This is my favorite Gunn novel yet.. & yet I largely disagree w/ its philosophical thrust. Nonetheless, it seems like the most developed & accomplished novel of his that I've read. This is a picaresque novel - the anti-hero, Gavin, is fairly foolish & stupid but not necessarily any worse than pretty much everyone around him. Gunn places his adventures in what wd've been at the time of writing a near-future society (from our time now a time past) - a dystopia the product of unchecked 'radicalism'.

It's the dystopia, of course, that's the main subject & it functions, as literary dystopias usually do, as a critique of political/social trends of the time of writing. "Kampus" was published in 1977. Gunn envisions a world where militant student 'radicals' have 'won', where there're no longer prisons, where universities are walled-in playpens for 'leftist'-motivated bombings & kidnappings & 'free love'.

The philosophy apparently intended to be that closest to Gunn's own is presented by the Professor thru monologues & dialogs & lectures near the beginning of the bk & thru quotes from the "Professor's notebook" in the rest of it, etc.. I find the Professor's opinions interesting enuf but, as w/ more or less everyone, I agree w/ some of it & disagree w/ some of it.

Gavin's adventures, joined for most of them by Elaine - a more pragmatic & sympathetic character, take him thru various extremes that a "Dionysian" society might offer. Like "Candy" or "Justine" there's more than a little cynicism at work. Interestingly, at one point someone's quoted as having a negative take on Apollinaire's respect for de Sade.

IN the beginning teachers at the university are pleading for students in their classes - mostly resorting to sexual manipulation. An English prof hawks his wares thusly:

""Many works of literature, many exciting - yes, even pornographic - passages have never been translated into visual form. Imagine the delight of reading Fanny Hill in the original or Justine or The Story of O! Even the best of translations leaves much to be desired; you cannot imagine, if you have never experienced it, the exquisite pleasure of summoning up your own images instead of having someone else's ideas thrust upon you.""

I reckon that part of Gunn's humor here is that "Justine", eg, isn't even IN ENGLISH in its original form, etc.. As for not "having someone else's ideas thrust upon you" just b/c it's a bk instead of a movie or whatnot? Nah, I don't really buy it.. I don't even borrow it.

The inside blurb reads: ""New Politics" . . . or Programmed Anarchy?" & what the fuck does that mean exactly? There's plenty of anti-'anarchist' thrust to this bk - written from the usual perspective of someone who appears to have little or no knowledge of actual anarchist theory or praxis. To me, as an anarchist, his use of the words "anarchy" & "anarchist" are sadly ludicrous. Here's an obviously literate man who throws literacy out the window as soon as he pulls his bogeyman out. Too bad. Gunn, you're intelligent, but you're not THAT intelligent.

On p 66 as Gavin's invited to be part of a militant mission he replies "I'm not an anarchist" & the reply is "Who is?". In other words, Gavin's saying he's not an extremist & won't attack the police barracks & the person trying to recruit him is saying that he's not an extremist either. This is a little inconsistent w/ other parts of the novel given that there don't appear to be cops anymore except "Kampus Kops" who don't appear to have much power. The gist here is that 'anarchy' is used as the name for total unleashed violent chaos, as (stupidly) usual, rather than, more accurately, as a referent for a more self-responsible philosophy.

On p 101, the Chancellor tells Gavin: ""After the uneasy quiet of the Apprehensive Decade, [..:] burned out by the riots of the sixties, alarmed by the shortages and inflation and unemployment, the overall trend established in the late sixties resumed its progress toward anarchy".

Gavin gets expelled from school & returns home to his parents only to find himself unwelcome. The "generation gap" that defined so many conflicts between parents & kids in the 1960s & '70s has the parents here as 'radicals' disgusted w/ the 'meaninglessness' of their son's struggles. Gavin's father rants: ""We were the generation of Mario Savio, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dorn, and Abbie Hoffman - the saints of the revolution.""

On 294, Gunn has students burning bks & has the now-very-changed Gavin (or is he?) thinking: "They were anarchists destroying their human heritage for the sport of it. The Professor would have called them barbarians and despised them." Funny, I don't usually associate anarchists w/ bk-burnings.

As the event that involves the bk-burning 'progresses' we read: "Here order made its last stand; here anarchy presented its final negation to tyranny. Here the world ended, Gavin thought." There's the usual cast of thoughtless clichés: anarchy vs order rather than anarchy as self-ordering; humanity self-destructing as the end of the world. Ho hum.

Gunn's apparent position, as presented thru the Professor, takes an anti-back-to-nature standpoint: "To what more glorious or more natural existence do we look back? Did the neolithic farmers envy the more natural lives of their paleolithic forefathers, and did those savage hunters, in turn, recall nostalgically the carefree careers of their arboreal ancestors?" To wch I reply: Was Gunn forced to work as a child in a factory by a robber baron? I think not - so its easy for him to glorify the industrial 'revolution', as he goes on to do here, b/c he's privileged enuf to not be its direct victim. I, too, am not exactly a 'back-to-nature' type or a so-called 'anarcho-primitivist' but I don't think the arguments for such things can be dismissed as easily as Gunn does. Of course, this review is using expediency & so does Gunn's novel.

Gunn's ultimate position is that of a SF writer: (he's prescient enuf to mention terra-forming on p 273) his role as one-time president of the Science Fiction Writers of America is perhaps most obvious in his most sympathetically presented community's being a thinly-veiled fantasy of what SF writers are: researchers of a technologically induced utopia, reasonable & even-tempered. In the "enchanted mountain" retreat, the Director explains that Science Fiction writers help disseminate the results of the retreat's inhabitants' research.

In the end, Gunn's naivity & limited bourgeois perspective is most clearly revealed when he has the Director say: ""The world is engaged in a dangerous experiment, [..:] a social experiment called freedom. The experiment began on this continent more than two hundred years ago, and spread eventually to the rest of the world."" Sheesh! In other words, the USA is the good old role model for democracy at its finest. It's in ludicrous opinions like these that Gunn's privileged deluded position as a univeristy professor become painfully obvious: since when is the USA anything other than yet-another place where brutality was used to put some in power & to displace & destroy those in-the-way?!

Thru the Professor mouthpiece he says: "slavery was dying before the Civil War; protests may've prolonged the Vietnam war through middle-class resentment of the protesters"! I think not, Gunn, I think not! If Gunn thinks that waiting for slavery to die off gradually wd've been somehow preferable to the Civil War I'd have to disagree; if he thinks that the Vietnam war wd've ended QUICKER w/o such widespread resistance to it at home I strongly disagree: the "middle-class resentment of the protesters" was, 1st & foremost, a resentment of their having the war shown to them at all. As long as it was something that happened over there to anonymous OTHERS they cd ignore it. I don't really believe that many people in the middle-class had anything but the foggiest notion of why to support the war in the 1st place & I don't think that changed as protest grew. ( )

Read this way back in the day. Did not like it much then, and I suspect that if I had a copy to re-read now, I would like it even less. A rather silly romp through a redneck interpretation of a future USA based on the perceived culture of the 1960s left-wing, hippie student world. The novel attempts to highlight the faults of the alternative cultural movement. It just did not work for me. Dumb. ( )

Fiction