ABSTRACT
The commencement of work on The Mask of Orpheus coincided almost precisely with the start of the economic decline of the West, and the instability and loss of confidence that ensued. The Mask of Orpheus stands as a late flowering of a high modernism. Modernism explores the interface between a fractured tradition and a speculative progress. Yet The Mask of Orpheus also suggests the possibility of interpretation in terms that move beyond modernity. Myth has been important for modernists because it engages with memory and symbol, with psychology and identity. In The Mask of Orpheus it is through music that the myth of Orpheus is ritually refashioned for the late twentieth century. The Mask of Orpheus is about the pathology of mourning. Nostalgia finds its mode of expression in melancholy. Time and temporality are the elegiac mysteries of duree and memory'; their waning is symptomatic of postmodernism which is 'dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time'.
