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in the academy it is a worthy successor to Emerson 's " American
Scholar," with its message (which Brown quotes) that "the one thing
in the world, of value, is the active soul." But
Love 's Body
(1966) is
as far beyond the renewal of institutions as it is beyond consecutive
thinking. Instead it comes on as a new gospel, in which a vulgar
Freudian mode of symbolic analogy gets applied indiscriminately to
every corner of life, every institution in culture. Now and then the
book makes some brilliant, witty conjunctions ; but
if
every body in
space is a phallus surrounded by a vagina, then this symbolism has
lost all hermeneutic value ; it becomes an unwitting burlesque of a
certain post-Freudian rhetoric of interpretation . (Some recent French
Freudianism has extended the caricature ; it makes Brown look like a
piker.)
The ingenuity of Brown 's later poetics, however dubious, is suf–
ficient to indicate how much of the success of
Ltfe Against Death
stemmed from its own different but daring rhetoric. Brown is a devas–
tating polemicist, a lucid expositor and critic, and a remarkable
synthesizer of material from different disciplines . His reading of
Freud has a fervor and dramatic excitement that Freud 's own work
eschews; it comes to us not as dry science , an analysis of the given, but
as an evangel, a Bringer of Truth . After reading it I became a convert
of sorts, and heroically preached a subversive doctrine of vitalism
and sexual liberation in all my undergraduate and graduate term
papers, finding the message (not without reason) in texts as diverse as
The Rape ofthe Lock,
"The Beast in the Jungle ," and
Hard Times.
Poor disciple that I was, I remained quite oblivious to Brown's attack
on "a program of oversimplified sexual liberation, " which he at–
tributes to Reich and early Freud . If the real message was "poly–
morphous perversity" I must have had a hard time making use of it .
And by 1962, when I heard Brown himself (in a lecture at Wesleyan)
allude disparagingly to " the academic author of
Life Against
Death,"
I knew the game was up. He had become a guru , hemmed
in by flatterers , enveloped by pregnant silences, beyond ordinary
discourse. He would never answer the questions he had helped to
raIse.
Marcuse's reading of Freud was less complex and drastic than
Brown 's; he seized and brilliantly appropriated only a few central
strands of the Freudian system, and his political anchor kept him
