During the interwar years Eugene Jolas championed the modernist writing of Joyce and Doblin and Beckett and Schwitters. As editor of the journal Transition, he actively confronted literary nemeses – “the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism” – which still mire much narrative fiction.

Jolas believed the short story would be succeeded by the paramyth, “a kind of epic wonder tale giving an organic synthesis of the individual and universal unconscious, the dream, the daydream, the mystic vision.” The paramyth might evolve, he thought, into a “phantasmagoric mixture of the poem in prose, the popular tale of folklore, the psychograph, the essay, the myth, the saga, the humoresque.” The new form would birth a new syntax: “The language of the paramyth will be logomantic, a kind of music, a mirror of a four dimensional universe.”

He provided a dozen examples, one from Kafka, others from names long forgotten, a few by himself. During one of these , ‘Arrival of the Hallamoor’ three readers are executed in the British Library.

“I tatterambled around London,” he writes.” I was no longer I… I was an arboreal mammal with a long muzzle and a dark fur that tinklepalpitated with the percussions from the streetnoises. My eyes were discs sunglinting hugely. My paws were knife protuberances.” As he arrives in the old reading room:

“Suddenly I felt hungergrip. With a hop and a grunt I was on a large Oxford Dictionary that stood on a rotating desk. I began to tear pages from the volume. The letters L and N were soon in my muzzle, and I felt relieved as I avidchewed the pages.”

The years of Transition were a watershed moment, suggesting and permitting new directions for writing. Did we explore them all, might we still?

First published in Transition 23, July 1935