308
PARTISAN REVIEW
as
Mr. Eliot effectively reminds us, has exacted an enormous toll from
the production
as
well
as
the consumption of art, and is now threaten–
ing the very existence of the elite-though it is true that there has
been some compensation, in that the ensuing tensions have been ex–
tremely favorable for creative activity. The point is, however, that this
cultural pattern is imbedded in the structure of society, and I can–
not see that Mr. Eliot is offering us anything more, at best, than a
freezing of existing social relations and a mummification of history in
order to merge the past with the present. It goes almost without say–
ing that institutions cannot be moved from one epoch to another like
so much historical furniture. Nor, even if
it
were possible to preserve
the present social order and endow it with a religious homogeneity,
is it clear just how this would improve our intellectual life. Anything
like the so-called medieval synthesis-which by the way was actually
a delicate and changing equilibrium between various contending
forces-would surely be an anomaly today in an irretrievably secu–
larized world whose divisions and conflicts represent deep-seated so–
cial contradictions that cannot simply be reconciled by an act of the
imagination.
If
such proposals for cultural unification
as
Mr. Eliot's,
be they literary or religious, are to have any meaning for us, it is
only
as
myths projected by the literary mind in order to sustain itself
in these dark and critical times.
I think the contradictions in Mr. Eliot's position become more
evident if we examine concretely some of the cultural phenomena to
which he refers. Obviously, the character of modem
art
reflects its
origins and antagonism to a society whose industrial and scientific
advances and organized philistinism have led, on the one hand, to
an enormous expansion of consciousness, and on the other, to a con–
traction of the moral and imaginative self. How else account for our
urban, alienated, skeptical, self-indulgent art?--or its dissociation of
the ego and its search for a symbolism to express its detachment
as
well
as
its identification with society
as
a whole? But the imposition
of a common religious culture could not help but completely alter
the values of the elite and the accents of art, perhaps to the point of
changing even our idea of the creative act. Certainly a socialist sys–
tem, which would at least provide the natural conditions for an
urganic society, is bound to produce esthetic forms and relations
utterly different from those now prevailing and almost inconceivable
in terms of our present sensibility. The question, it seems to me, is
not whether the elite step down or the folk step up, but rather what
the effects of any social change would be on our creative life. One can
no more imagine
Finnegans Wake,
say, or abstract art, in a socialist
