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PARTISAN REVIEW
and work, production and consumption, will fall to the lot of differ–
ent individuals.")
It is not unimaginable that in the future the paradox of progress
will be resolved and acting and thinking reintegrated. We can be cer–
tain, however, that a conquest so consummate will take place not
within our civilization but beyond it, on the further shore of historical
necessity, when man, at long last reconciling nature and culture within
himself, will no longer be compelled to purchase every gain in freedom
with the loss of wholeness and integrity. Admittedly that too is prob–
ably a dream, but it is at least a possible dream and so long as civil–
ization lasts perhaps an indefeasible one. The fulfilment it promises
is the hope of history-and its redemption. And inconceivable as that
fulfilment may seem to us at present, it will be brought about through
the real processes of history or not at all-never through the magic
potion of myth.
I said above that the craze for myth is the fear of history.
It
is
feared because modern life is above all an historical life producing
changes with vertiginous speed, changes difficult to understand and
even more difficult to control. And to some people it appears as
though the past, all of it together with its gods and sacred books, were
being ground to pieces in the powerhouse of change, senselessly used
up as so much raw material in the fabrication of an unthinkable fu–
ture. One way certain intellectuals have found of coping with their
fear is to deny historical time and induce in themselves through
aesthetic and ideological means a sensation of mythic time-the eternal
past of ritual. The advantage of mythic time is that it is without
definite articulation, confounding past, present, and future in an un–
differentiated unity, as against historical time which is unrepeatable
and of an ineluctable progression. The historical event is that which
occurs once only, unlike the timeless event of myth that, recurring
again and again, is endlessly present.
The turn from history toward myth is to be observed in some of
the important creative works of this period, as Joseph Frank has
shown in his remarkable essay "Spatial Form in Modern Literature."
He quotes Allen Tate as saying that Ezra Pound's
Cantos
in their
"powerful juxtapositions of the ancient, the Renaissance, and the
modern worlds reduce all three elements to an unhistorical miscellany,
