BOO KS
477
twentieth century as all of a piece: a century of the new, of invention,
transformation, remaking, fresh gestures.
In
other words, Mr. Rosen–
berg's idea is that if you don't remake yourself in this century, some–
body else will remake you-in a gas chamber.
If
modern history is
a panoramic stage, it is also a scientific laboratory for the production
of new human beings, new identities. The action painter who "gesticu–
lates" on canvas so that he may see himself, as it were, in silhouette and
discover who he is, is experimenting on himself just as Rimbaud did,
and as the Communists did to manufacture, out of the "iron" process
of logic, the figure of the Bolshevik, and the Nazis in their concentration–
camp workshops, to make a new "scientific" humanity-as well, inci–
dentally, as a new kind of lampshade. The purge indeed (Mr. Rosenberg
does not happen to mention this, but he would surely agree) is the
first obligatory step, whether it is the infantile castor-oil purge of Mus–
solini, the mass purges of the Soviet Union, the brainwashing of the
Korean prisoners-of-war, the pseudo-purge of religious conversion, the
prefrontal lobotomy, or the self-purgation of the artist. Mr. Rosenberg
is not afraid of this amalgam, as it would have been called in the
Thirties. When Anthony West declared in
T he New Yorker
that the
poems of Baudelaire led straight to the death-camps, he was asserting in
an hysterical way a philistine and semi-totalitarian doctrine of "respon–
sibility"; Mr. Rosenberg sees a connection between all these modern
events that is neither causal nor criminal. His detachment permits him
to observe a likeness-in-difference without feeling obliged to confess up
and withdraw his support from Rimbaud, Baudelaire, or De Kooning.
Similarly, Mr. Rosenberg's eagle's eye view of the twentieth century
has made him the first to discern tendencies and correspondences that
became only slowly visible, if visible at all, to other critics.
In
an essay
on the Fall of Paris, written in 1940, he rapidly sketches out the whole
idea of Malraux's
Musee Imaginaire
(1949); it might be objected that
Mr. Rosenberg did not "do" anything with his idea while Malraux
made a book out of it, but a better way of putting it is that Malraux
"got" a book out of it, i.e., labored it to yield him a return. Mr. Rosen–
berg was also the first to see through the guilty-liberal racket and the
mass-culture racket: in a number of essays now grouped under the gen–
eral heading, "The Herd of Independent Minds." This new body of
parasitic literature--the
True Story
confessions of ex-Communists and
ex-liberals and the mass-culture symposia-produced for kicks for a
mass audience, is itself of course a sociological phenomenon, reflecting
the vast growth of a class of professional intellectuals who are the tour–
directors of modern society on a cruise looking for itself. The architects,
designers, psychiatrists, museum men, questionnaire sociologists, "depth"
