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LESLIE A. FIEDLER
ture born; and Dada became Surrealism, i.e., submitted to the
in–
fluence of those last neo-Humanists, those desperate Socratic Cabalists,
Freud and Marx-dedicated respectively to contriving a rationale of
violence and a rationale of impulse. The new irrationalists, however,
deny all the apostles of reason, Freud as well as Socrates; and
if
they seem to exempt Marx, this is because they know less about him,
have heard him evoked less often by the teachers they are driven to
deny. Not only do they reject the Socratic adage that the unexamined
life
is
not worth living, since for them precisely the unexamined life
is the only one worth enduring at all. But they also abjure the
Freudian one: "Where id was, ego shall be," since for them the
true rallying cry
is,
"Let id prevail over ego, impulse over order,"
or-in negative terrns-"Freud is a fink!"
The first time I heard this irreverent charge from the mouth of
a student some five or six years ago (I who had grown up thinking of
Freud as a revolutionary, a pioneer), I knew that I was already in the
future; though I did not yet suspect that there would be no room
in
that future for the university system to which I had devoted my life.
Kerouac might have told me so, or Ginsberg, or even so polite and
genteel a spokesman for youth as
J.
D. Salinger, but I was too aware
of what was wrong with such writers (their faults more readily
apparent to my taste than their virtues) to be sensitive to the
truths
they told. It took, therefore, certain public events to illuminate (for
me) the literature which might have illuminated them.
I am thinking, of course, of the recent demonstrations at Berkeley
and elsewhere, whose ostensible causes were civil rights or freedom
of speech or Vietnam, but whose not so secret slogan was all the
time:
The Professor is a Fink!
And what an array of bad anti–
academic novels, I cannot help reminding myself, written by
dis–
gruntled professors, created the mythology out of which that slogan
grew. Each generation of students is invented by the generation of
teachers just before them; but how different they are in dream and
fact-as different as self-hatred and its reflection in another.
How
different the professors in Jeremy Lamer's
Drive, He Said
from those
even in Randall Jarrell's
Pictures from an Institution
or Mary
Mc–
Carthy's
Groves of Academe.
To be sure, many motives operated to set the students in action,
some of them imagined in no book, however good or bad. Many of
