Daring to Hope

...The somewhat conflicting virtue, while no high hopefulness, might be described as a certain willingness, an availability to hope: that unorthodox attitude of mind which an eminent absentee from this anthology in his Myth of Sisyphus termed, "ni l'espoir, ni le d?©sespoir, mais la disponibilit...

...It makes the ungrateful systems and syntaxes imposed on authors by, say, an R. P. Blackmur or a William Empson (not represented in the anthology) look like latterday scholasticisms of the critical spirit...

...And so Henderson, terrified, his knees "like two rocks in a cold Alpine torrent," enters the wild animal's cage, believing that he might just possibly become, if he tries, something more of a man and a friend...

...It is certainly a provocative "myth" of Phelps' that we have been broken down in certain things of Nathanael West and Henry Green, but broken up in some works of Proust, Joyce, Stravinsky, and Picasso...

...But our generalization of a peculiar blend of factuality and availability to hope seems most eloquently supported by Jean Genet and Saul Bellow, both presented by Phelps under the heading of Breaking Through...

...Since they are ranged under a single heading, may we suppose that they have all "broken through" in somewhat the same way...

...Of all the symbolic works reproduced in this anthology, none seems to condense more perfectly in a single image what it might mean to break through in this modern fashion than the "Chariot" of Giacometti: those brittle, immense wheels, precariously ridden by an agonizingly attenuated, yet somehow upright man...

...breed, MerriamWebster says) and taurus...

...For example, a 1945 Isherwood selection belongs to the first or breaking-down moment of the dialectic, and Yeats' 1917 "Anima Hominis" belongs to the third or breaking-through moment...

...Similarly, Val?©ry's fictive "Monsieur Teste," a projection of the poet's esthetic ideas, is paired with Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation...

...To list according to category the 50 or more names represented by writings and reproductions (and some, such as T. S. Eliot and Pablo Picasso, occupy more than one) would be impractical...

...indeed, Phelps himself disarmingly supplies in the Introduction a list of some of the most highly qualified absentees...

...To be sure, in her small essay Gertrude Stein left almost everything about writing unsaid, unlike so many other modern critics who leave not a single literary principle unturned...

...Yet she did not oversimplify...

...The organization of the anthology is further complicated and enlivened by the ingenious device of pairing materials that may be fruitfully compared and contrasted...

...With most of the modern world feeling more or less constantly broken down, broken up or both, Phelps' suggestion that there have been some who have broken through is appealing and reassuring...

...this "impossible book," as its editor Robert Phelps modestly calls it, naturally could not avail itself of an historian's hindsight for the selection and ordering of the contents...

...With our century twothirds over, only a few seem rather dated...

...Where rigorous conceptual systems are unattainable, we often invent-in no disparaging sense of the phraselittle myths, which, if not ungenerously and inappropriately scrutinized for exactness, may be very helpful...

...We must admit, however, that no exegesis could make it apply to Rilke's "Olive Garden," which seems entirely out of place within any meaning of Phelps' breaking through, since the wonted angel wholly neglects to come to Christ in Gethsemane...

...As Gertrude Stein wrote in one of the anthology's best and most unexpected selections, "Naturally one does not know how it happened until it is well over beginning happening...

...For instance, Lawrence's "Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine" is placed in tandem with a portion of Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon: genus mors animalis, species erethizon (the N. Am...

...There is," as Estragon opines, "an even chance -or nearly...

...In anthological organization, as much as in psychiatric analysis, it probably matters far less what set of focalizing rubrics are used than that some are...

...Composition as Explanation" was first published 40 years ago, and Phelps is to be congratulated for having put it into wider circulation...

...Simone Weil is represented by a letter to a priest explaining her religious hope together with her refusal to blink the facts of the Church and take the conventional institutional step...

...But most of the selections retain a contemporary impact...

...Thus, looking at the literary selections, we see a Theseus by Gide who knows full well he is no Daedelus, or even Icarus...

...Jean Cocteau's scattered thoughts on style and related matters, and Cyril Connolly's ruminations in The Unquiet Grave on "art, love, nature, and religion," sound self-consciously oracular...

...Suffice it to say that anyone's roster of 20th century writers, musicians and artists, whatever his special preferences, would almost certainly coincide at many points with Phelps' choices...

...Available to hope, yes, but his path passes before the deadly muzzle of the lioness...

...6.95 Reviewed by FORREST WILLIAMS Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado Even though by certain count our century is going to be making some sort of culture, for better or worse, for 34 more years, in this newest volume of "The Cultures of Mankind," series it has already been anthologized...

...For all its seeming simplicity, this last essay emerges as one of the clearest and most intelligent theories of literary composition advanced in a busy era of literary theory...

...The psychoanalytic movement evidently calls upon all of us, and not merely some specially defined class of "abnormals," to own up to specific desires whose embarrassing existence we habitually deny, and would have us take strength from these very admissions...

...Not at all in chronological sequence, the wide assortment of writings and photographic reproductions are allocated among three categories, "The Breaking Down," "The Breaking Up," and "The Breaking Through...

...Of course, a large number of illustrious and influential names are missing...

...Good mythic concepts are doubtless non-discursive, implicit...

...whereas, on occasion, a Forster, a Bellow, and a Rilke (who, however, went on in an elegy to break us down again) have broken through...

...At our best, then, we are a century bound upon the concrete, dismaying facts, and therefore almost -but not totally-unstrung...

...James Joyce, Igor Stravinsky, Henri Matisse, Charles Chaplin-they, and many others, are present...

...As Susanne Langer has noted, the empiricism of today is committed not so much to the rather elevated abstractions that have traditionally served as factual ground in the natural sciences, but to the more singular and concrete facts found in historical disciplines...

...And so on, throughout the literary selections...

...Instead, assuring himself of a list of illustrious names, Phelps has selected and organized TwentiethCentury Culture: The Breaking Up according to a quasi-Hegelian triad of notions built on the theme of the sub-title...

...The missive is rather disconcerting, as she elaborates at length her thesis, perhaps less obvious to her real or imagined correspondent than to most, that she really can strive to be a Christian and a theist, even to the point of transcending migraine during Easter service, without accepting baptism...

...Kafka's great wall of China is not necessarily a gigantic futility of ignorance and bureaucracy, though its painstaking chronicler does grant that, after all, "one can gather nothing definite...

...One tendency-when we are at our best-is a certain unblinking sense of facts, however harsh...

...She will make consciousness to shine...

...instead, "Alas, there came the night/And leafed through the trees, indifferently...

...Such, at least, is our little "myth" about Phelps' little "myth...

...Whether our present generalization applies to Eliot's "East Coker" quartet depends on which exegesis you chose...

...In Henderson, the Rain King, Bellow enrolls a 20th century Everyman under the tutelage of the African King, Dahfu, who persuades this perpetual avoider of facts ("Oh, you have accomplished momentous avoidances") to encounter and learn from the lioness...

...Anthologizing is ever a case of silencing Peter in order to hear Paul...

...But he has founded a city, he has seen Oedipus hallow his Attica with a sacred death, and he has some reason to think that he will leave his fellow men with a slightly better chance than they had before him...

...The three curious categories introduced by Phelps might best be thought of as imaginative variations on a common theme, used to bring unruly geniuses into some sort of perceivable order...

...She distilled...

...But if we were nevertheless to try, in the Chinese phrase, "to put legs on the snake," it would perhaps be legitimate to attempt to generalize by speaking of a peculiarly 20th century blend of two somewhat conflicting tendencies...

...She will burnish you.' For this lioness, "She do not breathe shallow...

...Genet's "The Funambulists" (in a perfect translation by Bernard Frechtman) is a literary performance as scintillating as the tight-rope walker whom he imagines dancing with such artistry that "it is not you who will be dancing, but the wire.' The facts, taut and fine, will make the dance...

...Turning to his examples, we find such apparently dissimilar authors as Freud, Gide, Bellow, Forster, Kafka, Genet, Eliot, Simone Weil, and Rilke, and such artists as Bonnard, Chaplin, De Kooning, Gaudi, Klee, Giacometti, and David Smith...

...Phelps does not say...

...So, unlike the previous anthologies (Greek Culture, Roman Culture, The Age of Reason, etc...

...And this is itself worth finding out by way of Phelps' effort...

...Forster considers, for all his very English commonsensicalness, that a Sicilian fisherman might actually have laid eyes on the Siren of the sea...

...The third or breaking-through moment of 20th century culture as viewed by Phelps invites particular speculation, not because its entries are intrinsically more valuable, but because their category in some unexplained sense looks to the future...