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513
mate anti-word, which the demonstrators at Berkeley disingenuously
claimed stood for FREEDOM UNDER CLARK KERR.
Esthetics, however, had already anticipated politics in this regard;
porno-poetry preceding and preparing the way for what Lewis Feuer
has aptly called porno-politics. Already in 1963, in an essay entitled
«Phi Upsilon Kappa,"
the young poet Michael McClure was writing:
"Gregory Corso has asked me to join with him in a project to free the
word FUCK from its chains and strictures. I leap to make some new
freedom...." And McClure's own "Fuck Ode" is a product of this
collaboration, as the very name of Ed Saunders' journal,
Fuck You,
is
the creation of an analogous impulse. The aging critics of the young
who have dealt with the Berkeley demonstrations in such journals as
Commentary
and the
New Leader
do not, however, read either
Saunders' porno-pacifist magazine or
Kulchur,
in which McClure's
manifesto was first printed- the age barrier separating readership in
the United States more effectively than class, political affiliation or
anything else.
Their sense of porno-esthetics is likely to come from deserters
from their own camp, chiefly Norman Mailer, and especially his recent
An American Dream,
which represents the entry of anti-language
(extending the tentative explorations of "The Time of Her Time")
into the world of the middle-aged, both on the level of mass culture
and that of yesterday'S ex-Marxist, post-Freudian avant-garde. Char–
acteristically enough, Mailer's book has occasioned in the latter
quarters reviews as irrelevant, incoherent, misleading and fundamen–
tally scared as the most philistine responses to the Berkeley demonstra–
tions, Philip Rahv and Stanley Edgar Hyman providing two egregious
examples. Yet elsewhere (in sectors held by those more at ease with
their own conservatism, i.e., without defunct radicalisms to uphold)
the most obscene forays of the young are being met with a dishearten–
ing kind
of
tolerance and even an attempt to adapt them to the con–
ditions of commodity art.
But precisely here, of course, a disconcerting irony
is
involved;
for after a while, there will be no Rahvs and Hymans left to shock–
anti-language becoming mere language with repeated use and in the
face of acceptance; so that all sense of exhilaration will be lost along
with the possibility of offense. What to do then except to choose silence,
since raising the ante of violence is ultimately self-defeating; and the
