192
STEVEN MARCUS
man's
The Lonely Crowd.
As
far as criticism goes, one might say of
this highly original and intelligent study that the most critical thing
about it is its title. At some point during its preparation a decision was
reached which seems to sum up the tone of the following years. For
alongside the impressive description and analysis of the two basic ·
types of modern character, the inner-directed and the other-directed,
there ran an elaborate refusal to judge between the two. There were
certainly all kinds of useful reasons to be advanced for this decision,
but the net effect of it, I think, was to deny the evidence of the
senses and the intellect. The escape hatch was found, as it so often is,
in a third term, "autonomy," and in the idea of an autonomous man.
This distinguished personage was a synthetic creation transcending
both types, was projected as a hopeful vision of the future, and was
in short a bit incredible, less an ideal than a myth. One might do
better by betting blindly at a horse race- the horses at least exist.
But such are the consequences of suspending critical judgment, for
whatever reasons and in whatever cause.
But lest we be misguided into supposing that in such times as
these the simple and stalwart determination to be critical will inspire
the triumph of intelligence, we might remind ourselves of such a
book as Norman O. Brown's
Life Against Death.
Coming a decade
after
The Lonely Crowd
and being actuated by very different
im–
pulses, it expresses all the bitter, negative and apocalyptic wisdom of
the era, just as ten years before Mr. Riesman's work had revealed
the disposition toward compromise, reconciliation, and justification in
relation to society which intellectuals at that moment wanted to
affirm. And again, after a brilliant and moving analysis of the
manifold afflictions which characterize the malady we call modern
society, Mr. Brown, like Mr. Riesman before him, makes a leap in
the direction of some fantastic, unrealizable future-though it is to
his credit that he warns us to willingly suspend our common sense.
He looks forward to "the abolition of repression," and to a society
in which there will be a general "resurrection of the body." The new
man who thus walks erect will also simultaneously crawl on all fours,
since he will still inhabit the "polymorphously perverse body of
childhood." This creature is not simply incredible; he is almost un–
thinkable, not to say inconceivable. And yet there is a sad correspond–
ence of opposites between him and Riesman's autonomous man. Be-
