352
A. ALVAREZ
posthumous, immobile lives, stripped of all personal qualities, ap–
petites, possessions and hope. All that remains to them is language;
they palliate their present sterility by dim, ritual invocations of a
time when things still happened and their motions still stirred. The
fact that Beckett's detachment and impeccable timing produces com–
edy out of this universal impotence only serves, in the end, to make
the desolation more complete. By refusing even the temptation to
tragedy and by stylizing his language to the point of minimal survival,
he makes his world impregnable.
As
a - presumably -lapsed Cath–
olic he is creating a world which God has abandoned, as life might
abandon some burnt-out star. To express this terminal morality he
uses a minimal art, stripped of all artifact.
It
is the complement of
Borowski's concentration camp stories, and equally deprived; the to–
talitarianism of the inner world.
It is here that Totalitarian and Extremist
Art
meet. When Nor–
man Mailer calls the modern, statistical democracies of the West
"totalitarian," he is not implying that the artist is bound and muzzled
and circumscribed as he would be in a dictatorship - a vision not
even the most strenuous paranoia could justify. But he is implying
that mass democracy, mass morality and the mass media thrive
in–
dependently of the individual, who joins them only at the cost of
at least a partial perversion of his instincts and insights. He pays for
his social ease with what used to be called his soul- his discrimina–
tions, his uniqueness,
his
psychic energy,
his
self. Add to that the
ubiquitous sense ,of violence erupting continually at the edges of per–
ception: local wars, riots, demonstrations and political assassinations,
each seen, as it were, out of the corner of the eye as just another
news feature on the television screen. Add, finally, the submerged
but never quite avoidable knowledge of the possibility of ultimate
violence, known hopefully as the balance of terror. The result
is
totalitarianism not as a political phenomenon but as a state of mind.
"To extreme sicknesses, extreme remedies," said Montaigne. In
this instance the remedy has been an artistic revolution as radical
and profound as that which took place after Wordsworth and Cole–
ridge published the
Lyrical Ballads
or ,Eliot brought out
T he Waste
Land'.
In a sense it completes the revolution which began with the
first Romantics' insistence on the primacy of their subjective vision.
The implied ideal of spontaneity was acceptable in principle but not
