The Autosexual Novel

The trouble with America, as any Liberal will tell you, is that it is “anti-intellectual.” As usual, there is an uncanny accuracy about the Liberal’s statement: it is precisely the reverse of true. “Intellectuality” is dissolving America as the surrealist painter dissolves a landscape. The comparison is not fanciful. There are parts of man which should grow out of dark roots, with whose vitality the mind has no more business than it has trying to feed earth and its crops with thought instead of rain and air. This intellectuality is no more intelligent than the attempt to feed cows with IBM machines; both suffer from the experiment. And so, when the intellect undertakes tasks not properly its own, the instincts or emotions are perverted, and the intellect is itself destroyed. The trouble with America? We are too “intellectual.” Ideology, doubt, the endless thinking of unthinkable things, have made the mind a useless instrument with which we hack at trees and flesh and fact. Instincts wither under this assault and take on sickly shapes.

But the more the “emancipated” mind prostitutes itself, the more debauchery it demands. It is a taboo that no taboo can limit our speculation. The courageous doubter and radical denier, the free-thinking free-lover, and the homosexual remain the subjects of our literature. But the greatest of these is the homosexual. If a book does not actually mention homosexuality, critics repair the error and call it the secret them of the book or the secret incentive of the author.

GW

About the Author

Garry Wills

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The trouble with America, as any Liberal will tell you, is that it is “anti-intellectual.” As usual, there is an uncanny accuracy about the Liberal’s statement: it is precisely the reverse of true. “Intellectuality” is dissolving America as the surrealist painter dissolves a landscape. The comparison is not fanciful. There are parts of man which should grow out of dark roots, with whose vitality the mind has no more business than it has trying to feed earth and its crops with thought instead of rain and air. This intellectuality is no more intelligent than the attempt to feed cows with IBM machines; both suffer from the experiment. And so, when the intellect undertakes tasks not properly its own, the instincts or emotions are perverted, and the intellect is itself destroyed. The trouble with America? We are too “intellectual.” Ideology, doubt, the endless thinking of unthinkable things, have made the mind a useless instrument with which we hack at trees and flesh and fact. Instincts wither under this assault and take on sickly shapes.

But the more the “emancipated” mind prostitutes itself, the more debauchery it demands. It is a taboo that no taboo can limit our speculation. The courageous doubter and radical denier, the free-thinking free-lover, and the homosexual remain the subjects of our literature. But the greatest of these is the homosexual. If a book does not actually mention homosexuality, critics repair the error and call it the secret them of the book or the secret incentive of the author.