238
PARTISAN REVIEW
tion. It was not: in this or that respect I resemble Ulysses.
It
was simple:
I
am
Ulysses. Thus identification became reincarnation or reenactment
of the mythological past in the flesh. As opposed to this strategy, the
modernist approach drew more on a dialectic between identification
and difference and played on the inherent possibilities of irony and
distance. In short, while the Moderns might compare themselves to
mythological figures of almost any given origin, they also stressed that
they were not these figures. Similarly, the modernist use of myth as a
provider of identities and the attempts of some of today's novelists
towards the same end are different. I would like to sketch a few of the
recent examples of this strategy so that the difference can come into
focus.
Jacob Horner's stabs at mythotherapy clearly end in disaster. The
gory mess at the end of his road leaves one of the participants dead
(Rennie), a second one in violent desperation (Joe), and two others
utterly uprooted and in flight from the consequences of their ingenious
schemes (the doctor and Horner himself). Everyday reality has effec–
tively repudiated Horner's attempts to turn it into a mythical drama.
The main characters of Thomas Pynchon's three novels follow a
similar pattern from hope to failure and thus further demonstrate that
home-made myth is a questionable strategy. Herbert Stencil
(V.),
Oedipa Maas
(The Crying of Lot
49) and a whole bunch of characters,
from the determinist Pointsman to the puzzled victim Slothrop, in
Gravity'S Rainbow
sort through the bits and pieces of history and their
own world in pursuit of the one structure that wi ll give coherence and
explanation to apparent chaos. Though all of them try their hand at
various speculations, hypotheses, and fictional or heuristic schemes
they are unable to catch with the net of imaginative theory their objects
of pursuit, embodied respectively in the shape-shifting V., the Tristero
conspiracy, and a wide range of elusive phenomena from the rocket to
the fact of World War II itself. Pynchon's characters thus occupy a
middle ground between those figures of contemporary fiction who
overpower reality with their imaginary inventions and those who
succumb to it. Their fictional schemes, often dubious even to them–
selves, pose urgent questions
to
a reality which time and again answers
violently or flatly in the negative. The inevitable outcome, by now
fairly familiar from Pynchon's novels, is that the questers sink into a
bog of paranoia, suspecting that all stories and projections are delu–
sions, originating from twisted states of mind.
If
Pynchon's heroes h esitate to rate fantasies higher than facts ,
hesitate to create coherence where it cannot be distilled from the debris
