The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/The Beatster, the White Negro, and the Evolution of the Hipster in Fight Club: Difference between revisions

Bly refers to numerous cultures whose initiation rituals include the symbolic wounding of adolescent males. Living in a culture that does not offer him such initiatory rituals, the narrator must invent his own: Fight Club is an archetypal ritual post-modernized, generated not so much from existing cultural practices as self-created. The members of Fight Club compete for what Mailer in his essay calls the “sweet,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=349}} the experience of summoning the courage to meet the existential challenge. Competition or “lifemanship”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=349}} and violence are themes running throughout Mailer’s life and career, from his combative public persona to his interest in boxing, as in ''The Fight'' (1975), and in “The White Negro,” Mailer sees life as a zero sum game in which there are clear winners (hipsters) and losers (squares). One of the most controversial aspects of “The White Negro” is Mailer’s endorsement of violence as a form of both rebellion and existential growth. Like most middle-class millennials, ''Fight Club''’s narrator has been taught all his life to abhor violence as a barbaric and outmoded means of resolving conflict, but “How do you know who you are,” Tyler asks the narrator in the David Fincher film adaptation, “if you’ve never been in a fight?”{{sfn|Fincher|1999|}} They fight as a way to acquire self-knowledge of the sort sought by Mailer’s “philosophical psychopath”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=343}} who can examine his own motives and act in a consciously anti-social way to gratify his desires, “liberating” himself, as Mailer said, “from the Super-ego of society.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=354}} Because the White Negro refuses to sublimate either sexual or violent impulses, Mailer declares that the “nihilism of Hip proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=354}} Unfortunately, once Palahniuk’s narrator has loosed his id, he releases a maelstrom of violence that threatens to engulf him.

Hipsters are Tricksters, either living outside and evading the system, as the Beats and hippies did, or, in the style of the Weather Underground or the Space Monkeys, subverting it through the creative destruction of anarchy. (Palahniuk himself has been involved with a group of anarchistic, anti-globalization tricksters called the Cacophony Society.) “Hip,” Leland says, “which validates troublemakers, is an engine of progress . . . [hipsters] loosen society’s grip on the certainties that prevent it from evolving.”{{sfn|Leland|2004|p=165}} Mailer similarly constructed his White Negro as his Nietzschean ''übermensch'', or what Frederic Whiting calls his “Third Man,” who would reinvent the meaning of being human. Hip, then, manifests as a form of Social Darwinism, but not in the sense in which the rich and powerful dominate because they are the most highly evolved; rather, hipsters promote societal growth because, as Leland says, “Darwinism favors contradiction and disruption.”{{sfn|Leland|2004|p=165}} Just as the 1960’s counterculture opposed the establishment’s military-industrial complex through theatrical antics such as the attempt by Ginsberg and others to levitate the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietnam (recreated by Mailer in ''The Armies of the Night''), “the typical trickster tale,” Leland tells us, “is of a weaker character . . . who uses superior wit and deceit to prevail over a stronger one”;{{sfn|Leland|2004|p=165}} thus, Tyler employs tricksterism to subvert corporate culture, using his job as a film projectionist to splice subliminal, pornographic images into family-friendly films and his job as a waiter in upscale restaurants to urinate into rich people’s vichyssoise. Tyler’s subversive pranks and his formation of Project Mayhem link Hip to anarchy in the sense that Hip is, according to Leland, “a system of order that incorporates chaos” and promotes “intellectual growth,”{{sfn|Leland|2004|p=184}} and as Mailer wrote in his essay, one must “grow or pay more for remaining the same.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=350}} Tricksterism connects Palahniuk’s characters to countercultural figures like Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, the subject of Tom Wolfe’s ''The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test'' (1968). In a carnivalesque inversion of the social order, the Pranksters, including Neal Cassady, perform the archetypal role of Holy Fool, playing mind games and goofing on the Squares, those not metaphorically “on the bus.” Through the use of psychedelic drugs, the Pranksters had experienced what Wolfe calls the “Unspoken Thing,”{{sfn|Wolfe|1968|pp=111–132}} a transcendent, spiritual awareness achievable only by an elite and beyond the power of language to express, just as Mailer argues that the meaning of the language of Hip is inaccessible to the unenlightened Unhip or Square. As Clarence Major writes in ''Juba to Jive'', the root words of hip are the African Wolof words ''hepi'', “to see,” and ''hipi'', “to open one’s eyes”; the hipster, then, is a man or woman who is enlightened.{{sfn|Major|1994|p=234}} The narrator claims that Fight Club is like Zen enlightenment: “After a night in fight club, everything in the real world gets the volume turned down. Nothing can piss you off. . . .”;{{sfn|Palahniuk|2005|p=49}} he then feels like “the calm little center of the world.”{{sfn|Palahniuk|2005|p=64}} However, in one of several paradoxes in Palahniuk’s narrative, despite their rejection of much stereotypical male behavior, like sculpting their bodies at the gym, the narrator and Tyler still resort to violence as a way of validating and expressing masculinity.