AUDEN'S IDEOLOGY
443
rational life is falsified by the guilty hypocrisy of our half-diseased,
half-insane rationalization or ideology. ("Ideology is a process which
of course is carried on with the consciousness of the so-called thinkers,
but with a false consciousness. The real driving force which moves it
remains unconscious, otherwise there would be no ideology." This
careful and specific description of
rationalization-ideology
in Engels'
terms-appeared in the
Anti-Dilhring
in 1878.) Choice, will itself,
Auden thinks of as a "necessary error": whatever we do is wrong,
inadequate, done for reasons we do not understand, so that we are
never free of either guilt or
anxiety.
To a more or less rational anxiety
is added sexual anxiety, that of repressed or forbidden sexual develop–
ment; genetic anxiety, that of the creature which can neither grow
nor evolve properly, whose most spectacular success is never anything
more than a specialized and exaggerated impasse from which it is
now too late to escape; moral anxiety-for in the early Auden the
superego is as strong as it is confused, and he finds it horribly difficult
but horribly imperative either to know what he should do or to find
out how to do it; and hypochondriacal, neurotic anxiety, both psychic
and somatic-in "this country of ours where nobody is well," even
diseases normally considered organic are something that we
m'ean
(see Groddeck) , so that our hypochoiJ,driacal anxiety is a guilty one
as well.
In Stage I Auden is guiltily and partially rejecting, revolting
against,
authority.
That part of us which does not revolt, judged
either by Reason or by our own conscious standards, is despicable in
its neurotic or diseased, bourgeois, corruptly passive guilt; but that
part of us which revolts against the authority of the Father and the
State is guilty by
their
standards, our own unconscious standards: so
much so that it desperately seeks sanction in the mythical authority
of that hastily-invented fiction, our "real Ancestor," the Uncle.
It
is
as if the gnawn and rock-bound Prometheus had had to postulate a
"real" Zeus and a "real" vulture under whose authority he "really"
was. (And Prometheus,
if
he was not an orphan, probably did feel
compelled to do something of the sort: we can remember in our
own time how Little Father Nicholas was replaced by Little Fathers
Lenin and Stalin, Holy Russia by the Fatherland.) Auden's early
apotheosis of the (Wicked) Uncle is no more than a particularly in–
nocent, Protestant, and Beatrix-Potterish form of diabolism. It is no
surprise to learn, in
Letters from Iceland
and other places, that
Auden's parents were unusually good ones, very much venerated by
the child: Auden moralizes interminably, cannot question or reject'
