A Celtic Quest, by John Layard. A review of sorts.

A Celtic Quest. John Layard 1975.

 

In my last post I praised ‘This is not a Grail Romance’ for attempting to read a medieval story on its own terms. John Layard’s ‘A Celtic Quest; Sexuality and Soul in Individuation. A depth-psychology study of the Mabinogion legend of Culhwch and Olwen’ is a fine example of what happens when a critic does the opposite, taking a text and imposing a reading practice on it.

 

As a demonstration of a psychoanalytical meditation on a text, the book is fascinating. As one way of thinking about the development of an individual, it is coherent and thought provoking. But I think it would work best if you haven’t read the story it claims to be studying. 

 

As a reading of the text, rather than a performance that uses the text as a starting point, it doesn’t offer much in the way of critical enlightenment. It suffers from the author’s wide knowledge of what something might mean and his assumption that because something might mean something in another story, it means the same thing in this one. His willingness to shoehorn the story into an existing theoretical paradigm requires a willing suspension of incredulity on the part of any reader who isn’t a card carrying Jungian. 

 

Ironically  I suspect the book’s value may lie in forcing a reader to be patient and negotiate the tension between the reading and the text. The struggle to suppress the temptation to throw the book away, and find some useful insight into the story is salutary.

 

Firstly, a reader has to suppress the urge to object to statements like this:

 “’Born in a pig run’ is equivalent to being ‘born of a sow’ (p.11.).’ No. Simply, no, they are not. Culhwch’s mother is most definitely not a sow. 

 

Secondly. Anything can symbolise anything. Freud’s great perception about dreams was that the symbolism is always specific to the dreamer. This seems a useful way of approaching symbolism in stories. It’s not Layard’s. He is wedded to the idea of archetypes. He reads the story as though it could be neatly analysed and explained by recourse to an old fashioned book of dream symbols.

 

When Culhwch and his companions find Custennin the shepherd, the latter is sitting on a mound overlooking his limitless flock of sheep: 

‘…he is a man in the service of the Devouring mother, since in dreams and mythological imagery, the mound he stands on would seem to symbolise the breast’ (p.38)

 

At times this borders on self-parody. When Olwen’s father is finally beheaded and his head stuck on a stake; 

‘Another aspect of body imagery is that it may be that the mound symbolises the breast, with Ysbaddaden’s head on it  stake representing the ‘bad nipple’ . The hero seizes the good one ‘And he took possession of his fort and his dominions’.; the fort of the breast and the immense power it wields.’(p.198) 

 

With all due respects, this is hard to take seriously. There is nothing in the story to suggest ‘the fort of the breast’,  and this in a story where the storyteller delighted in playing with the potential absurdity of names.  Culhwch does not take possession of ‘the fort and his dominions'.  The ‘he’ in that sentence refers to another character, Goreu, who is also the one who beheads Ysbaddaden.

 

It feels as though symbolism is being found everywhere for the sake of finding symbolism with little reference to the story. When Cei murders Wrnach the Giant, having first tricked the giant into giving him his sword, Layard writes:

 

‘The scabbard here stands for the giant’s muddled head, into which Cei plunges the sword. The sword also symbolises the power of insight (the Logos) that pierces and destroys the blind forces of darkness (the blackness of the giant) or of the unconscious super-conservativism and resistance to change that giants are apt to represent.’ (p.102) 

 

Faced with such a reading it seems almost pedantic to point out that Wrnach is not described as black or back haired. But it does seem to be a worth asking how this applies to the story. Who gains what insight? Wrnach is dead, and Cei is about to leave the story in a fit of petulance after Arthur teases him. 

 

How the reading applies to the story is a constant question. Most readers will see Culhwch’s stepmother’s actions as wilfully (perhaps spitefully) putting him in danger. When she says he will not marry any woman unless it is Olwen, the phrase she uses  ‘ Tygaf tyghet’ is glossed by Bromwich and Evans as ‘I will swear a destiny’ and they point out the same phrase is used by Aranrhod, in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi,  when she swears her three [debilitating] destinies on her own son, Lleu. As Culhwch soon finds out, no one asking for Olwen’s hand has escaped alive. 

 

However, for Layard: ‘stepmother and fairy god mother are thus seen to represent two aspects of the same female spiritual principle, at first appearing to be 'bad’ but turning into the ‘good’. Such will be seen to the nature of the stepmother in this present tale, who in fact causes the hero to undertake all sorts of fearsome tasks so as, in the end, to win the prize most worth having, the spiritual bride or soul’.  (p.13). 

 

It feels pedantic, again, to point out that Culhwch doesn’t complete ANY of the forty tasks he’s given. Other people do it for him. He earns nothing, and learns nothing. He isn’t so much a non-hero as a non-presence in most of the story. The paradigms of the fairy tale or the ‘hero journey’ are not helpful here and what fairy godmothers and step mothers do in other tales seems irrelevant. 

 

These are not isolated or uncharacteristic examples but I think they demonstrate how a reading practice is being imposed on the text. 

 

Like most reading practices it also requires the reader to accept the critic’s assumptions: in this case those underwritten by a Jungian Binary, which in a simplified form, wants  to divide everything into two columns, one marked ‘male’ and the other ‘female’, regardless of gender or actions in a story. The Twrch Trwyth, the terrifying wild boar who slaughters men and devastates provinces, who can only be hunted by the mustered warriors of three kingdoms: 

..’is the image himself of nature outraged at having to be transformed, female in origin but in male guise to indicate its wild destructiveness’. (p.11) (The TT is a King who God has turned into a boar for his sins, and the aim of the hunt is not necessarily to  kill him, but to seize the comb, razor and sheers from between its ears.)

 

The binary is 19^th century and to non Jungian acolytes completely arbitrary. Things are masculine or feminine because someone said they were. ‘Magic is always feminine” … and “…thought is a masculine attribute which women can have as well as men (witness the stepmother) once they admit the man as mate and not only as son’. (p.197)

 

Her husband is murdered so she can be the second wife of Culhwch’s widowed father. Her speeches in the text do not suggest ‘thought’ or that she has any attitude towards her new husband except relief to find he isn’t impotent.

 

Culhwch and Olwen is one of the world’s great literary performances. In its entirety it is like no other text. It is full of inconsistencies, and lacking in what a modern reader might expect in terms of character development and plot. It is not a fairy tale. But Leyard’s treatment of it as though it neatly illustrates a Jungian approach to Individuation, ignores the story itself and becomes an excellent example of what happens when a modern reading practice is imposed on a medieval text.