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{
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APOCALYPSE
361
of a shared language. The others succeed only in so far as they are
that, and since they are trying not to be they more often fail.
These distinctions made, it remains to affirm also the continuity
of apocalyptic postures. In a world otherwise seen as lacking the form
that an end implies, this may seem absurd; indeed it is called so, and
highly valued for being so. Apocalypse is a part of the modern
Absurd. This is testimony to its vitality, a vitality dependent upon its
truth to the set of our fear and desire. Acknowledged, qualified by the
skepticism of the clerks, it is-even when ironized, even when
denied-an essential element in the arts, a permanent feature of a
permanent literature of crisis.
If
it becomes myth, if its past is
forgotten, we sink quickly into myth, into stereotype. We have to
employ our knowledge of the fictive. With it we can explain what
is inessential and eccentric about early modernism, and purge the
trivial and stereotyped from the arts of our own time. Great men
deceived themselves by neglecting to do this; other men, later, have
a program against doing it. The critics should know their duty.
Part of this duty, certainly, will be to abandon ways of speak–
ing which on the one hand obscure the true nature of our fictions
-by confusing them with myths, by rendering spatial what is es–
sentially temporal-and on the other obscure our sense of reality by
suggesting that fictions represent some kind of surrender or false con–
solation. The critical issue, given the perpetual assumption of crisis, is
no less than the justification of ideas of order. They have to be
justified in terms of what survives, and also in terms of what we can
accept as valid in a world different from that out of which they come,
resembling the earlier world only in that there is biological and cul–
tural continuity of some kind. Our order, our form, is necessary; our
skepticism as to fi ctions requires that it shall not be spurious. It
IS
an issue central to the understanding of modern literary fiction.
