518
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
our improbable novels of passion and our even more improbable
love songs.
The young to whom I have been referring, the mythologically
representative minority (who, by a
proc~
that infuriates the mytholo–
gically inert majority out of which they come, "stand for" their
times), live in a community in which what used to be called the
"Sexual Revolution," the Freudian-Laurentian revolt of their grand–
parents and parents, has triumphed as impedectly and unsatisfac–
torily as all revolutions always triumph. They confront, therefore,
the necessity of determining not only what meanings "love" can have
in their new world, but--even more disturbingly-what significance,
if
any, "male" and "female" now possess. For a while, they (or at
least their literary spokesmen recruited from the generation just
be–
fore them) seemed content to celebrate a kind of
reductio
or
exaltatio
ad absurdum
of their parents' once revolutionary sexual goals: The
Reichian-inspired Cult of the Orgasm.
Young men and women eager to be delivered of traditional
ideologies of love find especially congenial the belief that not union
or relationship (much less offspring) but physical release is the end
of the sexual act; and that, therefore, it
is
a matter of indifference
with whom or by what method ones pursues the therapeutic climax,
so long as that climax
is
total and repeated frequently. And Wilhelm
Reich happily detaches
this
belief from the vestiges of Freudian
ra–
tionalism, setting it instead in a context of Science Fiction and witch–
craft; but his emphasis upon "full genitality," upon growing up and
away from infantile pleasures, strikes the young as a disguised plea
for the "maturity" they have learned to despise. In a time when the
duties associated with adulthood promise to become irrelevant, there
seems little reason for denying oneself the joys of babyhood--even
if
these are associated with such regressive fantasies as escaping it all
in the arms of little sister (in the Gospel according to
J.
D. Salinger)
or flirting with the possibility of getting into bed with papa (in the
Gospel according to Norman Mailer).
Only Norman O. Brown in
Life Against Death
has come to
terms on the level of theory with the aspiration to take the final
evolutionary leap and cast off adulthood completely, at least
in
the
area of sex. His post-Freudian program for pan-sexual, non-orgasmic
love rejects "full genitality" in favor of a species of indiscriminate
