• 1 Beidler, Philip D. Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the ’60s, Athens: Universit (...)

1The counterculture of the 1960s, in the minds of many, ushered in the post-literate sensibility writ large across the sensory phantasmagoria of the present-day Internet and streaming media. Mental transport via mind-altering drugs, surrender to free-form rock music, and immersion in meditative states all confound the syntactical linearity of the word on the page. Yet at least one attentive observer has counter-intuitively dubbed the decade “the last great reading culture.” This critic, Philip Beidler, expands on that dictum to argue that this period saw “a proliferation of particular texts bought, read or read about, borrowed and loan, discussed and often acted upon as instruments of self and social awareness and identification.” Underlying all the body-shaking music, extravagant costume, and intemperate acting-out on the political stage lay a bookish platform, one indeed “largely without precedent in the history of print literacy, print production, and print consumption.”1

• 2 Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha next to Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
• 3 Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death with Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man.
• 4 Frank Water’s The Book of the Hopi next to Agarika Govinda’s The Way of the White Clouds.

2The claim might sound over-stated, but it accords with folk memory of the period when the same battered paperbacks were invariably to be seen on brick-and-board shelves alongside the cannabis paraphernalia and haphazard furnishings in the apartments and communal houses of the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, or the East Village in New York. Visionary occultism kept company with absurdist satire2; abstruse meta-psychology with neo-Marxist polemic3; native-American myth with Buddhist discipline4. If a unifying principle appears elusive, texts like these invariably departed in some dramatic direction from the practical rationality that governed American middle-class life and ruled its collective imagination.

• 5 Roszak, Theodore. The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its (...)
• 6 Ibid., p. xxvi

3Theodore Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture, published in 1969, came late to these ensembles and sought in part to make retrospective sense of them5. In that effort, Roszak coined the word (now generally conjoined as “counterculture”) that definitively labeled the moment and spirit of rebellion during ’sixties decade. But Roszak’s still impressive treatise nowhere offers a capsule definition of its object. He emphasizes instead the conditions of American postwar abundance that had opened the necessary space for the ferment of youthful discontents. The massive expansion of higher education in the postwar period had had the unintended effect of putting dangerously critical ideas in circulation, while inculcating an ethic of personal fulfillment and subsidizing years of freedom from the deadening demands of the marketplace. For a critical mass within this unprecedentedly advantaged generation, these conditions fostered active rebellion against the surrender of individual autonomy demanded by the postwar “technocratic” order. As he wrote in a later appraisal, “We will never know how many people belonged to the counter culture. It may be wrong to speak of it as having a membership at all. Rather it was a vision, that to one degree or another, drew the attention of passing many. More important than the size of the dissent was its depth. Never before had protest raised issues that went so philosophically deep, delving into the very meaning of reality, sanity, and human purpose.”6

• 7 Ibid., p. 63-65: “Beat-hip bohemianism may be too withdrawn from social activism to suit New Left r (...)
• 8 Ibid., p. 65
• 9 Ibid., p. 88
• 10 Ibid., p. 115

9Roszak was then and remained a lonely voice arguing that the Hippie/Lefty dichotomy was more a matter of surface attachments than deep substance7 (and useful to the enemies of both); indeed the two tendencies depended on one another, as no social emancipation could be sustained without a complementary “psychic liberation of the oppressed8.” Thus it was Marcuse’s residual attachment to the conventional materialism of practical politics (who gets what and how) that demoted him in favor of Brown, despite the latter’s exasperating rhetorical excesses: “In the realm of social criticism,” Roszak concluded, “the counter culture begins where Marcuse pulls up short, and where Brown, with no apologies, goes off the deep end9.” The countercultural credibility of the former resides in his recognizing the excess of psychic repression rooted in bypassed conditions of endemic scarcity, but falters under his conventionally Marxist and Freudian conviction that in the last analysis entirely empirical constraints and conflicts were to blame. Brown, by contrast, locates that repression in the primordial disavowal of death that constitutes human consciousness, as Roszak puts it, “a diseased reification of body metaphors born of repression at the deepest instinctual level10.” From that denial arises the ceaseless building, making, and getting, the stubborn attachment to hierarchy, and the manufacture of “history,” all to serve the neurotic disavowal of mortality and all at the expense of perfectly realizable freedom and happiness.

• 11 Ibid., p. 120

10Brown’s stirring testament holds that the long-lost acceptance of death as integral to life can be glimpsed in the outpourings of poetic visionaries and prophets. Seconding Brown, Roszak asks, “On what sure grounds are we to tell those who claim to have known these ‘things unseen’ that they have not known them […] not really? Or what they have known is no part of our liberation?” Here lies the proleptic anticipation of the counterculture to come, not the fits and starts of the version on offer in 1969: “Brown, Marcuse, you and I, most of us, perhaps all of us, must now begin to dig our way out of the entrenched estrangement of our being: how dare we specify the limits of the real while we stand on this benighted side of liberation?11”

• 12 “Trout Fishing” being alternatively the book’s theme and its main character.

11In aid of this digging out, like the denizens of Plato’s cave seeking the light, Roszak endorsed in the chapter that follows the Eastern meditative seeking of no-mind as popularized by Allen Ginsberg and Alan Watts. By the same token, he abjured the high-profile promotion by Timothy Leary of short-cuts to enlightenment via psychedelic drugs as a counterfeit substitute for the real thing, in keeping with his general aversion to carnivalesque excess. Any reader who wanted access via writing to the opposite side of that coin had only to pull from the shelf Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, published just the year before Roszak’s manifesto. A work of underestimated depth of research and still an unsurpassed record of the great psychedelic experiment, Wolfe demoted Leary in favor of Bay Area novelist Ken Kesey, ringleader of the obstreperous entourage known as the Merry Pranksters, who would proceed from one of their Acid Tests to the next in a wildly patterned school bus and proceed to serve an LSD-laced brew to anyone in attendance, while barraging their senses with massed sound and light equipment. Published so soon after the events it recounts as to become a countercultural phenomenon in itself, Wolfe’s weighty tome might be said to have kicked off the second wave of American alternative reading, in which it would soon be joined by fiction on the order of Vonnegut’s utopian war requiem Slaughterhouse Five (with the resonantly named Billy Pilgrim as its protagonist) and the reportage from the Native American’s “separate reality” claimed in Carlos Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (cited with approval by Roszak). Perhaps trumping them all was the slight, unclassifiable Trout Fishing in America by the Western poet Richard Brautigan, whose cycle of wryly elliptical fragments12 vaulted out of its cult origins to become a best-selling phenomenon.

• 13 He took his own life in 1984.

12The fact that mention of the once-celebrated Brautigan nowadays draws blank looks13 testifies to the amnesia that has overtaken the hot house reading culture that paradoxically characterized a decade better remembered for derangement of the senses than cognitive absorption. To read the wise and temperate Roszak’s Making of a Counterculture today offers a path back to that lost moment. Its prophesy of the counterculture to come may have failed to foresee that the revolt against technical expertise would in our time go in an atavistic, right-wing direction; in the nearer term, despite living in a state governed by Ronald Reagan, he likewise grievously underestimated the viciousness of the political counter-revolution against the idealism associated with the 1960s, transformed by a compliant establishment media into an object of general ridicule and disdain. Roszak’s death in 2011 prevented him witnessing the upwelling of protest in the Occupy and BLM movements, along with their complement in the growing emancipation of the inner sexual self, all of which confirms his faith in the young. At the same time, his focus on self-transformation foreclosed an anticipation of the great confrontation now taking place between these emergent liberated norms and a mass, armed enemy population in the American hinterland. But reading or re-reading The Making of a Counter Culture offers a source of resolve in that clash between an enlightened existence and its opposite.