From: fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster)
Subject: literary lions
Summary: and a bit of a response to "Re: careful handling required?" 
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 18:13:45 GMT

I've been thinking lately about the iconography of the lion--
traditional image of courage, strength, and fearsome power--and
especially about "literary lions," and "to lionize" as used in a
literary context.  A pop tune that has been getting a lot of airplay
--"Jeremy" by Pearl Jam--associates the lion with an emergence of both
personal identity and the oral power of language.  In this song, a boy
who has been seething with quiet rage suddenly gains voice: his
classmates, who've been tormenting him, are portrayed as having
"unleashed a lion" who "bit the recess lady's breast."  In a dramatic,
declamatory voice, the lead singer repeats "Jeremy *spoke* in class
today" as the refrain.

In listening to this song, I thought of a common version of the Tarot
deck in which the eighth trump card is Strength, depicted as a woman
taming a lion.  If you divide the 21 trumps (not counting the un-
trump, the Fool) into three 7-card sequences of development, the cards
1 to 7 can be seen as maturation in the outer world, cards 8 to 14 as
an inner, psychological journey, and 15 to 21 as a spiritual
awakening.  This view places the Strength card at the first step of
gaining inner understanding, self-knowledge.  The woman taming the
lion is supposed to convey an awareness of inner ("animal") qualities
such as spontaneity and desire, coupled with an ability to harness
these urges, to put the unconscious at the service of conscious
intention.

What else does the lion represent?  A number of different cultures had
images of women taming, especially riding lions: Hera rides a lion, as
does Cybele, and also the Great Mother as found in ancient Egypt,
Phrygia, Canaan, Babylon, Phoenicia, and Libya.  Male heroes such as
Hercules and Samson often included killing a lion with their bare
hands among their list of accomplishments.  The lion is sometimes
associated with the Destroyer phase of the Goddess, but when the
symbol is imported into pagan Britain, the lion represents the
ascending phase of the sacred year.  In alchemical lore, lions are
identified with fire energy, and with the sun, sulphur, and gold.
(The transformation of sulphur to gold is an alchemical metaphor for
the transformation of the inner self.)  Paired lions that face
backward and forward are the Egyptian equivalent for the Roman Janus--
an image of time--which is further elaborated when the lions' necks
are depicted as very long and intertwining to form a figure 8, or
infinity symbol.  In the Bible and the Prayer Book, the lion is a
beast to be subdued ("tread upon") by the Lord.  Blake writes, "The
wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God."

All of this is rather confusing, but it does suggest a common theme of
the lion as a primal energy that must either be conquered and subdued,
or harnessed and channeled.  Fire energy must be "earthed" in order to
be useful; the unconscious must be balanced by the conscious.

So, I'm wondering now, how do we come by this image of writers as
lions?  The pop tune that got me started on this chain of thought
figures the lion as oral rage, and thus speech.  I remember an essay
by Annie Dillard (reprinted in _The_Writing_Life_) in which not only
does she make many comparisons between writing and chopping wood for
fire, but she cries "Bring on the lions!" at the start of her writing
day, and also writes of horses (another fire-energy animal) and lions
as follows:

          A work in progress quickly becomes feral.  It
          reverts to a wild state overnight.  It is barely
          domesticated, a mustang on which you one day
          fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch.
          It is a lion you cage in your study.  As the work
          grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion
          growing in strength.  You must visit it every day
          and reassert your mastery over it.  If you skip
          a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the
          door to its room.  You enter its room with bravura,
          holding a chair at the thing and shouting "Simba!"

Here the literary lion is not the writer herself, but the part of
herself that is her writing energy--or, at even more of a distance,
the work itself.

Somewhere though, obviously before these recent references, there was
a decision to dub authors "lions" and to "lionize" their achievements,
when other ancient images (a serpent as bearer of wisdom, an eagle as
air/mental energy) might have been used instead.  Turning to the OED,
I find that while "lion" is often applied to authors (as in "the
vulgar honours of literary lionism"), it's actually a general term for
a celebrity, or even a place of interest.  "To have seen the lions"
means the result of a sightseeing trip, and also (more archaically) to
have had a full experience of life.

Maybe we don't call authors lions anymore, though.  I note that in a
recent review of Susan Sontag's _The_Volcano_Lover_, the author is
described as a "black-clad high priestess."  Interesting how if you
map this onto the Tarot card of Strength (although trump #2, the
Papess, might be more appropriate), Sontag is not the lion, but the
woman who controls the lion.  I must say, I prefer the image of a
writer as an elemental force that may be dangerous--or at least as
containing a duality of conscious control and unconscious power--
rather than Dillard's image of the writer as a rational being who has
to wrestle her writing into submission.  (Maybe here, Barb M., I'm
stabbing at an answer to your question about what I meant, in my
oblique objection to Dillard's view of violence in fiction, by agree-
ing with Lauren C. that Dillard overemphasizes analysis and thought.)  

I'm inclined to think of the "real" writer as the Beast of Disney's
movie, who paces back and forth, enraged, on all fours, before his
fireplace, but who also can be "lionized" in a civilized social
setting, looking a bit silly, but sexy nonetheless, standing up on his
hind legs and dressed in tight trousers and a jacket.  (Surely I'm not
the only little girl in America who finds it disappointing, at the
end, when the Beast reverts to human form.)

Hmmm...lions and fire.  Sex and rage.  Biting teeth and mellifluous
speech.  Where I'm going with all of this, I don't yet know.  But I'd
love to hear what you have to say about lions.

                                                  --Fiona Webster
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