SLSL Intro: Pynchon mention in Interview with Morris Dickstein

[pynchonoid]

http://www.theminnesotareview.org/ns55/dickstein.htm
the minnesota review n.s. 55-56 (2002)
Morris Dickstein with Robert S. Boynton
Between Generations: An Interview with Morris
Dickstein


"[...] Robert S. Boynton: In Gates of Eden you write
about coming to consciousness between the 50s and the
60s and claim that you never felt wholly comfortable
in either world, "though both were passionately
important to me in their turn." What do you mean by
this? 

Morris Dickstein: One of the most exciting things
about the 50s was its exploding intellectual culture,
and in many ways I felt that I was a child of that
culture. At the same time, during the period I was a
student at Columbia, which was between 1957-61, my
friends and I felt we were in rebellion against that
culture. The books that we adopted as special for us
were by writers like Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse,
Paul Goodman, Norman Mailer. In fact, in my last
semester at Columbia we had a lecture series and
invited all of them to come. Only Goodman actually
came. A few years ago, when I was introducing Mailer
at a reading, I was looking over some of his early
novels and a letter from March 1961 dropped out of one
of them in which he explained why he couldn't make it.


Boynton: What was the goal behind assembling these
figures? 

Dickstein: We had fallen in love with the idea of the
"guru," the wise mentor. A friend of mine once ran
into Lionel Trilling on the Columbia campus and
Trilling had never heard the word before. He said,
"Oh, I love that idea. I should use it sometime." And
of course he did. 

Some of the figures who came to interest me later,
like the social critics of the 50s—David Riesman,
William Whyte—they were too tepid and liberal for us
at the time, and too popular. What fascinated us were
the more apocalyptic figures who came on the scene in
the mid-50s, roughly around the time of Marcuse's Eros
and Civilization, although I hadn't read it at the
time. I was especially taken with Mailer's "The White
Negro," and most of Advertisements for Myself. Norman
O. Brown's Life Against Death was practically a sacred
text to us when it came out in 1960. I seemed to be
out to confirm its message in the papers I was writing
for my English courses. I was twenty years old. I
sought out writers who would tell me that repression
was bad for you, sex was redemptive, a revolution in
consciousness was possible. We were looking for daring
iconoclastic role models, outlaw intellectuals. 

Of course, we were also getting a mainstream education
in the Western tradition. We were the products of the
Great Books curriculum at Columbia, which was not just
a literary curriculum, but also involved contemporary
civilization—the history of social thought,
philosophy, economics, politics. Unlike the University
of Chicago's Great Books curriculum, Columbia's was
organized chronologically. It had a very strong
historical dimension. So although we were formed by
the Great Books culture of the 50s, we had a kind of
historicist take on it that really foreshadowed some
of the political interests we developed in the 60s.
[...] 
Dickstein: In retrospect, I came to see the extent to
which things I had taken for granted, like the postwar
prosperity, were really decisive. The social forces
that determined the 60s explosion, both intellectually
and in the streets, were a product of the tremendous
economic advances that took place after the war.
Writers who seemed like rebels against affluence, like
Kerouac, were actually playing off the economic
expansion: they had an expansive, Whitmanesque mood
that, in a curious way, reflected the expansiveness of
the life of the middle class. 
[...]
Dickstein: In 1968, ten years after I heard Ginsberg
read Kaddish, he came back to Columbia to read poems
that would eventually be published in Planet News,
which collected his work from the 1960s. I was very
taken with them. I had an idea of doing a piece about
Ginsberg for Commentary, but I didn't want to do it
strictly as a literary essay. Instead, I saw all the
currents of the 60s flowing through Ginsberg. So I
used the poetry as an occasion to talk about the
differences between the 50s and the 60s: how the new
young novelists, like Pynchon and Heller, were
different from the 50s novelists, such as Bellow and
Malamud. There was an implied history, a great deal
about cultural rather than literary matters.
[...] "


-Doug



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