Day Trips to the Underworld

This week saw the posthumous publication of Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney’s poetic translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI, long considered one of the highlights of the Roman epic poem. Book VI is the pivotal point of the Aeneid:  Trojan hero Aeneas, having fled the destruction of the city, has been wandering the Mediterranean in search of a new home; in the sixth book he descends to the underworld, where his father’s ghost shows him a vision of the future Roman empire. For the next six books of the poem, Aeneas will fight to establish a home in Italy.

This wasn’t the first time that Heaney had taken inspiration from Virgil: in his poem Route 110 Heaney buys a copy of Aeneid VI in a second-hand book shop, and goes on a bus journey from Belfast through “an age of ghosts.” Artists have of course been addressing the problem of the afterlife for centuries, and the concept of a land of the dead is probably as old as humanity. In classical literature, the first poetic katabasis, or journey to the Underworld, is to be found in Homer’s Odyssey.

Odysseus tempts a ghost with some dead sheep

In Book XI, Odysseus attempts to get information about how to return to get back home to Ithaca by performing the gruesome rite of nekyia (ἡ νέκυια). This was a form of ghost-bothering which involves digging a trench and sacrificing some sheep. The anaemic spirits are attracted to ovine blood, and surround the trench hoping for a taste. Odysseus offers a drink to any spook he wishes to engage in conversation; the hangers-on are chased away at the point of his sword.

Around 700 years after Homer, Virgil composed the Aeneid, the great Roman foundation epic; he appropriated, in hommage or theft, much of the Homeric action, including a katabasis.

But when Aeneas visits his late father Anchises in the Virgilian Underworld, it’s all a bit more complicated (and civilised): rather than dragging his old man from his resting place to lick gore from a hole in the ground, like a good son (pius Aeneas) he does what Anchises providently told him to do and engages the wise Sibyl as his guide.

Turner's The Golden Bough

She tells him he needs to find a golden bough in the forest, and then points him in the direction of the river Acheron (rather than the Styx, which is merely a tributary). He will then have to cross over on the ferry of the god Charon.

Charon is a psychopomp, a god or spirit who guides the recently deceased to the Underworld: he was to the Greco-roman mythology what Anubis was to the Egyptians; what the Valkyries were to the Norse peoples; and what the Grim Reaper was to Bill and Ted.

Virgil characterises Charon as a grumpy ticket collector with poor personal hygiene:

Michelangelo's Charon

…cui plurima mento/ canities inculta iacet; stant lumina flamma/ sordidus ex umeris nodo dependet amictus. (A.vi. 299-301)

A scraggy grey beard on his chin, staring fiery eyes, stained and knotted cloak hanging from his shoulders.

You can’t get on my boat unless you’re dead and buried, he says. Had that Hercules in the back once, never again. Tried to steal our bleeding dog.

There’s little doubt that Virgil is having a laugh here, despite the grim subject matter; or, rather, because of the grim subject matter: since time immemorial we have had a tendency to attempt to cope with fear of death and its unknowable aftermath by reductive anthropomorphosis. See, for example, Death represented in Family Guy as a sarcastic misanthrope with issues.

Anyway, the jobsworth ferryman’s mood is assuaged on the production of a golden bough from a magic tree, which acts as Aeneas’ return ticket: normally, only singles were available, the fare being generally believed to be one obol. For this reason ancient funeral rites required the placing of a coin in the mouth of the deceased: those unfortunates who did not have the fare, and/or had not received a proper burial, were condemned to haunt the near side of the river for a century:

Stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum / tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore/ navita sed tristis nunc hos nunc accipit illos / ast alios longe submotos arcet harena (A.vi. 313-316)

All stood begging to begin their crossing, reaching out hands in longing for the further shore; the grim ferryman takes on this one and that, but chases others away from the sands.

One of these unfortunate ghosts is Palinurus, Aeneas’ trusted helmsman who had fallen overboard while on duty. He begs Aeneas to give him a lift on Charon’s ferry, but is firmly told by the Sibyl that rules is rules. This is a pathetic scene: we cannot help but compare and contrast the helplessness of brave Palinurus, who once controlled an ocean-going ship, with the power of the scruffy Charon, who pilots his tub across a muddy pond.

You’re either on the boat or you’re off the boat; you’re either on the way to the far shore or you’re left kicking your heels on this side: such is the duality explored in Don Paterson’s poem The Ferryman’s Arms, which transfers Charon’s barge to Scotland today. Like Heaney’s Route 110 bus, Paterson’s journey to the land of the dead is by public transport: we all have to stick to the timetable. The narrator is early, and has ten minutes to kill (sic) in the eponymous pub prior to embarking on the ferry. He buys a Guinness (black and white – duality again) and is “drawn, like a moth” to the light of a pool table in the darkened back room.

Dali's Charon

He decides on a whim to play against himself: I took myself on for the hell of it. Slotting / a coin in the tongue of the table, I looked round for a cue. (Paterson’s language more than hints at where we are: hell; the allusion to the coin in the mouth; the pun on cue/queue reminding us of the line of souls awaiting the ferryman). He makes an immaculate clearance of the balls, as the black / did the vanishing trick while the white stopped. It is a small miracle that seems to call into question the laws of physics.

He then watches the ferry arrive, from somewhere unspeakable; like a ghost ship, it hardly disturbs the black water. The narrator (or half of him) gets on board, leaving his imaginary opponent sullenly / Knocking the balls in, for practice, for next time.

Although the ferryman is unseen and unheard in the poem (as is the barman, who has presumably poured the narrator’s Guinness), he permeates it: the poet is always on Charon’s territory, either in the Ferryman’s Arms, or on board the ferryman’s boat. The pointed lack of description of other people suggests that the poet is experiencing a sort of existential loneliness: but you’re never alone with a split personality, a trope so common in Scottish literature and culture (Jekyll and Hyde, Highland and Lowlands, Protestant and Catholic, Yes and No) that the term Caledonian Antisyzygy had to be invented to identify it. Hugh MacDiarmid, who literally wrote the book on the subject, was also Chris Grieve.

At the end of the poem, the narrator is both winner and loser, on the boat and off the boat, alive and dead: like Schrödinger’s cat. As he has already noted in the Ferryman’s Arms, “physics itself becomes something negotiable”.

Paradoxically it is the winner who boards Charon’s ferry, leaving the loser to the tedium of his existence until “next time”. On the face of it, this detail could admit a nihilist interpretation, that death is not only inevitable, but preferable to a meaningless existence; however, in my own view, the “next time” implies a future re-match, a re-uniting of the dual personalities; that the passenger to the other world not only had an obol to get there, but a golden bough to return; and that like Aeneas and Odysseus, he would return from his encounter with the Dead wiser and forever changed.