Existentialism, Violent Liberation, and Racialized Masculinities: Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” and An American Dream: Difference between revisions

{{DISPLAYTITLE:Existentialism, Violent Liberation, and Racialized Masculinities: Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” and ''An American Dream''}}

In ''[[Advertisements for Myself]]'', his 1959 collection of excerpts and articles, Norman Mailer pauses to meditate on Ernest Hemingway’s influence on his own work. While he admits to a deep-seated admiration for his literary predecessor and acknowledges that Hemingway “did a lot of things which very few of us could do,” Mailer also believes that the author “pretended to be ignorant of the notion that it is not enough to feel like a man, one must try to think like a man as well.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=20}} While it is tempting to take issue with this assessment of Hemingway, the statement’s significance to a study of Mailer’s work lies not necessarily in its accuracy but in its purpose, for in expressing this concern, Mailer implies that he, by contrast, will ''not'' pretend to ignore this point. And Mailer does, in fact, spend much of his literary career exploring what it means to “think like a man.” While Mailer’s representation of masculinity is controversial in that its reliance on various modes of violence — from interpersonal to misogynistic to political — does threaten to reify many of the oppressive social structures that Mailer and his protagonists find so restrictive, his body of work nevertheless offers significant insight into prevalent issues of conflicted gendered identity in American culture. Here, I aim to illuminate the oft-overlooked complexity of some of Mailer’s most infamous representations of masculinity. More specifically, I examine not only the ways that Mailer’s representations of masculinity paradoxically reinforce the oppressions he seeks to overturn through his protagonists’ violent rebellions, but also those moments when Mailer himself interrogates these violences and their roles in shaping gender identity.

Mailer’s meditations on masculinity revolve around an existential anxiety in the midst of what he continually refers to as a cancerous or decaying society. His existential theory also draws on the tenets of French existentialism; in fact, I would suggest that though he is often maligned as a reactionary, anti-feminist writer, Mailer adopts a project quite similar to that of Simone de Beauvoir. His early work indicates that the major similarities between his definition of existentialism and that of both Beauvoir and Sartre lie within two particular tenets: his view of individual liberation as a step towards transcendence, and the importance of the role of an Other in that project.{{efn|While Mailer did not hesitate to call himself an existential author, and repeatedly referred to a wide range of existential themes in his own work, Mary Dearborn points out in her biography of Mailer that his knowledge of existential philosophy came mostly from reading William Barrett’s ''What Is Existentialism?'' However, Mailer was certainly aware of the philosophies of Sartre and de Beauvoir from the company he kept as a member of the ''Partisan Review'' circle, and by 1966 when he was interviewed for ''The Paris Review''’s “Art of Fiction” series, he admitted to having studied more of both Sartre and Heidegger.}} These existential themes are central to Mailer’s nonfiction essay “[[The White Negro]]” (1957) and his novel ''[[An American Dream]]'' (1965), two works that I believe most explicitly demonstrate the connections between existentialism, violence, and masculinity that pervade Mailer’s oeuvre.

In these narratives, Mailer fashions protagonists who articulate a sense of entrapment within a stagnant situation, one that is often described in terms of death and decay. Mailer depicts this decay as arising from an increasingly totalitarian society that enforces conformity—a scenario that parallels the existential concept of immanence discussed by Beauvoir. In Mailer’s language, man’s immanence is associated with totalitarian oppression, and the direction of man’s ultimate existential quest is toward a transcendent liberty that would allow him to move outside of this oppressive culture and define himself as an “outlaw.” The protagonists’ repeated references to an escape from this conformity also invoke the existential language of transcendence, as both the hypothetical “sexual outlaw” of “The White Negro” and the morally ambiguous Stephen Rojack of ''An American Dream'' work to fashion a more expansive definition of masculinity that defies convention.