DAVID SIDORSKY
245
WHILE NOT DISAGREEING
with the substantive elements of Fukuyama's
account of the
I
960s, Roger Kimball's method of analysis in
The Long
March
sets a sharp contrast. Kimball guides the reader through an
extended tour of the cultural icons of those provocative times. He does
not seek any coherent set of root causes or historical substructure for
the phenomena he inspects, surveys, and reviews. Yet each portrait
speaks for itself in a harrowing gallery of cultural change and decline.
For Kimball the I960s marked a revolution that was characterized by
continual erosion of the capacity or will of major cultural institutions to
assert literary merit, artistic standards, or critical and scholarly truth.
Kimball's opening sketches represent the anticipations of Sixtyism in
what he refers to as the "Beat triumvirate" of the 1950S: Jack Kerouac,
Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs. For Kimball, the poetry of
Ginsberg and the fiction of Kerouac are the initial evidence of literary
breakdown in their disintegration of the formal structure generally con–
sidered essential to artist ic achievement. This conclusion is reinforced by
his review of Burroughs's writings. Kimball argues that the "primary
claim" of Burroughs's
Naked Lunch
is "not literary but ethical or
moral," that is, a "defiant challenge to prevailing moral standards,"
achieved through the "depiction of sexual torture and heroin-induced
dementia." Thus Kimball concludes that the writings of the Beat move–
ment are not works of literary merit, but that they gained their notori–
ety because of their role in expanding freedom of expression.
In
this
context, Kimball notes the connection often made in the I960s between
artistic freedom and the freedom to use drugs.
Kimball proceeds to dissect Norman Mailer's writings as evidence of
cultural decline accelerating throughout the 1960s. He documents this
thesis by citing the great distance between Mailer's own literary heroes,
Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, and the deterioration of
Mailer's writing in his later novels.
In
Mailer, Kimball finds an ideolog–
ical basis for Sixtyism. Thus he believes that Mailer, in
The White
Negro,
"articulated an ethic that underlies not only his own view of the
world in all his later writings, but also the view that would inform the
cultural revolution of the 1960s."
It
is an ethic that supports an arbi–
trary existential commitment to moral nihilism, with its celebration of
the violence of the psychopath as one who breaks the bonds of the total–
itarian American society. Thus, when asked to explain the cowardly acts
of criminals against weak victims in street crime and store robberies,
Mailer responded that "the hoodlum is daring the unknown, and so no
matter how brutal the act, it is not altogether cowardly."
