PARTISAN REVIEW
Shapelessness, lack of meaning, and being without direction is most
people's nightmare, once they begin to think-and more and more
people are beginning to think, clearly. Of course all thought has a
tinge of emotionality:
it
may be greater, it may be less. The pure
thinker, capable of thinking without regard to himself, is, I imagine,
rare. Isn't the average thinker simply trying to trace out some pattern
around himself? Or, to come on, detect, uncover a master-pattern in
which he has his place? To the individual, the possibility that his life
should
be
unmeaning, a series of in the main rather hurting fortuities,
and that
his
death should be insignificant, is unbearable. Temporarily,
for the reader (or the listener to music, or the looker at pictures)
art
puts up a buttress against that--or, still more important, makes a
counter-assertion. The very arbitrariness of art brings an odd peace.
You and I, by writing a story, impose shape--on fictitious life, it's
true, but on life that is real-seeming enough to be familiar and rec–
ognizable. Every action or word on the part of any one of the char.ac–
ters in the story has meaning (because it's essential for you and me
that it
should
have meaning), and the whole trend of the story sug–
gests direction-it may or may not be a tragic one. Even stories which
end in the
air,
which are comments on or pointers to futility, imply
that men or women are too big or good for the futility in which they
are involved. Even to objectify futility is something.
And couldn't it be that the wish, the demand for shape is more
than individual,
th£~-t
it's a mass thing? Or rather, the mass's wish or
demand not to have to go on being a mass merely? The difference
between a mass and a society is, I suppose, shape. Yes, you, I see, say:
"When I say 'society,' I mean more than people; I mean people bound
together by an end, who are making a future." Shape, relation, direc–
tion.... I can't explore this further; I wish you would. I'm only on
the edge of a hazy idea that the artist, in these days, is being sought,
focused
on-he
may feel, sometimes, beleaguered- because he seems
to be a conferrer of shape, an interpreter of direction?
If
society, at
this moment, in this age,
did
exist- as something conscious, authori–
tative, explicit and realized- ! imagine that the artist would be in
a more neglected, but for himself healthier, position. At the moment,
he's not simply being asked whether he is, feels himself to be, or should
be, in relation with society; he's being asked, implicitly, to create a
society to be in relation with. Or- in so far as society
is
a sensation
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