0456
GERTRUD lENZER
probably indicates excessive involvement. Following Wittfogel's advice,
Lipset, like most of his colleagues, plays it cool when it comes to Marx,
and deals with him by a kind of casual avoidance. Yet this will not do.
One need not be a Marxist oneself to see that the
intellectual
problems
which a Marxist analysis of American society and political life raise are
exactly those which Mr. Lipset has no real way of dealing with. Indeed
the danger as well as the inadequacy of Lipset's style of "value analysis,"
is, as I have tried to indicate, that if you merely take a peek behind those
values, what is revealed is nothing other than a standard Marxist vision
of-not democracy, which Lipset is concerned to champion, but the
bourgeois political world of the capitalist phase of production. And who
wants to defend
that?
Not even Seymour Martin Lipset.
Gertrud Lenzer
TWO FIRSTS
THE BENEFACTOR. By Suson Sont09. Forror, Strous
~nd
Compony,.
$4.50.
THE SUN'S ATIENDANT. By Chorles Holdemon. Simon
&
Schuster. $4.95.
A first novel,
The Benefactor
is
the
first novel which attempts
to extract from psychoanalytical theory an image of what the resurrected
body would be like. It demands of its character-for it has only one
character, and a number of shadowy emanations and specters around
him-activity of a kind that in contrast to our current fictional modes can
only
be
called play. Such activity (described in the mild, detached, seam–
less voice that fills this book until we gasp for air, for light, for
'Otherness)
is based not on anxiety, on the friction and aggression which are the
subject of our novels these days, and perhaps of all novels up to now,
but on narcissism and erotic exuberance.
In order to avoid even the semblance of recording life's surfaces, as
they are made known to us by our "social" senses, the author has
resorted to the semblances of convention, chiefly relying on a prose as
varnished and desiccated as that of Constant, say, or of Stendhal in
Armance,
though here the shellac crystallizes much too often (for
those writers) into aphorisms, one of the author's irresistible incon–
sistencies. I imagine it is hard to renounce a talent for
maximes
so
pronounced:
Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others....
