The artist, who dwells in Eden, apprehends history as a visionary pattern that was written out before time began. On quite similar grounds Berdyaev denies that the real stuff of history consists of objective empirical data. Such history has some limited validity, but true history is a mythical reality, an ideal world created and perpetuated by popular memory. Berdyaev sees each man as a microcosm in which all the great historical epochs co-exist and are accessible. All these writers, as Mann reads them, share the concept of a specifically human world of freedom and determinism, a psychological cosmos.
Myths claim the same kind of psychological reality.
It is at once passively experienced and actively created, at once historical and prophetic, timely and timeless. He treats Joyce's use of the Odyssey as an effort to find an external order and a source of meaning that will lend form and value to the confusion of modern life. And the element of myth in his art is not so much a creative method, a resumption of the role of mythic poet, as it is an intellectual strategy, a device for gaining perspective on himself and on his myth-forsaken time. The Modern Tradition, Backgrounds of Modern Literature. The contents of this site, including all images and text, are for personal, educational, non-commercial use only.