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BEN B. SEliGMAN
than seriousness that is cheated. It can be argued that Jarry's
art
is
reductive, and perhaps because of this he is finally a limited writer.
But though it often deserves it, reality is not often cheated, at least not
so the liberation is a positive good: esthetic pleasure, or (more important
in J arry's hands) release, emerging as meaningful release.
Stephen Koch
IT'S
NO ACCIDENT
THE ACCIDENTAL CENTURY.
By
Michael Harrington. Macmillan. $5.95.
Michael Harrington argues in this interesting work that the
unparalleled competence of modern technology was all an accident.
Accidental too was the transformation of human existence that ac–
companied the changes in the way men did their work and equally
accidental, he implies, was the decay of man's awareness of hims'elf.
Harrington supports his thesis, which some may want to question, by
calling on the testimony of novelists, philosophers, sociologists, poets, and
some economists as well. He finds the tragic mood of Thomas Mann's
Buddenbrooks
mirrored in the cleavage between community and society
that Ferdinand ninnies had detected, while the poverty of spirit that
Nietzsche saw at the center of technology had been somewhat earlier
reflected in the alienation of the youthful Marx. The disbelief of a
Camus and a Wright Mills, urges Harrington, is not unrelated to the
antipathies expressed by an Ortega y Gasset to the Western world's
mass man.
All these great thinkers saw what was happening and in character it
was radical. Existence was divided into categories and functions that
could be evaluated, measured, quantified. The fundamental aboriginal
drives that once tied man to nature were severed as he sought to attain
new heights by developing his reason to the exclusion of everything else
that was human. Men wanted to seize reality by pure intellect alone, a
self-assigned task that was bound to fail. And fail it did, as revealed
through the insights and sensibilities of Dostoevsky, Eliot, Yeats, Joyce,
Veblen, Malraux, Mannheim, writers to whom Harrington appeals with
marked effectiveness. But if the evidence is so overwhelming, as Harring–
ton demonstrates, was man's metamorphosis then really so accidental?
