122 I Criticism in the twentieth century
Hardly naive in any sense, it is synthetic in both senses. The book unifies an encyclo- some of the most often quoted remarks on Modernist use of myth, he was not typically
paedic variety, not just of narrative subject-matter, but also of modes of organizing the
world as invoked in the successive techniques of its episodes. By the same token, it wears
its artificiality on its sleeve. It does not affect to be myth, but uses a mythic sign to
indicate the meaning of the artistic whole. One of the several ways in which Friedrich
Nietzsche anticipated Modernism was in his affirmation of the aesthetic, not as an
aestheticist remove, but as a category fundamental to human life. Art is the primordial
activity of man in creating the human world. Joyce kept, at least overtly, an ironic
distance from the fashionable German who had been taken up in reductive and politic-
ally regressive ways, but he frankly honoured the neglected Italian, Giambattista Vico,
who had argued in the third edition of The New Science (1744) that poetry is the
primordial form from which culture derives, and, rather than seeing this primordiality
as irrelevant to a later world, Joyce saw it as the continuing unconscious of the culture.
He realized creatively Nietzsche's insight that beneath the positivist conception of
science the human world is permanently sustained as a work of art:
We who think and feel at the same time are those who really continually fashion something that had
not been there before: the whole eternally growing world of valuations, colors, accents, perspectives,
scales, affirmations, and negations. This poem that we have invented is continually studied by the
so-called practical human beings (our actors) who learn their roles and translate everything into
flesh and actuality, into the everyday. . . . Only we have created the world that concerns man-But
precisely this knowledge we lack, and when we occasionally catch it for a fleeting moment we
always forget it again immediately; we fail to recognize our best power and underestimate ourselves,
the contemplatives, just a little. 2
Nietzsche catches the flickering doubleness whereby the world as external reality and as
human creation cannot be seen fully at the same time. The need to act in the world
competes with our sense of it as radically created. Yet our relation to the world is crucially
affected by this underlying awareness, and the conscious artifice of Ulysses creates just
such a double consciousness within the action of the novel. It invests the action with a
similarly elusive doubleness of historical reality and linguistic playfulness in which the
eternal shimmer of the language ultimately enhances the solidity of the Dublin day it
describes.
If the two novelists are most evidently in the business of world creation, Yeats and
Eliot, two poets strongly associated with myth, are similarly opposites in their relation to
it. Yeats is Nietzschean in his formation of his own life and poetic persona into an
artistically constituted myth. Unlike Nietzsche's practical men who are unaware of
themselves as actors, Yeats embraces the theatrical image with its full Nietzschean
significance. In his poem 'Lapis Lazuli', when the Shakespearian characters and actors
'do not break up their lines to weep', they represent the conscious performance of
existential roles which is how history itself is to be lived. And even when Yeats declares,
in 'The Circus Animals' Desertion', that he 'must lie down where all the ladders start I In
the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart', the performance continues in the poem itself.
Yeats is no less of a myth-maker when he denies it. By contrast, although Eliot made
Anthropology, myth, and modern criticism I 123
mythopoeic in a manner comparable to the other authors mentioned. His tum to
religious faith is not readily compatible with Modernist mythopoeia, and his comment
on Ulysses as using the mythic method is a clue to his own essentially external conception
of it. His claim that it is 'a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a
significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy that is contemporary
history' and of 'making the modern world possible for art' is ambiguous. 3 Does it
transform the futility and anarchy into something else, or exhibit it as against a template?
The latter seems to be the case, rather than the transformative impact of mythopoeia,
and the same applies to his use of Jessie Weston's interpretation of the Fisher King myth,
to which he drew attention in his 'notes' added to The Waste Land. The notional
celebration of fertility at the level of the myth is belied by a sexual revulsion felt in the
poem and not fully explicable as a representation of moral and spiritual degradation. In
Four Quartets, by contrast, although Eliot may be personally committed to Christian
belief, his creative investigation of history and temporality is closer to the spirit of
Modernist mythopoeia. Its affirmation is won out of a self-questioning scepticism. Yet
it was the Eliot of The Waste Land who was one of the most powerful creators of myth in
his generation. As his personal vision of modernity in that poem became canonical,
academic discussion of the poem repeatedly explicated its structure and imagery as a
commentary on the modern spiritual condition, without questioning its highly partial
perception. The real myth lay in the cultural judgement underlying the literary use of the
Fisher King motif. This opens a larger ambiguity in the authority of poetry and myth in
the period.
Literary anthropology
Modernist literary myth-making is most essentially an awareness of the primordial
creative activity of human beings as imaged in the creation of poetic and fictional
worlds, and including therefore the world of modernity. In so far as creative literature
is itself a form of mythopoeia, it stands independently of prior mythic content or
anthropological justification, and reflects speculative analyses and judgements of mod-
ernity. A relevantly philosophical, and evolutionary, model of culture can be seen in the
work of Ernst Cassirer, whose three-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (orig. 1923-9)
encompasses the conceptions just outlined in Lawrence and Joyce. Taking all human
worlds as modes of symbolic creation, he incorporated contemporary anthropology to
trace the gradual transformation of mythopoeic sensibility into the symbolic order of
modern science. For him, as for Schiller, these two modes of symbolizing the world were
tragically incompatible: myth relates to the world by direct sympathy, but does not truly
know it, while science has true knowledge, but has lost the mythic relation. Yet Cassirer,
whose project was continued by Suzanne Langer, was developing a view of the aesthetic