derstand the situation in Russia we
need only conceive the institution–
alization of the endemic impulse of
our time to overvalue ideology and
to associate it with bitterness and
violence. We talk easily of repres–
sion by authority and reactionary
force. What we do not easily con–
ceive is the exclusive antl repres–
sive impulse in our own culture and
our own hearts. It is not easily con–
ceived, yet any plan for any truly
better social community must learn
to conceive it and to make provi–
sion to guard against its institution–
alization.
Lionel Trilling
A PORTRAIT
OF THE HIPSTER
As he was the illegitimate son
of the Lost Generation, the hipster
was really
nowhere.
And, just as
amputees often seem to localize
their strongest sensations in the
missing
limb, so the hipster longed,
from the very beginning, to be
somewhere.
He was like a beetle
on its back; his life was a struggle
to get
straight.
But the law of hu–
man gravity kept him overthrown,
because he was always of the min–
ority-opposed in race or feeling to
those who owned the machinery of
recognition.
The hipster began his inevitable
quest for self-definition by sulking
721
in a kind of inchoate delinquency.
But this delinquency was merely a
negative expression of his needs,
and, since it led only into the wait–
ing arms of the ubiquitous law, he
was finally forced to
formalize
his
resentment and express it
symbol–
ically.
This was the birth of a phi–
losophy-a philosophy of
some–
whereness
called
jive,
from
jibe:
to agree, or harmonize. By dis–
charging his would-be aggressions
symbolically,
the hipster harmon–
ized or reconciled himself with his
society.
At the natural stage in its growth,
jive began to talk. It had been con–
tent at first with merely making
sounds- physiognomic talk- but
then it developed language. And,
appropriately enough, this language
described the world as seen through
the hipster's eyes. In fact, that was
its function: to re-edit the world
with new definitions ... jive defi–
nitions.
Since articulateness is a condi–
tion for,
if
not actually a cause of,
anxiety, the hipster relieved his
anxiety by disarticulating himself.
He cut the world down to size–
reduced it to a small stage with a
few props and a curtain of jive.
In a vocabulary of a dozen verbs,
adjectives, and nouns he could
describe everything that happened
in it. It was poker with no joker,
nothing wild.
There were no neutral words in
this vocabulary; it was put up or
shut up, a purely polemical lan–
guage in wh.lch every word had a
