PARTISAN REVIEW
355
what he knows. But the intelligence required is essentially different
from that of classical
art.
It is provisional, dissatisfied, restless.
As
D. H. Lawrence said of his own free verse:
"It
has no finish.
It
has
no satisfying stability, satisfying for those who like the immutable.
None of
this.
It
is the instant; the quick." What is involved, then,
is an artistic intelligence working at full pitch to produce not settled
classical harmonies but the tentative, flowing, continually improvised
balance of life itself. But because such a balance is always precarious,
work of this kind entails a good deal of risk. And because the artist
is committed to truths of his inner life often to the point of acute
discomfort,
it
becomes riskier still.
It
is here that post-Arnoldian art joins with what I have called
the dimension of absurd death: the artistic revolution of the last
decade and a half has occurred, I think, as a response to totalitarian–
ism in Mailer's sense of the word: not as so many isolated facts out
there in another country and another political system for which
somebody else is responsible, but as part of the insidious atmosphere
we breathe. The nihilism and destructiveness of the self - of which
psychoanalysis has made us sharply and progressively more aware–
turns out to be an accurate reflection of the nihilism of our own
violent societies. Since we can't, apparently, control it on the outside,
politically, we can at least
try
to control it in ourselves, artistically.
The operative word is "control." The Extremist poets are com–
mitted to psychic exploration out along that friable edge that divides
the tolerable and the intolerable; but they are equally committed to
lucidity, precision and a certain vigilant directness of expression. In
this, they have more in common with the taxingly high standards set
by Eliot and the other grandmasters of the nineteen-twenties than
with the Surrealists, who were concerned with the wit, or whimsicality,
of the unconscious. Out of the haphazard, baroque connections of
the mind running without restraints the Surrealists created what is,
essentially, a landscape
art.
In comparison, the Extremist artists are
committed to the stage below this, a stage before what Freud called
"the dream-work" begins. That is, they are committed to the raw
materials of dreams; all the griefs and guilts and hostility which
dreams express only elliptically, by displacement and disguise, they
seek to express directly, poignantly, skillfully and
in
full consciousness.
Extremism,
in
short, has more in common with
psychoanalys~
than
with Surrealism.
