TWILIGHT OF THE THIRTIES
13
so much retire into themselves, however, as into their group lives
and group cultures. They immersed themselves in the "destructive
element," which has been defined as the awareness of "a void in
the
present." Moreover, in their desire to recover the lost unity of
consciousness, they created a whole range of what might be called
idealized negations of the society they scorned: some made a
religion of art, some denied the reality of ideas in order to gain
freedom in a life of sensations, some embarked on expeditions-into
the
past in search of ancient mythologies and the old religions.
From
Rene
to
The Waste
Land,
what is modem literature
if
not a
vindictive, neurotic, and continually renewed dispute with the
modern world?
But the effect of the crisis of our time has been to undermine
this tradition, so that at present it is fast breaking up. In the first
place its social equilibrium was destroyed as soon as the weakened
capitalist system withdrew the privilege of limited self-determina–
tion hitherto granted to its intellectuals. Once the very existence of
this
system was threatened, it could no longer afford to "keep" its
intelligentsia in a state of even semi-independence; nor could the
latter, now that it was compelled to think seriously of its future,
afford any longer to belittle and neglect political creeds and politi–
cal
action. Despite all their postures of objectivity, it is the law of
10eial gravitation toward the ruling class which, in the last analysis,
determines the behavior of
~e
intellectuals. Still, their problem
was
not simple, for the actual location of the ruling class was not
at
all obvious any more. The question was: Who is the real ruler?
Ia
he the benighted and visibly decaying bourgeois or is he that
enlightened and mighty proletarian who, as they were assured, was
auccessfully building socialism in Russia as well as preparing the
revolution the world over? And many decided to throw in their lot
with
the youthful contender for power.
The modern literature of individualism was then belabored
111
all sides by the new converts to the socialist cause. Those of its
critics who remained friendly admired its past splendors while
iasisting that it put political teeth into its abstract-spiritual dissent
from
bourgeois values. On the other hand the whole-hog leftists,
led
by the impassioned party-liners, attacked it outright for pro–
jecting its ideals back into history instead of forward into the
