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RICHARD WASSON
ness of individuals, the unity of self, the values of prose, the acci–
dental nature of events, the partial and artificial nature of literary
forms. Robbe-Grillet and Murdoch, Barth and Pynchon share the
feeling that the modernist consensus over the nature of myth and
metaphor and the centrality of both to literature led to false and
disastrous views of the world, to exaggerated claims for poetry and
to erroneous systems of value judgement. They desire to get back
to particulars, to restore literary language to its proper role which
for them means revealing "the raggedness, the incompleteness of it
all." They want a literature finally which accurately presents man's
place in a world of contingency, a world in which man
is
free
to
cope spontaneously with experience.
The critique of modernism that emerges from these writers raises
a number of historical and theoretical issues for literary critics. We
will want to evaluate the validity of the models contemporaries make
of modern literature, to examine the implications of their historical
metaphor which implies that the moderns sought an Apollonian
unity where contemporaries cautiously celebrate Dionysian contin–
gency. Anyone who knows the moderns (or for that matter the Ro–
mantics and Victorians) knows that the distrust of metaphor and
the desire for a language of immediate experience is hardly new. It
would not be difficult to make a case that the work of these writers
really constitutes another manifestation of the modernist rejection
of romantic notions of personality and history.
Critics will also want to understand, in addition to the relation–
ship between the contemporaries and the moderns, the connections
between these writers and other figures and movements on the con–
temporary scene. The emphasis on the particular and the concrete
surely links these writers with the radical immanentism of the
God–
is-Dead theologians. Then too, the new literature's concern with free–
dom, with the contingent and accidental, with the mysteriousness of
other persons, would imply a politics very different from the con-
servative aestheticism of the moderns. Where moderns raged for
Of-
der, our contemporaries cope with chaos. No doubt similarities exist
(
between the
Weltanschauung
of these writers and the new politics,
which works much less with ideologies and much more with the co-
t
operation of individuals confronting a monolithic power structure
decked out with a grotesque myth of good and evil, East and West.
