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and the good." The result is: "It (poetry) creates anew the universe."
Hence it was not the business of the literary imagination, or any kind
of imagination, to extract meaning from the universe but rather to
endow the world with meaning. Even the correlation between an
increase of disorder and an increase in the use of the imagination, more
typical for our time than for Shelley's, was seen and accurately stated by
Shelley: "The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at
periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle,
the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of
the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature."
Such propositions sound familiar indeed and the strategies de–
duced from them are those of many recent novelists. It has again come
to this: if world and self have no definable contours, no richness of
meaning in the context of the given, then unity and meaning must be
created and superimposed on an indifferent world and an undecided
self. This procedure is perfectly legitimate, John Barth claims in
Chimera,
because " ...Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of
fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the
world."
However, no full equation is possible between the ideology of our
contemporary mythotherapists and Shelley's philosophy of the imagi–
nation. Shelley's dichotomy of reason and imagination, going back to
Kant's famous distinction between "Verstand" and "Vernunft," saw
the imagination as the higher of the two faculties because it organized,
synthesized and thus unified the data of experience. For the contempo–
rary authors and their characters it is less a question of synthesizing the
given elements of experience than of transcending experience alto–
gether, of passing on into realms beyond it. Though many of them
seem to strive desperately for verisimilitude in their works, they
actually make up new forms of experience after the old ones have failed
and disappointed them. The awareness of this function intensifies at
the same time a disillusionment which followed the romantic theory of
the imagination. A great deal of postromantic disillusion stems from
the recognition that the imagination, if seen as the faculty of synthesis,
might as well be seen as its source and author. And if it is the source
of synthesis and unity in the world, what is the basis of its claims to
truth?
Our contemporary champions of fantasy, fable, myth-and all this
means the creative and synthesizing powers of the imagination in
action-are more aware than the romantics of the shakiness of their
constructs or, more precisely, make their readers aware of it. Hence the
