MUTANTS
509
Beatniks or hipsters, layabouts and drop-outs we are likely to
call them with corresponding hostility--or more elegantly, but still
without sympathy, passive onlookers, abstentionists, spiritual cata–
tonics. There resides in all of these terms an element of truth, at
least about the relationship of the young to what we have defined
as the tradition, the world we have made for them; and if we turn
to the books in which they see their own destiny best represented
(The Clockwork Orange,
say, or
On the Road
or
Temple of Gold),
we will find nothing to contradict that truth. Nor will we find any–
thing to expand it, since the young and their laureates avoid on
principle the kind of definition (even of themselves) for which we
necessarily seek.
Let us begin then with the negative definition our own hostility
suggests, since this is all that is available to us, and say that the
"mutants" in our midst are non-participants in the past (though our
wisdom assures us this is impossible), drop-outs from history. The
withdrawal from school, so typical of their generation and so inscrut–
able to ours, is best understood as a lived symbol of their rejection
of the notion o( cultural continuity and progress, which our graded
educational system represents in institutional form.
It
is not merely
a matter of their rejecting what happens to have happened just
bdore them, as the young do, after all, in every age; but of
their attempting to disavow the very idea of the past, of their
seeking to avoid recapitulating it step by step-up to the point of
graduation into the present.
Specifically, the tradition from which they strive to disengage
is the tradition of the human, as the West (understanding the West to
extend from the United States to &ussia) has defined it, Humanism
itself, both in its bourgeois and Marxist forms; and more especially,
the cult of reason-that dream of Socrates, redreamed by the Renais–
sance and surviving all travesties down to only yesterday. To be sure,
there have long been anti-rational forces at work in the West, in–
cluding primitive Christianity itself; but the very notion of literary
culture is a product of Humanism, as the early Christians knew
(setting fire to libraries) , so that the Church in order to sponsor poets
had first to come to terms
with
reason itself by way of Aquinas and
Aristotle.
Only
with
Dada was the notion of an anti-rational anti-litera-
