PARTISAN REVIEW
195
who, with a similarly acute sense of the power of sfyle on men's
minds, has remarked that "to be a new man is not a contradiction
but an effort." Rubin's confidence is derived in some part from his
conviction that the power of television "telescopes the revolution
by centuries." This may be true, but whose revolution? The styles
given preferen tial room on the screen--if they are as effective on
people who really are as vulnerable as Mailer, Marcuse, Rubin, and
others suggest--are more likely to produce one-dimensional than
Protean man, Yip pies, or even a new type of man.
However much I share the radical critique of existing struc–
tures and especially the radical contempt of Wilhelm Reich for the
sexual repressions upon which the structures rest, the aesthetic
criterion of contemporary radicalism in America and Europe
seems to me presumptuous about the value of literature and high
culture, condescending or ignorant about the native wit and wis–
dom of ordinary men and women, and elitist in a self-protecting
and finally uninquisitive way. Radicalism is failing because it is
preposterously afraid of science and technology, with Mailer as a
signal instance in
Th e Pr£soner of Sex.
Since he proposes in that
book to champion the imagination against science and technology,
then it must bluntly be said that the work of Kinsey and of
Masters and Johnson does more service to freedom of imagination
and the liberation of the mind than this book or, when it comes to
sex, Mailer's entire oeuvre. I am not afraid, as a teacher of
literature, of sounding like B. F. Skinner when he remarks that "I
believe we are controlled, of course. But it is
.1
question of control
through volition rather than coercion." Skinner's weakness is that
the controls he would make volitional are too simple for the or–
ganisms he wants to man age. That criticism can be made of his
position--and it is a d amning
one--without
subscribing to
mythologies about the inner man promoted by literature. It can be
made rather on the basis of our persistent ignorance about our–
selves, especially about our sexual selves, which is confirmed by
science, and on the basis of the very
existence
of science and of
literature. Skinner is primarily interested in survival, while the
invention of culture proves that we are animals interested in more
than survival, or that we are at least willing to take terrible risks
with survival.
