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A.
ALVAREZ
with which to grasp in the imagination the historical facts of
this
century; a language, that is, for "the destructive element," the dimen–
sion of unnatural, premature death.
Inevitably, it is the language of mourning. Or rather, the arts
take on the function of mourning, breaking down that "psychic
numbness" which follows any massive immersion in death: "The
books we need," wrote Kafka in a letter to
his
friend Oscar Pollack,
"are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer
like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make
us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest
remote from all human habitation - a book should serve as the axe
for the frozen sea within us." Clearly, books of
this
order
will
not
be written simply by invoking the atrocities - a gesture which usually
guarantees nothing but rhetoric and the cheapening of all those
mil–
lions of deaths. What is required is something a good deal more
difficult and individual: the creative act itself, which gives shape,
coherence and some kind of gratuitous beauty to all those vague
depressions and paranoias art is heir to. Freud responded to the First
World War by positing a death instinct beyond the pleasure principle;
for the artist, the problem is to create a language which is both be–
yond the pleasure principle and, at the same time, pleasurable.
This ultimately is the pressure forcing the artist into the role of
scapegoat. In order to evolve a language of mourning which
will
release all ' those backed-up guilts and obscure hostilities he shares
with
his
audience, he puts himself at risk and explores his own
vul–
nerability; it is as though he were testing out his own death in
his
imagination - symbolically, tentatively and with every escape hatch
open. "Suicide," said Camus, "is prepared within the silence of the
heart, as is a great work of
art."
Increasingly, the corollary
also
seems
to
be
true: under certain conditions of stress, a great work of art
is
a kind of suicide.
There are two opposite ways into
this
dimension of death. The
first is through what might be called Totalitarian Art (which is, in–
cidentally, different in kind from traditional art in a totalitarian
s0-
ciety). It tackles the historical situation frontally, more or less brutal–
ly, in order to create a human perspective for a dehumanizing pro–
cess. The second is what I have called elsewhere Extremist
Art:
the
