The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Reflections on Modern Culture, Language and

Literature
Author(s): IHAB HASSAN
Source: The American Scholar , Summer, 1963, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Summer, 1963), pp. 463-
464, 466, 468, 470, 472, 474, 476, 478, 480, 482, 484
Published by: The Phi Beta Kappa Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41210064

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 The Revolving Bookstand ,,,,,,,,,,,

The Dismemberment of Orpheus

Reflections on Modern Culture, Language and Literature

IHAB HASSAN

If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion
between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that
representation.
- Antonin Artaud

Modern literature is the enormous dream the force of desire. My specific aim will be
of men haunted by the mortality of their to comment on the strategy of that litera-
ture in its labor to derive life from enforced
gods. But in dreams, the poet said, begin
deprivation. The strategy, it will be seen,
responsibilities. The enormity of modern
leads literature from radical distortions of
literature springs from the soul of men, and
form to a parody of self-repudiation, and
moves in the very life of their culture. With
this knowledge begin all responsibilities.
from the latter to a verbal equivalent of
Yet most of us look upon the mangled fig-silence. Modern literature protests against
ures who possess the literary imaginationthe
of idea of culture; the ultimate protest of
our time as if they were an alien breed. language is silence; the literature of silence
Even madmen know better than thus to entertains wordlessness for its future. This
elude their fate. Antonin Artaud was at is the stark outline.
times mad, and he saw the point with piti- The outline is stark and the statements
less clarity: "What is most importantexcessive;... is our road may not lead to Blake's
not so much to defend a culture whose ex- palace of wisdom. Yet excess is not the only
istence has never kept man from going hun- risk we run. In a particular sense, the liter-
gry [he was not thinking of our bellies],atureas of silence is not simply extreme; it is
to extract, from what is called culture, ideas
also subversive. For without language, his-
whose compelling force is identical with tory and society cease to exist, and civiliza-
that of hunger." tion reverts to aboriginal darkness. Accord-
My general purpose in this essay is to ingre- to the Gospel, in the Beginning was the
Word, and human life became possible
flect on a strain of modern literature which,
when the Word was made Flesh. Is the
in its agonistic relation to culture, endeav-
human race, then, which has come such a
ors to extract from it the force of hunger,
long and terrible way through the passages
О Born in Cairo, Egypt, IHAB HASSAN came of prehistory, to be now turned back by
to the United States in 1946 and is now an
some erratic dream? Quite to the contrary.
American citizen. A professor of EnglishModern
at literature may be extreme and its
Wesleyan University, he has written extensively
on modern literature and is the author of
dreams outrageous. But it is conceived in
the interests of life, which always progress
Radical Innocence: The Contemporary Ameri-
through
can Novel. He is currently, on his second Gug- contradictions. Two major trends,
genheim Fellowship, writing a book on litera- now in uneasy unison and now in
working
ture and disorder. exuberant opposition, testify to this fact.

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

The first trend reveals a growing Orpheus pays for his "crime" against Dio-
disaffec-
tion with modern civilization, nysus a profound
with dismemberment. But the act of
grumbling which expresses itself, dismemberment
rather su- is also a crime against
perficially, in adolescent violence, Apollo, patron of culture, that demands
hipster
anarchy and Oriental mysticism. bothThe
retribution
sec- and restitution. The Mae-
ond trend, intimately related to nadsthe first,
cannot wash their bloody hands in the
reveals a growing distrust of language river Heliconaswhich
a dives in horror into
medium of expression, and a the distrust of
ground; in one account, they are turned
form, which has impelled certain into twisted
modern trees. This is retribution. And
writers to cultivate chance and disorder as the head of Orpheus continues to sing, and
legitimate elements of the artistic process,where his limbs are buried by the Muses,
or to evolve patterns of non-sense that may the nightingales sing sweeter than any-
be called antiform. The distrust of languagewhere else in the world. This is restitution.
reflects a more radical distrust of reason, Retribution and restitution; meanwhile, the
history and social organization. At bottom, primordial conflict continues unresolved.
the revolt is directed against those insepara- I take the myth of Orpheus to be a para-
ble twins: Authority and Abstraction. For ble of the artist in our time. The powers
authority in social life and abstraction of in Dionysus, which our civilization has so
language are corollaries: they are com- harshly repressed, threaten to erupt with a
mandments issued to the flesh, coercing pri-vengeance. In the process, energy may over-
vate experience into objective order. The
whelm order; language may turn into a
two trends, we see, are aspects of the same
howl, a cackle, a terrible silence; form may
quenchless feud. What is that feud? be mangled as ruthlessly as the poor body
Here I revert to the parable of my title.
of Orpheus was. And yet the haunting ques-
tion remains, now as on that wild day in
It is the death of Orpheus, first among sing-
the hills of Thrace: must not the head of
ers, that provides a focus to the story. There
are, of course, many versions of the story,
the poet be severed in order that he may
although all are equally gory. Orpheus is
continue to sing? Let me put the question
killed by the Maenads at the behest of even
Di- more bluntly: is it not necessary that
onysus or, in Ovid's version, in a fit of life
un- overwhelm art periodically to insure
controllable jealousy; for since the deaththe
of health, the prevalence, of man? I should
his wife, Eurydice, Orpheus had preferred like to suggest that an affirmative answer to
the company of young men to women. One this question is perhaps more needful at
thing is clear: Orpheus, the supreme maker,
this time than a negative one; and I should
was the victim of an inexorable clash be- also like to propose that we are witnessing
tween the Dionysian principle, representedin modern literature a movement toward
by the frenzied Maenads, and the Apollo- disorder, an attack on form, intended to re-
nian ideal which he, as a poet, venerated.
cover a kind of human innocence. Here I
We do not really need a motive or excuse
end my parable and end my preamble. We
for the murder. The maker of songs of- can move closer to the subject by more spe-
fended the primal forces of life; he is over-
cific cultural, historical and literary analy-
whelmed by them. Ovid describes the scene sis.
thus: The voice of common sense cannot be
Mad fury reigned, and even so, all weapons stilled; it leads to an overwhelming ques-
tion. Why should the disaffection with civi-
Would have been softened by the singer's music,
But there was other orchestration: flutes lization, in our age, be so acute as to drive
Shrilling, and trumpets braying loud, andliterature to such extreme measures? The
drums,
implication is always that intellectuals are
Beating of breasts, and howling, so the lyre
Was overcome, and then at last the stones
baroque worriers, addicted to a pessimism
Reddened with blood, the blood of the singer,which they impose on their age. Possibly so,
heard although one suspects that our asylums and
No more through all that outcry. penitentiaries are full of men who did not

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

worry enough. The question, however,quitestill

as relentless as both Brown and Freud
stands, and until a black Syntopiconmake it out to be - is that repression begets
of our
maladies is compiled, we can onlycivilization,
answer civilization begets more repres-
sion,
it obliquely. Let us begin with a few more repression begets abstraction,
scat-
tered and unlikely names. What and drove
abstraction begets death. We are mov-
ing along
Henry Miller to take as his motto the in- the road of pure intelligence
which, as Ferenczi thought, is a principle
scription: "When I hear the word Culture,
of madness. Is any salvation for the race
I reach for my revolver?" What prompts
Nikolai Berdyaev to say, in The Fate ofBrown offers this:
possible?
Man in the Modern World, "What is tak-
ing place in the world to-day is not a crisis The human ego must face the Dionysian
of humanism . . . , but the crisis of human- reality, and therefore a great work of self-trans-
formation lies ahead of it. For Nietzsche was
ity"? And what leads Robert Ardrey, con-
right in saying that the Apollonian preserves,
templating the fate of man among ancient the Dionysian destroys, self-consciousness. As
fossils and murderous bones, to conclude
long as the structure of the ego is Apollonian,
thus his African Genesis: "Man is neither Dionysian experience can only be bought at the
unique nor central nor necessarily here to price of ego-dissolution. Nor can the issue be
stay. . . . The power of conscience, blind,resolved by a "synthesis" of the Apollonian
anti-rational, and acting in alliance withand the Dionysian ego. Hence the late Nietzsche
the weapons fixation, will be the responsi-preaches Dionysus

ing a Dionysian ego is immens

ble force if self-annihilation be the human
outcome"? Such statements, like grapeshot,signs that it is already under w
cern the Dionysian witches'
penetrate the flesh in many places. The
heavals of modern history - in
malady of man is antique; it is compounded
de Sade and the politics of Hit
by the malady of culture; both may bediscern in the romantic reacti
working toward an unholy climax. Dionysus into consciousness.
Grapeshot scatters widely. Freud, how-
ever, probes the mind with a dagger. InFor the neo-Freudians, then
Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud repression, abstraction, and
shows that society rests on instinctual re-the construction of a Dio
pression. This much we all know. What wetheir view, language ultim
do not always realize is that every act of re-"the natural speech of the b
nunciation in our lives prepares the way
adopted from Rilke.
for further renunciations. The matter does But the fact that Brown cites Nietzsche
not end there. Freud goes on to argue thatis also relevant; for Nietzsche is indeed the
civilization, in its innermost dynamic, re-crucial figure in the intellectual history of
quires more and more repression. The psy-our time. He is the ancestor of both Freud-
chic toll of this process is compounded.ians and Existentialists, and he is the living
The implications of this process for mediator between the two movements.
literature are crucial. In a shocking andNietzsche's analysis of Western civilization
important book, Life Against Death, Nor- offers, therefore, a parallel argument to
man O. Brown begins where Freud ends.Freud's, and one that is perhaps even more
Arguing that all sublimation entails a cer- compelling. For Nietzsche, the root of evil
tain degree of negation of the life instincts,in the modern world is not simply repres-
Brown concludes thus: "The negative mo-sion, which is wholly instinctual, but also
ment in sublimation is plain in the insepa-nihilism, which acknowledges the conscious
rable connection between symbolism (inhuman drive to meaning. From the depths
language, science, religion, and art) andof the nineteenth century he proclaimed
abstraction. Abstraction, as Whitehead has God dead, and he saw that the crisis of
taught us, is a denial of the living organ ofmodern man was a crisis of values. "Why
experience, the living body as a whole. . . ."has the advent of nihilism become neces-
The logic then - and I do not know if it issary?" Nietzsche asks in The Will to Power.

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

And he answers: "because nihilism repre-

depths of crime. As Erich Heller put it, in
The
sents the ultimate logical conclusion of Ironic
our German: "Art tragically la-
great values and ideals - because wements
mustthe loss of its own mystery in
Doctor
experience nihilism before we can find Faustus, and gaily reports it to the
out
what values these 'values' really had.
cosmicWepolice in Felix Krull." Gaily is the
require, at some time, new values." word,For
a dreadful gaiety. Ultimately, the
face of disorder is comic, and the writer
him, as for contemporary Existentialists,
the fundamental problem is obviouslywho wishes
one to capture its lineaments finds
himself in the position of the notorious
of meaning. Unlike most of them, however,
Cretan,
Nietzsche was a Utopian. His solution restedwho by affirming that all Cretans
were liars,
on the affluence of life in the Superman. In denied the truth in the process
that Nietzschean view, the ideal of of language
stating it, or maintained the truth in the
becomes action, becomes gesture, since process the
of denying it - no one can tell ex-
creation of meaning is less a verbal than
actly a
which. This is the silence of self-irony.
vital process. With Camus, self -irony raises the question
Obviously, then, the prophecies of Uto- of ontological doubt. In Resistance, Rebel-
pians, whether Freudian or Existentialist, lion and Death Camus says, "The hatred of
minimize the role of sublimation, and art, of which our society provides such fine
therefore of language. The human Diony- examples, is so effective today because it is
sus or the Superman of the future is simplykept alive by artists themselves. The doubt
not a loquacious creature. The future, how-felt by the artists who preceded us con-
ever, is a long way off, and the business of their own talent. The doubt felt by
cerned
men is neither to rush history nor to end it of today concerns the necessity of
artists
but simply to participate in it. Literaturetheir art, hence their very existence." What
always calls our attention to the present in nature of this doubt that ravages the
is the
which we participate. It is, therefore,artist
the and subverts his art? In the same essay
response of literature to our age, an age of
Camus states: "To create today is to create
unusual negation, that must engage our im-
dangerously. Any publication is an act, and
mediate attention. that act exposes one to the passions of an
What is the response of literature to the
age that forgives nothing

culture of abstraction and repression? Let for all those who cannot live without art
me cite three modern authors who are as and what it signifies, is merely to find out
different in age and background as possi- how, among the police forces of so many
ble: Thomas Mann, Albert Camus and ideologies . . . the strange liberty of creation
Norman Mailer. Their common theme is is possible." The phrase "police forces of so
danger, the danger to human life, themany even ideologies" subsumes all the repres-
graver danger to art. In two of his master-
sive forms that the human intelligence has
pieces, Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus,
evolved in our time. The primary aim of
these
Mann portrays an artist-hero who trifles, at police forces is to exercise their con-
his peril, with total depravity. Like Or-in depth, on the instinctual impulses
trol,
pheus, poor Aeschenbach is destroyed of man,
by and in breadth, on the existential
the passions he had long neglected. Yet freedom
his of his actions. Apollonian Form
head sings on with the voice of Mann finally
him- becomes Abstract Authority. We
self. The voice is one of consummate irony,
should not be surprised, therefore, to dis-
cover that the doubt of the artist to which
rising only to cancel itself in that self-par-
ody which Mann, in his later years, be- refers is the doubt concerning his
Camus
lieved to be the only hope of art. very
The being, his identity not merely as a
knowledge of Leverkuhn is even more maker
de- but also as a man. The reaction
monic; we are not surprised to discover tothat
this ontological doubt, I have already
Doctor Faustus incarnates the theme of art hinted, is twofold: the man rebels, and the
on the verge of its own impossibility. Later
artist plays at repudiating his art. The close
still, Mann ventured into the chartless connection between these two aspects of re-

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

volt - what the New Critics, may they

grow rest
a personality which in the end enables
in peace, call the biographicalman to transcend
fallacy - is art." But the end is not
demonstrated by Norman Mailer. In are
near. We "Theall still very much in need of
White Negro" Mailer describes art.the
The "hip-
best we can do, as Mailer declared,
ster" as "the man who knows that if our is to accept the terms of uncertainty, even
collective condition is to live with the in-
of death, which are a part of our condition.
This has been the strategy of literature in
stant death by atomic war, relatively quick
death by the State ... or with a slow death
our time. It is a temporary strategy; it may
by conformity . . . why then the only even life-be temporizing. Literature recoils from
giving answer is to accept the terms theof withering authority of the new Apollo;
death, to live with death as immediate but it does not surrender itself wholly to
danger, to divorce oneself from society, thetofrenzy of Dionysus. It only feigns to do
exist without roots, to set out on that un-
so. It employs self-irony and self-parody, as
in the novels of Mann and Camus; it de-
charted journey into the rebellious impera-
tives of the self. In short, whether the velops,
life as in the works of Beckett or Genet,
is criminal or not, the decision is to encour-
forms that are antiforms; it cultivates a new
age the psychopath in oneself, to exploreliteralism, as in the novels of Nathalie
that domain of experience where security Sarraute or Robbe-Grillet; it evolves the
is boredom and therefore sickness, and poetic
one surrealism of John Hawkes and
exists in the present James Purdy or the coilage improvisations
of William
ously as an artist, the writer must Burroughs;
also live and it sometimes
dangerously as a man. For art, the
entertains risk
a chatty is as the later work
silence
total self-repudiation; for
of man,
Salinger it isLiterature,
does. self- in short, pre-
annihilation. tends to a wordy wordlessness and partici-
The crisis of culture as of literature is pates in the Dionysian denial of language
evident. Literature, in our time, confronts
not with its own flesh but with the irony of
its divided
the abstract and chilling gaze of Apollo, a intelligence.
deity closer to the Newton of Blake thanSo tomuch for the heady response of litera-
the gods of the Greeks, and closer still to to modern culture. Language aspires
ture
to silence and form moves toward anti-
the image of Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor.
Literature confronts Authority, and with-
form. Still, we may find some reassurance
ers. Should it recoil too far back into the in the recognition that the modern phe-
Dionysian sources of energy, should it nomenon
avoid of antiform has a long and honor-
all abstraction and escape all sublimation,
able history, and that it is not, therefore, a
it will have expunged the motive for its monstrous
be- child of the moment. Its ante-
ing. For the Dionysian personality doescedent
not may be called the "open form,"
choose to live vicariously. Nor is it the which
kind is aptly defined by Robert Martin
of personality to escape abuse. We Adams, have in Strains of Discord, as a structure
lived to see the demented hope of Mari-
of meanings that "include a major unre-
netti's Futurism consummated by Hitler.
solved conflict with the intent of displaying
its unresolvedness." An earnest evolutionist
"Come then, seize the pickaxes and ham-
mers! Sap the foundations of the venerable may go so far as to claim that just as litera-
cities. We stand upon the extreme promon- ture seems to have developed from the
tories of the centuries . . . ," Marinetti cried,
mythical to the ironic modes, so do literary
and one visualizes the sullen face of Mars forms seem to develop from closed to open
rising without promise of regeneration. Di- and from open forms to antiforms.
forms,
onysus does not prophesy war. What he distinction between closed and open
The
may prophesy is the complete wedding forms
of is immediately apparent when we
Art and Life, by magic if nothing else. contrast
Per- two plays, Sophocles' Oedipus the
King and Euripides' Bacchae. Adams is
haps this is what Pursewarden, the writer
in Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, meant
right in perceiving that while Oedipus
when he said, "The object of writing is
manages
to to resolve its conflicts and to in-

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

duce a state of partial repose style

in the audi-
there usually is a personal unrest, a com-
ence, The Bacchae refuses to resolve its plex psychology that agitates the form and the
tensions and leaves its audience in a state phrase. When we examine the strains within
the mannerist structure in painting, architec-
of unreleased anguish. As a closed form,
ture, and poetry, we inevitably become aware
Oedipus expresses a conservative and re-
of the scourge - or the quicksand - within the
ligious view of the world, and a collective
mannerist temperament. Mannerism is experi-
sense of experience; as an open form, ment
The with the techniques of disproportion and
Bacchae conveys a radical and skepticaldisturbed balance; with zigzag, spiral shuttling
view of the world, and an individual sense
motion; with space like a vortex or alley; with
of experience. By extrapolating boldlyoblique
on or mobile points of view and strange -
this curve, we can say that as an antiform,
even abnormal - perspectives that yield approx-
imations rather than certainties.
Beckett's Waiting for Godot implies an
ironic and nihilistic view of the world,Isand
not this precisely the feeling we have
a dream-like sense of experience that isabout
en- Shakespeare's later plays, Jacobean
tirely private. drama and Metaphysical poetry, as well as
But we need not adhere to a strict the-
the paintings of Titian, Tintoretto and El
ory of literary evolution in order to realize
Greco?
that between The Bacchae and Waiting The Romantics, of course, went further
for Godot a great number of works toward in unsettling literary forms, haunted
Western literature have revealed a growingas they were by that vague Stimmung, the
sense of disruption, an increasing capacity
craving for the infinite. Faust stands at the
for distortion. Consider, in drama alone, very threshold of the period, an amalgam
the sequence suggested by the following of pagan and Christian influences which
plays: Shakespeare's Hamlet, Goethe's it transmuted, both in structure and theme,
Faust, Büchner's Woyzeck, Kleist's Prinz into a plea for life's outrageous contradic-
Von Homburg, Maeterlinck's Blue Bird, tions - only the dazzling genius of Goethe
Ibsen's Ghosts, Strindberg's A Dream Play, could keep such a drama in artistic control.
Jarry's Ubu Roi, Pirandello's Six Charac- The dark company of Romantic heroes -
ters in Search of An Author, Brecht's Man's Faust, Endymion, Alastor, Don Juan, Ju-
Man, Genet's The Blacks and Ionesco's lien Sorel, Manfred, Axel - were forever
The Killer. Dramatic form seems to move
threatening to break out from the mold
from unresolved tensions to symbolic elu- that contained them, in proud insurrection
siveness, from the latter to surreal or ex- against their makers. The Self had erupted
pressionistic contortion, and finally comesin literature, and so had the dream and the
to rest in absurdity. I limit myself to drama unconscious. Novalis and Nerval, Hoff-
simply to maintain the purity of the illus-mann and Poe, Kleist and Büchner, Cole-
tration. But the movement of form toward
ridge and Keats carried language into the
antiform, despite large and irrefutable midnight
ex- terrain of the soul, or else they
ceptions throughout history, can be ob- cultivated that notorious romantic irony
served in Western art generally. which served to incorporate in every state-
It is probably fair to say that the three ment its own negative. At other times, Ro-
major phases of that development were manticism denied itself the possibilities of
marked by the emergence of Mannerism, harmony or resolution by the perversity of
Romanticism and Modernism. Mannerism
its own spirit. It explored sadism, demon-
was the formal dissolution of the Renais-
ism, cabalism, necrophily, vampirism, and
sance Style. It was, as Wylie Sypher suggests lycanthropy, reaching for a definition of
in Four Stages of Renaissance Style, a man signwhere no human definition could ob-
of strain and irresolution. In Manneristtain. art, It is no wonder that Goethe thought
"the psychological effect diverges fromRomanticism
the to be a form of disease, and
structural logic." Here is Sypher's defini- Hugo identified it with the grotesque. I am
tion of what we mean by an open form: aware, of course, that I am emphasizing the
Behind the technical ingenuities of mannerist nocturnal impulse of the movement. But
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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

that was precisely the impulse from ature,

whichthe over-determinacy o
a large part of modern literature derived novels itsseem to carry the scou
energy. It was also the impulse, the guageagonyof Mallarmé and Rim
if you wish, which helped to destroy twentieth
the century. I do not w
classic forms of literature. Mario Praz, that Mallarmé
in influenced Kafka, or Rim-
The Romantic Agony, says, "The baudessence
influenced Joyce, although they may
of Romanticism comes to consist in that well have done so in the mysterious ways of
which cannot be described
the creative process. I wish to suggest that
tic exalts the artist the forms
who of Kafka, like thosenot
does of Mallarmé,
give
material form to his move toward
dreams a kind of semantic
- the absence,
poet ec
static in front of aa total forever ambiguity; and that the forms
blank page, of th
musician who listens Joyce,to like the
those of prodigious
Rimbaud, reach for a con
certs of his soul without semantic fullness, a kind of total statement.
attempting t
translate them into notes. It is romantic to There is an effort, in the first, to dissolve
consider concrete expression as a decadence, reality, and, in the second, to reconstruct
a contamination." Here, then, is the begin- the whole of it. (In this respect, Beckett is
ning of silence, a literature without words far closer to Kafka than he is to his former
-or to be more precise, a literature thatemployer, Joyce.) Meantime, French litera-
disdains all but the most primitive andture was steering crazily between these two
magical use of language. The French Sym-modes of antiform, veering now toward the
bolists, who are, of course, the direct an-one and now toward the other as it rushed
cestors of the modern movement, exemplify through Dadaism, Surrealism, Existential-
this trend clearly. Mallarmé's sonnets de- ism, and, most recently, the New Literal-
vised the syntax of self-abolition; Rim- ism, or Roman Concret, of Butor, Sarraute,
baud's Illuminations scrambled the deno- Mauriac and Robbe-Grillet. It is, of course,
tation of language in an effort to derange hopeless to discriminate adequately be-
the senses; and Lautréamonťs Maldoror tween all these movements in an article of
opened the way for surrealism. It may well this scope; our survey must remain a blitz
be, as Brown claims, that in Romanticism through the literary history of four centu-
ries.
Dionysus reentered the consciousness of
literature. It is more certain that in Ro-
I do not think, however, that this survey
manticism the dual retreat from language
will have been totally vain if we recognize
became evident: first, in the ironic and self-
that the impulse first to distort, then to in-
effacing manner of Mallarmé, and, second,
hibit, language is a matter of long standing.
in the indiscriminate and surrealistic man- It defines a strain - a single strain, to be sure,
ner of Rimbaud. In one, language aspires
but a significant one - in Western litera-
to Nothing; in the other it aspires to All.ture. This strain is now confirmed by a re-
Both are manners of silence, formal disrup-newed urge to withdraw from the word.
tions of the relation between language and Ironically, this urge has been sanctioned
reality. It is these two modes, compounded not by poetry but science, not by Dionysus
in strange ratios, that account for the de-but Apollo, not in the interests of the flesh
velopment of antiform in modern literature but in the interests of abstraction. In an
from Kafka to Beckett. important article entitled "The Retreat
With Modernism, organized chaos reigns;from the Word," George Steiner clarifies
or as Yeats put it, "the center cannot hold; the point. He writes:
/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
. . . until the seventeenth century, the sphere of
/ The blood-dimmed tide is loosed
language encompassed nearly the whole of ex-
is impossible to convey in a few pages the
perience and reality; today, it comprises a nar-
extent of disintegration rower
anddomain.
reintegration
It no longer articulates, or is
in the major works of ourrelevant to, all majorIn
century. Ger-
modes of action, thought,
man literature, the frightening indetermi-
and sensibility. Large areas of meaning and
nacy of Kafka's works and,
praxisin
nowEnglish liter-
belong to such non-verbal languages

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

as mathematics, symbolic logic, and formulas of

literary scene, it becomes quickly obvious
chemical or electronic relation. Other areas be-
that the attack on form and the retreat
long to the sub-languages or anti-languages of
from language take on a peculiar hue in
non-objective art and musique concrete. TheAmerica. The hue is essentially comic, and
world of words has shrunk.
it colors the genres of drama, poetry and
This, of course, is largely true. The modern
fiction. I shall focus mainly on the last.
ideologies of men as diverse as Marx, Freud The new comic spirit in American litera-
and Wittgenstein have all helped to dimin- ture attends a special awareness of reality,
ish the powers of language to encompass a new sense of error and incongruity. It
reality. But Mr. Steiner, unites horror and slapstick, realism and
I fear, is an Apol-
lonian himself, albeit oneof the classical, surrealism, in the most antic manner. Writ-
anthropomorphic rather than the modern, ers nowadays seem anxious to respond to
dehumanized variety. He deplores the statethe incoherence of life, to its openness and
of language in literate society, and thus absurdity. They are relearning the old art
concludes: "that civilization on which of improvisation; they are cultivating the
Apollo looks no more shall not long en-
picaresque and the fantastic modes. Know-
dure." It is my feeling, in this strident ing era
how outrageous facts can be, they do
of over-communication, that we are more not pretend to subdue the intractable stuff
likely to perish by the word than by ofthe
reality with a Jamesian flourish or a
sword, and least of all to perish by a mythical
loving symbol. Random operations and
silence. But I do not wish to press theradical point distortions are accepted in litera-
very hard; contemporary literature, turefar
not simply as a source of humor but
from abdicating its role as a shaper also of hu-
as a critique of social goals and tradi-
man consciousness, has accepted the chal-
tions. Chance, which defies the rigid pre-
lenge of the enemy. It has, that is, embraceddictability of contemporary life, restores a
the retreat from the word in order to renew measure of individual freedom; and distor-
the life of the culture that nourishes it. tion defies the habitual response to the
world we live in. This is sometimes carried
This development is so recent that it does
not yet carry the authority of a major
so far as to reveal an anarchic impulse
masked
writer. Perhaps its clearest reflection is in in tomfoolery. The clownish ele-
that remarkable international movement ment can be sensed in the theatre of Albee
called the Theatre of the Absurd which in-and Gelber, the poetry of Corso and Fer-
cludes under one jaunty rubric the works linghetti, the fiction of Kerouac and Bur-
of Beckett, Artaud, Genet, Adamov, Ionesco,
roughs. But it is by no means confined to
Arrabal, Pinter, Gelber and Albee. No mat-efforts of the Beats or their associates; it is
ter what we may think of it as an art formequally present in such works as Thomas
- and I think a good deal of it - we must Berger's Reinhart in Love, Joseph Heller's
recognize that the movement expresses, in-Catch-22, J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger
Man, John Hawkes's The Cannibal, Saul
directly, nothing less than the desire to re-
deem Western values. Although the move- Bellow's Henderson the Rain King or
ment may not resurrect Dionysus on the James Purdy's Malcolm. The new comedy,
which combines boisterousness and bitter-
stage before our astonished eyes, Martin
Esslin is right when he says, "it is in thisness, is really an attempt to restore sanity
striving to communicate a basic and as yet through madness or buffoonery. Above all,
undissolved totality of perception, and in- the new comedy seeks to preserve the health
tuition of being, that we can find a key of to the community through a qualified toler-
the devaluation and disintegration of lan- ance of disorder. Might not the dismember-
guage in the Theatre of the Absurd." ment of Orpheus prove, after all, to be a
Let me end with literary examples some- comic event?
what more detailed than any we have The connection between the new comedy
viewed so far, and also closer to our situa-and new antiforms can be illustrated by
tion in America. In reviewing the current three recent works of fiction: Hawkes's The

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

child
Cannibal, Salinger's Seymour: An through the novel, just as Zizendorf
Introduc-
tion, and Burroughs's Naked Lunch.
stalks his preyI below. At the end, the luna-
have chosen these works because they devours
tic literally all the child, and Zizen-
possess a certain originality that dorf kills the
is not verysoldier. All men are cannibals,
widely or wisely recognized, and because,
whether in love or in hate. A cold frenzy
different as they are, each represents permeates the novel which telescopes the
a par-
ticular manner of tampering events withof form.
1914 and 1945, dispelling the so-
Furthermore, I consider them all to be lidity of the known world with diabolic ir-
comic and surrealistic works: comic, in relevance
my and implacable poetry. And yet
sense of the word, because they acknowl- the book remains a tangled parable, hard,
edge the open, indeterminate or absurd ruthless
ele- and comic, of the modern world.
Its form crystallizes all those distortions
ment in human experience, and surrealistic
because they tilt and distort the surfaceprefigured
of in the flux of man's earliest and
reality in order to express it. blackest recollections. And its language re-
John Hawkes is a striking and until verts to the syntax of dream or delirium, a
quite recently a much neglected writer.crafty
He mirror of decomposed consciousness.
is the author of seven novels and novelettes,
The act of decomposition is far more
of which the best may still be The Canni-whimsical in the work of Salinger. Zooey,
bal, one of the deepest books to come outRaise
of High the Roof Beam, Carpenters
World War Two. Like D juna Barnes and or Seymour: An Introduction present a
Flannery O'Connor, Hawkes is a specialist curious difficulty to the unwary critic.
in the gothic and grotesque, and his humor Many feel that the embarrassing manner-
is the grim humor of nightmares. He un- isms of these stories - their garrulousness,
derstands the leering comedy of evil, and convolutions, private jokes and sly asides -
has written, "there is no pathetic fun or
betray the fumbling efforts of Salinger to
mournful frolic like our desire. The con- render an experience he has not yet man-
summation of the sparrow's wings." He has aged to master. I am not of that opinion;
also said, "If the true purpose of the novelI consider the style of these novelettes to be
is to assume a significant shape and to ob-an approximation of comic sur-realism, mo-
tivated by a sacramental notion of silence.
jectify the terrifying similarity between the
unconscious desires of the solitary man and Let me explain. In his earlier work, the
the disruptive needs of the visible world, dramatic gestures of Salinger's fiction were
then the satiric writer, running maliciously
defined by the poles of love and of squalor.
at the head of the mob and creating the
When the gestures aspired to love, or to
shape of his meaningful psychic paradox pureas religious expression, language reached
into silence. When the gestures revealed
he goes, will serve best the novel's purpose."
In The Cannibal, the style of Hawkes their purely squalid or satiric content, lan-
moves into the twilight region between the guage moved toward sentimentality. In re-
rational and absurd. The images are chilly cent years, Salinger has been far more con-
and monstrous. The characters are always cerned with love than with squalor, and
both the language and the antiforms of his
out-of-focus, floating vaguely through a psy-
chic continuum which is neither time nor stories have been conditioned by an ideal
space. The action is frighteningly simple.ofA holiness. The verbal correlative to holi-
German called Zizendorf is intent on kill- ness, in Zen, is often silence. Salinger, how-
ing the one American soldier, Leevey, who ever, is an author, not a Zen master. His
patrols on a motorcycle a third of the entire
task in describing Seymour, a "ringding en-
defeated nation. Both men are equally sin-
lightened man," is to convey in words a life
gle-minded and inhuman. There is a town, that finds its true consummation in a poetry
"shriveled in structure and as decomposedof silence.
as an oxen's tongue black with ants," and The distrust of language is evident in all
there is an insane asylum on a hill. The these
in- later works. In Raise High the Roof
mates go berserk, and one of them stalks a Carpenters, Buddy Glass, the narra-
Beam,
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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

tor, is comforted only by the tiny Cultivating,

deaf-mute as it were, his radical insuf-
relative of the bride. Buddy says withthe
ficiency, dis-
writer, like Seymour playing
gust, "It was a day, God knows,marbles, not only must of
try not to aim, must try not
rampant signs and symbols buttoof wildly
try. This is perhaps just what Salinger,
extensive communication via the written in this loose and baggy monster of a narra-
word." The profanation of languagetive, andseeks to dramatize. Unpretentious bou-
spirit are ubiquitous - and identical.quets The of "early-blooming parentheses" are
climax of the story comes when Buddyoffered con- to the reader; witty exhortations
fesses to the deaf-mute, that is, to unhear- and knowing allusions to Salinger himself,
ing ears, the truth about Seymour which he who masquerades as Buddy, follow. "Oh,
had withheld from all the others. Seymour's you out there - " Buddy cries to the reader,
own attitude toward language is equally "with your enviable golden silence." The
clear in the story: he believes that the Get- novelette has no conventional structure or
tysburg Address should have been one man climax; the portrait of Seymour turns out
silently shaking his first at the audience on to be a whimsical catalogue of hair, eyes,
the occasion of fifty thousand deaths, and ears or nose. Vignettes follow vignettes al-
he also writes, "the human voice conspires most haphazardly. Language becomes in-
to desecrate every thing on earth." In discriminate, random, fluent beyond words.
Zooey, the same revulsion from language is And when illumination finally comes to
manifest. Buddy says, "The old horror of Buddy - one of only five such experiences
being a professional writer, and the usual in his lifetime - it comes in a purely ac-
stench of words that goes with it, is begin- cidental fashion. Actually, illumination
ning to drive me out of my seat." A crucial comes to Buddy because he had opened
insight he receives while talking to a little himself to accident. Buddy is happy; he has
girl in a supermarket escapes words en- understood himself as a writer because he
tirely, and he can only "go through the mo- has understood, with the help of Seymour,
tions" of writing about it to his brother the value of suspending purpose. Could it
Zooey. The strange paradox of the stories is be that the mannered volubility of the nov-
that their prolixity seems to undermine, elette is intended to dramatize for us the
rather than to confirm, the authority of very same insight: that the happiness of art
words.
may lie in the freedom of language to seek
This is perhaps most obvious in Seymour: some purposeless and indeterminate anti-
An Introduction. In the two earlier stories, form?
language was brilliantly shattered and dif- Indeterminacy is carried further in
fracted: letters, diaries, footnotes, messages Naked Lunch. This shocking work is some-
scrawled on bathroom mirrors and quota- times considered the underground master-
tions inscribed on beaverboard, telephone piece of the Beat generation. (In last year's
conversations and endless dialogue dis- Edinburgh Festival, writers as different as
persed the power of the word, tilting and Norman Mailer and Mary McCarthy
jumbling the modes of speech. The same praised it highly.) It is, of course, impossi-
practice is exaggerated in Seymour. Buddy, ble to describe Burroughs's book and very
who is again the narrator, calls himself hard to judge it; the mind reels under the
"a thesaurus of undetached prefatory re- impact of its outrageous vision, its de-
marks." The epigraphs to the novelette mented language. The ghastly experiences
testify to the inability of language to of drug addiction, sexual perversion and
cope with love. In the quotation from political crime lie at its center, and they
Kafka, love prevents language from exercis*- seem almost beyond the scope of the human
ing its verbal powers, and, in the quotation imagination, a satirical nightmare which,
from Kierkegaard, language simply revolts like the more shattering works of Swift or
against the author. But the implication is Hieronymus Bosch, must be dreamt to be
that a true artist will accept the subversion believed. In the terrifying metaphor of
of language in the name of a richer art. junk, "the mold of monopoly and posses-
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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

sion," Burroughs seems to haveover

found an
the dangerous act of Orpheus' dismem-
expression for solipsism as well as berment. More than ever, we have much to
social an-
nihilation. The fiend of narcotics devours
preserve in the human heritage, and much
everything in the book, devours even to fear from the madness incarnated in his-
the
diabolic sexuality that enrages the censors.
tory. Men of virtue cannot opt for disor-
The "novel" is finally a testament toder,
theor choose the terrible darkness of un-
insanity of society, the wilfulness of the
consciousness over the light of courage or
human spirit and the futility of language,
devotion. Without language, without form,
a testament of blood and black laughter.
there can be no human cognition, and
"The title means exactly what the words
without cognition of the self as of the
say," Burroughs writes, "Naked lunch - a there can be no light. We should not
world,
frozen moment when everyone sees what revel,
is therefore, as the mindless Maenads
on the end of every fork." did, in the destruction of Orpheus. In his
But the effect of gallows surrealism death,
de- we all die a little. And yet is this not
pends as much on the subject as on alsothe the Christian, indeed the primordial,
paradox of experience: that in symbolic
style of the work. The style is unstrung,
berserk, splintered. At times, it seems a there is renewed life, and in pro-
death
product of what Burroughs calls "The visional
Cut destruction there is the promise of
Up Method" which goes back to the creation?
sur-
As a student of literature, I have de-
realist antics of Tristan Tzara. Burroughs
describes the method thus: scribed a trend toward formlessness and
toward wordlessness. But in my view, a
Method is simple: Take a page or more or
critic cannot hold back his moral commit-
less of your own writing or from any writer liv-
ment; he must also stand forth to testify. I
ing and or dead. Any written or spoken words.
Cut into sections with scissors or switch blade as therefore add to my description something
preferred and rearrange the sections. Looking more than a statement and less than a pre-
away. Now write out the result
scription. I add a plea: that we extend a
Applications of cut up method
little of ourare literally
sympathy to the ordeal of mod-
unlimited cut out from time limits. Old word
ern literature, that ordeal by dismember-
lines keep you in old word slots. Cut your way
ment which is our very own. We live in an
out. Cut paper cut film cut tape. Scissors or
age of organized chaos, and we have more
switch blade as preferred. Take it to cut city.
to fear from organization than from chaos.
There is the method, and there the ra- The desire to thaw the frozen patterns of
tionale: "cut your way out!" Neumann's our life, to open the forms of our literature
theory of games or the random spirit of Zen or of our society, is not merely an artistic
are equally valid in freeing man from pre- aspiration; it is a moral necessity. There is
determined forms, from language itself as so much that we have allowed habits and
we have understood it for several millenia fears to exclude from our love; the human
of history. Hawkes twists and distorts,
reach is shrunken. Yet life still beckons
reaching for the decomposed consciousness with bright surprise. We can but admire
of man; Salinger plays with artistic pur- the artist - he is the composer, John Cage -
pose, and begins to rely on the silence whoof says, "Our intention is to affirm this
diffuseness and improvisation; Burroughs life, not to bring order out of a chaos nor
actually employs a random method of com- to suggest improvements in creation, but
position. The purpose of indeterminacysimplyis to wake up to the very life we're
the same: cutting the way out. Out of what?
living, which is so excellent once one gets
Out of history, authority, form, abstraction.
one's mind and one's desires out of its way
Into what? This is a matter each man, withand lets it act of its own accord." This is
luck, may determine alone. the statement of a man who rejects the
The story of man, we must aver on faith,tyrannies of art without refusing its exu-
is without an ending. The story of litera-berance. The artist in Cage is commensu-
ture is equally endless. We cannot gloat
rate with the man. Nor will any lesser meas-

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 THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR

Land
ure do for audiences who expect toalso to provide them with a setting
benefit
from the bounties of art. No great art canthat would have signifi-
for an experiment
cance for
survive without great audiences, andall the
nonations.
audiences will survive at all without more Their nationalist aspirations were there-
quickness, more openness. The storyfore
is bound in with social ones. For cen-
really a very old one. To hear again, toturies,
see the situation of the Jews had been
again, to feel again, and perhaps sometimes
abnormal, not only in their lack of a ter-
to love what is seen or heard or felt - is this ritorial base, but also in their separation
not the whisper of silence in modern litera- from agriculture, the basic pursuit of other
ture? Is this not why the head of Orpheus men. Since the Middle Ages, at least, the
sings on, and his sacrifice is finally justified?Jews had been divorced from the land and
compelled to lead the life of petty trades-
men and artisans. Some of the more sensi-
tive among them found it difficult to deny
An Old Dream Defended
the accusation that their relationship to the
economy had become largely parasitic.
The Other Society. By H. Darin-Drab kin.
Normalization meant for them not merely
Harcourt, Brace and World. $5.95. the establishment of a national state, but
Reviewed by Oscar Handlin also the development of a just social order
based on the return to productive labor on
In retrospect, the nationalists of the the soil.
first decade of the twentieth century seemThese impulses entered into the forma-
attractive in their innocence. The great tion of the collective agricultural settlements
wars were still in the future and the ideal- of Palestine. The pioneers who went forth
ists could dream without anguish of peoples to make gardens in the desert organized
redeemed by nationhood to a higher level themselves in kibbutzim, social units in
of social experience. Nationalism was then which all the tasks of production and all
not narrow or particularistic. Its prophets the rights of consumption were communal.
labored not for themselves alone, nor for In the 1930's, with the onset of refugee
migration, the settlements gained in
their particular folk only, but for mankind
strength; and since then, they have re-
in general. National unity and dignity were
a means of achieving universal reform. mained a permanent feature of life in Israel.
This characteristic was particularly These communities form The Other
prominent in East European Zionism. For Society, which is the subject of Dr. Darin-
Drabkin's study. An official in the Israeli
millions of Jews whose ghetto walls had just
begun to crumble, the exposure to the im-Ministry of Labor, Dr. Darin-Drabkin has
pulses of modern life was unsettling. Many been closely associated with the kibbutz for
of them identified Zionism with their hope thirty years, and he writes as a convinced
for a future that would be better than the defender of its way of life out of which,
past. Eager young men and women could he believes, will emerge a new type of man
not wait for a millenial redemption in God's who works with his hands and also with his
own time; they insisted that it come at once brain.
and that it involve a total reconstruction of The book opens with a brief history of
society. Such a people conceived of Palestine communal societies, ancient and modern,
not merely as a place of refuge and asand
a then proceeds to a summary descrip-
tion of the structure of the kibbutz. The
means of resolving the Jewish problem in
its narrow sense. They expected the Holy
major part of the work, however, is devoted
to an examination of the effectiveness of
collective society. The author subjects the
О OSCAR HANDLIN's most recent book is
kibbutz to
The Dimensions of Liberty. Mr. Handlin is various tests of social and eco-
nomic efficiency
Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard Uni- in order to demonstrate its
versity. worth to the nation. Although the book is
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