Making destiny his choice: The quest to choose necessity in James Merrill's 'The Changing Light at Sandover'

I argue that Merrill's epic trilogy depicts his private struggle with what is figured at various points as heredity, the unconscious, and necessity. I begin my introductory chapter by asserting that Merrill's epic is first and foremost a private quest--what he refers to in an early poem as the "inner adventure"--and not the prophetic and apocalyptic document that many have claimed it to be. I then briefly trace Merrill's influences in the creation of his epic.
In my second chapter I contend that the poet's unhappiness with the user/used relationship between art and life leads him to "project" his Oedipal struggle into the fictional form of a novel. The poet's unconsciously willed loss or abandonment of this novel proves to him that any artistic effort to choose necessity and placate heredity must take the form of the quest for the sublime (depicted in "The Book of Ephraim") in which the real and the ideal, life and art, become one.
In my third chapter I argue that Mirabell's Books of Number, the trilogy's second volume, is written in reaction to the failure of the poet-quester of "The Book of Ephraim" to "break out" of or to transcend the repetitive cycle of the sublime quest. In Mirabell the ouija board spirits warn the poet-quester of the dangers of continual rebellion against the natural order; they urge him to accept the limitations of his time-bound and body-bound nature.
My concluding chapter concerns itself with the third book of Merrill's epic, the supposed Paradiso of this trilogy, in which the poet-quester proceeds not to beatitude but back to life. This is the most elaborate of the three poems, but its legions of ouija board figures, startling mythical histories, and endless wordplay simply serve to emphasize how little faith the poet has invested in his own celestial system.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-06, Section: A, page: 2147.
Chairperson: Naomi Lebowitz.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Washington University in St. Louis, 1993.