354
A. ALVAREZ
Its only end is the adventitious cutting off that comes when a heart
bursts, or a sun. Still, the individual "piece" of art must be ob–
jective in some sense; it lies on the page, on the canvas. Practically
speaking, what is a limitless object?
It
is a fragment; a random
fragment; a fragment without intrinsic form, shading off in all
di–
rections into whatever lies beyond. And this is what our art has
become in the past two decades: random, fragmentary, and open–
ended.
Hence in literature any particular "work" is linear rather than
circular in structure, extensible rather than terminal in intent, and
at any given point inclusive rather than associative in substance; at
least these are its tendencies. And it is autobiographical, that goes
without saying. It is an act of self-creation by an artist within the
tumult of experience.
The break with classicism has produced, then, not a new form of
Romanticism - which remains too cozy, self-indulgent and uncritical
to be adequate to the realities of the period - but an Existential art,
as tense and stringent as its classic forebears but far less restricted,
since its subject is precisely those violent confusions from which both
the Augustans and the Neoclassicists of the last hundred years with–
drew nervously and with distaste.
For example, a poem by T. S. Eliot is opaque; it gathers the
light into itself and gives back only the image of its own perfection.
In
contrast, a poem by Robert Lowell, though no less carefully con–
structed, is like a transparent filter; you look through it to see the
man as he is. Similarly, in
The Armies of the Night,
Norman Mailer
takes a fragment of contemporary history in which he played a part
(the March on the Pentagon in October, 1967), presents it, like a
good journalist, in all its attendant farce, muddle and political jostling,
and yet at the same time transforms it into an internal scenario in
which all the conflicting, deadening facts take on a sharpened coher–
ence as reflections in the somewhat bloodshot eye of his own develop–
ing consciousness as an artist. The politics of power are replaced
by the politics of experience.
None of this absolves the artist from the labor of art - which
is one reason, among many, why the confessional poets who follow
Ginsberg seem so sad. On the contrary, the more directly an artist
confronts the confusions of experience, the greater the demands on
his intelligence, control and a certain watchfulness; the greater, too,
the imaginative reserves he must tap so as not to weaken or
falsify
