Word: arcadian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Into this "wasteland" climate of despair, a countermyth of hope, has been introduced. It may be identified as the myth of the New Arcadia. The New Arcadians see their salvation in a return to Eden innocence. Arcadian man will not reprogram the world; externalized change is the Promethean trap. Arcadian man will change his own head. He will retap the sources within his archetypal self. A million individual religious experiences will take place, and these will change the world...
...America, Charles Reich tried (and failed) to define this spiritual revolution: a mysticism of self-renewal that would save modern man from himself. In Where the Wasteland Ends, Theodore Roszak fails too, perhaps inevitably. But in the meantime he has brilliantly summed up once and for all the New Arcadian criticism of what he calls "postindustrial society." His book expresses almost as an act of autobiography the needs and demands he first began to detail in The Making of a Counter-Culture...
...create a sane life?" "How do I save my soul?" These, Roszak thinks, are the pertinent questions for Arcadian man, cornered by urban-industrial necessities and manipulated by "a vast mandarin establishment of hysterical professional obfuscators...
Roszak argues from Apocalypse. He might well ask: What other choice does man have today? At first glance, René Dubos, a distinguished microbiologist and Pulitzer prizewinner (So Human an Animal), seems to agree. Like a proper New Arcadian, he writes: "Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature and a substitute for magic." The very title of his book, A God Within, is his translation of enthusiasm ("one of the most beautiful words in any language...
...chief drawback attaching itself to Hawkes's first-person narrative technique rests with none other than his narrator, Cyril, who (as one gathers early on) is the archetypal "multisexualist." Through Cyril's eyes--his center of consciousness--the reader surveys obliquely a "tapestry of love." The Arcadian setting is as timeless as it is detached from the quotidian world of mortals--or so Cyril believes: "In Illyria there are no seasons...