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RICHARD WASSON
versal unconscious, the voice of Everybody as it went through the
cycle of
all
human days and nights. Stephen is Telemachus and
Bloom, Ulysses, and though the literary mode and genre of such
stories has changed, the central human experience has not. History
repeats on both the personal and cosmic levels.
Myth, then, in modern theory works two ways. On one level
it provides "plot" structures. On another it becomes a mode of
per–
ception, even of vision, which provides the unstable subjective
self
with a world order that transcends individuality. Though the myths
of Eliot,
J
oyee and Yeats are different, each functions to get the
writer beyond himself, by turning history into a drama which
is
incorporated into the self. Myth expands consciousness allowing
it
to include the drama of the world. In this sense myth is a perceptual
device for including the other within the self; but for the proce$
to work the individual personality must discipline itself by playing
roles, by becoming other than self.
This dramatic mythologizing of self and history was obviously
antirational and involved new notions of the nature and role of
metaphor. According to the modernist consensus, the world could
not be interpreted from the empirical and rationalist bias of naive
realism which denied the validity of the dramatic and mythic. For
Eliot and his critical followers, metaphor was modeled on the In–
carnation, on the notion of the presence of the eternal man in the
concrete object and the present moment. Similarly Yeats saw meta–
phor as a way of getting at the spiritual world of "moods" and
"essences." To most moderns, the world was a vast buzzing con–
fusion, an array of disconnected particulars, "an extraneous object,
full of other extraneous objects" (as Wallace Stevens put it), and
only the poetic imagination using metaphor could supply the world
with order and meaning. For example, both Cleanth Brooks and
I.
A. Richards, for
all
their disagreements, saw metaphor as a way
of reconciling opposites. Experience was full of paradoxes and con–
tingencies which the great poet ordered through metaphor. In most
versions of these theories, metaphor created a truth different from
that of rational and empirical methodology and language.
As
Hart
Crane wrote to Harriet Monroe, " the
rationale
of metaphor belongs
to another order of experience than science." This rationale was, in
R. P. Blackmur's phrase, a kind of "reason in madness," a way of
