“Intentionalists”—writers who attempt to control every facet of their creative output and who intend
virtually every effect in their works. Many of them are from the modernist period, essentially the era
around the two world wars of the twentieth century. In an essay called “ Ulysses, Order, and Myth
(1923),” Eliot extols the virtues of Joyce’s newly published masterpiece, and proclaims that, whereas
writers of previous generations relied on the “narrative method,” modern writers can, following Joyce’s
example, employ the “mythic method.” Ulysses, as we know from our earlier discussion, is the very long
story of a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, its structure modeled on Homer’s Odyssey (Ulysses being
the Latin equivalent of the name of Homer’s hero, Odysseus). The structure of the novel utilizes the
various episodes of the ancient epic, although ironically—Odysseus’s trip to the underworld, for instance,
becomes a trip to the cemetery; his encounter with Circe, an enchantress who turns men into swine,
becomes a trip to a notorious brothel by the protagonists. Eliot uses his essay on Joyce to defend
implicitly his own masterpiece, The Waste Land, which also builds around ancient myths, in this case
fertility myths associated with the Fisher King. Ezra Pound borrows from Greek, Latin, Chinese, English,
Italian, and French poetic traditions in the Cantos. D. H. Lawrence writes essays about Egyptian and
Mexican myth, Freudian psychoanalysis, issues in the Book of Revelation, and the history of the novel in
Europe and America. Do we really believe that novels or poems by any of these writers, or their
contemporaries Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, will be
naive? Doesn’t seem likely, does it?
p. 84Faulkner, for instance, in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) makes use of a title from the
Bible—Absalom is David’s rebellious son who hangs himself—and plot and characters from Greek
mythology. The novel is Faulkner’s version of Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458B.C. ), the tragedy of the
returning soldiers from Troy and revenge and destruction on a mythic scale. Their Trojan War is the Civil
War, of course, and the murder at the gates is of the illegitimate son by his brother, not of the returning
husband (Agamemnon) by his faithless wife (Clytemnestra), although she is invoked in the mulatto slave,
Clytie. He gives us Orestes, the avenging son pursued by Furies and ultimately consumed in the flames of
the family mansion, in Henry Sutpen, and Electra, the daughter consumed by grief and mourning, in his
sister, Judith. Such baroque planning and complex execution don’t leave much room for naive,
spontaneous composition.
Okay, so much for the modern writers, but what about earlier periods? Prior to 1900, most poets would
have received at least rudimentary elements of a classical education—Latin, some Greek, lots of classical
poetry and Dante and Shakespeare—certainly more than your average reader today. They could count
on their readers, moreover, having considerable training in the tradition. One of the surest ways to be
successful in theater in the nineteenth century was to take a touring Shakespeare company through the
American West. If folks in their little houses on the prairie could quote the Bard, is it likely that their
writers “accidentally” wrote stories that paralleled his?
Since proof is nearly impossible, discussions of the writer’s intentions are not especially profitable.
Instead let’s restrict ourselves to what he did do and, more important, what we readers can discover in
his work. What we have to work with is hints and allegations, really, evidence, sometimes only a trace,
that points to something lying behind the text. It’s useful top. 85keep in mind that any aspiring writer is
probably also a hungry, aggressive reader as well and will have absorbed a tremendous amount of
literary history and literary culture. By the time she writes her books, she has access to that tradition in
ways that need not be conscious. Nevertheless, whatever parts have infiltrated her consciousness are
always available to her. Something else that we should bear in mind has to do with speed of composition.
The few pages of this chapter have taken you a few minutes to read; they have taken me, I’m sorry to
say, days and days to write. No, I haven’t been sitting at my computer the whole time. First I carried the
germ around for a while, mulling over how best to approach it, then I sat down and knocked a few items
onto the screen, then I began fleshing out the argument. Then I got stuck, so I made lunch or baked some
bread or helped my kid work on his car, but I carried the problem of this chapter around with me the