Maple Oatmeal Cake Rides Again

In his book Immortality, Milan Kundera describes in excruciatingly observed detail how an enterprising woman named Bettina engages Goethe in a protracted battle of manipulation over Goethe's image. Though he keeps control of the public's perception of him throughout his life, in death Bettina wrests his image from him, which is to say, Bettina sculpts Goethe's immortality. The book discusses some interesting concepts that I'd like to bring to bear on culture heroes. 

Kundera speaks of ideology and imagology, the second the driving and defining factor of our age in his view. Would be hard to deny him. But thinking about it, imagology as he defines it has a broader reach than these last 100 years or so. Kundera uses the dissemination of Marxism to illustrate the differences between ideology and imagology, the way one transformed into the other.

Some one hundred years ago in Russia, persecuted Marxists began to gather secretly in small circles in order to study Marx's manifesto; they simplified the contents of this simple ideology in order to disseminate it to other circles, whose members, simplifying further and further this simplification of the simple, kept passing it on and on, so that when Marxism became known and powerful on the whole planet, all that was left of it was a collection of six or seven slogans so poorly linked that it can hardly be called an ideology. And precisely because the remnants of Marx no longer form any logical system of ideas, but only a series of suggestive images and slogans (a smiling worker with a hammer, black, white, and yellow men fraternally holding hands, the dove of peace rising to the sky, and son and so on), we can rightfully talk of a gradual, general, planetary transformation of ideology to imagology…

I want to add to this comparison of ideology and imagology: ideology was like a set of enormous wheels at the back of the stage, turning and setting in motion wars, revolutions, reforms. The wheels of imagology turn without having any effect upon history. Ideologies fought with one another, and each of them was capable of filling a whole epoch with its thinking. Imagology organizes peaceful alternation of its systems in lively seasonal rhythms… ideology belonged to history, while the reign of imagology begins where history ends (Kundera, Immortality, 113-6).

I hesitate to decouple ideology and imagology, placing the later outside of history and declaring the former dead. For millennia the two have functioned symbiotically. Culture heroes provide a window into this relationship.

Tomoe, where is she now?

We identify culture heroes by their collection of attributes, their image. No matter in what story he shows up, Väinämöinen is old, skilled in magic, wise yet with some foolhardy achilles heel, can sing, and has a touch of the lech about him. We recognize Cuchulainn as young, short, a braggart, fond of women, skilled in battle, and prone to violence. Tomoe is always beautiful, headstrong and alluring, yet faithfully subservient to her daimyo. And of course a terror on the battlefield.

But no matter their image, which holds with slight variation between tales (Cuchulainn's hair changes color, for instance), the ideology each hero serves can vary widely across stories. Does Tomoe drown herself in lake Biwa after the battle of Awazu in which her daimyo, Minamoto no Yoshinaka, is killed? Does she marry the victor, Yoshinaka's cousin and mortal enemy? Does she become a nun? Does she escape to the forest and bear Minamoto no Yoshinaka's child? Each outcome serves a different conception of women's place in society and the consequences of her transgression of that place. Is Odin a petty, inimical trickster or a wise, ends-driven battle lord? Thor a cross dressing fool or the protector of the farm and family? Does Väinämöinen bring music and magic to his people, drive beautiful young girls to their death with selfish blindness or is he the insubstantial illusion of a fading pagan world? Cuchulainn: protector or brute?

No wonder culture heroes often feel like cardboard cutouts. They possess each a lovely, shiny, archetypical image, as perfect as any one of the shifting identities of a pop princess, as compelling, as gripping as the protagonist of a soon-to-be-forgotten genre novel, but their ideology, their meaning, the core with which we seek a deeper connection changes to suit the ideology of each tale teller. The hero is a figurehead for the ideology of anyone canny enough to chain their dogma to the imagological power of the hero.  

Often as a student writer, I see this mantra on the blogs of established writers and in books of writing advice - push your protagonist to the max. Make her someone readers want to identify with, beautiful, at the top of her field, hot boyfriend. What's her most salient positive feature? Amplify it. But she can't be too perfect. What is her flaw? Deepen it. Then, exploit it once, twice, and thrice before she overcomes it. She must have two needs that drive/cripple her. Two creates layers and layers equal reality. I see the characters resultant of this advice sprinkled all over fiction, and they bore the fuck out of me. They are not human. Worse, they are not subtle. Theirs is the false depth of bright water, distant mountains reflected in a stream two feet deep. At best, they offer the momentary illusion of depth that exotic beauty often creates. Just like the most successful pop star. The image is so compelling that we want to ascribe meaning. George Eliot expressed this neatly while portraying the shallow, self absorbed, kittenishly monstrous heroine/villain/victim Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede, "But Hetty's face had a language that transcended her feelings. There are faces which nature charges with a meaning and pathos not belonging to the single human soul that flutters beneath them, but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations--eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless has been and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes--perhaps paired with pale eyes that can say nothing; just as a national language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it." (Adam Bede, Chapter XXVI The Dance)

Killed him a bear when he was only three.
...uh, what's he doing with bears now?

We confuse things like beauty, youth, and strength easily with meaning and depth. Even with visually repulsive characters like Väinämöinen we may become fascinated with some attribute, his musical skill, and tie meaning to this anchor. An unusual appearance--Davy Crockett's hat and native-inspired dress, Kaguya-hime's diminutiveness, Tomoe's white skin and habit of wearing men's armor--may inspire the sort of fascination that invites the attribution of meaning.

But in the end this meaning does not arise from the hero, from the symbol. It comes from the teller, the one who deploys the symbol, knowingly or unknowingly in the service of their own thoughts, feelings, ideas, and agenda. This shifting core is why heroes often do not impress us with emotional validity. Why nations, rebels, fascists, and factionists alike vie for control of culture heroes. For if the culture hero lacks inherent meaning, his/her image wields terrible power.

Those who valorize history are prone to fascism, a common saw. We have lots of examples. Nazis. Certain segments of the black metal scene. America's Tea Party. But what is this valorization of history really? The insertion of our modern ideas into a historically proven array of powerful images, that is, a repurposing of old images for new ideologies. This can work better or worse. The Nazis tried to insert their own ideas where a matrix of meaning already supported the symbols. Established symbols and mythical figures can only be pushed so far from their traditional meaning, or a deal of time is necessary to move the locus of their meaning. The Nazi's thin repurposing of northern European myth and symbol failed to take root in all but a few cases (sun and rebirth are not the associations that pop into most people's minds when presented with a swastika). 

Folk metal bands play the same game, insertion of ideas into historical symbols, often culture heroes, with various levels of success. Amorphis has played the game fairly successfully. Since taking on Tomi Joutsen as their singer, they've produced four albums which tell the stories of three heroes and one villain of the Kalevala. Eclipse for Kullervo, whose villain status is as relative as it is interesting, Silent Waters for Lemminkäinen, Skyforger for Ilmarinen, and The Beginning of Times for Väinämöinen. In the Kalevala, each hero has a collection of Runos or stories concerning him. Lönnrot arranged them in such a way as to create the impression of chronological order. He tweaked the stories to make them more cohesive, chose which to include and even more to exclude, yet across the Kalevala, many views of each hero emerge. Though transformed into a single epic text, it is clear that each runo was originally the product of a unique teller using stock characters and stories for his or her own ideological ends. Väinämöinen doesn't quite line up with himself in the Kalevala.

Väinömöinen's singing that dude down into a swamp.
Not nice. Then he goes off and drives the dude's cute
sister to suicide... Dude was kinda a dick though.

Amorphis take these characters in their story arcs and flesh out an emotional context for them. More than narrating the action in the stories, their lyrics add emotional content. Adding their take on these characters feelings while retelling the stories from a modern viewpoint creates a powerful symbol. Amorphis uses this to drive album sales and increase their popularity, and perhaps also to raise the profile of Finnish culture in the world. Of the thousand things that could be done with this tool, fine, well and good.

Then we have certain bands who invoke a tradition without fulfilling it. If you seek to use the past, you cannot ask it to remain behind you and shore you up in your irrelation to it, but must bear it before you and pour something of yourself into it.

And then, because his gravity is great, we have Joyce. Depending on who you ask, Joyce systematically reworked Irish myth in total throughout his body of works creating a new Irish identity from the shards of the past, or he just played with bits and pieces of it in interesting ways. I'm inclined more towards the later, though when we say 'interesting' with Joyce, the qualifier 'very' enters as an inherent, understated implication. In Ulysses, Joyce gives Cuchulainn such an imaginative reworking. While his contemporaries mounted the hero as the figurehead of an increasingly violent nationalism, Joyce assumed more thoroughly the style of Irish myth while utterly reworking its past imaginings into something modern. Take the Cyclops chapter where Irish myth is most visible.

I have intentionally mixed gods, historical figures, and purely legendary heroes here and have broadly related them to pop icons and genre fiction protagonists. I feel that they occupy the same mind space and serve similar functions. In a way, Thor is as real as Davy Crockett. Both serve to entertain, guide, inspire, and embody a nationality, just as Väinämöinen charms with the same tricks as Kanye West (yeah, old reference, who the hell is popular now?) After the passage of sufficient years, if the figure is remembered, all aspects collapse into the heroic.  Tomoe may have been a real person, an entertainer and political figure of sorts whose image has collided with ideas of warlike female deities and collapsed into a legendary hero.  In 1200 years will we remember Davy Crockett as a historical figure or a legend, if we remember him at all?

To paraphrase DH, our minds are a clearing in the vast wilderness of our souls through which strange gods come and go (Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature). Though we may ascribe our meanings to these gods, charge them to serve our causes, who is in control here? As Kundera points out, in the end the image is the immortality. Our ideas, causes, only serve these gods, these heroes, these larger than life pictures.  Our wee, drop-in-the-bucket contribution becomes only another layer in the fascination-glamour of the hero image. We cannot know what lies in the forest where they tread, what other clearings they will come into. And so, though we play with them like toys, they fascinate us, and in the end hold us in thrall.

This multilayered, complex, visually compelling cake held me in thrall!  Some words before the recipe.

This cake is a sugar punch to the mouth, and is not too healthy, despite what associations oatmeal and chia seeds might incur. It was tasty, visually impressive, and a lot of fun. Give it a try in this dinner party worthy form. Afterwards, may I suggest preparing the oatmeal cake as a simple, single layer cake with your favorite topping? The cake is moist and delicate, hard to stack and not the most suitable for the four layer shtick. The flavor is robust and could stand on its own as a simple dessert.

Sugar!!!!

Oatmeal Cake

Boil water and pour:
1 1/2 cup boiling water
into:
1 cup rolled oats
Stir and let sit until water is absorbed and oats cool.

Mix:
1 3/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cream together:
1/2 cup margarine
1/2 cup brown sugar packed
3/4 cup white sugar
Add 2 tablespoons soy yogurt and stir.

Mix all ingredients together in a few swift strokes

Bake in a greased floured 9x13 pan at 350 for 25 min

Broiled Coconut Topping

Mix together:
4 tablespoons melted margarine
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/8 cup maple syrup
1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons soy yogurt
1 cup flaked, unsweeted coconut

Let the cake cool.  Measure out the cake with a tape measure or other suitable tool and divide into four equal rectangles.  Put a piece of parchment paper onto a cookie sheet, and using spatulas, carefully maneuver one rectangle of cake onto this fresh sheet.  

Move the bottom layer of the cake onto your serving tray or preferred final location of the cake. Spread an 1/8 inch thick layer of chia seed custard. Using spatulas and care, lift the next layer and place on top of the first. Repeat until you have left aside only the top layer.

Spread the top layer with the coconut topping and place directly under a hot broiler. The topping will start to bubble and the coconut brown; watch closely and remove from the oven as soon as the coconut takes on that toasty look. It may take less than a minute. While warm cake is usually harder to handle, the longer the top layer sits with the broiled topping, the more delicate it will become. I recommend setting up the underlying layers and custard first, then taking the top layer directly from beneath the broiler to the top of the cake.

Once your cake is stacked, pack frosting into corners and edges as needed to get the cake level, then coat the sides with a thick layer of frosting.