180
RICHARD POIR IER
social order in art. It did so not at all to make art into a "great
negation." Quite the contrary. Art served rather to denature any
ideas that might, if translated into
action,
have truly constituted a
"great negation."
Art proposed that there was indeed a kind of central man
buried deep under the accumulations of history and industrial
power; it did not propose that he could have any real existence or
that he in fact ever did. The aesthetics of radicalism has a source in
English literature of .the sixteenth century, then, even in its key
images. Leaving aside the obvious fact that since that time the idea
of the self has gone through extraordinary mutations, we nonethe–
less find in most essentially radical writers (like Marcuse, Mailer,
Reich, or Brown), and in such nineteenth-century predecessors as
Melville (for the pessimistic strain working in Mailer), or Whitman,
Emerson, and Thoreau, the association of capitalistic enterprise
with
ac~umulation,
with dross. It produces the filthy lucre whose
history is brilliantly traced by Norman O. Brown in
LzJe Against
Death,
the excrement and pollution which bury the essential self,
the natural being.
While we now live in a time when a report from the Club of
Rome entitled "The Limits of Growth" shows statistically that
pollution is growing exponentially, that it doubles every so often,
as does population every thirty-three years, it is impressive that
long before any such findings were made, the metaphors of mul–
tiple pollutants as a result of growth were fixed in the literary
imagination. So much so that they scarcely changed, regardless of
how conditions might have been changed between, say, Spenser
and Lawrence, who can write in
Lady Chatterley's Lover
that
"this is history. One England blots out another. The mines had
made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting out the cottages.
The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One
meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old
England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical." And
when Connie notices that the miners are only "the gray half of a
human being" and that Mellors is the son of such a man, she
corrects herself so as to allow for the so-called saving remnant in
the lower classes always necessary to the radical imagination: "Not
quite. Forty years had made a difference, an appalling difference
