438
PARTISAN REVIEW
that required art as a further ornament and decoration to a life
already golden and gilded? The connection between art and mean–
ing, the making of art and the authentication of civilization was
already in question before the First World War. In its aftermath, the
Dadaists would insist that art was only an artifact of power and
should be caustically nullified, while the post-revolutionary Soviet
artists would deny value to the art object in its entirety and claim
that art had value only if it led to the production of useful works that
would enhance the life of the proletariat. West and East, art was to
be obliterated or else, where pursued, was to be conducted in a spirit
of such radical reconception of the world as to leave all but a handful
of early enthusiasts of Cubism baffled and tormented by the Cubist
refusal of a traditional rendering of the object world. The modernist
critique of literary expressionism was no less devastating: Kafka's
oeuvre,
made up of unfinished stories, each fabulated as a new myth
of the hopeless entrapment, guilt, and confusion of one person,
Franz Kafka, secured a reading of the twentieth-century psyche as
jarring and dislocated in language as was the achievement of Alban
Berg, Anton Webern, and Arnold Schonberg in music, devising as
they did a system of serial expression in which all the permutations
of the twelve tones yield a new music that annihilates and transcends
the formal structure of classicism, in the direction of a previously
unexamined musical language.
The modernist response was not, as it has now become, a given
of the century, taken for granted, grist for the academician, but in
those early days the most painful and brutal of personal decisions.
The artist no longer believed in the possibility of new creation or for
that matter in its efficacy but nonetheless, desperately, persistently,
continued to create. The issue for Kafka, for Schonberg, for Igor
Stravinsky, to mention another, was henceforth how to remove the
work of creation from the welter of subjectivity in which it had been
mired by the ego-asserting confidence of the previous century. Sub–
jectivity had gone far enough in the plastic arts, in music, in litera–
ture and poetry. It was necessary to restore man to his precarious
estate, to affirm his contingency, and to separate the work of art
from any self-deluding ratification of the human being as the suffi–
cient measure of genius and worth. Already with millions dead
in the Great War, the suspicion of the prewar generation - Rilke
over Stefan George, Rodin over Daumier, Picasso over Dela–
croix, Thomas Mann over Flaubert, Schonberg and Stravinsky over
Mahler and Berlioz-authenticates a direction in which the auton-
