Cross the Border, Close the Gap

Almost all today's readers and writers are aware that we are living through the death throes of literary modernism and the birth pangs of postmodernism. The kind of literature that had arrogated to itself the name modern (with the presumption that it represented the ultimate advance in sensibility and form, that beyond it newness was not possible), and whose moment of triumph lasted from just before World War One until just after World War Two, is dead; i.e., belongs to history, not actuality. In the field of the novel, this means that the age of Proust, Mann and Joyce is over, just as in verse, that of T.S. Eliot and Paul Valéry is done with.

Obviously, this fact has not remained secret and some critics have even been attempting to deal with its implications. But they have been trying to do so in a language and with (continued on page 230) cross the border (continued from page 151) methods that are singularly inappropriate, since both language and method were invented by the modernists themselves to apologize for their own work and the work of their literary ancestors (John Donne, for instance, or the symbolistes), and to educate an audience capable of responding to them. Naturally, this will not do at all; so the second- or third-generation new critics in America prove themselves imbeciles and naU+00EF;fs when confronted by, say, a poem by Allen Ginsberg, a novel by John Barth.

Why not, then, invent a new new criticism, a postmodernist criticism appropriate to postmodernist fiction and verse? It sounds simple enough--quite as simple as imperative--but it is, in fact, much simpler to say than to do; for the question that arises immediately is whether there can be any criticism adequate to postmodernism. The age of T. S. Eliot, after all, was the age of a literature essentially self-aware, a literature dedicated to analysis, rationality, anti-romantic dialectic--and, consequently, aimed at respectability, gentility, even academicism. Criticism is natural, even essential to such an age; and to no one's surprise (though, finally, there were some voices crying out in dismay), the period of early 20th Century modernism became an age of criticism--an age in which criticism first invaded the novel, verse and drama and ultimately threatened lo swallow up all other forms of literature. Certainly, looking back from this point, it seems as if many of the best books of the period were books of criticism (by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and I. A. Richards, by John Crowe Ransom, Kenneth Burke and R. P. Blackmur, to mention only a few names); and its second-best were novels and poems eminently suited to critical analysis, particularly in schools and universities: the works of Proust-Mann-Joyce, for instance, to evoke a trilogy that seems at the moment more the name of a single college course than a list of three authors.

We have, however, entered quite another time--apocalyptic, anti-rational, blatantly romantic and sentimental; an age dedicated to joyous misology and prophetic irresponsibility; one distrustful of sell-protective irony and too-great self-awareness. If criticism is to survive, therefore, if it is to become or remain useful, viable and relevant, it must be radically altered, though not in the direction indicated by Marxist critics, however subtle and refined they may be. The Marxists are last-ditch defenders of rationality and the primacy of political fact; they are intrinsically hostile to an age of myth and passion, sentimentality and fantasy.

A new criticism certainly will not be primarily concerned with structure or diction or syntax, all of which assume that the work of art "really" exists on the page rather than in the reader's apprehension and response. Not words on the page but words in the world or, rather, words in the head, at the private juncture of a thousand contexts--social, psychological, historical, biographical, geographical--in the consciousness of the reader (delivered for an instant, but an instant only, from all those contexts by the ekstasis of reading): This will be the proper concern of the critics to come. Certain older ones have already begun to provide examples of this sort of criticism by turning their backs on their teachers and even their own earlier practices. Norman O. Brown, for instance, who began with scholarly, somewhat Marxian studies of classic literature, has moved on to metapsychology in Life Against Death and Love's Body; while Marshall McLuhan, who made his debut with formalist examinations of Joyce and Gerard Manley Hopkins, has shifted lo metasociological analyses of the mass media in Understanding Media and, finally, to a kind of pictographic shorthand, half puton and half serious emulation of advertising style, in The Medium Is the Massage.

The voice, as well as the approach, is important in each case, since in neither Brown nor McLuhan does one hear the rhythm and tone usual to "scientific" criticism. No, the pitch, the rhythms, the dynamics of both are mantic, magical, more than a little mad (a concept that one desiring to deal with contemporary literature must learn to regard as more honorific than pejorative). In McLuhan and Brown--as in D. H. Lawrence--criticism is literature or it is nothing. Not amateur philosophy nor objective analysis, it differs from other forms of literary art in that it starts with the world of art itself, not with the world in general: it uses one work of art as an occasion to make another.

There have been many such mediating works of art in the past, both fairly recent (Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy) and quite remote (Longinus' On the Sublime), that make it clear that the authority of the critic is based not on his skills in research nor his collation of texts but on his ability to find words and rhythms and images appropriate to his ecstatic vision of, say, the plays of Euripides or the opening verses of Genesis. To evoke Longinus or even Nietzsche, however, is in a sense misleading, suggesting models too grandiose and solemn. The newest criticism must be aesthetic, poetic in form as well as in substance; but it must also be comical, irreverent and vulgar. Examples have appeared everywhere in recent years--as in the case of Angus Wilson, who began a review of City of Night by writing quite matter-of-factly, "Everyone knows John Rechy is a little shit." And all at once, we are out of the Eliotic church, whose dogmas, delivered ex cathedra, two generations of students were expected to learn by heart: "Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed noi upon the poet but upon the poetry.... The mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely on any valuation of personality, not by being necessarily more interesting, or having 'more to say,' but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which," etc.

Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least permits its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the culture religion of modernism, from which Eliot thought he had escaped--but to which, in fact, he only succeeded in giving a High Anglican tone: "It is our business, as readers of literature, to know what we like. It is our business, as Christians, as well as readers of literature, to know what we ought to like." But not to know that such stuff is laughable is to be imprisoned in church, cut off from the liberating privilege of comic sacrilege. It is high time, however, for such sacrilege rather than for piety.

The kind of criticism the age demands is death-of-art criticism, which is most naturally practiced by those who have come of age since the death of the new poetry and the new criticism. It seems evident that writers not blessed enough to be under 30 (or 35, or whatever the critical age is these days) must be reborn in order to seem relevant to the moment and to those who inhabit it most comfortably: the young. But one hasn't even the hope of being reborn unless he knows first that he is dead. No novelist can be reborn unless he knows that insofar as he remains a novelist in the traditional sense, he is dead. What was until only a few years ago a diagnosis, a predication (made almost from the moment of the invention of the novel: first form of pop literature and, therefore, conscious that, as compared with classic forms such as epic or tragedy, its life span was necessarily short) is now a fact. As certainly as the old God is dead, so the old novel is dead. Certain writers (Saul Bellow, for instance, or John Updike, Mary McCarthy or James Baldwin) continue to write old novels and certain readers, often with a sense of being quite up to date, continue to read them. But so do preachers continue to preach in the old churches and congregations gather to hear them.

It is not a matter of assuming, as does Marshall McLuhan, that the printed book is about to disappear; only of realizing that in all of its forms--and most notably, perhaps, the novel--the printed book is being radically altered. No medium of communication disappears merely because a new and more (continued on page 252) cross the border (continued from page 230) efficient one is invented. One thinks, for instance, of the lecture, presumably superannuated by the invention of movable type, yet flourishing still after more than five centuries of obsolescence. What is demanded of a medium of communication when it becomes obsolete is that it become a form of entertainment, as recent developments in radio (the disappearance, for instance, of all high-minded commentators and pretentious playwrights) sufficiently indicate. Students are well aware of this truth in regard to the university lecture, and woe to the man who does not know it!

Even as the serious lecture was doomed by the technology of the 15th Century and the serious church service by the philology of the 18th and 19th, so is the serious novel and serious criticism by the technology and philology of the 20th. Like the lecture and the Christian church service, the novel's self-awareness must now include the perception of its own absurdity, even impossibility. Since the serious novel of our time is the art novel as practiced by Proust, Mann and Joyce and imitated by their epigoni, it is that odd blend of poetry, psychology and documentation, whose real though not always avowed end was to make itself canonical, that we must disavow. Matthew Arnold may have been quite correct in foreseeing the emergence of literature as Scripture in a world that was forsaking the old-time religion; but the life of the new scripture and the new-time religion was briefer than he could have guessed.

Before the Bible ceased to be central to the concerns of men in Western society, it had become merely a book among others; and this may have misled the Arnoldians, who could not believe that a time might come when not merely the Book ceased to move men but even books in general. Such, however, is the case--certainly as far as all books that consider themselves art, i.e., Scripture once removed, are concerned; and for this reason, the truly new new novel must be anti-art as well as anti-serious. But this means that it must become more like what it was in the beginning, what it seemed when Samuel Richardson could not be taken quite seriously and what it remained in England until Henry James had justified himself as an artist, against such self-declared "entertainers" as Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson: popular, not quite reputable, a little dangerous. The critical interchange on the nature of the novel to which James contributed The Art of the Novel and Stevenson A Humble Remonstrance memorializes their debate--which in the Thirties most readers believed had been won hands down by James' defense of the novel of art, but which in the dawning Seventies we are not sure about at all, having reached a time when Treasure Island seems to be more to the point and the heart's delight than The Princess Casamassima.

This popular tradition the French may have understood once (in the days when Diderot praised Richardson extravagantly and the Marquis de Sade emulated him in a dirtier book than the Englishman dared), but they lost sight of it long ago. And certainly the so-called nouveau roman is, in its deadly earnestness, almost the opposite of anything truly new, which is to say, anti-art.

Totally isolated on the recent French scene is Boris Vian. He is in many ways a prototype of the new novelist, though lie has been dead for over a decade and his most characteristic work belongs to the years just after World War Two. He was, first of all, an imaginary American (as even writers born in the United States must be these days), who found himself in opposition to the politics of America at the very moment he was most completely immersed in its popular culture--actually writing a detective novel called I'll Spit on Your Grave under the pen name Vernon Sullivan but pretending that he was only its translator into French. By virtue of this peculiar brand of mythological Americanism, he managed to straddle the border, if not quite close the gap, between high culture and low, belles-lettres and pop art. On the one hand, he was a writer of pop songs and a jazz trumpeter much influenced by the New Orleans style; and, on the other, he was the author of novels in which thinly disguised French intellectuals such as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are satirized. But even in his fiction, which seems at first glance conventionally avant-garde, the characters move toward their fates through an imaginary city whose main thoroughfare is called Boulevard Louis Armstrong.

Only now has Vian won the audience he deserved all along, finding it first among the young of Paris, who, like their American counterparts, know that such a closing of the gap between elite and mass culture is precisely the function of the novel now. And though most of the younger American authors who follow a similar course follow it without ever having known him, he seems more like them than like such eminent American forerunners as Faulkner or Hemingway. Vian, unlortunately, turned to the pop novel only for the work of his left hand, to which he was not willing even to sign his own name.

The young Americans who have succeeded Vian, on the other hand, have abandoned all concealment; and when they are most themselves, nearest to their central concerns, turn frankly to pop forms--though not to the detective story, which has become hopelessly compromised by middle-brow condescension, an affectation of college professors and Presidents. The forms of the novel that they prefer are those that seem now what the hard-boiled detective story once seemed to Vian: at the farthest possible remove from art and avant-garde, the greatest distance from inwardness, analysis and pretension and, therefore, immune to lyricism on the one hand and righteous social commentary on the other. It is not compromise by the market place they fear; on the contrary, they choose the genre most associated with exploitation by the mass media--notably, the Western, science fiction and pornography.

Most congenial of all is the Western, precisely because it has for many decades seemed to belong exclusively to pulp magazines, run-of-the-mill TV series and class-B movies--experienced almost purely as myth and entertainment rather than as literature--and its sentimentality has come to possess our minds so completely that it can now be mitigated without essential loss by parody, irony and even critical analysis. In a sense, our mythological innocence has been preserved in the Western, awaiting the day when, no longer believing ourselves innocent in fact, we could decently return to claim it in fantasy. Such a return of the Western represents, of course, a rejection of laureates of the loss of innocence such as Henry James and Nathaniel Hawthorne--those particular favorites of the Forties who, despite their real virtues, turn out to have been too committed to the notion of European high art to survive as major influences in an age of pop. And it implies as well momentarily turning aside from our beloved Herman Melville (compromised by his new critical admirers and the countless Ph.D. dissertations they prompted) and even from Mark Twain. To Hemingway, Twain could still seem central to a living tradition, the father of us all; but, being folk rather than pop in essence, he has become ever more remote from an urban, industrialized world. Folk art knows and accepts its place in a class-structured world that pop blows up, whatever its avowed intentions. What remains is only the possibility of something closer to travesty than emulation--such a grotesque neo-Huck as the foul-mouthed D. J. in Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam?, who, it is wickedly suggested, may really be a black joker in Harlem pretending to be the white refugee from respectability. And, quite recently, Twain's book itself has been rewritten to please and mock its exegetes in John Seelye's Huck Finn for the Critics, which lops off the silly-happy ending, the deliverance of Nigger Jim (in which Hemingway never believed), and puts back into the tale the cussing and sex presumably excised by the least authentic part of Samuel Clemens' mind, as well as the revelation, at long last, that what Hutk and Jim were smoking on the raft was not tobacco but hemp, which is to say. marijuana. Despite all, however, Huck seems for the moment to belong not to the childhood we all continue to live but to the one we have left behind.

Natty Bumppo, on the other hand, who dreamed originally in the suburbs of New York City and in Paris, survives, along with his author. Contrary to what we long believed, it is James Fenimore Cooper who remains alive, or, rather, who has been reborn, perhaps not so much as he saw himself as in the form D. H. Lawrence reimagined him en route to America. Cooper understood that the dream that does not fade with the building of cities, but assumes in their concrete and steel environment the compelling vividness of a waking hallucination, is the encounter of Old World men and New in the wilderness, the meeting of the transplanted European and the red Indian. No wonder Lawrence spoke of himself as "kindled by Fenimore Cooper."

The return of the redskin to the center of our art and our deep imagination, as we have retraced Lawrence's trip to the mythical America, not only is based on the revival of the oldest and most authentic of American pop forms but also projects certain meanings of our lives in terms more metapolitical than political, valid as myth rather than as history. Writers of Westerns have traditionally taken sides for or against the Indians; and unlike the authors of the movies that set the kids to cheering at the Saturday matinees of the Twenties and Thirties, the new novelists have taken a clear stand with the red man. In this act of mythological renegadism, they have not only implicitly declared themselves enemies of the Christian humanism but also rejected the act of genocide with which our nation began--and whose latest reflection, perhaps, is to be found in the war in Vietnam.

It is impossible to write any Western that docs not in some sense glorify violence: but the violence celebrated in the ant-white Western is guerrilla violence--the sneak attack on civilization as practiced first by Ceronimo and Cochise and other Indian warrior chiefs and more latterly apologized for by Ché Guevara or the spokesman for North Vietnam. Warfare, however, is not the final vision implicit in the new Western, which is motivated on a deeper level by a nostalgia for the tribe--a social organization thought of as preferable to both the bourgeois family, from which its authors come, and the soulless out-of-human-scale bureaucratic state, into which they are initiated via schools and universities. In the end, both the dream of violence in the woods and the vision of tribal life seem juvenile, even infatile. But this is precisely the point; for what recommends the Western to the new novelist is pre-eminently its association with children and with the kind of books superciliously identified with their limited and special needs.

The legendary Indians have nothing to do with art in the traditional sense but everything to do with joining boy to man, immaturity to maturity. They preside over the closing of the gap that aristocratic conceptions of art have opened between what fulfills us at 10 or 12 and what satisfies us at 50 or 60.

In light of all this, it is time to look again at the much-discussed immaturity of American literature, at the notorious fact that our classic books are boys' books, our greatest novels at home in the children's section of libraries; in short, that they are all in some sense Westerns--accounts of an idyllic encounter between white man and nonwhite in some variety of wilderness setting. But suddenly this fact--once read as a flaw--seems evidence of a real advantage, a clue to why the gap we now want to close opened so late and so unconvincingly in American letters. Before Henry James, none of our novelists felt himself cut off from the world of magic and wonder; he had only to go to sea or, especially, to cross our own particular border, the frontier, to inhabit a region where adults and children, educated and uneducated shared a common enchantment.

How different the plight of mid-19th Century English writers, such as Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear or George Macdonald, who had to pretend that they were writing for the nursery in order to enter the deep wonderland of their own imaginations. It makes a difference, after all, whether one thinks of the world across the border as faery or frontier, fantasy or history. It has been so long since Europeans lived their deepest dreams, but only yesterday for us. And this is why even now, when we are at last sundered from those dreams, we can turn rotten-ripe without loss of essential innocence, be decadent children playing Indians--be imaginary Americans, all of us, whether native to this land or not. But to be an American is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one, since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than of history--and have now come to know it.

In any case, our best writers have been able to take up the Western again--at one playfully and seriously, quite like their ancestors who began the Revolution that made us a country by playing Indians in deadly earnest and dumping all that English tea into the salt sea. There are many writers still under 40--among them, the most distinguished of their generation--who have written new Westerns that have found the hearts of the young. John Barth's The Sol-Weed Factor represents the beginning of the wave that has been cresting ever since 1960 and that has carried with it not only Barth's near contemporaries such as Thomas Berger (in Little Big Man), Ken Kesey (in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion) and, most recently, Leonard Cohen (in his extraordinarily gross and elegant Beautiful Losers) but has won over older and more established writers such as Norman Mailer, whose newest novel, Why are we in Vietnam?, is not a book about a war in the East as much as a book about the idea of the West. Even William Burroughs, expert in drug fantasies and homosexual paranoia, keeps promising to turn to the genre, though so far, he has contented himself with science fiction--another pop form, another way of escaping from personal to public or popular myth, of using dreams to close a gap.

Science fiction does not seem at first glance to have an appeal as universal as the Western's, at least in book form, though perhaps it is too soon to judge; for it is a very young genre, having found its real meaning and scope (after tentative beginnings by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells) only after World War Two. At that point, two things became clear: first, that the future was upon us, that the pace of technological advance had become so swift that a distinction between present and future would be harder and harder to maintain; and, second, that the end of man, by annihilation or mutation, was a real, even an immediate possibility. But these are the two proper subjects of science fiction: the present future and the end of man, not time travel nor the penetration of outer space, except as they symbolize the former.

Perhaps only in advanced technologies that also have a tradition of self-examination and analysis can science fiction really flourish. For only in America, England and the Soviet Union does the science-fiction novel or post-novel seem to thrive; though science-fiction cartoon strips and comic books, as well as science-fiction TV programs and films (where the basic imagery is blissfully wed to electronic music and words are kept to a minimum) penetrate everywhere. In England and America, the prestige and influence of the genre are sufficient not only to allure Burroughs (in Nova Express) but also to provide a model for William Gelding (in Lord of the Flies), Anthony Burgess (in The Clockwork Orange) and John Barth (whose second major book, Giles Goat-Boy, abandoned the Indian in favor of the future).

Quite unlike the Western, which asserts the difference between England and America, science fiction reflects what makes the two mutually distrustful communities one; as testified by a joint effort (an English author, an American director) such as the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. If there is still a common Anglo-Saxon form, it is science fiction. Vet even here, the American case is a little different from the English; for only in the United states is there a writer of first rank whose preferred mode has been from the first science fiction in its unmitigated pop form. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., did not begin by making some sort of traditional bid for literary fame and then shift to science fiction, but was so closely identified with, that popular, not-quite-respectable form from the first that the established critics were still ignoring him completely at a time when younger readers, attuned to the new rhythm of events by Marshall McLuhan and Buck-minster Fuller, had already made underground favorites of his The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle. That Vonnegut now, after years of neglect, teaches writing in a famous American university and is hailed in lead reviews in the popular press is a tribute not to the critics' acuity but to the powers of the young.

The revival of pornography is best understood in this context, also; for it, like the Western and science fiction, is a form of pop art. Since Victorian times, it has been the essential form of pop art--the most unredeemable of all kinds of subliterature, understood as a sort of entertainment closer to vice than to art. Many notable recent works of the genre have tended to conceal this fact, often because the authors themselves have not understood what they were after and have tried to disguise their work as earnest morality (Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn) or as parody (Terry Southern's Candy). But whatever the author's intent, all those writers who have helped move porn from the underground to the foreground have, in fact, been working towad the liquidation of the very conception of pornography, since the end of art on one side means the end of porn on the other. And that end is now in sight, in films, pop songs and poetry, but especially in the novel, which seemed initially more congenial than later pop-art forms to the sort of private masturbatory reverie that is essential to pornogi aphy.

The standard forms of heterosexual copulation, standardly or "poetically" recorded, seem oddly old-fashioned, even a little ridiculous: it is fellatio, buggery, flagellation that we demand in order to be sure that we ate reading not love stories but pornography. A special beneficiary of this trend has been Norman Mailer, whose first novel, The Naked and the Dead, emulated the dying tradition of the anti-war art novel, with occasional obscenities thrown in, presumably in the interest of verisimilitude. But more and more, Mailer has come to move the obscenity to the center and the social commentary to the periphery, ending in Why are we in Vietnam? with an insistence on foul language and an obsession with scatology that are obviously ends in themselves, too unremitting to be felt as merely an assault on old-fashioned sensibility and taste. And even in his earlier pop novel, An American Dream, which marked his emergence from ten years in which he produced no major fiction, he had committed himself to porn as a way into the region to which his title alludes: the place where, in darkness and filth, all men are alike--the Harvard graduate and the reader of the Daily News, joined in fantasies of murdering their wives and buggering their maids. To talk of such books in terms of Dostoievsky, as certain baffled critics have felt obliged to do, is absurd; James Bond is more to the point. But to confess this would be to confess that the old distinctions are no longer valid and that critics will have to find a claim to authority more appropriate to our times than the outmoded ability to discriminate between high and low.

Even more disconcertingly than Mailer, Philip Roth has, with Portnoy's Complaint, raised the question of whether pornography, even what was called hardcore pornography, any longer exists. Explicit, vulgar, joyous, gross and pathetic. Roth has established himself not only as the laureate of masturbation and oral-genital lovemaking but also as a master of the "thin" novel, the novel with minimum inwardness--ironically presented, in Portnoy, as a confession to a psychiatrist. Without its sexual interest, the continual balancing of titillation and burlesque, his book has no more meaning than any other dirty joke, to which genre it quite clearly belongs. There is pathos, even terror in great plenty, but it is dependent upon, subservient to the dirty jokes about mothers, Jews, shrinks, potency and impotency; and Roth is, consequently, quite correct when he asserts that he is less like such solemn and pious Jewish-American writers as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud than he is like Tiny Tim (himself actually half Arab and half Jew).

"I am a Jew freak," Roth has insisted, "not a Jewish sage"--and one is reminded of Lenny Bruce, who was there first, occupying the dangerous DMZ between the world of the stand-up comedian and that of the proper maker of fictions. But Bruce made no claim to being a novelist and, therefore, neither disturbed the critics nor opened up new possibilities for prose narrative. Before Portnoy's Complaint, the Jewish-American novel had tome to seem an especially egregious example of the death of belles-lettres, having become smug, established, repetitive and sterile. But Portnoy marks the passage into the new world of porn and pop, as Roth's booming sales (even in hard covers!) perhaps sufficiently attest.

It is, of course, the middle aged and well heeled who buy the hardcover editions of the book; yet their children apparently are picking it up, too, for once, not even waiting for the paperback edition. They know it is a subversive book, as their parents do not (convinced that a boy who loves his mother can't be all bad), and as Roth himself, perhaps, was not at first quite aware. Before its publication, he had been at least equivocal on the subject of frankly disruptive literature--full of distrust, for instance, of Norman Mailer--and he appears, therefore, to have become a pop rebel despite himself, driven less by principle than by a saving hunger for the great audience, quite like that which moved John Updike recently out of his elitist exile toward best-sellerdom and relevance in Couples.

There is no doubt in the minds of most other writers whom the young especially prize at the moment that their essential task is to destroy just such distinctions and discriminations once and for all--by parody or exaggeration or grotesque emulation of the classic past, as well as by the adaptation and camping of pop forms. But to turn high art into vaudeville and burlesque at the same moment that mass art is being irreverently introduced into museums and libraries is to perform an act that has political as well as aesthetic implications, an act that closes a class, as well as a generation gap. The notion of one an for the "cultured" and a subart for the "uncultured" represents the last survival in mass industrial societies of an invidious distinction proper only to a class-structured community. Precisely because it carries on, as it has carried on ever since the middle of the 18th Century, a war against that anachronistic survival, pop art is, whatever its overt politics, subversive--a threat to all hierarchies insofar as it is hostile to order. What the final intrusion of pop into the citadels of high art provides for the critic is the exhilarating new possibility of making judgments about the goodness and badness of art quite separated from distinctions between high and low, with their concealed class bias.

But the new audience has not waited for new critics to guide them in this direction. Reversing the process typical of modernism--under whose aegis an unwilling, aging elite audience was bullied and cajoled slowly into accepting the most vital art of its time--postmodernism provides an example of a young, mass audience urging certain aging, reluctant critics toward the abandonment of their former elite status, in return for a freedom the prospect of which more terrifics than elates them. Postmodernism implies the closing of the gap between critic ami audience, also if by critic one understands leader of taste and by audience, follower. But most importantly, it implies the closing of the gap between artist and audience or, at any rate, between professional and amateur in the realm of art.

It all follows logically enough. On the one hand, a poet such as Ed Sanders or a novelist such as Leonard Cohen grows weary of his confinement in the realm of traditional high art; and the former organizes a musical pop group called the Fugs, while the latter makes recordings of his own pop songs to his own guitar accompaniment.

Even more surprisingly, some who had begun as mere entertainers, pop performers without loftier pretensions, were crossing the line. Frank Zappa, for example, has, in interviews and in a forthcoming book, insisted on being taken seriously as poet and satirist, suggesting that the music of his own group, The Mothers of Invention, has been more a deliberate parody of pop than an extension of it in psychedelic directions: while Bob Dylan, who began by abandoning folk music with left-wing protest overtones in favor of electronic rock 'n' roll, finally succeeded in creating a kind of pop surrealist poetry, passionate, mysterious and quite complex--complex enough, in fact, to prompt a score of scholarly articles on his "art." Most recently, he has returned to acoustic instruments and to the most naïve traditions of country music--apparently out of a sense that he had grown too arty and had once more to close the gap by backtracking across the border. It is a spectacular case of the new artist as double agent.

Even more spectacular, however, is the case of John Lennon, who, coming into view first as merely one of the Beatles, then just another rock group from Liverpool, has revealed himself stage by stage as novelist, playwright, moviemaker, guru, sculptor, etc. There is a special pathos in his example, since, though initially inspired by American model1:, he has tried to work out his essentially American strategies in English idioms and in growing isolation on the generally dismal English scene. He has refused to become the prisoner of his special talent as a musician, venturing into other realms, where he has as little authority as anyone else. He thus provides one more model for the young who, without any special gift or calling, in the name of mere possibility, insist on making tens of thousands of records, movies, collections of verse, paintings, junk sculptures, even novels in complete contempt of professional standards. Perhaps, though, the novel is the most unpromising form for an amateur age (it is easier to learn the guitar or make a two-minute eight-millimeter film) and it may be doomed to become less and less important, no matter how it is altered. But for the moment, at least, on the border between the world of art and that of nonart, it flourishes with special vigor as it realizes its transitional status and is willing to surrender the kind of realism and analysis it once thought its special province in quest of the marvelous and magical it began by disavowing.

Samuel Richardson may have believed that when he wrote Pamela and Clarissa, he was delivering prose fiction from that bondage to the merveilleux that characterized the old romances; but it is clear now that he was merely translating the marvelous into new terms, specifically, into bourgeois English. It is time to be through with pretenses; for to close the gap means also to cross the border between the marvelous and the probable, the real and the mythical, the world of the boudoir and the countinghouse and the realm of what used to be called faery but has for so long been designated mere madness. Certainly, the basic images of pop forms such as the Western, science fiction and pornography suggest mythological as well as political or metapolitical meanings. The passage into Indian territory, the flight into outer space, the ecstatic release into the fantasy world of the orgy--all these are analogs for what has traditionally been described as a journey or pilgrimage toward a transcendent goal, a moment of vision.

Pop art can no more abide a mythological vacuum than can high art; and into the space left vacant by the disappearance of the matter of Troy and the myths of the ancient Middle East has rushed, first of all, the matter of childhood--the stuff of traditional fairy tales out of the Black Forest, which seems to the present generation especially attractive, perhaps, because their progressive parents tended to distrust it. But something much more radically new has appeared as well: the matter of metropolis and the myths of the present future, in which the nonhuman world about us, hostile or benign, is rendered in the guise not of elves or dwarfs or witches or even gods but of machines quite as uncanny as any Olympian--and apparently as immortal. Machines and the mythological figures appropriate to the media mass-produced and mass-distributed by machines: the newsboy who, saying "Shazam!" in an abandoned subway tunnel, becomes Captain Marvel; the reporter (with glasses) who, shucking his civilian garb in a telephone booth, is revealed as Superman, immune to all but Kryptonite--these are the appropriate images of power and grace for an urban, industrial world busy manufacturing the future.

But the comic-book heroes do not stand alone. Out of the world of jazz and rock, of newspaper headlines and political cartoons, of old movies immortalized on TV and idiot talk shows carried on car radios, new anti-gods and anti-heroes arrive. In the heads of our new writers, they live a secondary life, begin to realize their immortality-not only Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart, Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong and Lenny Bruce, Geronimo and Billy the Kid, the Lone Ranger and Fu Manchu and the Bride of Frankenstein but Hitler and Stalin, John F. Kennedy and Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby, as well. For the press mythologizes certain public figures, the actors of pop history, even before they are dead, making a doomed President one with Superman in the supermarket of pop culture, as Norman Mailer perceived so accurately and reported so movingly in an essay on John F. Kennedy.

But the secret he told was already known to scores of younger writers and recorded in the text and texture of their work. In the deep memory of Leonard Cohen writing Beautiful Losers, or Richard Fariña composing Been down so long it looks like up to me, or Ken Kesey making Sometimes a Great Notion, there stir to life not archetypal images out of books read in school or at the urging of parents but those out of comic books forbidden in schools or radio and TV programs banned or condescendingly endured by parents. In the newest writers mockery and condescension are absent: they are living in the only world in which they feel at home. They are able to recapture a certain rude magic in its authentic context, by seizing on myths not as stored in encyclopedias or preserved in certain beloved ancient works but as apprehended at their moment of making--at a moment when they are not yet labeled myths.

The present movement-not only in its quest for myths but also in its preference for sentimentality over irony, and especially in its dedication to the primitive--resembles the beginnings of romanticism, with its yearning for the naïve and its attempt to find authentic sources for poetry in folk forms such as the Märchen or the ballads. But the romantics turned exclusively toward the past, in the hope of renewal--to a dream of the past, which they knew they could only write, not actually live. And there persists in the postmodernists some of that old nostalgia for folkways and folk rhythms, curiously tempered by the realization that the folk songs of an electronic age are made not in rural loneliness nor in sylvan retreats but in superstudios by boys singing into the sensitive ear of machines. What recent writers have learned and are true enough children of the present future to find exhilarating is not only that the naïve can be machine produced but that dreams themselves can be manufactured, projected on TV or laser beams with all the vividness of the visions of saints. In pre-electronic romanticism, it took an act of faith on the part of Novalis to be able to say, "Life is not a dream, but it can be and probably should be made one."

The dream, the vision, ekstasis: These have again become the avowed goals of literature; for our latest poets realize in this time of endings what their remotest ancestors knew in the era of beginnings, that merely to instruct and delight is not enough. They are convinced that wonder and fantasy that deliver the mind from the body, the body from the mind, must be naturalized to a world of machines--subverted, perhaps, or even transformed, but certainly not destroyed or denied. The ending of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest expresses that conviction metaphorically when the Indian, who is his second hero, breaks out of the insane asylum in which the system has kept him impotent and trapped--and flees to join his fellows who are building a fishing weir on a giant hydroelectric power dam. The dam and weir both are essential to postelectronic romanticism, which knows that the point is no longer to pursue some uncorrupted West over the next horizon, since there is no incorruption and all our horizons have been reached. It is, rather, to make a thousand little Wests in the interstices of a machine civilization on its steel and concrete back; to live the tribal life among and with the support of machines; to shelter new communes under domes constructed according to the technology of Buckminster Fuller; and to warm the nakedness of new primitives with advanced techniques of solar heating.

All this is less a matter of choice than of necessity; because, it has turned out, machine civilization tends inevitably to synthesize the primitive, and ekstasis is the unforeseen end of advanced technology, mysticism the by-product--no more nor no less accidental than penicillin--of scientific research. In the antiseptic laboratories of Switzerland, the psychedelic drug LSD was first developed, first tried by two white-coated experimenters; and even now, Dow Chemical, which manufactures napalm, also produces the even more powerful psychedelic agent STP. It is, in large part, thanks to machines--the supermachines that, unlike their simpler prototypes, insist on tending us rather than demanding we tend them--that we live in the midst of a great religious revival, scarcely noticed by the official spokesmen of established Christian churches, since it speaks quite another language. Yet many among us feel that they are able to live honestly only by what machines cannot do better than they--which is why certain poets and novelists, as well as pop singers and pornographic playwrights, are suggesting in print, on the air, everywhere, that not work but vision is the proper activity of men and that, therefore, the contemplative life may, after all, be preferable to the active one. In such an age, it is not surprising that the books that most move the young are essentially religious books, as, indeed, pop art is always religious.

In the immediate past, however, when an absolute distinction was made between high art and pop, works of the latter category tended to be the secret scriptures of a kind of shabby, storefront church--a religion as exclusive in its attempt to remain the humble possession of the unambitious and unlettered as the canonical works of high art in their claim to be an esoteric gospel of art itself, available only to a cultivated elite. But in a time of closing the gap, literature becomes again prophetic and universal--a continuing revelation appropriate to a permanent religious revolution, whose function is precisely to transform the secular crowd into a sacred community, one with each other and equally at home in the world of technology and the realm of wonder. Pledged like Isaiah to speaking the language of everyone, the prophets of the new dispensation can afford to be neither finicky nor genteel; and they echo, therefore, the desperate cry of the Hebrew prototype: "I am a man of unclean lips ... in the midst of a people of unclean lips."

Let those to whom religion means security beware, for it is no new established church that is in the process of being founded; and its communicants are, therefore, less like the pillars of the Lutheran Church or Anglican gentlemen than they are like ranters, enthusiasts, Dionysiacs, Anabaptists: holy disturbers of the peace of the devout. Leonard Cohen, in a moment of vision that constitutes the climax of Beautiful Losers, aptly calls them new Jews; for he sees them as a saved remnant moving across deserts of boredom, out of that exile from our authentic selves that we all share, toward a salvation none of us can quite imagine. Such new Jews, Cohen (himself a Jew as well as a Canadian) adds, do not have to be Jewish but probably do have to be Americans--by which he must surely mean imaginary Americans, since, as we have been observing all along, there were never any other kind.