On "Cassandra"
Robert Zallar
[Note: Jeffers wrote about Cassandra twice in his career, first in "The Tower Beyond Tragedy" and later in "Cassandra"]
In radical contrast to the visionary is the prophet, whose prototype is Cassandra in "The Tower Beyond Tragedy. " If chastity is the limit of Onorio's visions, Cassandra's derive from sexual initiation by a god. Whereas Onorio's visions are the sole value of his life, Cassandra's powers are the curse of hers. Onorio wants to commit suicide when his visions abandon him; Cassandra wants to die because she cannot be free of hers. The figure of the pitcher that Onorio uses to describe his sense of "containing" his visions contrasts sharply with Cassandra's description of the gift of prophecy: "he hates me, the God, he will never / Take home the gift of the bridleless horse / The stallion, the unbitted stallion." The bridleless stallion is an image of rampant sexuality; it signifies not only the bridal gift but the bridal act, the god himself. We have only to consider the development of this theme in "Roan Stallion," whose heroine seeks union with the divine through an act of bestiality. In Cassandra's monologue, the gift of prophecy is closely associated with the instigation of desire:
I would not let him touch me though love of him maddened me
Till he fed me that poison, till he planted that fire in me,
The girdle flew loose then.
Cassandra's insistence on the gift of prophecy as the price of her seduction is the Promethean sin of coveting divine powers, and it is therefore visited on her as a punishment instead. The nature of that punishment - that she forever inspire disbelief - poses the dilemma of prophecy in its acutest form. The content of prophecy is truth, and the prophet's task is to speak it. It is precisely this moral imperative which distinguishes the prophet from the visionary. Onorio's visions are private and idiosyncratic; they have no truth value, that is, no message for the community. He relates them as fables, signs that "mean something in their own country but ... / Nothing in this." But the truth value of Cassandra's visions is absolute; that is, their relevance to the community is total; and therefore the mandate to communicate them is imperative. This is why she must prophesy even though the gods ordain that it will be in vain. Whereas Onorio is exalted to the role of spectator Cassandra is reduced to it, and what she beholds is fate, the truth that cannot be altered because it cannot be shared. Cassandra's knowledge places her "beyond humanity" not because, like Orestes, she has renounced or transcended the will, but because she has been deprived of the power to act efficaciously. If that power is, within the context of fate, an illusion, it is nonetheless the illusion by which all men (except Orestes) live. Neither god nor human, Cassandra is isolated on a height of solitude and terror, the captive of history, the witness of the unity-in-change that is the vision of universal process. So she is "sick after steadfastness, " that is, the cessation of truth; she longs for the illusion of stasis that only the counter-motion of human will can impart to things; and failing that, she can only long for death. She is the prisoner of inaction as Clytemnestra is the prisoner of will, and it is only appropriate that Orestes deliver them both.
For the Greeks themselves, the situation could not have been so radically posed. For them, the obligation of the prophet was to speak, not to convince. He was a messenger, an intermediary; often (as in the case of the Delphic oracle) he served the god directly or lived in his precincts; at other times he was (like Tiresias) a recluse or hermit who lived on the fringe of the community, His role was not hortatory; the success of his communication was not his concern. The prophet as proselytizer or leader of his people is a Jewish mode, and quite foreign to Greek thought. One might even say that Cassandra is precisely the opposite of a figure such as Moses: alien, captive, powerless, degraded.
Cassandra, indeed, has every reason not to prophesy. She has no social or moral obligation to the community, and can scarcely wish to tell the Greeks anything that may be of advantage to them. Nor can she serve as messenger or intermediary for the gods, since they have specifically disabled her for this task. Nonetheless she prophesies, despite the futility of her situation, because the content of truth must be spoken. Prophecy is that which must be spoken, regardless of audience, effect, or belief; it is an unconditional imperative. Jeffers examines this in his late meditation "Cassandra". . . .
In Jeffers' modern reading of the Cassandra myth, it is men who deny the truth, not the gods who deny it to them, but the essential paradox is the same: The truth must be spoken, but cannot be believed. This paradox is ironic in the Greek myth - indeed, only in terms of irony could it be so radically stated - but tragic in a judaeo-Christiati context. Pagan culture was an adherence to personal values, whereas ours is an adherence to morality, that is, behavior toward others. For the pagan, truth telling is a matter of honor; for the Jew or Christian, it is an obligation toward the other, the sharing of the Word. For the Greeks, Cassandra must be as she is, for there is no ultimate message, no revelation, and the gods cannot foreknow their own will. What Cassandra sees is merely the will of the gods as it unfolds, and she is permitted to see it only because she is unable to communicate it, lest the balance between gods and men be destroyed.
from The cliffs of solitude: A reading of Robinson Jeffers. Copyright © 1983 by Cambridge Unviersity Press.
Arthur B. Coffin
By 1948, in The Double Axe, the next to the last volume of verse published during the poet's lifetime, we are not surprised to hear Jeffers say, in Cassandra,
Poor bitch, be wise.
No: you'll still mumble in a corner a crust of truth, to men
And gods disgusting.--You and I, Cassandra.
This, Jeffers said in a book that bore an unusual Publishers' Note, which announced that Random House felt "compelled to go on record with its disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume." The Cassandra of the poem The Tower Beyond Tragedy (1925) had predicted such a war as the readers of The Double Axe volume had just come through. Furthermore, Jeffers had preached throughout the thirties that such war was inevitable, unless the United States changed its course of action in world affairs, and in Such Counsels You Gave to Me (1937) and in Be Angry at the Sun (1941) he foretold events that history was yet to record.
Jeffers' remark to Cassandra (in the later poem) came at perhaps the most trying time in his career: the principles to which he steadfastly clung had apparently been proved by the events of history, as he saw them, but there seemed to be no one listening. What was more, he had to endure, with "cheerful consent," as he generously put it, the singular treatment from his publisher. He was right from his point of view, but, when he needed the emotional support, very few of his readers gave him credit for his perspicacity.
from Robinson Jeffers: Poet of Inhumanism. Copyright © 1971 by The Regents of the University of Wisconsin.
Diane Wakoski
To focus on Jeffers's women seems beside the whole point of Jeffers's philosophy, which is that men and women alike ("You and I, Cassandra") are doomed in their human, evolutionarily misguided drive to wreak destruction through greed, avarice, desire, and power-mongering. No doubt there is a personal psyche at work in Jeffers which allows him to portray women as so much bigger, more flexible, stronger than most of his male figures. But I interpret Jeffers as caught in the paradox of trying to have an "inhuman" vision while still bound by his humanity, which includes the fact that he is a man and limited by that gender.
It is not accidental that, in this lyric poem, "Cassandra," coming after the bitter time of his Double Axe persecution and unofficial literary blacklisting, he makes himself equal or a twin to a woman. It is a gesture, I think, showing his stance as a poet, and one that can be found in many other of the short lyric poems. The poet is outside, an observer. "It" (the poet) can be either male, as Jeffers is, or female, as Cassandra is. The haunting lament, "You and I, Cassandra," is a statement of his equality with her, and the hopelessness of the human condition out of which, for the duration of the poem, they both remain. They both have given up their personal (i.e., gender) identities in the pursuit of truth. This lyric offers a glimpse into Jeffers's view of the godly androgyny which he wishes he could imagine in an "inhuman" world. When Mark Mitchell illustrates that Jeffers refers to God with the masculine pronoun yet implies a female identity, what I draw from that is androgyny--that god is neither male nor female, or both, in some non-sexual, non-gendered way. I think we must accept that Jeffers could himself hardly conceive of what this meant.
From a panel discussion about Jeffers and the female archetype in Robinson Jeffers: Dimensions of a Poet. Ed. Robert Brophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 1995. Copyright © 1995 by Fordham University Press.
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