Saturday, September 27, 2014

Furiously missing the point

I have now read some of Randall Jarrell on Auden, and am not sure what to think. On the one hand, I am self-aware enough to know that I will shrink back, even hide, from criticism of that which I hold most dear. But I really do think there is a Lilliputianist strain to his complaints, wrapped in a lot of the kind of Marxist "realism" that English departments regularly collect and cultivate, like mold in a petri dish, as a sort of salve to soothe their members' own lack of talent and as a prop for their weird political inclinations. Mendelson's response is better than anything I could come up with; but I'll let you decide whether Jarrell's point is valid.

Randall Jarrell, "Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden's Ideology," in The Third Book of Criticism (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1969), pp. 185-187.
[Auden] is fond of the statement Freedom is the recognition of necessity, but he has never recognized what it means in his own case: this if he understands certain of his own attitudes as causally instead of logically necessary--insofar as they are attitudes produced by and special to his own training and culture--he can free himself from them. But this Auden, like most people, is particularly unwilling to understand. He is willing to devote all his energies and talents to finding the most novel, ingenious, or absurd rationalizations of the cluster of irrational attitudes he has inherited from a former self; the cluster, the self, he does not question, but instead projects upon the universe as part of the essential structure of that universe. If the attitudes are contradictory or logically absurd there, he saves them by taking Kirkegaard's position that everything really important is above logical necessity, is necessarily absurd. In the end he submits to the universe without a question; but it turns out that the universe is his own shadow on the wall beside his bed.
     Let me make this plain with a quotation. On the first page of the New York Times Book Review of November 12, 1944, there appeared a review of the new edition of Grimm's Tales--a heartfelt and moral review which concluded with this sentence: 'So let everyone read these stories till they know them backward and tell them to their children with embellishments--they are not sacred texts--and then, in a few years, the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Coöperative Camp for Prudent Progressives and all other bores and scoundrels can go jump in the lake.'
    Such a sentence shows that its writer has saved his own soul, but has lost the whole world--has forgotten even the nature of that world: for this was written, not in 1913, but within the months that held the mass executions in the German camps, the fire raids, Warsaw and Dresden and Manila; within the months that were preparing the bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki; within the last twelve months of the Second World War.
    The logical absurdity of the advice does not matter, though it could hardly be more apparent: people have been telling the tales to their children for many hundreds of years now (does Auden suppose that the S. S. men at Lublin and Birkenau had bot been told the tales by their parents?); the secular world Auden detests has been produced by the Märchen he idealizes and misunderstands, along with a thousand other causes--so it could not be changed "in a few years" by one of the causes that have made it what it is. But the moral absurdity of the advice--I should say its moral imbecility--does matter. In the year 1944 these prudent, progressive, scientific, cooperative "bores and scoundrels" were the enemies with whom Auden found it necessary to struggle. Were these your enemies, reader? They were not mine.
    Such mistaken extravagance in Auden is the blindness of salvation, a hysterical blindness to his actual enemies (by no means safe enemies as Prudent Progressives) an to the actual world. But it is hard for us to learn anything. When the people of the world of the future--if there are people in that world--say to us--if some of us are there, 'What did you do in all those wars?' those of us left can give the old, the only answer, 'I lived through them.' But some of us will answer, 'I was saved.'
 Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1999), p. 193:
Randall Jarrell furiously missed the point when complained that 'these prudent, progressive, scientific, cooperative "bores and scoundrels" were the enemies with whom Auden found it necessary to struggle. Were these your enemies, reader? They were not mine.' But no one needed to be warned against enemies who loudly threatened to kill or enslave. The enemies Auden warned against were the voices that threatened to lose the peace by establishing a political religion--as in the anti-Communist inquisition of the 1950's--and the voices that sought to reassure Auden and his readers by telling them their enemies were so clearly evil that they themselves could comfortably congratulate themselves on being good.

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