24/CHRONICLESnThe Uses of Diversity:nRecovering the Recent Pastn(continued from page 9)nW.B. Yeats, Allen Tate, Flannery O’Connor, and WalkernPercy. It is more than a little ironic. This was the eranforetold (accurately, for the most part) in which Westernnman was supposed to discover that his God was dead. Thenancients faced a similar shock in late antiquity. Plutarch, innhis essay on the decay of oracles, tells of the mysteriousnproclamation that the great god Pan was dead. Mrs.nBrowning, for all her occasional silliness, knew the tale hadna modern ring:nAnd that dismal cry rose slowlynAnd sank slowly through the air,nFull of spirit’s melancholynAnd eternity’s despair!nAnd they heard the words it said—n’Tan is dead—great Pan is dead—nPan, Pan is dead!”nAnd yet it was precisely then, at the collapse of paganism,nthat men in large numbers began to reject the poetic storiesnand pretty statues and looked deeper and higher for thenkingdom of heaven. The moderns have also been tried as bynfire and not all have been found wanting.nMost of modernism’s spiritual rebels have been recognizednas in some way reactionary. Eliot and Russell Kirknhave seen the conservative side of Baudelaire, and GeorgenPanichas has devoted his best efforts to exploring Dostoevsky.nBut there are other modern writers, apparendy lessnspiritual, whose works can be seen as part of a strugglenagainst the principaliHes and powers of the age. Southernersnwill think immediately of Faulkner, but there are other lessnobvious cases—Kafka and Proust for example, two of thenfounding fathers of modern fichon.nKafka, it will be said, was a neurotic, and Proust not onlynneurotic but homosexual. Do not look for Sophocles or BennJonson in an age of decadence. It has been increasinglyndifficult for powerful imaginations to deal with the realitiesnof modern life. If Kafka, Proust, or Oscar Wilde were sick,ntheir sufferings were common to the age. What is importantnis their search for wellness. In Kafka’s ease, he created anpowerful tool for rebelling against the absurd and horrifyingnconditions of life in a total state. His repellent litdenfables—I think especially of “The Penal Colony”—gonstraight to the heart of the matter: the despair that leadsndecent men to construct a society which compels others tonbe virtuous. Eastern Europeans have been mining goldnfrom this vein ever since. Most recendy, the eerie talesnof Negovan Rajic, a Francophone Yugoslav turned Canadian,nbear witness to the continued vitality of the Kafkanntradition.nIn point of fact, Kafka had little to complain about. Lifenin Prague at the end of the Hapsburg empire was, by allnaccounts, uncommonly pleasant, and when he read hisngrisly tales to friends in cafes, they laughed aloud. And yet,nKafka’s special quality, as his biographer Ernst Pawelnnnobserves, is not foresight but insight, insight into a humanncondition that has become increasingly doubtful as thencentury passes.nIf Kafka was a harbinger, Proust devoted his life tonlooking back. His long novel, the only major accomplishmentnof his life, can be read as a sentimental celebration ofnthe old order in France. An ardent Dreyfusard, Proust wasnalso an aid reader oi Action Frangaise, partiy because henappreciated Charles Maurras’ prose; partiy because he wasnan old friend of the Daudet family (Leon Daudet sered asncoeditor); and partiy—in all probability—because henshared with the Maurrasians a sense of regret for the decaynof old France. Even Proust’s bizarre metaphysics of time arenpart of his reactionary temper, because it is in life as it isnhed and in history that we find meaning—not in thenaugust platitudes of liberty, equality, and fraternity.nThe search for meaning has been largely a private andnindividual affair, so much so that artists hae seemed to cutnthemseKes off from the world outside themscKes. Paintersnincreasingly turned away from portraits and natural landscapesnto mental interiors; composers—especially the serialistsnand other atonal experimenters—came to rejectnharmonies based on the overtone series and rooted innhuman perception and deised ideal systems for abstractnlisteners. The most serious change came in the mostnuniversal arts—poetry, novels, and drama. Rhyme andn(worse) rhythm were sloughed off in faor of erse formsnthat are so free that no one will pay mone}’ for them ornrhythmical techniques so intricate that no one can hearnthem. The heart of all verse, howeer, is the alternation ofnonly two qualities—whether they are the classical long/nshort or the Germanic stressed/unstressed. Rhythmic alternationnis the systole-diastole, the heartbeat of poetry. Itntakes more than a circulatory system to keep an organismnalie (a brain helps for some of us, although Keats managednto do reasonably well without it), but it is essential.nArhythmical poetry has all the forcefulness and vitality ofncardiac arrest.nIf poets have given up rhyme, they—like practitioners ofnthe novel—have also turned their backs on reason, innparticular that reason which is used in reconstructing thenworld through narratie. In the Poetics, Aristotie put mythos,nstory-telling, at the center of poetry. He was thinkingnprimarily of epic and drama, but the judgment applies to allntrue literature. In telling a story, we are forced to makensense of the formless flow of e’eryday occurrences. Onenevent must lead to another, characters must display enoughnconsistency to make their actions intelligible and congruent.nAs Alasdair Maclntyre has expressed it more recentiy,n”Man is in his actions and practice, as well as his fictions, anstory-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomesnthrough his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth.”nThe rejection of plot and narrative in fiction reflects a morengeneralized despair of the-world. The modern novelist isntelling us, no less than the painter and composer of music,nthat there is no point in even trying to make sense of things.nBut it is too easy to excoriate the writers and artists of thenpast 150 years for giving up on the world. In a sense, thenworld abandoned them first. The history of English versenfrom Wordsworth to Eliot constitutes a series of responses tona civilizati3n that was destroying the artists’ natural habitat.n