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The Development of Myth in Post-World- War-Ti American Novels

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The Development of Myth in Post-World- War-Ti American Novels N8/J NO, 2 THE DEVELOPMENT OF MYTH IN POST-WORLD- WAR-TI AMERICAN NOVELS DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the North Texas State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR CF PHILOSOPHY By Larry Joe Hall, B. A., M. Div., M. A. Denton, Texas August, 1974 Hall, Larry Joe, The Development of t in q World-War-IT American Novels. Doctor of Philosophy, August, 1974, 231 pp., bibliography, 201 titles. Most primitive mythologies recognize that suffering can provide an opportunity for growth, but Western man has developed a mythology in which suffering is considered evil. He conceives of some power in the universe which will oppose evil and abolish it for him; God, and more recently science an, technology, were the hoped-for saviors that would rescue him. Both have been disappointing as saviors, and Western culture seems paralyzed by its confrontation with a future which seems death-filled. The primitive conception of death as that through which one passes in initiatory suffering has been unavailable because the mythologies in which it was framed are outdated. However, some post-World-War-II novels are reflecting a new mythology which recognizes the threat of death as the terrifying face the universe shows during initiation. A few of these novels tap deep psychological sources from which mythical images traditionally come and reflect the necessity of the passage through the hell of initiation without hope of a savior. One of the best of these is Wright Morris's The Field of Vision, in which the Scanlon story is a central statement of the mythological ground ahead. This gripping tale uses the pioneer journey west 2 to tell of the mysterious passage the unconscious can make through the ccntempoorary desert to win the bride of life. It serves as an illuminator and normative guide for evalu- ating how other novels avoid or confront the initiatory hell. By the Scanlon standard, some contemporary mythology is escapist. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle express the youthful desire to arrive almost automatically at a new age, either with help from a new Christ or through practicing a simplis- tic morality. Other novels tell of the agony of modern Grail questers who sense that a viable myth is possible, but cannot com- pletely envision it nor accomplish the passage through the void to gain it. The hindrances in each case are powerful forces which exert control over society. These forces are scientific objectivity and racism in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and an unbeatable Combine which forces people to be rabbits and like it in Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Thomas Pynchon's The Cring of Lot 49 makes clear thet the confining forces are sustained because the secret of life has been lost, and man needs protection from the void which he cannot face without the secret. Saul Bellow deals directly with mythologies in Mr. Sammler's Planet. On the one hand is the popular view which ignores what every man knows is right and asserts 3 instead that whatever one wants, he should have. This view replaces the archetypal sustaining images with a myth of continuous progress which, now that progress has faltered, makes living seem overwhelmingly hopeless. However, Sammler believes that meaning is established in life even as it collapses. The good man is part of an elite which is un- usually intelligent and discerning, able to develop the will to carry out the contract with life and to enjoy the mystic potency in living. The novels in this study indicate a trend toward a reformulation of the basic mythological structures of Western man. Possibly the belief is weakening that some- thing from somewhere will save him from his given situation, and a mythology is emerging which tells of significant life in the common, discovered through an awareness of the archetypal consciousness. ~I\ /4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. WESTERN MAN'S LOSS OF VIABLE MYTHS . 1 Societal Trends Literary Trends II* WRIGHT MORRIS AND THE MYTHOLOGICAL GROUND AHEAD . * * . .. ..* ... .48 * III. THE YOUTH COUNTER CULTURE'S FLAWED MYTH . 92 IV. THE QUEST . 137 V. THE DEVELOPM1.T OF AN IMPECCABLE SPIRIT: SAUL BELLOfr'S MR. SAMMLER . 176 VI . THE EMERGENCE OF COMPREHENSIVE MYTHICAL IMAGES . * . * . *. * 230 BIBLIOGRAPHY . * . *. 234 iii CHAPTER I WESTERN TAN'S LOSS OF VIABLE MYTHS For the last hundred years Western man has been involved in a radical transition away from civilization toward a new stage in his evolution.1 The reality of the transition can be experienced by every person in Western culture in, for example, the acceleration of his experience and activity, the extension of his senses by electronic media, the shift away from agriculture as primary occupation toward advanced technological activity, the continuously increasing rate at which knowledge about the world is ex- panding, and in the alteration of social institutions such as the family, economics, and the state.2 '"Civilization" is used here as Kenneth Boulding uses it, to refer to society organized into cities in orier to produce enough food surplus so that *the kings, priests, soldiers, builders, and artisans of civilization can sub- sist.' Post civilization is organized primarily in order to discover, disseminate, and use knowledge. The Meanin of the Twentieth Zentury: The Great Transition7ew York: Haroer Colophon, 1964), po. 1-5. "Ifanyonein an advanced society today were to be suddenly thrust back into the world of only a hundred years ago, he would feel utterly alien and strange. A considerable part of his vocabulary would be meaningless to the people around him. He would find it hard to adapt to the incon- veniences and to the restricted life which he would have to lead." Boulding, p. 180. For similar views of the tran- sition, see Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam 1 2 However, in mid-twentieth-century Western man appears to have faltered in the transition, unable to retreat into the oast and unable to gain the courage to plunge coher- ently into the future. 3 In the nast decade, a chorus of observers has blamed science and technology for the impasse,4 but others suggest that the more basic problem is Western man's loss of a comprehensive, dynamic concept of the world. 5 Books, 1970), pp. 12-18; Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1955), ppT218-19, 226- 29; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: Signet, 1964), pp. 19-31, 83-84; and Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Mentor, 1925), pp. 10-11, 23. 3 See Mirces Eliade, , Dreams and Mysteries: The Encounter between Contemoorary Faiths and~Archaic Rgallties, tr. Philip Mairet (New York: Rarper & Row, 1960), p. 235; Joseph Camobell, The F-1ht of the Wild Gander (Chicago: Gateway, 1969), -. 191; Chardin, pp. 227, 229; Victor C, Ferkiss, Technological Man: TI and the Reality (New York: Yentor, 1970) ,p. 239; Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence: Studies in the Contemporary American Novel (Prneton: PrInceton Univ. Press, 1961), p. 70; Raymond Olderman, Beyond the Waste-Land: A Study of the American Novel in the Nlneteen-Sixties iW H n: ale Univ. Press, 197p),pp, 3-5; and William Irwin Thompson, At the Edge of His (New York: Harper Colophon, 1971) pp. 19-21. 4 For this view see especially Theodore Roszek, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postin- dustrial So l(New York: Anchor, 1973); Thompson, At the Ede of History; and Loren Eiseley, The Invisible Pjr- mid (New Y'ork: Scribner's, 1970). Many of those in the hippie movement also took this position. See Fred Davis, "Why All of Us May Be Hippies Someday," Trans-Action, Dec. 1967, pp. 11-18; and Lewis Yablonsky, The HfppieTr (New York: Pegasus, 1968), pp. 314-16. 5 See Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Heroer Torch- books, 1963); Campbell;~Ferkiss; Harvey Cox, "Feasibility and Fantasy: Sources of Social Transcendence,' The Religious Situation: 1969, ed. Donald R. Cutler (Boston: Beacon, 1969); and Sam KeeReflections on a Peach-seed "Monkey or 3 The latter position is a more fundamental analysis of the causes of paralysis than is the former. Scientific ration- ality was adopted as the primary mode of knowing in Western culture chiefly because Western man lost the ability to relate meaningfully to comprehensive life-stories. Since traditional sources of security and meaning have been lost, much of the general populace seems to assume that science will provide it with a security and affluence which will overcome the need for life-stories. However, as one of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s characters suggests, without stories people die, either of "petrescence of the heart or atrophy of the nervous system." 6 Lack of adequate meaning-stories, not the use of science and technology, is the fundamental problem. Science, al- though it provides knowledge, cannot provide myths which en- able men to develop satisfying relationships to their world. 7 Technology uses the findings of science to provide useful Storytelling and the Death of God," Philsoph religion, ed. Norman 0. Schedler (New York: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 81- 97. 6Cat's Cradle (New York: Dell, 1963), p. 156. 7 Science does not, because of its nature, deal with all important questions. According to Thomas S. Kuhn, the scientific approach makes no claims for the future since it is not by nature future-oriented, nor does it deal with that which cannot be treated "with precision and detail. Though science surely grows in depth, it may not grow in breadth as well." The Structure of Scientific Revo- lutions (Chicago: Univ.
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