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LESLIE A. FIEDLER
trov, of the Soviet Doctors, of Eichmann) to real justice or Demon–
stration Voting (for one party or a token two) to real suffrage.
At least, since Berkeley (or perhaps since Martin Luther King
provided students with new paradigms for action) the choice has been
extended beyond what the earlier laureates of the new youth could
imagine in the novel: the nervous breakdown at home rather than
the return to "sanity" and school, which was the best Salinger could
invent for Franny and Holden; or Kerouac's way out for his "saintly"
vagrants, that "road" from nowhere to noplace with homemade gurus
at the way stations. The structure of those fictional vaudevilles between
hard covers that currently please the young
(Catch
22,
V., A Mother's
Kisses),
suggest in their brutality and discontinuity, their politics of
mockery something of the spirit of the student demonstrations; but only
Jeremy Lamer, as far as I know, has dealt explicitly with the abandon–
ment of the classroom in favor of the dionysiac pack, the turning from
polis
to
thiasos,
from forms of social organization traditionally thought
of as male to the sort of passionate community attributed by the an–
cients to females out of control.
Conventional slogans in favor of "Good Works" (pious emenda–
tions of existing social structures, or extensions of accepted "rights" to
excluded groups) though they provide the motive power of such pro–
tests are irrelevant to their form and their final significance. They
become their essential selves, i.e., genuine new forms of rebellion, when
the demonstrators hoist (as they did in the final stages of the Berkeley
protests) the sort of slogan which embarasses not only fellow-travelers
but even the bureaucrats who direct the initial stages of the revolt: at
the University of California, the single four-letter word no family news–
paper would reprint, though no member of a family who could read
was likely not to know it.
It is possible to argue on the basis of the political facts them–
selves that the word "fuck" entered the whole scene accidentally
(there were only four students behind the "Dirty Speech Movement,"
only fifteen hundred kids could be persuaded to demonstrate for it,
"-
etc., etc.). But the prophetic literature which anticipates the movement
indicates otherwise, suggesting that the logic of their illogical course
eventually sets the young against language itself, against the very
counters of logical discourse. They seek an anti-language of protest as
inevitably as they seek anti-poems and anti-novels, end with the
ulti-
