%\hoffset=1cm
\voffset=1cm

\magnification=1200
\hsize=11.25cm
%\vsize=18cm
\vsize=18.1cm
\parskip 0pt
\parindent=12pt
\frenchspacing
\raggedbottom

\newif\ifpagetitre
\newtoks\auteurcourant \auteurcourant={\hfil}
\newtoks\titrecourant \titrecourant={\hfil}

\pretolerance=500 \tolerance=1000 \brokenpenalty=5000
\newdimen\hmargehaute \hmargehaute=0cm
\newdimen\lpage \lpage=13.3cm
\newdimen\hpage \hpage=20cm
\newdimen\lmargeext \lmargeext=1cm
\hsize=11.25cm
\vsize=18.1cm
\parskip 0pt
\parindent=12pt

\def\margehaute{\vbox to \hmargehaute{\vss}}%
\def\margebasse{\vss}

\output{\shipout\vbox to \hpage{\margehaute\nointerlineskip
  \corpsdepage\margebasse}
  \advancepageno \global\pagetitrefalse
  \ifnum\outputpenalty>-20000 \else\dosupereject\fi}

\def\corpsdepage{\hbox to \lpage{\hss\pagetexte\hskip\lmargeext}}
\def\pagetexte{\vbox{\makeheadline\pagebody\makefootline}}
\headline={\ifpagetitre\titleheadline \else
  \ifodd\pageno\rightheadline \else\leftheadline\fi\fi}
\def\leftheadline{\bf \the\auteurcourant\hfil}
\def\rightheadline{\bf\hfil\the\titrecourant}
\def\titleheadline{\hfill}
\pagetitretrue

\auteurcourant={Anne Foata}
\titrecourant={Death in the Garden}

\def\cf.{{\it cf.}}

\rightline{ANNE FOATA}
\vskip 5pt
\hrule
\vskip 5pt

\rightline{{\bf Death in the Garden:}}
\rightline{{\bf The Edenic Images in the Fiction of
Andrew Lytle}}

\vskip 1.2cm

\noindent
In warning the reader that the family chronicle he is
about to read in {\it A Wake for the Living} ($\oldstyle1975$)
is the story of an American family's search for Eden, Andrew
Lytle chose to seal by the exemplary story of his own family 
the major theme of his fiction, proclaiming one last time the
importance of the Edenic drive in the making and destiny of his
country.

Lytle sees the Edenic myth embedded in the heart of every American
in his yearning for innocence and renewal, a dream made
impossible, of course, by man's very expulsion from Paradise,
which was also the exact moment of his fall into History.
For, in mythical terms, History {\it is} the curse
visited on postlapsarian mankind, henceforth prey to the slow
degradation of time, to the conflicting strivings of the
human heart.  Lytle in this respect, like so many of his fellow
Southern novelists, is no romantic : if man is capable of the best
at times, he is also more often and more
easily inclined to follow the less strenuous allurements of
pettiness and evil. History, as we all know, is of our own making
and why should  American history escape the common lot ?  In
Lytle's vision, the westward drive which brought the Europeans
to America and then pushed them to the other side of the
continent merely  confronted them with themselves, neither
better nor worse, whereas in its more brutal form it sent them
ravaging and despoiling all over the virgin lands. 

In Andrew Lytle's fiction,{$^1$} the story of
America's settlement, from the first West wrenched open by the
Spaniards' greed to the many progressive Wests that span the
national territory, is the sad story of a large-scale
depredation. In the vast continent that opened itself to their
heart's desire, the settlers found unlimited opportunity for the
unleashing of their passions and the exercise of unbridled
power; abandoning all sense of human contingency they lost
themselves in the inflation of their egos and the frenzied
pursuit of material ends.

This is Lytle's vision of the European venture in the New World,
a vision which, at the time of his writing {\it At the Moon's Inn}
in the late thirties, prompted him to write a series of novels
``progressive in time" whose common theme was to be the different
kinds of exploitation perpetrated on the American
soil.{$^2$} With the Spaniards this meant gold and its ruthless
pursuit which made them sleep ``at the moon's inn" on a continent
unknown to Christian geography, but later it meant the insatiable
hunger for land and the aimless wandering of the pioneers
engulfed in the ``long night" of their soul, and soon after, their
fratricidal encounter on the battlefields of the Revolutionary 
and Civil Wars.  Not all of the novels of the projected series
appear to have been written, but there is no doubt that the
evil for which Lytle sought a name (\cf. the title of his
third novel {\it A Name for Evil\/}) is the sin of pride which made
the Americans believe in a private, privileged communion with
God and eventually take themselves for God. {\it Eritis sicut dii},
the old Intruder once told our first parents, that of all
temptations the temptation most alluring to men whose 
Faustian appetites may well lead to a worldwide destruction.
Always pursuing the dream, the object, or the purpose that
lies just ahead of his desire, entrenched in the firm
conviction that to pursue is to obtain and to obtain is to
be happy and restored in the wholeness of his dream, the
American in Lytle's fiction is ``the man with the strained neck,
looking always back to Eden" ({\it ANFE} 247) and ending up
in California or in some swampy jungle on the other side of
the world.  ``To pursue in such a way," Lytle warns the
reader at the beginning of {\it A Wake for the Living}, ``is
to destroy" ({\it  Wake} 5), a blunt enough statement which
the narrator of {\it A Name for Evil} endorses even more indisputably 
when he concludes his considerations on the whole pioneering
venture of his countrymen with this chastening piece of truth :
``To yearn for the West is simply to yearn for death" ({\it ANFE}
169).

And here we might recall what Lytle himself never ceased
reminding his readers, that in most of 
our mythologies, from the Greeks' to the American Indians', 
the West meant death, the grave, the night
sea journey, the terror of the abyss which engulfed and
sometimes failed to give back; so that nowadays, 
if the West in general, that is the whole western world, means
power and abundance of material goods, the threat of its eternal
symbolical  meaning still lurks in the western man's mind.

No wonder then that all the blissful Edenic metaphors which blossom
in Lytle's prose reveal themselves full of snares and dangers for 
his heroes, places of violence and death where the Enemy lies
in wait to undo their impossible dream of happiness and renewal.
These images --- the lush forests, beautiful gardens, 
fragrant coves --- which are so many spatial metonymies 
of the West and of America, gradually gain in depth 
while the Edenic quest  makes itself felt more 
and more powerfully as a quest for wholeness, for
the recovery of a lost androgynous unity.  Thus Lytle's heroes'
quest becomes a withdrawal from life and his Edenic images
as many matricial representations of a dangerous journey
back into the womb of the earth and the blissful latency
of Chaos or Undifferentiated Matter.  It is as if Lytle were
reading his Bible backwards: first disposing of Eve to tarry
awhile on the androgynous Adam of Genesis~1:27, then discarding
Adam with Eden itself, and leaving only the Serpent, no
longer  the biblical purveyor of apples and temptations, but the
slumbering Dragon eating its tail in the waters of Chaos,
which in so many cosmogonies preceded the creation of the world, 
the all-pervading {\it tehom} of Genesis~1:2.

``Unity equals zero," Poe had written in {\it Eureka} one century
before Lytle dramatized  it in {\it A Name for Evil} : this
equation, if intuitively felt by many artists and by Lytle
himself, was the truth which more and more compellingly
forced itself upon his creative imagination with the reading of
Jung, Neumann  and others, and his growing conviction of
an ever-recurring archetypal experience within and without
the time of man, making of the discovery of America and of
its settlement just another phase in the eternal cyclic
revolution of death and renewal.

\bigskip
\centerline{\bf  1. The Garden of Delight}
\medskip
In Lytle's fiction the West, that is the entire American
territory in its gradual discovery and settlement,
stands for the overall image of Eden, that Paradise of Pleasure
that Christopher Columbus dreamed of having opened for the
Spaniards' delight. Then, within this generic metaphor Lytle
proceeds,  by synecdochic reductions, to confine the
Edenic image to a few privileged spots, the forest, a few
clearings and coves, and still further reducing, to a tree,
a pond, the green shimmer of Creation. At this point the
Edenic images proper disappear, absorbed by a quite different
kind of representation.

``Think," de Soto declares to his future companions,
the grandees of Spain who will land with him in Florida,

{\bigskip\narrower\noindent
of a land where the air is forever soft,
the rivers wholesome from coursing through
earth that is never free of gold; think of
a climate where a man is rarely driven to close
chambers with the cold, nor ever burns his 
shins before the fire which
will make him old
before his time by resolving the natural heat
of his body. Think of all this and you will be in Florida, the
lords of that land. ({\it ATMI} 52)
\bigskip}

\noindent
Brave new world indeed, which the discovery of the Indian
settlement of Cutifichiqui confirms in its Edenic delight :

{\bigskip\narrower\noindent
There was no fatter land in heathendom, or
one more pleasing to the eye. Wide, open
forests free of thickets, hummocks of mulberry
and oak lying close about the town,
and everywhere a great plenty of game\dots\ What
a land for ease and riches and pleasure. ({\it ATMI}~303)
\bigskip}

\noindent
For the weary Spaniards Cutifichiqui is the materialization
of the Land of Plenty, of the Paradise of Leisure, and above all,
of the Garden of Love where Indian maidens make ``bad spinsters"
and love is free of sin. Yet there too lurks the serpent and
after a while love no longer appears as innocent as it first seemed.
A strong intimation of the country's latent elemental evil
is perceived by the narrator when he chances upon a snake
in the act of smothering a hawk, then stealing away
without even stirring a leave of the underbrush, whereupon
he hears the moan of pain of one of his companions in great
danger of being emasculated by an Indian damsel.

Three centuries later for the hardy settlers of {\it The Long
Night} Alabama holds the same promise as Florida once did for
the Spaniards.  Savannah-born Judge Wilton,
who ``decided to try his fortune in the West," dreams of it as
``a land of imagination : the vast green forests, the blue mountains,
the pleasant fountains, and somewhere a miraculous
fortune" ({\it TLN}~79). The reader of the novel knows what
happens  to that dreamer of the American dream : the evil
encounters, the ``coarse debaucheries of the frontier," the
cheating of  the Indians, the ``slow death of the great trees,"
the large-scale despoiling, and the ensuing moral degeneration.
And yet to be sure ``he wasn't by nature a bad man" ({\it
TLN}~96), only weak, only a man, sinful without reprieve
wherever he peddled his dream of renewal. Like de Soto and his
soldiers who ``came hunting gold and found only themselves"
({\it  Wake}~50), Judge Wilton, the McIvors and their neighbors
only found themselves, the same as ever or just a little worse
for the unlimited opportunities that came their way. Robert Penn
Warren has a ballad on this theme, and the Billie Pottses must
have been legion on the frontier, for

{\bigskip\narrower\noindent
[t]here is always another country and always another place.

\noindent
There is always another name and another face.

\noindent
And the name and the face are you, and you

\noindent
The name and the face.$^3$
\bigskip}

\noindent
Scattered amidst the virgin lands which the pioneers have come
to settle, a few ``happy places" further concentrate the Edenic
mood. Such is the clearing in Georgia where the McIvors make
camp on their way to Texas, with spring breaking all at once, the
woods full of bird song, the air soft and mild, and a ``wet weather
spring" not far away. In harmony with their surroundings, the
McIvors find themselves in a ``frolicsome mood"; there is some
fiddling, dancing and courting in the fragrant night. Yet their
fate was already sealed and Cameron McIvor's murder ordained at
the darkest of a night no longer kind and welcoming to the heart
of the weary.

In {\it The Long Night}, forest and night are closely
interrelated in their metaphorization of the American wilderness,
as images of a dream that has veered to nightmare.
How tender indeed the night and friendly the forest to the
McIvors' happy romping near Opelika, and how tutelar and
comforting to young love when Damon Harrison and Ruth Weaver
``passed\dots\ through the great trees\dots\ wandering
in the strange delight of new, common sensations\dots\ and never
believing the long night would come to an end" ({\it TLN}~169).
Yet the promise of life they hold is illusory; everywhere
around lurks ``danger, invisible and sinister" ({\it TLN}~171), and
death awaits its victim. The forest which shelters the avenging
son, the night which enfolds him in its great tenderness also
protect a monomaniac murderer and his reciprocating ``secret
death with secret death" ({\it TLN}~68).

Some time later forest and night seem to breed the violence
of the battle of Shiloh and the Civil War, the dead
end where the Edenic dream of so many settlers shattered in
the nightmare of a fratricide. Synecdoche of the wilderness
the Europeans came to settle, the forest in {\it The Long Night}
is a place of violence and death where the promise of regeneration
inscribed in the heart of men stumbles against a dire reality
of their own making. The Civil War, in Lytle's novel as in the 
novels of many other Southerners, is the image of that stumbling, 
the young American nation's definitive Fall from innocence.

The forest imagery, whether or not associated with the 
night of men's ordeals, both metonymic representations of
the successive Wests that have extended to the other side of
the American continent and metaphors of the entire pioneering
venture of the Americans, is sustained thoughout Lytle's fiction.
Leaving aside for the moment its deeper mythic abstraction in
{\it The Grove} and the garden of {\it A Name for Evil}, we see it
emerge again in the poetic images of  {\it The Velvet Horn} (set
in 1879-80). Here the ``deep forest" has just about vanished from
the American landscape, leaving only a few patches here and
there that are about to be reclaimed for urban and industrial
settlements, a ``fool's paradise" soon to be engulfed in the
advent of the New South. But how beautiful and fragrant the
``April woods" along the old Wilderness trail in Tennessee with
their tall trees, clusters of azalea and jasmine, and how ``very
out of this world" the wood full of honeysuckle around Seven
Springs! But if the forest of the Rim, still dense and teeming
with game, allows Beverly, Duncan and Julia  Cropleigh who
wander in it to share in the prelapsarian innocence and unity of
all things created, this also is an illusion and a dangerous one
at that, for it is a place of transgression where once more the
Fall is being enacted. Parcher's Cove, Beverly's tamed deer
sanctuary, is also the locale of Julia's seduction, of Duncan's
and Pete Legrand's murderous encounter, and of the Cropleigh
brothers' ``fratricide and suicide and whatever it is to give a
leg" ({\it TVH}~213). In view of Parcher's Cove, Tilford Springs
offers its soft spongy floor, its  moon-drenched atmosphere to
other carnal encounters, whence once again, having eaten of the
forbidden fruit, the couple is being expelled by the ``flaming
darts" of the rising sun.

In all the places where the Edenic connotations are
emphasized, Lytle took great care that they appear located out of time
and space, as intemporal as the drama that is
being re-enacted there, gardens of delight for young lovers
locked in each other's arms in that ``one posture" ``out of
all the combinations possible" ({\it TVH}~95) in which they
strive to restore wholeness.

\bigskip
\centerline{\bf  2. The images of Chaos}
\medskip

At the farthest end of the metonymic process which
characterizes Lytle's Edenic representations one finds the tree :
Tree of Life or Knowledge to be sure in many of its manifestations in
the novel, but also ``seed tree of the world" ({\it TVH}~149),
``line tree" which ``had stood from the time of man" ({\it TVH}~3),
``one large female tree" topping the triangular cedar glade
in Parcher's Cove ({\it TVH}~138), the ``high-branched tree
growing upwards from the abyss," with no visible roots or top,
which seems to rise from the dull, gelid, opaque surface
of the pond barring the entrance to the Cove ({\it TVH}~105).
Associated with the stagnant water and the ``green glaucous
gloom" imagery, the tree, however, leaves the Edenic
representations proper to enter the realm of the mythic 
cosmogonies, where, rising from the all-pervading waters
and the heavy gloom of Chaos, it is some form of the Cosmic Tree
joining earth and firmament together in the act of Creation.

Such indeed does the tree appear to Jack Cropleigh
in {\it The Velvet Horn}, who with his almost superhuman
clairvoyance has much of the seer or the shaman in him :

{\bigskip\narrower\noindent
So, he thought, must the floor of the world have
looked on the first day, its patina immaculate
in the instancy of creation, that stilled pulsation
of the polished film as the instant of time clicked
and time began the myriad prick, sprouting\dots
And now within the stilled monotony of his clairvoyance
he saw the high-branched tree growing upwards
from the abyss.  As it grew it was grown, but
nowhere could he make out where the roots fed, 
nor could he measure where the topmost branches 
paused in their growth. ({\it TVH}~104-105)
\bigskip}

\noindent 
Another typical example of the subtle shift in time that operates
within the Edenic images is to be seen in the scene of
Julia's seduction inside Parcher's Cove, as relived by
her lover Pete Legrand in the ``Passionate Husk" section of the
novel ({\it TVH}~166-168).  Parcher's Cove, it is remembered, 
is the very image of the Garden in the novel, always beautifully, 
romantically described whenever it appears, a deer sanctuary
to Beverly, Julia's and Pete's fragrant love nest; and
so indeed it appears to Pete Legrand, out of this world
and back in time, ``the world simple as the first day."
The scene he evokes here and again later in the novel
for Julia's son's benefit ({\it TVH}~323) is the Genesis
temptation scene with  Adam, Eve, and the Serpent under
``the large female tree" of Knowledge, but the pervading water
imagery of the description at the same time pulls it farther
 backwards in time to the all-pervading waters of Chaos when,
surging out of its depth, a Primordial androgynous creature
arose to start the work of Creation

{\bigskip\narrower\noindent
In this seasonless grove of cedar he [Pete]
had arisen\dots\ fluttering the {\it evergreen
reflection} into which the flames rolled. The air
{\it pitched with the color and motion of the sea}.
Its chaste scent was as {\it astringent as
sea water}.  The laces entwined in his fingers,
falling, {\it undulated like seaweed}.  He crossed
over as indifferent as a {\it fish}.  \dots\
Only her hair, aureate, glistened as {\it it floated
into the firelight's surging}.  \dots\ His
senses {\it drowned} in the fragrance of the rose.
({\it TVH}~ 167-68; {\it my emphasis})
\bigskip}

\noindent 
The shift in imagery testifies to a change,
or rather a deepening, in Lytle's apprehension of the
Edenic myth.  Instead of an untrammeled desire to enjoy,
or to engage in wordly pursuits for a maximum of profit
and pleasure, the Edenic drive makes itself felt as a
yearning for Plenitude which, being impossible in this
world, conduces to syndromes of withdrawal and of nostalgia
for the blissful state of the Uncreated.  

This makes for a quite different interpretation of the Americans'
pioneering venture.  Lytle voiced it in his critical study of
Caroline Gordon's novels, writing (in 1949) that behind
``the nostalgic effort to return to Eden or some kind of
innocence" lay ``that temptation of all the most near to
a return to Chaos" ({\it Hero}~159).  That Lytle's fictional
Edenic images can also be apprehended as images of the
Undifferentiated Origins of the world thus explains {\it per se}
why they are so dangerous, so lethal to the heroes
of his novels.  To yearn for ``the prenatural equilibrium
of innocence and wholeness,"
Lytle writes in ``The  Working Novelist and the Mythmaking
Process," is to ``refus[e] to engage in the cooperating
opposites that make life" ({\it Hero}~184).  Hence the special
quality of evil exuded by some of Lytle's Edenic spots,
no longer evil reckoned on a purely moral scale, but some kind 
of elemental indifference to man, to life itself.  
There is an intimation of this essential, ontological brand
of evil as early as {\it The long Night}, when the protagonist
in the forest around Shiloh is made aware of its ``sullen
vicious strength" turned loose on the men who have come to
fight in it.  In {\it At the Moon's Inn}, the same foreboding as to
Florida's ``rightful meaning" and evil comes to Nu\~no de Tovar
at the close of the Edenic Cutifichiqui episode. Florida indeed

{\bigskip\narrower\noindent
was the very body of the world. Not through any agent but
through its proper self it worked its evil\dots\ Had
they perchance stumbled upon Eden, abandoned of God, 
running its un\-pruned seasons, ignorant
of the generations of men, yet throughout all those
generations growing heavier with the bloom that cannot die,
the decay that cannot live, for the dry rot and the odour
of that fruit which blooms and falls, falls and blooms, at the
garden's pole? ({\it ATMI}~324)
\bigskip}

\noindent 
This image of Florida held as it were in a state of arrested growth,
suspended in some kind of eternal summer that never reaps its fruit,
is the striking image of life-denying sterility that Lytle will
use again in the following novels. For the narrator of {\it A
Name for Evil} for instance, life, love, should be in the image of
an ideal garden ``forever in bloom, forever whithholding its
seed" ({\it ANFE}~254) : ``a lovely illusion" indeed, but also so
``utterly barren" and finally destructive as his own garden will
prove, tranformed by the snow and frost of a winter day into
``one blooming mass" of unreal and lethal beauty.

``What a monstrous summertime," exclaims still another of Lytle's
characters, Jack Cropleigh in {\it The Velvet Horn}, ``flowerless,
fruitless, seedless" ({\it TVH}~260). Jack's hallucinatory vision
from down Joe Cree's open grave into which he has tumbled is
that of a green irridescent sphere, of some kind of primal swamp
which holds

{\bigskip\narrower\noindent
a lush balance between growth and decay,
live eating itself up as it grew, the rolling
shine of the green-golden gloom, where nature is never
asleep, nor ever awake. A growth so rich it cannot stop to
flower. Everything gone to weed. ({\it TVH}~260)
\bigskip}

\noindent
His vision, like Tovar's premonition in Florida, is that of
``the body of the world,"

{\bigskip\narrower\noindent
damp, warm from the primal moisture seeping 
to the molten center, the heat traveling
upwards as the rich slime presses down upon
the rocky fires. And the sun nowhere present,
only this green light
inside of which he lay poised. ({\it TVH}~260)
\bigskip}

\noindent 
It is a representation of the Original Chaos, of the state
of Undifferentiated Matter before Creation, neither asleep
nor awake, slumbering away in the eternity of a-created
Time. Drowsily floating in its midst, like some great
primordial fish, or like the fetus inside its mother's womb,
Jack is given the shamanic privilege of witnessing the very
act of Creation, when he sees ``the lightning horn piercing
earth and firmament together," which, thus fecundated,
will bring forth the Primordial androgynous man.

The Lytlean hero's Edenic nostalgia, after {\it The Long Night},
thus makes itself felt more and more powerfully as a yearning
for a blissful state of latency, for the ``utter rest and oblivion"
of nothingness, which is also a strong drive towards
annihilation. De Soto's ``conquest" of Florida, as revealed to his
ghost in a post mortem shock of recognition, was the vain
pursuit of ``one bent on his own destruction" ({\it ATMI}~397),
and Henry Brent's labors of regeneration in {\it A Name for Evil}
but thinly disguise his truly Manichaean hatred of life and all
created matter.  For the Cropleigh siblings in {\it The Velvet
Horn}, the Edenic dream is a yearning for the impossible state of
Wholeness,  for a re-union with the other part of their self in
the gratifying slumber of the womb, the unconscious. It is a
death wish, similar to that of the mystics or to the death
ecstasy of Tristan and Isolde, or if not actually for death,
then as Erich Neumann explains in {\it The Origins and History
of Consciousness} which Lytle acknowledged having read
during the composition of the novel, at least a very strong
wish to return to the latency of fetal life inside the womb,
to the ``pleromatic stage" of consciousness through what he
terms ``uroboric incest."{$^4$} And here the reader familiar
with {\it The Velvet Horn} and with Lytle's essay on the genesis
of the novel, ``The Working Novelist and the Mythmaking
Process"(in {\it Hero\/}), will have recognized the three major
clusters of metaphors around which revolve the Edenic images of
the novel : the symbols of incest, of androgyny, and of a
dangerous passage to the womb, all of them representations of
a state of Wholeness which was also the state of Original Chaos.

The images of incest and androgyny are closely related to the
one symbol of the {\it Uroboros}, one of the many figures ---
here the Gnostics' --- of the Primordial Monster, Snake or
Dragon, lying about the waters of Chaos, eternally impregnating
and regenerating itself.  As a symbol of Undifferentiation, the
{\it Uroboros} is contained in the Original Man, Anthropos or
Hermaphroditic Adam, ``the entire creature," Lytle writes,
``isolated within himself" ({\it Hero}~187), whose innocence
implies the ``stasis" which denies life or creation.  For Lytle,
``incest" then is the symbol of man's eternal striving towards
the state of Undifferentiated Wholeness,  his
efforts to become one again through ``every kind of human
love which the separation had scattered throughout the world"
({\it Hero}~188).  Paradigmatic of this effort towards Wholeness
appears the love between brother and sister, of 
``the identity-in-essence in the 
separate-in-form" ({\it TVH}~111), but also the
all-too-intense love between parents and children, the sexual
drive in general, man's {\it participation mystique} with Nature
and her beasts, all the forms of intense, exclusive attraction
that are represented in the novel.  All of them involve violence
and death, because ``incest" posits a  state of nature dangerous
for man and therefore ``forbidden by divine and human law"
({\it Hero}~184), this same state of nature which centuries of 
civilization have endeavored
to subdue or disguise under the cloak of manners and customs, 
the whole edifice of institutions and conventions devised 
to restrain the unruly demands of the blood and to check
their disruptive power.

In {\it The Velvet Horn}, the incestuous drive is everywhere present,
even in the animal world of mating turkeys and jackasses; 
it is enacted however in the legal sense between Duncan and 
Julia Cropleigh and epitomized in its central character, their
brother Jack, whom Lytle has termed the ``spiritual hermaphrodite"
({\it Hero}~189).  Jack is made aware of his own strong incestuous longing
during the climactic night of Joe Cree's wake when right after
his vision of the origins of the world he sees himself as part
and parcel of an alchemical conjunction of opposites, the
desperate attempt at fusion between Duncan as Fire and Julia
as Water.  In the scene described on page 260, Jack indeed
experiences Duncan and Julia's conjunction as growing out
of his own body, ``himself on each side of himself moving into
himself," miraculously restored to his Oneness
in the middle of the ``damp," ``warm," ``green-golden"
``irridescent" sphere in which he sees himself floating,
``never asleep nor ever awake," blissfully returned to the
latency of the womb.{$^5$}

The womb imagery thus subsumes almost all the Edenic images 
of {\it The Velvet Horn}, but it is already to be found in
{\it A Name for Evil}, where Henry Brent's fascinated stare
into the sinkhole in the middle of his estate testifies
to his ``extravagant longing for abandonment" to ``the
dangerous pull" of ``the black gaping opening" with its promise
of ``release, escape from the unbearable, the lull of utter
rest and oblivion" ({\it ANFE}~277-78).

If the images themselves in their moist warm closeness or truly
enchanted beauty seem pleasurable and protective enough
to the seeker of release and rest, their access, on the contrary,
is fraught with dangers and pitfalls which attest to the
lethal character of the whole venture.  They can be perceived
as yet another version of a {\it descensus ad inferos}, the descent
into the belly of the monster which is also the womb of the earth, 
the ordeal of so many mythological heroes in their necessary quest
for rebirth.  In Lytle's world, however, this ordeal is the end 
itself, ``the participation
in withdrawal" ({\it TVH}~110) in the
great slumbering 
Void.  Consider for instance the two descriptions
of Parcher's Cove in {\it The Velvet Horn} on pp.~135-41 and 212-13.
The ``cleft in the rock" leading to the ``jagged entrance"
of a ``close warm passage" with its ``broken and stony bottom"
opening on a ``dim grey eye" testify to the pitfalls of the
journey, which the overall metaphor of the ``incestuous tube"
transforms into a passage through the castrating obstacles
of a {\it vagina dentata}.  The return to the womb is indeed
a mutilating process, as is shown by the spectacle that meets
the eye in both descriptions : animals and men either torn
apart, physically, or at least spiritually, destroyed.

\goodbreak
One also remembers that the beautiful summer garden
of the Brents' estate in {\it A Name for Evil} was the cemetery
of Major Brent's six wives and becomes the place both of
Henry's final disintegration and of his wife's death;
and Henry's difficult progression through the ``barrier
of thorn trees" and the ``tangle of brush and briar" ({\it ANFE}~277)
towards the sinkhole at the center of the tangled wood
again evokes the dangerous labyrinth of the quester's
return to the womb.

It is interesting to note the emergence of these womb images
as early as {\it At the Moon's Inn}, where they appear in
the night black labyrinth of the Cuban jungle which leads 
to the clearing where Tovar seduces Do\~na Eleonora and
then in his illumination on the ``rightful meaning" of
the conquest and the land they have come to conquer.  The
clearing, the Edenic locale of a quite bewitching scene of
seduction, is compared to an ``open space" in the middle
of a ``black waste," a ``savage place," and access to it is
through a ``long funnel," a ``labyrinth" through which
Tovar has to crawl,  ``tearing clothes and flesh" ({\it ATMI}~89-91),
overwhelmed by terror.  When Do\~na Eleonora exclaims
``we might be together at the middle of the world," she merely
uses another of the many metaphors of the {\it axis mundi},
the geometrical center of the Uncreated Void out of which,
in the {\it illud tempus} of myth and mythology, soared the creative 
power of the Cosmic Tree (Mircea Eliade mentions this center 
of the World as the ``creational space" 
{\it par excellence}, 318)

In Tovar's shock of recognition at the dawn of his ``Indian
fashion" wedding night, the ``garden pole" location of
Florida is still another version of the {\it axis mundi} in
the middle of Chaos, ``running its unpruned seasons,
ignorant of the generations of men" ({\it ATMI}~324).
The matricial images which expressed his progress in the
Cuban jungle again brush on the surface of his
consciousness, with his sensation of being ``shut in a 
narrow room \dots\ existing nowhere in space," and his
awareness that Florida was ``but a succession of such 
rooms, each with its corridor, indefinitely multiplied,"
the very ``body of the world," the Matrix of the Universe.
Tovar's erotic exertions on his wedding night leave him spent, 
``consumed" like ``dry wood," and his strenuous journey to
the ``confines of Christendom" forever stranded in the
dark womb of the earth.

The ambiguous character of all the Edenic images in 
Lytle's fiction, the ambivalent feelings they arouse in the
characters, both a yearning for paradisal bliss and
terror of the abyss, their deadly thrust for all those who
seek their impossible shelter, in other words, the
fascination and terror of the womb, help explain the role and
nature of the Lytlean woman.  Alluring and destructive,
virgin and bride, the mother who lulls and comforts
on her life-giving bosom and the death-dealing Gorgon, Eve
in Lytle's Paradise has a precarious stand, wooed and
feared, worshipped and derided if not downright denied
and destroyed.  Eve's creation, by shattering Adam's
blissful wholeness and making him --- unwillingly --- 
participate in the work of Creation, is an obstacle to
man's Edenic nostalgia; and here Jack Cropleigh, the
``spiritual hermaphrodite" of {\it The Velvet Horn}, very
certainly expresses the general feeling of all the male
heroes of Lytle's fiction when he ruefully reflects that
Adam must indeed have been tricked by sleep to allow himself 
to be robbed of his precious rib.  The Lytlean man's inborn
terror is undoubtedly to be sucked back ``booted and spurred" 
into ``the primordial dark and slime, where the weather's
neither too hot nor too cold, too wet nor dry, just
one long growing season" ({\it TVH}~90), the image again of
the Primordial Womb.  His terror, in the last resort, is quite
certainly to be denied his place in the universe, to be
negated by the uroboric self-regenerating process of Chaos,
or swallowed by the great Chthonian Mother in order to 
be brought forth again 
in one of those virgin births men do
not necessarily appreciate.  Jack Cropleigh here is the
staunch spokesman of his sex, whose imagination is both
fascinated and repelled by the spectacle of the monstrous
Ada Rutter cradling her idiot son Othel, paradigmatic
of all the incestuous mother-son/lover couples of mythology.

Similarly, to refer to the title of Lytle's novel, Florida, the
whole new world, truly is the ``moon's inn," the dangerous 
abode of the Great Goddess of the matriarchal theogonies,
who reckoned her tribute ``in sweat, hunger and in blood"
({\it ATMI}~397), and Diana-like, punished with death all
male violators, as Lytle explains in a 
letter.{$^6$}
Death is the penalty Florida exacts from the Spaniards
whose ``conquest" appears as the aggressive act of a ``purely
masculine society" ({\it Hero}~158), disguising its destructive
will under the cloak of Edenic yearning.Their urge was to
conquer, that is to violate, to impose their will on
the bountiful virgin nature they might have fertilized instead 
with their superior skills in the respect and preservation
of life, thus committing themselves in the long run to a prolonged 
dance of self-destruction.  Lytle has a parable about this,
a story of a marvelous garden and a beautiful woman,
and of the destruction of both by a man's self-deluding dreams of
Edenic fulfilment.  The story is called {\it A Name for Evil}.

\bigskip
\centerline{\bf  3.  The Grove, Henry Brent's fragile crystal
Paradise} 
\medskip

In {\it A Name for Evil}, the Garden metaphor clearly shows
through the telling name of the Brent estate, {\it The Grove};
it is then further compressed by synecdoche into the
flower garden and the wood in the middle of the property
which once held the perfection of a Revolutionary major's
pioneering ventures. Henry Brent's purpose in buying the 
house and the land which once belonged to his ancestor is
to perform a labor of love : the restoration of the dilapidated
estate, or rather as he prefers to say, its ``regeneration."
It soon becomes evident that by this word he
is also thinking of himself, prompted by the Edenic dream
of so many of his forebears who had ``removed" to the 
``current West" of their time to start anew a life that had failed
elsewhere. More specifically his dream of regeneration
concerns his manhood, his abilitly to father a heir
after many years of barren wedlock and to give
his beloved wife Ellen the status demanded by the American bourgeois
standard of living. All this, however, proves to be a
self-delusion; Henry's secret longing is for ``release,"
``escape," ``the lull of utter rest and oblivion"
({\it ANFE}~278), for a return to the state of minimal life which characterizes
the state of ``uroboric incest," very akin, we have seen,
to the death wish.{$^{7}$}
He has, in fact, the Manichaeans' hatred for all 
created life and his erratic attempts
at restoration throughout the novel hardly disguise his one
real purpose which is to suppress all life around him, 
his wife's, and their longed-for son's, as once his ancestor
had done some three-quarters of a century earlier. The
projection of his life-denying impulses on the reappearing
specter of the major accounts for the ghost story the novel
(also) purports to be, and {\it is} quite successfully, despite
the parabolic or metaphoric reading Lytle proposes to his
reader. I cannot agree, indeed, with Todorov's contention that
any such reading kills the fantastic in a novel of this
kind, provided of course it does not prove 
intrusive.{$^{8}$}
In {\it A Name for Evil}, it does not and the ghosts (for there
is a second one) certainly seem real enough (if one may say
so), but is is none the less true that the image retained
of the American Garden from a certain reading of the novel
is an image of death, because those who were sent to
``tend" it, as Adam once in Eden, destroyed every semblance of
life in their unconscious drive for annihilation.

Henry Brent's secret loathing of life, which Lytle here
posits as inherent to the Americans' yearning for innocence
and Edenic bliss, reveals itself in his conception
of ideal love, of the ideal woman and the ideal garden;
it materializes in his own garden
made ideal and lethal by the frost. In the image of an
ideal garden, which, as we have seen,
should remain forever in bloom and forever withholding
its seed, the woman should be forever the bride
on the morning of her nuptials, an ``image of inviolability
to change" ``for all men to behold" ({\it ANFE}~184), the
impossible fusion of ``innocence and desire" ({\it ANFE}~270),
the recipient of a ``grace impossible
therefore miraculous, of
incorruptible innocence and voluptuous play inexhaustible"
({\it ANFE}~295), ``pure, trim, and immaculate" ({\it ANFE}~184), in
short, ``an angel" ({\it ANFE}~169). A phantasm of man's immature
love, her beauty, ``which men of all time have been unable to
resist," calls for his very act of possession, which is
an act of will and not of love, an act of darkness, not meant
to bear any fruit. 

Henry's recoil (in chapter~26) from
Ellen's kneading the dinner biscuits, ``a ritual as old as the
world," which reminds him of the bringing back to life of a
drowned body, is revealing, as are his celebration of the
tomatoes, the Ancients' love apples that could also kill, and his
calling Ellen Helen. His own vision of himself is that of the
perennial bridegroom poised on the narrow edge between the
feasting of the eye and the ravishing of the body, the romantic
image of eternal, irresponsible youth. To live, to love, to
(pro)create, to regenerate, is to partake in ``the common filth of
living" ({\it ANFE}~184), which he of course grandiloquently
refuses, and one can safely say that Ellen's death warrant
is signed when she tells him of her unexpected pregnancy,
the life rising inside her womb appearing as loathsome to
him as the biscuits rising in the oven. The sentence will
be executed shortly afterwards in the couple's garden
which winter has made as unreal, as ideal in its fragile
crystal beauty as the image that has kept haunting him.
Arrested in time, as if suspended in a silent void and
transformed into ``one blooming mass" of
frost, the garden
appears frozen into that ``unimaginable zero summer"
which was T.S. Eliot's vision of a winter garden in
``Little Gidding," ``neither budding nor fading.
Not in the scheme of generation."{$^{9}$}
This had already been, we remember,
Tovar's vision of Florida, ``running its unpruned seasons,
oblivious of the generations of men," before becoming 
the Cropleighs' marvelous ``seasonless grove" of their own disenchantment.
Image of atemporal beauty and sterility, maintained in that
one artificial season to which also Lytle
refers as ``that season which is life-in-death"
with its arresting description of ``great bloody flowers already
drying" and the ``blight" everywhere present underneath its
breathtaking magnificence ({\it ANFE}~276), the Garden, in Lytle's
fiction, is a place that kills.

Through Henry Brent's destructive self-delusions
Lytle allows us to apprehend the nature of the Europeans'
and then the Americans" ``westward movement" on the American
continent. Henry's overt, stated purpose in buying his
ancestor's estate is to take stock, to live within
a fixed inheritance, or as he says, ``to abide"
({\it ANFE}~266); he takes pains to make his meaning explicit,
adding a few lines further : ``I came to a place
{\it with a western view}" (my emphasis).
At this stage of his demented solipsism Henry has
quite forgotten what an earlier flash of lucidity had made
him perceive, when, reflecting on the many progressive
Wests his country has known, he reached the stark conclusion that
``[t]o yearn
for the West is simply to yearn for death"
({\it ANFE}~169). 

The ``western view" is thus replaced in its ``rightful meaning,"
disencumbered from the delusions of Edenic renewal, of
life-building fantasies. Furthermore, Lytle has Henry Brent
re-enact the Major's selfsame venture, who did remove ``to the
current West of the time," and then, in an act of demonic hubris,
destroyed his property at the height of its beauty and yield,
deeding the house to a spinster daughter and dismissing his
unmarried sons with journeymen's pays. 

The garden itself, we
remember, was of his making, perfect in its symmetry and
all-season flower growth, a manifestation of ``utter
daring\dots\ brilliant imagination\dots\ satanic pride" ({\it
ANFE}~228). It was also the private burying ground of his six
wives and mistresses, their tombs laid out in a circle around a
springhouse topped by a serpent's head carved in stone. A place
of death with, it its middle, the fountain of rejuvenating water
that once so appealed to the Europeans' imagination (similar to
the sinkhole in the middle of the abandoned field that once held
the Major's richest crop), the garden will destroy again, with
the Major dressed as a bridegroom (Henri's major phantasm
of innocent love) claiming his ultimate victim in an act
of brutal possession which is the grasp of death.

In giving to Henry an ancestor whose very character
he embodies and whose very deeds he re-enacts, Lytle supplies
the reader with a clue to the true significance of
the Americans' pioneering venture. Prompted by ``the hidden
nostalgic effort to return to Eden or some state of innocence"
and start a new life, it was also a temptation ``of all the
most near to a return to chaos" ({\it Hero} 158), to the
blissful inertia of death in the earth's welcoming womb.
This of course makes for a rather unusual unmasking of
the secret springs of the Americans' celebrated love of
action and industry, of their practical-minded philosophy,
their political endeavors on behalf of progress and democracy.
Back in the thirties, in his essay contributed to the Agrarian
symposium, Lytle had already warned his countrymen
that their senseless pursuit of happiness, the old Edenic
dream of mankind made true American-style, was but
a sterile and potentially destructive ``running around,"
which lacked even the logic of a dog chasing its tail (``{\it
Tit}" 202), a derisory image of the great Uroboros which shapes
their secret longing of peaceful slumber and rest.

So in the end one might wonder if the overall metaphor
of Lytle's fiction, its central Edenic image, were not the
one contained in the title of his first novel, the ``long
night" of the soul which is also the timeless night
of Chaos, the point of no return of the Americans' night 
sea journey, the stumbling block of their dreams of Edenic
bliss. And if the new world was to be the old world's destruction,
as Lytle once told his publisher, what a blow finally dealt to the
accepted American notion of the frontier to show death 
embedded in their beautiful virgin Garden and the death wish at
the very root of America's discovery and  settlement!

\vfill

$(^*)$ This paper is an updated version of the article 
``American History and the Edenic Myth: Andrew Lytle's Images of
the Garden of the World" published
in {\sl Mythes, Croyances et Religions dans le Monde
Anglo-Saxon}. Universit\'e d'Avignon (Section d'Anglais)
5 ($\oldstyle 1987$): 213--242. 


\eject


\rightline{\bf Notes}
\vskip 5pt
\hrule
\vskip 5pt
{$^1$}The
page references of the quotations will be given parenthetically
in the text of the article and are those of the following
editions of Lytle's work: {\it The Long Night} ($\oldstyle 1936$),
abbreviated as {\it TLN}, from the 1988 reprint; {\it At the Moon's
Inn}, or {\it ATMI}, from the original 1941 edition; {\it A Name for
Evil}, or {\it ANFE}, from the 1958 collection  {\it A Novel, A
Novella and Four Stories}; {\it The Velvet Horn}, or {\it TVH},
from the original 1957 edition;    {\it A Wake for the Living},
abbreviated as {\it  Wake}, from the 1975 original. Lytle's essays
which appear in {\it The Hero with the Private Parts} will be
quoted as {\it Hero} with their page reference from the original
1966 edition.  His contribution to the Agrarian symposium will
appear as (``Tit") from the 1962 Harper Torchbook edition. 


{$^2$}In  a letter to D. L. Chambers, Lytle's editor
at Bobbs-Merrill's, included in Noel Polk's bibliography of
Lytle's work in {\it The Mississippi Quarterly} 23 (Fall
$\oldstyle 1970$): 453--54.  

{$^3$}``The Ballad of Billie Potts"
in {\it Selected Poems, New \& Old} (New York: Random House,
$\oldstyle 1966$)~230.

{$^4$}Neumann's book
appeared in Z\"urich in $\oldstyle 1949$ and was translated
into English in $\oldstyle 1954$.

{$^5$}For a more detailed
analysis of the symbolism of {\it The Velvet Horn}, see
my article: ``The symbolic structure of Andrew Lytle's
{\it The Velvet Horn}," in {\it The Kentucky Review}
5 (Autumn $\oldstyle 1983$):~16--31.

{$^6$}Without 
date or addressee, included in Noel Polk's bibliography
of Lytle's work, {\it The Mississippi Quarterly} 23 (Fall
$\oldstyle 1970$):~455-56.

{$^{7}$}Compare Henry Brent's 
longing to that of the poet's soul in D.H. Lawrence's ``The
Ship of Death" quoted by Neumann as an illustration of the
stage of ``uroboric incest" (in {\it The Origins}, vol.~II, p.~279):
``Drift on, drift on, my soul, towards the most pure/most
dark oblivion\dots\ /the core/of sheer oblivion and utter
peace/the womb of silence in the living night/\dots\ peace,
complete peace!"

{$^{8}$}In {\it The Fantastic: A Structural
Approach to a Literary Genre} (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve
University Press, $\oldstyle 1973$ and Cornell
University Press, $\oldstyle 1975$). Todorov also declares,
and I agree, that any second reading, by force less
``naive" than the first, is a kind of metareading that
jeopardizes if not downright kills the fantastic.


{$^{9}$}In {\it Four Quartets} (London: Faber \& Faber,
$\oldstyle 1944$):~35. Compare Lytle's description of the garden
in chapter~31 with Eliot's:

{
\narrower
\noindent\llap{``}Now the hedgerow

\noindent
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom

\noindent
Of snow, a bloom more sudden

\noindent
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading

\noindent
Not in the scheme of generation."


}


\bigskip
\bigskip
\rightline{\bf Works cited}
\vskip 8pt
\hrule
\vskip 8pt
\parindent=0pt

%reference pour un article :
\def\article#1|
    {{\leftskip=0mm\noindent
     \hangindent=10mm\hangafter=1
    #1 \par}}



\article
Eliade, Mircea.  {\it Trait\'e d'Histoire des Religions}. Paris: Payot,
1964; quoted from the 1974 paperback reprint (Payoth\`eque).|

\article
Jung, Carl G.  {\it Psychology and Alchemy}. Vol. 12 of The Collected
Works of Carl G. Jung. Transl. by R.F.C Hull (Bollingen Series XX).
 Princeton University Press, 1953; revised edition, 1968.|

\article 
\hbox to 2cm {\hrulefill}\thinspace. {\it Mysterium
Coniunctionis}, Vol. 14 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung.
Transl. by R.F.C. Hull (Bollingen Series XX). Princeton University
Press, 1963; 2nd edition 1970.|

\article
Lytle, Andrew Nelson.  {\it The Long Night}.  Indianapolis \& New
York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1936. Rpt. Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 1988.|

\article
\hbox to 2cm {\hrulefill}\thinspace. {\it At the Moon's Inn}. 
Indianapolis \& New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1941. Rpt.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990.|

\article
\hbox to 2cm {\hrulefill}\thinspace. {\it A Name for Evil}. 
Indianapolis \& New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1947.  Rpt. in {\it A
Novel, A Novella and Four Stories}. 
New York: Mc Dowell, Obolensky, 1958.|

\article
\hbox to 2cm {\hrulefill}\thinspace.  {\it The Velvet Horn}. New
York: Mc Dowell, Obolensky, 1957. Facsimile rpt.  Sewanee, Tenn.: The
University of the South, 1983.|

\article
\hbox to 2cm {\hrulefill}\thinspace.
{\it A Wake for the Living}.  New York: Crown, 1975. Rpt.
Nash\-ville: J.S. Sanders, 1992.|

\article
\hbox to 2cm {\hrulefill}\thinspace.
{\it The Hero with the Private Parts}.  Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1966.  Thirteen of its essays are
reprinted in {\it Souherners and Europeans}.  {\it Essays in a Time of
Disorder}.   Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State UP, 1988.|

\article
\hbox to 2cm {\hrulefill}\thinspace.
``The Hind Tit." {\it I'll Take My Stand.  The South and the
Agrarian Tradition}, by Twelve Southerners.  New York: Warner \&
Bros,  1930.  Rpt. New York: Harper \& Row (Harper Torchbooks), 1962;
revised ed. 1970.  Rpt.: Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1977.  Rpt.
in {\it From Eden to Babylon.  The Social and Political Essays of
Andrew Lytle}.  Washingten, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989.|

\article
Neumann, Erich.  {\it The Origins and History of Consciousness}. 
Transl. by R.F.C. Hull (Bollingen Series XLII).  Princeton University
Press, 1954.|

\article
\hbox to 2cm {\hrulefill}\thinspace.
{\it The Great Mother}. Transl. by R. Manheim (Bollingen
Series XLVII). Princeton University Press, 1955.|

\bye
