Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America

Four. A Question of Character: The Dramaturgy of Erving Goffman and C. Wright Mills

cHAPtEr Four A Question of character: the dramaturgy of Erving Goffman and c. Wright Mills I n William Burroughs’s 1952 novel Queer, the narrator, William Lee, travels from Mexico City to South America in search of a plant called yage, which, as Lee explains, is used by Russian leaders “to induce states of automatic and ultimately, of course, thought control.”1 Noting that officials in the United States are experimenting with similar drugs, Lee fantasizes about the power to control the mind of another: “Think of it: thought control. Take anyone apart and rebuild to your taste. Anything about somebody bugs you, you say, ‘Yage! I want that routine took clear out of his mind’” (89). Seeing little difference in the political practices of the two superpowers, both of which have instituted psychological control through the mechanisms of state power, Lee argues that his own desire to “schlup” or possess those around him marks him as the Ugly American—maniacal and possessive. Throughout the novel, Lee’s sexual desire for Eugene Allerton, a former member of the Counter-Intelligence Corps and currently Lee’s indifferent lover, parallels what Burroughs saw as the aggressive seduction of the individual by the national political machine. Indeed, Queer was one of many meditations Burroughs wrote on the social engineering of hapless masses. As Lee explains to his friend: “Automatic obedience, synthetic schizophrenia, mass-produced to order. That is the Russian dream, and America is not far behind. The bureaucrats of both countries want the same thing: Control” (91). As the language of psychoanalysis became part of the American vernacular, Burroughs wondered aloud whether or not his fellow citizens had merely accepted another form of conditioning. 128 revolt of romantic Modernism Burroughs’s invectives against state control set the tone for the other dominant modernist tradition in the early Cold War, that group of Beat poets, abstract expressionists, and purveyors of hipsterism who reacted to the hegemony of high modernism by returning to the origins of modernist practices in the late nineteenth century when artists and writers began peeling away the metaphysical and transcendental claims found in religion and applying them to art. I refer to this group of avant-garde writers, artists, and critics as romantic modernists for their inspired return to the original roots of modernism in Romanticism, a project designed to convert art into life and vice versa. Ranging from the action painting of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to the color-field painting of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, the art criticism of Harold Rosenberg, the spontaneous poetry of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and the fiction of Norman Mailer and William Burroughs, this tradition of romantic modernism transformed American art and literature by injecting new forms of experimentation, spontaneity, and expressionism into artistic practices. But more important, their aesthetic project was designed to liberate the individual from the stultifying conditions of modern life. Portraying modern man as castrated by the bureaucratic nature of American society, these romantic modernists argued that totalitarianism, in the form of mass media and mass politics, had crept into Western society. But unlike their high modernist counterparts who turned to Freudian notions of proper ego autonomy to safeguard the mental health of the individual, romantic modernists argued instead that the ego itself was the site of psychological control. Borrowing from the psychoanalytic work of Wilhelm Reich and Robert Lindner, writers such as Burroughs and Mailer argued that the ego was an artificial construction that originated from the hostile repression of man’s libidinal impulses, a regression that emanated from an endless list of familial and social taboos. Consequently, the ego was merely a defense mechanism or characterological prison holding in check man’s true desires and not the source of autonomy as Theodor Adorno and Lionel Trilling, among others, claimed. Indeed, unlike high modernists who privileged reason over desire and mind over the body, romantic modernists inverted this hierarchy, seeking instead to liberate man from the artificial trappings of character. In this sense, the main argument within modernist circles in the early Cold War was about the actual sources of the self. In their criticisms of high modernism, David Riesman and Kenneth Burke, for instance, echoed the concerns of romantic modernists in worrying not only about the limitations of formalist aesthetics but also about the conservatism within high modern- A Question of character 129 ism. As we have seen, Burke, Riesman, and...