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between the modernist use of myth, in Joyce, Yeats et a!., as a
framework for self-definition and the fictional strategies of contempo–
rary mythmakers. Three distinctions can be made. First, the wild
imaginary outbursts in the novels of Barth, Nabokov, Vonnegut,
Brautigan, Barthelme, Pynchon (and several lesser known writers such
as Ronald Sukenick, Earl Rauch, Rudolph Wurlitzer, Stanley Elkin,
Steve Katz, or Earl Rovit) usually lead to intensely private fantasies
which have no parallels or prefigurations in the past. In very few cases
do our authors use specific historical models or "public" myths like the
Moderns, namely as the subphenomenal framework or organizing
principle for their works (Joyce's
Ulysses
is the classical case). Instead,
recent myth-makers invent or let their characters invent brand new
fictions which, as a rule, are inhabited and inhabitable only by
themselves. They create the private myths of Jacob Horner, Bokonon,
Ebenezer Cooke, or Billy Pilgrim. And though "private" myth, as'
Harry Levin once noted, is rather pseudomyth, because it does not
imply a collective fantasy and because it lacks the wide recognition of
its iconography, these fictional constructs nevertheless serve one of the
age-old functions of all mythical stories. This is the function of
providing, on a fictional level, unity and structure to an otherwise
puzzling set of phenomena. In other words, what is copied in these
novels is the attitude of the traditional myth-maker and not the stuff
out of which he built his universe. (Admittedly, this makes the term
"mythical" a dangerous label, because it can now be applied to all
cases where imaginary constructs stand in contrast to, or overshadow,
those ingredients of a novel which are borrowed from a world of
assumed actuality. Yet this danger cannot be avoided, because there is
no other accepted term available for the strategies in question.)
It
is this general attitude of using the imagination and the mythic
fantasy as a weapon in the struggle with the world which brings our
contemporary mytho therapists close to the romantics. Shelley's pro–
grammatic "Defence of Poetry" left no doubt which of the two faculties
of human understanding, reason or imagination, he thought superior.
Partly in reaction
to
the neo-classical aesthetic. which had one-sidedly
favored reason over any other faculty, Shelley and the romantics
declared the supremacy of the imagination and defined poetry (or
literature) as its true expression. Epistemologically, the functions of
the imagination were understood
to
be two-fold: "by one it creates new
materials of knowledge and power and pleasure; by the other it
engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them accord–
ing
to
a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful
