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but also that practically nobody now does. It is a fiction, a fiction
cousin to a myth which had its effect in more practical politics. In
extenuation it might be said that they felt, as Sartre felt later, that in
a choice between Terror and Slavery one chooses Terror, "not for its
own sake, but because, in this era of flux, it upholds the exigencies
proper to the aesthetics of Art."
The fictions of modernist literature were revolutionary, new,
though affirming a relation of complementarity with the past. These
fictions were, I think it is clear, related to others, which helped to
shape the disastrous history of our time. Fictions, notably the fiction
of apocalypse, turn easily into myths; people will live by that which
was designed only to know by. Lawrence would be the writer to dis–
cuss here, if there were space; apocalypse works in
Woman in Love,
and perhaps even in
Lady Chatterley's Lover,
but not in
Apocalypse,
which is failed myth. It is hard to restore the fictive status of what has
become mythical; that, I take it, is what Mr. Saul Bellow is talking
about in
his
assaults on wastelandism, the cant of alienation. In
speaking of the great men of early modernism we have to make very
subtle distinctions between the work itself, in which the fictions are
properly employed, and
obiter dicta
in which they are not, being either
myths or dangerous pragmatic assertions. When the fictions are thus
transformed there is not only danger but a leak, as it were, of reality;
and what we feel about all these men at times is perhaps that they
retreated into some paradigm, into a timeless and unreal vacuum
from which all reality had been pumped. Joyce, who was a realist,
was admired by Eliot because he modernized myth, and attacked by
Lewis because he concerned himself with mess, the disorders of com–
mon perception. But
Ulysses
alone of these great works studies and
develops the tension between paradigm and reality, asserts the resist–
ance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against
plot. Joyce chooses a Day; it is a crisis ironically treated. The day is
full of randomness. There are coincidences, meetings that have point,
and coincidences which do not. We might ask whether one of the
merits of the book is not its
lack
of mythologizing; compare Joyce
on coincidence with the Jungians and their solemn concord-myth, the
Principle of Synchronicity. From Joyce you cannot even extract a
myth of Negative Concord; he shows us fiction fitting where
it
