554
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
taste, though
his
argument would seem to have more to do
with
psychology than with aesthetics.
We have a certain sense of specialness about these voluntary bodily
functions each must perform for himself - bathing, eating, defecat·
ing, urinating, copulating, performing the sexual perversions from
heavy petting to necrophilia. Take eating, for example. There are
few strong taboos around the act of eating; yet most people feel
uneasy about being the only one at the table who is, or who is not,
eating, and there is an absolute difference between eating a rare
steak washed down by plenty of red wine and watching a close-up
of a movie of someone doing so. One wishes to draw back
when
one is actually or imaginatively too close to the mouth of a man
enjoying his dinner;
in
exactly the same way one wishes to remove
oneself from the presence of a man and woman enjoying sexual
intercourse. Not to withdraw is to peep, to pervert looking so that it
becomes a sexual end in itself. As for a close-up of a private act
which is also revolting, a man's vomiting, say, the avoidance-prin–
ciple is the same as for a close-up of steak-eating, except that the
additional unpleasantness makes one wish to keep an even greater
distance.
But then he proceeds to connect excessive sexuality with politics
and with morality. All the pillars of our existence, according to
Elliott - the family, government, society and civilization itself -
all
are threatened when sex
is
on the loose. "Indecency," he says,
''is
put to politically dangerous uses." Furthermore, he
says,
if one
is
for civilization, "for even our warped but still possible society in
preference to the anarchy that threatens from one side or the other,"
then one has to sacrifice "some sensuality of the irresponsible."
This
irresponsible sensuality, Elliott explains, is mostly to be found in "the
politically repressed." "This would help to account," he goes on,
"for the apparently greater sensuality among American Negroes than
among American whites...."
What all this sexual and political irresponsibility adds up to for
Elliott is the dread disease of nihilism, which by his definition "would
dissolve both the state and the family in the name of unrestricted
gratification of natural appetite." The principal carriers are Genet,
Burroughs and Henry Miller, though other writers, like Baldwin, are
slightly ' infeCted. For some reason, however, the most subversive
is
Miller, whose sexual deviations and social estrangement Elliott re–
gards as a menace to literature and society.
