Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/463
What I started to say is that crooks are adventurers, masculine elements carrying the state of knowledge further, but they are very poor scientists because they have such respect for the S, so little capacity to engage it and alter it without S reacting and fighting back. The “good realist” is the man who is very sensitive to the smoothest solution or resolution of any given H vs. S which he comes across. Which is why con men are more intelligent than hoodlums. Their understanding of S is less symbolic and polarized and more given to the subtleties, nuances, and infinities that lie in the moment beneath the instant. (I is our word for the conscious. Me is our word for the unconscious). That is why my narrators, Lovett[1] and Sergius[2] were so poor and undernourished in surface personality—I was wrestling with what the hell I really am. What I was trying to say was “me” not “I”.
notes
- ↑ The amnesiac war veteran and the narrator of The Naked and the Dead who carries McLeod’s political message into the future.
- ↑ The narrator of The Deer Park, Sergius O’Shaugnessey, is a veteran U.S. Air Force pilot who flew combat missions in Korea. After his discharge, he settles in Desert D’Or, where he has an affair with movie star Lulu Meyers.
