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I suggest that the play appeals generally to those who have violent leftist notions and yet, like the author, think socialism a failure. In madness, one can combine such ideas. | I suggest that the play appeals generally to those who have violent leftist notions and yet, like the author, think socialism a failure. In madness, one can combine such ideas. | ||
However, the interest in madness presently expressed, and by a good many talented and intelligent people, may go far beyond the need to conciliate political leftism with despair of socialism. The frantic, the frenetic, the wild and outrageous are continually being stated as positive values nowadays, in literature, in the films, and on the stage. I recently saw an extremely clever French film in which the goal of the hero—he achieves it--is schizophrenia. The film is light, intelligent, ironical, and in that way pays tribute to French rationality, but it is an ironic tribute, for the real appeal of the film is in the figure of its protagonist finally at home in the white walls of an asylum. And if one correlates with a film of this kind, the various expressions of hysteria, irrational violence, homosexual hatred, and sheer nuttiness regularly ex- pressed by our youngest writers, one has to look more deeply into what may have caused or promoted what now amounts to a powerful trend. | However, the interest in madness presently expressed, and by a good many talented and intelligent people, may go far beyond the need to conciliate political leftism with despair of socialism. The frantic, the frenetic, the wild and outrageous are continually being stated as positive values nowadays, in literature, in the films, and on the stage. I recently saw an extremely clever French film in which the goal of the hero—he achieves it--is schizophrenia. The film is light, intelligent, ironical, and in that way pays tribute to French rationality, but it is an ironic tribute, for the real appeal of the film is in the figure of its protagonist finally at home in the white walls of an asylum. And if one correlates with a film of this kind, the various expressions of hysteria, irrational violence, homosexual hatred, and sheer nuttiness regularly ex- pressed by our youngest writers, one has to look more deeply into what may have caused or promoted what now amounts to a powerful trend. | ||
I have in mind The White Negro, that wacky though powerful essay by | I have in mind The White Negro, that wacky though powerful essay by [[Norman Mailer]], in which our genial friend and Marxist gone haywire singled out psychopaths as the bearers of future values. In this piece, he also defended the courage of some tough young kids who beat up a weak old man. Now there was a time when courage was understood very differently. Not a few French knights in feudal times thought it unmanly to engage in combat when not outnumbered. I also have in mind Mailer's recent novel, <i>[[The American Dream]]</i>, in which the protagonist, Rojack, kills his wife and then immediately afterwards buggers their maid. I must note here that the deed is a variant of one in Jean Genet's <i>Querelle de Brest</i>. In that novel the young sailor Querelle, having killed a man, feels that he ought to pay for his crime, and has himself buggered by the local pimp. Thus buggered, Querelle becomes a marked man, an enculé, and for all eternity. So Querelle does not entirely escape the mark of Cain. Except that the mark Cain had to bear on his forehead is kept hidden by Genet's hero in his ass. Now Mailer's American hero, who kills as if Cain had never existed, appears, after his crime, like an innocent abroad; he has no feeling of guilt, no need for expiation. And how was Mailer's novel understood? When Philip Rahv attacked the book insofar as its hero is without any kind of con- science, his objection was met with derision, as if it were absurd to judge a fictional character morally! As if the best of our critics had not done just that, and ever since the novel came into being. | ||
Or take Leslie Fiedler's article, The Mutants, published in the Fall 1965 Partisan Review. I heard Mr. Fiedler give that essay as a lecture at a conference at Rutger's University and so I can supply some additional data which may throw light on Mr. Fiedler's purposes; these, from his essay as published, may be unclear. In his essay, and also in his lecture, Mr. Fiedler quoted a contemporary kid as having said to him: "Freud is a fink." Now what interested Mr. Fiedler was not whether this judgment was true or false. What interested him was that a kid should say this, and I submit that if you look at Mr. Fiedler's article you will see that he is inclined to accept the kid's judgment. Why? At Rutgers Mr. Fiedler said in so many words, though I quote from memory—but there is a transcript of the discussion which may be checked—: "I myself have become as tired of the rationalism of Freud as of Marx." Is Freud then really a fink? And why did the young man Fiedler cited say so? The answer to this is not hard to find. Norman Brown, who has had a very great impact on many of our very young men, says in his now famous book that the insistence of many conventional American males on satisfying women sexually is a form of repression stemming from Freud, and something to be rejected in the name of freedom. So even fucking, in other words, is to Mr. Brown and to the young enlightened by him a bit too classical, just too upstanding) | Or take Leslie Fiedler's article, The Mutants, published in the Fall 1965 Partisan Review. I heard Mr. Fiedler give that essay as a lecture at a conference at Rutger's University and so I can supply some additional data which may throw light on Mr. Fiedler's purposes; these, from his essay as published, may be unclear. In his essay, and also in his lecture, Mr. Fiedler quoted a contemporary kid as having said to him: "Freud is a fink." Now what interested Mr. Fiedler was not whether this judgment was true or false. What interested him was that a kid should say this, and I submit that if you look at Mr. Fiedler's article you will see that he is inclined to accept the kid's judgment. Why? At Rutgers Mr. Fiedler said in so many words, though I quote from memory—but there is a transcript of the discussion which may be checked—: "I myself have become as tired of the rationalism of Freud as of Marx." Is Freud then really a fink? And why did the young man Fiedler cited say so? The answer to this is not hard to find. Norman Brown, who has had a very great impact on many of our very young men, says in his now famous book that the insistence of many conventional American males on satisfying women sexually is a form of repression stemming from Freud, and something to be rejected in the name of freedom. So even fucking, in other words, is to Mr. Brown and to the young enlightened by him a bit too classical, just too upstanding) | ||
I want to say something further about Mr. Fiedler's essay. | I want to say something further about Mr. Fiedler's essay. According to him, the taking of drugs by the young is their expression, and main expression, of dissatisfaction with a boring and spiritually flat society. I will not go so far as to say that Mr. Fiedler recommends that the young take drugs, but I suggest that no one whose children are engaged in taking drugs should call on Mr. Fiedler to dissuade them from doing so. To take drugs, according to him, is to be an adventurer, and in a society in which little adventure is possible. It is to travel inwards, something very up-to-date, like the up-to-dateness of the cosmonauts who go towards outer space. Once again, I do not want to charge Mr. Fiedler with recommending the taking of drugs, but I think his whole essay is a confession that he cannot call upon one value in whose name he could oppose it. Why? | ||
When there is a real trend, and I think I am talking about a real trend here, one has to look for something deeper to explain it than the views of those who represent it verbally, even with cleverness. It is not enough to call names as Philip Rahv did in his review of Norman Mailer's The American Dream. Nor is it enough to argue politically with the youth, as Irving Howe did in his article on the "new left." Call Mailer foolish or a bad novelist—the last he is not—and the young will still listen to him. Call the "new left" ahistorical, as Irving Howe did in his essay, and the youny will reply—they already have replied— with violence. Philip Rahv and Irving Howe are perfectly right, of course, but I can't help remembering Hegel's remark about Rome in its decadence. The philosophers were right, Hegel said, but the people were right not to listen to them. | When there is a real trend, and I think I am talking about a real trend here, one has to look for something deeper to explain it than the views of those who represent it verbally, even with cleverness. It is not enough to call names as Philip Rahv did in his review of Norman Mailer's The American Dream. Nor is it enough to argue politically with the youth, as Irving Howe did in his article on the "new left." Call Mailer foolish or a bad novelist—the last he is not—and the young will still listen to him. Call the "new left" ahistorical, as Irving Howe did in his essay, and the youny will reply—they already have replied— with violence. Philip Rahv and Irving Howe are perfectly right, of course, but I can't help remembering Hegel's remark about Rome in its decadence. The philosophers were right, Hegel said, but the people were right not to listen to them. | ||