X. The Early Fatalistic

1.

From the subjects of our last chapter, the Beat Generation, we could learn something culturally useful. If we turn now to the big-city juvenile delinquency of the underprivileged, e.g., new immigrants economically marginal, we are dealing with uneducated children. Their legal arrests and convictions occur at average age fifteen to sixteen, but their delinquencies date from twelve and thirteen, if not earlier; and of course they attend school the least and get the least out of it. The so-called “delinquent subculture” has a few flashing and charming traits, but nothing in it is viable or imitable. On the other hand, the fight these kids put up, the record of their delinquencies, does test and explore our society.

The accounts and statistics of delinquency come mostly from social agencies, the police, and reform schools. In a sense we know about juvenile delinquency only from its failures, the lads who are most disturbed and have the least general ability—except the one important ability of getting caught. I do not believe this gives us a valid picture; so in the following discussion, I shall persistently try to distinguish Delinquent Behavior as doing-the-for-bidden-and-even-defiant from Delinquent Behavior in-order-to-get-caught. (Naturally I shall often have to say, “I guess.”)

2.

Thus far we have been using a fairly standard theory of delinquency, though better rounded, I think, than the usual statement of it. Let us recapitulate it: The early childhood of juvenile delinquents is “permissive” or “neglected,” depending on the point of view. They play truant and quit school as soon as they can. This is not necessarily a failing in them, for the schools are poor, and the policy of keeping them there to educate them for some viable life or other in modern society, is benevolent but largely doomed.

Their escape from school proves that they are less supervised at home, and in turn it gives them more freedom, at first, to sharpen their wits on the streets. Less restricted, they probably have more elaborate early sexual experience than the middle class or the more regulated poor boys. This may get them into early and repeated trouble, and it may, therefore, result in repression and becoming less sexually adventurous than the average boy later. Such an outcome is, I think, common and when it occurs it is certainly disastrous, for repressed sexuality will drive them to more and more frantic excitement to break through.

(My guess is that the delinquent older adolescents who are active with the girls are not the lads who are caught and get counted. For one thing, important sexual adventure is rarely a gang activity. For another, sexual success diminishes the need to raise the ante and be punished. And it always gives “something to do.” That is, my guess is that sexual expression is compatible with, and perhaps favorable to, “delinquent acts”; but is incompatible with delinquency-in-order-to-get-caught. This is speculation; but consider the following two statements of F. M. Thrasher: “Sex represents a decidedly secondary activity in the gang. In the adolescent group in particular it is subordinated to the primary interests of conflict and adventure.” But “groups of this [sexually very active] type are probably far more common than is ordinarily supposed”—that is, such kids don’t get caught and counted.)

Mostly these kids have nothing to do and will have nothing worth while to do. They feel worthless and guilty, and these feelings are often enhanced by unusual hostility at home, both taken and given. (The psychological mechanism is that some of the child’s hostility against his parents turns against himself and is felt as guilt.) As a reaction to these feelings, they develop the characteristic conceited self-image that has to keep proving itself: proving that they are men and not boys, potent and not impotent, and that they are good as anybody else.

It is this syndrome, of conceit and hostility, which then meets their social situation of being underprivileged and deprived, and finds it so insulting; whereas other poor boys—in a less hostile home, more tolerant of school, and perhaps more lucky in keeping out of sexual trouble—make an easier adjustment. In the case of racial minorities, there is certainly real insult as well as fantasy insult; and there is real insult when a fresh kid is treated as a young punk. The combination of family hostility, conceit, and the insult of underprivilege now makes the kids disaffected, at war with ordinary society, and they have their sport and triumph by breaking its laws.

They appoint themselves to a gang. Positively, this gives them pride and something to belong to; negatively, it protects each one’s conceit by conformity. The finding of the Gluecks and others that the delinquent juveniles are more unconventional than the average applies, of course, to their standard behavior and their disturbed personalities; but all the more they are undeviatingly conformist in their own peer groups. The gangs have highly satisfactory communal features: living and working together (e.g., a boy angry at home can sleep at his friend’s), often sharing such sexuality as there is, and as careless of one another’s property as they are of the world’s. But it is a community, we have seen, that lacks personal affection and that stops abruptly at the adults, and therefore provides no grounds for growth. This abrupt divide is of course sharper in the usual case of first-generation immigrant parents.

In our model of the closed room and the rat race, we pointed to a clandestine alliance between juvenile delinquents and the middle status of the organized system, exchanging culture heroes, norms of cool behavior, and the values of cynicism, against the earnest boys in the middle class and working class. This view seems to me more currently realistic than A. K. Cohen’s proposition that, whereas the nondelinquent “corner-boy culture temporizes with middle-class morality, the delinquent subculture does not: it permits no ambiguity in its negation of the respectable status-system, and so sets the delinquent above the most exemplary college boy.” On the contrary. It is likely, rather, that the nondelinquent corner boy, less conceited, has not cut himself off from ordinary poor satisfactions, and therefore does not need to run in gangs and get caught; he is not “temporizing” with middle-class morality but is not much bothering about it. Conversely, it is obvious that the juvenile delinquents, like the hustlers (male prostitutes), fancy themselves as movie heroes in sports cars; and it is importantly the inner conflict between their dreams of American glamour and their own impotent resources that exacerbates their resentment. It is perhaps only the juvenile delinquents who take the American way of life fully earnestly. This is what is implicitly hinted at by those students, e.g., Barron, who speak of the juvenile in delinquent society: it is the hipster attitude of the organized system that provides the model for delinquent behavior: the short cut, the empty sensation, raising the ante, and contempt of honest effort and earnest goals.

In sum, we have a picture of early freedom, under-privileged frustration, reactive conceit, and gang conformity. If we now consult the personality picture of caught delinquents given in—for instance, the painstaking study by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck—we see it is quite identical with that of the young hero of our story:

He is: vivacious, extroverted, less self-controlled, more manually inclined, more aggressive, less fearful of failure and defeat, more independent, more initiating, less submissive, less amenable to conventional expectations. These are positive powers and must therefore be early survivals, for only physical nature has such energies. But the frustration appears in responses like “impulsive, oral, narcissistic,” and the reactive conceit appears as “hostile, resentful, defiant, suspicious, destructive, socially assertive, not feeling recognized or appreciated, defensive, unco-operative.” And finally he is more sociable in play in the sense of “needing supportive companionship,” which we can take as both a positive and a negative trait.

3.

But these are, let us not forget, the characteristics of below-average kids in a reformatory compared with those of carefully matched nondelinquents, equally below average and underprivileged. Accordingly, they tell us very little about more gifted or favored kids either prone or not prone to delinquent behavior. In the nature of the case, such statistics are hard to collect. E.g., it is essential for the intelligent performance of forbidden deeds to keep them under your hat and not have too many accomplices; then how can we know how many gifted kids are performing how many misdemeanors? And middle-class delinquents don’t end up in reform schools but in military academies and other schools that promise “to make a man of your boy.”

From this point of view, it must be said that the essential property of juvenile delinquency as defined is: such personality and behavior as guarantee getting caught, punished, and tabulated. I do not think that this property is a tautology: it has important content that distinguishes the delinquency of doing-the-forbidden-and-defiant from the delinquency to-get-caught. Getting caught is guaranteed by:

(1) Compulsive repetition of a behavior because it is not really giving satisfaction. This tends to allay the alertness and prudence of the routine tries, as well as to multiply the chances of being caught. And it leads to:

(2) Raising the ante, in order to force feeling. This must result in disaster.

(3) Conversely, in place of mischief or the attraction of the forbidden or rebelliousness or even malice, the caught delinquent exhibits a profound fatalism, indicating an unconscious need to be saved from his compulsive round or not worth-while experience and brought back into the “meaningful” structure of authority and punishment. It looks as though the caught delinquent has done the forbidden and defiant deed in order to tease and provoke the authority, to compel his attention. Psychologically, then, though he thinks and operates on his own, he is not “independent.”

(Let me mention the touching case of an English boy who stole a watch and then returned it, saying he had found it, “in order that somebody should say he was a good boy.” The next best thing is for somebody to say that one is a bad boy.)

(4) The gang is used as a structure for psychological support. But running with the gang also guarantees getting caught, both because it is conspicuous and because its in-group concentration and habits soon get quite out of touch with the surrounding mores. Aping his friends, a lad forgets what safe behavior is, what ought to be concealed because people are outraged by it. A lad who is infinitely secretive and suspicious gives himself away by his slouch, his clothes, and every word he utters. Also, they dare one another to excesses that each individual would avoid. Naturally this is all the worse with cultural minorities who do not know the “right” behavior to begin with; e.g., Spanish boys might be badly judged for behavior that to them is perfectly acceptable.

I propose that these four guarantees of getting caught make juvenile delinquency an interesting cultural study. For it is: the powerless struggling for life within, not resigned from, an unacceptable world. At first inspection this does not seem a promising lesson. But on reflection, we see that this fatalism is a deeply religious position, not far from what Dostoevski was trying to tell us. Many of his characters are adult delinquents. In our time, Genet has made of the doomed delinquent culture a powerful thought and poetry. The fatalism of juvenile delinquency is a kind of adolescent religious crisis, with a religious passion and content, whereas the conventional religion is empty. On the streets, they feel worthless-and-abandoned; in the reformatory, they are accepted back home.

This fatalism in the face of the overwhelming and unacceptable is a commentary on the poignant remark of the criminologist:

It must be confessed that it is much easier and hence more “practical” to deal with superficial symptomatic behavior or its immediately observable causes than to strive to cut the deeper roots of delinquency. When those deeper roots are made evident, however, we have to ask ourselves how deep we wish to go in the attack on crime. Are we willing, for example, to sacrifice many of our material satisfactions or to give up our racial prejudices? [Donald Taft]

4.

As ordinarily used, the term “juvenile delinquency” is thoroughly confused. First, as we have said, we must distinguish forbidden-and-defiant-acts from behavior-to-get-caught. Then, among the socially forbidden acts we must obviously distinguish those that any lad of sense and spirit will perform if he has to and whenever he can, from those that are indeed harmful to others or disruptive of good society. And again, as many authorities have pointed out, with respect to any of these acts there is an immense discrepancy in their adjudication and our information: delinquent acts of middle- and upper-class boys almost never get to courts or social agencies; white boys are dismissed or put on probation where Negro or Spanish boys are put away; the incorrigibility and sexual offenses of boys are treated lightly, of girls severely, and so forth. It is not surprising, then, if many statistics and analyzes of delinquency disagree. Apart from the one factor of getting caught, there is no real concept of delinquency. Yet obviously this factor is not sufficient by itself, for getting caught does have some essential relation to forbidden acts.

Let us therefore take a different tack. Instead of looking for a concept of delinquency, let us expand the subject matter as a series of possible punishable relations obtaining between the boy struggling for life and trying to grow up, and the society that he cannot accept and that lacks objective opportunities for him. Roughly, we can name six importantly distinct stages in the series:

(1) Acts not antisocial if society had more sense.

(2) Acts that are innocent but destructive in their consequences and therefore need control.

(3) Acts antisocial in purpose.

(4) Behavior aimed at getting caught and punished.

(5) Gang fighting that is not delinquency yet must be controlled.

(6) Delinquency secondarily created by society itself by treating as delinquents those who were not delinquent, and by social attempts at prevention and reform.

5.

(1) Acts not antisocial that are punished are most animal expression and some spirited enterprise. These include a lot of trespassing and hell raising with annoyance and minor damage. Most sexual behavior. Running away and truancy. But even certain important “theft.”

The trespassing and hell raising speak for themselves. Where everything has become property and order, it is quite impossible to be vivacious, aggressive, undeliberate, exploratory and venturesome, without being out of order and sometimes smashing things. This is generally agreed and the police are usually not unreasonable. But the bother comes when emotional heat is generated and meets incipient deeper grounds of delinquency, the exchange of insults and the need for revenge. E.g., a cop is rude and the boys get angry; or a chap foolishly drives away the kids who are diving from his cruiser, so they retaliate by boring holes in the bottom of it and sinking it.

Most sexual behavior would give more satisfaction and do lasting good, and certainly result in far less damage, if any, if it were completely ignored by the police and not subject to any social disapproval qua sexual. There may be grounds for debate about the harmfulness or indifference of “corrupting the morals of a minor”—many societies have managed handsomely without such notions; but all competent authority would agree that, in most cases, more damage is done by the fear and shame accompanying a sexual act than can possibly follow from the simple act itself. (Typically, “Masturbation is a habit without deleterious effects in itself, yet a source of behavior difficulties because of strong social disapproval.… [It is hard] to find a rational reason for committing mere sex delinquents to an institution. To be effective, [help for these girls] must be divorced from restraint and stigma.”—Donald Taft, Criminology.)

In truancy, the burden of proof lies on the schools, which are demonstrably stupefying to many children, whose truancy is therefore a kind of self-preservation. Naturally, these kids get nothing from hanging around the streets either. The solution is hard but simple: decide that the kids are in the right and make good education at whatever cost.

The same thinking applies to vagabondage. If a kid is a lonely runaway without domicile or means of support, it takes no great wisdom to infer that he has left a cruel or drunken home or a situation of intolerable uselessness and boredom, or that he is ashamed. Then provide him with something worth while, and give him solace.

But consider the principle of the burden of the proof in even an important crime like auto theft, important solely because cars are expensive. (The real social danger, from wild driving, occurs with all car-crazy adolescents, not only those who steal cars.) Almost all juvenile auto theft—in 1959, 68 per cent of all auto theft—is for joy riding. For example, a band of Spanish kids, now mostly locked up, made it a point of their game to return the car to the identical spot, a foolhardy gesture. Now we live in a society where for all classes these cars are the chief means, and the Madison Avenue symbols, of power, manliness, freedom to go and do. Kids of other periods drove the horses at an early age; in rural places they drive cars at fourteen. In urban traffic conditions young adolescents cannot be licensed to drive. Underprivileged kids may never have the means to drive. What then? When an absurd social pattern has created an insoluble dilemma, is it the case that the kids must be the ones punished? Certainly from such a crime as auto theft I fail to see, with Bloch and Flynn’s Delinquency, that “youthful offenders under eighteen years have become our greatest single threat to law-abiding security.” But as it is, our dilemma works out as follows: “A couple and their three-year-old son were killed in Queens last night when their car hit a telephone pole after it was struck by a stolen car being chased by the police. Five shots were fired in the pursuit and two hit the car.”)

(2) Auto theft takes us into the second category of “innocent acts destructive in their consequences and needing control.” Of course none of these acts, except vagabondage, is innocent in the sense that the kid does not know it is forbidden, unless he is a moron. But to do the forbidden, in order to transgress limits that seem unnatural, is normal and innocent; and if the limits are unnatural it is often necessary and admirable.

But I want especially to call attention to acts whose motivation is strongly approved socially, but where the frustrating conditions or the boys’ ignorance or ineptitude in handling the baffling means, gets them into trouble.

An obvious cause of innocent trouble is playing. Some wise authorities have compared delinquent behavior to play. So when A. K. Cohen, again, speaks of the “uselessness” of much delinquent destructiveness and thievery as a counteraction to middle-class ethics, he is surely exaggerating. All play is “useless,” and since everything is property, underprivileged kids are bound to play with other people’s property. This can be very serious. A band of kids decide it would be bully to remove the blocks and set a huge truck in motion downhill, resulting in $10,000 worth of damage. But of course it is bully. (I think so.)

But let us go on to a much more thorny illustration, which would not generally be viewed in the light I want to place it in: the plight of a present-day poor boy with regard to earning money and having a little money. First, let me quote an official spokesman, the Superintendent of Schools of Rochester, New York:

Many parents have long since given up the struggle to encourage youths to share in the few remaining home duties that still require physical effort. Yet, no school program can provide the discipline, the maturity, or the self-respect that comes from performing real work that is highly valued and fairly paid for by the adult world.

Well said. Now this quotation is taken from a Sunday supplement article praising newsboys and containing the joyful report that “over one half of today’s newspaperboys belong to our middle- or upper-middle-income groups.” This is not a surprising fact; in present conditions, it takes a good deal of arranging, and living in the suburbs, to get such a news route going. Does it not raise the question as to how the poor boys, who have not learned such expert management, will get their discipline, maturity, self-respect?

This matter is highly important; let us be clear about the usual thinking. Eugene Gilbert, the census taker of teen-age economics, says: “Within a decade the number of teen-agers holding steady jobs has doubled.… Some four and one-half million do part-time work or odd jobs throughout the year.” That sounds promising; but he then goes on to explain that “Typical [1] of most American youngsters today are the students and graduates of the Pearl River High School in Rockland County, N. Y.,” nearly 100 per cent of whom are going on to college, though in the country at large barely a half graduate from high school, and only 15 per cent enter college. The poor, the working-class, and even the lower-middle-class boys seem to have vanished from society; they do not contribute enough to the ten- to eleven-billion-dollar annual teen-age sales. This is not a promising attitude for going serious attention to the young of America.

For a child, to get money is a major part of his notion of being grown-up and independent, for this is what all grown men do: they make money and are thereby free to act. (This has very little connection with Max Weber’s version of the Protestant Ethic or middle-class ideology.) Let me give a precise, if annoying, illustration. In countries where it is not too antipathetic to the mores, young fellows will engage in homosexual activity; but they might ask for a few pennies, enough to buy five cigarettes. This sum is not the wages of prostitution; such a thought would outrage them, for if they did not enjoy what they were doing they would not do it. It is, rather, a way of making the act legitimate, justified, not merely pleasure. The money serves exactly the same symbolic function as the wedding ring for a young woman. Earning some money affirms that a young fellow is a man. (In America, however, this youth would at once be driven to “proving” and delinquency. Having engaged in the sex, he is vulnerable to contempt and therefore may react by robbery and assault. “Rolling queers” is the ideal delinquent calling better than auto mechanic—for it combines pleasure profit, morality, and grounds for boasting; and it is pretty safe from follow-up by the police.)

As our system becomes more tightly organized and highly urbanized, it is the poor city kids who are squeezed out. We no longer have a neighborhood tradition of small after-school jobs—fewer shops make occasional deliveries; to deliver for the chain stores is a full-time job (except perhaps on Saturdays); messengers are hired full time; there are no lawns to mow, there is no snow to shovel; there are fewer news routes in the city; baby sitting is a middle-class business and anyway belongs to girls. An early teen-ager is caught in the following trap: he gets nothing out of school and does not do his homework; on the other hand, he is too young to get working papers. (We saw that one of the few proposals in the Governor of New York’s antidelinquency program was aimed at this situation.) The youth cannot continue to beg from his parents, for the sums now come to three or four dollars and he feels degraded by being dependent. How will he get some money to prove his legitimacy and independence?

Many petty thefts and burglaries—that seem “uselesss” risks to the sociologist, and therefore he interprets them as counteraction to bourgeois values—are desperate efforts to feel grown-up. They are compelled by an objective dilemma. Naturally, subjectively, they are not innocent; they are energized by frantic excitement, cold sweat and terror, and finally the need to be caught, to escape the anxiety; but we must look at the whole picture. They are “short cuts,” but maybe there is no long way round. The question is this: if these kids had socially acceptable opportunities to earn money, would they avail themselves of them? Some would. It is worth trying. They might learn discipline, maturity, self-respect.

(Consider the following by the Executive Director of the New York City Mission Society: “We have experimented for two summers with employment of 100 to 150 teenagers from high delinquency areas.… Our $10-per-week employes all stayed out of trouble. [But] on the occasions we tried what were essentially “made work” jobs, the young people understood this immediately and lost all interest.”)

(3) It is with the next category, acts intentionally antisocial, that we come to the delinquents who largely fill the courts and the reformatories. Malicious destructiveness, theft and burglary for real money (often for narcotics), vengeful assaults, sexual attacks. In these, the reactive hostility of the standard delinquent syndrome has begun to operate, and it inevitably leads to getting caught. An illustration: some fifteen-year-olds hold up a crippled old man; the loot is too small and their disappointment at once triggers the deep passion: that his debility is an intolerable threat to their own glorious perfection, so they stomp him to death.

A less horrible illustration: The behavior of a pedestrian or of another motorist that happens to inconvenience the youth in the slightest degree is at once interpreted as a deliberate insult or at least as a proof that that person ought not to exist; and this may easily lead to a case of hit and run.

An absolutely typical economic illustration: If a fellow offers to walk half a mile in order to save fifteen cents carfare, his mates will at once contemptuously say that he is “cheap.” Once the “proving” syndrome is present, the boys are quite out of touch with the simplest realities; and vice versa, because they are out of touch with the simplest realities, they are called on to “prove.”

(4) So we come to behavior-to-get-caught: compulsive repetition, increasing negligence, raising the ante, giving way to irrational rage. We can see the fatalism on the surface.

Here is a scrap of conversation with one of the auto thieves mentioned above, not caught:

“How is it you weren’t caught?”

“I got scared the other time, the time the cop pulled up and I got away. So I wouldn’t go with them.”

“Isn’t Carlos [the leader] scared?”

“No.”

“What do you mean? Isn’t he scared they’ll catch him?”

“No. He don’t care if he gets caught.”

“Is that what he says? or is that what you think?”

“That’s what he said, and I think so too.”

“Why did you go ten rides?”

“What else is there to do? I can’t just hang around when they all go.”

The problem, that is, is the fatalism that the one has whereas the other experiences fear and prudence. (In this particular case the fatalist is the more able boy and has a better home background.) One part of the fatalism is certainly apathy: life has no interesting prospect—e.g., there might be a sexual block. Another part is certainly the need to be caught, to get out of the anxious round of risks.

6.

(5) I doubt, despite Thrasher, that there is a nondelinquent “gang.” The gang begins like the primitive fraternity of boys who live in the boys’ house; but in the primitive culture this is done by social sanction, whereas the defining property of the gang, as we customarily use the term, is that it is a community abruptly cut off from the adults and their sanction. The full-blown gang suits its members not as a fraternity in which to learn growing up, but essentially in so far as they are “grown up” or have ceased to grow: it is a sharing of a common conceit. The members consider it their identity, they appoint themselves to it. But since it is only a conceit, it is vulnerable, and therefore all the more must be protected by strict conformity of behavior and opinions, it does not tolerate individual interests or wandering off by oneself. Existing instead of the adult society, the gang is in principle an extraterritorial enclave in society, and therefore it has developed a feud Code. It is this extraterritorial loyalty that is powerfully cemented by the shared danger of the delinquencies: all are in the same boat of having participated in punishable deeds; anyone who would get out is tacitly or explicitly blackmailed.

But it does not follow from this that the gang is delinquent-to-get-caught. On the contrary. Finding one’s gang is a haven from the fatalistic drive toward disaster. One is caught by the gang; the gang provides a supportive structure; it is not so necessary to provoke the old authority. (But of course, as we have seen, running with the adolescent gang accidentally increases the certainty of getting caught. Adult criminal gangs have learned the ropes.) It could be said that belonging to the gang diminishes the delinquent behavior of the members of the gang. The chief activity of the gang becomes war against other groups; it is no longer a struggle for the growth of the self by forbidden acts. And correspondingly, the persisting “delinquencies” of the gang members begin to look very much like crime, war against society. They are no longer merely incidents of growing up, but self-conscious acts of a responsible achieved-identity.

Some such analysis as this is necessary to explain the puzzling predominance suddenly assumed by gang fighting. Adolescent gang wars are not, as such, delinquent any more than international wars are. Gang wars are significant nowadays mainly because of the technological improvement of the weapons, which used to be mainly sticks and stones. (The same could be said of the international wars.)

If the rest of society did not exist, the gang wars would continue as the absorbing interest of these youths. Since the rest of society exists, it becomes a background for plunder—as an army lives on the land. Irate magistrates, trained in Hobbes and on Leviathan, are impatient at having to deal with young punks as if they were citizens of a foreign power with its war chief and other grand viziers and its territorial rights. The Youth Board, as we have seen, accepts the situation as it is and tries to win over the youth’s allegiance.

In this framework of analysis, it is clear why the gangs war on one another. The entire structure, and most of the loyalty, of each gang is grounded in the vulnerable conceit of its members, now socialized and immeasurably strengthened by the gang name, uniform, and territory. So there at once begins to operate, on the gang level, what Freud beautifully called the “narcissism of small differences”: that it is the smallest difference from one’s own self-image of grandeur and perfection that is most threatening and most arouses rage. Living on the other block is quite sufficient to make an enemy. Being a slightly different color is guaranteed. We must remember that the gang has almost no real social or cultural resources to support its tight structure and intense loyalty; it has to make everything out of “points of honor,” out of the formal fact that its territory has been invaded. (Thus, if it is publicly acknowledged that Joe is no longer a member of the Dragons, he can safely walk down X Street.)

Into this formal insult pours all the accumulated real frustration, the undischarged stimulation, the thwarted growing up, and the natural insult that is endemic in our society. In our truly remarkable and unexampled civil peace, where there are rarely fist fights; where no one is born, is gravely ill, or dies; where meat is eaten but no one sees an animal slaughtered; where scores of millions of cars, trains, elevators, and airplanes go their scheduled way and there is rarely a crash; where an immense production proceeds in orderly efficiency and the shelves are duly cleared—and nevertheless none of this comes to joy or tragic grief or any other final good—it is not surprising if there are explosions. They occur at the boundaries of the organized system of society: in juvenile gang fights, in prison riots, in foreign wars.

These conditions are almost specific for the excitement of primary masochism. There is continual stimulation and only partial release of tension, an unbearable heightening of the unaware tensions—unaware because people do not know what they want, nor how to get it. The desire for final satisfaction, for orgasm, is interpreted as the wish for total self-destruction. It is inevitable, then, that there should be a public dream of universal disaster, with vast explosions, fires, and electric shocks; and people pool their efforts to bring this apocalypse to an actuality.

At the same time all overt expression of destructiveness, annihilation, anger, combativeness, is suppressed in the interests of civil order. Also, the feeling of anger is inhibited and even repressed. People are sensible, tolerant, polite, and cooperative in being pushed around. But the occasions of anger are by no means minimized. On the contrary, when the larger movements of initiative are circumscribed in the competitive routines of offices, bureaucracies, and factories, there is petty friction, hurt feelings, being crossed. Small anger is continually generated, never discharged; big anger, that goes with big initiative, is repressed.

Therefore the angry situation is projected afar. People must find big distant causes to explain the pressure of anger that is certainly not explicable by petty frustrations. It is necessary to have something worthy of the hatred that is unaware felt for oneself. In brief, one is angry with the Enemy.

(Gestalt Therapy, II, viii, 8.)

7.

(6) Last, but not least, by its own response to annoyance, society creates delinquent behavior and delinquents. If a child, who does not know what he is, is authoritatively told that he is a delinquent, he obediently conforms to this role too, especially when it involves exclusion from nondelinquent playmates. A spell in a “reform” school increases the chances of returning to some other correctional institution on a more serious charge, and almost guarantees belonging to a gang, for it deepens fatalism and throws one in with congenial companions. For a long time philosophers have been pointing out that if there were no jails there would, in time, be less crime; but the popular wisdom will not buy it.

The social creation of the delinquent character is a matter of the very highest importance and deserves a book to itself. Consider what happens. There are a number of quite different behaviors, some really harmful and antisocial, some indifferent and even performed innocently, yet all forbidden. When, however, they are all tarred with the same brush, the salient fact about them all becomes their defiance, culpability, and punishability. Vice becomes “vertical”: if a boy masturbates, smokes, plays truant, he might as well steal, joy ride, hustle, use narcotics, commit burglaries, etc. Such a boy no longer has friends, but mutually blackmailing accomplices. A spectacular example of this social creation of felony is the illegality of marijuana, which increases contact with pushers of addictive drugs; and the intransigent attitude toward heroin as a criminal rather than a socio-medical problem guarantees worse consequences still.

8.

The delinquent fatalism is the feeling of no chance in the past, no prospect for the future, no recourse in the present; whence the drive to disaster. It is a religious crisis. We spoke of the French writer Jean Genet as its literary prophet. Let us conclude this chapter by some remarks about his work.

Genet writes, sometimes explicitly but always essentially, as a juvenile delinquent. The criminals with whom he empathizes are not fully grown like those of Dostoevski or Shakespeare, like the Possessed or Iago and Edmund. They are not adequate, they do not have pretensions, to the independent social identities of kingship, marriage, fatherhood, politics, wealth. Genet’s heroes are young hustlers, sailors dependent on the mother ship, young men in jail, soldiers of occupation. His thieves do not rob to get rich, but to get spending money or money to squander and show off. This thwarted juvenilism is the same thing as the exclusive homosexuality of his world, with its phallic proving and phallic adoration. Yet with this unpromising material, he performs a poetic miracle.

He does it by stripping away the conceit, the conformity and the one-upping. He accepts, fully and fundamentally, the true situation of degradation, humiliation, uselessness, and terror in which his fellows live. In this he is like Dostoevski. He does so with perfect awareness and even, as a writer, with deliberate calculation. For instance, he begins Les Pompes Funèbres as if he had asked: What is the most degrading and offensive episode possible for middle-class French readers? Yet his aim is not to offend, he is not defensive; it is that, like a classical playwright, he wants to establish his premises at once: that in the situation in which he finds himself, these are the things that work for him as an artist, that are still alive.

In a speech on delinquency (banned from the radio), he explained that if he tried to write about the bourgeois and their important doings, his pen stuck, he had nothing to say; but if he turned to these young criminals (really juvenile delinquents), his thoughts took wing, his style glowed. Therefore he knows they are more heroic, they are the superior people.

That is, he drops the defenses of the underprivileged boy-man and gives himself completely to his own riches as an inspired artist; and the effect is not sensational—nor even bravado—but, as the images soar and the feeling becomes more tender and anguished and the thought more profound, our normal valuation of things is indeed swept away, and is succeeded by a living confusion. Naturally, then, his book is rewarded by coming to the cataclysmic little sentence: “T’as été malheureux, hein?” (You been unhappy, haven’t you?) This truth is, of course, precisely what the tough juvenile delinquent could in fact never say—but neither could most adults. We are back to total abandonment, and there is nothing to do but bawl.

When the conceit, the being cool, the mask-face, are taken away, the kids at once appear in their variety, color, lyric speech, and graceful and vigorous poses, very different from either the usual delinquent sullenness or the conventionality of the resigned Beats. Having himself no achieved independent perspective to view them from, Genet cannot, of course, treat them fully as characters in their real place in nature. But again his art does not fail them. What he presents is his own and their existent fact: how these shapes appear as fantasy-objects for himself and one another. (He is writing as an heir of Proust.) He uses as the basis of his narrative manner the evoked serial daydreams of schoolgirls and adolescent boys, that are often masturbation fantasies. This is a literary innovation.

The importance of Genet for our purposes is this: By a scrupulously honest artistic method he creates from this unpromising material a world that has interest and value. Without being phony, he makes the doings of ignorant and self-destructive kids glow with nobility and religious significance; he makes them more worth while than the apparently adult doings in our standard writers. Now an artist demonstrates his world. If Genet can write more beautiful books about them, then they have more love and nature in them, for nothing comes from nothing. Like Miller and the Beat writers, Genet also accepts what is, whatever it is; but in their world “whatever it is” is ashen dull, whereas at the level of Genet’s disaffected juveniles, it begins to glow a little; some live embers are uncovered.

And indeed, the fatalistic self-destruction of the kids struggling for life in an environment not suited to produce great human beings, is more interesting than the successful doings of that society.

9.

It is not interesting enough; for they are juvenile delinquents and do not have enough world. As soon as we ask questions from the world of great culture and society, these boys begin to be, in Robert Lindner’s phrase, rebels without a cause, and that is not interesting.

Here is the pathos of literary critics like Lionel Trilling who demand that our novels illuminate the manners and morals of prevailing society. Professor Trilling is right, because otherwise what use are they for us? But he is wrong-headed, because he does not see that the burden of proof is not on the artist but on our society. If such convenient criticism of prevalent life does not get to be written, it is likely that the prevailing society is not inspiring enough; its humanity is not great enough, it does not have enough future, to be worth the novelist’s trouble.

The history of contemporary novel-writing tells the story very clearly. Hemingway, for instance, is a pretty good writer and he caught the spirit of the young men of a whole generation; but this ideal, we have seen, turns out to be the conceited “proving” of tribes of junior executives and juvenile delinquents. Faulkner is a pretty good writer but his world is resigned (this is the meaning of its parochialism), and his work turns out to be a very complicated way of being Beat. In my own The Empire City, I undertook the task of not giving up any claim of culture and humanity, but my characters then turn out to be far out of this world. Meantime there has developed a counterstream of writing that has given up the task of integrating, and depicts instead the situation as it is, whatever it is: so Céline, Miller, Genet, Burroughs. But among the many virtues of this school, conspicuously absent is edification.