Introduction
The historical arc of the past century clearly indicates that there has been a massive thrust in the direction of a sort of decadent populism, a populism which was contained in the class structures of Europe but which has burst through the strata of containment in America — with the help of such mass cultural innovations as films, paperback books and television — and flows through every dimension of the society which, at this moment, is the most savagely lonely, the most expressively rampant and the most overpoweringly industrial on earth. There are more books published in America than anywhere on earth; there are more pounds of the flesh of paper disseminated between spines or bindings — on a given day — than anywhere in the solar system. The circulatory capacity of American books — at least within its own borders — is staggering. The circulatory capacity of American movies may well have to do with changing the perceptual capacity of the entire earth. The tonnage is immense, the consumption enormous—and this includes everything from erotic literature to poetry. Creation is no sooner presented than, with hardly a reflection, it is imitated, parodied, thrown into a mixmaster of media, turned into song, photographed, shot up on big screens where its leading characters pass through a period of hero-worshiping idolatry — and all this takes place from the throat to the gut, so to speak, a rapid digestion, skipping the by-this-time obvious heart, and certainly having nothing to do with the damaged bones of memory.
What has happened? Cries of fascist go up and down the streets of the world, cries of millennial apocalypse, of atomic doom. The mind, souped-up both by what sets its gears in motion from the outside, and by what drives it on through what it takes in;— the mind, with all due respect to the psychologists, has broken down. Over and over again. Sometimes, in many, each day; each day a sort of tense and nervous breaking down of the good old tissue of the past, the onion-skinning without hope of enlightenment, this absurd peergynting.
I am one of those who believes that the Second World War was a central event in this breakdown — even for those who were not yet born to witness it. Behind the Nazi ideals sputtered out of mouths bent on self-destruction, an actual conquest of the world lay in potentiality. That world, I insist, is not merely the one visible to the cartographical eye. Ask any man alive, and even the dead ones — perhaps first of all the dead ones — and he will let you know, after a certain time, of an awful legacy he carries, something passed down through the psychological and industrial bloodstream, some terror that passes all the couches in the world, some nightmare he cannot dislodge though all his dreams are exhausted.
I am not particularly referring to the genocidal aspect of the Nazis. The murder of the Jews is only a part of the total plan. Rather, I mean to point to a condition of continual and unabated disassociation, a sort of cosmic schizophrenia running between transcendentalism and realism — but a romantic realism (as that seems to be the term) divorced from the 'feel' of earth, a world which excites us to the depression that is itself a lid upon an older earth whose spirits we no longer care to dwell among. In such a world, seeing will be believing; a certain mutated objectivity will be the rule; a sort of applied photography of light will serve as the instrument of transcendence, and a just-feel-able cool and comfortable environment will be set up, with inlaid distances. Isolation shall not be the preface to solitude, and solitude to organic creation. Rather isolation shall be a form whose existence implies that one is being mastered. Needless to say, in 1968, we are already well into this 'machine,' this sweatless and fabricated 'body' of man.
Some of the signposts of such a world are presented, unconsciously perhaps, by The Naked and Monique. On the surface, of course, this is only another erotic book, written by a Belgian after the last war. It has a 'translated quality' that pulls it away from the Anglo-Saxon, gives it a certain heightened feel, referring as it does to that old-time, prewar, culturally 'free' world of Paris.
But what is interesting here is that the book is raced through, by means of a rapid series of episodes, pastiches less of style than they are of sexual action. I say interesting because the historical time of the book is the entire period of the Second World War. But where the descent of women in other erotic literature I have encountered, usually has taken the form of a series of at least somewhat stylized and delineated encounters, here our heroine, beginning and ending as a prostitute, telling her story in retrospect, seems ever concerned with getting the business of the story finished with as quickly as possible — with little time for the fribble-frabbles of pleasure.
Now one could simply let it go as a weak book, and have done with it. But scanning erotic literature from the wartime period of the Nazis, one finds an interesting parallel: there is hardly any work referent to that time — in the genre of the erotic — which does not have this stepped-up quality, as though what had been cut loose by Nazism was so erotically terrifying that, from that point on, everyone in the world, doctors, lawyers, artists, businessmen, prostitutes and the rest of the dramatis personae of this ever-powerful and at the same time ever-diminishing earth, could no longer accurately be viewed except in relation to his being in the act of "taking a powder." When Nazism touched the "volkish" roots with its lunacy, when it shook to the foundations the very idea of an inner community of beings called people, it did so with some unbearable diamond-pointed drill aimed at the sex and cash-registering brain of Western man stuck on himself and creating this endless rapidity which flows through our currents from everything and every being encountered. This is not to say that a recycling of Nazism is the fate of Western man. The very explosion of all the verbalized and visualized taboos will not render man exhausted fodder for some militant surrender coming forward with a gun in its hand. This very whacky, deadly and yet censorably uncensored America is the clearest indication that the machine is being fought at every turn of its own fierce propulsions. The future, of course, looms brightly only when there is an acceptance of the fact of the business of the matter of our bodies. Let that be the mask which permits the operation of that other, and intertwined, and intricate aspect of our being to continue in the dark light of its creative stance. It is to be mean, in order not to be mean. The prize continues as tomorrow's anguished day is (yes, still) certain to rise.
Rudolph Conway, Ph.D.
Los Angeles, April 1968