The White Negro/2: Difference between revisions

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{{dc|dc=I|t is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared:}} the American existentialist — the hipster,{{refn|Here Mailer introduces his protagonist—the Hipster. Among critics of Mailer’s work, some have taken issue with his characterization of the Hipster arguing that the Hipster, as Mailer describes him, never existed, while others have concluded that Mailer’s Hipster is Mailer himself, or more specifically, a romanticized or idealized version of himself. Readers have also noted that this Hipster is exclusively male. That is not completely accurate. Mailer does later on suggest that female Hipsters exist, yet his consistent characterization of the Hipster as male resonates with the male-bonding which characterized the Beat Generation figures like [[w:Jack Kerouac|Kerouac]] and [[w:Neal Cassady|Cassady]] who rejected middle-class domesticity and the [[w:Protestant work ethic|Protestant work ethic]] and set out on the road in search of kicks and sexual conquests. All those early Beat characters were Hipsters, even if their conception of what it meant to be Hip were not always consistent with Mailer’s.}} the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as ''l’univers concentrationnaire'',{{refn|Mailer alludes to [[w:David Rousset|David Rousset]] a concentration amp survivor and author of ''L'Univers concentrationnaire'', translated as ''A World Apart'', one of the first studies of the Nazi concentrations camps.}} or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer{{refn|Mailer’s hipster resists the “slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled” because he senses that such emotional repression causes “cancer,” or any number of other psychosomatic illnesses that threaten a healthy human being in the process of personal growth. Throughout his career, Mailer used cancer as a metaphor for the inevitable result of the contaminating influences of the modern world.}} will discover in a hurry), if the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death,{{refn|The Hipster must abandon the relative safety of conformity; he must, as [[w:Friedrich Nietzsche|Friedrich Nietzsche]] said, “live dangerously,” to dare to live according to his own set of values.}} to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.{{refn| He has made the conscious decision “to divorce [himself] from society, to exist without roots”; i.e., he has committed to live as an outcast, without societal or familial ties, in order to “set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self,” to live a life devoted to personal growth and self-fulfillment; he is on a “journey” which is “uncharted” because it is existential in nature, a process of discovery, a journey with no known destination because the destination is not the point; the journey is all. Recall Kerouac in ''On the Road'': {{" '}}Where we going, man?{{' "}} {{" '}}I don’t know, but we gotta go.{{' "}} }} In short, whether the life is criminal or not, the decision is to encourage the psychopath in oneself,{{refn|Mailer’s use of the term “psychopath” is problematic. Basically, a psychopath is a person with a chronic mental disorder who exhibits abnormal, sometimes violent behavior. The psychopath is distinguished from the sociopath, a person with a personality disorder which manifests itself in anti-social behaviors and attitudes and a lack of conscience. Neither term is much used by mental health professionals today. Mailer’s Hipster seems more like a sociopath in the sense that his behavior is often anti-social, but the problem with applying either of these labels to the Hipster is the word “disorder” which pathologizes his rebellious behavior; quite the opposite, Mailer regards such behavior as healthy and necessary for growth. In any case, Mailer will later qualify the label “psychopath” and then reject it altogether.}} to explore that domain of experience where security is boredom and therefore sickness, and one exists in the present, in that enormous present which is without past or future, memory or planned intention, the life where a man must go until he is beat, where he must gamble with his energies through all those small or large crises of courage and unforeseen situations which beset his day, where he must be with it or doomed not to swing.{{refn|Mailer begins to use Hipster slang—Hipsterspeak, “with it” and “swing”; more on this below.}} The unstated essence of Hip, its psychopathic brilliance, quivers with the knowledge that new kinds of victories increase one’s power for new kinds of perception; and defeats, the wrong kind of defeats, attack the body and imprison one’s energy until one is jailed in the prison air of other people’s habits, other people’s defeats, boredom, quiet desperation, and muted icy self-destroying rage.{{refn|Victories and defeats here result from either summoning the courage to seek out new experiences, to overcome inhibitions to action, to “live dangerously,” while defeats result from failing to rise to the occasion, the invitation to seize the moment, and suffering the inevitable pangs of “self-destroying rage.” As we shall see, Mailer sees personal growth through rebellious action as central to the Hipster’s ethos.}} One is Hip or one is Square (the alternative which each new generation coming into American life is beginning to feel) one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.{{refn|Mailer here presents a simple alternative: “One is Hip or one is Square.” He clearly regards the Hip and the Square as binaries without considering that the Hip and the Square might exist on a continuum with degrees of Hipness and Squareness between the two extremes.}}

To be an [[w:Existentialism|existentialist]], one must be able to feel oneself — one must know one’s desires, one’s rages, one’s anguish, one must be aware of the character of one’s frustration and know what would satisfy it. The over-civilized man can be an existentialist only if it is chic, and deserts it quickly for the next chic. To be a real existentialist ([[w:Jean Paul Sartre|Sartre]] admittedly to the contrary) one must be religious, one must have one’s sense of the “purpose” — whatever the purpose may be — but a life which is directed by one’s faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious; it is impossible to live such a life unless one’s emotions provide their profound conviction. Only the French, alienated beyond alienation from their unconscious could welcome an existential philosophy without ever feeling it at all; indeed only a Frenchman by declaring that the unconscious did not exist could then proceed to explore the delicate involutions of consciousness, the microscopically sensuous and all but ineffable ''frissons'' of mental becoming, in order finally to create the theology of [[w:Atheism|atheism]] and so submit that in a world of absurdities the existential absurdity is most coherent.