
Mother herself is a Jungian
"coincidence of opposites," being a figure both good and
evil, sexual temptress and castrating ogress, at once benign
and destructive. And so, too,
Stagg's career is at once a
sexual wish-fulfilment and the,
ultimate demonization and dehumanization of the total man,
who is reduced to being a function only of his non-rational
faculties. He is thus an ambivalent answer to the specula-
tive question, "What if man did
have unlimited sexual capacity? 6 Farmer's own attitude,
which modulates between the serious and the outright satiric
throughout the novel, seems to re-enforce the ambiguity of New
Earth's relationship to the present world. (We are not sure
whether we are supposed to sympathize with the characters and
identify with their problem, orto distance ourselves from
them, particularly through satiric laughter.)
First, New Earth's advantages. The rites of the Mother promote
human fertility and environmental improvement in a world
devastated by ecological cataclysm, a world nearly sterilized,
and still severely underpopulated. Perhaps this best explains
why its only technology deals with biology and human sexuality,
for it was our own civilization's continued assaults on nature
in an attempt to exploit its resources to the full that brought
about the collapse. Like Frankenstein on a macrocosmic scale,
Western man experimented to tap new power sources in the very
core of the Earth but exceeded the physical limits of the planet
(pp. 27-8, cf. p. 67). Even from outer space the planet
looks totally different from the one the starmen left (pp.19-20).
The world of the Mother is also superior psychologically insofar
as its regular calendar of rituals and ceremonies allows
for release of inhibitions as an accepted part of social life:
periodic sexual orgies, wild drunkenness, blood sports, temple
prostitution, and sadistic violence are the norm in this culture.
It is a world controlled by feeling, rather than thought,
a world where the heights of both pleasure and pain may, and
should, be experienced. Thus here again we seem to be dealing
with that "oral" phase of Farmer's literary persona mentioned
by Leslie Fiedler, 7 for the mythical dimensions of the world of
the Goddess are based in large part on the Gargantuan "appetites"
(for food, drink, sex, violence) of its denizens. This
is a world that values the intensity of experience above all,
and this attitude in turn invests every fundamental act like
eating or sexual intercourse with deeper emotional satisfaction.
Fiedler and Franz Rottensteiner have both said, that all of
his books are about sex, religion, and violence. 8 They are correct,
yet the very fact that the three come clustered together
in a trinity presupposes some larger principles at work. Rollo
May suggests the term "daemonic" for this same triad and means
by it to identify man's inner, unconscious drive to transcend
his current limitations--whether imposed on h m from within or
without--and to achieve a new, larger "self.9 The "daemonic"
thus would not only characterize Stagg as a savage god, often
rendered sub-human by his own abnormal powers, but it would go
far to explain the violent character of all of Far7ner's supermen
(as in the World of Tiers series) and specifically of his
Tarzan, who is his most perfect representative of daemonic passion
and power. This same daemonic triad might also lead us to
second Fiedler's view that Farmer's essential contribution to
s-f is located in the field of depth psychology. Beneath the
exciting and racy adventure yarns that owe so much to Burroughs
there is an awareness, based on a thorough understanding of
psychoanalytical literature, that man must always be searching
for new, creative confrontations with the world. Hence sex, religion,
and violence as man's three basic, elemental drives to
help him achieve ever more intense, ever more creative experience.
I would further speculate that the "crudity" in style and
plot-construction that Fiedler, Rottensteiner, and Damon Knight
have all recognized as typical throughout even the best of Farmer's
works is isomorphic with the daemonic atmospheres the direct,
frenzied, Burroughsian pace of Farmer's adventures mirror
the daemonic passions of his heroes.
From the satiric perspective, too, New Earth appears superior
to our own, for our social rites and institutions seem to
pale beside the undiluted myths and rituals in the realm of the
Mother- thus, in Deecee, the Washington Monument has been reerected
explicitly as a giant phallic symbol, and the U.S. Capitol now
sports two domes to symbolize the twin breasts of the
Mother; the White House Honour Guards are bow-brand-ishing Amazons,
while Georgetown University now houses the castrated musician-priests
of the Goddess; social fraternities like Moose,
Elk, and Lions are now full-fledged totem clans, the Speaker of
the House in Congress goes by the name of John Barleycorn (the
sacrificial "corn spirit" who by his name symbolized fermentation in
Robert Burns's poem 10, and baseball is a sadistic rite,
played with a spiked ball that is hurled about in order to
spill as much blood as possible.
Sometimes, in fact, this kind of satire is purely verbal,
and Deecee and the other nations and institutions of New Earth
often come down to being nothing more than a series of word plays.
There can be a fairly gratuitous travesty--like "Deecee"
for Washington, D.C.--to more complex sequences of associations,
like the nation "Caseyland," named after the K. of C. (Knights
of Columbus), which gives away its Roman Catholic inspiration,
and all of whose citizens are named "Casey"; most telling of
all, its national sport is baseball, and the captains of its
teams always have the name "Mighty Casey.,, In another briefer
sequence like this, Alba, the woman-as-crone whose name means
"White," is cleverly tied to the partly homonymous city of
"Albany."
Sometimes, too, figurative statements from our world become
literally true in the future: "Kill the ump" means just that in
Farmer's version of the game, and George Washington's honourific
title, "father of his country," becomes a mythical fable about
the greatest procreator of them all. That the many word-plays
form complete systems of reference is a striking feature of
Flesh. This kind of wit is recurrent enough to call to mind
that exuberant Joycean punster of "Riders of the Purple Wage."
Perhaps, though, Freud is as much an inspiration as Joyce.
In particular, the name of still another nation of New Earth,
the "Pants-Elfs," comes close to Freud's discussion in Jokes
and Their Relation to the Unconscious. The first part of the
name is a shortened homonym of "pansies"; the second is a synonym
for "fairies." Thus "Pants-Elfs" is a barely disguised slur
against a nation of fierce homosexual warriors. A second pun
shares both a Freudian and Joycean dimensions "Homeycums"
(pp. 119, 125). One of the Pants-Elfs, a would-be lover, calls
Stagg this as a term of endearment in baby-talk, but "cums" is
also a well-known obscene verb and "Homeycums" is a barely
disguised reference to the Stagg's appetite for orgasms. Thus
Farmer's puns contain a "latent" (that is, sexual) meaning in
addition to the obvious "manifest" one.
Still other contrasts between old and New Earth show the
latter to advantage. In particular, two other starmen represent
sexual codes that many would already find arbitrary and archaic
in 1982. Sarvant, the ship's chaplin, is a religious fundamentalist
whose outmoded spiritual fervour is conducive to masochism,
and he has much of both the would-be martyr and the sexual
pervert in his make-up. Finding himself in a world of constant
sexual overstimulation puts his archaic beliefs under too
much pressure. Finally, he falls in love with a woman who happens
to be barren, and when he discovers that she is a participant
in promiscuous rites at a certain temple to cure her infertility
he is overwhelmed by conflicting emotions and, finally, he rapes
her. For profaning the worship of the Mother, Sarvant is hauled
off and hung by a mob, though to his own narrow religious
sensibility the woman was never anything more than a cheap whore.
Churchill, the First Mate, fares better, falling
in love with the daughter of a wealthy merchant sailor; the
love is reciprocated and all is well, until it is revealed that
the bride-to-be is pregnant by Sunhero. This is cause for rejoicing
in the girl's family, but a rather severe blow to
Churchill's ego--it had always been his male fantasy, primitive
in its own way, to marry a virgin (p. 110).
However, it is important to remember that the world of the
Mother, as an alternative to our own, is limited and relative.
For in addition to the nation of Deecee, which maintains the
worship of the Goddess in its "orthodox" (that is, Gravesian)
form, New Earth contains other viable cultures that stand in
altering contrast to both Deecee and our Earth in regards to
both sex and religion. In addition to the Pants-Elfs and Caseylanders,
one should also mention the only nation resembling
anything like a world-power, the Karelians, Finnish pirates
whose Empire is scattered over three continents.
Even in the central issue of sexual mores, the religion of
the Mother is not always superior. One evidence is still another
love-relationship in the novel: between Stagg when he is in
his right mind and a young captive virgin from Caseyland.
Whereas Stagg acquired his first wife, Virginia, simply by
taking her as Sunhero, he has to win Mary Casey under that nation's
code of allowing her to remain a virgin, proving himself
through his rational self's disciplined control over the
Stagg appetites (even here we might suspect a half-serious
parody of American boy-girl courtship behavior typical of
the Fifties).
An even better clue to the non-absoluteness of the Goddess's
world is evident in Stagg's fate. Ultimately, to be sure, the
captain cannot escape his preordained mythical doom. Though
Stagg escapes the Deecee for a time, Alba finally does recapture
and sacrifice him; the entire myth of the Dying God is
completed. However, the sophisticated technology of the Terra
is able to resurrect Stagg, though the brain damage incurred
while dead leaves him without any memory of his days as Sun:
hero. Yet his death-rebirth pattern--with the rebirth deriving
from the male-generated technology of our civilization--undercuts
the power of the Mother-system as depicted by Graves,
where the Mother herself is the final and sole repository of
all capacity for death or rebirth. In fact, it is highly significant
that the end of the novel dissociates into two distinct
perspectives that leave open the question of the relative superiority
of "male" and "female" cultures.
On the male side, Stagg and his crew steal women from Earth
and again leave for the stars with the intention of re-establishing
society as they had known it in another world. More
than once this act of starting a new civilization is likened to
rape, and the kidnapping of wives is compared to Livy's story
of the Rape of the Sabine Women, a tale associated with the
founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus:
"Violence, abduction, rape,"
Churchill said. "What a way to
start a brave new world!"
"Is there any other way?"
Wang said.
"Don't forget the Sabine women," Steinborg said...
Churchill frowned. There
seemed no way to get away from
violence. But then it had always been so through men's
history.
(p. 146)
Norman Brown was soon to express this same notion of the origin
of higher (scientific, technological) culture in male violence,
best symptomized by the violent power-oriented act of rape (and
BroWn also analyzes the Rape of the @qlbines as a mythical
statement of the origin of culture). 11 Yet even here there are
ironies: Stagg has two wives, the Caseyland maid and his pregnant
Virginia--surely to prove an explosive enage á trois--
and Churchill is well aware that he has just begun a life-long
challenge from his new wife to keep taming the shrew.
The very last word, in the Epilogue, is reserved for the
Goddess and the feminine viewpoint after all. Three priestesses
representing the three (Gravesian) phases of Woman meet to assess
events and plan future strategy, for they have by no means
been defeated by the starmen out of the masculine past. The
Mother still rules Earth and may some day gain sway over all of
mankind, even out among the stars; after all, the Dying God
really did die and Virginia is still his bride.
The Epilogue is a deliberately vague and mysterious passage,
unlike any other in the book, and makes one think of Todorov's
term, "fantastic," referring to fictional worlds that are
ambivalently structured in order to conceal the difference between
the natural and supernatural laws. 12
In particular, the enigmatic last three sentences of the
Epilogue, being a reminiscence of the opening witches-scene of
Shakespeareis Macbeth, heightens the mysterious atmospheres:
The maiden says, When shall we three meet again?
The matron replies, When man is born and dies and is born.
The hag replies, When the battle is lost and won.
The matron's reply seems to refer to the Dying God, who is born
and dies and is born (that is, "reborn") in the cyclical vegetative
myth, but we should also remember that in the Goddess's
religion the god is the mythical prototype for every man. Thus
one other meaning for the riddling answer of the matron is that
every time a man is born there shall be a woman present--his
mother, of course.
The hag's reply, however, refers to the most famous and
eternal battle of the sexes, and one specific interpretation of
her riddling answer is that woman is the matrix out of which
all change and human history must emerge; that wherever time
and humanity intersect, there too must woman be (the alternations
of time are suggested by the word "battle," by the rhythm
of "lost and won," as well as by the matron's "born and dies
and is born," the latter being reinterpreted anew in light of
the hag's response).
Thus, this very last sentence of Flesh leaves the work
openended in the sense that the conflict between male and female
can never be resolved totally in favour of either sex so lorg
as human history remains a creative interplay between conscious
and unconscious, reason and instinct, the erotic and inhibitory,
the emotional and the contemplative, science and religion, tech-
nology and ritual. Famer leaves his fictional universe in a
state of dynamic incertitude as to its future, with both male
and female societies in full flower. Insofar as human history
requires both male and female components, Farmer's vision of
humanity is anything but sexist: it is, rather, androgynous.
FOOTNOTES
1) References are to the."Amended and Enlarged Edition," Noonday Press, 1966.
2) John Vickery, Robert Graves and the White Goddess is a readable
survey of this theme throughout Graves's corpus. Not mentioned
by Vickery is Graves's Watch the North Wind Rise (also
published as Seven Days in New Crete), a novelistic treatment
of the White Goddess that should be read closely with Robert
Canary's analysis, "Utopian and Fantastic Dualities in Robert
Graves's Watch the North Wind Rise," Science-Fiction Studies 1
(1973-4), 2 -255. This view of triune woman was anticipated
in Freud's essay, "The Theme of the Three Caskets" (1913),pub-
lished in vol. 12 of James Strachey's edition of the Complete
Works (London, 1958), 290-301.
3) In this and many other of his mythological ideas, Graves is
indebted to Frazer's Golden Bough (for details, see Vickery,
1-25), where one repeated and essential image is that of a vegetative
deity whose career of birth, waxing powers, waning potency, death,
and rebirth is modelled on the annual cycle of
seasons. Graves retains the Dying God as his own central masculine
symbol but makes the male secondary to the female, the latter
remaining the inexhaustible repository of power, fertility,
and immortality. Graves's major treatment of the Dying God as
such is in his novel, King Jesus (for which, see Vickery 47-53).
Two important general studies of Frazerian ideas and themes are
Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank (New York, 1966), 187-291,
and John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough
(Princeton, 1973).
4) Northrop Frye, "Graves, Gods and Scholars," Hudson Review 9
(1956), 298-302, recognizes that much of what Graves has to say
is sly, obscure satire against the modern world -- and his
readers.
5) On p.18 Stagg is "surrounded by flesh" in the mob scene at
his investiture as Dying God; on p.90 the god goes berserk and
rides a giant stag into a crowd of priestesses--a "trap of lace
and flesh"--dismembering and decapitating the women; on p. 96,
Mary Casey refers to the Stagg body as a "cage of flesh"; on
p.99 Stagg refers to his nightly orgies as "visions of screaming
white flesh"; on p.119 his powerful hunger becomes a "fire
raging within him, flesh devouring flesh." The other three references
are no less significant and related to the title of the
booki on P-38 the female biological surgeons of the Mother are
described as "artists in flesh", on P.122 the Pants-Elfs give
as the rationale for repressive treatment of women in their society
that "the flesh was weak," and on p.160 Mary Casey expresses the
same sentiment from the Caseyland perspective, declaring that it
is obvious that men and women who spend time alone "must succumb
to the flesh."
These and all subsequent page references are to the expanded
Doubleday version of 1968 (in paperback, reprinted by Signet
Science Fiction in 1969); Beacon Press published a shorter ver-
sion in 1960.
6) Stagg himself recognizes the ambiguity- "...last night I enjoyed
what I was doing. I had no inhibitions. I was living the, secret
dream of every man--unlimited opportunity and inexhaustible ability.
I was a god!" (P. 59, cf. p. 86).
7) "Thanks for the Feast," in The Book of Philip José Farmer
(DAW Books, 1973), esp. 238-9.
8) Fiedler, ibid., 236-7; Rottensteiner,"Playing Around with
Creation: Philip José Farmer," Science-Fiction Studies 1
(1973-4), 97. Unfortunately the latter article is almost solely the
author's expression of his distaste for Farmer precisely in the
three areas under discussion, and it is prescriptive criticism
rather than analysis. For further criticism of Rottensteiner,
see Damon Kniaht Science-Fiction Studies 1 (1973-4), 219-20 and
2 (1974-5), 89.
9) Love and Will (New York, 1969), esp. 163-4 and 170-72; cf.
Power and Innocence: A Search for the Sources of Violence (New
York, 1972), for the transforming power of violence.
10) He turns up in Frazer's Golden Bough, and it is there that
Farmer seems to have found him and not in Burns or Graves. See
Vol. 5 [vol. 1 of Adonis Attis Osiris ] (3rd edition, London,
1914), 230-31. However, the figure of Tom Tobacco, who is
clearly a doublet of Barleycorn, seems to be solely Farmer's
conception and is a neat Frazerian imitation.
11) Love's Body (New York, 1966), 15 (the ancient reference is
Livy 1.4-5).
I should at least mention Susan Brownmiller Against Our
Will: Men, Women, and Rape (Simon and Schuster, 1975, a new
Feminist work that regards rape as a sustained political mechanism
by means of which men intimidate women and keep them in
their place; she regards rape as the sine qua non of
male-oriented Western civilization.
12) Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, R. Howard, trans. (Ithaca:
Cornell Paperbacks), 1975, with Forward by Robert Scholes. I
have reviewed the theory in "A Structuralist View of Fantasy,"
Extrapolation 16 (Dec. 1974), 45-47.