358
A.
ALVAREZ
genuinely advanced
art
from the fashionable crowd of pseudo-avant–
gardes. On these tenns, an artist could live to
be
as old as Robert
Frost or Ezra Pound and yet still, in his work,
be
a suicide of the
imagination.
I am suggesting, in short, that the
best
modem artists have in
fact done what that Hiroshima survivor thought impossible: out of
their private tribulations they have invented a public "language which
can comfort guinea pigs who do not know the cause of their death."
That, I think, is the ultimate justification of the highbrow arts in an
era in which they themselves seem less and less convinced of their
claims to attention and even existence. They survive morally by
be–
coming, in one way or another, an imitation of death in which their
audience can share; to achieve this the artist, in his role of scape–
goat, finds himself testing out
his
own death and vulnerability for
and on himself.
It may
be
objected that the arts are also about many other
things, often belligerently so; for example, that they are preoccupied
as never before with sex. But I wonder
if
sexual explicitness isn't a
diversion, almost a fonn of conservatism.
Mter
all, that particular
battle was fought and won by Freud and Lawrence in the first
quarter of
this
century. The old guard may grumble and occasionally
sue, but in a society where
Portnoy's Complaint
is a record-breaking
best seller sexual permissiveness is no longer an issue. The real re–
sistance now
is
to an art which forces its audience to recognize and
accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, the facts not of life but of
death and violence, absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified and
in–
escapably part of the society we have created. "There is only one
liberty," wrote Camus in
his
Notebooks,
"to come to tenns with death.
Mter which, everything
is
possible."
