Thomas Wolfe and the Mythical Method

The phrase "the mythical method" was coined by T. S. Eliot. Describing Joyce's Ulysses in a 1923 essay in the Dial, he stated: "In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him.... Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method" (177-78). Writers, according to Jewel Spears Brooker, had used mythical reference over the centuries, but Eliot, and many moderns, felt a lack of tradition and of common assumptions (110). Brooker notes that the "method" Eliot had used in The Waste Land (1922) and saw as "making the modern world possible for art" (Eliot, "Ulysses, Order, and Myth" 178), was akin to the method of mythologist James G. Frazer in The Golden Bough, (1) a work Eliot cites in his essay (Brooker 111). By comparing and analyzing thousands of myths and customs, Frazer constructed more comprehensive myths and moved backward toward the primitive unity, the story of Diana's grove, and then used "his rationally constructed abstractions as keys to understand ... the fragments with which he had begun" (Brooker 116). And in Eliot's method, "Artists do not bring the myth in its entirety; they bring, rather, the information needed to construct the myth" (Brooker 121). Although Richard S. Kennedy tells us that Wolfe did not like Eliot's "wastelanderism," (2) the many references to The Waste Land in Of Time and the River (1935) (3) suggest that Wolfe had been affected by Eliot's work--and Wolfe adopted the mythical method, with a reference point myth. Kennedy saw a conflict between Wolfe's Platonic view of man and his vitalist beliefs over the years; because Wolfe did not use a single mythical subplot, Kennedy concluded that Wolfe did not fruitfully adopt "a myth or legend providing], besides plot organization and conflict, many appropriate possibilities for symbolism ..." (208-09). (4) Pierre Jamet's exhaustive article on the mythical method, published in France recently, presents Wolfe as writing the epic of America while, like Eliot, linking prosaic modern life and the eternal beauty of the classics. For Brooker, Eliot's method unifies juxtaposed fragments of contemporary life by allusions to a comprehensive abstraction, a reference point myth not present in contemporary culture, chosen by the artist, but not contained in the text. The myth is contained, instead, in the mind of the artist and reader, and the collaboration with the reader in reconstructing the abstraction also creates unity (120-21). John Irwin's study of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the mythical method shows that though Fitzgerald knew Eliot and followed his vision, a personal bent explains his reworking of the Pygmalion myth throughout his fiction (158-93). Wolfe's approach was, I believe, similar. Wolfe's use of the Golden Age myth gives his work shape and significance, and a mystical depth to the desire for a fulfillment that will appease loneliness: the peace and contentment of Hesiod's first Age of Man (lines 109-26) (5) are a goal, and Euripides's description of the Garden of the Hesperides, the memory of "The Apple-tree, the singing and the gold" (line 788) evokes a state of harmonious fusion that must be recaptured, even in the later fiction. Moreover, Wolfe's choice of the mythical method situates him among his peers in America and links him to the wider current of European modernism. Finally, the Golden Age myth also had personal significance for Wolfe, who was driven by an impulse to recover lost happiness. Wolfe's vision as a novelist was mythical from the outset, as stylistic and formal elements show. "The most ancient poets," Roland Barthes points out, "would exorcise the terrifying arbitrariness of the narrative (why begin here rather than there?) by a proem whose ritual meaning was: the story is infinite, it began long ago (did it ever begin?); I take it up at this point, which I announce ..." (32; my translation). …