8. Howard Rollin Patch, The Other World, According to Descriptions in Medieval Literature
This book is not, as I expected from its title, a study of medieval imaginations about the fate of the soul after death. Mr Patch is concerned with texts that describe strange regions or wonderlands: an island in the Odyssey or in an Irish imram, a place in a hollow hill, an allegorical garden, even the Green Chapel, are all, in his terminology, ‘other world.’
His work obviously springs from a long and deep love of his matter. He is well aware that the genre continues to our own day and that it gives rise to many psychological and even philosophical questions. He is therefore quite free from any attitude of provincial superiority; he would not deride, though he declines, the question which Matilda answers in Purgatorio XXVIII, 139–141. For the purposes of his book, however, he limits himself to a single question: how far the medieval pictures of ‘other world’ depend upon folk-lore?
His study, therefore, resolves itself into a search for recurrent ‘motifs’ – the island, the river, the perilous bridge, the descent into the earth, the flight through the air. In order to disengage these, a prodigious number of texts are presented in abstract and quotation. The method is, inevitably, very hard on the texts as literature. ‘Motifs’, as Professor Tolkien has reminded us, are mere products of analysis. They do not, as ‘motifs’, occur in concrete imaginative experience. If the text really captures us, we have, not an instance of ‘the perilous bridge motif’ but this individual bridge.
The search for ‘motifs’ forces upon our attention in each text precisely what mattered least to the story-teller and his audience. Hence, as Mr Patch sees (p. 320), no method could more effectively kill the interest in which his own labours began. ‘Nothing’ (to adopt Lowell) ‘is beyond its power to disenchant.’ But this is no criticism of Mr Patch. Aesthetic appreciation was not his aim, and ‘none can compass more than they intend.’ It would be a good reason for keeping his book, if possible, out of the hands of a beginner who was threatening to study literature before he had learned to enjoy it. That does not mean that the book will not be of real use to scholars.
Mr Patch well understands the danger of mistaking for common ‘motifs’ what are only accidental coincidences. I am not quite sure whether he is equally on his guard against the possibility of resemblances which result neither from chance, nor from a common origin in folk-lore, but from the exigencies of the narrative art itself.
The story-teller, after all, must make it clear why we do not walk into ‘other world[s]’ every day. This means that he must locate it far away or put it behind some barrier: seas, rivers, caves with small entrances, the wastes of the sky, are obvious expedients. I think that if Mr Patch sat down to write an ‘other world’ story himself he would soon find that it needed no folk-lore to make him put it under the earth, or in the sky, or on a remote island. There are also passages where, I think, he has put undue pressure on the individual image to bring it into conformity with the ideal ‘motif’: notably on p. 199. I doubt if we understand either folk-lore or the Roman de la Rose better by making the stream at l. 104 into an instance of ‘the river barrier.’ But such instances are the exception.
Only a deeply and curiously erudite reader will rise from this book without having learned much that is new to him.