MUTANTS
517
lescence of masculinity long before it was felt even by the representa–
tive minority who give to the present younger generation its character
and significance. And literary critics have talked a good deal during
the past couple of decades about the conversion of the literary hero
into the non-hero or the anti-hero; but they have in general failed to
notice his simultaneous conversion into the non- or anti-male. Yet ever
since Hemingway at least, certain male protagonists of American liter–
ature have not only fled rather than sought out combat but have also
fled rather than sought out women. From Jake Barnes to Holden
Caulfield they have continued to run from the threat of female sexual–
ity; and, indeed, there are models for such evasion in our classic
books, where heroes still eager for the fight (Natty Bumppo comes to
mind) are already shy of wives and sweethearts and mothers.
It
is not absolutely required that the anti-male anti-hero be
impotent or homosexual or both (though this helps, as we remember
remembering Walt Whitman), merely that he be more seduced than
seducing, mor
y
passive than active. Consider, for instance, the oddly
"womanish" Herzog of Bellow's current best seller, that Jewish Emma
Bovary with a Ph.D., whose chief flaw is physical vanity and a taste
for fancy clothes. Bellow, however,
is
more interested in summing
up the past than in evoking the future; and
Herzog
therefore seems
an end rather than a beginning, the product of nostalgia (remember
when there were real Jews once, and the "Jewish Novel" had not yet
been discovered!) rather than prophecy. No, the post-humanist, post–
male, post-white, post-heroic world
is
a post-Jewish world by the
same token, anti-Semitism as inextricably woven into it as into the
movement for Negro rights; and its scriptural books are necessarily
goyish,
not least of all William Burroughs'
The Naked Lunch.
Burroughs
is
the chief prophet of the post-male post-heroic
world; and it is
his
emulators who move into the center of the relevant
literary scene, for
The Naked Lunch
(the later novels are less suc–
cessful, less exciting but relevant still) is more than it seems: no mere
essay in heroin-hallucinated homosexual pornography-but a night–
mare anticipation (in Science Fiction form) of post-Humanist sex-J
uality. Here, as in Alexander Trocchi, John Rechy, Harry Matthews
(even an occasional Jew like Allen Ginsberg, who has begun by in–
scribing properly anti-Jewish obscenities on the walls of the world),
are clues to the new attitudes toward sex that will continue to inform
