Iron John: A Book About Men
Robert Bly,
Addison Wesley
MYTHIC heroes are not the only people who must venture into dark, mysterious forests.
One of these wilder shores is the Adyar Bookshop in Sydney, tranquil havens strong on crystals and other paraphernalia anathemic to the rugged hearts of the Right.
Nonetheless, it is here that they will find a subtler understanding of "gender politics", including the hysteria now raging in American colleges about date rape and curricula focused on the works of dead white males.
A notable treasure is Robert Bly's Iron John: A Book About Men, about as comforting a broadside as you are likely to find against the idea that men must be reconstructed, and that a father's true role is to pitch in postnatally with nappy changing and formula furing.
Like the relatively few conservatives who grapple with socio-sexual issues, Bly is a 1960s rebel grown wiser. For the last 20-odd years, he has been living in Minnesota, brooding about the male role, being a Jungian analyst and producing the odd slim volume, mostly of poetry, while American publishers otherwise turned up their noses just as they did with that other heretic, Camille (Sexual Personae) Paglia.
Throughout the 1980s, Bly conducted workshops for fraught American males, exposing them to large therapeutic doses of myth and fairytale. Notably the Brothers Grimm, from whom he takes his exemplary story -- Iron John, or Eisenhans.
Iron John is a passionate, forceful yet sensitive creature rather on the lines of Zorba the Greek (far removed from Sylvester Stallone), whose qualities are totally missing in the modern Soft Male, those "lovely, valuable people ... not interested in harming the earth or starting wars". The trouble is, though, that the Soft Male is incapable of starting much at all, so terrified of being labelled a sexist pig that he has fallen into an impotent puppyhood, trotting at the heels of a radiantly energetic woman.
Well, so she seems. Jungian psychiatrists are not the only ones who have noticed that life with a Soft Male, eternally asking "what would you like me to do now, dear", both in bed and behind the vacuum cleaner, can set women yearning for dark decisive truckies -- a phenomenon the French seem to have noticed as early as 1968, going on Louis Malle's film of the period, Milou in May.
Bly's diagnosis is that his unhappy audiences lack a necessary fierceness and resolve -- not to go gunning for Commies or beating up poofters, nor looking under beds for Soft Women and Hard Men to savage on their mistresses' behalf. Instead, they must learn "joyful decisiveness".
Far from exerting a malevolent patriarchy, Bly says men, especially fathers, have been going downhill ever since the Industrial Revolution when they were no longer able to take adolescent boys aside to discover various male competencies in workshops, fields and forests. Instead of developing esteem and a sense of what masculinity is all about, boys were increasingly reared indoors by mothers, imbibing the idea that what fathers did was grubby and inferior compared with the more spiritual and cultured yearnings of women.
These cravings for gentility and the sanitisation of life, so marked in today's baby boomers, are nothing new. They are the dark flipside of education and upward mobility, and not surprisingly, D.H. Lawrence, reared in industrial England by a dominant mother, emerges as an early example of Soft Malehood, albeit one who by mid-life was working overtime on the problem. Such a boy, Bly maintains, can take one of two routes -- he identifies with women, shares their confidences and feels ashamed of his imputed crimes, or he determines to acquire what he imagines, erroneously, are proper manly attributes. Both courses are equally disastrous.
In metaphysical terms, the absent father causes a vacuum to appear in the boy's psyche, which rapidly fills with demons. Never trust anyone over 30, especially old men wanting to send you to Vietnam, and otherwise confirm your worst suspicions that age and treachery will beat youth and talent every time.
Hence the anguish over President Kennedy's death, the boos for Darth Vader in Star Wars, and the popularity of Dead Poets' Society or anything else starring Robin Williams.
Bly draws widely on coming to manhood in other societies -- Amerindian, African, Aboriginal, Viking -- with special emphasis on the role of older males generally, and the often highly feminine values which underlie their apparent "patriarchy". He makes nice observations, too, about television and comic strips, where the male has declined into an ineffectual dolt who spends his evenings slumped on the sofa while his wife and children merrily outwit him.
Iron John, which offers a solution to this malaise, is the usual story about a king's son. When the neighbouring forest becomes a sort of Bermuda Triangle in which hunters and hounds disappear, the king's men drag a pool and discover the culprit, a wild shaggy man whom they promptly lock in a cage in the palace courtyard.
In fairytales, anything found near water or in a forest is trying to tell us something -- Lawrence's Mellors in the woods, Thomas Mann's lissom Taddeuz on the beach. And in this case it is that to release Iron John, who has very decently handed back the lad's golden ball, the boy must steal the key from under the Queen's pillow.
Most of the young men in Bly's workshops are horrified by this. Why can't the boy just ask his mother nicely? Create some kind of consensus or win:win situation?
Sorry, says Bly. To start on the path to manhood, a boy must be much tougher. Decisive. Even devious. He cites Hamlet, who despite some ravings and trickery turns wimpish whenever he comes near his mother, and eventually drives Ophelia crazy. Soft males are bad news for young women, although the more educated ones, who remain out of touch with their bodies until 30-something, seem slow to make the connection. (Why else all those books about indecisive, non-committing men?)
The king's son, however, is bold enough to steal the key and scarper with Iron John, who sets him to guard a sacred pool. Inevitably, he fails, and is sent to work as a scullion at another royal household. But should he need help, all he has to do is call, and Iron John, who has abundant treasure, will come to his rescue.
There now begins what Bly calls the "ashes period", something primitive cultures understand well, allowing young males a time of hibernation -- Vikings called it "cinder biting" -- which encourages introspection and self-discovery before springing forth with new vigour. Contrast western society, where a boy who heeds this instinct and drops out of university is considered doomed and disturbed.
By the end of the story, the king's son has come to the attention of the king's daughter, and has single-handedly overcome the king's enemies in the forest on three occasions with the aid of a horse and armour magically provided by Iron John.
The message is that to become a man, a boy needs to get in touch with a wilder, gutsier, more intuitive side of himself, which can not be found sitting at the feet of women. It can only be learnt from close encounters with older men, and breaking free into an ecstasy of discovery. Some, though, seem to attempt it on their own, like the boy in Peter Schaffer's Equus, whose rituals by night with the horses brings home to the psychiatrist the aridity of his own soul.
Like the similar transcendent moments experienced by male shamans, and by initiates through history, this is a world away from adopting the feminine values of women, the only alternative we can now imagine to becoming a hard, dry economic rationalist or an entrepreneurial Rambo.
But how it is to be achieved in a society where myths exist only to be exploded, and where fathers and other older men spend their days in high-rise offices, allegedly inflicting misery on other people though probably just being miserable themselves, is the big question.
Bly admits he was lucky -- his father was a farmer who provided many hours of warm male communication. But he worries that with even mothers now, being absent, a similar demon-filled vacuum may soon appear in young girls, causing them to suspect and vilify older women. (Soon? Educated virgins have been rubbishing traditional women for years, and can even find reasons to attack non-traditional ones, especially if successful).
Perhaps it will change as the information society begins to put more fathers, not to sav mothers. back in the home, albeit beSide a modem and a bleeper, where children can see what they do all day.
When Iron John appeared in the UK in January last year, it coincided with some public outrage about Prince Charles teaching Prince Harry to drive a Landrover around Sandringham -- exactly the sort of thing Bly would class as meaningful, necessary male bonding. Yet no connection was made, and today, most of Australia remains in its own enchanted forest where boys never grow past needing Daddies to give bottles and take them to kindergarten, and where initiation rites are something civilised societies need to outgrow.
No wonder we are haunted by dreams of damp, shaggy men rattling the bars of their cages, demanding that attention be paid to them.
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