PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE
47
Anyone with experience in Marxist literature will recognize
immediately in this essay the adaptation to the hipster of the myth of
the proletariat. Mailer's essay is a completely Marxist-revolutionary
essay. Although the characters are the same, their names are different;
and although the plot is really the same, too, the real difference
is that the play is not on the boards, nothing is really taking place
except theoretically. There
was
a proletariat once, and a bourgeoisie;
people did suffer from starvation, inhuman hours, physical violence.
But Mailer's picture of the Negro and of his revolutionary, unprece–
dented orgasms gives even the interested and sympathetic reader the
sense that all this is being relayed to him from far away, for it
i!
all
a mental construction. Nothing here is taken from the real life of
struggle, from life as actual conflict; it is an attempt to impose a
dramatic and even noble significance on events that have not genu–
inely brought it forth. So desperate is Mailer for something to be revo–
lutionary about, as Osborne is, that after telling us contemptuously
that modern psychoanalysis merely softens the patient up by adapting
him to modern middle-class society, he says that by contrast, two
strong eighteen-year old hoodlums beating in the brains of a candy–
store keeper do have courage of a sort, "for one murders not only a
weak fifty-old year man but an institution as well, one violates
private property, one enters into a new relation with the police and
introduces a dangerous element into one's life. The hoodlum is there–
fore daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the act, it is
not altogether cowardly."
Jack Kerouac is a far less gifted and intelligent writer than
Mailer but in his recent best seller,
On The Road,
one finds this
same loneliness of emotions without objects to feel them about, this
same uprush of verbal violence which, when one looks at it a little
closely, seems to be unnaturally removed from the object or occasion.
Kerouac, indeed, writes not so much
about
things as about the search
for things to write about. When he celebrates the "kick" of ecstasy
brought about by drink, drugs and jazz, it is the relief of having so
strong a sensation that impresses him, not his communion with some
object in ecstatic relatedness. And it is significant that his highest
praise is for "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to
talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the
ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, bum,
