Freud to Paul: The Stages of
Auden's Ideology
RANDALL JARRELL
T
HERE ARE
three stages of the works (and the ideas which are
their sources or elaborated by-products) that we call Auden. In the
beginning there is the Old Auden, the Ur-Auden. What should I call
this stage?
Freud and Grettir? The Law of the Members?
Here every–
thing of importance happens inside the Realm of Causal or Magical
Necessity. Here-in
Poems,
in
Paid on Both Sides,
and in most of
The Orators-is
the .world of the unconscious, the primitive, the
childish, the animal, the natural: it is Genesis. The basic structural
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picture (in Wittgenstein's sense) underlying these poems is that of the
long struggle o genetic development, of the hard, blind journey of the
creature or its kind. Existence is an essentially dialectical evolution,
presented with particular directness in Freudian or saga terms-i.e.,
in terms succeeding or preceding those of the higher religions. The
primary subject of the poems is the discontinuities of growth, the un–
recognized or opposed Necessity that determines men and Man. The
"change of heart" is meaningless except as a preliminary to change
-is, generally, an evasion by which we avoid changing.l'3ut even the
real choices, the continued-in changes, possess a deterministic pathos.
Our fundamental activity is a guilty revolt against a guilty Authority;
a revolt predetermined to immediate or eventual failure, a revolt by
the neurotic and diseased (to the Auden of Stage I medicine is a
branch of psychiatry, and all illness is functional) against a neurotic
and diseased culture.
In Stage I morality is never the instant of choosing, but the
years of doing. It is thought of not as a choice, a simple single act
of the will or understanding, but as a long and almost impossibly dif–
ficult series of actions, a process of processes. True development and
genuinely moral behavior have nothing to do with the systematic,
di~interested
abstraction of the moralist; they are what you yourself
are mixed up in, puzzle out, and work at all your life, failing or suc–
ceeding only to fail. This is a narrative morality instead of a sermon
morality; morality as particular, experienced practice instead of
morality as general, vicarious theory. It is Job's morality opposed to
I
