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

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 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]]}}
-Mailer was opening himself to—was indeed ardently seeking—a means of integrating, of better balancing, the powers of his conscious and unconscious life. He was seeking rapprochement between the two. He was seeking, therefore, an integration or “individuation” of psyche. In “The Relations between Ego and the Unconscious,” in ''Two Essays on Analytical Psychology'', Jung defines individuation as “embracing our innermost . . . . becoming one’s own self . . . . coming into selfhood or self-realization.”{{sfn|Jung|1966a|p=173}} “The unconscious is a process,” Jung writes in his autobiography (''Memories, Dreams, Reflections''), “and . . . the psyche is transformed or developed by the relation of the ego to the contents of the unconscious,” which contents in humanity’s “collective life . . . has left its deposit principally in the various religious systems and their changing symbols.”{{sfn|Jung|1963|p=209}} Jungian therapist and scholar June Singer, in ''The Boundaries of the Soul'', emphasizes the psychological dynamic of growth and change nicely: “The starting point of understanding the analytic process is the concept of the psyche as a self-regulating system in which consciousness and the unconscious are related ''in a compensatory way''.” Singer, as we’ll soon see, could have been describing Mailer and his journal when she adds that as the “resources of the unconscious” integrate with consciousness, ''the conscious psyche can release the'' “''attitudes, modes of behavior, that are no longer necessary or desirable'',” realizing the individual potential “which has somehow gotten lost.”{{sfn|Singer|1972|pp=10–11}}{{efn|My emphasis.}}
+Mailer was opening himself to—was indeed ardently seeking—a means of integrating, of better balancing, the powers of his conscious and unconscious life. He was seeking rapprochement between the two. He was seeking, therefore, an integration or “individuation” of psyche. In “The Relations between Ego and the Unconscious,” in ''Two Essays on Analytical Psychology'', Jung defines individuation as “embracing our innermost . . . . becoming one’s own self . . . . coming into selfhood or self-realization.”{{sfn|Jung|1966a|p=173}} “The unconscious is a process,” Jung writes in his autobiography (''Memories, Dreams, Reflections''), “and . . . the psyche is transformed or developed by the relation of the ego to the contents of the unconscious,” which contents in humanity’s “collective life . . . has left its deposit principally in the various religious systems and their changing symbols.”{{sfn|Jung|1963|p=209}} Jungian therapist and scholar June Singer, in ''The Boundaries of the Soul'', emphasizes the psychological dynamic of growth and change nicely: “The starting point of understanding the analytic process is the concept of the psyche as a self-regulating system in which consciousness and the unconscious are related ''in a compensatory way''.” Singer, as we’ll soon see, could have been describing Mailer and his journal when she adds that as the “resources of the unconscious” integrate with consciousness, ''the conscious psyche can release the'' “''attitudes, modes of behavior, that are no longer necessary or desirable'',” realizing the individual potential “which has somehow gotten lost.”{{sfn|Singer|1972|pp=10–11}} (My emphasis.)
 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}}
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 Indeed, the conflict between the soul and society, which echoes Emerson as much as it does Jung, is the central theme and insight of ''Lipton’s Journal''. Mailer writes of “the cry of the soul against society” and “the anger of the soul” forced to “travel the roads of the social world.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/45|#45]]}} Soul and society comprise but one dualism Mailer examines throughout his journal, the extreme opposition to the soul is totalitarianism, the greatest state of imbalance. He places “the soul’s insights against the world’s insights.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 25, 1955/255|#255]]}} The individual’s soul is “part of the collective soul” that society opposes.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/59|#59]]}} Mailer goes so far as to declare that a writer’s “style gives the clue . . . to what happened to the soul.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 24, 1955/250|#250]]}} Mailer also concluded, as Jung did, that although the underlying symbolic structures of the archetypes endure, the symbolic forms are colored by, shaped by, the society in which one lives: “No matter how deeply we dip into . . . our collective wisdom,” Mailer writes, “the particular insights we return with to the world are colored by our S,” our dominant society.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/606|#606]]}} Most people probably know of the symbols and archetypes that unfold across millennia through the work of Joseph Campbell, but Campbell based much of his own work on his predecessor Jung, even if he carried Jung’s work further.
+Like Mailer’s journal, Jung’s is full of raw material that can be difficult to judge or comprehend, but the editor for the published version of ''The Red Book'', Sonu Shamdasani (Professor of Jung History at the Center for the History of Psychological Disciplines at University College of London) is an excellent guide to Jung’s. In his nearly 100-page introduction, Shamdasani points out that ''The Red Book'' depicts the rebirth of God in the soul, a “hermeneutic experiment” not unlike Yeats’ automatic writing experiments that published as ''A Vision'' reveal the creation of an individual cosmology.{{sfn|Jung|2009|pp=30–31}} Although Yeats’ cosmology was fully formed once published, as was William Blake’s in his illuminated works, Mailer reveals in ''Lipton’s'' merely the seeds of his own cosmology, seeds that will begin to bear fruit in “The White Negro” (1957), “Hip, Hell, and the Navigator” (1958, 1959), and his work of the 1960s. (In “Navigator,” published in ''Advertisements'', we encounter Mailer’s emerging cosmology, which posits a God in danger of dying and in existential battle with a Devil—as two “warring element[s] of the universe” that place mankind in a “staggering moral” position, to be navigated by unconscious messages to consciousness.{{Sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=380–383, 386}} Like Blake, but unlike Mailer’s mere doodling, Jung adds extensive drawings and paintings in the process of developing his integration of soul and consciousness, individuality and society. “The overall theme of the book,” Shamdasani writes of Jung’s ''Red Book'', “is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation . . . . a new worldview in the form of psychological and theological cosmology . . . . a prototype of Jung’s conception of the individuation process. . . .”{{sfn|Jung|2009|p=48}}
+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''.
+Mailer’s desire, as he later said in ''Advertisements for Myself'', to find “the courage to pay the high price of full consciousness . . . . and to make a revolution in the consciousness of our time”{{Sfn|Mailer|1959|p=17}} was necessarily based first on making a revolution in his own consciousness through ''Lipton’s'' in the mid-1950s.{{efn|Speaking of the collapse of former civilizations and the old order in World War I, Jung too understood that no social revolution is possible without internal revolution first in individuals’ consciousness. He put it this way: “Too many still look outwards . . . . But still too few look inwards, to their own selves, and still fewer ask themselves whether the ends of human society might not best be served if each man tried to abolish the old order in himself, and to practice in his own person and in his own state those precepts . . . which he preaches at every street corner, instead of always expecting these things of his fellow men.”{{sfn|Jung|1966a|p=5}}}} His work in the sixties represents not only a significant change in style, but the breaking through of a new self, a self that includes qualities his former self lacked and that now give “rise to images assumed worthless from the rational perspective,” as Shamdasini describes the phenomenon. Shamdasini then adds, “The first possibility of making use of them is artistic.”{{Sfn|Jung|2009|p=60}} The archetypal imagery in Mailer’s fiction, as in any archetypal art, is imagery that can educate the spirit of an age, off-setting its one-sidedness. It is art that can synthesize dualities by resetting the balance against imbalance and disproportion. “If society is allowed total reason, it will destroy itself,” Mailer writes. “I am a revolutionary because only by revolution, and probably not political revolution, can the S [Society/ Sociostasis] be set back . . . and put into serious retreat, thus opening larger H [Homeostasis or later in the journal “Homeodynamism”] gambits for future generations.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/353|#353]]}} Mailer argues that without the counterpoise of homeodynamic psychic force, Reason becomes Society’s Rationalization, “so H turns to the illogical, the intuitive, the ''irrational''.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 26, 1955/282|#282]]}} The dialectic he was drawn to he found in himself: “I am the rationalist who is drawn to mystery.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 26, 1955/289|#289]]}} For Mailer it is “the extraordinary contradiction of my personality . . . that gave me strength as a writer.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 27, 1955/316|#316]]}}
+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''.
 . . .
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 * {{cite book |last=Begiebing |first=Robert J. |date=1980 |title=Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Work of Norman Mailer |url= |location=Columbia |publisher=U of Missouri Press |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Jung |first=C. G. |date=1963 |title=Memories, Dreams, Reflections |editor-last=Jaffee |editor-first=Aniela |url= |location=New York |publisher=Pantheon Books |ref=harv }}
-* {{cite book |last=Jung |first=C. G. |author-mask=1 |date=2009 |title=The Red Book: Liber Novus, A Readers’ Edition |editor-last=Shamdasani |url= |location=New York |publisher=W. W. Norton |ref=harv }}
+* {{cite book |last=Jung |first=C. G. |author-mask=1 |date=2009 |title=The Red Book: Liber Novus, A Readers’ Edition |editor-last=Shamdasani |editor-first=Sonu |url= |location=New York |publisher=W. W. Norton |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Jung |first=C. G. |author-mask=1 |date=1966 |title=The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature |translator-last=Hull |translator-first=R. F. C. |series=Bollingen Series XX |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}
 * {{cite book |last=Jung |first=C. G. |author-mask=1 |date=1966a |title=Two Essays on Analytical Psychology |translator-last=Hull |translator-first=R. F. C. |series=Bollingen Series XX |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}