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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. 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. | |||
A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the general anxiety is greater. Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation — that post-war generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War. Sharing a collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too many things, they knew almost as powerful a disbelief in the socially monolithic ideas of the single mate, the solid family and the respectable love life. If the intellectual antecedents of this generation can be traced to such separate influences as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich, the viable philosophy of Hemingway fits most of their facts: in a bad world, as he was to say over and over again (while taking time out from his parvenu snobbery and dedicated gourmandise), in a bad world there is no love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can keep his courage, and this indeed fitted some of the facts. What fitted the need of the adventurer even more precisely was Hemingway’s categorical imperative that what made him feel good became therefore The Good. | A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the general anxiety is greater. Indeed if one is to be a man, almost any kind of unconventional action often takes disproportionate courage. So it is no accident that the source of Hip is the Negro for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries. But the presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz, and its knife-like entrance into culture, its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation — that post-war generation of adventurers who (some consciously, some by osmosis) had absorbed the lessons of disillusionment and disgust of the Twenties, the Depression, and the War. Sharing a collective disbelief in the words of men who had too much money and controlled too many things, they knew almost as powerful a disbelief in the socially monolithic ideas of the single mate, the solid family and the respectable love life. If the intellectual antecedents of this generation can be traced to such separate influences as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Wilhelm Reich, the viable philosophy of Hemingway fits most of their facts: in a bad world, as he was to say over and over again (while taking time out from his parvenu snobbery and dedicated gourmandise), in a bad world there is no love nor mercy nor charity nor justice unless a man can keep his courage, and this indeed fitted some of the facts. What fitted the need of the adventurer even more precisely was Hemingway’s categorical imperative that what made him feel good became therefore The Good. | ||
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It is this knowledge which provides the curious community of feeling in the world of the hipster, a muted cool religious revival to be sure, but the element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed, the inner life and the violent life, the orgy and the dream of love, the desire to murder and the desire to create, a dialectical conception of existence with a lust for power, a dark, romantic, and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for it sees every man and woman as moving individually through each moment of life forward into growth or backward into death. | It is this knowledge which provides the curious community of feeling in the world of the hipster, a muted cool religious revival to be sure, but the element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed, the inner life and the violent life, the orgy and the dream of love, the desire to murder and the desire to create, a dialectical conception of existence with a lust for power, a dark, romantic, and yet undeniably dynamic view of existence for it sees every man and woman as moving individually through each moment of life forward into growth or backward into death. | ||
===Notes=== | |||
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