The Modern Construction of Myth

6 The Modernist Contribution to the Construction of Myth

[ 6 ] The Modernist Contribution to the Construction of Myth This chapter is an examination of the important mediating role of modernist literary art in the twentieth-century construction of “myth.” The artists’ contribution is not so much innovation in theory as it is the rich embodiment of a set of assumptions, the success of which inspires a later revival of theorizing. The arts of the early century famously express the growing agreement, examined in the two previous chapters, about the structural rapport of the modern mind with the “primitive.” This response is far from confined to literary expression. One need only recall instances like the evocation by Stravinsky and Diaghilev in The Rite of Spring of an archaic moment in the oldest of the arts, or of Gauguin’s attempts to recuperate among Breton peasants and Marquesas Islanders the visual correlatives of a sense of the sacred lost to modernity.1 My restriction to the discussion of literary manifestations is purely practical, as is its further limitation to the handful of writers in English most inescapable in discussions of this topic. The outburst of literary experimentation generally labeled “modernist,” whose recourse to “myth” is one of its best known features, was also an international movement; much of the kind of case made here with reference principally to W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and James Joyce could be made by a study of Mann, Kafka, Hesse, and Broch, or of Cavafy, Kazantzakis, and Seferis. This modernist literary contribution to “myth” stands in complicated relation to its romantic or transcendentalist predecessor. We’ve seen that by the 1880s The Modernist Contribution to the Construction of Myth 135 transcendentalist myth has become ossified and sentimentalized. While certain prescient artists (like George Eliot in Daniel Deronda) express an uneasy sense that myth may be a radical clue to “the buried life,” they lack the conceptual context that would encourage them to pursue such suspicions. Among the generation of high modernists, however, the literary construction of “myth” rebounds with an intensity stimulated by the new matrix of affective theory in anthropology and depth psychology. The first three of our four modernist examples—Yeats, Eliot, and Lawrence—agree in their conviction that the distance can be annihilated, that in myth we experience the racial past immediately. In reply to the melancholy historicism of their Victorian predecessors, they develop concrete phenomenological accounts of transactions that occur in a special space, comparable to Bergson’s “intensive manifold,” outside of clock-time and history. These writers espouse implicitly the Virgilian line that Freud adopts explicitly as the epigraph of The Interpretation of Dreams, “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” (“If I cannot soften the high gods, I will stir up the depths of hell”). If connections with the past and with timeless truth are interdicted from above, they can be recuperated from below. These writers often present themselves as in revolt against nineteenthcentury romanticism and their success in challenging the canons of “realism,” the brilliance of their innovations in technique, and even their embrace of the new anthropology and psychology, appear to ratify their assertions of a radical break. In the matter of myth, however, as in much else, their manifest differences from their predecessors mask latent continuities. The modernists’ reassertions of transcendentalist assumptions about myth are particularly evident at precisely those points where they have to misunderstand the new psychology or anthropology in order to make it work for them. Their persistent misconstrual of The Golden Bough, for example, is a recurrent motif in the first part of this chapter. They ignore its Whiggish view of mankind’s evolution from magic and religion into the light of science; they read it as a demonstration of the permanent and intimate structural relation between the “savage” mind and the civilized. The ambiguities in Frazer’s text that permit this reading could scarcely account by themselves for such consistent indifference to the author’s intentions. The pervasive misreading is an effect of the way that the homogenizing of geographical and historical differences in Frazer’s “comparative method” plays into the inherited assumption that myth communicates permanent truth. In his critique of the MoMA’s “Primitivism in Modern Art” exhibition of 1984, James Clifford identifies as the principal assumption shared by the organizers of the show and the modernist artiststhemselves“the capacity of art to transcend its cultural and historical context” (Clifford 1988, 195). This persuasion of the universalizing power of art smoothes the way in turn for...