TWILIGHT OF THE THIRTIES
15
can do today is to warn. That is why the true poets must be
truthful."
For this minority, which has learned how to resist the reaction·
ary
Zeitgeist,
there is surely no turning back to pre-political modes
of expression; but neither should it bind itself to some closed and
definitive political doctrine. For it is in becoming a mouthpiece
that the
wiit~r
defeats himself. His work is vitiated not so much
by the errors he commits in his own right, not so much by the
errors he has actually
lived,
as by the seemingly impersonal errors
which are for that very reason all the more abjectly mindless, by
the errors that he imitates out of cowardice and the servile desire
to ingratiate himself. Moreover, even the best of doctrines is thick
with prohibitions.
It
is much too remote and narrow a base for
literature, which relates itself to life through experience and only
secondarily through ideas.
If
a sufficiently organic, active, and
broad revolutionary movement existed, it might assimilate the
artist by opening to him its own avenue to experience; but in the
absence of such a movement all he can do is to utilize the possibil–
ities of individual and group secession from, and protest against,
the dominant values of our time. Needless to say, this does not
imply a return to a philosophy of individualism. It means that all
we have left to go on now is individual integrity-the probing con–
science, the will to repulse and to assail the forces released by a
corrupt society.
The dissident artist, if he understands the extremity of the
age and voices what it tries to stifle, will thus be saved from its
sterility and delivered from its corruption. Instead of deceiving
himself and others by playing with bureaucratized visions of
the shining cities of the future or else by turning his art into a
shrine for things that are dead and gone, he would be faithful to
the metamorphosis of the present. And every metamorphosis, it has
been said, "is partly a swan song and partly a prelude to a great
new poem."
PHILIP RAHV
