454
PARTISAN REVIEW
In Stage Ill success (always unconsciously feared and distrusted
because of its element of revolt, independence, separateness) is seen to
be impossible. Intrinsic success becomes religious salvation, Grace- and
its passivity and determinism come to seem less arbitrary; extrinsic
success is realized to be one of the more important varieties of sin, a
variety particularly characteristic of scientific, industrial, secular man.
Influenced by Kafka's meditation on psychoanalysis, Auden states
that "half our troubles, both individual neuroses and collective manias
like nationalism, seem to me to
be
caused largely by our poverty of
symbols, so that not only do we fail to relate one experience to an–
other but also we have to entrust our whole emotional life to the few
symbols we do have." (This was written not by other people about
Auden, but by Auden about them.) Now it is true, in Auden's case,
that the great organizing symbols, the determiners of his develop–
ment, are few; but he is perfectly well able to relate
any
experience
to any other experience, since the relation can be as superficial and
paradoxical-as absurd- as he pleases. It is this which makes it so
difficult for him to
learn
anything in the full sense of the word: when
we learn and assert A we cannot continue to assert not-A; but this
Auden not only does, but knows that he is required to do--not to do
so, as he states again and again, is a great sin, that sin by which
Adam fell: "He could only eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good
and Evil by forgetting that its existence was a fiction of the Evil One,
that there is only the Tree of Life." Nothing is good or bad but
thinking makes it so
(i.e.,
makes it
seem
so) : this is an old song–
there is a beautiful version of it in Herodotus-but it is rare to find
it utilized in just this way by the religious. Statements important to
Auden often end with
there is only ONE Something-or-other,
since
there is nothing he adores so extravagantly as monism, nothing he
fears so superstitiously as dualism; yet his rhetorical monism invari–
ably flowers from an absolute dualism that he has stated only to
transcend. The whole theological tradition Auden comes at the tail
of is essentially a series of adaptations of the dualism of Paul; and as
Auden--with the simplicity of genius- has understood, the only
practical and effective way of transforming it into monism is to
state that it has already been transformed.
This Auden has done.
The stages of Auden's development can even be diagrammed.
In Stage I Anxiety and Guilt are fused in an isolated sexual core,
consciously repelling or cowering under (and unconsciously attracting
or yearning up to) the Authority that hangs in menacing ambivalence
just overhead. In Stage II an active.Anxiety dominates this core; it has
