466
JOHN GOODE
fully the agony of individuation in Lawrence's work. At his best, in the
earlier essays on Virginia Woolf (which is a generous and patient
demolition) and on Mann, he demonstrates a profound awareness of
the most important issues in "the modern tradition" as a whole, and
en route
not only foreshadows the approach to fiction as a poetic struc–
ture but the critique of that approach made in recent years by liberal
individualists. Only the essays on Scott Fitzgerald seem to me totally
unrewarding (one of them, with depressing ominousness, is called "The
Authority of Failure"), and this is clearly because he was too close to
Fitzgerald in time and place to achieve a clear perspective. In general
what emerges from this book is an engagement with modern literature,
radically questioning its subjectivity and carefully trying to analyze
its predicament in terms of larger cultural patterns, which will take its
place with
Axel's Castle
and
New Bearings in English Poetry
as a
critique of modernism so close to its impact that it is part of the
movement itself.
The general concern to emerge is much more problematic. Troy
came to attach increasing importance to myth, not only as a pattern
present in all literature but as an instrument of man's salvation.
It
is a
conceptual framework which provides a double problem: in the first
place it tends to become reductionist (though Troy
is
much more tactful
than later myth critics), and in the second it tends to turn away from
literature towards moral discourse. These are questions which demand
lengthy consideration. For the time being it is perhaps sufficient to sug–
gest that Troy found the essay the most viable critical form because he
understood the need to maintain the flexibility of his conceptual frame–
work - a flexibility that a genuinely unified book might have under–
mined: the price to be paid for the single vision was too high. There
might have been a lesson here for Winters: like Troy he had a fine
mind, but unlike him, his mind was less fully engaged with literature
than committed to his .identity. Engagement rather than certitude is
Troy's first quality, and though it may not have been his "bliss",
its
survival
is
an urgent necessity.
John Goode
