182
RICHARD POIRIER
intense view of existence matches their experience and their
experience and their desire to rebel.
Along with the emphasis here on rebellion as a consequence
of radical vision, is the vocabulary of the buried or repressed life
struggling to get out: as in the references to "his inner universe,"
"the recessive nuances of one's own motives," "inner certainty
that his rebellion is just," "the wise primitive in a giant jungle."
The Hipster is someone who is capable of acting, as the psycho–
path is not, in order to free himself from the "hopeless contradic–
tions he knew as an infant." He wants, in Mailer's words, to give
expression "to the buried infant in himself ... he is looking for
the opportunity to grow up a second time." The Hipster is thus
not simply a pastoral figure. He is also his own pastoralist. He is
both the child and the figure who has the sophistication to nurture
what is childish in himself, to release it in some ideal form, or at
least in a form that has been less minted than have most others by
contemporary culture.
The influence of Wilhelm Reich on Mailer's radicalism is con–
spicuous in the emphasis, as in
An American Dream,
on orgiastic
potency, the capacity, in Reich's words, "for surrender in the
acme of sexual excitation
in
the natural sexual act."
It
is evident,
too, in the stress given a presumably entrapped or buried natural
self. Reich uses the term "armoring" to describe this entrapment.
"The character structure of man of today," he writes, "who is
perpetuating a patriarchal, authoritarian culture some four to six
thousand years old--is characterized by
an armoring against na–
ture within himself and against social misery outside himself."
One
can better understand some of the recently publicized differences
between B. F. Skinner, author of
Beyond Freedom and Dignity,
and Noam Chomsky in these terms. Chomsky believes, and Skin–
ner does not, in the existence of an armored or buried self, though
Chomsky would locate it (with a confidence of scientific verifica–
tion) in measurable workings of the human brain. Chomsky's in–
nateness hypothesis is that man has within him some special and
distinguishing capacities that are not subject to environmental
manipulation.
If
this hypothesis seems to be at odds with
Chomsky's political conviction that the system is oppressive to the
