PARTISAN REVIEW
179
game, language game - harmless and without commitment, shock
which no longer shocks, and thus succumbing?
The radical literature which speaks in formless semispontaneity
and directness loses with the aesthetic form the political content,
while this content erupts in the most highly formed poems of Allen
Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. The most uncompromising, most extreme
indictment has found expression in a work which precisely because
of its radicalism repels the political sphere:
in
the work of Samuel
Beckett, there is no hope which can be translated into political tenns,
the aesthetic form excludes all accommodation and leaves literature
as literature. And as literature, the work carries one single message:
to make an end with things as they are. Similarly, the revolution
is
in Bertolt Brecht's most perfect lyric rather than in his political plays,
and in Alban Berg's
WQzzeck
rather than in today's antifascist opera.
This is the passing of antiart, the reemergence of form. And with
it we find a new expression of the inherently subversive qualities of
the aesthetic dimension, especially beauty as the sensuous appearance
of the idea of freedom. The delight of beauty and the horror of
politics; Brecht has condensed it in five lines:
Within me there
is
a struggle between
The delight about the blooming apple tree
And the horror about a Hitler speech.
But only the latter
Forces me to my desk
[Translated from the German by Reinhard Lettau]
The image of the tree remains present
in
the poem which is "en–
forced" by a Hitler speech. The horror of that which is marks the
moment of creation, is the origin of the poem which celebrates the
beauty of the blooming apple tree. The political dimension remains
committed to the other, the aesthetic dimension, which,
in
turn,
as–
sumes political value. This happens not only
in
the work of Brecht
(who is already considered a "classic") but
also
in
some of the
radical songs of protest of today - or yesterday, especially in the
lyrics and music of Bob Dylan. Beauty returns, the "soul" returns:
not the one in food and "on ice" but the old and repressed one,
the one that was in the
Lied,
in the melody:
cantabile.
It becomes
