Author: Robert Bly
Reviewed by WELD Intern Peter Bierman
Iron John is a book about the process of boys becoming men. Author Robert Bly bemoans the fact that our culture, along with many other modern cultures, has lost its way in providing guidelines and mileposts for this process. Ever since the Industrial Revolution, when men's work started taking them out of the home, boys lost the opportunity to learn at their father's knees and partake in the masculine world from an early age. That world is now separate, often perceived as irrelevant, and by the time men arrive home in the evening they often lack the time and energy to interact in a positive way with their sons.
Bly asserts that we no longer know what it means to be a man in the most positive sense of that word. Masculinity has a deep, nurturing, and spiritual inner dimension, but our culture often defines it as shallow, aggressive, and imbued with the most negative aspects of machismo. Modern media, such as TV and movies, often portray men as angry and out of control or as incompetent, inconsequential buffoons.
How do boys seeking to become men find their way out of this dilemma? Bly discusses rituals and initiation rites of passage that were common in ancient civilizations and continue today in primitive cultures throughout the world. In these pre-modern cultures, older men serve as mentors and as a group guide boys in the transition to manhood. In post-industrial civilizations, where many older men themselves have not experienced the guidance to assist them in receiving the gift of knowledge of what it means to be a man, this connection has been lost along with the mentoring capacity of an older generation of wise men. How can they give to boys and young men the tools of passage that they have not received themselves?
Bly is a poet and he describes what is needed metaphorically in the language of poetry and the stories of ancient mythology. The basic framework of his book is the story of "Iron John", from a tale preserved by the Brothers Grimm. Iron John, who he more frequently refers to as the "Wild Man", is a mentor and guide to a young boy making the transition from boyhood to manhood. The stages in the Iron John story include separation from the feminine world of his mother, reconnection with the forces of the natural world and the earth, a descent into a state of grief, woundedness, and ashes, development of the inner warrior to provide strength for his spiritual journey, and ultimately movement into a mature, whole, and spiritual emotional state where wounds have been healed and the achievement of a kingly state, or manhood, is accomplished.
The retelling of the Iron John story is actually relatively short, but Bly separates the myth into its individual stages which he elaborates on by drawing upon similar ancient stories and poetic insights by many authors. This makes the overall book very rich and colorful, but also very dense and at times somewhat inaccessible. The truths and underlying meaning of mythological stories were far from self evident to me, so I needed his translations and interpretations for them to become real. Even with this help, I often felt a distance between the revelations of what it means to travel the road from boyhood to manhood and how I could apply them in a practical manner to my life. There is a distance I could not completely overcome between metaphor and the pragmatic reality of day-to-day existence.
At least part of the solution to this problem is probably a need to view the process of growth from boy to man as an inward journey that really does need a separate language from normal day-to-day existence. The context is completely different and the inner, spiritual dimension of life requires a reorientation from my normal life perspective. This book did cause me to do a lot of thinking. And it was a refreshing change from my normal technical, problem-solving orientation and ways of thinking. It was a reminder that there is more to life than what appears right in front of me, right now.