The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018/Lipton’s Journal: Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal: Difference between revisions

{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>''Lipton’s Journal'': Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal}}

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{{cquote|The modern mind has forgotten those old truths that speak of the death of the old man and the making of a new one, of spiritual rebirth and similar old-fashioned “mystical absurdities.” My patient, being a scientist of today, was more than once seized by panic when he realized how much he was gripped by such thoughts. He was afraid of becoming insane, whereas the man of two thousand years ago would have welcomed such dreams and rejoiced in the hope of a magical rebirth and renewal of life. But our modern attitude looks back proudly upon the mists of superstition and of medieval or primitive credulity and entirely forgets that it carries the whole living past in its lower stories of the skyscraper of rational consciousness. Without the lower stories our mind is suspended in mid air. No wonder it gets nervous. The true history of the mind is not preserved in learned volumes but in the living mental organism of everyone.|author=[[w:Carl Jung|Carl Jung]]|source=''Psychology and Religion''}}

Mailer found his journal to be “a refuge. . . giving him a clean feeling.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 24, 1955/218|#218]]}} He began to see that, “Only through understanding myself can I come to create . . . . As I understand myself . . . so I can waste less time.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/582|#582]]}} He was on a quest through self-analysis for potential sources of rebellion against the claustrophobia he was feeling about his life as a rejected, perhaps even failed, artist. “''The Deer Park'' is a failure, but I have discovered myself,” he writes, and adds that he will no longer need “to protect myself against quitting the values of the world.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/145|#145]]}} His self-analytical journey in ''Lipton’s'' would be his turning point, the source of his personal transformation.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/155|#155]]}} He sees himself as “shoving off into a total re-evaluation of everything . . . . I must trust what my instincts tell me is good rather than what the world says is good.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/159|#159]]}} In the same entry, Mailer notes that he considers ''The Naked and the Dead'' to be an “imposture” he tried to hide behind, but he now is committed to going forward. He wants his work now to become less derivative, more rebellious and outrageous, more instinctual and deeper, foretelling not only ''Advertisements for Myself'', but ''An American Dream'', ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' and ''The Armies of the Night'' in the coming decade. Mailer also believes such “self-analysis will make me a happier more effective rebel . . .because I will be less afraid.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 21, 1955/623|#623]]}} “I believe I’m going to come out of this bigger than I went in.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 25, 1955/262|#262]]}}

In his own journal of self-analysis, Jung demonstrates his motivations and processes in search of a more integrated self,{{efn|The “self” in Jung’s psychology “is produced through the synthesis of conscious and unconscious elements of the personality,” as Jung explained in “On the Psychology of the Child Archetype.”{{sfn|Jung|2009|p=136}} The self is therefore a potential for and a result of the individuation process. Self is the wholeness of psyche or “the subject of my totality”; whereas the “I” is “the subject of my consciousness.” The “persona” is the “conscious attitude,” essentially the mask we wear as social beings.{{sfn|Jung|2009|p=59}} }} a quest not unlike Mailer’s own forty years later. Jung’s more extensive journal, first composed in a series of six small “Black Books,” began at the end of 1913, on the eve of the first world war and after he had parted ways with his mentor Freud, a stressful time when Jung, much like Mailer, feared he was susceptible to a nervous breakdown. In his autobiography Jung describes his feelings as he embarked on his journal as “uncertainty” and “disorientation,” as if he were living “under constant pressure” and in a “state of tension” and “psychic disturbance.” He experienced “a feeling of panic” and became “afraid of losing command of myself.” He then started his journal as “a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious as a scientific experiment” on himself. “I was in effect writing letters to the anima” or “the soul, in a primitive sense,” to “she who communicates the images of the unconscious to conscious mind.”{{sfn|Jung|1963|pp=170–187}} Jung’s journal itself demonstrates his non-linear process, continued off and on with greatest intensity until June of 1917, when he began to understand the material arising out of his experiment. In his earliest journal entries, Jung describes his “unbearable inner longing” for something more than his professional accomplishments, some potential enrichment of his soul, an enrichment he has “long discarded.” He felt as if he were “half a man” stuck in his own time.{{sfn|Jung|1963|pp=127–128}} The inexplicable brooding darkness he felt eventually manifests in the reality of world war, and by 1914 he comes to believe that wars, as with any human conflict, are an external projection of the unbalanced duality within human beings. That inner struggle, that imbalance, is “the wellspring of the great war.”{{sfn|Jung|1963|pp=199–200}}

Jung would have his patients follow a journaling process similar to his own, complete with drawings, to illuminate dreams and images arising out of their confrontations with the collective unconscious. As therapist, Jung helped his patients toward self-transformation by enabling them to interpret and integrate into the self the unconscious materials (fantasies and dreams, often in dialogue form) called forth by the creative journaling process he called “active imagination.”{{sfn|Jung|2009|p=39}} The creative goal, as Shamdasani puts it, is to use the mythopoeic imagination (a “higher wisdom”) that has been lost to the modern age in order to “reconcile the spirit of the time with the spirit of depth.”{{sfn|Jung|2009|p=49}}{{efn|The spirit of the time (more commonly the Zeitgeist) is the general spirit in which we act and think as we live in our era; the spirit of depth, Jung writes, “evokes everything that man cannot” and speaks “in riddles,” often in dreams, “the guiding words of the soul.”{{sfn|Jung|2009|pp=132, 154–155}} The spirit of depth is thereby the gateway to the soul, the nourishing unconscious. But out of balance, the unconscious is less nourishing than dangerous: “The spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly, balance is godly.” Understanding this, Jung adds, “is how I overcame madness.”{{sfn|Jung|2009|p=150}} }} The fusion effected by individuation, then, inspires a break with social conformity, bound by time.{{sfn|Jung|2009|pp=204–207}} Individuation is, therefore, a transcendent function for the individual, a function Mailer was obviously seeking throughout ''Lipton’s''.

In early 1955 while waiting for the galley proofs of ''The Deer Park'', Mailer comes to understand that ''Lipton’s Journal'' is showing him the way forward as a rebel artist. “Doing my analysis in the way proper for me . . . is through creativity—taking into self, synthesizing.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/379|#379]]}} He comes to see that in our psychic duality (“the polarity, the double”) the conscious and the unconscious reflect one another in the manner of “a dialectic.” Mailer puts it this way: “What I believe is true of psyche and of dialectic” is that “as we plumb . . . the unconscious, states of consciousness appear.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/440|#440]]}} As a psychotherapist, June Singer describes the therapeutic process, likewise, as the “dialectic between ego and the unconscious” that has the potential to “result in a transformation of the personality.”{{sfn|Singer|1972|p=29}} Jung called this nourishing and rebalancing of consciousness “''mysterium coniunctionis''”—wholeness of self through the synthesis of opposites. “My mind is deeply dialectical,” Mailer later writes. “The whole journal has been a dialectical illumination.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 7, 1955/491|#491]]}} Right to the end, this duality/dialectical theme reappears in Mailer’s journal. “We dip into our er, our collective wisdom,” Mailer says, and return to the world “with insights . . . colored by our S.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/606|#606]]}} (“Er” becomes one of Mailer’s words for vital force in the unconscious, just as S becomes his shorthand for Society/Sociostasis). This vital duality within us, this “lore of the mind-body . . . is the source of all creativity to us.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 21, 1955/645|#645]]}} The exploratory processes, his adventures, in ''Lipton’s'' will become ever more the processes of his later books, just as archetypal imagery will reflect that creative narrative process. “The novel goes from writer’s-thought to reader’s-thought by the use of an oblique (obliging) symbol, expression, or montage,” Mailer writes. The creative process must be authentic (that is, autonomously archetypal), fed by the unconscious, not constructed by the rational mind alone. And that is why Mailer says he can’t write a fully outlined novel knowing “what I want to say,” because “it comes out too thin, too ideated. My best scenes are the ones where I didn’t know what I was doing.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 22, 1955/698|#698]]}} Those interested in pursuing a detailed analysis of how archetypes function and cohere throughout Mailer’s writings (up to 1980) may refer to {{harvtxt|Begiebing|1980}}, ''Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Work of Norman Mailer''.

''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966), a collection of diverse pieces, can be read as a sort of exegesis for ''An American Dream'' (1964, 1965). The two books function like artistic pendants, parallel texts. The extension of speculations and meditations begun in ''Lipton’s'' are developed much further in ''Cannibals'' for publication. And just as Mailer began to make use of the dialogue form in his published existential and psychological musings in ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963), in ''Cannibals'' the technique—echoing the many dialogues in Jung’s ''Red Book''—comes to full fruition. Two dialogues are of particular significance. “The Metaphysics of the Belly” posits intuition as messages from the unconscious that can transform perception, perception that is both physical and psychic, that is, integrated.{{sfn|Mailer|1966|pp=263–265}} It is such messages from the unconscious that continually urge themselves on the hero Rojack in ''An American Dream'', the potential source of his transformation: “I felt as if I had crossed a chasm of time and was some new breed of man.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=81}} In the other major dialogue “The Political Economy of Time,” Mailer explicitly connects body and soul into a “being” and connects the soul with the unconscious.{{sfn|Mailer|1966|pp=287–373}} This dialogue particularly is in turn strikingly (if annoyingly as some of Mailer’s critics claimed) similar to the dialogue in Chapter 6 of ''American Dream'' between Rojack and his heroine Cherry, a dialogue that repeats much of what Mailer wrote in ''Lipton’s'' about the struggle between Soul and Society.

Two years later, Mailer writes a novel of a very different kind that nonetheless carries forth the themes first arising out of ''Lipton’s Journal''. ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967) is Mailer’s Swiftian-satirical, libidinous, Dionysian, darkly humorous rant, complete with mythic rituals, dialogues, and confrontations among archetypal figures. It is Mailer’s rant against the status quo of the military-industrial society that peaked in the 1960s. A spontaneous rant in the form of an inspired tour de force of youthful alienation from a murderous, hyper-technological society that desacralizes all elements of the ancient hunt ritual in a rapacious desire for complete domination over man and nature. It is the cry of Mailer’s soul-rage (embodied in the trickster-fool narrator D.J., “disk jockey to the world”). Mailer’s rage expresses his homeodynamic “er” (the vital force of his unconscious, as he describes the “er” in ''Lipton’s'') pitted against a corporate America that chose devastating technological warfare in a far-off Asian jungle. Warfare America would eventually lose. The satirical obscenity in the novel is nothing compared to the obscene lies and acts that enabled the war in Vietnam and took more than three million lives (half a Holocaust) and wasted millions of other lives of survivors and their families. Back in 1955 in ''Lipton’s'' Mailer also had been already trying out part of his narrative strategy in ''Vietnam''? That is, his theory of human beings as “receivers and senders of electric waves”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/174|#174]]}} and of the radio as providing “an ear” into one’s unconscious, “a vital experience longed for,” giving us “electric communication.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/344|#344]]}} Mailer went so far as to propose in ''Lipton’s'' that his wife Adele could be “a hipster-lady” if she could “m.c.” her own radio program.{{Sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 22, 1955/681|#681]]}} Adele, thereby, might be seen as an early prototype in Mailer’s mind for the narrator of ''Vietnam?'' as a D.J. who beams her/his “grassed out” hipster rant across the collective “magnetic-electro fief” to the American ear.

He writes of his coming to understand that “jazz consists almost entirely of surprising one’s expectations” and that “the artistry lies in the degree to which each successive expectation is startled.” It is an art form that “has risen to the crisis of modern painting” by “changing the audience’s expectations nightly . . . . a self-accelerating process,” that is not without risk and is now blending all the arts.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 1, 1954/8|#8]]}}

Mailer more than once compares playing jazz to bullfighting, another existential art, and posits that jazz, bullfighting, and cosmopolitanism are the three “culture bearers of the hipster,” culture bearers that “Stalinism [i.e., totalitarianism] will continue to war against.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/57|#57]]}} Mailer will follow up this thought later, writing, that Be-bop “is a hybrid art (like opera)” expressing a distrust of society, a sort of decadence that allows the soul of the musician to be expressed.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/422|#422]]}} These thoughts lead Mailer into meditations on the language of jazz and the hipster, the language of anti-totalitarianism. Hipster speech contains “fucking rhythms . . . almost as powerful as music.” About the be-bop jazz chorus, he writes, “You get me bee-bopping too.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/186|#186]]}} It was the energized be-bop form of jazz in the early fifties that helped him feel his way beyond “the sweet clumsy anxious to please Middle-class Jewish boy.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/187|#187]]}}