PARTISAN REVIEW
with individual differences the general state of mind-not as a duty,
but because he cannot help participating in it." Eliot is plainly a
more "sincere" poet than Pound, and he is also a religious man;
and it is necessary to uphold the distinction between religion and
myth. His religiousness, which has temperamental as well as deep so–
cial roots, hardly disallows the cultivation of historical awareness.
This
may well explain why he has always been able to curb his "myth–
icism," so that it is but one of the several tendencies in his work
rather than its motive-power. As a literary critic he is seldom inclined
to hunt for mythological patterns, whose task it seems to be to reduce
the history of literature to sameness and static juxtaposition; more
typically he searches for those alterations of sensibility that are
his–
torically illuminating and productive of significant change.
It
is Pound who in his later phase is wholly in the throes of
"mythicism." But, far from being a reincarnation of an ancient
im–
aginative mode, it is really but another sample of modern ideology,
applied to poetry with frenetic zeal in an effort to compensate for
lo~
of coherence. In the
Cantos
time neither stands still as in myth nor
moves as in history; it is merely suspended.
As
for Joyce's
Ulysses,
it seems to me that the mythological parallels it abounds in provide
little more than the scaffolding for the structure of the novel; and
only critics fascinated by exegesis would mistake it for the structure
itself. Those parallels do not really enter substantively into the pre–
sentation of the characters. The manner in which Bloom is identified
with Odysseus and Stephen with Telemachus is more like a mythic
jest or conceit, as it were, than a true identification. To be sure, it
reflects the somewhat scholastic humor of the author; but its principal
function is that of helping him organize his material. In that sense
it has more to do with the making of the novel than with the reading
of it-for as readers we find both Stephen and Bloom convincing
because they are firmly grounded in the historical actualities of Joyce's
city, his country, and Europe as a whole. It is in
Finnegans Wake,
far
more than in
Ulysses,
that the mythic bias is in ascendant, the histor–
ical element recedes, and the language itself is converted into a medi–
um of myth.
Finnegans Wake
is the most complete example of "spatial form"
in modern literature. Joseph Frank's definition of that form is ex–
tremely plausible, yet I cannot agree that it is a mythic form in any
