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Iron John: A Book About Men
by Robert Bly
Vintage Books, 1992 (Originally published by Addison-Wesley, 1990)

A Guest Review by Donald R. Walker

I will start by saying this is a flawed book. As in his poetry, Mr. Bly frequently loses track of this thoughts and gets distracted along the way. By my own definition, Bly is a very modern artist--his work requires specific biographical information about him to be completely comprehended, it doesn't stand well on its own. Throughout Iron John there is more than a little hankering after "the noble savage" and, above all else, Bly's prose tends toward the thick.

This is not a "sit down and read it through" book. I tried to read it when it first came out and gave up after a couple chapters. I attempted Iron John a second (and successful) time after happening upon an article that told me that Mr. Bly, like myself, was the son of an alcoholic father. At this time I was struggling with my feelings about my father and only just coming to know the depth of my anger towards him, so I thought I would give the book another chance.

There are two, and seemingly contradictory, theses to Iron John. First, that we have relegated "fatherhood" to a sort of comic status that is incapable of preparing boys for the transition to manhood and that this comic role is an insufficient model to help boys separate from their mothers when the time is right to begin their journey to manhood. The second is that there is a lack of transformation ritual in our society to guide boys through the perilous journey of adolescence to full manhood. I do find myself at issue with these theses.

First, I believe the notion of the "TV Daddy in the form of the well-meaning boob like Ozzie" to be one of those modern myths, like the myth of the "deadbeat dad" that has been repeated so often it has assumed the status of fact. I am certain that there are any number of goofball fathers out there who fit this stereotype, but I question whether they are a majority or simply a highly visible minority. I am very serious about being a father to my six-year-old son. Most men who are fathers whom I know personally are also serious about their roles. Many of those men, like myself, have rejected the societal "norms" of distance of emotion, lack of personal involvement in the day-to-day affairs of their children (sons), and slavish devotion to career. We are not perfect, but neither are we Mr. Bly's father.

Mr. Bly's second thesis, that there is a lack of transformation ritual in our society is nonsense. There are no end of rituals, taken very seriously by our society, and no end of elders ready to guide boys through those rituals. A more pertinent question, one that is raised from time to time, obliquely in this book and never answered, is what kind of man do these rituals and elders turn boys into and is that kind of man desirable? In the end, however, the book resolves neither of these issues and that lack of resolution does not detract from the book's value.

As a mythical roadmap to illustrate his views of the journey to manhood, Robert Bly used one of the "marchen" of the Brothers Grimm, "Iron John" or "Iron Hans" as it is called in some translations. I won't repeat the entire story here, it is told in full in the book and is also found in numerous collections. However, in brief, the hero, a young prince, releases a Wild Man captured by his father's retainers, who then spirits the boy--who fears punishment for releasing the Wild Man, away with him when he returns to the woods. From this point the boy undergoes a series of adventures and misadventures that ultimately conclude with the boy growing to manhood marrying a princess.

In several detailed chapters Mr. Bly takes every character and event in this tale and imbues them with his own personal interpretation of their symbolic character and how it relates to his original theses. This is the most difficult part of the book because as his theses are somewhat contradictory, so are his interpretations. Here Mr. Bly tends to lose himself in his own words. Here the reader will most likely find himself lost in a kind of magic forest of ideas without a very good roadmap and sometimes none at all. This is the most flawed part of the book„and the most valuable.

One of the things we have lost in our material age is an ability to think symbolically; to step outside of the immediacy of our problems and issues and view them and manipulate them abstractly. In medieval society, for example, it was believed widely that everything in nature was a symbol revealing to those who would see, the nature of God and of the spiritual world to come. The stamens of the lily represented the nails that pierced Christ's hands and feet, the leaves of a clover were the trinity, and so forth. So, in fairy tales or "marchen" human problems become symbols. Bruno Bettelheim, in his landmark "The Uses of Enchantment," observed that it is not an accident that the most striking figure of terror in fairy tales is the giant. And Robert Bly takes the reader of "Iron John" through a detailed instruction of how to apply the symbols of the tales to the problems of everyday life, and through the manipulation of the symbols, come to see that the problems are not insuperable.

You do not need to agree with Mr. Bly's personal interpretations of the symbols. They are his because of who he is. But it is hard to find fault with his use of the interpretations. That is where the value of this book lies. Once you start thinking symbolically, you will find it hard to stop. You will start to see things in very different ways than before„possibilities will emerge where before were only obstacles. Just as reading the difficult middle part of this book requires an act of will, so seeing our problems and learning to deal with them rather than allowing them to deal with us also requires an act of will„and a kind of second sight. Iron John is a primer on gaining that second sight.

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