Mythic Voices

Abstract

Faith in the capacity of the imagination “to discover truth” is for Dhafu in Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King a power that makes and unmakes worlds—a conviction he proclaims fervendy: “All human accomplishment has the same origin, identically. Imagination is a force of nature … Imagination, imagination, imagination! It converts to actual. It sustains, it alters, it redeems!” (271). Society and art, life and the imagination are represented thus as interdependent units, both orders governed and reinforced by resonant constructs ideally replicated through the compressed language of poetic or analogical forms.