PARTISAN REVIEW
185
rather familiar theological and literary mumbo jumbo.
If
the inner
self is possibly corrupt, as Mailer conceives of it, if it is the pro–
ducer of the systems that then tum around upon it and corrupt it
further, it is also--and more importantly--mysterious. Indeed,
it is so mysterious, so as yet unexplored- -after four to six millen–
nia, as Reich would have it--that one must not even use the
products of technology, like drugs and antibiotics, to keep it
gomg.
Here we get an example of the absurdity, for me, of the
radical position about the inner man, the homunculus, as Skinner
derisively calls it. Because if Mailer is less offensive than Marcuse
in
being now and then more alive to individuals and to redemptive
particularities, if he seems--as Marcuse never does--at least to
have talked to some o f the people who are treated by Marcuse
with such pastoral certitude and condescension, he nevertheless
seeks rhetorical refuge in elitist abstractions. This is especially
noticeable throughout
The Pnsoner of Sex,
where he is prepos–
terously talking not about the experience of sex in time, on Mon–
day or Tuesday or Saturday, but about sex in space, in a cartoon,
a Platonic bubble over the head of the unwary copulator. And he
is
no less anxious to be the Big Time Literary Man in his talk
about other kinds of bodily functions, as in his discussion of disease:
A man brought back from death by chemicals his own
body did not manage to provide cannot know afterward if he
should be alive. Small matter, you may argue; he is much
alive, is he not? But he has lost biological dignity, he is cru–
cially less alive in a part of his mind and body. That is one
reason metaphors are not encouraged near to science now,
for one would then have to say that the patient is alive, but
his soul has died a degree. So the Argument would demand
that there be metaphors to fit the vaults of modern experi–
ence. That is, in fact, the unendurable demand of the middle
of the century, to restore the metaphor, and thereby displace
the scientist from his center. (from
Cannibals and Christians)
Mailer is an aesthetician all-inclusive. For if he is scrupulously
unwilling to transfer villainy from the self to society he is quite
willing to transfer it to science and technology and then to set
