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Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Vol. 27, No. 3, August 2007, pp. 357–370

THE MYTHICAL METHOD: ELIOT’S ‘THE WASTE


LAND’ AND A CANTERBURY TALE (1944)

Scott Freer

T.S. Eliot, when reviewing James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), defined the ‘mythical
method’ as manipulating ‘a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and
antiquity’.1 T.S. Eliot’s epic poem, ‘The Waste Land’, published in 1922, is famous
for using the ‘mythical method’ as a poetic method to create a complex web of
oblique allusions and cross-cultural correspondences. The poem’s endnotes point to a
heritage of literature crossing over various time periods, whilst evoking a common
thread of cultural continuity and traditional order. Eliot also refers to the ‘mythical
method’ as a way of

controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense


panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.2

Out of a crisis of history that largely informed a despair of modernity, Eliot perceived
that a notion of tradition and cultural order was vital for marrying the present with
the past. For Eliot, modernity was marked by a severance between the past and the
present, and the grand narrative of Christianity functioned as a symbolic bridge, or an
adhesive unifier, linking people together through a traditional past.
In the literary canon, Eliot’s description of the ‘mythical method’ has become
central to a critical understanding of various modernist writers, and Anton Chekhov’s
1894 short story, ‘The Student’, is an early example of a narrative method that
anticipates Eliot’s concept. Ivan Velikopolsky, a son of sexton, undergoes a temporary

Correspondence: Scott Freer, 42 Howard Road, Clarendon, Leicester, LE2 1XH, UK.
E-mail: sef17@le.ac.uk

ISSN 0143-9685 (print)/ISSN 1465-3451 (online)/07/030357–14 ß 2007 IAMHIST & Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01439680701443127
358 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION

lapse of faith on Good Friday, but soon experiences the symbolic parallels of history as
an epiphany:

The past, he realized, was linked to the present by an unbroken chain of events,
which flowed from one into another. And it seemed to him that he had just seen
both ends of this chain: he touched one end and the other had moved.3

In discovering a symbolic association between an event from the Gospels and present
sensations, Ivan realizes that history can be narrowed to a singular event, which bears
an overarching meaning. In expressing the salutary effects of a symbolic time-
continuum, Ivan also appropriates the archaic trope of time as a river, which in the
hymn ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ is an ever-rolling stream that bears all its sons
away, embodying both permanence of God’s eternal life and the destructive force of
human mortality. Though sensing his own temporal fragility, Ivan is able to heal his
existential anxiety by remarrying a symbolic connection through time.
Yet, given the poetic and narrative uses of the ‘mythical method’ within
literature, its employment as an aesthetic device within the medium of films has
largely gone unrecognized. For example, the 1916 film, Intolerance, directed by D.W.
Griffith, with its mixing together of four time periods, adopts a structure that also
predates Joyce’s epic narrative. In similar terms to Eliot’s definition, and whilst using
the trope of time’s river, Griffith describes the interweaving and converging of actions
as occurring on separate temporal planes:

[The] stories will begin like four currents looked at from a hilltop. At first the
four currents will flow apart, slowly and quietly. But as they flow, they grow
nearer and nearer together, and faster and faster, until in the last act, they mingle
in one mighty river of expression.4

Closely allied to Eliot’s notion of tradition and order, the structure of Intolerance,
in dealing with themes of social injustice, persecution, bigotry and man’s inhumanity,
implies parallels of human behaviour and morality that are trans-cultural.
And between the 50 time transitions, the recurring cameo shot of Lillian Gish,
as Eternal Motherhood rocking the cradle of humanity, also acts as a symbolic bridging
device.
Likewise, A Canterbury Tale (1944—produced and directed by Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger, length: 120 minutes) deploys the ‘mythical method’ as a
narrative method to evoke trans-cultural themes of continuity. The film’s quest
narrative involves three modern-day pilgrims travelling to Canterbury—Sgt Peter
Gibbs (Dennis Price), Sgt Bob Johnson (John Sweet) and Alison Smith (Sheila Sim)—
and all are delayed at the Kentish village of Chillingbourne, where they meet the local
magistrate, Thomas Colpeper (Eric Portman). As a British propagandist film, it is
somewhat typical of ‘consensus cinema’ in attempting to galvanize a national ethos
evoked through a vision of a unified community.5 Other films, like Went the Day Well?
(Alberto Cavalcanti, 1942), present a similar pastoral view of a pre-industrial England
during a time of national crisis. Nevertheless, A Canterbury Tales transgresses the
propagandistic norms of 1940s’ British cinema by incorporating a modernist method
to translate immediate wartime concerns into a set of wider cultural parallels
THE MYTHICAL METHOD 359

and anxieties. Andrew Moor, in Powell and Pressburger: a cinema of magic spaces (2005),
argues that the film’s valorization of an archaic countryside is a ‘residuum of
Romanticism . . . a reaction against the soulless alienation associated with industry and
urbanisation’.6 Moor also argues that the film depends on a familiarity with characters
as ‘mythical types’, such as Colpeper (the symbol of continuity) and the village idiot,
who represent the ‘dramatis personae of the nation’.7 Moor explores the film’s rural/
urban duality, but these themes can be best illuminated by contextualizing the film’s
‘non-plot’, or curious narrative structure, within a modernist poetic tradition. This is
because A Canterbury Tale, like Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, employs a similar ‘mythical
method’ to express a sense of cultural dislocation or loss whilst suggesting continuous
parallels of symbolic reconnection. Through an elaborate set of cross-cultural
correspondences, the film is concerned with restructuring the disconnected desires of
the contemporary individual towards a more communal and symbolically continuous
society.
At the heart of the film’s ‘mythical method’, and thus underlining the mythical
journey to Canterbury, is the spatial and temporal juxtaposition between the two time
periods of 1943 and a medieval world. The film immediately foregrounds at the start a
sense of a timeless place with a close interior shot of bells ringing in the tower of
Canterbury cathedral. The camera then moves outwards to look down at the
surrounding town, and fades into a shot of Chaucer’s text with a narrator reading out
the general prologue in Middle English:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote


The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in such licour
Of which vertu engendred in the flour . . . 8

As the narrator continues, we then see a map of medieval England marking several
important cultural towns like Salisbury, Winchester, Gloucester and Bath, as well as
the main roads to Canterbury. The effect is to establish a theme of pilgrimage that was
in medieval times seen as concomitant with a ‘season of wanderlust’:

Lords and ladies, burgesses and their wives, rich and poor, cleric and lay, all
yearned when the bleak winter was past to take to the road, to become pilgrims
and to visit distant shrines in various shrines.9

In the opening of ‘The Waste Land’, Eliot also alludes to the prologue of
The Canterbury Tales, but immediately inverts a general sense of seasonal expectations
which implied that with April came the hope of renewal. Through this disruption of
familiar associations, Eliot evokes a tradition of symbolic roots which can be located
within an ancient agrarian culture, buried beneath the ruins of contemporaneity.
Similarly, the narrative of A Canterbury Tale is premised on a symbolic rite of passage,
which involves re-connection to traditional rural practices. This is why the film
visually establishes a sense of journeying back into a medieval past to witness a scene
of pilgrims full of reverie moving through ancient woodland. And it is here that the
film creates a dramatic parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, when a
falconer lets loose a bird of prey. There is a time cut as the image of the falcon merges
360 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION

into a modern bird of prey, a spitfire diving out of the skies. The narrator then
resumes his poetic voiceover:

600 years have passed. What will they see, Chaucer and his goodly company
today? The hills and valleys are the same. Gone are the forests since the enclosures
came. Hedgerows have sprung, the land is under plough and orchards bloom with
blossoms on the bough. Sussex and Kent are like a garden fair, but sheep still
graze upon the ridges there. The pilgrim’s way still winds . . . But though so little
has changed since Chaucer’s day another kind of pilgrim walks the way.

With this last comment, an armoured vehicle then abruptly comes into shot. The rest
of the narration emphasizes the new menace of such steel vehicles that have replaced
ancient rural forms of transport with the suggestion that contemporary war has
disturbed the pilgrim’s way, severing the present from the past. Like ‘The Waste
Land’, the film, in its opening scenes, undercuts a sense of hope experienced through
seasonal expectations. The sudden time cut to 600 years ahead highlights the theme of
cultural dislocation as a result of historical severance. The rest of the film though aims
to evoke the symbolic links necessary for the modern-day pilgrim to complete the
pilgrimage.
The diving spitfire also works as a poetic motif reminding the film’s audience of
the contemporary significance of the film’s title, for Canterbury was directly related
to recent developments in the war. In response to the allied bombing of the historic
centre of Lübeck, which destroyed the cathedral and main churches, the German
Luftwaffe had targeted cities in England which were relatively unimportant
strategically, but were culturally and historically symbolic. The cities were reputedly
selected from the ‘German Baedeker Tourist Guide’ according to their star rating.
During the first period of the Baedeker blitz, cities like Bath and Exeter were hit, and
these places are also marked on the medieval map in the opening prologue of the film.
During the second period, following the bombing of Cologne, extensive damage was
caused to the medieval centre of Canterbury. The cathedral, it seems, had
miraculously survived:10

The Cathedral, undoubtedly the Luftwaffe’s principal target, had a remarkable


escape from any serious damage.11

Even though it was not an industrial site like Coventry, Canterbury was seen as an
important cultural site at the symbolic heart of a traditional England.
A Canterbury Tale reacts to the bombing of Canterbury as though the very idea of
Englishness, enshrined within the cultural and ecclesiastical walls of the cathedral, was
under serious threat. The film, throughout, plays on Canterbury as a place of cultural,
historic and Christian significance. Canterbury was traditionally a cathedral city,
the seat of the Archbishop—the Primate of All England—and the pilgrim’s way taken
from Winchester, in Hampshire, to the shrine of Thomas à Becket, is also a route that
follows closely a pre-existing ancient track-way.12 Canterbury had also been a
settlement since prehistoric times before a Roman administrative centre was
established at the junction of three main roads. The film’s conflation of a Christian and
ancient history is made explicit when Thomas Colpeper, the local magistrate, during
THE MYTHICAL METHOD 361

his lantern-slide lectures given to members of the military stationed nearby, briefly
refers to some of these historical facts to highlight the importance of the bend at the
top of the old hill that he has lobbied to preserve and excavate. Despite the film’s time
cut, Colpeper evokes echoes of the medieval world of Chaucer’s revellers journeying
through the ancient way to Canterbury. And it is through such a manipulation between
antiquity and contemporaneity that the film attempts to restore the symbolic links
severed between the past and the present.
In a contemporary context, the narrative of symbolic reconnection to the past
involves three modern-day pilgrims, Alison, Bob and Peter, who eventually arrive at
Canterbury’s cathedral. This is the telos of their quest but it is more important for
their pilgrimage that they are temporally deferred at Chillingbourne close to the
ancient way. Here, through the character of Colpeper, they are encouraged to
appreciate the threads of continuity that exist within traditional arts that are passed
on from one generation to the next. Colpeper wants to prevent people from just
passing through the isolated place of Chillingbourne, such as Bob Johnson who has
only seen Salisbury where he watched a cinema movie. He wants to educate
outsiders so as they can appreciate more the folklore of the past and how it
reverberates still in the present. Like Lillian Gish, Chillingbourne serves as a
symbolic bridging device between divided time periods. Colpeper’s lantern-slide
lectures are a way of communicating how beneath a familiar rural landscape a
sense of history echoes in the present day, which in turn implies a sense of cultural
kinship.
The film goes beyond its 1940s’ propagandist agenda to suggest that modern life
is the source of social alienation and cultural dislocation. This is why the wheelwright
scene, where we see Alison Smith and Bob Johnson spending time conversing with the
locals, is crucial for expressing the cultural values of Chillingbourne. Alison is an
urbanite who has lost contact with the ways of country life. But, in being sent to
Chillingbourne by the War Agricultural Committee, she is now part of a journey
reconnecting her with the cultural roots she hankered for when working in a London
store selling garden furniture. We initially see Alison tending to a horse, now wearing
land girl clothes—for it is important for her to be seen moving away from the city and
to be merging with an ancient rural life. There are interior shots of the blacksmith’s
work-place, lingering on the physicality and sounds of an ancient trade. Alison’s rite of
passage involves the process of readjustment and so she is initially seen looking out of
place, surrounded by local men curious at her unusual presence. Ned Horton, the
wheelwright blacksmith, then converses with Alison by berating the poor farming up
in Northumbria, the county of her birth-place. This exchange, with the blacksmith
using esoteric technical terms, establishes the differences of culture and customs that
exist between Chillingbourne and Alison’s outside world. But, in highlighting
a country/city divide, the scene also stresses Alison’s emblematic malaise, one which
has more to do with modernity than the blitzing of London. When Ned Horton
explains how he has been a blacksmith for 37 years, the same as his father, and his
father’s father, a sense of continuity is represented through ancient trades that are
passed on through generations. A modern urban life does not have the same appeal,
as made apparent when Alison later, in discussion with Prudence Honeywood,
describes the hot and sweaty queues for buses, and the flies and customers in summer
362 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION

stores. And when asked about the view she had, the city is described as uniform,
shabby and dreary, deprived of cultural intimacy:

Prudence: Was it a long street with every house a different sort of sadness in it?
Alison: It was a long row of back gardens, the tall sad houses were all the
same.
Prudence: Ghastly in Winter.
Alison: Airless in Summer.

This gloomy depiction of the urban masses thronged together in the dim streets of
London echoes Eliot’s imagery:

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,


A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.13

Despite a common national identity, the dissension between Ned Horton and Alison is
meant to highlight the fact that Alison is like many other modern-day Londoners, who
need to be re-introduced into the ancient rural ways of her country.
In heavily relying upon a pastoral view of England, which is ideologically at odds
with what urban modernity had to offer, the film shares another characteristic of
Eliot’s modernism. In relishing the opportunity to be a part of a rural community,
and bemoaning the harassment of daily life in London and its drear uniformity of back-
to-back houses, Alison’s personal sense of modern alienation and disillusionment with
contemporary cultural life allies itself with the modernism of T.S. Eliot.
Chillingbourne is a rural sanctuary removed from the ills of modern life. For Eliot,
the popular activities of the city and all forms of modern intimacy also seemed bereft
of nostalgic romance. He associates ‘pubbing’ with habitual demotic expressions:
‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’.14 Modern sexual encounters are seedy and
associated with other doomed and illicit relationships in history, like Elizabeth and
Leicester:

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all


15
Enacted on this same divan or bed . . .

Whereas Eliot inverts mythical equivalents to highlight the decadence of modern love,
Alison can be read as a positive inversion of her antecedent equivalent in Chaucer’s
The Miller’s Tale, the carpenter’s wife who got ‘poked’ and had her ‘bottom eye’
kissed.16 Another pilgrim, who is separated from his partner, is Bob Johnson and seems
to be honourable in love, and unlike Eliot’s ‘the small house agent’s clerk’ who makes
frustrated assaults at the ‘bored and tired’ typist.17 For Eliot, modern urban life was
morally and culturally bankrupt because it was severed from the symbolic roots of a
traditional Christian heritage. Again, A Canterbury Tale implies that the causes of modern
futility reach beyond the destruction caused by modern warfare and are rooted in the
lived experiences of urban culture that is unfulfilling and disconnected.
When the American GI, Sergeant Bob Johnson (played by an actual GI) arrives
on the scene, it becomes clear that he is ironically more connected to England’s
THE MYTHICAL METHOD 363

past than Alison. Despite the shots of bemused old men, Bob immediately looks more
relaxed and seems better placed to win over the local citizens. He expresses an
interest in the ‘old road’ to which Ned Horton replies: ‘Them were the days for a
wheelwright’. Bob and Ned then discuss in esoteric terms the process and techniques
of seasoning wood. A common ground of shared interest that links across time and
place is expressed as Bob describes what ‘they do in his parts’, and Ned continually
replies with: ‘And so do us’. The two men bonding through their work functions as a
metaphor to forge the common cultural identity shared between two nations allied in
war. The two then discuss briefly how seasoning wood requires patience, yet both are
also aware that the war has influenced some to alter traditional practices:

Ned: Folks go mad, they cut oak at mid-summer.


Bob: Oak should be cut in winter.

This exchange is important for effecting a sense of shared beliefs that are imparted
through each generation. When Bob says that his dad taught him this, Ned then replies
that he was brought up well. Despite outward signs of cultural difference, the two
express a common thread of cultural identity. It is pointed out that in America the
trade is referred to as the ‘lumber’ business, whereas in England it is referred to as
‘timber’. On the surface things make look different, yet the custom remains the
same—again implying a deeper bond of mutual understanding. Bob then echoes Ned
when he tells him:

My granddad had the first mill in our parts. Dad he was a cabinet maker . . . I cut
my teeth on wood shavings . . . Dad he cut my cradle out of cedar of Lebanon.
He said, what was good enough for Solomon, was good enough for a Johnson in
Johnson County.

The film projects a romance of an ancient trade that reaches back to Biblical times to
link America to a common Christian heritage. The bond established in this scene is
thematic of the whole film, and is cemented further when Ned invites Bob for midday
dinner at his home. When Alison and Bob ride away on a horse and cart, passing
a water mill, their conversation perfectly sums up the aim of the wheelwright scene:

Alison: How did you get round Mr. Horton that way? I believe you are a
detective.
Johnson: We speak the same language.
Alison: I’m English and don’t speak their language.
Johnson: He knows about wood, see, and so do I.

There are various references to medieval trades that are being continued in
Chillingbourne, suggesting that a pre-1600 England is also American history, and that
the ancestors of Chillingbourne were also ancestors of America. This is why a literal
American GI is depicted on his way to Canterbury, and is temporally deferred
at Chillingbourne. This is because in finding a cross-cultural point of interest, Bob
Johnson has become an emblematic figure within the film’s allegory, a didactic
messenger edifying his fellow soldiers into the deeper meanings of a shared history.
364 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION

This serves a primary propaganda aim of reaching beyond a less self-contained view of
England to forge stronger cultural links between the allied forces of Britain and
America. The film is set during August 1943, when American soldiers were arriving in
England in preparation for the D-day landings, the following June, and therefore wants
to convey an idea that America is fighting for same set of values embodied in a shared
cultural heritage.
The insistence on a common heritage of Christian civilization that transcends
national differences is important in Powell and Pressburger’s wartime films, and
A Matter of Life and Death (1946) also appeals to a sense of Anglo-American
commonality shaped by a tradition of familiar ancestors. When squadron leader Peter
D. Carter of the RAF, accompanied by Conductor 71, initially ascends the stairway to
heaven, the first statue that is noted is that of Abraham Lincoln. The various
references to two national histories, and Peter Carter’s developing relationship with
the American girl, becomes symbolic of the lasting marriage that had existed between
England and America since the pilgrims first crossed over the Atlantic. When Dr.
Reeves first arrives on heaven, we our given a glimpse of another trans-cultural figure:

Conductor 71: One of the best men in the service, a compatriot of yours.
Reeves: What’s his name?
Conductor 71: John . . .
Reeves: Bunyan! Yes, of course!18

John Bunyan, of English-birth, but responsible for transporting a discourse of religious


thought to the shores of America, is a literal cultural bridge between the two nations.
In A Canterbury Tale, Bob Johnson’s grandfather, who built a Baptist church, would have
been a descendant of Bunyan’s religious legacy. When Peter is offered the chance to
play on the organ in the cathedral, at the same time we see Bob rapt by the
reverberating sounds:

And my dad’s pa built the first Baptist church in Johnson County, Oregon—red
cedar, cedar shingles, 1887.

Bob’s coincidental appearance is part of a wider design that is full of chance


encounters to reinforce the parallels between the past and the present.
For the third modern-day pilgrim, Peter, reconnection to a cultural heritage has
overtones of Christian repentance. Peter appears to be the most disconnected from the
modern-day pilgrimage, so his rehabilitation to the ancient ways of the past is more
urgent. In relinquishing his dream of playing the church organ to become a cinema
organist in the West-end, Peter became a cynical urban socialite spending his free-days
playing cards and ‘pubbing’. Like Alison, he is from London, but seems more at home in
the big city, preferring to catch a train than to walk. On the 10-minute train ride to
Canterbury, Colpeper comments on the significance of pilgrim to the cathedral: it is
a place where one can do a penance or receive a blessing. But Peter is derisive towards
such spiritual ideas, and so it is important that Peter is seen as the first ‘convert’.
Significantly, he is absent during the all-important wheelwright scene. Peter’s Biblical
equivalent may be ‘Doubting Thomas’, and there are parallels with the confused Peter
who denies Christ. The cathedral redeems Peter from the ills of his current stasis in life.
THE MYTHICAL METHOD 365

When Peter enters into the cathedral he asks where he can find the superintendent, and
fate conspires for him to meet a fellow organist. A piece of musical score floats down in
front of Peter, dropped by the organist, and he feels compelled to make his way up to the
church organ to hand it back. There are other pressing matters in the world, namely the
war, but the film is making the point that here, as in Chillingbourne, time stands still as a
place of spiritual and cultural refuge against the onrush of history. The exchange
between the two men clearly echoes the wheelwright scene and parallels the exchange
between Ned Horton and Bob Johnson on the subject of seasoning wood:

Peter: This is some organ.


Organist: What do you know about it?
Peter: I’m an organist. Well, at least I was before the war.
Organist: O well, once an organist, always an organist.

The film links the spiritual vocation of organ playing with other ancient guilds
because, like Ned and Bob, the two men share a bond of humanity through their
trade. This is reinforced when the organist tells Peter, as if to placate his anxiety about
having played in a populist cinema, that as a young man, after he got his degree,
he played in the lowly cultural sphere of the circus. Peter has discovered a kindred
spirit in the cathedral organist, whose great rival was also the younger man’s professor
at the Royal Academy of Music. Like Ivan’s repentance, Peter’s cultural rehabilitation
is expressed as a religious epiphany in which he is converted through symbolic
parallels existing between the past and the present. This takes place within
Canterbury’s cathedral, which is visualized as a sonorous and transcendental place for
modern weary pilgrims to find a sense of cultural and spiritual renewal.
Despite the film’s title, the reference to an antecedent canonical text is secondary,
given that the idea of pilgrimage is underplayed in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales,
where it is used more as a device to bring together a diverse collection of people for
literary purposes. The film metaphorically reroutes the antecedent-text back to a level
of religious seriousness by focusing more on a pilgrimage quest narrative that brings
people together to appreciate the redeeming qualities of the past. The idea of a holy
pilgrimage is immediately highlighted at the start of the film when Chaucer’s general
prologue is read out, ending with a reference to the healing powers of St. Thomas à
Becket:

Of England, to Canterbury they come,


The holy blessed martyr there to seek,
Who gave his help to them when they were sick.19

The quest becomes mythical at the final cathedral scene, with overtones of Christian
redemption or purification, and where three modern-day pilgrims receive a form of
symbolic blessing. The cathedral and the Christian theme are integral to the film’s
teleological message, which continually points towards the recognition of a common
heritage. The pilgrimage is framed within a visual symmetry, with the film ending as it
began as we see another shot of the bells ringing in the tower. The symbolism of the
cathedral alludes to its miraculous survival in the Baedeker raids. During the final
scenes, Canterbury’s cathedral is viewed standing like a medieval sanctuary.
366 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION

When Alison walks down Rose Lane to find the garage that has kept her holiday
caravan preserved as a piece of memory, she views the ruined remains of buildings
caused by a German bombing raid. Lost, she seeks directions, and a passer-by says:

It is an awful mess . . . but you get a very good view of the cathedral now.

Alison’s sense of disorientation implies she is a modern-day Dante in need of a guide


to take her through the carnage of a modern hell. But the cathedral has a permanent
presence, as if made immovable and protected by the act of providence. The camera
lingers on posted signs indicating where once stood business premises like: ‘George
Mount & Son, Florist, Now Moved to the Nurseries’, or ‘James Walker Ltd.,
Goldsmiths & Silversmiths, Now at 16 Sun St.’, or ‘Sun Insurance’. This accurately
reflects the devastation caused by the Baedeker raids.20 Similar to the disjunctive
imagery of ‘The Waste Land’, an ironic juxtaposition is made between the signs of
man’s material or commercial transience, temporal disorientation, and the
overarching image of a more stable narrative:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow


Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images . . . 21

Alison’s journey takes her through a heap of broken images implied in the ruins of an
urban landscape. Nevertheless, the cathedral stands untouched, removed beyond the
destruction of history, evoking a more reliable guarantor of insurance against the
dangers of the world.
At the heart of the film’s symbolic finale are the themes of redemption and
reconciliation. Alison’s preserved caravan, as an enshrined museum to the past, seems
to parallel the cathedral, but she soon finds out that the tyres have been requisitioned
for the war effort, and moths are eating everything. And, as if from nowhere,
Colpeper mysteriously appears, saying:

I don’t doubt your feelings, but there is something impermanent about a caravan.
Everything on wheels must be on the move sooner or later.

It is no coincidence that Colpeper is there to witness the good news that Alison’s
fiancé, presumed shot down in action, has been found safe in Gibraltar. The tower of
the cathedral is seen in the background as if emitting a magical aura, illuminating the
miracle of resurrection. Alison then in a flurry opens the windows of the caravan to
rid it of its moths as if she were being suddenly released from her repressed soul to
renew the joys of life. The accompanying musical score also echoes the sense of
a spiritual destiny and that Canterbury is a place of redemption, as well as cultural
renewal. The cathedral is also present in the background when Bob Johnson finds his
American comrade, who viewing the surroundings through a camera, brings a blessing
to Bob: a bundle of letters that reveal his future wife had after all joined up with the
W.A.C. in Sydney, Australia. And at the Special Service in the cathedral, all three
pilgrims are present, with Peter playing the organ. We glimpse Jeffrey’s father, putting
THE MYTHICAL METHOD 367

his arm around Alison’s shoulder as a gesture reconciling their social differences.
He had previously objected to her marrying his son. The hymn that is heard, ‘Onward
Christian Soldiers’, underscores the theme of a Christian calling, and suggests that
God is on the side of the Allies in their war against Germany.
Nevertheless, one character stands outside of the film’s happy closure, where
Thomas Colpeper’s presence is seen as a detached onlooker. Colpeper has arrived
in Canterbury to be on the bench of the district law courts, yet his role as magistrate
also extends to the role of spiritual and cultural guide. As a gentleman farmer,
Colpeper is fanatical about getting people to reconnect with the past. During his
lantern-slide lecture, he evokes various parallels to 600 years ago, and when
describing the old bend where the pilgrims first caught sight of Canterbury, he
resumes the overarching theme of Chillingbourne as a timeless place, is expressed by
the film’s narrator:

There are more ways than one of getting close to your ancestors. Follow the old
road and as you walk think of them and the old England. They climbed
Chillingbourne hill as you did. They sweated and paused as you breathe just as you
did today.

To achieve his missionary aims, he secretly plays the role of the ‘glue man’ to entice
people to his lectures concerning Kent’s medieval heritage. At night, he attacks
women by pouring glue onto their hair to deter women from going out with the
stationed soldiers. This means the soldiers are not distracted from attending
Colpeper’s lectures. Colpeper later justifies his criminal act as protective, to instil
historical understanding of Kent’s Roman and medieval past, and thereby to reconnect
the soldiers to their cultural roots. An obvious figure in the antecedent text of
The Canterbury Tales to whom we may compare Colpeper, is Chaucer, because he too
stands outside of the pilgrim characters. However, Chaucer does not orchestrate
events and act as a cultural mediator.
There is another, more convincing mythic equivalent present in ‘The Waste
Land’—Tiresias—the mythic figure who is blessed with the gift of prophecy. In the
endnotes to ‘The Waste Land’, Eliot writes:

Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most
important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest . . . What Tiresias sees, in
fact, is the substance of the poem.22

The name, ‘Glue man’, is highly apposite to Colpeper’s allegorical role within the
film, because he brings people together to appreciate a more shared sense of cultural
heritage that crosses the Atlantic. Colpeper sees into the past and wants to preserve
it for the sake of the future. Like Tiresias, who unites all the rest, he is an adhesive
agent within the ‘mythical method’ of the film, uniting people across a cultural divide.
When Colpeper is confronted by the three pilgrims on a train to Canterbury about the
guilt of his crime, he defends his actions by saying he was pouring knowledge into
people’s heads, and a love of the country’s beauty. For Colpeper, historical
connections are important for preserving a set of values such as ‘truth’ and ‘honour’,
words that are inscribed into the wooden beams of his courtroom.
368 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION

Throughout the film, Colpeper has a magical presence, at times with messianic or
providential qualities. When Alison finds herself on Chillingbourne hill, Colpeper,
as if from nowhere, pops up from behind the grass. Alison thinks she can hear the
horse’s hooves, voices and the musical sounds of a bygone era. The audience is
reminded of the initial time period and the pilgrim’s reverie, whilst Colpeper
responds by saying:

Those sounds come from inside, not outside. Then only when you’re
concentrating, or when you believe strongly in something.

Colpeper is not only in tune with the two divided time periods but is able to sense the
inner sadness of people’s cultural malaise. Alison makes an analogy between human
depth and the layers of a geological dig, which is apt because Colpeper’s philosophy is
akin to Eliot’s, believing that human values are connected deeply with the memories
retained within the earth’s soil or agrarian symbolism. Colpeper is also present when
Alison receives news that her fiancé is alive. Neither Colpeper’s arrival nor departure is
seen, as if he were a mysterious spectator or guardian angel. The film also continually
hints towards his providential role through the use of light. When Colpeper first
appears in the film, he is viewed in an elevated position with his head shrouded in light
amidst the medieval iconography of the courtroom. During the lecture speech, his head
quickly moves out of the darkness to be illuminated by the light of lantern.
The mysterious hand Colpeper plays in Peter’s fate is also implied through the use
of light and a set of coincidental circumstances. As the train to Canterbury pulls up at
the station, Peter refutes Colpeper’s idea of the cathedral’s power to give a blessing to
pilgrims: ‘I’ll believe that when I see a halo round my head.’ Just as he says these words,
the light emitted from outside the carriage window shrouds his head. Before Peter joins
his unit, he insists on reporting Colpeper to the police concerning his criminal activities
as the ‘glue man’. Nevertheless, Peter inadvertently ends up in the cathedral after a
local inspector tells him that the superintendent is performing a special service there.
At first, it may seem a set of coincidences have conspired to bring Peter to this holy
place, but the film hints at more than temporal causes. Before he departed company
from the rest, Colpeper had patted Peter on the shoulder and wished him ‘good luck’.
The others comment on the special attention he has received, and Peter puts this down
to the fact his battalion is off to join the war. However, the uplifting choral music that
coincides with Peter’s first sighting of the cathedral underscores the idea that Colpeper
has singled out Peter for the first blessing.
But, in fulfilling his mythical role as Tiresias, Colpeper can only stand as the
pansexual spectator in the cathedral. Colpeper is single, lives with his mother, and
there are other signs he has not consummated a relationship. His willingness to keep
the American troops apart from the local women suggests more than outmoded
prudishness. Like Tiresias, Colpeper seems cursed by the gods to be asexual:

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,


Old man with wrinkled female breasts.23

Colpeper’s appearance in the cathedral suggests he is there to perform a penance


rather than to be blessed. Colpeper has magical powers because he too transcends
THE MYTHICAL METHOD 369

conventional human relationships, thus enabling him to function in a mythical and


unifying role. Colpeper is integral to the cultural importance of Chillingbourne, and,
like Lillian Gish in Intolerance, he acts as a symbolic bridge between the past and the
present.
Colpeper has a conspiring and mythical presence when coincidences transform
into the pull of fate, driving the modern-day pilgrims to their calling. Like Griffith’s
description of four currents mingling into one mighty river of expression, the four
protagonists, with their separate life stories, converge into the mighty cathedral of
Canterbury. And like Eliot’s poem, the film suggests that within the sacred walls of the
cathedral a tradition of order and continuity symbolically exists amidst the rubble and
chaos of the modern world. For what has Colpeper been trying to teach his modern-
day pilgrims to appreciate all along? In the words of Ivan Velikopolsky:

The past was linked to the present by an unbroken chain of events, which flowed
into one another.24

As Mark Wollaeger argues, the literary works of modernism and the media
environment of propaganda frequently shared aesthetic and cultural links. Within
modernism, concurrent with a perception of fragmentation, was a taste for ‘totalizing
fictions generated by societies eager to hold themselves together.25 Often visions of
a cultural re-integration were defined by a symbolic reconnection to the past.
In threatening national survival, the might of the Nazi war machine had also inspired
visually mediated notions of English identity that were dependent upon a vision of an
integrated society. Whilst deploying modernist techniques of poetic juxtaposition and
symbolism to produce a sophisticated interplay between poetic echoes and the concept
of time, A Canterbury Tale is interested in the cultural politics of integration
propaganda. The film creates a notion of roots as agrarian and Christian which both
serve a propaganda purpose and a wider modernist one. In ‘The Waste Land’, Eliot
too focuses on a series of agrarian symbols which cross cultural divides, and which are
also invested with Christian meaning. And despite presenting images of cultural
disintegration and the lived experience of fragmentation, the poem induces its readers
to restructure their individual desires towards a more communal society. In
A Canterbury Tale, a form of national salvation is dependent on individuals being
rehabilitated into a set of cultural norms transmitted through the tapeworm of history.
‘The mythical method’ was therefore an effective modernist tool in both film and
literature for re-imagining the symbolic links necessary for giving shape and
significance to a society threatened by the forces of historical severance and cultural
fragmentation.

Acknowledgements
This article was originally presented as a conference paper for Literature on Screen,
at De Montfort University, September 2006. I am grateful to Professor James
Chapman of Leicester University for sharing his knowledge of English propaganda
films during the Second World War.
370 HISTORICAL JOURNAL OF FILM, RADIO AND TELEVISION

Notes
1 T.S. Eliot, Ulysses, Order, and Myth, in Frank Kermode (ed.) Selected Prose
(New York, Harvest Book, 1975), 177.
2 Ibid.
3 Anton Chekhov, The Student, in About Love and Other Stories (Rosamund Bartlett,
trans.) (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004), 106.
4 David A. Cook, A History of Narrative Film (New York, W.W. Norton, 2004), 76.
5 See James Chapman, The British at War: cinema, state and propaganda, 1939–45
(New York, I.B. Tauris, 1998).
6 Andrew Moor, Powell and Pressburger: a cinema of magic spaces (New York, I.B. Tauris,
2005), 90.
7 Ibid., 109.
8 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (director and script writer), A Canterbury
Tale (The Rank Silver Collection, Carlton, 1999).
9 Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (London,
A Condor Book, 1967), 21.
10 John Killen, The Luftwaffe: a history (London, Frederick Muller, 1967), 222–223.
11 Paul Crampton, The Archive Photographs Series: Canterbury (Chalford, Chalford Pub.,
1997), 53.
12 See D. Gardiner, The Story of the English Towns (London, The Sheldon Press, 1933).
13 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Waste Land and Other Writings (New York,
The Modern Library, 2002), lines 62–63.
14 Ibid., lines 141–169.
15 Ibid., lines 243–244.
16 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, 97.
17 Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 222–242.
18 Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (director and script writer), A Matter of Life
and Death (The Rank Collection, Carlton, 2003).
19 Geoffrey Chaucer, in David Wright (ed.) The Canterbury Tales (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1985), 1.
20 See Crampton, The Archive Photographs Series: Canterbury, 59.
21 Eliot, The Waste Land, lines 19–22.
22 Ibid., note 28.
23 Ibid., lines 218–219.
24 Chekhov, The Student, 106.
25 Mark Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, & Propaganda: British narrative from 1900 to 1945
(Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006), 17.

Scott Freer is an Associate Lecturer for The Open University (The Nineteenth-Century
Novel), a module convenor for Vaughan College (Myth and Literature), as well as tutor for the
University of Leicester. He is currently writing a book, The Poetics of Myth in a Post-Religious
Age, which explores the aesthetics of myth within the literature of modernism and
20th-century popular culture.

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