444
PARTISAN REVIEW
Authority except under the aegis of this pathetically invented opposing
authority, because the superego (or whatever term we wish to use
for the mechanism of conscience and authority) is
excepti~nally
7
strong in him-as
~er
says, "The superego is based on affection,
not hatred; on delegated and not enforced authority." People have
always been puzzled by the doom that hangs like a negative halo
over the heads of the revolutionists of Auden's early works, who
without exception commit suicide, die or fail. But Auden
must
re–
ward them only with failure or death, in order to relieve the guilt of
his own revolt; those who defy Authority must come to bad ends,
he knows, and he their creator has at least made them come to such
ends, thus satisfying Authority at the same time he has revolted
against it. This helps to explain, among other things, Auden's mak–
ing
his
revolutionists as neurotic and diseased as the diseased and
neurotic society they revolt against. But note his moral use of dadaist
and surrealist elements as
symptoms;
the rather comic (and essential–
ly Catholic) life-cycle of the French surrealists-who die at advanced
ages, prosperous, well-adjusted, and
still surrealists-is
inconceivable
to Auden, the product of a thoroughly moralistic and Protestant cul–
ture.
In Stage I guilt is particularly apparent in connection with
sexualit;v,
a sexuality repressed and condemned by both external and
internal authority. This sexuality seems disease like so much else, revolt
like so much else: the lover is presented as the leader of a secret cult,
as the revolutionist, as the growing organism seduced into regression;
but most of all as the sick neurotic-we are given so many lists of the
fetishes of abnormal and difficult sexuality that we tend to believe a
normal or easy sort not only rare but non-existent. Love is condemned -
by the Immanent Will within the evolving animal as a fatal, foetal
regression, as the great refusal of the creature; when we love wo–
men--who are always, in these cases, the primary vessels of sexual
wrath-we are giving in to the Mother, stagnating, corruptly ac–
qui~cing
to Authority instead of persisting in the difficult revolution
of growth. Even when treated most favorably love is considered
something to be transcended, to be replaced by "independent de–
light"-it is an escape from which Auden would like to escape. In the
psychoanalytic terms haunting Auden's head, it was nothing but oral,
anal or genital stages of drives which, dammed up, diverted, or finally
breaking free in disguise, were always subjective, predetermined states
superficially related to some objective pretext, rather than real res–
ponses to a person who is loved. Love is seen as a
~ay
of hysterically
