The Mailer Review/Volume 14, 2020/Mailer and Emerson: Lipton’s Journal and the Dissident Soul: Difference between revisions

The Mailer Review/Volume 14, 2020/Mailer and Emerson: Lipton’s Journal and the Dissident Soul (view source)

Revision as of 09:09, 7 June 2021

12,885 bytes added , 7 June 2021

Added more. More to do.

Grlucas

Bureaucrats, Administrators

10,116

edits

@@ Line 25: / Line 25: @@
 Mailer entitled his journal “Lipton’s” (tea, marijuana) because cannabis, “which destroys the sense of time also destroys the sense of society and opens the soul,” was his aid to deeper self-explorations and growth.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/63|#63]]}} He is speaking here not of intimate personal relations, which cannabis can of course enhance, but of the oppressive Collective Society and its “war upon each individual.” He then gives the example of modern advertising as one means by which society “reaches deep into each man’s soul and converts a piece of it to society.” Advertising coopts the soul’s longing for “love and power, the two things the soul seeks for in life, legitimately, finely,” by attaching that longing to commodities, which tempt the soul to “enter its contract with society.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/64|#64]]}} Modern advertising becomes, for Mailer, but one soul-trapping tool of Emerson’s 20th-century joint-stock company.
+For a novelist who, by 1954, is wondering whether he might be a failed artist, who is fighting depression and felt suicidal, Mailer’s evolving theories of homeostasis/dynamism in conflict with sociostasis become of central importance to his whole project of psychic and artistic renewal. He now finds himself disappointed with the derivative ''Naked and the Dead'' (“an imposter”), the abortive ''Barbary Shore'', and the “enormous lie” and “failure” of ''The Deer Park''.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/460|#460]]}} By “imposter” Mailer is referring to his recognition that he was imitating his literary heroes in his most successful novel so far, a literary procedure Emerson often warned against. Emerson’s broader argument throughout ''Nature'' is for the individual to create an original relation to the universe; in “Self-Reliance” he proclaimed that “imitation is suicide”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|p=65}} and “insist on yourself; never imitate”;{{sfn|Emerson|1960|p=148}} in “The American Scholar” Emerson warns, “in a degenerate state, when the victim of society, he [the scholar] tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|p=165}} Imitation, for Emerson as for Mailer by the 1950s, becomes a type of literary failure.
+By questioning his previous work, Mailer is also questioning the success or failure of his rebellious soul. “A novel is the record of a sociostatic retreat if it is a great or good novel. A bad novel is the record of a sociostatic advance.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 24, 1955/243
+|#243]]}} This is an attitude toward the novel since 1954 that Mailer would carry for the rest of his life, variously rephrasing the journal entry he made a half-century earlier. In ''The Big Empty'' (2006), for example, he would say: “The good novel, the serious novel, is antipathetic to corporate capitalism. The best seller is one of the props of corporate capitalism precisely because it’s an entertainment. . . . Well, every time there’s a page turner to read for too little, someone’s mind is being dulled. Even page-turners can get into interesting questions, but dependably, they will always veer away from moral exploration.”{{sfn|Mailer|Mailer|2006|p=129}} The essence of genius, for a novelist, is “to make a voyage which is opposed to society. . . . He is always attacking society because he is always carrying further our knowledge of the Self.” And courage is the virtue most in demand for such self-knowledge and self-reliance: “What makes a genius” Mailer continues, “is his incredible courage, for he is a man who lives always in fear, and yet he continues.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/337|#337]]}} Such Emersonian courage, based on self-trust, is what inspires Mailer’s hope for rebellious transformation—his twentieth-century heroic adventure.
+Emerson specified the soul as our inner resource of rebellion, a theme best expressed in his “Divinity School Address.” “In the soul then let the redemption be sought. Whenever a man comes, there comes revolution.” Those who “love to be blind in public . . . think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|p=112}} Emerson then exhorts his Harvard audience of graduating seniors and their faculty mentors: “Oh my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn. . . . All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason. . . . Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For once you are alive, you shall find they all become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul.”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|pp=114–115}} For his efforts, Emerson then had to deal with reviews and reactions to his words as negative as those Mailer had faced in the wake of ''Barbary Shore'' and ''The Deer Park'', including the well-known troubles Mailer had in getting ''The Deer Park'' published. Emerson withstood the onslaught better than Mailer, by the testimony of his journals, as in Emerson’s August 31, 1838, journal entry: “Steady, steady. . . . Who are these murmurers, these haters, these revilers? Men of no knowledge and therefore no stability.”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|p=116}} Still, the critical onslaught against Mailer sparked his “soul rage” and became the very catalyst for his self-reliant transformation through the analytical processes of ''Lipton’s''.
+==“The Doors of Discovery”: The Power of Instinct and Intuition==
+Reflecting in his journal on a visit to his parents, Mailer notes with empathy that his sister Barbara feels betrayed because his advice and example had “made her a rationalist over the years—I took her sensitive delicate nature and hammered my harsh mind into hers. No wonder she’s furious at me now that I say Reason is bad, Instinct is good.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/400|#400]]}} Mailer then associates thinking with fucking as a species of intuitive leap, where “thought like fucking is dialectic but directed. The ultimate end of the fuck like the ultimate end of thought is to comprehend the universe as a whole.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/526|#526]]}} Mind and body collaborate in the processes of comprehension. “Indeed, no human can enrich himself without returning and dipping into the lore of mind-body. It is the source of all creativity available to us, outside of what we intuit from nature when we personify it. For indeed man is a part of nature and so can comprehend nature by understanding himself.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 21, 1955/645|#645]]}} Emerson phrased the point this way in his late essay “Fate”: “Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in perfect solution.”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|p=351}} Mailer had prefaced the above journal entry seeking wholeness and unity by a speculation that “the closer man approaches to the infinity of God the more he will live in passivity.” That is, the war of soul against society begins to resolve itself as we more fully approach infinity, comprehend intuitively the divine in the particulars of the natural world and in ourselves.
+We begin now to understand better Mailer’s earlier (Blakean/Thoreauvian) comment that “in the tiny is the profound. Those things which are too insignificant to notice are always ''the doors of discovery''”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/352|#352]]}} [my emphasis]. Or, as Emerson put it in ''Nature'': “1. Words are signs of natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of the spirit.”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|p=40}} The reason so many academicians are dull, Mailer argues, is that there is no pursuit of such intuitive unity (or psychic integration) in their professional lives: “they have given themselves over to a subject they are not close to spiritually—usually to hide some other deeper drive of their nature. They conceal the rampant murderer, lover, adventurer, etc. within themselves from themselves. . . . There is a war mounting between the academicians and the ones with true vocation.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 20, 1955/213|#213]]}} Mailer then provides a litany of specialists who understand nothing deeper (spiritual, loving, intuitive, hence truly “vocational”) about the subject of their life-work—from psychoanalysts, to editors, to sociologists, to anthropologists, to historians. Here we might be tempted to launch a Swiftian riff on certain ideological literary theorists as “Projectors” obsessed with their clever reductive grids, or a George Eliot riff on the Edward Casaubons of academic criticism, striving to hold “the Key to all Mythologies” or literatures, without any loving or spiritual attachment to literature. But to honor our reader’s patience so far, we will resist the temptation.
+The preeminence of intuition and instinct over rationalist materialism that Mailer approaches in his journal is also fundamental to American transcendentalism. As early as “The American Scholar,” Emerson says: “I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that can lead him back to his prerogatives. . . . If a single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will come around to him.”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|pp=75, 79}} In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson asks, “What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded?” Then he answers, “The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis can go, all things find their common origin.”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|p=156}} In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson clarifies the point further: “Transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant . . . who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself.”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|p=197}} For Emerson, an ordained American divine who had despaired of organized religion, doctrine, and orthodoxy, who resigned his ministry in 1832, and who outraged many in his “Divinity School Address,” Jesus was an example of the highest “moral sentiment,” the “indwelling Supreme Spirit” that should “not be attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest” because “the doctrine of inspiration is lost.” Rather:
+{{quote|It [inspiration] is an intuition. It cannot be received second hand. . . . Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Alone in history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World. . . . He felt respect for Moses and the prophets, but no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial revelations to the hour and the man that now is; to the eternal revelation in the heart.{{sfn|Emerson|1960|pp=104–105}}}}
+For Mailer, Jesus (both man and symbol of the liberating power within) is similarly “the rebel, the anarchist, the saint, the compassionate, the life-giver . . . [who] was put on the cross and all his teachings were reversed. Christ became Christianity just as Reason became Rationalization.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/376|#376]]}} This early insight would inform Mailer’s later work on Jesus a half century later in ''The Gospel According to the Son'' (1997) and ''On God'' (2007).
+Although Gospel flummoxed some critics by the audacity of Mailer writing the novel in the first person, the first-person Jesus story goes back in the English tradition at least as far as “The Sacrifice” by George Herbert (one of Emerson’s favored poets), likely composed about the time the Pilgrims were settling in America. Other reviewers were more concerned with the execution of Mailer’s novel, a more legitimate concern. Be that as it may, Mailer’s Jesus is an Emersonian prophet, “Even mightier than the prophet Ezekiel.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=36}} Not unlike what Mailer recognized in himself during the 1950s, Jesus is filled with both Apollonian and Dionysian impulses: “If his [Satan’s] odor could leave me uneasy it also offered sympathy to desires I had not yet allowed myself to feel.” Jesus embodies the kind of “double life” Emerson thought open to us all: a man living the human, sensuous life but with divine energies (a dissident, transcendent soul) within. Jesus, Mailer asserts, is of the Gnostic Jewish Essene sect. Like Emerson’s Jesus in the “Divinity School Address,” Mailer’s Jesus is the foe of orthodoxy, law, and nominal piety as exemplified by the Pharisees and the Synagogues, and as opposed to the interior experience and love of God,{{efn|See {{harvnb|Mailer|1997|loc=48, 72, 80, all of chapter 35, and 239}}.}} and as opposed to the wealthy and powerful coopting for their own purposes desires in the human soul.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=152–153}}
 . . .