Vilnius pedagogical university faculty of foreign languages department of english philology

A deep warm darkness was lit by sparks. The floor of the grotto was waxed black by oil droppings. […] His eyes adjusting to the gloom, Caldwell saw heaped about him overturned fragments of automobiles, fragile and phantasmal, fenders like corpses of turtles, bristling engines like disembodied hearts. […] The windows were opaquely spattered with paint from the outside; the walls between them were hung with wrenches aligned by size, ballpeen hammers with taped handles, electric drills, screwdrivers a yard long, intricate sprocketed socketed tools whose names and functions he would never know, neat coils of frazzled wire, calipers, pliers, and, stuck and taped here and there in crevices and bare spots, advertisements, toasted and tattered and ancient. (The Centaur, pp. 10-13)

The quotation above illustrates the chaos of Hummel’s garage very well. It is impossible to imagine Caldwell working there, his ambitions and values would never let him stay in such a place for a longer time. This garage is a proper place for Hummel-Hephaestus and his three helpers Cyclopes. In her book Mythology Edith Hamilton describes Cyclopes in the following way: “[They were] given the name Cyclops (the Wheel-eyed), because each had only one enormous eye, as round and as big as a wheel, in the middle of the forehead. The Cyclopes, too, were gigantic, towering like mighty mountain crags and devastating in their power.” (The Centaur, p. 65) The Cyclops Polyphemus, for instance, was savage and primitive; his spiritual world was very narrow. He possessed only the physical necessities: food and sleep; and favoured club-law.

Thus, contrasting real and mythological lines in this particular case Updike raises the problem of decline, impoverishment and deterioration of social and private life in America. The author depicts moral crisis of values which became obvious in the nineteen sixties. By bringing Caldwell and Cyclopes into contact Updike seeks to draw the line of differentiation between them, to elicit the differences between an intelligent teacher and half-animal garage workers.
Caldwell’s inner world is complex and conflicting, he keeps constantly questioning the purpose of his existence on the Earth. The teacher wants to do something important in his own life and the lives of other people; he is a thinking man wondering about the spiritual aspect of life. The image of the centaur enables Updike to contrast Caldwell’s spiritual world with the material world. On the other hand, the author describes Hummel’s helpers as “swarthy men”. (The Centaur, p. 10) Then Updike writes: “His three moronic helpers clustered around jostling to see the silver shaft, painted at its unfeathered end with blood.” (The Centaur, p. 15) Cyclopes behave like half-men, half-animals, they get excited by the human blood: “The three Cyclopes gabbled so loud the man turned, Archy, outpouring from his throat a noise like a butchery of birds, pointed to the floor.” (The Centaur, p. 19) These characteristics given by the author present Cyclopes as the savages of the modern times. As
they are overtly dull, they are simultaneously extremely strong; these traits make them villainous.
Thereby, Updike inspires the school of Olinger and Hummel’s garage with chaos. However, this is not all. Spiritual chaos is also present in Minor Kretz’s luncheonette. The characteristic of it is the following: “It was a maze, Minor’s place. So many bodies; yet only a tiny section of the school ever came here. […] the set at Minor’s was the most criminal.” (The Centaur, p. 108) Later, when Peter waits for his father while he is visiting a doctor, Caldwell’s son remarkes: “I pushed my way through the bodies as if through the leaves of a close-set series of gates.” (The Centaur, p. 108) Further on, Updike writes: “The herd deserted Minor’s.” (The Centaur, p. 183)
For the three times people visiting the luncheonette are deliberately depersonalized, they are called “bodies” and “herd”. By employing this device, which can be called depersonification, Updike seeks to depreciate the place and the pupils spending their time in it, due to the fact that this place deprives them of the common sense’s relic. For that reason when Caldwell asks Peter to wait for him in Minor’s luncheonette, he says: “You got lots of time to kill.” (The Centaur, p. 107) The teacher thinks that sitting in Minor’s café is equal to killing time. The place is a veiled cultural centre of Olinger; however, it is really a maze, a labyrinth, which absorbs young people’s minds and hearts and kills their personalities.
Minor Kretz himself is a cunning and cautious character; he possesses the features of his prototype Minos, a king of Crete. Because Minos failed to sacrifice a beautiful white bull to Poseidon, the Gods punished him. He caused Pasiphae, his wife, to conceive a lustful passion for the animal, by whom she bore the Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man. The craftsman Daedalus constructed the labyrinth in which the monster was confined. Just as Minos wanted to deceive the Gods, Minor Kretz hopes to fool his visitors, selling them ice cream and lemon Pepsis and simultaneously serving the fascist ideology. In other words, Updike portrays a repulsive image of fascist salesman Minor Kretz. At first sight he seems to be a good man selling ice cream to the children all day long. However, the myth of Minos, underlying his figure, characterizes him as a cruel dissembler. For that reason Peter observes: “I felt in this clouded interior a powerful secret lurking, whose nostrils exhaled the smoke and whose hide exhaled the warmth” (The Centaur, p. 108), and later: “Minor is a cauldron of rage; his hairy nostrils seem seething vents.” (The Centaur, p. 183)
Minor’s luncheonette compared to a maze obtains an interesting symbolism. Traditionally, labyrinth is meant to be an intricate building of chambers and passages, often constructed so as to perplex and confuse a person inside (Encyclopedia wikipedia). However,
there is one more meaning of a maze, which is a cultural one. According to it, prehistoric labyrinths are believed to have served either as traps for malevolent spirits or as defined paths for ritual dances. As far as Minor’s café is concerned, it can be also treated as a place of entertainment. Pupils come here in order to eat an ice cream, to drink a cocktail, to date. However, there is one more interesting coincidence: ancient Greeks had labyrinths which had a pattern of swastika. In his article Return to the Labyrinth an archeologist Joseph Alexander MacGillivray writes that the city of Knossos began to mint coins of which the earliest show the Minotaur on the obverse and a labyrinthine swastika with a star or sun motif in the center on the reverse. Over time, the swastika gave way to the maze pattern.
Consequently, the form of the swastika was quite popular among the ancient Greeks. They simply liked it, found it original. It is significant that the Greeks had labyrinths in the pattern of swastika. Updike is a great master of combining reality and mythology. Making Minor’s luncheonette a maze, the author inspires it with several meanings: the myth of Minos and the form of the labyrinth which obtained a new meaning with the appearance of fascism. Nowadays swastika is perceived as its emblem. Thus, Updike imparts Minor with this sign and makes him a fascist Minos, the larcener of people’s souls. The mechanism of ideological processing is quite simple: first, students are served confection and after that they are stuffed with the ideas of militarism and fascism.
Turning back to the labyrinth, it performs one more function in the novel. Updike considers that contemporary America is being lost in the labyrinth of false values and spiritual hollowness. This fact characterizes the whole society, changes every aspect of it. Regrettably, the labyrinth absorbs more and more teen-agers; it produces mundane people who do not possess any moral values and ambitions.
The result is awful: young people, just beginning to live, declare: “I love Hitler […] He’s alive in Argentina.” (The Centaur, p. 185), or: “We should’ve dropped an atom bomb on Moscow, Berlin, Paris, France, Italy, Mexico City, and Africa. Ka-Pow. I love that mushroom-shaped cloud.” (The Centaur, p. 185) Johnny Dedman does not even differentiate towns from countries and even continents. All that is reflected in his words is his stubborn and brutish cruelty. He also says: “I’m waiting for the war.” (The Centaur, p. 187) The luncheonette’s owner, Minor Kretz is the one who seeds such ideology in youngsters. Peter asks him: “Why do you exploit us poor teen-agers so ruthlessly? Why are you so brutal?” (The Centaur, p. 185) However, Minor does not reply to this question.
Minor Kretz is one of the characters who exemplify the degradation and decrement of a modern man, for he is sly and egoistic – he does not care about the teenagers who come to his café. All that matters for him is to deceive them by selling ice cream and then cramming
their young susceptible minds with the cruelest ideology of the world. However, there is another character in the novel, who embodies everything that kills people like Caldwell and symbolizes the cruelty of the surrounding world and moral degradation of a man. This character is the principle of the school, Zimmerman.
Zimmerman’s image strikes the reader right from the beginning of the novel. He first appears in the episode when Caldwell returns from Hummel’s garage and tries to finish his lesson. Zimmerman is already present in the classroom pleased with taking the chance to humiliate the teacher of science. Zimmerman belongs to the category of people who are not capable to do their duty. As soon as such people obtain power, they immediately change their attitude to their colleagues and treat them as inferior. Due to it, the novel is pierced with Caldwell’s fear of the principal; and when the teacher returns from the garage he sees Zimmerman’s face as “a gigantic emblem of authority” (The Centaur, p. 32) Then comes even more vivid description: “An implacable bolt, springing from the centre of the forehead above the two disparately magnifying lenses of the principal’s spectacles, leaped space and transfixed the paralysed victim [Caldwell].” (The Centaur, p. 32)
Zimmerman inspires fear and constant tension in Caldwell; it is extremely difficult for the teacher to work in such conditions. The principal’s pressure wears Caldwell out and emaciates his inner strength: “He [Caldwell] felt the colours of the class stir under him; Zimmerman’s presence made them electric.” (The Centaur, p. 34) However, later Zimmerman reveals himself to be even worse than that – he starts to cuddle one of the girls, Iris Osgood, straight in the classroom: “His [Zimmerman’s] lechery smelled; the kids were catching fire.” (The Centaur, p. 38) The climax of this episode was reached when “Zimmerman had slipped Iris Osgood’s blouse and bra off and her breasts showed above her desk like two calm edible moons rising side by side.” (The Centaur, p. 44)
In one of her articles Orlova analyses this scene. She wonders if the similar event can really happen in the worst, most dissolute class of the worst American school. The answer is negative. However, she comes to a conclusion that the verity of this episode lies not in the equivalence to a real lesson but in the equivalence to Caldwell’s feelings. Even the best teacher can sometimes feel separated from students. He can feel despair when all that he has learned and prepared with toil and love do not reach the pupil’s minds. He may despond due to the fact that everyone around shouts and talks and hums but does not listen. Moreover, the teacher may be afraid of the school’s principal (more than the Olympian Gods were afraid of Zeus), and he may feel ashamed because his students see that fear. Yet more, when the wounded ankle hurts, he has to conceal this pain because otherwise it can be even worse.
These are Caldwell’s feelings which are encoded in the phantasmagoria of thoughts, sensations and actions in the first scene of the novel.
Consequently, the scene of the lesson seems at some places absurd, at others even fantastic. However, its core, its alpha and omega is the school’s principal, Zimmerman. He made the kids to catch fire; he demonstrated them the skill of humiliating the teacher; finally, it is he who directed the pupils and set the model of behaviour. Zimmerman has the authority and because of that he goes the length of doing whatever he wants – even having many women and, what is more, having sex with them just in his office. All these aspects elucidate his degradation and moral decay. And it is not surprising that nearly all other teachers working at school are similar to Zimmerman – when in Rome, do as the Romans do. “Living corpses”, “dead meat”, “pale eyes”, “waste, rot, hollowness, noise, stench, death” (The Centaur, p. 226) – this is what surrounds Caldwell. One reads: “As long as Mrs. Hummel is on the premises he [Caldwell] feels the school is not entirely given over to animals.” (The Centaur, p. 208)
To conclude, Caldwell’s environment, which reflects the contemporary situation in America can be described as spiritual chaos and degradation of the modern people; loss of values; and the triumph of mediocrity, depravity, and platitude. And all these features are intensified by the harmony and high morality of the Chiron myth.

3. 
   COSMOLOGICAL FUNCTION OF MYTH
   

In The Centaur, it is an interesting coincidence that Caldwell is a science teacher (Campbell believed that scientists as well as artists and poets are responsible for performing the cosmological function). Moreover, there even exists the episode in the novel, in which he describes the creation of the universe. Consequently, Caldwell can be conceived as the “great seer”, who himself performs the cosmological function. According to Campbell’s classification, he is, perhaps, the great Scientist, having the most valuable knowledge – the one which describes the very beginning of everything existing in the Cosmos. However, despite the inestimable value of his knowledge, nobody is interested in it. Caldwell tries to simplify the information transmitted to the pupils – he contracts five billions years in three days and continues his lesson in a comprehensible mode, but it is still not enough. The children studying at Olinger school are not interested in the cosmological dimension as well as contemporary America is not interested in it.
Another aspect of the cosmological function in relation to the novel comprises the mystery and significance of every detail and object present in the book. The first instance is
the arrow received by Caldwell. At the very beginning the reader perceives it as an element of the myth of Chiron (the two epigraphs preceding the novel evoke the mythological background): “Caldwell turned and as he turned his ankle received an arrow.” (The Centaur,
p. 7) Then the arrow is perceived as a real object when Hummel extracts it from the teacher’s ankle. After that the arrow again receives a mythological connotation, because Hummel sniffs it wondering if it can be poisoned (as in the Chiron myth). Then the arrow is perceived as a real and simultaneously mythical object when the arrow-shaft is jutting from Caldwell’s pocket and Zimmerman wonders if it is a lightening rod. Finally, the arrow receives a fully mythological meaning when the reader fins out that Caldwell is ill.
The metamorphosis of the arrow presented before endows the simple object with mystery, majesty and significance. It illustrates how the cosmological function of myth operates in the novel – when ordinary things obtain additional purport and meaning.
Another example of how elements of the novel receive extra-meaning is the earth. The major metaphor by which Updike connects Caldwell and Peter with the earth is, from Vargo’s point of view, the tree. In the teacher’s mind the image of the tree is bound with women, because according to the myth, Chiron’s father Kronos sired him in the shape of the horse; and after that his mother “so loathed the monster she bore that rather than suckle you [Chiron] she prayed to be metamorphosed into a linden tree.” (The Centaur, p. 23) Consequently, the earth, through the metaphor of the tree, obtains the purport of Caldwell’s estrangement from the women around him.
The image of the tree is also encountered in Peter’s dreams. However, its meaning is different there. Peter sees a dream in which his girlfriend Penny is turning into a tree, and this dream brings “a sense of exaltation into Peter’s adolescent life”. (Rainstorms and Fire, p. 89) Seeing Penny transforming into a tree he acquires a new insight into the nature of their relationship. The result is that Peter concludes that Penny would sacrifice for him, and this understanding raises their love on a higher level. Besides, the tree-metaphor “also operates within the context of the dream to bring Peter to a kind of celebration of the mystery of human love”. (Rainstorms and Fire, p. 90)
The major element of the earth which is pervaded with holiness is the land itself – the farm on which the Caldwells live. George’s wife Cassie feels that working the soil brings the wholeness to one’s life. She lives in “the mystical solidarity with Nature” (Rainstorms and Fire, p. 90). However, Peter and his father cannot accept this viewpoint. While for Cassie the land represents purity and harmony, for George it is no more than dead and cold land. These attitudes remain stable throughout the whole novel. Cassie wants her husband to quit teaching and farm the land with her: “Work with your hands, George. Get close to Nature. I would