Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Summary Themes Style Historical Context Critical Overview Sources For Further Study

Criticism

Chris Semansky

Chris Semansky’s most recent collection of poems, Blindsided, has been published by 26 Books of Portland, Oregon. In the following essay Semansky explores the relationship between the actual and the imaginary in MacBeth’s “Bedtime Story.”

George MacBeth made a career out of offending the literary tastes of critics and establishment poets. It was not only his treatment of lowly poetic subjects such as masturbation or necrophelia, but

MacBeth also was not a believer in the idea that poetry should necessarily be enduring. “Bedtime Story” is a poem that will probably not endure, yet its very title alludes to kinds of expression which do endure, namely folktales. In this sense, MacBeth plays a trick on his audience, something he did often during his career as poet, novelist and television producer. In his relentless experimentation with language and his focus on the materiality of the word, MacBeth embodies the “spirit” of post-modern play, often leading readers to a place of seeming meaning only to then spring a trap door on them. An examination of “Bedtime Story” shows how his poetry often suggests various meanings without exhausting, or sometimes even developing, them. This can be confusing, even exasperating, and requires readers not to reach too hard for definitive meanings.

The poem begins with a common refrain often used to signal fairytales and folktales. This conforms to how we expect a bedtime story to begin, and we prepare ourselves for a tale about a mythic place. That place approximates our image of the earth itself, but the time period is unclear. It could be ten thousand years ago or it could be as recent as a few hundred, or even a hundred years ago. When we are then told that the “Mission Brigade was at work in the jungle / Hard by the Congo,” we think of Africa in colonial times. The first Europeans to explore Central Africa, the Portugese, established a close commercial relationship with the Kongo Kingdom in the fifteenth century. By the nineteenth century, this region of the continent was broken up into tribal power centers, and in 1910 Middle Congo became part of French Equatorial Africa, which included Gabon, the Central African Republic, and Chad. Today, The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly known as Zaire, is Africa’s third-largest country, with a population estimated at 46, 000, 000. The country shares borders in the east with Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda; in the west with the Congo Republic; in the north with the Central African Republic and Sudan; and in the south with Angola and Zambia. We do not know the time to which the narrator refers, but the Congo itself, today as in the past, evokes an image of lushness and wild primates, of untamed nature. The country is known for its game reserves and national parks sheltering animals, such as lions, monkeys, gorillas, zebras, antelope, elephants, and other rare animals like the Bonobo apes and the Okapi antelopes. But it is not the actual Congo to which the speaker refers. It is a Congo of the imagination which draws on our image of the real Congo. This image is developed in the second stanza when we are now presented with a baobab tree, a lush flowering fruit tree found in tropical Africa. But what is the Mission Brigade doing scouting for green-fly, a kind of insect that eats sap from trees? And who is this “last living man”? Insects such as termites, crickets, grass-hoppers, and palm grubs form a staple of the Congolese diet, but the Mission Brigade is not Congolese. When we are told that there were wars which “extinguished the cities,” we begin to reconfigure our sense of what kind of story we are being told and realize that quite possibly we are hearing the tale of someone who is not human, who somehow evolved out of human beings or from another species. After all, who is telling the tale if the “last living man” is what he is described as being?

The poem provides clues, but no answers. MacBeth plays with the idea of the last man as he plays with the idea of the Congo. The “last man” conjures images of the wild child, a type popularized in myths and movies (think of Tarzan or Truffaut’s movie, The Wild Child), that human being born in the wilderness and raised by animals who encounters civilized human beings and is overwhelmed by their strangeness, their otherness. The last man also suggests a boogie man, that evil, mischievous character so prevalent in “darker” bedtime stories. In this case, the man could stand for a fear of nature itself, or at least the animal part of human nature, which the tale-teller is attempting to either mock or come to terms with. Another possibility is that MacBeth is satirizing the ways in which imperialist Europeans have behaved towards Africans. Hannah Arendt says this about the psychology of white racist thought in her study The Origins of Totalitarianism:

What made [Africans] different from other human beings was not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality — compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike. They were, as it were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specific human reality, so that when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.

The seventh stanza compounds our confusion as to who is doing the narrating. Now we see the brigade moving through the jungle from the point of view of the last man himself, or at least how the narrator himself thinks the last man saw the brigade, with his “shaved spear”

Glinting beneath broad leaves. When their jaws cut
Swathes through the bark and he saw fine teeth
      shine,
Round eyes roll round and forked arms waver
Huge as the rough trunks

These lines are ambiguous at best, indeterminate at worst. On the one hand they can be metaphors for saws and other heavy equipment, but what would “forked arms ... Huge as the rough trunks” be doing above him? At this point, the description breaks down and we are left to make sense of imagery which does not seem to fit.

When the last man attacks one of the soldiers, we are told that “the tipped spear pricked him.” Judging from the proximity of the man swinging down from the tree we would expect the spear to do more than simply “prick” the soldier. This provides more evidence that perhaps the narrator’s “people” are not people. However, we are confused once again when the Queen is brought into the story. Because we know that MacBeth is Scottish and lived most of his life in Britain, the first queen that comes to our mind is the Queen Mother of the United Kingdom. However, MacBeth, it seems, is merely using the Queen as a type in order to echo a certain sense of noblesse oblige that the British Empire (and Empires in general) exhibited, or at least believed it exhibited, towards its colonized subjects. In the actual, historical Congo, European masters put the Congolese people to work in plantations and mining sectors. Little or no effort was

“ ‘Bedtime Story’ shows how [MacBeth’s] poetry often suggests various meanings without exhausting, or sometimes even developing, them”

made to educate them with the exception of Catholic missionaries who sought converts. The Queen is used in this poem satirically, to suggest self-deception on the part of the narrator and his species in their attitude towards the last man. As readers we are meant to be shocked to learn that the brigade had orders to “bring back the man’s picked bones to be / Sealed in the archives in amber.”

Perhaps the most confusing and enigmatic statement made in “Bedtime Story” occurs in the eleventh stanza, when the speaker says that “the penultimate primate” has been killed off. If the last man is the next-to-the-last primate, who is the last? One possible answer is the monkey he had been stalking earlier in the poem. Another answer is the species (a post-primate human?) to which the narrator belongs. In either case, we are given no further information. The poem leaves the question unresolved. As if to mock the reader’s (expected) confusion, MacBeth ends the poem with an image of another actually extinct animal, the dodo, a flightless bird whose name itself has become a label of derision. The answer to the riddle of this poem’s actual meaning has too been “Ground by the teeth of the termites, blown by the / Wind ....

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• Hannah Arendt’s 1968 study, Imperialism: Part Two of the Origins of Totalitarianism, provides a provocative exploration into the cultural and political underpinnings of Fascist ideologies.
• MacBeth’s Collected Poems: 1958-1970, published in 1972 provides a rewarding look at MacBeth’s genius as well as his silliness. This book is entertaining and provocative.