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PARTISAN REVIEW
toys, but the mother and child were flesh and blood larger than a
cathedral."
Goodman knows what is hidden from other ideologists : that the
secret of the ideological age is a hunger for miracles. Mass belief and
action aim at evocation-as Sartre has pointed out, a Communist
demonstration, though it be devoid of practical results, has the function
of a testamentary ritual. To Goodman every doing is a sacrament or
ought to be. What does not change in him over the years is his belief
that man ought to pour out his energies as an oblation to the opening
of the heavens.
The most accessible miracle, the old reliable, is sex, but there are
others. Sex in
The Empire Gill
is therapeutic, sociological, political,
philanthropic-in a word, the sex of sex-reform, of "outspokenness" and
"healthy relations," as much as of the wonder of creation. Horatio is
Eros, Eros is a therapist and the therapist is Paul Goodman. As impulse
and reflection "become one feeling of faith" in the gift to be received,
art and thinking become ways of praying for it, that is, ways of evoking
and seducing, which are the same thing.
In
Goodman's esthetic, writ–
ing a novel is an exercise in calling up intentional dreams that will act
as a love charm to the world, with a second, intimate spell for the
close ones.
As a priest of enthusiasms Goodman centers his teaching on what
follows from attempts to work natural magic in public. On the streets
of the Empire City a visible sacrament may bring down shame or even
trouble with the police. Perhaps this is as it should be, but Goodman
has a classicist's revulsion to hotel rooms . Let the whole city become
a sacred grove, "and over it all an exulting community spirit." Only the
public presence can make the magic real.
The celebrant thus turns into an ideologist of the reconstituted
community; and though it is very likely that "a community occasion
is under God's providence," this is the stress in Goodman that I find
more embarrassing than anything "dirty." Other Utopians keep their
generalized ecstasies for the end, when the phalansteries are set up and
in working order; Goodman menaces privacy in every word.
Happily, however, we can be confident that the menace will re–
main a private one. For ideologist that he is, Goodman is never a mere
agitator. He does not wish to organize a force for his desire, having so
deep a belief in desire as a force. By weighing in practice how far
this belief is to be trusted, the celebrant passes through the ideologist
into the sage. Goodman's description of Eliphaz's mind is evidence of
his adeptness in dual thinking that is the opposite of fanaticism:
