NORMAN MAILER
383
strength by a humble return to "theory." The "little object" that
McLeod has stolen from the State Department is never identified,
but we can be fairly confident in thinking of it as Hope or Dedica–
tion or Vision or a "coagulation" of all three-the loss of it is what
accounts for the gradual and subtle derangement of the system and
the possession of it by this lone individual entails the most fearful
of responsibilities. Vision and hope and dedication, at any rate, are
the qualities that separate McLeod from
all
the other characters and
that finally enable him to jolt Lovett out of his stupor and to
win
the support of Lannie. By the rigorous terms set up in
Barbary Shore
he points to the only possible course left to the modern consciousness
-which is to hold on with all its might to the "little object" while
crying a plague on both your houses to the two contiending powers
in the cold war who are irrevocably committed to the cause of death.
The heritage McLeod passes on is a feeble thing, but it means feeling
for Lovett where there was apathy before and relatedness where
there was absolute isolation.
What it meant for Mailer, however, was another matter en–
tirely, since the grand heroic life he was looking for could no more
be found in revolutionary socialism than in liberalism.
If
the one is
bankrupt in drive, vision, and imagination, the other is dead in prac–
tice, frozen in outworn categories, and cut off from the living realities
of the present. Several years after the appearance of
Barbary Skare
Mailer declared (in replying to Jean Malaquais' attack on his
Dissent
article "The White Negro") that Marxism had failed in application
because it was "an expression of the scientific narcissism we inherited
from the nineteenth century" and motivated by "the rational mania
that consciousness could stifle instinct." One might almost take this
as a criticism of the cold, tense, claustrophobic brilliance of
Barbary
Shore
itself; and indeed, Mailer's abandonment of revolutionary so–
cialism in favor of the point of view he calls "Hip" was as much
a repudiation of ideological thinking in general as of Marx and
Trotsky in particular. Here again we have an example of the curious
relation to intellectual fashion that appears to mark the movements
of Mailer's mind. Just as he remained untouched by all the sophisti–
cated arguments against "unreconstructed" liberalism that were cir–
culating so energetically through the intellectual atmosphere of 1948
until he had discovered their truth for himself and in his own good
