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

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{{byline|last=Nakjavani|first=Erik|abstract=A meditative, postmodern retrospective-prospective method to Norman Mailer’s reception of various modes of sociocultural inheritance.|note=In memory of Robert W. Lewis.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr10nakj}}

In what follows, I apply a meditative, postmodern retrospective-prospective method to writers’ reception of their various modes of sociocultural inheritance. I think of it as my adaptation of German literary theoretician [[w:Hans Robert Jauss|Hans Robert Jauss]]’s reception theory, and its concept of “horizons of expectation.” The reception theory enables us to develop a new hermeneutics of writers’ nascent encounters with their inherited sociocultural world. More specifically, it will provide us with a postmodern interpretive theory to understand Mailer’s response to an array of reigning paradigms early in his career as a writer in the 1950s.

I hope that my meditations will result in revealing some of Mailer’s significant and signifying conceptual acts of acceptance or rejection of his familial, religious, socioeconomic, and cultural hand-me-downs. In his defiant acts of reception, he creates a differential calculus, as it were, between the past as “independent variable” and the present as “dependent adjustable.” In other words, it makes a clearing for a nuanced temporal mediation between the diachronic paradigms, historically and sequentially developed, and the synchronic paradigms in progress, to which writers actively contribute.

Accordingly, a fundamentally open-ended philosophy of progressive changes concomitantly generates its own hermeneutics and epistemology. As Neo-Marxist Herbert Marcuse has put it in a somewhat different context, “It [epistemology] is the essentially human project. If man has learned to see and know what reality is, he will act in accordance with truth. Epistemology is in itself ethics, and ethics is epistemology.”{{sfn|Marcuse|2013|p=125}}

{{quote|In 1919, Paul Valéry began “''La crise de l’esprit''” with the following words ‘We later generations . . . we too know that we are mortal’. We too, earthlings of the twenty-first century who have not been through a world war, and who form the present-day humankind, now know that we ''are capable'' of self-destruction. And if in the past the possibility of such an extinction of our kind was inconceivable other than as a consequence of God’s anger—of original sin—today there is no longer any religious reference at the origin of this extreme global pessimism.|author=Bernard Stiegler|source=''What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology''{{sfn|Stiegler|2013|p=9}} }}

In the above passage, Mailer declares himself to be on the side of “the isolated courage of isolated people,” among whom one assumes he includes himself. Courage here becomes synonymous with bravery of the isolated and nonconformist individual who remains undefeated, thus laying the foundation for cultural rebellion. If the rebel is not merely rebelling for the sake of rebellion, he or she will find they have chosen to travel along a hard but adventurous road. Because there are few signs along the way, a sense of unsettling, unfathomable freedom with inescapable responsibilities defines their journey. In that light, “The White Negro” provides Mailer’s political and psycho-philosophical manifesto. It offers a promising emergent ground for applying our retrospective-prospective subcategory of Jesus’s reception theory to Mailer’s first decade as a writer of fiction and a fierce, defiant, groundbreaking essayist.

{{quote|Georg Lukács, a prominent proponent of a Marxist theory of art, complained in a programmatic essay “Art and Objective Reality” as late as 1934 that Marxist aesthetics was lagging far behind the general development of Marxist theory. He regretted that Marx had broken off his manuscript without tackling the thorny problem of why he still enjoyed the Greek epic.|author=Wolfgang Iser|source=''How to Do Theory''{{sfn|Iser|2006|p=105}} }}

In the interstices of “The White Negro” Mailer has left us hints on how we might profitably concurrently receive and perceive a colossal philosophical work such as ''Capital'' as fiction. More specifically, one might read it as a utopian fiction such Thomas More’s ''Utopia'' or Plato’s ''Republic''. If such reading would offer its own interpretive, emotional, cerebral epistemology, well then kudos to Marx the philosopher and Mailer the novelist. Reading Marxian philosophy as fiction is no mean task and no paltry contribution to the reader-response theory. Above all, Mailer’s imaginative reading of ''Capital'' introduces a generational reading that raises it to the status of interpretive art. Following this logic, generally the art of reading philosophical works imaginatively brings the reader of philosophy and literature the unlimited richness of the human mind intuitively at work in the reciprocal acts of writing and reading.

In the mid-1950s, Mailer was wont to challenge other worldviews by attacking them or transforming them into formulations of his own. In his essays, he made an ensemble of his own interpretations of Marxism, Freudianism, and Reich’s Freudo-Marxism. Mailer was also thoroughly conversant with the works of Freudian psychoanalyst and lucid theoretician Robert M. Lindner (1914–1956), with whom he did an unfinished analysis. Lindner wrote noteworthy works such as ''Prescription for Rebellion'' (1952), ''Rebel without a Cause'' (1944), ''The Fifty-Minute Hour'' (1955), and ''Must You Conform?'' (1956). Lindner’s acute psychoanalytic studies dealt with subjects such as psychopathy and sociopathy, matters of fervent interest to Mailer the novelist and essayist. Mailer must have also been aware of Marcuse’s ''Eros and Civilization'' (1955), which also foreshadows Brown’s ''Life against Death'' (1959) and ''Loves Body'' (1955). He perceived them as intellectually nonconformist efforts, which deepened his own rebellious sensitivities toward received ideas as unjustifiably predetermined and fixed.

Mystics in all Abrahamic religions of the Middle East cherished this moment of ecstasy as ''being-one-with the other''.

As we know, Freud squarely embeds the psychoanalytic session in the realm of empathic, dialogic, and revelatory human dialogue. One human being in distress narrates an intimate personal story, ''speaking his or her mind'', and another sympathetically listens, encourages, and tries to understand and interpret what he or she hears. At its best, this revelation renders conscious the origin of neurotic suffering as repressed pre-genital desires. William Barrett observes that “the etymology of the Greek word for truth, ''[[w:Aletheia|a-letheia]]'', means, literally, un-hiddenness, revelation. Truth occurs when what has been hidden is no longer so.”{{sfn|Barrett|1962|p=215}} Barrett suggests that for Heidegger this dialectic movement from hiddenness to un-hiddenness is mediated by a “revelation-light-language.”{{sfn|Barrett|1962|p=215}} In common parlance, we often call it a “talking cure.” Some insight akin to Heidegger’s notion of “revelation-light-language” originates in the hidden depths of the unconscious and rises to consciousness through the power of nonjudgmental, empathic human dialogue in psychoanalysis.

Now Mailer’s own important dialectical adventures as an intellectual, intertwining Marxism, Freudianism, and Reichianism, made up a tripartite mixture of his own sweeping psychoanalytic interpretations. To place this theoretical zone more centrally within Mailer’s own intellectual contemporaries, one has to place him among Marcuse, Fromm, and Brown on the one hand and Reich on the other. In his early essays, particularly “The White Negro,” Mailer militates for what I think of as an ancestral instinctive sexual revolution in which genital sexuality or lust fulfills itself in uninhibited socio-ethical nonconformity. This is a regressive-progressive vision of the dawn of human appearance on earth. This sexual revolution promises access to Nirvana through repetitive “apocalyptical orgasm.” Perhaps Mailer’s understanding of Reich’s oeuvre derived, at least somewhat, from his being an imaginative novelist who considered “orgonomy” as a manifestation of cosmic energy. Mailer was interested in imaginative science fiction such as Arthur C. Clarke’s excellent ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' (1968). Clarke creatively shows how universal chaos is kept at bay within certain fundamental natural structures in an apocalyptic vision of human endeavors. Such creative possibilities might have played a role in his lasting interest in Reichianism as “soft science fiction.”

{{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)}}

Among the core ideas of the essay are the phenomena of conformity and alienation. Externally, there are socioeconomic, cultural, and class distinctions. Thus, there is a weighty sense of alienation as nonbelonging. Internally, there is neurotic alienation, deriving from a psyche riven by instinctual forces and conventional ethics. It manifests itself as a suffering from the lack of a cohesive psychosomatic life. On the one hand, there are the ineradicably powerful compulsive forces of Eros as life instincts. On the other, there is the totalizing strength of internalized dos and don’ts as the sum total of learned socio-ethical mores as inviolable, and Thanatos as death instinct. From this Freudian psychoanalytic perspective, the modern individual remains a divided, troubled being. A tragic battle of discordant forces always rages on in the mind, beyond the likelihood of peace. In our everyday life, we experience not only the antithetical problematics of Eros vs. Thanatos but also their baffling unholy alliance as a reedy dirge-like blues of the lived experience of alienation from our world and ourselves. As Robert Lindner reminds us:

Mailer finds a way out of this aporetic dichotomy between the hegemonic determinism of obsessive-compulsive urges of Eros and Thanatos. He does so through the instrumentality of an emerging, mostly speculative rebel in the mid-1950s American society. As drawn by Mailer, this nonconformist rebel frees himself from all traditional and dogmatic boundaries. Partly as a creature of Mailer’s own fundamental inclinations as novelist and his inclinations toward a combination of Marx, Reich, and growing existential theories, the hipster as a rebel par excellence is born. He is a mixture of Mailer’s desires, defiant intellectual vision and imagination. Primarily, however, he is a creature of language unfolding in its unlimited creative expanses.

Clearly, the hipster’s orgasmic paroxysmal intensities fail to carry a hint of the ecstasy that ideally unites two human beings, beyond their evident disparities. Ideally, “apocalyptic orgasm” should reside in simultaneous fulfillment of desires as raw, corporeal, and visceral as well as magical and sacral union of two beings, usually condemned to existential aloneness. One remembers Robert Jordan and the young Spanish girl Maria in Ernest Hemingway’s ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', making love in the midst of a country torn apart by a civil war, united as one with each other and with the Earth’s rotation around its own axis and its orbital rotations around the sun. Here the orgasmic coincides with the yearnings for cosmic oneness attributed to love by all the mystic traditions of the Abrahamic religions of the Middle East. Perhaps Mailer might have agreed with designating this uncommon numinous love as Tao of orgasmic union. Such union would be the gnostic principle of the birth of the human race from nonexistence to existence.

After all is said and done, one would have to admit that Mailer as an intellectual had the zeal of a passionate, old-fashioned American pioneer. All his life he actively moved toward new epistemological horizons. Along with the French philosopher and anthropologist Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Mailer might have said, “I have done everything to know what is knowable and I have looked for that which is unformulable in my depths. I myself am in a world I recognize as profoundly inaccessible to me: in all the ties that I thought to bind it with, I still don’t know what I can conquer, and I remain in a kind of despair.”{{sfn|Bataille|2001|p=113}}

Consequently, Mailer as a young novelist, essayist, and literary intellectual received his staid, inherited sociocultural legacy by radically, critically assessing it. He strongly challenged the preconceived, expected, and accepted sociocultural and literary norms. He advanced the notion of engaging in sustained, courageous, transgressive limit-experiences with the dark, unfathomable side of human existence. It resulted in a formulation of his determined, exploratory styles of thought and writing, then and later. Mailer was in the grips of an insatiable epistemophilia of prodigious dimensions. Perhaps his true love was the transcendent as-yet-unknown rising to the surface from the dark depths of the mysterious and perhaps the unknowable.

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* {{cite book |last1=Arendt |first1=Hannah |last2=Heidegger |first2=Martin |date=2003 |title=Letters: (1925–1975) Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger |translator-last=Shields |translator-first=Andrew |editor-last=Ludtz |editor-first=Urusla |url= |location=New York |publisher=Harcourt |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Jauss |first=Hans Robert |date=1989 |title=Toward an Aesthetic of Reception |translator-last=Bahti |translator-first=Timothy |url= |location=Minneapolis |publisher=University of Minnesota Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lefebvre |first=Henri |date=1982 |title=The Sociology of Marx |url= |location=New York |publisher=Columbia University Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2013 |chapter=The White Negro |title=Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays of Norman Mailer |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages=41–65 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Marcuse |first=Herbert |date=2013 |title=One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society |url=https://archive.org/details/onedimensionalm00marc |location=Boston |publisher=Beacon Press |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}