PARTISAN REVIEW
463
revealing situations which neither common sense nor science could
even perceive. Metaphor revealed a kind of truth which was beyond
the bounds of ordinary language and experience. Consequently, the
language of poetry was, as Herbert Read never tired of arguing,
essentially different from both ordinary language and prose. Prose
was for explanation, for delineation, for didactic purposes, while
metaphorical poetry was the language of unified truth. In Ransom's
language, prose gave us the world's skeleton, poetry the world's body.
This rough sketch of modernist theory is less than complete,
but it defines the aspects of modernism rejected by our contem–
poraries. By turning now to the theoretical statements of English
Iris Murdoch, French Alain Robbe-Grillet and American John
Barth and Thomas Pynchon, the nature of that rejection can be
made specific. Since my
aim
is
the definition of theoretical differ–
rnces between moiierns and contemporaries, I
will
treat only the
essays of Murdoch and Robbe-Grillet and only the ideological fea–
tures of Barth's
The End of the Road
and Pynchon's
V.
Iris Murdoch's objections to dramatic myth and unifying meta–
phor are as familiar as Robbe-Grillet's. Both attack specifically, as
does John Barth, the existential notion of myth and the totalitarian
implications of such myth as
it
effects human choice-making. Mur–
doch in "The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited" reviews the
philosophy of
art
and ethics from Kant through Hegel and Kierke–
gaard to Sartre and Wittgenstein, and finds that all present an image
of man as an individual alone in the universe making choices against
an apocalyptic background. This man has no confidence in either
reason or his subjective life, yet he is forced to choose between peo–
ple, ideologies and courses of action that demand total commitment.
To this man the only thing that matters is his own consciousness;
the world, its objects and people have no reality as separate, con–
tingent beings, but exist only as symbols in his internal drama.
Though Robbe-Grillet does not trace the philosophic develop–
ment of the process that leads to this kind of man, he makes the same
point. In the existential fictions of Sartre and Camus the world of
nature, of objects, of other people was always appropriated to the
subjectivity of the hero and the author. The writers of the past did
not accept the difference and distance between the subject and the
Other, so they continually tried through metaphor to overcome dis-
