PROTEAN MAN
23
the dry wit; one refers to a segment of life experience as a "bit,"
"bag," "caper," "game," (or "con game"), "scene," "show" or
"scenario"; and one seeks to "make the scene" (or "make it"), "beat
the system" or "pull it off" - or else one "cools it" ("plays it cool")
or "cops out." The thing to be experienced, in other words, is too
absurd to be taken at its face value; one must either keep most
of the self aloof from it, or if not one must lubricate the encounter
with mockery.
A similar spirit seems to pervade literature and social action
alike. What is best termed a "literature of mockery" has come to
dominate fiction and other forms of writing on an international scale.
Again Gunter Grass's
The Tin Drum
comes to mind, and is probably
the greatest single example of this literature - a work, I believe,
which will eventually be appreciated as much as a general evocation
of contemporary man as of the particular German experience with
Nazism.
In
this country the divergent group of novelists known as
"black humorists" also fit into the general category - related as they
are to a trend in the American literary consciousness which R. W.
B.
Lewis has called a "savagely comical apocalypse" or a "new kind
of ironic literary form and disturbing vision, the joining of the dark
thread of apocalypse with the nervous detonations of satiric laughter."
For it is precisely death itself, and particularly threats of the contem–
porary apocalypse, that protean man ultimately mocks.
The relationship of mockery to political and social action has
been less apparent, but is, I would claim, equally significant. There
is more than coincidence in the fact that the largest American
student uprising of recent decades, the Berkeley Free Speech Move–
ment of 1965, was followed immediately by a "Dirty Speech Move–
ment." While the object of the Dirty Speech Movement - achieving
free expression of forbidden language, particularly of four-letter
words - can be viewed as a serious one, the predominant effect, even
in the matter of names, was that of a mocking caricature of the
movement which preceded it. But if mockery can undermine pro–
test, it can also enliven it. There have been signs of craving for it in
major American expressions of protest such as the Negro movement
and the opposition to the war in Vietnam.
In
the former a certain
chord can be struck by the comedian Dick Gregory, and in the latter
by the use of satirical skits and parodies, that revives the flagging
attention of protestors becoming gradually bored with the repetition
