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important, even essential ways of understanding reality; like Murdoch
he opposes the tendency of metaphor and myth to imply transcen–
dental or complete or closed or subjective systems of reality. For
all their national and philosophic differences, then - Murdoch rooted
in British empirical liberalism tinged with romanticism and Robbe–
Grillet
in
phenomenology, existentialism and structuralism - both
writers believe that fiction must avoid total metaphoric and mythic
constructions, the techniques of mirroring and doubling, the values
of ambiguity and paradox. Both believe that prose is a viable instru–
ment of the imagination, though their conception of the proper
language
of
prose is very different indeed. Both strive, by different
techniques and structures to create a literature which describes con–
tingency, otherness, the distance and difference between self and the
other, a literature which is rigorously aware of its limitations.
Though John Barth and Thomas Pynchon have produced no
body of theoretical writing comparable to Murdoch or Robbe-Gril–
let's, their work makes remarkably similar points. Barth's
The End
of the Road
is the end of the road for myth and metaphor as the
moderns understood it. The book is an ideological farce and the
most farcical of ideologies
is
Mythotherapy, the doctrine propounded
by that "superpragmatist," the unnamed doctor. Mythotherapy is
Barth's version of the complex bundle of ideologies which Murdoch
attributes to Totalitarian Man and which Robbe-Grillet attributes
to existentialism. In the Progress and Advice Room of his Remobili–
zation Farm, the doctor, an existentialist with American energy, ex–
plains the most powerful of his "string of implausible therapies." He
begins with the modern commonplace that existence preceeds
es–
sence and proceeds to spin out, like Totalitarian Man, the theory
that life is a drama in which we are the heroes of our own stories
about ourselves.
If
we are to be successful, the doctor says - ap–
parently having read Yeats as well as Sartre - we must learn to as–
sign ourselves different roles, to wear different masks and to assign
other people roles in our drama. "This kind of role-assigning is myth–
making and when it
is
done consciously or unconsciously . . . it be–
comes Mythotherapy." Like all modern metaphor creators and myth–
makers, he urges
his
patient Horner to assign others a role in the
mythic drama of his own life, thus overcoming the sense of otherness
and contingency which separates him from the world.
