Alice Notley’s Mythic Descent/Dissent
Alice Notley’s Mythic Descent/Dissent

Summary/Abstract: The myth of descent pervades western discourse, appearing already in ancient stories, as when Gilgamesh seeks Utnapishtim and when Odysseus consults the shade of Tiresias, entering Christian mythology as Christ’s harrowing of hell, forming in medieval times the architecture of Beowulf and of Dante’s Inferno, and informing such modernist literary works as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. To extraliterary culture it contributes such common metaphors as descent into poverty, descent into illness, descent into despair, and descent into madness. Alice Notley, a contemporary American poet who lives in Paris, drew on the myth of descent in her 1996 book-length poem The Descent of Alette. Notley’s poem has a dual aspect: viewed as plot, Alette’s descent is a journey, and viewed as character, her descent is a metamorphosis. This dual aspect, the ability of either plot or character to bind the reader’s gestalt, enables myth to critique both itself and the society in which it originates, thus enabling Alette’s descent to be also an act of dissent.

• Details
• Contents