Social and anti-social aesthetic drives in Joyce, Yeats, and Sorel

pp. 95-109

in: Tudor Balinisteanu, Violence, narrative and myth in Joyce and Yeats, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Georges Sorel's theory of social myth offers an opportunity to reintegrate myth, narrative or any kind of art text, and social action in a unifying perspective. The main points in Sorel's understanding of social myth which allow us to achieve such integration are: the view that any kind of text can be regarded as a myth, provided that it serves, for the subject of myth, as a means to envision a new and desired world to come in a revolutionary way (Sorel, 2004, p. 52); this world is defined in pictures formed for action, that is, in a narrative language which is translatable into the language of movement and action so that, as in traditional myth, social agent and the narrative subject through which the social actor signifies himself are fused (Sorel, 2004, pp. 46–50); and this process manifests both aesthetic creativity and a material reproduction of the world, not in the serial mode of capitalism, but in the mode of artisans and craftsmen, that is, preserving the individuality and uniqueness of the subject recreating himself and of the world which he has recreated (Sorel, 2004, pp. 54–5).