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Astrological Profiles

May 17, 2008

Sam Spade and Odysseus: Aries Triumphant (by Jill Baron)

            In the previous discussion on astrology I presented W.H. Auden as a convincing though in the end inauthentic Aquarius, whose exact birth date falls not under the sign of the Water Bearer, but that of the Fish, Pisces.  Therefore I propose that we butterfly stroke out of these murky waters and try something different. 

            Let’s undergo astrological rebirth!  And what better place to do so than in Aries, the first sign of the zodiac cycle, harbinger of new beginnings. This time around, I would like to consider the Arian qualities of a character or two from literature and the books that begot them.  That’s right – I’m asserting in a very Arian way that not only does a literary character possess an astrological sign but that a book does too.  I would like to inaugurate this study with a profile of four Arians in literature: Sam Spade, his prototype, Odysseus, and the two books that birthed them, The Maltese Falcon and Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey.

            Sam Spade, for those of you who don’t know noir, is the protagonist of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon, published in 1929.  From the first page of the book, on which Hammett describes Spade as looking “rather pleasantly like a blond satan,” we know that Spade is a tough, no-nonsense guy with a penchant for trouble, but willing to go to any length to solve a crime, or, in this case, get his hands on the coveted black bird.  Odysseus, as you, kind reader, already know, is the great warrior and wanderer who spends much of his adult life overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles.  I am profiling these characters in tandem because when I read The Maltese Falcon, I couldn’t help recalling Odysseus every time that Sam Spade outsmarts an adversary with his cunning and physical strength.  It appears that one has begotten the other.

            What makes these characters a pair of Aries?  A fire sign, the Arian archetype is the Ram.  Those born under the sign of the Ram, according to Steven Forrest, astrologer, “come forth into the world armed with intelligence, vitality, and an instinct for survival.”  The Arian is a warrior, a daredevil: courageous, assertive, energetic, competitive and often impulsive.  Sam Spade is nothing but courageous, daring, and, as his primary love interest Brigid O’Shaughnessy says time and time again, “altogether unpredictable.” When Joel Cairo, also known as "The Levantine," first visits Spade to solicit his services in recuperating what Cairo calls "an ornament……that has been mislaid," a "black figure of a bird," he holds Spade at gunpoint. Spade barely flinches at the threat: "Spade did not look at the pistol. He raised his arms and, leaning back in his chair, intertwined the fingers of his two hands behind his head." During the crisis Spade, to all appearances, is perfectly at ease. When Cairo pats Spade down to make sure he is not armed, Spade gets the better of the man, striking him in the face with his elbow and rendering him unconscious.            

            Similarly, Odysseus, a “raider of cities”, who outsmarts a one-eyed giant, excels in athletic competition. and fights a houseful of men intent on his demise, is a man who relies on his physical and mental prowess to get the better of his adversaries.  He is the Hero of all heroes, the archetype itself, made plain by a straightforward narration that does not delve too deep – or at all - into the psyche of the exiled Ithakan.  This is not to suggest that Odysseus does not have an inner life, or that an Arian is emotionally vacant.  Yet as a “positive” sign, Aries tends to be extroverted in its sensibility.  The classic Arian revels in communication and action and is less inward than a “negative” sign, such as a Scorpio, Capricorn, or any earth or water sign.  It is undeniable that Odysseus is an outwardly expressive character.

            So too Sam Spade: “Red rage came suddenly into his face and he began to talk in a harsh guttural voice.  Holding his maddened face in his hands, glaring at the floor, he cursed Dundy for five minutes without break, cursed him obscenely, blasphemously, repetitiously, in a harsh guttural voice.  Then he took his face out of his hands, looked at the girl, grinned sheepishly, and said: ‘Childish, huh?  I know, but, by God, I do hate being hit without hitting back.’”  Brigid O’Shaughnessy responds: “You’re absolutely the wildest person I’ve ever known.”  This passage shows Spade being angry as opposed to feeling angry; he glares, curses ad infinitum, and then excuses himself.  To his sense of honor, there is injustice in a man not being able to hit back, and he makes his feelings perfectly clear. 

            When Odysseus triumphs over the Cyclops, it is not enough that he and his men escape.  At sea he taunts the giant, putting his crew at risk of further harm: “Kyklops, / if ever mortal man inquire / how you were put to shame and blinded, tell him / Odysseus, raider of cities, took your eye.”  This soon meets Poseidon’s revenge: “and whelming seas rose giant above the stone.”  In another instance, when a Phaiákian boy mocks him, asserting that Odysseus cannot throw a discus, he responds with “I find my heart inside my ribs aroused / by your impertinence…You spoke heart-wounding words.”  Odysseus then rises to the challenge and wins, spurred on by an innately competitive nature.   

            If a person has an astrological sign, then why cannot a text?  To understand The Maltese Falcon and The Odyssey as Arian texts we must return to this notion of the “positive” sign, and realize that the exteriorized narration of The Maltese Falcon and The Odyssey adheres to this principle of outward expression.  It is as Erich Auerbach writes about The Odyssey in his essay “Odysseus’ Scar”: “Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible; and not less clear – wholly expressed, orderly even in their ardor – are the feelings and thoughts of the people involved.”  In The Odyssey, we know the character Odysseus through his actions and through his physical responses to situations.  Of The Maltese Falcon this is also true. Every movement of the hand, twitch of the eye, tap of the foot is documented, rendering an almost cinematic quality to the narration. 

There is one moment in The Maltese Falcon that requires introspection: the Flitcraft episode.  Here the narrative digresses from the quest for the black bird and requires the reader to ponder why Spade is recounting a story about a man he knew that has nothing at all to do with the narrative at hand.  In fact, the Flitcraft episode is so unique in The Maltese Falcon that filmmaker John Huston omitted it in an otherwise faithful 1941 adaptation of the novel.  In general, however (and by astrologizing we must do a good deal of generalizing), The Maltese Falcon follows the model of The Odyssey, possessing, according to Auerbach, “the Homeric style [that] knows only a foreground, only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.” 

           One detail in The Odyssey surely proves the protagonist’s astrological provenance, if not that of the book itself.  It is hardly an accident that a certain domesticated animal enables Odysseus’ escape from the Cyclops’ den: none other than the “woolliest ram, the choicest of the flock.”  Odysseus and the ram, “the leader…weighted by wool and me with my meditations” become a single body that outwits the blinded giant.  The Hero finds salvation in the Ram.

-- Jill Baron 

Odysseus defeats the suitors [Greek postage stamp]
Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade

April 10, 2008

Why Auden is an Aquarius (by Jill Baron)

Wystan Hugh Auden, born February 21, 1905

When I read Under Which Lyre: A Reactionary Tract for the Times (the Phi Beta Kappa Poem he read at Harvard in 1946) for the first time, my astrological radar detected an Aquarius. Who but the Water Bearer -- also known (according to astrologer Steven Forrest’s list of Aquarian archetypes) as the Genius, the Truth Sayer, the Scientist, the Exile, the Revolutionary -- would write these lines: “Thou shalt not be on friendly terms / With guys in advertising firms, / Nor speak with such / As read the Bible for its prose, / Nor, above all, make love to those / Who wash too much. // Thou shalt not live within thy means / Nor on plain water and raw greens. / If thou must choose / Between the chances, choose the odd: / Read The New Yorker, trust in God; / And take short views.”

Only an Aquarius would have the chutzpah, or, in Auden’s case, the gall, to reveal opinions so conclusive they sound like truth. For an Aquarius is above all a person of strong individuality. An Aquarius speaks his mind without fear of recrimination. Despite pressure to conform, socialize, and be accepted, an Aquarius will choose his own path, remaining loyal to his personal truths. An Aquarius is a maverick. Auden is a maverick. Therefore, Auden is an Aquarius.

You may be thinking: but all poets are mavericks. Well, wasn’t Auden especially so? Doesn’t Auden represent the Truth-Sayer, the Exile, and the Revolutionary? Liberty and freedom of choice are paramount to him. As he wrote in his essay “The American Scene": "liberty cannot be distinguished from license, for freedom of choice is neither good nor bad but the human prerequisite without which virtue and vice have no meaning. Virtue is, of course, preferable to vice, but to choose vice is preferable to having virtue chosen for one.” Auden’s biographer Edward Mendelson wrote, “[Auden] hoped that art could serve persuasion as well as freedom by guiding its readers into making the right free choice instead of the wrong one.” And Marianne Moore has commented, “the thought of choice as compulsory is central to everything [Auden] writes.” So yes, fellow poets and devotees of Auden – what we have here is an Aquarius through and through.

Imagine my dismay when I discovered that our Truth-Sayer, Revolutionary, and Exile all wrapped into one was not technically an Aquarius but a Pisces! The sun rests in Aquarius from January 20 to February 18, throwing Auden in deep water with the other fish. And yet despite the plain facts of the case, I have decided - in true Aquarian spirit - to hold fast to my own personal truth. That’s right. No one could ever confuse Auden for a Pisces, the sign of dreamers and mysticism. In fact, didn’t Auden deplore Yeats for the elder poet’s interest in the magic and the occult? “The deplorable spectacle of a grown man occupied with the mumbo jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India.” This was a man – and a poet – who told it like it was, in plain talk, or (in Marianne Moore's phrase) “plain American which cats and dogs can read!”

Or – did he? Was Auden as clear as air, or rather, a poet who made much use of irony, a rather more murky enterprise that achieves its means, according to Fowler, through – gasp! – mystification! Oh dear. I’m afraid that my aim – to prove that Auden is an Aquarius – has come undone. Perhaps my reliance on sun signs is flawed.

Not many essayists disprove their thesis in the middle of an essay and continue writing in an attempt to make amends, but I suppose not many essayists write the words “Aquarius” and “Auden” in the same title line. Maybe it’s just this: I admire the Aquarian traits, and I admire Auden, and I wouldn’t mind having some more of the former, and being more like the latter, and I would foolishly like to think of Auden not as a human being, complex in his beliefs and counterbeliefs and charms and foibles, but as the fulfillment of the archetype of the Trailblazing Poet and Ideas Man. Which he was, undoubtedly - though he was also a devout Christian, raised on Norse mythology, whose “first religious memories [were] of exciting magical rites.”

The problem with archetypes is their one-dimensionality, which I suppose is why we really shouldn’t use the sun sign to define an individual’s personality. If Auden were here today, reading my defense of astrological reasoning, I suspect he would turn that superb one-liner on me: “Sorry, my dear, one mustn’t be bohemian!”

-- JB