PARTISAN REVIEW
345
In other words, that sense of chaos which, I suggested,
is
the driving
force behind the restless experimentalism of the twentieth-century arts
has two sources - one developing directly from the period before
1914, the other emerging for the first time during the First World
War and growing increasingly stronger and more unavoidable as
the century has gone on. Both, perhaps, are consequences of indus–
trialism: the first
is
connected with the destruction of the old social
relationships and the related structures of belief during the Industrial
Revolution; the second is produced by the technology itself which, in
the process of creating the wherewithal to make life easier than ever
before, has perfected, as a kind
of
lunatic spin-off, instruments to
destroy life completely. More simply, just as the decay of religious
authority in the nineteenth century made life seem absurd by depriv–
ing it of any ultimate coherence, so the growth of modern technology
has made death itself absurd by reducing it to a random happening
totally unconnected with the inner rhythms and logic of the lives
destroyed.
. This, then, is the Savage God whom Yeats foresaw and whose
intolerable, demanding presence Wilfred Owen sensed at the front.
To be true to his vocation as a poet Owen felt he must describe
that "blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit's";
which meant he had to return to France and risk
his
life. This double
duty - to forge a language which will somehow absolve or validate
ahsurd death, and to accept the existential risks involved in doing so
- is, I think, the model for everything that was to follow. "There
exist no words, in any human language," wrote a Hiroshima survivor,
"which can comfort guinea pigs who do not know the cause of their
death." It is precisely the pressure to discover a language adequate ,to
this apparently impossible task which is behind the curious sense of
strain characteristic of nearly all the best and most ambitious work of
this century.
There are, of course, other, more obvious pressures, some of
which I have already touched on: the collapse of traditional values,
impatience with worn-out conventions, the minor pleasures of icono–
clasm and experiment for their own sakes. There is also the impact
of what Marshall McLuhan calls the "electronic culture," which has
so effortlessly usurped both the audience and many of the functions
of the "formal" highbrow arts. But beyond all these, and becoming
continually more insistent as the atrocities have grown in size and
frequency, has been the absolute need to find an artistic language
