Destroyers, Defilers, and Confusers of Men

A generation ago, Auden summed up an attitude in an astonishing line: “There is no such thing as the State.” In its poem, “September 1, 1939,” this sentence serves its purpose well enough. The poet imagines himself in “one of the dives on Fiftysecond Street” on this night at the end of “a low dishonest decade”; a war was beginning which it seemed nobody would win, though some could lose more appallingly than others. Emotionally, he turns from all that political confusion and falsehood — and also, though this is not in the poem overtly, from his own involvement in those politics — and cries out that the whole mess is a lie and an illusion, it isn’t really there. One can argue, I think legitimately, that Nazi Germany was not a State, was an anti-State, a monstrous parody of a State, because it did not fulfill one of the essential requirements of a State, define the status of all those whom it governed. But in this poem Auden was not talking about Nazi Germany alone or about the nature of a good State.

Emotionally, wishfully: yes. But intellectually: of course not. Authority as such is not a lie, nor does it just lie. Both in fact and in theory, there is such a thing as the State, and it is not an illusion, in itself it is not a lie (though a given actual state may lie and be full of lies). Indeed, Auden’s statement is so egregious that there would be no point in taking it as other than an emotional counter in a poem except that it asserts what some people, including some writers, seem to believe; at least they do not seem to have disentangled the private wish from the public fact. I can assert this with some confidence, since for several years in the forties I myself was so entangled; I used to fondle these lines of Auden’s like a talisman. (In his Collected Poems of 1945, this poem appears without the stanza quoted; the entire poem is omitted from the Selected Poems of 1959.)

You may say that the modern State is full of evils and that its worst evil is its pervasiveness and power. In fact, it is hard to think of many twentiethcentury writers worth reading who do not say something like this, if they mention the State at all. If you are anarchistic enough, you may even say the State is an unnecessary evil, let’s get rid of it. But you may say that the State is not there only in a Christian Science sort of way (there is no evil, evil is illusion), as the expression of a flabby wish, profiting little, or of a flabbier spite, “they don’t pay as much attention to me as they should.”

I don’t know of an apothegm to set beside Auden’s, summing up a less immoderate, more widely held, antagonistic attitude toward the State. Here is a passage, important only as it is typical, from a “Letter from England” by Anthony Burgess (in the Autumn, 1967, Hudson Review).

My political views are mainly negative: I lean towards anarchy; I hate the State. I loathe and abominate that costly, crass, intolerant, inefficient, eventually tyrannical machine which seeks more and more to supplant the individual. The more State we have, the more wretched we become.

Clearly, Burgess is here using “State55 narrowly, to apply only to government (the ultimate test of which is that it can call on military and police power to enforce its will), excluding that collection of institutions and customs which “state” sometimes includes but which arc now commonly subsumed under “society.” I daresay one could get a long list of writers, from all countries now, who would subscribe to Burgess’ attitudes. They don’t like the State, and they think it is here to stay; but they aren’t going to do much more about it than fume, for they doubt that poets are even unacknowledged legislators of the world anymore.

To be sure, a writer may simply ignore the whole matter. We Americans have quite a tradition of ignoring the State, both in literature and in life. Huck Finn and Nigger Jim come to life as fugitives from the law, and when it catches up with them, the book vitiates. The Pequod is a microcosm of something, but not of the American society, which it leaves out of sight and nearly out of mind. It is not his government that James’s ambassador represents. From reading Wallace Stevens’ poetry you would suppose he had stayed as remote from institutions of social power as Emily Dickinson did in both her poetry and her life.

We have narrowed politics till it suggests little more than something nasty, mean, performed in smoke-filled rooms, certainly not something as various and wide as Aristotle meant by it or as ideally noble as Dante meant. We have larded politicians with ignominy, splitting them off from statesmen, of whom we consider ourselves lucky to get one in a generation. For example, my parents lived in or near a town of two thousand for the first thirty-five or forty years of their lives. When I was ten, they moved to a desert, and of course talked a great deal about our distant hometown. Yet I cannot recall hearing them mention any governing official of that town or county, mayor, alderman, sheriff, either by name or office, only the constable two or three times. National politics existed for them - in Washington, something you read about in the papers or heard about over the radio, and talked about rather as you talked about baseball players (my father never saw a big league game) or famous actors (my mother never saw one on stage). They referred to Woodrow Wilson as a real statesman, and after Franklin Roosevelt died, they conceded that maybe he had had something of the statesman in him. They were old-fashioned and Republicans.

Susan Sontag is newfangled and, she says, a socialist, and she is sophisticated and intellectual to a degree. But her hostile indifference toward the State is as traditional as punkin pie. These quotations are from the McLuhanish last essay in Against Interpretation:

What we are getting is not the demise of art, but a transformation of the function of art. Art, which arose in human society as a magical-religious operation, and passed over into a technique for depicting and commenting on secular reality, has in our own time arrogated to itself a new function — neither religious, nor serving a secularized religious function, nor merely secular or profane (a notion which breaks down when its opposite, the “religious” or “sacred,” becomes obsolescent). Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility.

In Miss Sontag’s scheme of things, nothing matters so much as the expansion and exploration of consciousness— for which purpose, presumably, art is superior to LSD only if it does a better job. Politics, humanism, ethics — all such matters she relegates to the antique shop with Matthew Arnold.

The distinction between “high and “low culture seems less and less meaningful. For such a distinction - inseparable from tfie Matthew Arnold apparatus — simply does not make sense for a creative community of artists and scientists engaged in programming sensations, uninterested in art as a species of moral journalism.

Still, she doesn’t want to be too rude to us old fogies; it is stupid of us to be nonmodernist, but not totally idiotic; we are not vicious so much as eccentric. (To an idolator of the Zeitgeist, is there anything quite so shameful as not being up to date?)

Outraged humanists, please note. There is no need for alarm. A work of art does not cease being a moment in the conscience of mankind, when moral conscience is understood as only one of the functions of consciousness.

That notion expanded me all right when I read it, about as much and as long as a serving of baked beans would have done: it hadn’t occurred to me before that moral conscience could be viewed as a charming little thing all gussied up with bright moments. (Miss Sontag really means it: she was so busy programming her first novel for sensations that she didn’t get around to putting any people in it; her second, and much better, novel does have a character in it, though a dead one, nearly all the action taking place in his mind after his suicide. In my nonmodernist view, creating live people in the fictional mode is not just an aesthetic job but essentially and inextricably moral as well.)

Currently in the United States, there are writers who are not content to ignore or merely to disdain politicians, politics, our society, the State; it is their ideas and practices I am primarily interested in here. They are frequently claimed as part of the modernist movement, and maybe they are; I, however, think of them as nihilists. But there are all sorts of nihilists. According to the name, what they have in common is Nothing. Yet not all those who believe in Nothing arc called nihilists. There is an unnamed species of aesthetic antimystic — Mallarmé is their laureate — for whom experience of Nothingness, the Void, is the central fact of life. (Robert Martin Adams has written well about some of them in NIL.) For them, connection with others is peripheral, at the most something to be savored à la Gide and at the least an occasion for coffinfrugging à la Terry Southern. Nihilists, as the word is commonly used, are obsessed, like genuine moralists, with their connections with others, and their heresiarch is the great, gloomy Marquis. They cannot forgive God for not existing. Love is their indispensable enemy within — in Genêt’s perfect sentence, “I so need love from which to draw vigor enough to destroy it” (Thief’s Journal). They are against the State not just as government but as institutions and customs as well. It is this political aspect of literary nihilism which I am going to concentrate on.

I DISTINGUISH three main sorts of nihilistic writers, destroyers, defilers, and confusers. Of the three, the destroyers are much the most congenial, for the taproot of their impulse is unmistakably rage against injustice, against social evil. To the extent that their writing expresses this rage it can be purgative for a reader who shares the emotion, whether or not he himself is a nihilist (when it assaults the reader himself, things get more complicated), Bazarov and Arkady in Fathers and Sons are the first named nihilists in literature. “A nihilist,” said Arkady, “is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence that principle may be enshrined in.” A century ago, characters with sentiments like these looked pretty horrific, and the publication of Turgenev’s (otherwise conventional) novel stirred up a great ruckus. But to us now in the last third of this wasting century, these characters are less threatening than congenial. Their moral motives show. They hate social evil, and they believe in the power of literature to change men’s dreams and thereby modify their actions, their societies; they zealously dream about and recommend demolishing this or that corrupt society in the hope that a new and good society may rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the old one. Well, I do not believe in phoenixes, but I find it hard to hate a man who does.

James Baldwin is such a one sometimes — The Fire Next Time. He does not see love as his enemy, but he puts it to peculiar uses: “because love is so big with us, we must kill you.” Norman Mailer once managed to find something worthy of respect in a gang of hoods setting upon a defenseless bum and burning him alive. Allen Ginsberg saw the best minds of his generation destroy themselves because of Moloch. Kenneth Rexroth accused professors, Madison Avenue, and the Statue of Liberty of killing Dylan Thomas. LeRoi Jones’s The Slave says, perhaps more explicitly than is good for a play, that a society which twists its citizens as hideously as ours must be destroyed. The racial issue, like the class issue a generation ago, is subordinate in writers like these to the main political drive — a rage against social evil so obliterative that nothing will satisfy it but wholesale destruction. It is all society’s fault. Yet they tell you both directly and indirectly that they yearn above all things for a society limitlcssly good, a harmony of justice and love and justice and freedom and justice and radical equality.

Their rage was generated in the first place by the evils of our Society and our State, but the destructiveness of their rage is limitless because their dream of the good society is utopist. Their dream does not accept envy, possessivencss, cruelty, and power-lust as givens which politics must always accommodate, an acceptance which makes one both less hopeful about the future and less despairing about the present. For example, the revolutionary college students now are opposed to middleclass values, as they have been taught to be in college, without knowing what “middle-class” (or “bourgeois”) means exactly. Their emotional logic runs somewhat like this: the middle class is bad; it rules; therefore ruling is bad; also therefore, let’s throw out the middle class and let’s us rule. A Columbia graduate student who participated in the rebellion last spring told me he did not believe there was such a thing as a decent cop; right behind that statement was the implication that there should be no cops. But without force, without police and/or soldiers, there is no State, no government. Exactly: anarchy is the emotional dream of these rebellious children of the bourgeoisie. But they are also intelligent, and suspect, I would guess, that their dream is unattainable. Most nihilist destroyers, black or white, middle-class or déclassé, are less than total anarchists; they want to wreck not the idea of a good society so much as this or that bad state, and they want you to join them in the job. Their literary modes tend to be hortatory, prophetic, seldom very unconventional formally.

The defilers are not much for unconventional modes of expression either. Mimicking, parody, blasphemy (though it’s not easy to blaspheme these days, what with GOD IS DEAD all over mass magazines), pornography, naturalism, these are favorite literary instruments for defiling, but the way they are used seldom surprises. Tame defilers, like Mort Sahl or the earlier Nichols and May, content themselves with mocking those others most of the time; Broadway has use for them; their satire matters about as much as a Playboy bunny’s scut. But there are rougher ones, like the late Lenny Bruce, who regularly assault and befoul the audience as well. There was a time when the bourgeoisie did not go in for that sort of entertainment, but now a sizable portion of it says “Épatez us again, Daddy-O, we love it.”

Jean-Claude van Itallie’s America Hurrah, for example, has made an off-Broadway success by denigrating things American, and it docs this in ways that are by now stock-in-trade for what Robert Brustein has named the theater of revolt, especially in its direct assault on the audience. “Motel,” the last of the three one-act skits that make up America Hurrah, culminates with two of the three characters scrawling public-toilet graffiti on the walls of the set in front of you, with strong lights blazing directly out at you so that you can watch what is going on only by squinting through your fingers, and with the P.A. system turned up as high as it will go — for an hour or two after the performance I was partially deaf. Stuff like this is sometimes treated like scourging satire, but I don’t think it should be so treated, for I do not see in it the serious moral purpose which there must be in genuine satire. Anyway, scourging ceases to be moral when the victim enjoys it (the way some white liberals apparently enjoy having black power demagogues beat up on them), and scourging is at the best dubiously moral when it becomes as fashionable as audience-assaulting has become recently. (No producer since Nero has been in a position to afford literally to slaughter his audience, and apparently it didn’t occur to Nero — but then, nihilism was invented in the eighteenth century, the dark side, of enlightenment.)

Listening to Lenny Bruce chant dirty words — cocksucker, motherfucker, niggerboy, kike — might be a relief if you had been on a steady diet of television goo for a long time and were afraid to use those words yourself; but any higher satiric function it might have escapes me. The one record of Bruce’s I listened to included a long passage in which he hysterically befouls the memory of Eleanor Roosevelt. I can sort of understand why he was faddish, just as I can sort of understand why watching women wrestle in mud was faddish a few years ago in Hamburg. All in all, I think I would prefer the wrestling; at least if you sit far enough back you won’t get splattered with the mud, and there is no possibility of pretending that either the wrestling or your pleasure in it is anything but filthy.

Hubert Selby is a defiler of a more serious order. Last Exit to Brooklyn is a collection of one long and five short stories recounted in a clumsy naturalistic style interlarded with dehumanizing passages in a kind of tumid, on-and-on prose characteristic of pornography. Most of the characters in the book are encapsulated within themselves, and all of them are seen as trapped in a foul part of a brutal city in an irredeemably vile nation. The characters have no chance of getting out; they have been trapped so long that few of them know they are trapped, have hope enough even to feel frustrated. What little beauty manifests itself in the stories is sentimental, love is lust and usually perverse, social action is a cover for the gratification of cupidity and selfish power. The book at least projects a kind of moral vision which includes us readers: the society is ours; we are implicated; we too, the author says, are trapped and damned. Moreover, the very crudity of the prose and narrative styles, combined with the obsessive pornography and violence, entraps the reader even as he is reading. Selby succeeds in defiling everything, including the reader’s mind, and not in any faddish way. That’s not mud he’s slinging, that’s shit. But his stories fail as fiction and are only half there as satire. For he uses Yahoo means to write about Yahoos, and the result is about what you would expect in the way of Yahoo art. (The critic Webster Schott reports that Selby said in an interview he had been motivated by love of his characters. God shelter us all from such love! I think that if Selby had seen what Genêt saw — “I so need love from which to draw vigor enough to destroy it” — he might have written a book which had other virtues than sheer strength and which did not just defile. But then, of all the nihilistic writers I know about, past and present, Genêt alone is capable of moral lucidity, and not even he always.)

There is a built-in contradiction to being a literary nihilist. After all, if you really believe in Nothing, if you finally despair of God, love, and society, if you think nothing matters either ultimately or now, you don’t create a work of art to say so; you do, like Kirilov in The Possessed, shoot yourself. Granted that literary nihilists cannot go whole hog, even so they have their troubles. A destroyer, for example — what sort of social wreckage can a poem produce? Propaganda can do a good job over the long haul, but for visible results right now, words can never be as dandy as a bomb. A serious defiler is better off than a destroyer, since he is not aiming so much to effect social action as to affect the reader’s state of mind; but among literary resources there is not much besides pornography and blasphemy by which he can gain his end directly — maybe parody once in a while, but not often. A confuser, though, is in fine shape. If he is not hung up on phoenixism or immediate annihilation, if he is modest enough to settle for producing confusion in his readers’ minds, then he has excellent literary instruments at hand.

I SEE Confusion as the last stretch on the literary way to Nothing, well past raging Destructiveness, just beyond the bogs of Defilement, though of course a writer who is out to sow confusion will avail himself of what he has learned as he went through those lesser regions. John Barth did a pretty good job of dirty destruction in End of the Road and The Floating Opera. In The Sot-Weed Factor he tried his hand at defilement, though he is so good at parody that the fun of the novel is much more important than such defiling as it manages. In Giles Goat-Boy he moved on to confusion, employing what he had learned before. But he is a third-rate confuser; he hates fairly well, but clouds of ideology make this novel vague, more boring than confusing. Literary high jinks meaning fun is what he is best at.

In Tiny Alice, Edward Albee makes extensive use of blasphemy. On behalf of the Church, a cardinal accepts in exchange for a true though shaky believer, Julian, two billion dollars from the worldly agents of some mysterious power. This power employs social institutions evilly; yet it is not the devil exactly; yet it is supernatural. The one thing we know about it for sure is its name, Tiny Alice. At the end, shot and dying, darkness approaching him, an amplified heartheat swelling in the theater, Julian assumes a posture parodying the crucifixion; his last words are, “God, Alice ... I accept thy will”; three vast heartheats, total darkness, curtain. So you begin probing the play hard for a meaning, and presently find yourself shat upon: “tiny Alice” is buggerese for “tight ass-hole.” Injured and insulted, you may try to understand the play even so — it is very stageworthy, Albce is a whiz at theatrics. What about all the false, leads, themes that come to nothing? What is this malign power which the characters Lawyer, Butler, and Miss Alice are agents of, and is it called Tiny Alice only to insult the audience and give the buggers a snicker? Is there any genuine love in Miss Alice’s tenderness for Julian? Does the play mean to say that there is nothing but greed, self-interest, and cruelty in the institutions of society and all their representatives? Most of your questions are unanswerable, and those you can more or less answer cancel each other out; in the guise of paradoxes, the play offers insoluble contradictions. One cannot easily say whether this confusion is deliberate on the playwright’s part or merely expressive of an uncontrolled confusion in himself. It is true that nowhere else in Albee’s published writings does he show much evidence of mind, but I prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt in Tiny Alice and assume that he calculated its confusion (as Robbe-Grillet calculates the confusion in his fiction). Either way, of course, the play is quite effective nihilism. But if Albee knew what he was up to, then my hostility toward him could stand untainted by the slightest pity or even contempt; and I would like that better than looking down on him as incompetent, too mixed up and mindless to know what he was doing.

I HAVE saved William Burroughs till last, for two reasons: Naked Lunch is in many respects more impressive than the other books I have gone into here; and his reputation as a writer seems to me not only inflated but also — what is more important — inappropriate — as though John Updike were to be greatly praised for his meters.

Burroughs’ announced intentions are unimpeachable. On the dust jacket of Naked Lunch, he is quoted as saying:

Certain passages in the book that have been called pornographic were written as a tract against Capital Punishment in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal. These sections are intended to reveal capital punishment as the obscene, barbaric and disgusting anachronism it is.

Moreover, toward the end of an interview published in the Fall, 1965, Paris Review, he says:

I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally, yes, to wise up the marks. All of my work is directed against those who are bent, through stupidity or design, on blowing up the planet or rendering it uninhabitable.

(Various notions he expresses in the course of the interview arc nutty; but having some nutty theories doesn’t necessarily do a writer in — think of Yeats.) However, the actual effect of Naked Lunch does not conform to these stated intentions. Take the supposed satire against capital punishment. It consists of a phantasmagoria of inconsecutive episodes, detailing with intimate vividness some of the most diseased sexual mechanics conceivable. The absolute in these matters was reached late in the age of enlightenment by Sade (who also professed to be morally outraged by capital punishment). Since then, the question has been how to refine on the master. Burroughs’ refinements are to omit nearly all the philosophizing during the course of the fiction, to speed up the orgasms to one a page or so, and to emphasize necrophilia (Sade favored coprophilia). But this bears even less relation to a true Swiftian satire against capital punishment than a sensational account of cannibals capturing, processing, and eating children would bear to A Modest Proposal. Swift’s satire, being the genuine article, itself directs you toward its target, whereas Burroughs has to tell you extrancously that he intends his writing to do something utterly different from what it is actually doing; in Swift’s satire the ugliness is in the evil attacked, whereas in Burroughs’ pseudosatire the ugliness, so far as the reader is concerned, is mostly in the style of the attack itself, and the primary object of the attack is not capital punishment but the reader. The result, if nothing else, is confusion. However, to be a really great confuser like Sade, you must be in far better control of your material and intentions than Burroughs is. Confusion permeates his writing only because it permeates himself unrecognized and therefore unmastered.

That confusion is in the writing I assert from my experience of his fiction; once having felt this, I looked for corroboration of my feeling. That confusion is in the author’s mind unrecognized I presume to assert on the basis of certain mutually incompatible statements Burroughs has made about his writing. His exalted satiric intention has been noted. Yet in the Paris Review interview, he goes on to say:

Like the advertising people we talked about, I’m concerned with, the precise manipulation of word and image to create an action, not to go out and buy a Coca-Cola, but to create an alteration in the reader’s consciousness.

I believe that satire addresses itself to the reader’s understanding with the aim of encouraging him to make such and such a choice about a moral, and commonly a social, vice or folly, and that this is quite different from aiming to “create an alteration in the reader’s consciousness”; the latter, the meaning of which is not entirely clear to me, smacks of McLuhan and Robbe-Grillet rather than of Swift and Orwell. But Burroughs records another confusion much more radical than this. Here are three other statements he has made about, not in, his writing; they are irreconcilable with bis professedly satiric intentions.

There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing. . . . I am a recording instrument. . . .

I apparently took detailed notes on sickness and delirium [during his opium addiction]. I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title NAKED LUNCH.

As a raw projection of diseased fantasies Naked Lunch has a certain vivid force, and its confusion is justifiable on clinical, though not aesthetic or moral, grounds; but to disguise its chaotic vividness as high moral order is a confusion for which there is no justification—as though Coleridge should present “Kubla Khan” as a tract on the nature of God. Naked Lunch may turn you against capital punishment, but only as it turns you against everything about civilized society about the very idea of civilized society “as we know it” (or as I at least can imagine it). Insofar as the novel concerns itself with social evil, its effective message is: it’s so awful why bother? (I take it as possible to be against capital punishment, dope addiction, the police state, and nuclear warfare, and still be in favor of civilization.)

Yet Naked Lunch is well spoken of. Jack Kerouac says, “Burroughs is the greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift”—which proves if nothing else that Jack Kerouac is a honey of a blurb writer. Norman Mailer says, “I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius” — which would be even less interesting if one believed that Mailer meant it. Robert Lowell says: “It’s a completely powerful and serious book. . . . I don’t see how it could be considered immoral” —which at least gives you something to argue with. Not only these three but also Herbert Gold, William Wasserstrom, Mary McCarthy, as well as others whose opinions I respect in varying degrees, speak well of Burroughs. To explain what I take to be their error in judgment is a way to get at a larger error that helps account for the prestige of nihilistic writing these days.

There are some lesser reasons for the esteem which Naked Lunch enjoys. It is experimental, “new,” and there is nothing that adoration of Zeitgeist likes better than experimentation; the novel’s special novelty is apparent randomness, coherent inconsistency (his later books have gone so much further in the incorporation of the random that they are confused beyond what even many of his admirers can tolerate). The literary-intellectual counterestablishinent esteems writing which is against, and Naked Lunch is the most thoroughgoingly anti book I know of by an American. (In me, its anti effects boomerang: what it sets me against is itself and its author.) The book has certain literary strengths, of felicitous phrase, of nightmarish cruelty and pornography, of vivid revulsion. Moreover, the central metaphor of the book, as Burroughs defines it, has a considerable and illuminating power: addiction to junk is not only a social evil in itself, it is the extreme instance of a lot of debilitating “addictions” which modern civilization provides, encourages, imposes. If the book actually embodied this metaphor, cumulatively, rationally, with modulation, then it would indeed be a masterpiece of satire. But Naked Lunch is irrational, spasmodic, unstructured, always at a pitch of extremity, “absurd,” cartoonish, pop: very chic. The following passage could have occurred on practically any page; it did occur, for no apparent reason, in no context I can discern, on page 136 (the ellipses are in the original). I quote it because in it the message is slightly less opaque than usual. (It goes without saying that high-class modernist writing should be difficult to understand.)

The washing boards are down, and the sheets are sent to the Laundromat lose those guilty stains — Emmanuel prophesies a Second Coming. . . .

There’s a boy across the river with an ass like a peach; alas I was no swimmer and lost my Clementine.

The junky sits with needle poised to the message of blood, and the con man palpates the mark with fingers of rotten ectoplasm. . . .

The root reason, as I conceive the matter, for the book’s reputation is the expressivistic fallacy. The well-known fallacy of imitative form — if the subject is disorder, the poem should be disordered too — is the best-defined literary manifestation of expressivism, but the whole fallacious attitude and practice are far more diffused than in just this one error. Expressivism, like so much else that is wrong with the world, became important with, and in good part because of, Rousseau. It holds that the function of true art is to express either the artist himself or what is of profound importance to him and to other, perhaps to all, men. By this criterion, Naked Lunch has unmistakably succeeded. Burroughs’ destructiveness, disgust, and confusion are embodied in shards of images, broken rhythms, and spasmodic actions, so powerfully that many people find the book of high value, having in themselves feelings that find a certain satisfaction in his words. But if you believe, as I do, that the impression a book makes on its readers is quite as important as the effectiveness with which it expresses feelings and attitudes, then you have more complex standards of judgment. Naked Lunch does not just express disgust and confusion for me; it disgusts and confuses me, to no end. For this reason I am able to say, as Lowell was not, that this book, like all nihilistic confusion, can be considered immoral. Burroughs himself is of my general persuasion, at least in conscious, stated intention: to satirize capital punishment and modern civilization, and to alter the reader’s consciousness, concern the effects which writing has on others; they are moral acts if anything literary can be moral. I think that he failed to accomplish these honorable intentions, but succeeded only in producing (not just expressing, but causing) foul confusion, a result which by his own professed standards is immoral. I think that to justify his fiction is an error, because expressivism is a fallacy, the chief fallacy of aestheticism, of seeing art as autonomous, independent of ethics and politics.

There is such a thing as the State, as social order, as society, and literature is inextricably connected with it, for good or for ill. There was a time when nihilistic exhortation made a kind of sense: “help the old world die.” But that message has been received, and the wreckers are busy acting on it now. A new world is soon to come forth, or at least we must behave as though it were, and who is to dream its shape better than writers? The social engineers? Perish forbid!

Whatever else you may think about it, literary nihilism is out of date.