The Style of the Mythical Age

1947

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The Style of the Mythical Age

SOMEWHERE in this book Rachel Bespaloif says: "It is impossible to speak of an Homeric world or a Tolstoyan world in the sense one can speak of a Dantesque world, a Balzacian or a Dostoievskian world. Tolstoy's universe, like Homer's, is what our own is from moment to moment. We do not step into it; we are there." – This is a somewhat startling statement; and when we ask why it should be valid, one reason seems to us especially relevant: Homer is on the threshold where myth steps over into poetry, Tolstoy on that where poetry steps back into myth.

Coming from myth, returning to myth: the whole, or nearly the whole, history of European literature is strung between Homer and Tolstoy. But what a strange development of the human expression, since, apparently, it returns to its mythical source. Is this not like a late homecoming? And if it be such – does it not portend the dusk before the night? Is it not the curve that drops back into childhood?

Undoubtedly myth embraces qualities of both periods, that of childhood (so nearly identical with that of primitive man) and that of old age, the styles of both expressing the essential and nothing but the essential, the one before it has entered the realm of subjective problems, the other when it has left this realm behind.

The "style of old age" is not always a product of the years; it is a gift implanted along with his other gifts in the artist, ripening, it may be, with time, often blossoming before its season under the foreshadow of death, or unfolding of itself even before the approach of age or death: it is the reaching of a new level of expression, such as the old Titian's discovery of the allpenetrating light which dissolves the human flesh and the human soul to a higher unity; or such as the finding by Rembrandt and Goya, both at the height of their manhood, of the metaphysical surface which underlies the visible in man and thing, and which nevertheless can be painted; or such as the Art of the Fugue which Bach in his old age dictated without having a concrete instrument in mind, because what he had to express was either beneath or beyond the audible surface of music; or such as the last quartets of Beethoven, in which he – only then in his fifties but already near to death – found the way from earthly music to the music of the infinite; or such as Goethe's last writings, the final scenes of Faust for instance, where the language discloses its own mysteries and, therefore, those of all existence.

What is common to these various examples? All of them reveal a radical change in style, not merely a development in the original direction; and this sharp stylistic break can be described as a kind of abstractism in which the expression relies less and less on the vocabulary, which finally becomes reduced to a few prime symbols, and instead relies more and more on the syntax: for in essence this is what abstractism is – the impoverishment of vocabulary and the enrichment of the syntactical relations of expression; in mathematics the vocabulary is reduced to nothing, and the system of expression relies exclusively on the syntax.

In the complicated interplay between vocabulary and syntax, as it appears in the arts, most of the vocables are the result of syntactical combinations which become universally accepted conventions, i.e., as symbols, and as such are regarded as naturalistic representations. We have only to note the stylizations of medieval art which, as the writings of the period advise us, were then considered realistically convincing. That forming of conventional vocables, by which the "content" of the piece of art is transmitted to the spectator, the reader, the listener (procuring for him at the same time the naive pleasure of recognizing such contents) is the basic characterization of all period styles, style being the fixing of a set of conventions for a certain epoch. Even music, the most "syntactical" of all arts and, therefore, as one would suppose, the most independent of vocable formation, shows in its styles that here, too, the same process of converting syntactical relations into a conventional vocabulary occurs of necessity again and again.

The artist thus graced and cursed with the "style of old age" is not content with the conventional vocabulary provided him by his epoch. For to render the epoch, the whole epoch, he cannot remain within it; he must find a point beyond it. This often appears to him a technical problem, the problem of dissolving the existing vocabulary and, from its syntactical roots, forming his own. His main, sometimes his sole concern is one of craftsmanship: Bach's Art of the Fugue was intended as a purely technical work; and the Japanese painter, Hokusai, reaching the peak of his mastery at about ninety, had only this to say: "Now at last I begin to learn how one draws a line."

But although the artist's problem seems to be mainly technical, his real impulse goes beyond this – it goes to the universe; and the true piece of art, even though it be the shortest lyric, must always embrace the totality of the world, must be the mirror of that universe, but one of full counterweight. This is felt by every true artist, but is creatively realized only by the artist of old age. The other, who remains bound to his conventional vocabulary, seduced by the known richness of its content – a Frans Hals or a Thomas Wolfe – though he may enlarge his art more and more, reaching a boundless abundance, is never able to achieve his real goal: one cannot capture the universe by snaring its atoms one by one; one can only capture it by showing its basic and essential principles, its basic, and one might even say, its mathematical structure. And here the abstractism of such ultimate principles joins hands with the abstractism of the technical problem: this union constitutes the "style of old age."

The artist who has reached such a point is beyond art. He still produces art, but all the minor and specific problems, with which art in its worldly phase usually deals, have lost interest for him; he is interested neither in the "beauty" of art, nor in the effect which it produces on the public: although more the artist than any other, his attitude approximates that of the scientist, with whom he shares the concern for expressing the universe; however, since he remains an artist, his abstractism is not that of science but – surprisingly enough – very near to that of myth. And there is deep significance in the fact that the creations of the "style of old age" acquire, for the most part, mythical character and even, as in the case of Goethe's Faust, have become, being so full of essential symbols, new members of mankind's mythical Pantheon.

Both myth and the "style of old age" become abbreviations of the world-content by presenting its structure, and this in its very essence.

"As for myself, I find it difficult to tell all; I am not a God," says Homer. And Rachel Bespaloif adds: These modest words of Homer could have been adopted by Tolstoy for himself. To both of them it was not necessary to express everything in order to express the Whole. They alone (and, at times, Shakespeare as well) were in possession of those planetarian pauses above the earthly happening, pauses in which history in its continuous flight beyond every human goal reveals its creative unaccomplishment." And in this never-accomplished and always self-creating reality – the building of a new vocabulary out of syntax – lies the essential.

And this explains the connection – at first surprising to us – between myth and mathematics. For every real approach of man to the universe can be called a presentiment of the infinite. Without this, not mathematics, nor myth, nor art, nor any other form of cognition would exist. "The sense of the true is always a kind of conquest, but first it is a gift," says Rachel Bespaloff.

It is this sense of truth, innate in the infinite, which compels man to build perceptive models of the world. For instance, the model of history by Marx employs such economic vocables as exploitation, concentration of capital, etc.; the vocabulary of classical physics consists of certain connotations, such as matter, force, energy, etc.; the psychological model of Freud works with the vocables of drive, suppressed desire, compulsion and the like. In all these models a picture of reality is developed by the composition of the vocables in a syntactical relationship directed by some basic logical rules. In the mythical model these "vocables" consist of the various and imperceptible forces by which primitive man feels himself threatened and moved, within and without; and they are represented by the gods and heroes, their acts and motivations, which then come to form the syntactical texture of the whole model, keeping it in motion. The mythical model is a cosmogony and a theogony ruled by a supreme authority of so remote and abstract a character that even the gods must yield to its commands, becoming merely its actors: this power is Fate. The position of Fate in respect to the mythical model is exactly the same as that of the basic logical rules in respect to the scientific model of the world. No wonder that in the later Greek philosophy Fate and Logos come to have an increasingly identical connotation.

So one returns to Aristotle's remarks on Hesiod, recognizing myth as a kind of prescience of primitive man, his so-to-speak mathematics. For myth is the first emanation of the Logos in the human mind, in the human language; and never could the human mind or its language have conceived the Logos had not the conception been already formed in the myth. Myth is the archetype of every phenomenal cognition of which the human mind is capable.

Archetype of all human cognition, archetype of science, archetype of art – myth is consequently the archetype of philosophy too. There exists no philosophy which, in its structure and modes of thought, could not be traced back into the parent province of myth. Rachel Bespaloff shows in passing the connection between Platonism and myth; but when in her main argument she interprets Homer's metaphysical standpoint as an identification of Fate and Force – "In the Iliad force appears as both the supreme reality and the supreme illusion of life" – she shows implicitly that this blind force, as the nature of nature, as its inescapable law, represents a connection with the metaphysics of existentialism. Philosophy is a constant fight against the remnants of mythical thinking and a constant struggle to achieve mythical structure in a new form, a fight against the metaphysical convention and a struggle to build a new metaphysics; for metaphysics, itself bounded by myth, bounds philosophy, which without these boundaries would have no existence at all. The myth of Jacob who fought against the angel in order to be blessed by him is the myth of philosophy itself.

Myth becomes religion when the mythical model of the universe, hitherto merely cognated or expressed in certain visible forms (of art, etc.) passes into the act of man, coloring his entire behavior, influencing his daily life. In being a member of the polis participating in its civic duties, its religious celebrations, its mystery rites, the Greek citizen became a unit in the all-embracing cosmogony (and theogony) which was tentatively limned in his myths. And the medieval peasant, with no knowledge of reading and writing, with no knowledge of the Latin he heard in his church, nevertheless felt himself a part of the Catholic Universe by virtue of the whole hierarchy of values which mirrored the universe, and in which he belonged by living it. The civilization of an epoch is its myth in action.

In other words: civilization, in spite of its practical issues, reveals itself as an all-coordinating myth expressed in a certain vocabulary of human attitudes and actions, which have become conventional and – just for this reason – form a general (and religious) system of values structurally symbolic of the universe. The great periods of culture and their styles, of which the artistic styles are only facets, are marked by the validity of their religious systems of values; they are "closed systems," i.e., systems which cannot be enlarged, but only destroyed and revolutionarily replaced by some other.

When myth through enactment has come to be religion, then art (along with other aspects of existence) becomes of necessity the handmaid of the central religious values, its function being to resymbolize these values which symbolize the world. In this way art is relieved of the labor which otherwise would be required to build its universal structure. It is left free for other tasks, and the human individuality, at first immersed in myth, is now progressively liberated to become the preoccupation of art. The myth of Christ in the art of the Middle Ages is set amidst a landscape of intimate sweetness, of maternal love, of masculine dignity, which embraces the whole scale of human feeling. Thus, after the Dark Ages the rigid grandeur of the myth became increasingly domestic and human, as it was swathed in the charms of legend; for this is the principal means by which it is brought closer to the daily lives of the people. Art, by this means, fulfills its serving task of being educative and social. So in legend the closed system representing the myth reaches a climax of humanization; but it is still a closed system, and for precisely this reason the art of such a period (the fifteenth-century Gothic, for example) renders in full the style of the epoch and in that style, though only in the style, the epoch in its entirety.

The legend makes myth not only human but humane. Homer, however, although merging the myth with art, does not approach legend but remains austere. Nevertheless his creation is humanization and it begins at the center of the myth with Fate which, according to Rachel BespalofF (and also to Simone Weil's coincidentally parallel essay), he identifies with Force. Yet this Force, though an anthropomorphic projection of human nature, is far from being humane; nor is Homeric Fate humane. The gods under the spell of such fate are vested with human but not humane qualities.

Indeed, Homer's humanization of the gods goes a step farther. It is true that they are not stripped of their abstract, mythical character; what they were they remain – mere names of the gigantic forces they represent, forces which keep in motion the model of the world and the struggle of man. But by transforming these impersonal qualities, which he leaves to the gods, into an element of poetic irony, Homer achieves their humanization, in a manner specifically his own.

Rachel Bespaloff is probably the first to discover the ironic light which flares up at the collision of the impersonal and the personal (that is, of myth and poetry), a light in which the gods become, as Jean Wahl expresses it, "sometimes slightly less, sometimes slightly more than the human being," so that, on the one side, they are passionately involved in the human struggle, while on the other – and that is especially true of Zeus – they are simply spectators, continuously and almost scientifically detached spectators of the whole human comedy, including even that part they themselves play in it. Against this background of cruel abstractness stands the human being: "The heroes of the Iliad attain their highest lucidity at a point when justice has been utterly crushed and obliterated."

The constant presence of the divine participants in the Iliad, this constant presence of their mythical activity, this constant sense of their remoteness and irony reduces the personal human problem, although potential in the myth, to an ephemeral and – again – nearly abstract role, so that, while it is never lost, it becomes situated at the soi-distant periphery of the poem, overshadowed by the terrible Fate of man, by his ultimate realities which are nothing but his longing for life and his certitude of death, both sustained in sorrow. Even the erotic element is removed to this periphery. "Helen," says Rachel Bespaloff, "walks across the Iliad, as a penitent; misfortune and beauty are consummate in her and lend majesty to her step."

Herein lies the "great style" of the classics, which, while always being tied to the myth of the central value, never loses the flash of irony. As Rachel Bespaloff quotes Nietzsche: "To be a classic, one must have all the gifts and all the needs, but one must force them all under the same yoke."

The "great style" of Christian culture was reached in the pre-Renaissance; the time when the mystics opened the path for the Protestant revolution.

The Protestant revolution was one against the hierarchial concept of myth. As a Christian, man was still enacting this myth. But he had also discovered that this myth he must enact was none other than the creation of his own mind, a creation that God, by a direct act of grace, had imbedded in his soul. With this discovery man could renounce the outside hierarchy, for he was building up the universe within.

On this basic change of view the human personality as such attained new status. Heretofore it could be used only as an illustration of the myth itself – as legend. Now it was drawn from the periphery and, residing in the center, shaped about itself a humanistic world.

And this casts a new light on the phenomenon of the "great style" in the arts. The great style comes into being when the crust of the closed system cracks open to give birth to a new system. At this moment, when there is still vitality and security in the old system and its forms, still certitude in the myth, the new system, vitalized by hope and striving toward openness, creates its own new form – the great style. This is to be seen in Michelangelo, in the Greek cycle of Aeschylus, or in the sculptures of Olympia, works which, as Rachel Bespaloif points out, share the gravity of Homer.

The "great style" is security and revolution in one, and it lasts only as long as the revolutionary tendency is aflame, but is doomed to harden once more into a system, closed as was its predecessor.

The Protestant epoch – the Protestant universe had its "great style" as well, actually one of the greatest in all history, that of the Dutch school in painting, of Bach and his predecessors in music, of Milton in poetry, and finally of Kant in philosophy, where we find less a style than the building of a Protestant scholasticism. And here, as before, the "great style" signalized the end of its epoch, when the now closed system of Protestantism had to be reopened by a new revolutionary act.

This verified the prophecy of Catholicism: in the eyes of the Church the Protestant revolt had been the first step in the destruction of the Western Christian unity, the first step in the heretical secularization of the human mind; and so it proved. In an irrevocable process, lasting from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the Western structure of values lost its Christian center.

These one hundred and fifty years of disintegration have produced a certain attitude in man which is called romanticism. As long as the system of values is fully alive and its universe intact, man is able to solve his private and personal problems within the existing framework, while in times of disintegration such solution is achieved only when the universe is shaped anew for (and from) every particular case. It is precisely this necessity of building the universe up from every single case, and of course from each human soul, that is the basic characteristic of romanticism. Obviously this romantic procedure could never have come to pass without the preparation of Protestantism, by the tenets of which man's soul is linked directly with the universe and with God.

The Protestant dogma gives the human soul a far greater autonomy than does Catholicism, and in romanticism this autonomy becomes absolute. It is for this reason that romantic art, even when produced by a great artist, can no longer achieve the "great style," which always requires the validity of a universally accepted myth. For whatever universe may be built from the single instance, its validity is limited by the boundaries of the autonomous human soul; though it may be approved by a certain number of people, its general, not to speak of its eternal, validity remains insecure. Infected by this ultimate insecurity, the romantic artist acquires the characteristic attitude of longing, longing in particular for the religious unity of the past. Thus wishing to solve his problems in an absolute way, and feeling that Protestantism is largely responsible for the dangers of his situation, the romantic in his homesickness is led back to Catholicism, to find shelter in the Church.

Every true artist, aware that he must form his own universe, is in some ways a rebel, willing to shatter the closed system into which he is born. But he should realize that revolution is not enough, that he must also build anew the essential framework of the world. And just that is achieved by the style of old age; for this style, revolutionary by means of its abstractness, gains a level one can only call the super-religious. On this level stands Bach in his last works, Goethe and Beethoven as well, though they, born in a period when the religious system of values was already dissolved, had to reach the abstract by the detour of romanticism.

In moving from romanticism to the abstract they were precursors; Tolstoy was no less a precursor, even a more radical one. War and Peace, though it cannot be called a work of old age, clearly has left romanticism behind, anticipating the style of old age in a new and abstract model of the universe – an Homeric universe as Rachel Bespaloff has rightly discovered. But Tolstoy's radicalism did not content itself with this artistic approach to myth; in contrast to Goethe and Beethoven, who were, in spite of their human greatness, preponderantly artists, Tolstoy was striving for more: he was striving for the complete abstractism of a new theogony. For the style of old age, which in time he achieved, had another goal than the Homeric one, a goal nearer to Hesiod and Solon than to Homer, and the merging of myth and art; with a zeal akin to that of Savonarola, he aspired to radical finalities, and so withdrew from art altogether to construct his own ethical universe.

In the case of Beethoven and Goethe it was not only their personal genius (as in Bach's case) which compelled them toward a new style, they were enjoined to it by their epoch, in which the closed values were already being shattered. There is a fair possibility that Homer, too, felt some such command from his epoch. Cretan civilization, we know, was a late and mature one. The Geometric vases of its early period hint at a closed system, religious in nature – a medieval hierarchy of values. But the "Saffron Gatherer" of the eighteenth century B.C. already indicates the free naturalistic culture of a ripening age, characterized by the liberation of human personality, and the following period is that of the luxurious palace of Knossos, contemporaneous with the romantic mysticism of Ikhnaton's Egypt. The Eastern Mediterranean was bound in a network of commerce and trade: it was as much an age of aesthetic sophistication and of the personal problem as the later Roman period. Late Minoan art shows refined types of a highly developed court civilization – was not Trojan Paris one of them? – and bears indubitable marks of a romantic period in which the beginning of the end shows its first symptoms.

The realization of this tragic situation came with the onslaught of the Achaians. If the Iliad be basically Cretan in origin, it is from this dread encounter that it received its mythical shape. It is specifically mythical that the two types of the old and the new, Paris and Hector, the one a playboy and the other a patriot, should be presented as coeval and brothers. Hector, "man and among men a prince," is subject to the apocalyptic mood of his time and, therefore, affectionately recognizes the peaceful achievements of the civilization for which he is ready to fight and to die. As later in Tolstoy, the personal problems fade away, and in the rising contours of the new myth the human element is reduced to sorrow and mourning, both sober and unromantic, but great as Fate itself.

It is unlikely that Homer was Cretan; the surge of the poem is Achaian: its impact is the same as that of the first Greek carvings, not at all like those of the late Cretan period. However, it is unimaginable without the Cretan influence: were the sources of the poem purely Greek, it would exult far more than it does in the Grecian victory; only Cretan influence makes Homer's impartiality credible, an impartiality which diminishes his joy for the Greeks and balances it by his lament for the Trojans. "Call him Achilles or Hector, the conqueror is like all conquerors, and the conquered like all the conquered." Moreover, this impartiality is an aesthetic one not only on the part of the gods (whose impartiality is not justice), or on the part of the poet, but on that of his characters as well. Rachel Bespaloif, in one of her most impressive passages, interprets the meeting of Priam and Achilles who achieve a moment of kinship through their mutual recognition of each other's beauty. And let us not forget that it was beauty, Helen's beauty, which gave life to the whole conflict.

This exaltation of the aesthetic, doubtless of Cretan origin, and originally strange to the barbarian Greeks, took a marvelous hold on them. In an astonishingly short time, they wrought from it a new and Hellenic form. Out of the broken fragments of the Cretan world was developed the poetic myth which became the religion and life of the Greek world.

Whether Homer existed or not, he is described as a very old man, blind as Milton, blind as Bach, blind as Fate; the style of old age in all its greatness, coolness, and abstract transparency is so obvious in his work that people had necessarily to conceive him in this form. He himself became myth, and since behind almost every myth stands some historical reality, we ought not to ask whether he existed or not, but should simply accept him as the mythical old man, the eternal paradigm of an epoch which demands the rebirth of myth.

It is somehow a blasphemy to compare our time with that of the Homeric epics; it is blasphemy because it was the fantasy of the Nazis to become the new Achaians demolishing an old civilization. However, it is not necessary to compare Hitler with Achilles when we compare the Mycenian cultural crisis with our own.

It need not be stressed again that, owing to its loss of religious centrality, the present world, at least of the West (although the East surely has not remained untouched), has entered a state of complete disintegration of values, a state in which each single value is in conflict with every other one, trying to dominate them all. The apocalyptic events of the last decades are nothing but the unavoidable outcome of such a dissolution.

Along with these developments, the romantic uneasiness was constantly on the increase. Seeking in an empirical period for some validity, romanticism could only join with an empirical science in a progression which (splitting the world more and more into fragmentary disciplines) increased the hunger of its search. Art became naturalistic, veristic, scientific in its methods, running through the sequences of Impressionism, until at last, in an ultimate despair of expression, it has become expressionistic. If in all these forms it renders the reality of our time, it does so in fact only as anarchy reflecting anarchy.

Thus it is only natural that there came to be a mood of deep distaste for this kind of art, and even for art at all. This distaste is felt neither by the general public which, though sometimes bored, consumes what it is served, nor is it felt by the pseudo-artist who accepts success as a proof of his quality, but it is felt by the few genuine artists, and by those who know that art which does not render the totality of the world is no art. If art can or may exist further, it has to set itself the task of striving for the essential, of becoming a counterbalance to the hypertrophic calamity of the world. And imposing such a task on the arts, this epoch of disintegration imposes on them the style of old age, the style of the essential, the style of the abstract.

The French painters at the turn of the century were the first – significantly guided by technical considerations – who were aware that the whole naturalistic, and unavoidably naturalistic, vocabulary had become obsolete, and that the essential had to be found, even at the price of abstractness. More and more the painter lost interest in the individual fact; the artist's goal was no longer to reproduce the smiling Mrs. X, but (whether or not he achieved it), to strive for the essence of smile. This search led, through increasing sophistications of technique, to the experiments of non-objective art.

Picasso's development is paradigmatic of these processes, all the more so since he achieved in one work a real and perhaps the first full expression of our time: this is "Guernica," a picture so abstract that it could even renounce all color, a picture expressing horror, sorrow, mourning – nothing else, and for this very reason the strongest rebellion against the evil.

Seen from the technical side, abstract art deals with problems very near to those of music, for music is the abstract art par excellence. The further the arts move in the direction of abstractism, the closer become the theoretical ties between them: the connec tion between music and painting is stronger in our time than ever before. And this applies even to poetry and literature; the work of Joyce gains its artistic validity in a very large measure from the musical elements and principles on which it is built.

The striking relationship between the arts on the basis of their common abstractism, their common style of old age, this hallmark of our epoch is the cause of the inner relationship between artists like Picasso, Stravinsky and Joyce. This relationship is not only striking in itself but also by reason of the parallelism through which the style of old age was imposed on these men, even in their rather early years.

Nevertheless, abstractism forms no Gesamtkunstwerk – the ideal of the late romantic; the arts remain separate. Literature especially can never become completely abstract and "musicalized": therefore the style of old age relies here much more on another symptomatic attitude, namely on the trend toward myth. It is highly significant that Joyce goes back to the Odyssey. And although this return to myth – already anticipated in Wagner – is nowhere so elaborated as in Joyce's work, it is for all that a general attitude of modern literature: the revival of Biblical themes, as, for instance, in the novels of Thomas Mann, is an evidence of the impetuosity with which myth surges to the forefront of poetry. However, this is only a return – a return to myth in its ancient forms (even when they are so modernized as in Joyce), and so far it is not a new myth, not the new myth. Yet, we may assume that at least the first realization of such a new myth is already evident, namely in Franz Kafka's writings.

In Joyce one may still detect neo-romantic trends, a concern with the complications of the human soul, which derives directly from nineteenth-century literature, from Stendhal, and even from Ibsen. Nothing of this kind can be said about Kafka. Here the personal problem no longer exists, and what seems still personal is, in the very moment it is uttered, dissolved in a super-personal atmosphere. The prophecy of myth is suddenly at hand. And like every true prophecy it is ethical: for where now are the old problems of poetry, the problems of love, marriage, betrayal and jealousy, when murder and rape and degradation are threatening the human being at every moment of his life, and nothing remains but sorrow and mourning? And what painter would still invite the spectator to rest under the idyllic trees of his landscape, when the landscapes of this earth have become exclusively roads of flight and persecution? Abstractism had attacked the private problems of men from the technical side, eliminating them from the realm of art; with Kafka it becomes apparent that they have lost their ethical validity as well: private problems have become as distasteful as sordid crimes. It is the last condemnation of all romanticism, of all these direct connections between the single private case and the universe, between the single fact and the general idea, as it is overemphasized by the romantic conception.

However, near as this point of view is to that of the French existentialists, Kafka does not belong to them, and his distaste for the private problem, especially in art, is not identical with their "nausee" though like them he knows that the utter isolation in which the single fact is plunged reduces all art and literature to non-existence. For they still remain in the sphere of traditional literature, traditional even when no longer employed for its own sake, but only, as in the existentialist novels and plays, for its value as parable – often approaching legend – to illustrate and concretize their philosophical theories; while Kafka aims in the exactly opposite direction, namely at abstraction, not at concretization – at an untheoretical abstraction to which he was driven exclusively by ethical concerns – and therefore transcends literature. He has reached the point of the Either-Or: either poetry is able to proceed to myth, or it goes bankrupt. Kafka, in his presentiment of the new cosmogony, the new theogony that he had to achieve, struggling with his love for literature, his disgust for literature, feeling the ultimate insufficiency of any artistic approach, decided (as did Tolstoy, faced with a similar decision) to quit the realm of literature, and asked that his work be destroyed; he asked this for the sake of the universe whose new mythical concept had been bestowed upon him.

Man as such is our time's problem; the problems of men are fading away and are even forbidden, morally forbidden. The personal problem of the individual has become a subject of laughter for the gods, and they are right in their lack of pity. The individual is reduced to nothing, but humanity can stand against the gods and even against Fate.

This is the dynamic of the Homeric myth. And as a phenomenon of farreaching importance, it reappears instinctively in the arts of our time. It is like a foreplan of the new myth which in the future may stand at the religious center of mankind's system of values. Art of itself cannot form the myth, but it points in that direction, because it is expression of the human needs.

Hitler thought to establish the new myth by forbidding the personal problems of men to exist. But his was pseudo-myth, for the real myth lives in the problem of human existence, the problem of man as such. However, if God has to exist, the devil eventually has to serve Him, and it is just the Nazi terror which may still ripen humanity for the ethical theogony in which the new myth will receive its being: if this happens, Fate again will be humanized, and presumably it will be not only human, as was Homer's Force, but also humane, in so far as it is in accord with Europe's Christian tradition. Homer's Force was to have been supplanted by Jehovah's justice, Jehovah's justice by Christ's love. "Through cruelty force confesses its powerlessness to achieve omnipotence."

To show these correspondences seems to have been Rachel Bespaloff's purpose in linking the Homeric epic with Biblical prophecy. In doing so she endows the Homeric work with a new significance for our time – a significance rather Kierkegaardian than existentialist – and it is from here that her interpretation gains a large measure of its essential importance. Were this the only justification of her analysis, this alone would suffice.

H. B.