THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE
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but a very limited analogical sense. It is best understood, to my mind,
as the aesthetic means devised for the projection of a non-historical
or even anti-historical view of history. The most one can say of this
form is that it reflects a mythic bias. But this bias is by no means in–
dependent of historicism, of which it is .a kind of reactionary distor–
tion or petrifaction.
There is a good deal of evidence supporting this conception of
"spatial form." Thus in his book,
The Protestant Era,
Paul Tillich
lists the main premises of the non-historical interpretation of history,
and we find that one such premise is that "space is predominant
against time; time is considered to be circular or repeating itself in–
finitely." What is the inner meaning of this spatializing of time?
From Tillich's philosophical standpoint it means that time is being
detached from history and yielded back to nature. In other words,
the contradiction between history and nature is resolved in favor of
the latter. Tillich defines time, in terms reminiscent of Schelling and
Bergson, as the dimension of the dynamic, creative, and qualitative,
whereas space he defines as the static and quantitative.
If
this con–
trast is valid, then one can only conclude that the attempt to re–
spatialize time implies a defeatist attitude toward history, an attitude
that in the long run makes for cultural regression.
Further premises of the non-historical interpretation of history
are that "salvation is the salvation of individuals from time and his–
tory, not the salvation of .a community through time and history,"
and that history is to be understood as "a process of deterioration,
leading to the inescapable self-destruction of a world era." It is not
difficult to recognize here some of the components of "mythicism."
As an ideology "mythicism" is of course not to be equated at all
points with its artistic practice. One must distinguish between the
cultism of myth, which is primarily an ideological manifestation, and
the literary works in which myth is made use of in one way or another.
In Joyce the ideology is hardly perceptible, but you will find it in
Eliot and a somewhat secularized version of it in Pound. Some critics
write about Thomas Mann as if he too were enlisted in the service
of myth. This is a mistake, I think.
Joseph and His Brothers
is not so
much a mythic novel as .a novel on mythic themes. In this narrative
it is the characters, not at all the author, who confound past and
present in their experience of that "pure time" which transcends
