The Extra 105
And culture- that both myth and ideology are (among other things) culturally-presecribed directives for thought and action, and that both work by translating the historical into the universal: a particular kind of man into mankind; a particular set of values into a metaphysics of the Good. Nonetheless, we have persisted in the old dichotomies. The standard technique for doing so might be described as a hermeneutics of inversion. Since ideology pretends to truth, we make it the task of analysis to uncover the sinister effects of its fictions, or at least to point out the discrepancies between those fictions and the real America. Since myths are fictions, we use analysis to discover their “deeper truths,” and at best to display the harmonies which those deeper truths reveal between abiding values and recurrent plots or metaphors. Hence the emphasis I noted on cultural schizophrenia in our criticism. To be critical about the myth of America is to appreciate it from within, to explicate it “intrinsically,” in its own “organic” terms. To be critical about American ideology is to see through it, to expose its historical function, necessarily from an extrinsic, and often from a hostile, perspective.
It will be a major task of the new American literary history to bridge these two approaches. This is not to deny the vast distance in mind and imagination between say Walden and the Loco Foco critiques of the market-place. No doubt Thoreau’s is worth the whole damn bunch of them put together. My point is simply that the very term America resists the split between myth and ideology, just as it resists the split between elite and popular culture, or between national canon and national context. However we define it, the parallel between myth and ideology is at once central to our classic texts, and central to our history, and in either respect deeply problematic. Any full history of our literature must account sympathetically for the symbolic richness of the ideologies that nourished it. It must also account, extrinsically, contextually, for the way that the literature is enmeshed in networks of ideology. Certainly a work of art in some sense transcends; it may be said to be trans-historical, or trans-cultural, or even trans-canonical. But it can no more transcend ideology than an artist’s mind can transcend psychology; and it is worth remarking as a possibility that our great