PARTISAN REVIEW
469
ignores the reality of the other person, of
his
reaction to meeting
an imitator.
Barth's satiric view of Mythotherapy contains a criticism of the
language theories upon which myth depends. The language of fic–
tion is inevitably a falsification, but it must
be
a precise and ac–
curately stated falsification, ironically aware of itself. The writer
tries "to tum experience into speech - that is to classify, to cate–
gorize, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it"; such trans–
formation is "always a betrayal of experience, a falsification of it;
but only
SO
betrayed can it be dealt with at all." While the writer
must be involved in myth since he has to translate experience into
a "plot," his aim is to create "precise falsification," "adroit careful
myth-making." Such myth-making differs from mythotherapy inas–
much as it seeks metaphors that reveal rather than overcome the
dichotomies of contingent reality; it trims its assertions; it aims at
the precise rather than the total, the conceptual and syntactical
rather than the metaphorical; by honing his "mythoplastic razor"
the writer can "have at reality."
The point is perhaps better made in a brilliant passage which at
once diagnoses the new critics and the linguistic analysts. Both are
"connoisseurs of paradox." "The connoisseur ... requires of a para–
dox, if it is to elicit from him that faint smile which marks him for
what he is, that it
be
more than a simple ambiguity resulting from
the vagueness of certain terms in the language; it should, ideally,
be a really arresting contradiction of concepts whose actual compati–
bility becomes perceptible only upon subtle reflection." One could
not find a better one-sentence parodic-summary of Cleanth Brooks's
notion of paradox, nor his thorough and patient efforts to find an
overriding unity which reconciles oppositions. For Brooks a good
poem has a "unifying attitude ... which really unifies, not by ignor–
ing but by taking into account the complexities and apparent con–
tradictions of the situation concerned." Such a poem is significant
because of "its character as drama," says Brooks in a statement
characteristic of Murdoch's Totalitarian Man. Barth links such con–
noisseurship with the analytical belief that the source of most para–
dox is in the language. On the contrary, paradoxes are not only in
the nature of language but in life itself; in the contradictory things
people feel, say and do. Paradoxes arise not so much because of
