AUDEN'S IDEOLOGY
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destroy enemy submarines by tracking them down with seals.
A more radical anxiety has transformed the solutions of Stage II
into
what we are anxious about
in Stage III: we are resignedly,
humbly, interminably anxious about everything but God. What is not
anxious
is
God, His Grace; though even that is agonizingly conscious,
every instant, of those 70,000 fathoms over which it is precariously
floating, trying desperately not even to wiggle its toes. What we are
most anxious about is our anxiety itself: the greatest of all sins, Auden
learns from Kafka, is impatience-and he decides that the hero "is,
in fact, one who is not anxious." But it was inevitable that Auden
should arrive at this point. His anxiety is fundamental; and the one
thing that anxiety cannot do is to accept itself, to do nothing about
itself-consequently it admires more than anything else in the world
doing nothing, sitting still, waiting.
In Stages I and II
success
is important as the opposite of (hence,
the goal of) the organism's core of anxiety, guilt, and isolation; in
Auden's last stage success is naturally replaced by salvation, since
Auden is running the Time-Machine in reverse, exhibiting the familiar
development of Western man backwards. In Stage I success is some–
thing we are struggling for, developing into; it is unsatisfactory except
as a goal-attained, it is seen as the failure away from which we
struggle, back to which we regress. The Successful One is the revolu–
tionary cult-leader who dies, the evolving qualitative leap that is in
its turn superseded.
In Stage II success splits into .extrinsic and intrinsic success. Ex–
trinsic success is altogether externalized, something we earn by the
external, arbitrary process of choosing, voting, making the lucky guess
predestined to success. This .extrinsic success is nothing more than the
lucky charm, the Sacred Object of the fairy-tale quests-which you
can have but never, alas! be. (Auden, spectacularly-and, to himself,
guiltily-successful, realizes without any trouble that something is all
wrong with this sort of extrinsic success, that not one thing is solved
for him by it.) The Extrinsically Successful One is understood, for–
givingly but rather contemptuously, to be a pathetic sham. Intrinsic
succe~s
is entirely internalized, introjected: its humble, commonplace
and apparently wholly unsuccessful Successful One is all being and
no doing. His success is, precisely, salvation without God, a secular
salvation that seems necessarily and fatally incomplete without the
divine ground from whi.ch it sprang. This intrinsic success is humble
enough for Authority not to punish it except by a complete lack of
recognition.
