An Incomplete Education

by Judy Jones

  RECOMMENDED READING: Growing Up Absurd, of course. And, if you liked that, The Empire City (1959), a novel with a hero perversely named Horatio Alger and a lambasting of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. Five Years: Thoughts in a Useless Time (1967), his journal of late-Fifties despair. And “May Pamphlet” (1945), a modern counterpart to Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” NORMAN MAILER (1923-)

  Although he probably wouldn’t have wowed them at the Deux Magots, Mailer, in the American intellectual arena, is at least a middleweight. Beginning in the mid-Fifties, when he took time off from his pursuit of the Great American Novelist prize to write a weekly column for The Village Voice (which he co-founded), he was, for decades, our most visible social critic, purveyor of trends, attacker of ideologies, and promoter of the concept of the artist as public figure. Operating as a sort of superjournalist—even Mailer has never claimed to be a man of letters—he proceeded to define new waves of consciousness, from “hip” to the peace movement to feminism, just as (though never, as his detractors point out, before) they hit the cultural mainstream. Like a true New Journalist, he was forever jumping into the action, taking risks, playing with the language, and making sociological connections. Unlike other New Journalists, however, he came equipped with a liberal Jewish background, a Harvard education, considerable talent as a novelist, and enough ambition to make him emperor, if only he’d been a little less cerebral and a lot less self-destructive. By the late Sixties, he’d hit on the strategy (soon to become an MO) of using narcissism as a tool for observation and commentary, a device that seemed both to validate a decade or so of personal excess (drugs, drink, fistfights, and the much-publicized stabbing of his second wife) and to set him up as the intellectual successor to Henry Adams. Later, he got himself into debt, wrote second-rate coffee-table books, launched an unsuccessful campaign for the mayoralty of New York City, married too many women, sired too many children, made too many belligerent remarks on TV talk shows, got behind one of the worst causes célèbres ever (Jack Abbott), spent a decade writing a “masterpiece” no one could read (Ancient Evenings) and another decade writing a spy story no one had time to read (Harlot’sGhost, 1,310 pages, and that’s only part one), and generally exhausted everyone’s patience—and that goes double for anyone even remotely connected with the women’s movement. Still, it’s worth remembering that, as Time magazine put it, “for a heady period, no major event in U.S. life seemed quite complete until Mailer had observed himself observing it.” Plus, he did marry that nice redhead and finally started behaving himself at parties. Most important, it’s hard to think of anyone who managed to explore the nature of celebrity in the media age from so many different angles—and lived to tell the tale.

  RECOMMENDED READING: Advertisements for Myself (1959), a collection of combative essays and mean-spirited criticism of fellow writers, which marked the beginning of Mailer’s notoriety; read it for the two acknowledged masterpieces: “The White Negro” and “The Time of Her Time.” Armies of the Night (1968), Mailer’s account of the anti–Vietnam War march on Washington; his most widely read nonfiction book and the debut of the narrator-as-center-of-the-universe format. Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1969), more of the same, only different; an attempt to penetrate to the heart—or lack thereof—of the Republican and Democratic conventions. The Executioner’s Song (1979), the Pulitzer Prize–winning saga of convinced murderer Gary Gilmore; Mailer’s comeback after all those coffee-table books and, as one critic suggested, his single foray into punk literature. NOAM CHOMSKY (1928-)

  For the better part of two decades served as the conscience of a nation. From the earliest days of the Vietnam War, he spearheaded resistance against the American presence in Southeast Asia, chiding the fancy, amoral policy makers in Washington, the technocrats of the military-industrial complex, and the “liberal intelligentsia,” especially those members of it charged with making sense of what was really happening, at the Pentagon as in the Mekong Delta. (It was the media’s failure to tell the whole story—and its implications, including the racism and arrogance inherent in First World imperialism—that arguably annoyed him most.) No shrinking violet, he maintained, for instance, back when Henry Kissinger was up for a Columbia professorship, that the former secretary of state and professional éminence grise was fit to head only a “Department of Death.” And he wasn’t just talk: In peace march after peace march you could count on spotting him in the front lines.

  Meanwhile, he somehow managed to function as an MIT linguistics professor, and, in fairly short order, became indisputably the most influential linguist of the second half of the century. Chomsky’s most famous theory concerns something he called generative—a.k.a. transformational—grammar, in which he argued that the degree of grammatical similarity manifested by the languages of the world, coupled with the ease with which little children learn to speak them, suggested that man’s capacity for language, and especially for grammatical structure, is innate, as genetically determined as eye color or left-handedness. The proof: All of us constantly (and painlessly) use sequences and combinations of words that we’ve never heard before, much less consciously learned. Chomsky singlehandedly managed to bring linguistics front and center, transforming it—you should pardon the expression—from an academic specialty practiced among moribund Indian tribes and sleepy college sophomores into the subject of heated debate among epistemologists, behavioral psychologists, and the French. Naturally, he accumulated his share of detractors in the process. Some complained that he made the human consciousness sound suspiciously like a home computer; others noted that he never really defined what he meant by “deep structure,” the psychic system from which our spoken language is generated and of which any sentence or group of sentences is in some way a map.

  Chomsky’s influence on political life seemed to peak, at least in the United States, in the early Seventies, after which, we can’t help noting, the threat of being drafted and sent to Vietnam ended for many of his most ardent campus-radical supporters. (It probably hadn’t helped that he’d spoken up for the Khmer Rouge over in Cambodia and for the Palestinians back when the Israelis were still the guys in the white hats, then turned around and defended a book, which he later admitted he hadn’t read, that denied the historical reality of the Holocaust.) And there was the problem of Chomsky’s own prose style, a flat, humorless affair that left many readers hankering for Gary Trudeau and Doonesbury. But Chomsky kept writing—and writing and writing. By the 1990s some publishers were savvy enough to publish his political essays as short, reader-friendly paperbacks, making him more accessible to a mainstream audience. Then came the attack on the World Trade Center and the Bush administration’s response, which apparently caused some people to feel they needed an alternative to the daily media spin. Suddenly Chomsky was no longer a figure on the radical fringe. His fierce denunciations of U.S. foreign policy (he views America as the mother of all “rogue states” and the Bush administration’s “grand imperial design” as an out-of-the-closet version of the kind of global aggression and disregard for international law we’ve been guilty of since the end of World War II) resonated with many people who did not consider themselves radicals, or even leftists. Chomsky’s 9-11 (2001), Power and Terror: Post 9-11 Talks and Interviews (2003), and Hegemony or Survival (2004) all made the bestseller lists, and his backlisted political books have sold millions of copies.

  RECOMMENDED READING: Aforementioned bestsellers, plus you might want to try Language and Mind, a series of three lectures Chomsky gave at Berkeley in 1967, for his clearest statement on the relations between his theory of language and his theory of human nature; follow with Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), an easy-to-understand reprise of his basic linguistic beliefs. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) is the classic working out of Chomsky’s mature theory, but if you stood even the slimmest chance of being able to read it, you wouldn’t be reading this. Many of the early political essays are collected in American Power and the New Mandarins (19
69); a more recent collection is Deterring Democracy (1991). SUSAN SONTAG (1933-2004)

  She delineated a new aesthetic, heavy on style, sensation, and immediacy. For Sontag (the Sontag of the Sixties, that is) art and morality had no common ground and it didn’t matter what an artist was trying to say as long as the result turned you on. For everyone from the Partisan Review crowd to the kids down at the Fillmore, she seemed like a godsend; she not only knew where it was at, she was where it was at. A serious thinker with a frame of reference to beat the band, a hard-nosed analytical style, and subscriptions to all the latest European journals, she would emerge from her book-lined study (where she had, presumably, been immersed in a scholarly comparison of Hegel’s philosophical vocabulary, Schoenberg’s twelve-tone theory, and the use of the quick cut in the films of Godard), clad in jeans, sneakers, and an old cardigan, to tell the world it was OK to listen to the Supremes. Maybe you never did understand what Godard was getting at— at least you knew that if Sontag took him on, he, too, was where it was at. Ditto Bergman, Genet, Warhol, Artaud, John Cage, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Norman O. Brown, and the government of North Vietnam. Eclecticism was the hallmark of Sontag’s modernist (today, read postmodernist) sensibility. A writer who had, at the time, all the grace and charm of a guerrilla commando issuing proclamations to a hostile government, she came under heavy attack from her critics for her political naïveté (and revisionism); for the uncompromising vehemence of her assertions; and for suffering, as one writer put it, “from the recurring delusion that life is art.” Over the years, however, as life came more to resemble bad television—and after Sontag herself survived breast cancer—she changed her mind about a lot of things, denouncing Soviet-style communism as just another form of fascism and insisting that style wasn’t everything after all, that the content of a work of art counted, too. In a culture increasingly enamored of simple-minded stereotypes and special effects, Sontag crusaded for conscience, seriousness, and moral complexity. She also branched out: writing theater and film scripts, directing plays (notably, a production of Waiting for Godot in wartorn Sarajevo in 1993), and trying her hand at fiction—she produced a self-proclaimed “romance” (The Volcano Lover, 1992) that managed to get some rave reviews. Still, throughout her life she remained outspoken about politics. For example, she made plenty of enemies after September 11,2001, when she wrote in the New Yorker, “Whatever maybe said of the perpetrators … they were not cowards.” Her last piece, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” published in 2004, the same year that she was to die of cancer (after fighting the disease, on and off, for more than thirty years), reflected on the photographs of Iraqi prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib. In it she declared, that, as representing both the fundamental corruption of any foreign occupation and the signature style of the U.S. administration of George W. Bush, “The photographs are us.”

  RECOMMENDED READING: Against Interpretation (1966), a collection of essays that includes some of her best-known works, e.g., the title piece, “On Style,” and “Notes on Camp.” Styles of Radical Will (1966), another nonfiction grab bag whose high points are a defense of pornography (“The Pornographic Imagination”), a lengthy discussion of Godard (“Godard”), and one of her most famous—and certainly most readable—essays, “Trip to Hanoi.” On Photography (1977), the book that won her a large lay audience and innumerable enemies among photographers (and that helped a lot of people feel they finally knew what to make of Diane Arbus). Illness as Metaphor (1978), written during her own fight against cancer, dissected the language used to describe diseases and challenged the blame-the-victim attitudes behind society’s cancer metaphors. AIDS and Its Metaphors (1988), a kind of sequel to the above, exposed the racism and homophobia that colored public discussion of the epidemic. AND EIGHT PEOPLE WHO, AMERICAN OR NOT, HAD IDEAS WHOSE TIME, IT SEEMED AT THE TIME, HAD COME MARSHALL McLUHAN (1911-1980)

  “The medium is the message,” of course. That is, the way we acquire information affects us more than the information itself. The medium is also, as a later version of the aphorism had it, “the massage”: Far from being neutral, a medium “does something to people; it takes hold of them, bumps them around.” Case in point—television, with its mosaic of tiny dots of light, its lack of clarification, its motion and sound, and its relentless projection of all of the above straight at the viewer, thereby guaranteeing that viewer an experience as aural and tactile as it is visual. And high time, too. Ever since Gutenberg and his printing press, spewing out those endless lines of bits of print, the eye had gotten despotic, thinking linear, and life fragmented; with the advent of the age of electronics man was at last returning to certain of his tribal ways—and the world was becoming a “global village.” There were those who dismissed McLuhan (for the record, a Canadian) as less a communications theorist cum college professor than a phrase-mongering charlatan, but even they couldn’t ignore entirely his distinction between “hot” and “cool” media (it’s the latter that, as with TV or comic books or talking on the phone, tend to involve you so much that you’re late for supper). Besides, McLuhan had sort of beaten his critics to the punch: Of his own work, he liked to remark, “I don’t pretend to understand it. After all, my stuff is very difficult.” R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER (1895-1983)

  “An engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer, and choreographer” was how Fuller described himself; for a few other people “crackpot,” “megalomaniac,” “enfant terrible,” or “Gyro Gearloose” did as good a job more economically. Convinced that man, through technology and planning, could become superman and “save the world from itself”; that “Spaceship Earth” was a large mechanical device that needed periodic tuning; that “the entire population” of that earth “could live compactly on a properly designed Haiti and comfortably on the British Isles”; that the geodesic dome, a sphere composed of much smaller tetrahedrons, was the most rigorously logical structure around; and that he himself had “a blind date with principle,” “Bucky” flew tens of thousands of miles annually, visiting Khrushchev’s Moscow and everybody else’s college campus with equal élan, waving excitedly from behind Coke-bottle glasses for up to six hours at a time. (Annually, that is, except for the year during which he refused to speak at all, to anybody, including his wife.) His ultimate conclusion: The universe is governed by relatively few principles and its essence is not matter but design. P.S. He may have been right. In 1985, scientists discovered a spherical carbon molecule, which, because it’s reminiscent in its structure of a geodesic dome, they dubbed a “buckyball”—or, more formally, a buckminster fullerene—and which has subsequently spawned a whole new heavy-breathing branch of chemistry. KATE MILLETT (1934–)

  Whatever their personal feelings about women in combat boots, you’d have thought men would be open-minded enough to admit that, for a chick, Millet had guts. An academic turned activist, and one of those unstoppable Catholics-in-revolt, she was always willing to walk it like she talked it. While Betty Friedan, the supply-sider of sisterhood, was still dressing for success and biting her nails over whether or not it was OK to have lesbians as friends, Millett was out in full drag, holding the Statue of Liberty hostage, chronicling her affairs in vivid—not to say tedious—detail, and telling women it was time to get out from underneath, not just figuratively but literally. But it all paid off eventually: Sexual Politics became a bestseller, its once-revolutionary thesis was accepted as basic feminist canon, men started having trouble getting it up, and Betty Friedan began to wonder if having your own corner office and your own coronary was really all it was cracked up to be.

  Not that Millet herself necessarily got to spend much time gloating over her ideological ascendency; diagnosed as manic-depressive in 1973, she rebelled against her lithium regimen seven years later and spent the early Eighties being chased around by men in white coats, an interlude she chronicled in her 1991 memoir, The Loony Bin Trip. Today, older, wiser, and presumably back on lithiu
m, she runs a women’s artist collective on her Christmas-tree farm in Poughkeepsie, New York. MALCOLM X (1925-1965)

  The Last Angry Negro, before he got everybody to stop saying Negro, Brother Malcolm (né Malcolm Little and a.k.a. Red, Satan, Homeboy, and El-Hajj Malick El-Shabazz) was one of the first to come right out and tell the world what he really thought of honkies. Although in his days as a radical—which, in what was to become a trend, followed closely on his days as a dealer/pimp/burglar/convict/Muslim convert—Malcolm never actually did much, he managed, through sheer spleen, to scare the socks off Whitey, make Martin Luther King Jr. reach for the Excedrin, and provide a role model for a generation of black activists who were ready to put their muscle where Malcolm’s mouth had been. Whatever folks thought of his politics, everyone had to admit that Malcolm had charisma: At one point, the New York Times rated him the country’s second most popular campus speaker, after Barry Goldwater. Malcolm mellowed considerably after Elijah Muhammad booted him out of the Black Muslims (and Muhammad Ali dropped him as his personal spiritual advisor). Unfortunately, it wasn’t long after that that he was gunned down by an informal firing squad hired, various rumors had it, by the Muslims, the U.S. government, or the Red Chinese. Whatever— he was immortalized by the bestselling autobiography coauthored with Alex “Roots” Haley. A symbol of black manhood and righteous anger for the next three decades (and, some social observers have suggested, a direct progenitor of “gangsta” rap), Malcolm briefly became a matinee idol—and barely escaped being reduced to a fashion statement—when director Spike Lee based a movie on the autobiography in 1992. ERNESTO “CHE” GUEVARA (1928-1967)