FRANK KERMODE
which, if we were willing to consider them openly, might call for some
effort tvwards complementarity. But they lie, as a rule, too deep. We
continue to assume, as people always have done, that there is a
tolerable degree of conformity between the disconfirmed apocalypse
and a respectably modern view of reality and the powers of the
mind.
In
short, we retain our fictions of epoch, of decadence and
renovation, and satisfy in various ways our clerkly skepticism about
these and similar fictions.
There is one other element of the apocalyptic tradition to be
considered, namely transition. One of the assumptions prevalent in
sophisticated apocalyptism was Yeats's "antithetical multiform influx"
-the forms assumed by the inrushing gyre as the old one reaches its
term. The dialectic of Yeats's gyres is simple enough in essence; they
are a figure for the coexistence of the past and future at the time of
transition. The old narrows to its apex, the new broadens towards its
base, and the old and new interpenetrate. Where apex and base come
together you have an age of very rapid transition. Actually, on Yeats's
view of the historical cycle, there were transient moments of perfec–
tion, or what he called Unity of Being; but there was no way of
making these permanent, and his philosophy of history is throughout
transitional.
In
this he is not, of course, original; but his emphasis on
the transitional character of our own preapocalyptic moment, in
contrast with those exquisite points of time when life was like the
water brimming beautifully but unstably over the rim of a fountain,
seems, for all the privacy of the expression, characteristically modern.
It
is commonplace that our times do in fact suffer a more rapid
rate of change technologically, and consequently in the increase of
social mobility, than any before us. There is nothing fictive about that,
and its implications are clear in our own day-to-day lives. What
is
interesting, though, is the way in which this knowledge is related to
apocalypse, so that a mere celebratory figure for social mobility, like
On the Road,
acquires apocalyptic overtones and establishes the lan–
guage of an elect; and the way in which writers, that is to say clerks,
are willing to go along, arguing that the rate of change implies revolu–
tion or schism, and that this is a perpetual requirement; that the
stage of transition, like the whole of time in an earlier revolution, has
become
endless.