Old Realities and New Myths

...There will be others enough to do that...

...While they do not ignore or deny the darker vision of the other six, they offer alternative possibilities...

...One wishes that Barrett had treated the more complex and significant works of Thomas Mann, who also is concerned with themes of quest and the conflict between esthetics and a bourgeois society, yet without Hesse's adolescent romanticism or pseudomysticism...

...Amid the rejection of old values, however, Barrett finds these writers shoring fragments against the ruins: Camus preserves the classicism of the Abbe Prevost...

...He need not, unasked, plunge himself and us into the brambles and underbrush where not only the straight way, but any way at all, may be lost...

...Even among Barrett's choices Faulkner would hardly seem to qualify as a "thin" spirit, yet one could argue that, fundamentally, he is more pessimistic...

...The juices of life here are not that rich...

...Barrett has recreated the mood and era of his subjects in a remarkably clear, readable style, giving us a thoughtful view of an important philosophical trend in 20th-century art and literature...

...The exclusion of Mann leaves a vacancy in this otherwise excellent pantheon of modern novelists...

...Here again there is a stripping away of traditional detail to convey a new "elemental" impression: the mythic qualities evoked by Picasso's "Three Musicians," Brancusi's "King of Kings," Henry Moore's earthbound "Re-cumbant Figure," or Giacometti's isolated thin men...

...In comparison with [Joyce's] robustness, the modern spiri twhatever its other profundities strikes us as thin and exigous...

...It is easy to consider the gentlemanly Forster as a counter trend, but many people will balk at putting Joyce in the same category...

...Barrett's romanticism is evident though, when he asserts that "The most isolated of men dies alone and unknown," ignoring the presence of Kafka's beloved, Dora Dynmont, at his bedside, and the appreciative following he had in some German circles...

...Flannery O'Conner, John Updike and Walker Percy have written unequivocally Christian novels, a genre Barrett insists is outmoded today...

...None of the six writers already mentioned is a nihilist, but each spends some time playing with the idea, if only to reject it...

...He wonders if we will awake to see it fulfilled, or to see it vanish...

...Nonetheless, Barrett makes a good case for Joyce's uniqueness...

...For example, he explains Forster's not writing another novel after A Passage to India by using a nihilistic image from that book: "He had heard the Marabar whisper, and henceforth he could not indulge himself in the illusions of fiction...

...Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud portray suffering, but also redemption...

...Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, that bitter parable about the degradation of the South, utilizes its nonchrono-logical time sequences to bring out resonances of the Christian Passion...

...and Irrational Man, attempts in Time of Need to portray the state of modern thought through prominent novels of the early 20th century: "The imagination has had to free itself from the tedium of reportage...

...Of Forster, Barrett remarks: "It is enough if the writer has told us that the darkness is there so that henceforth we shall never be altogether unprepared if we should stumble into it...

...Hemingway's famous "style" is a formal justification in itself, as is the lifestyle of his characters ("It's sort of what we have instead of God," says Lady Brett-Ashley...

...The book is divided into four parts...

...The chapter on Kafka is a poignant sketch of a man grappling with neurosis', the fact that he was not crippled by this, but rather employed it in his writing to achieve brilliant effects, is one of the marvels of literary history...

...Indeed, an observer from outside might very well say of the last fifty years that there seems let loose in it a rage to destroy, as if the culture itself were bent on working toward conclusions that destroy its own premises...

...The verbal richness of Joyce is evident in Vladimir Nabokov and Anthony Burgess...

...They may be ripe for the muckheap, but they can keen over themselves and they do so endlessly, humorously, mordantly, blasphemously, with the self-pity and self-accusation of Irish blather lifted to the level of poetry...

...His characters, denied everything else, at least are not denied that gift...

...Another great Irish writer, William Butler Yeats, tells us that "in dreams begin responsibilities," and for Barrett, Finnegans Wake is the dream of the salvation of modern culture...

...As for Beckett, he "at least preserves his lyricism...

...Decidedly they are lean, very lean...

...Of Finnegans Wake, he affirms: "Joyce wears a jester's cap and bells, but he is still a traditionalist who delights in every relic of culture that provides him material for fun and pun...

...As counterexamples Barrett proposes E. M. Forster and James Joyce, both, in his opinion, representative of the insular British tradition...

...Certainly in the American novel the movement has been away from the existential pessimism of the 1920s and '30s...

...There is neither hatred nor cynicism in his destruction of culture...

...Reviewed by Phoebe Pettingell William Barrett, best known for his What Is Existentialism...

...Much destruction has ensued on the way...

...Barrett sees Beckett's tramps as the meek who will inherit the earth because they have lowered themselves beyond the neurotic impasse of prideful knowledge...

...Barrett's study is pervaded with the sense that everything grows steadily worse, and...

...In Hesse this is typified by his mystic Journey to the East, and his general preoccupation with oriental religion (his parents were Protestant missionaries in India...

...The second section contrasts novelist with artist...

...Such excesses notwithstanding...

...In Barrett's view, the modern novel is attempting to break away from the realistic social chronicle of the 19th century, "to get beyond realism itself, to recapture if possible the pristine reality of myth that was available to the ancient storytellers...

...From the latter, Barrett shifts to the characters of his next series of writers: "We can hardly think of Steppenwolf, Josef K., or any of Beckett's waifs as fat men, or even of a moderately robust physique...

...Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett are all, in some sense, concerned with the mythic quest for self...

...Siding with T. S. Eliot's controversial judgment, Barrett sees Joyce as operating within the Catholic framework, albeit as a rebel...

...The first, "The World Without Meaning," discusses some novels of Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and, as its title implies, themes of nihilism...

...Robustness, energy, exuberance these are not the qualities we think of as distinctive of the modernist movement...

...The value of Time of Need is more historic than prophetic...

...occasionally, this leads him to romantic overstatement...

...Yes, but in this rage to destroy may be present the birth pangs of a new reality struggling for expression...