SOURCE: "Ironweed, Alcohol, and Celtic Heroism," in Critique, 33, 2, Winter, 1992, pp. 107-20.

[In the following essay, Taylor locates the importance of alcohol as part of the mythic structure of William Kennedy's novel Ironweed.]

The hero of William Kennedy's Ironweed, Francis Phelan, differs from many other drunks in modern American fiction—from Don Birnum in The Lost Weekend, from Jake, Brett, Mike, and Bill in The Sun Also Rises, from Gordon Sterrett and Charlie Wales in Fitzgerald's "May Day" and "Babylon Revisited," and from Julian English in Appointment in Samarra—because he is imbued with multicultural myths and stories that glorify his rapture and excess. Layers of legend, folktale, literary allusion, and patterns of the heroic journey reinforce the positive image of his altered consciousness and place him in the ancient tradition of the shaman, magician, voyager to the land of the dead, and culture hero. These carefully constructed layers prevent him from seeming pathological; they reveal him as adept at techniques of ecstasy known since earliest man.

Francis Phelan's shamanism shows in his soul-flights, his crossing into the land of the dead, and his superhuman strength. Shamanism, the subject of study by Mircea Eliade, by Joseph Campbell, and recently by Gloria Flaherty, has distinctive elements that appear in Siberia, in Tibet, in Africa, in North America, and even in early nineteenth-century Germany. The shaman, whether neolithic or literary, desires to transcend the limits of time-bound, space-bound mortality, to imitate the arrow or the bird, to enter the spirit world through a soul-flight. Deprived of food, sleep, shelter, and companionship, sometimes intoxicated by drugs or drink, the shaman is capable of surviving and ignoring hardship. He is lifted by his visions into the surrounding invisible world of the dead, and he speaks their language. The shaman masters the natural living world and the disembodied spirit world by submission to physical suffering and then by power over it. The shaman is athlete, wise man, prophet, poet, and healer, the most intelligent and charismatic man or woman of his group, contemptuous of the elements and filled with extraordinary power.

Shamanic feats are documented in cave drawings as well as in more recent trials of endurance. In The Way of the Animal Powers, Joseph Campbell argues that drawings in the Cave of Lascaux represent the temporary death of the shaman's body as his spirit shoots into the spirit world. During the absence of its spirit, the shaman's abandoned body must be protected by fellow tribesmen so that the soul will have a living form to reenter. Many oriental feats of endurance of cold and pain are thought to be related to such techniques of ecstasy, though the exact relation of Zen and other oriental techniques of meditative power to shamanism has not been determined. Mountain climbers sometimes experience isolated moments of shamanic power, which they often claim is accessible in high places. Eliade has suggested [in Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951] that several of the myths of Apollo, Orpheus, and Odin contain vestiges of shamanic experience. In Celtic myth echoes of shamanistic endurance and vision can be heard in the Cuchulain stories or in the stories of Taliesin, the ancient bard who has affinity with the Alaskan angekok.

The shaman, crossing over between the dead and the living, speaking the languages of spirits and of animals, is paralleled in western European culture by the magus, whose aims are similar but whose methods are more recondite. Both figures aim to transcend their mortal limitations, to communicate with spirits of the dead and spirits of universal forces, and to alter quotidian states of consciousness, often to shift their shapes and take on animal forms. But where the shaman experiences physical deprivation in order to achieve freedom from the body, the magus immerses himself in knowledge. Although both sing and chant spells, the magus's spells or charms are more learned and mathematical, drawing on Cabalistic traditions and on medieval and Renaissance systems of numerology and correspondence.

The magus, because of his bookish nature, is more prominent in literature than the shaman. Magus lore is central to Shakespeare's Tempest, to Marlowe's, Goethe's, and Mann's expansions of the Faust legend, to Shelley's Alastor and Prometheus Unbound, and to Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. The more physical shaman appears rarely, though elements of shamanic powers to transcend time, to take on shapes, to enter the realm of the dead, or to control other people and animals can be glimpsed in the ecstatic heroes of nineteenth-century Romanticism. By and large, however, Romantic and late-Romantic ecstacies arise from the learned tradition of the Renaissance magus rather than from that of the tribal shaman.

Twentieth-century anthropology has begun to reverse this imbalance, inspiring an emulation of tribal religious and mythical figures and a reawakening sense of kinship with fundamental patterns of tribal belief in a world where all cultures are recognized as creations of human imagination. Jesse L. Weston and Sir J. G. Frazer launched the first wave of anthropologically based literature and art in the period 1910-1930; Eliade and Campbell in recent years have launched another, in which the shaman appears as a cultural hero. Studies have argued that the shamanism described by Eliade and Campbell is a major theme in Margaret Drabble's Surfacing and in Ted Hughes's Crow poems, not to speak of numerous films that imagine the revival of neolithic cultural patterns after the destruction of the known world. Drawing from Nigerian folktales, Amos Tutuola's novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, is steeped in the lore of the alcoholically transformed shaman or trickster. Such films as Quest for Fire, Greystoke, and Star Wars reveal close knowledge of early tribal hero patterns.

Ironweed can best be understood in this context of anthropological and mythological study. In the novel, the last of Kennedy's Albany trilogy (after Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game), some of the primordial shaman's powers enter a shambling drunk who relives his life in one intense day and forgives himself for it. Beneath the surface of this seemingly naturalistic novel lie many distinctive elements of the shaman's mind-altering experience, which increase the reverberations of the novel: communication with the dead, ghosts, the glorification of violence and power, the keen expansion of consciousness, the deprivation of the body. These shamanic elements can be observed beneath the shabby surface of the' hero's presentation.

Francis Phelan is a man drenched in death. A famous third baseman, he participated in an Albany railroad strike of 1901, killed a scab driver with a smooth stone the weight of a baseball, and fled to escape the murder charge. He left town for good when he accidentally dropped his infant son Gerald, wrongly believing that his wife could never forgive him. He roamed America by box car for twenty-two years, abandoning his family and occasionally killing to survive. His guilt for his son's death makes him "a dead man all his life." As his wife tells their surviving children in Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, the preceding novel of the trilogy, "when a good man dies it's reason to weep, and he died that day and he wept and he went away and buried himself and he's dead now, dead and can't be resurrected." Phelan is one of the dead ones who returns, in Ironweed, like a ghost, a revenu, a messenger from the world of the dead, as Eliade explains the shamanic initiation. Despite his wife's fear, however, he can be resurrected; and in the novel he is wondrously purged and revived.

Ironweed opens in a cemetery. The smells of sweet putrescence from new graves and from the rotting bodies of Phelan himself and his crony Rudy shoveling fresh earth mingle in a mortal stink. This cemetery houses generation after generation of Albany's Irish dead, and Francis wanders into the area of the Phelans, where, miraculously, he can hear his dead mother, father, and son thinking. He hears his mother, a life-denying Irish Catholic, weaving and then eating crosses of dandelion roots with "an insatiable revulsion" (2) [all pages citations are from the Penguin edition, 1984]; he hears her disapprove of his approach and turn in disgust. He smells his father's pipe, senses his curiosity about his son and his amused hostility to his censorious wife; he is addressed by two young Phelan brothers "both skewered by the same whisky bottle in 1884" who read "in Francis's face the familiar scars of alcoholic desolation" (3). Most intensely he feels, without knowing how, the location of his son's grave and, for the first time, dares to approach it, as his own father watches from the underground, and "signalled to his neighbors that an act of regeneration seemed to be in process, and the eyes of the dead, witnesses all to their own historical omissions, their own unbridgeable chasms in life gone, silently rooted for Francis as he walked up the slope toward the box elder" (16-17).

This encounter with his dead son is rich in religious, mythic, and literary allusions. For Gerald, dead at thirteen days, has grown a full head of curls in his grave and learned a radiant wisdom. "Gerald possessed the gift of tongues in death. His ability to communicate and to understand was at a genius level among the dead" (17). Their speech is direct and intimate through the cover of sod. Like a guru, Gerald directs his father's penance and revival and forecasts the tests and trials that will release the hero from the spell that has enthralled him:

Gerald, through an act of silent will, imposed on his father the pressing obligation to perform his final acts of expiation for abandoning his family. You will not know, the child silently said, what these acts are until you have performed them all. And after you have performed them you will not understand that they were expiatory any more than you have understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me. (19)

Chapter one ends with this instruction from the grave, the child as father to the man; the subsequent seven chapters accompany Francis on his return to the living world.

On the single day of this novel Francis, like his predecessor on single Irish days, Leopold Bloom of Ulysses, inhabits a remarkably multiple consciousness. He not only speaks with the dead in their grave, but also experiences visitations of accusing spirits as he goes through the streets of his town. The present Albany of the novel is doubled or tripled by an overlay of time schemes; and Francis often carries on several conversations at once, to the wonder of living men and women who cannot see or hear his dead interlocutors. The dead sit near him on the bus inquiring about his motives for killing them; they crowd into an invisible stadium in his wife Annie's back-yard, scrutinizing his reunion. Harold Allen, the strike breaker killed by Francis's stone, and the horse thief Aldo Compione, whom Francis tried to rescue by gripping his hand out of a moving box car, appear to him in varied ghostly garb, prompting him to recall the exact details of his past. Rowdy Dick Doolen watches him wash his "encrusted orifices" (71) and recalls a night in Chicago under a bridge in 1930 (72) when he tried to axe off Phelan's legs but lost his own life instead.

Significantly for the shamanic and tribal elements of the novel, this day of communicating with the dead is Halloween, "the unruly night when grace is always in short supply, and the old and new dead walk abroad in this land" (29). This day corresponds closely to the day of another alcoholically magical book, Under the Volcano. Halloween, the day before All Hallows' Day, or All Saints' Day, and two days before All Souls' Day in the Roman Catholic Church, celebrates the dead and their continued presence among the living. In Ironweed we are reminded of the day by children in goblin costumes who scare Francis and the other bums or rob them (60). Nor is this merely the ordinary domesticated Halloween of American customs; the dead return in a more serious way than as disguised trick-or-treaters. Ironweed's Halloween has mythic Celtic overlays of Samhain, the celebration, later syncretized with the Christian festival, when the Side return from under their mounds to burn cities and castles. The Celtic bonfires that customarily imitated and magically forestalled these attacks are reproduced in Ironweed in the numerous references to fires and, cataclysmically, in the finale, when the police torch the "jungle," where bums, drifters, and homeless families huddle in the cardboard shelters of the Depression. Samhain marks one of the four annual festivals of Celtic ritual, the harvest, which is viewed both as a celebration of the dead and of new beginnings. Sacrificial victims, animal or human, are offered; and "masquerading in the animal's skins, thus assimilating the wearer to the Divine animal, is also found." In the novel, Celtic and Christian traditions of All Hallows are deftly merged, in that Francis Phelan is absolved of his guilt by the dead son he killed, is taught the penance that may finally free him, and is himself reborn when he communicates with the dead.

As the boundaries between the dead and the living are permeable on Halloween, the dead returning and the living imitating them in the disguises of ghosts or skeletons, so Francis Phelan's life is also figuratively underground, the dead more living to him than the living around him. He is the leader of a pack of alcohol-sodden bums, the living dead of the grim streets and vacant lots of the American subculture: "Bodies in alleys, bodies in gutters, bodies anywhere were part of his eternal landscape: a physical litany of the dead" (29). A drunk named Sandra is left by the self-righteous church shelter to freeze and be gnawed by dogs; Rudy, a drunken simpleton, helpless and passive to his accumulating illnesses, clings to Francis for leadership; Helen, an educated singer betrayed by her family, loves Francis and suffers his alcoholism in maudlin but charitable sorrow, which drags her further into destitution; Peewee, "an emotional cripple," Oscar, "another cripple, his ancient, weary eyes revealing to Francis the scars of a blood brother, a man for whom life had been a promise unkept in spite of great success, a promise now and forever unkeepable." (50), Jack and Clara stewing in cloacal sickness (78)—all drop out of the bottom of society, surviving in a primitive starving gang where "fornication [is] standard survival currency" (89).

This group gathers around Francis Phelan, whose power unites them. Rowdy Dick's spirits ask, "Why should any man be so gifted not only with so much pleasurable history but also with a gift of gab that could mesmerize a quintet of bums around a fire under a bridge?" (73-4). Despite his filth, Francis is heroic, articulate, and violent. His is not a world where virtue is rewarded but one where power is revered. Francis as athlete, killer, and drinker stands above the others. He kills by hand like an animal; he hefts Rowdy Dick by the legs and bashes his head on the cement; he throws Big Red around the flop-house; he defends the poor people in the jungle by beating raiding police with boards; he carries the dying Rudy to the hospital on his shoulders. He is possessed of superhuman energy, as well as of superhuman recall and superhuman communication. He is never a victim, he believes, always a warrior (216). Unlike Rudy, he is not beaten, or defenseless, but instead is in free flight.

What is the role of alcohol in creating or releasing these superhuman powers? As a technique for altering consciousness, alcohol is considered easy compared to self-generated meditations. Shamans who resort to it are decadent, having failed at the more difficult, inner techniques. Eliade writes that "narcotics are only a vulgar substitute for 'pure' trance.… [T]he use of intoxicants (alcohol, tobacco, etc.) is a recent innovation and points to a decadence in shamanic technique. Narcotic intoxication is called on to provide an imitation of a state that the shaman is no longer capable of attaining otherwise" (401). In Phelan's case penetration into a many-layered time scheme is aided by alcohol, but not exclusively, for his whole life defies ordinary activities and ways of thinking, and his hunger and cold keep him perpetually on the edge. He drinks an enormous amount, in a culture founded on drink, in a subculture of drunks, but, oddly enough, does not attain his visions as a drunk.

The trilogy is drink saturated from the start. Legs documents the vicious bootlegging rackets in Sullivan and Green countries south and west of Albany. In Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, too, drink is the center of gang life. Though the focus is on Francis's grown son Billy, Francis himself shuffles in, coughing and toothless, to earn money by registering to vote twenty-one times. Even in a drinking culture, Francis's drinking is worthy of note. The reporter Martin Daugherty sees "the bloom of drink in every pore, the flesh ready to bleed through the sheerest of skin." Daugherty and Billy see him in the courthouse: "The tramp dragged his feet, slouched, shuffled on fallen arches, or maybe on stumps with toes frozen or gone." Annie blames wine," and Helen reproaches him, "God, Francis, you were all right till you started on the wine. Wine, wine, wine" (Ironweed 84).

Similar descriptions of Francis Phelan's degradation blame his failure on wine, but elsewhere drink is not considered the cause, and sometimes it is even an assertion of freedom. In Ironweed he boasts that he "did not need Daddy Big's advice. He did not get sick from alcohol the way Daddy Big had. Francis knew how to drink. He drank all the time and he did not vomit. He drank anything that contained alcohol, anything, and he could always walk, and he could talk as well as any man alive about what was on his mind. Alcohol did put Francis to sleep, finally, but on his own terms. When he'd had enough and everybody else was passed out, he'd just put his head down and curl up like an old dog, then put his hands between his legs to protect what was left of the jewels, and he'd cork off. After a little sleep he'd wake up and go out for more drink" (5-6). Such self-command may be an alcoholic's delusion, but his feats in the jungle suggest that this boast is an accurate assessment, that he is not drinking himself to death like his friend Rudy and that it is not alcohol that has made him a bum. Watching a fellow bum sing, he wonders, "What was it, Oscar, that did you in? Would you like to tell us all about it? Do you know? It wasn't Gerald who did me. It wasn't drink and it wasn't baseball and it wasn't really mama. What was it that went bust, Oscar, and how come nobody every found out how to fix it for us?" (50). This question, crucial to inquiries about the causes of alcoholism specifically and failure generally, is one of the few moments when Francis views his drinking negatively and indicates that his life might have been better without it.

At the time of the action of Ironweed, however, Francis Phelan is not drinking. Because he ran out of money and needed to be sober to register, the graveyard meeting with Gerald signals a day of altered consciousness—altered from alteration—a new cleansed state of mind vibrant with memories of an era, and with possibility of a return. The masterpiece of telescoped memory, visioning his conception of life and death (98), is made possible by this intense state. But the fact that he is not drinking when he is seeing so clearly should not suggest that the novel urges sobriety, for at the end of the novel Francis buys quantities of muscatel and Green River Whiskey (192), hosts a party at the flop house, drinks Rabelaisian amounts, and then joins the "primal scene" in the jungle for the finale in fire and violence.

The question "What was it made us go bust?" is not, after all, a real question because by his own standards Francis Phelan is not bust. He is free. His life is fated to be in flight. Though his views of himself shift, he exalts in his "compulsion to flight," for running was "a condition that was as pleasurable to his being as it was natural: the running of bases after the crack of the bat, the running from accusation, the running from the calumny of men and women, the running from family, from bondage, from destitution of spirit through ritualistic straightenings, the running, finally, in a quest for pure flight as a fulfilling mannerism of the spirit" (75). Like the pure flight from destitution of spirit of his Irish forerunner Stephen Daedalus, escaping the nets of family, church, and nation, Phelan takes the bird as his totem animal and Daedalus as his winged model; he feels himself "in the throes of flight, not outward this time, but upward. He felt feathers growing from his back, knew soon he would soar to regions unimaginable …" (163-4). Despite his frequent feelings of worthlessness, he believes himself free (190) and intends to remain that way, to "beat the bastards, survive the mob and that fateful chaos" (207).

Phelan's violence and refusal to submit, his wavering belief in himself as a warrior (216), suggest that Kennedy seeks to place his hero in a different, perhaps pre-Christian, culture, before the Church broke men with guilt and the requirements of goodness. Even though Christian themes of atonement suffuse the trilogy, the novels give as a whole a picture of a Celtic, male, tribal group, whose lives, violent and vengeful, are governed by a code of shame, and whose laws are self-generated. The "Irish-American chieftan" prizes the violence of Celtic story; Phelan follows Cuchulain in his impulsive furies. Displaced from home ground, these Celts reenact the heroism of the Mohawks, the native Americans who ruled the land before them. Pride in the magical power of the dominant male pervades the trilogy. Women appear as goddesses, often in triplicate, as in the threesome of Katrina/Annie/mother in Ironweed. Katrina, in addition, is associated with a massive fertile tree, symbol of the energies that run through the globe's center. The bad women in the novel deny their vitality like Francis's mother; the good ones are forgiving and fiery like Francis's abandoned but waiting wife Annie, or like his girlfriend Helen, who dies singing the "Ode to Joy" and believing that loving Francis was the greatest thing she had done in her life (138). Women are the mediums by which and through which fathers and sons are reunited, as are Martin and Edward Daugherty through Melissa in Billy Phelan's Greatest Game or Billy and Francis through Helen, though less carnally. Women are attachments to the core of men; the men ignore as best they can the debilitating values of the Christian overlay—a religion of "self-neutered nuns and self-gelded priest" (Ironweed 99)—that would sap their strengths if they would let it. The tribe values the man of power, violence, energy, and memory, especially one who has gone to the land of the dead and returned; it treasures the orally transmitted legends that accrete around him. Such a figure was Legs Diamond, who eschews Christian values entirely, until superstitions overtake him; such a figure also is Francis Phelan, who struggles to free himself from the bondage of Christian guilt and to be the Celtic warrior, the violent Cuchulain, or wise Druid he was fated to be.

In addition to making his hero a tribal figure, a sort of shaman who can speak to the dead and return from the dead, who takes spirit-flights, chooses the bird as his totemic animal, and is endowed with superhuman power, Kennedy also dignifies his drunken bum by allusions to other great literary heroes, whose parallel experiences guide the reader to interpret Francis's experiences in a heroic light. The twenty-two years of Francis's wanderings, for instance, suggest Odysseus's twenty-years' absence. Like Odysseus, Phelan begins his wanderings with violence (here between the workers and the scabs) and is waylaid for nine years by a Circe, here Helen, a fellow bum. Phelan's return home is made possible by the aid of his son Billy, a Telemachus figure who has been left to grow up on his own and survive amid the hostile brawls of Albany's seedy underworld but who nevertheless forgives his father for his abandonment. Just at a time when Billy is shunned by the mob for not betraying a friend (like Telemachus among the hostile suitors), he bails out his father with the last money he has. Like Odysseus, too, Francis returns to a patient wife, loyal to him for twentytwo years, who has held the household together on her own and, despite her store-bought teeth, still stirs his memories of their first kiss on the woodpile (with the woodpile perhaps echoing the massive trunk that forms the platform of Odysseus's and Penelope's bed). The spirit of forgiveness—Annie has never told her children that Francis caused the death of their baby—her silence is one of the wonders that Billy relates that brings Francis back, disguised as a rag man, bearing a propitiatory turkey, just as Odysseus also returned, filthy, disguised as a beggar, and lurked around the doors of his own home to assess the dangers within.

In addition to these and other parallels with the Odyssey, Ironweed also makes many allusions to Dante's Commedia, particularly in conjunction with the two earlier novels in the trilogy. Overt references to Dante include the epigraph to Ironweed from the first lines of Purgatorio:

To course o'er better waters now hoists sail the little bark of my wit, leaving behind her a sea so cruel.

Dante's next lines explain his plan for the Purgatio, which also becomes the plan for Ironweed, submerged in the truncated allusion:

and what I sing will be that second kingdom, in which the human soul is cleansed of sin, becoming worthy of ascent to heaven.

The epigraph points to the final homing in of Francis Phelan to the high secret attic room in his wife's house where his mementos are cherished and to the release from guilt that she accomplishes for him. A Beatrice to his suffering, truculent, and banished Dante, Annie welcomes the sinner back, absolving him also of guilt for leaving her and the children. She has seen the breaking up of a good man from afar and watches him with compassion.

Though not all trilogies have Dantean elements, many references to hell and to demons suggest that, in rough and inexact correspondence, Legs may be the Inferno, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, an Inferno with approaches to Purgatorio in its themes of parenthood and reconciliation, and Ironweed the Purgatorio where the purified spirit is toiling upward, nearing completion. Legs is a devilish book, and Legs Diamond, the hero admired by Marcus Gorman, Albany lawyer and narrator of the novel, a demonic and daemonic figure. The novel, crammed with facts, depicts in sickening detail Legs' cruelty in a world where the only option is to kill or be killed. Legs kills whatever he wants to. He plays with human beings as he squeezes a canary in his fist and tosses the tiny corpse into his wife's bodice. He turns women into animals (as two women tell him) and draws into his magnetic range the once upstanding lawyer Gorman, who is so mesmerized by his power that he devotes his legal career to getting Legs acquitted for crimes everyone knew he committed. The viciousness of Legs—its random shootings in barns; the allure of its unscrupulous hero, whose body heats and trembles with menacing electricity; Legs' seductive power over men and women—indicate its infernal quality. Billy Phelan's Greatest Game begins the work of purging the gangland of Albany, in that Billy, a punk and hustler, Martin Daugherty (the son of the playwright and a literary newspaper man), and other young men defy the will of the Irish mob and stand up for individual values. In this purging, the novel is purgatorial, as also in its awakening of love in Billy and many others, including his father. The theme of the novel is less Billy's own personal purgation than the reunion of fathers and sons in several families, Daughertys, Bermans, and Phelans, miracles that bring renewed life.

Along with these references to traditional literary wanderers through the land of death, Kennedy draws on two twentieth-century novels (themselves steeped in the Odyssey and the Inferno)—Joyce's Ulysses and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Both of these novels take place on a single day inside the multiple consciousness of an observing and remembering hero, who is awaiting a reunion with his more or less Penelopean wife. The affinities between Ironweed and Under the Volcano point up a deliberate contrast between Phelan and the defiantly failing anti-hero of that novel, Geoffrey Firmin. Under the Volcano, written in 1947, and Ironweed, in 1983 take place in a single day on Halloween and All Souls' Day, in 1933 and 1938, respectively. In both novels, the Halloween motif emphasizes the presence of death, either within the heroes' wills or in the world pressing on them from without: in Under the Volcano, chocolate skeletons, falling bodies, witches, and a dead Indian merge the carnival customs of a Mexican rendition of All Souls' Eve with Firmin's morbid hallucinations; in Ironweed, ghosts and costumed goblins berate Phelan, whose hallucinations also summon the dead. The will to die is accomplished in Under the Volcano, as Firmin chooses to drink the mescal that he knows will kill him; by contrast, Phelan in Ironweed chooses life, even in a small attic room in hiding. In both novels, the heroes prepare for or are surprised by reunions with loving and patient wives. Both wives had been lost through the faults of the drunken heroes, and both women forgive their men their alcoholic betrayals although Yvonne Firmin is less loyal than Annie, who has never taken another man. While both wives are Penelopes, their husbands differ in their treatment of them. Geoffrey, paralyzed by jealousy and impotence, encourages Yvonne to be with Hugh Firmin and Jacques LaRuelle so that he can continue drinking; Francis, by contrast, once he learns that Annie has kept his secret goes in search of her and rejoins her.

Both men are heroic as talkers, entertainers, and drinkers. Geoffrey, a Faustian magus, verbose with knowledge of ancient wisdom, is the model for many of the men in the novel; they borrow his books, his bag, his sneakers, and his wife in order to resemble him. Francis Phelan is also the central figure of his group, admired by all, a legend for his feats. A partial cause of the reckless glory of both men is their stupendous drinking and the wildness and multilayered consciousness that drinking releases in both—wit, violence, rage, defiance, intuition, and memory.

In keeping with the Halloween settings, both novels are lit by firelight: Ironweed by the blaze of the jungle, Under the Volcano by the blazing rumbles of the volcano looming in the background. Against an even more distant background of political and social upheaval, both novels echo the memory, detail, single day, and reunions of Joyce's Ulysses. Both echo the Inferno: Under the Volcano full of references to bosques, woods, and the midlife journey in darkness; Ironweed similarly depicting a journey among the dead and a resulting purgatorio.

Despite these many similarities the two novels, about alcoholics on Halloween come to quite different conclusions. Firmin's alcoholism leads to his outrage, his courage to speak against his betrayers, his drunken taunting of the authorities, and his eventual death in the barranca, tossed in like a dead dog. Phelan's, on the other hand, after a brief week of sobriety, reasserts itself as a wild frenzy of life and strength. Like Geoffrey Firmin, Phelan defies the police; but unlike Geoffrey, Phelan triumphs over them. Firmin's day of death leads to his death, whereas Phelan's, in his warrior culture, leads to new a life.

The literary allusiveness of Ironweed is intensified by metafictions within the novel and across the trilogy. The heroes of the first two novels allude to Francis Phelan and his wanderings, as if he existed as a real person cutting in and out of other people's lives. He is also the hero of the imaginary play The Car Barns, written by Edward Daugherty, whose son is a major figure in Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and whose wife Katrina introduced the young Francis Phelan into the mysteries of female nakedness. Francis's role as the hero of this play-within-the-novel (and also outside it, because it is referred to in the other novels as an existing fact) increases his guilt for it presents him as the single radical killer of the scab Harold Allen, as a "Divine Warrior" of the Irish, adding another reason for his long exile. Only toward the end of Ironweed does Francis Phelan realize that The Car Barns is only one version of the story, not the truth, and that other stones were flying that day (206-7). The story-within-a-story indicates that another person's fiction has distorted the hero's view of himself and made him suffer more than necessary. Phelan comes to realize that he must create his own fictions to refute those of others, which either glorify him or, in the case of the fictions of his mother's family vilify him. "If he was ever to survive, it would be with the help not of any socialistic god but with a clear head and a steady eye for the truth; for the guilt he felt was not worth the dying" (207). The fiction led to his escape, and he must free himself from its delusions and write his own script. Curiously, Billy is also elevated by Martin Daugherty's fiction into a magical hero and subsequently dubbed "Magic."

Kennedy affirms this Irish myth-making and magical naming. Both the Daugherties, father and son, are Celtic bards, singing satires and legends to reform the present and keep the past alive. They enforce the values of the warrior code and spurn those of the well-behaved Christian women. The final sentence of Billy Phelan's Greatest Game revives the Celtic twilight in the male enclaves of playfulness, as Billy "made a right turn into the warmth of the stairs to Louie's pool room, a place where even serious men sometimes go to seek the meaning of magical webs, mystical coin, golden birds, and other artifacts of the only cosmos in town" (282). The allusion to William Butler Yeats's gold bird in "Sailing to Byzantium" and to its antithetical "dying generations" might also recall the other appropriate Yeats poem, "All Soul's Night," in which Yeats, like Francis Phelan in Ironweed, summons up the dead at this significant time. Also imbued with occult powers, Yeats toasts the returning dead with his wine, which the dead need only breathe, their "element is so fine" (224-26). In this Celtic tradition of Samhain, both Yeats the poet and Phelan the fictional character drink to the dead whom they recall from underground and bring once again to life in their stories.

Although the relations between fact and fiction are intricate in the novel, there seems to be a truth at the center. Kennedy glorifies the simple, ordinary, ruined man, by connecting him with mythic undercurrents. The more these myths are the hero's own creation, the more powerful and free he is. Francis Phelan is a momentary avatar of shamanistic power and at the same time the single creator of the myths surrounding him that take shape in his remarkably precise memory. In suggesting that this homeless man with shoes tied by string, sleeping under the cold stars, is a hero, Kennedy also suggests, as Joseph Campbell does, that inside each of us glimmers a heroic nature and that each of us momentarily possesses ancient power. Even a criminal vagrant is swathed in dignifying myths if he invents his life in a heroic mode, defying his temporary circumstance.

If we reversed the process and looked at Odysseus as he sat waiting to re-enter Ithaca or at a shaman in a Siberian village starving himself in preparation for his ecstatic lift-off, we would also find a shabby, filthy creature on the lower verge of humankind, secretly filled with power. Such speculation on the hero as avatar is, I suggest, at the heart of Ironweed, whose hero is the unlikely embodiment of shamanistic multiple consciousness and, indirectly, the beneficiary of much twentieth-century anthropological work on shamanistic culture.