The Mailer Review/Volume 5, 2011/Through the Lens of the Beatniks: Norman Mailer and Modern American Man’s Quest for Self-Realization: Difference between revisions

{{Working}} <!-- EDIT BELOW THIS LINE -->

{{dc|dc=F|ew mid-century writers were friendly}} with the Beat Generation. Most, including Norman Mailer, cited their criminal and licentious impulses as an undermining tangling of ethically strong American sensibilities. I have noted Mailer’s criticism found in “The White Negro,” where Mailer sketched the unkempt and ghettoized portrait of white rebels such as Neal Cassady. Whether it is Mailer, Arthur Miller, or left poet-rockers such as Bob Dylan, or even fiction writers such as Truman Capote, the recurring message of a degenerated gang of would-be hoodlums abandoning mainstream lifestyles remained a cynical counter-step to the endless innovations and cultural adventurism that was unheard of for most Americans in the 1950s.

We should remember that Mailer was a writer who faced the same crisis as the Beat Generation: that of publishing to earn a living. Still, Aronowitz’s {{pg|245|246}}essay underscores what we are often likely to dismiss—that their coinciding in the early 1940s breathed a kind of social estimation of American community and overall outlook. The harsh criticism, too, of “The White Negro,” although a key theme of Mailer’s recurrent centrism, veils a moment of social being that is the continuing effort and development of authorial translations of culture. Paraphrasing Oswald Spengler—for many critics the godfather of “Beat”—he establishes the continuity of literature instead of its schizophrenic and hasty re-drawing of consciousness and experience to suit political needs. In short, Mailer’s anticipation of the Beat Generation sustained a continuing moment of literary discovery: we find a delicious sort of foil that forecasts the problem and the praxis of modern American man’s social achievement.