THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE
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timeless and without origin." Frank analyzes
The Waste Land, Ulysses,
Nightwood
and other literary works along the same lines, establishing
that while on one level they seem to be dealing with "the clash of
historical perspectives induced by the identification of contemporary
figures and events with various historical prototypes," in practice they
make history unhistorical in that it is sensed as "a continuum in which
distinctions of past and present are obliterated . . . past and present
are seen spatially, locked in a timeless unity which, even if accentu–
ating surface differences, eliminates any feeling of historical sequence
by the very .act of juxtaposition. The objective historical imagination,
on which modern man has prided himself, and which he has cul–
tivated so carefully since the Renaissance, is transformed in those
writers into the mythical imagination for which historical time does
not exist.ll1O Frank offers no social-historical explanation of this retreat
from history; he
is
simply concerned with it as an aesthetic phenom–
enon expressing itself in "spatial form."
Perhaps for that very reason he too readily assumes that the
mythic imagination is actually operative in the writers he examines.
But the supplanting of the sense of historical by the sense of mythic
time is scarcely accomplished with such ease; the mere absence of
the one does not necessarily confirm the presence of the other. For
my part, what I perceive in Pound and Eliot are not the workings
of the mythic imagination but an aesthetic simulacrum of it, a
learned illusion of timelessness. We should not mistake historical retro–
spection, however richly allusive and organized in however "simul–
taneous" a fashion, for mythic immediacy and the pure imaginative
embodiment of a perpetual present.
In
point of fact, the polemical
irony which the poems both of Pound and Eliot generate at the ex–
pense of modern society in itself attests to a marked commitment to–
ward history. Are not these poets conducting a campaign against his–
tory precisely in the name of history, which they approach, however,
with mythic prepossessions, that is to say without either dynamism or
objectivity, responding to its archaistic refinements while condemning
its movement? The truth is that they are as involved in historicism
as most contemporary writers sensitive to the "modern situation," but
in their case the form it takes is negative. Willy-nilly they express
the age, that few would deny is historicist through and through.
ll
As
Eliot himself once wrote, if a poet is "sincere, he must express
