III. John Lennon: the
Myth and the Man
On a dark day in London, while Hitler's bombs rained from the sky, John Winston Lennon was born. A child of war, he would become a symbol of peace to all the world. His father left him to sail the sea. His mother was taken from him in the crash of a car. But he had music in him, and with his music he built a new family, which still endures and still grows. He traveled the earth, singing "come together" and "all you need is love." He journeyed to India to study peace in the land of Ghandi. He gave an anthem to the peace movement when he sang "All we are saying is give peace a chance" (Give Peace a Chance, 1969). And he gave the world a vision when he sang "Imagine" (1970):
Imagine there's no countries It isn't hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace... Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can No need for greed or hunger A brotherhood of man Imagine all the people Sharing all the world... You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope someday you'll join us And the world will be as one.
His voicing feelings that grew more and more personal struck a responsive chord in the fans who followed him; some commented that the experience was like group therapy. Following John's chant "all you need is love," a whole generation loosened the bonds with their parental generation and turned to their peers as family. With fellow Beatle Paul McCartney John wrote "I am the Walrus" ( 1967) , which began with the ego-destruction associated with LSD, "I am he as you are he," and led to the sixties communal ideal "we are all together." From Hamburg to Japan, from New York to India, John wandered with his three fellow Beatles, singing and living a message of honesty and non-violence. Lennon and McCartney 's "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (1967)" about "flowers that grow so incredibly high" was said to provide a nice image for a central chapter inthe history of youth culture: flower power and psychedelia (Weiner, 1984).
"And in the end," he sang, "the love you take is equal to the love you make." ("The End", 1969) The end for this man of peace came by a gun in the hand of a villain. But John Lennon is greater in death even than he was in life. In life, John Lennon was a rock star. In death, he became a myth. The young people who were his original devotees are no longer young, but are still his devotees. But now they are joined by their children and grandchildren: John Lennon has become a voice that speaks to all generations. The man who was born in violence and died in violence became a paramount symbol of peace.
John Lennon as a hero:
Jung's theory of archetype
If we try to understand how an exemplary myth figure impacts his people, we can appeal to Jung's psychological theories. Jung uses collective unconsciousness to indicate an inherited archive of archaic-mythic forms and figures that appear repeatedly in the most diverse cultures and historical epochs. Archetypes are these forms and figures which constitute the primordial structures of the human psyche. For example, "the universal hero myth always refers to a power man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of dragons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death." And "how the ordinary man can be liberated from his personal impotence and misery and endowed with an almost super-human quality"? It is by "the narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, humans, prayer, and sacrifices...that exalt the individual to an identification with the hero." (Jung, 1964)
If we reflect upon John Lennon's life story, we can find similar archetypal themes which can place him into the family of heroes. He wandered the earth, making his home on three continents; he rose rapidly to fame, ardantly embraced by devotees worldwide; he struggled against narrowmindedness and violence all his life: a struggle he seemed to lose by death but may have won in immortality; he was fallible (lost many fans when he observed that "The Beatles are more popular than Jesus Christ") and in the end may have become an immolation, a sacrifice to the cause of peace.
Lennon's Myth:
A Structural Perspective
For Jung, myth represents the psychological repertoire of our collective unconsciousness. For Levi-Strauss, myth is like a cognitive maneuver which tries to solve the puzzle of the human condition. Levi-Strauss claims the analogy between myth and bricolage. Bricolage is the working process of a kind of handyman who uses only a limited repertoire of tools and materials at hand to construct his project. Mythical thought is a kind of intellectual 'bricolage' which expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous and limited repertoire. How does myth think? Myth thinks by providing "a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction" (Levi-Strauss, 1963). Since this is an impossible achievement, myth "grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted. Its growth is a continuous process, whereas its structure remains discontinuous." In order to understand the meaning of myth, we have to analyze its structure first. Mythemes constitute the structure of myth through different opposite dyads. Here we can try to understand Lennon's myth by analyzing it according to three pairs of mythemes.
Born while bombs were falling, Lennon worked and sang for peace all his life. In the end, he was murdered by five shots from a .38 revolver.
John never lost the pain of the loss of both his parents. All his life he drew people together and to himself. He sang of love, telling us it is all we need. Ironically, the love of his life, Yoko Ono, was seen as the cause of the breakup of the Beatles.
John used his own pain to make music that spoke deeply to others. He contributed to a culture of youth, speaking out against social violence. His premature death gave rise to a powerful Lennon mythology which persists and grows in cyberspace. Yet the rupture of the Beattles has never been healed.
These mythemes cannot be limited to telling us about Lennon. More importantly, these mythemes represent how American culture "thinks about" itself by these opposite dyads. Appealing to the method of structural analysis does not mean to reduce Western culture into a set of exhaustive elements. These mythemes are like the grammars of our culture. We speak our self-understanding and image our possibility within them.