The Sibling Society. - book reviews

ROBERT Bly is known as "the woods man," "the tom-tom man," or simply "the man man" thanks to the movement he founded to help men rediscover what he calls the "mythopoetic" roots of masculinity through reenactments of primitive male-group rituals. It involves campfires, animal skins, reverence for the tribal elder (Bly), and enough spears for round-the-clock performances of Aida in the major opera houses of the world. Bly described it all in his first book, Iron John, which cried out for satirization -- and got it. The funniest send-up was Iron Joe Bob, by my partner in columny, Joe Bob Briggs.

In his new book, The Sibling Society, Bly analyzes our fatherless era and concludes that the Oedipus complex has been downsized. Without fathers to struggle against, more and more boys are being deprived of the maturing experience that the Oedipal situation imposes. Aiding and abetting this literal fatherlessness is the figurative fatherlessness that has plagued us since the Sixties destroyed hierarchy, authority, and tradition. With nothing and no one to look up to, we have become a "horizontal" society of perpetual siblings whose level gaze is locked on passive Mother Television, where two fatherless sons, Clinton and Gingrich, vie for our attention.

Trimmed down to its essentials, Bly's thesis would make an interesting five-thousand-word magazine article, but he doesn't pack a blue pencil in his old kit bag. He approaches the writing craft like Thomas Wolfe, who, asked to cut his manuscripts, replied: "Flaubert me no Flauberts, Bovary me no Bovarys, I'm a putter-inner, not a taker-outer."

Among the things Bly puts in this book are the complete text of "Jack and the Beanstalk," poems by everyone from Emily Dickinson to Hadewijch of Antwerp, Greek myths, Sioux rituals, Nordic sagas, and Hindu legends that read like early Ms. magazine: "If the elephant relates Ganesha to the magnificent areas of male divinity, the cow's head relates the Sister to the Great Goddess, to the Goddess of Life and Death."

Matters go from bad to worse when he stops ponying other writers and speaks for himself. He doesn't seem to be in the habit of revising and polishing his work -- or even rereading it. Real men write rough drafts, and his prose style provides comic relief on nearly every page.

Elvis was a part of what women had longed for, not militaristic, not rigid in feeling, not exclusionary toward mothers and young women, but lighthearted, open to impulses rising from below his belt, playful, and yet grounded in sexuality, heavier than Peter Pan, more human than the stiff-faced old grandfather who wound clocks. Young women felt themselves losing some of their Doris Day rigidity. . . . Why shouldn't she give up her mother's stuff about waiting until the ring is on the hand before having fun with zippers?

Whether from an excess of testosterone or simply a tin ear, his comparisons read like a clash of titans: "Why should desire disappear, like the red wolf, the passenger pigeon, and the Irish elk, into extinction?" Like heroism, sacrifice, and chivalry? Like faith, hope, and charity? The sentence requires three emotions, or three ethics. To go from desire to elks conjures a bellowing rut.

An incorrigible romantic in the Jean-Jacques Rousseau mold, he periodically slips over the line into metaphorical hysteria: "The big mother is the breasty mother, or the woolly mammoth mother, or the flooding mother. She is moorish, spongy. She is great." "Ronald Reagan was a sort of Grand Central Station for the trains of disaster."

This very short book takes a very long time to read because one keeps stopping and saying, "Huh?" Bly's howlers are memorable, as when he states that Oedipus "puts out his eyes with a hatpin," leaving the reader to reflect on an ancient Thebes full of Floradora girls. In the play, Oedipus uses the shoulder brooches that he tears from the dead Jocasta's robes.

In a tangled discussion of "vertical thought" and hierarchy, Bly tells us that the former has to do with longing and the latter with power, a distinction that was lost when the Catholic Church "conflated the two" and destroyed metaphorical thinking with its doctrine, "No salvation outside of the church." Bly renders this as "Ex exclessiam nulla sallus," proving that a little Latin is a dangerous thing.

He really goes off the rails in his overview of the various male movements that have shaped American life. The first of these was the cult of the western with its solitary rogue-male hero who practiced silence and stoicism and shunned introspection.

The movement produced books with titles like Riders of the Purple Sage instead of A Room of One's Own. We remember President Reagan's fondness for Louis L'Amour. We could say that Ronald Reagan was a late-coming Phyllis Schlafly for this group, although true to the western type, he spoke very little and it was mostly jokes. President Reagan was probably reading westerns when he invaded Grenada and sent illegal arms to the contras. President Bush could also be said to have been "west of everything" during the Gulf War.