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PARTISAN REVIEW
repentent noblemen of nineteenth-century Russia; their bad con–
science is their alibi. But the last thing that an artist ought to
experience before his art is repentence. This goes beyond a simple
and necessary humility-this pretense at relegating beauty to the
end of time, and, while waiting, depriving the world and the shoe–
maker of that extra nourishment from which one has benefited
himself.
This
ascetic madness, however, has its reasons which interest
us for their own sake. They translate, on the plane of aesthetics,
the battle between revolution and revolt. In every revolt there is
revealed a metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of pos–
sessing this unity, and the fabrication of a replacement. This also
defines art. The exigence of revolt, to tell the truth, is in part an
aesthetic one. All the thinking inspired by revolt is illuminated by
a rhetoric or a closed universe. The rhetoric of ramparts in Lucre–
tius, the convents and bolted castles of Sade, the isle of the roman–
tic cliff, the solitary heights of Nietzsche, the elemental ocean of
Lautreamont; the terrifying castles that are reborn among the
Surrealists, battered by a storm of flowers; the prison, the nation
entrenched within itself, the concentration camp, the domination
of slave overseers- all these light up in their fashion the same need
of coherence and unity. Within these closed worlds, man can finally
know and rule.
This movement is also that of all the arts. The artist remakes
the world to his advantage. Nature's symphonies do not know any
pauses. The world is never silent; its muteness itself eternally re–
peats the same notes, according to vibrations that escape us. As
for those that we hear, they bring us sounds, rarely an accord, never
a melody. Yet music exists, in which symphonies finish and melody
gives its form to sounds which, by themselves, have none; where
a privileged arrangement of notes, lastly, brings out of natural dis–
order a unity satisfying the heart and the spirit.
"I believe more and more," writes Van Gogh, "that one
should not judge God on the hasis of this world. It's a sketch of
his
that didn't come off." Every artist tries to remake this sketch
and to give it the style it lacks. The greatest and most ambitious
of all the arts, sculpture, desperately tries to fix the fleeting figure
of man in his three dimensions, to organize the disorder of gesture
