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RICHARD WASSON
something in the language, but from inability of language to point
to the precise and particular human feeling. "Things can be signi–
fied by common nouns only
if
one ignores the differences between
individual things and feelings." While sharing with Robbe-Grillet
a sense of the necessity of precision, of the description of differences,
Barth thinks that language can never precisely define these differ–
ences. Just as the writer cannot avoid making plots and myths
if
he
is to tell his story, so he cannot avoid assigning names to feelings and
attitudes. "Assigning names to things is like assigning roles to people";
nevertheless a writer of fiction must assign roles, he must name things:
"it
is a necessary distortion
if
one would get on with the plot...."
But where the connoisseur of paradox would value the myth-making
by the extent of its dramatic ambiguity, Barth, with Murdoch and
Robbe-Grillet, sees no innate value in deliberately building up a
set of ambiguities to be reconciled by a unifying metaphor and myth;
iike Murdoch, he believes that such methods lead only to ethical and
artistic irresponsibility. Homer finally learns that he must
carry
with
him the picture of the bound, bloody and dead Rennie; no meta–
phor, no cosmic dramatic myth can diminish the ugly and brutal
fact of her death and his responsibility for it. There is only "the rag–
gedness . . . the incompleteness of it all."
Yet the honed mythoplastic razors of art, the precise falsifica–
tion, the adroit and careful myth-making, the syntax, the grammar,
the concepts, the categories of art, the plot, the role assignment of
character provides an antidote to mythotherapy. Unlike Mythothera–
py, unlike metaphor-building, such an art is aware of its artificiality,
its incompleteness, its partial dumbness before reality. Mythotherapy
tries to force the whole world into the self and the self into the
world, to make everything in the world subordinate to the drama
of the self; mythoplastic art turns ironically on itself, works to
recognize the separate and mysterious difference between self and
other, artifice and reality. Barth's satiric attack on Mythotherapy
and his cautious hope for a mythoplastic art obviously links him with
Murdoch and Robbe-Grillet.
Pynchon shares in the contemporary critique of modernism but
it is difficult to abstract a theory from his loose and shaggy novel.
He works through an ironic thematics, an ironic juxtaposition of
fools and foolish theories, a technique which makes it difficult to
