AUDEN'S IDEOLOGY
445
blinding ourselves to our own essential, unchanging isolation- as a
sort of Ignoble Lie. (But Auden defends its excesses when other peo–
ple attack them, by retorting that naturally they seem sick and dis–
torted to a sick, distorted and capitalist world.) It would be hard to
make a better summary of what underlies much of Auden's develop–
ment than Kardiner's generalization of evidence gathered from several
cultures:
"If
the exercise of sexuality falls under the influence of
parental authority, all obedience constellations are reinforced, the
parents' value for good or evil becomes exaggerated, and guilt about
sexual activity leads to anticipation of punishment and the fear of
success."
If
this guilt is reinforced by society in later life, as it may
have been in Auden's case, the whole process is consider-;;:bly strength–
ened.
Auden has always insisted, with seemingly disproportionate
violence, upon the essential and inexorable
isolation
of the individual:
one can find dozens of different statements of the proposition. He
usually states flatly that it's
so,
and that's all there is to it; you must
be
alone and realize that you are alone, like it or not-any argument
or unity is romantic or primitive wishful-thinking. This attitude, in
Stage I, is grounded both in his genetic view of the individual (who
is separately frustrated and separately liquidated, without exception,
even if his species triumphs) and in
his
Freudian view of ontogenetic
development as an unaccountably faithful recapitulation of phylo–
genetic development. Some of his most beautiful poems express the
terrifying and pathetic isolation of the growing organism, unwillingly
alone from the moment it
is
thrust from the womb. He has been cut
off from any real union with Authority by his revolt against
) t;
and
sexual relations. his nex
ance at To etherness, are to
him
no more
..than a predetermined,
repetitiv~l
senseless process of isolated growth
·:_the object of
lqy~i&.
__
£!.
mere external retext, not essentially dif–
fering from the class of abnorm-al fetishes of w c 1t 1s t e one
· norr;al member. The Family is gone. But
if
it, our culture's normal !
complex of Togetherness (Sex-Children-Authority) is broken up,
both the feelings of isolation and the guilt feelings connected with sex
are enormously intensified. This is particularly apparent in Hart
Crane's case: his helpless rejection of the normal family, the normal
sexual situation of union, isolated him both from his past and in his
future-for he knew that he himself was never going to repeat this
situation; and, in his present, what sexual ties he attempted had for
him no trace of permanence, of recognition, of acceptance by and as
Authority.
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