What happens to tragedy in the twentieth century is not that it dies, but that it mutates into modernism. For a major strain of modernism belabours a middle-class society with which it nevertheless remains complicit, castigating the spiritually derelict condition from the right rather than the left. Modernism, too, can be rancorously anti-democratic, stridently elitist, homesick for the primitive and archaic, in thrall to spiritual absolutes which spell the death of liberal enlightenment. And if modernism lends the tragic impulse a new lease of life, it is not least because of the return of mythology. In the late modern era, mythical destiny shows its face again in the guise of vast, anonymous forces—language, will, power, history, production, desire—which live us far more than we live them.