DAVID SIDORSKY
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ignated victim groups. These curricular changes have hastened the aban–
donment of critical standards in the humanities.
The portraits of Mailer's extravagant self-advertisements, and of Son–
tag's literary criticism, arc framed within the revival of both neo-Marx–
ist and nco -Freudian ideologies.
In
the 1960S, Marxist theories in the
New Left combined with diverse movements for expressive liberation
vaguely related to rreudian or Reichian sexual theory.
Accordingly, figures like Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist of the original
Frankfurt school of the 1930S, whose stock was rejuvenated during the
1960s, became a representative icon of Sixtyism who exercised a crucial
funcrion in the long march. Marcuse's combination of Marxist and
Freudian themes restructured revolutionary activity in new directions.
The revolution was not to be carried out against its traditional target,
that is, the dominating, exploitative class that tyrannizes the workers.
Rather, its energies could be dirccted against a liberal democratic soci–
ety whose tolerance was dialectically analyzed as "repressive," since its
consumcrist seductions manipulated and limited choice and even,
miraiJile dictJl,
channeled human eros.
The union between Marxism and Fre udianism is a recurrent feature
of the ideological tendencies that dominated the [960s. Kimball's
account exhibits the tensions between these two sources. While Mar–
cuse's synthesis may have been in favor of Marx, the writings of the
popular critic Norman O. Brown were in favor of a variant reading of
Freud. Brown recognized that the revolt against repression was to be
carried out through social action, but his stress was upon the ways in
which liberation could be achieved through the practice of polymor–
phous sex and by the transcendence of rational inhibitions.
These explorations of academic and high culture are paralleled by
similar themes in popular culture. To a degree, Kimball traces such phe–
nomena as Woodstock, the rock-and-roll scene, and the new hippie
enclaves, whether in rural communes or urban neighborhoods.
Throughout this series of moral indictments, however, Kimball's prose
sustains a literary elegance; its tone is modulated and its arguments are
nuanced. The cutting edge emerges from careful interpretation of literary
evidence. The strength of Kimball's criticism often reflects his readiness
to
bring into sharp focus dimly remembered episodes of the cultural scene of
the 1960s, including those which its protagonists would prefer to forget.
Thus, Kimball quotes some of the adulation that greeted Charles
Reich's
The Greening of America.
Killl ball reports on Reich's construc–
tion of a dialectical interpretation of American history-from the condi–
tions of nineteenth-century agrarian society with its poverty and work
