The Mailer Review/Volume 10, 2016/Norman Mailer’s Reception of Inherited Sociocultural Norms (1950–1960): Difference between revisions

Mailer agreed with Marx in further placing the conscious human being within a more collective historical socioeconomic class-consciousness. After all, one always belongs to a certain class—at least initially, and remains acutely conscious of it. Furthermore, from the deep recesses of class-consciousness a sort of pre-conscious, that is pre-reflective sense of identity surfaces and endures. As Mailer must have vividly grasped, Marx formulates his significant theory of “alienation” from within the perspective established by his materialist dialectics of class-antagonism. With its obsessive intimations of marginalization concurrent with a pervasive mood of non-belonging, dispossession, and estrangement, alienation plays true havoc on the psyche of the alienated. By means of a socioeconomic process, which one might call deracination, alienation makes immigrants of those who live and work where they were born and raised. Mailer no doubt fully understood, because he had such an acute sensitivity for such complexities, this notion of deracination carries a surplus of existential meanings. Each child internalizes being born to parents with their familial culture of race, class origin, education, religion, and politics. Obviously, no child has ever been any time, anywhere in a position to choose such consequential matters at the time of conception or birth, for which just the same he or she ever after will be held essentially responsible. As Reich puts it in his own inimitable way, this time perhaps as an existentialist rather than a Freudo-Marxist:

Now, as we know, Marx argues that the super-haves appropriate the means of production in a given society. That process also signifies they appropriate or misappropriate a society’s culture—overtly or covertly. As Michel Foucault, a non-Marxist, has famously stated, “Knowledge is power”; of necessity, the reverse is true too. For every form of power creates its own corresponding knowledge or epistemology. Marx considered all forms of social, cultural, artistic, religious, educative, and political thought and action as superstructures. He advanced the basic idea that the superstructures had their roots deep in the fundamental economic structures. He extended institutions within which they occur, such as family, community, and state. In short, what one considers being the overall epistemology of a society for Marx emerges from its economic system.

In “The White Negro,” Mailer unreservedly praises Marx’s major philosophical work ''Das Kapital''. It is highly nuanced esteem and praise—properly measured, and equally salient to the aims of this essay. Mailer tells us, “It is almost beyond the imagination to conceive of a work in which the drama of human energy is engaged, and a theory of its social currents and dissipations, its imprisonments, expressions, and tragic wastes are fitted into some gigantic synthesis of human action . . .”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=65}}

{{quote|Mailer read it [Walter Kaufman’s ''Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre''] from cover to cover in December 1960, and always credited it as one of his most important influences.|author=[[J. Michael Lennon]] to this writer in an email (04/26/16)}}

The essay “The White Negro” provides Mailer with an opportunity to improvise on two challenging problematics of individual life in our time. I choose the verb “improvise” advisedly, using it in its fullest creative sense to impart a serious, highly innovative skilled jazz technique and style that, say, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and perhaps Ornette Coleman practiced. “The White Negro” possesses patterns comparable to the dialectical style of jazz improvisation: diversity within unity; freedom and essential formal boundaries; spontaneity and rhythmic, melodic, and chord progression. This essay develops through intricate surge of repetitions, combinations, and transmutations, all unfolding in mostly long stream-of-consciousness passages. These stylistic improvisational characteristics of “The White Negro” are deliberate as it celebrates and exalts jazz and the jazz musicians as artists whose lives and art coincide to make an authentic mode of ''being''—highly instinctive, distinctive, open, artistically adventurous, and thereby courageous. Put differently, the jazz musician makes a Sartrean existential choice: He or she is what he or she does, pure and simple.