184
RICHARD POIRIER
the self and society there is something buried in each of us, buried
in the corporate self; and it follows that these saving elements may
reside in those who have benefi ted least from technological sys–
tems and who are therefore least corrupted by it, like the blacks,
the poor, the Chinese of the mainland. Perhaps one should include
the children of the privileged who now find less reality in the
comforts won by their parents in the caves of Mammon than in
roughing it, in simplicity, and, not long ago, like latter-day Guy–
ons, in disruption.
Indeed, according to this geography, one moves toward the
center of power--the Bower of Bliss or the
Pentagon--only
to
disrupt it. Otherwise the effort is to move as far from the center as
possible. Electric media have made it increasingly difficult to es–
cape the gravitational pull of the center. In the 1940s Isaac
McCaslin in Faulkner's
The Bear,
acting as if he had read the
Agrarian program laid down in
I'll
Take
My
Stand,
could carry out
his initial act of relinquishment by leaving behind the instruments
of power--his watch, his compass, his stick-- in order to merge
with a wilderness that is threatened but still uncorrupted . When
Mailer's boys, Tex and D.J., try nearly the same thing in
Why Are
We In Vietnam?
the only wilderness not yet contaminated by
what they call "the mixed-up shit of corporation land" is the
utterly hostile region of the Arctic range. Full of an electronic
magnetism that duplicates in its effect the electronic media that
have already taken possession of the boys' minds, the North sends
ou t a message only to go forth and kill.
Mailer's obsessive fear of technology--to the point where
the word has become a tiresome catchall--is extreme even within
the radical spectrum. But he is also different from most other
radicals of his period in his acknowledgment in
The White Negro
"that no matter how crippled or perverted an image of man was
the society he had created, it was nonetheless his creation, his
collective creation (at least his collective creation from the past)
and if society was so murderous, then who could ignore the most
hideous of questions about his own nature." This is a position
which hard ly allows for much radical confidence in a buried self
uncontaminated by encrustation of "system." Mailer's position is
not argued with any logical stringency, and depends finally on
