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The Mailer Review/Volume 14, 2020/Mailer and Emerson: Lipton’s Journal and the Dissident Soul: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 14, 2020/Mailer and Emerson: Lipton’s Journal and the Dissident Soul (view source)
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The central theme running through ''Lipton’s'' is the conflict between the energies of the creative psyche or soul and repressive “caution . . . the high priest of society.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/50|#50]]}} For people “to live with their soul . . . means to war against society.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/155|#155]]}} Mailer returns again and again to his developing theories in ''Lipton’s'' about the conflict between what he terms “Homeostasis”—or later in entry [[Lipton’s Journal/January 24, 1955/223|#223]], “Homeodynamism” (“the personal healthy rebellious and soul-ful expression of man,” or individual creative energy) and “Sociostasis” (the repressions of society, the “element in man placed there by society”). Mailer adds, “The tendency of society is to make all of mankind neurotic-conformist—the tendency of man, as viz. his modern heroes and celebrities, is to liberate the saint-psychopath present to some degree in everyone.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/425|#425]]}} Other Emersonian themes surface in ''Lipton’s'' (such as the hermaphroditic potential of the human psyche, the necessity of exaggerated expression to break through to one’s audience, and the law of life that one must grow and change, to suggest three examples). But what gives this rambling—often frustrating—document a degree of coherence is Mailer’s quest for the means to liberate the socially repressed psyche, above all his own. | The central theme running through ''Lipton’s'' is the conflict between the energies of the creative psyche or soul and repressive “caution . . . the high priest of society.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/50|#50]]}} For people “to live with their soul . . . means to war against society.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/155|#155]]}} Mailer returns again and again to his developing theories in ''Lipton’s'' about the conflict between what he terms “Homeostasis”—or later in entry [[Lipton’s Journal/January 24, 1955/223|#223]], “Homeodynamism” (“the personal healthy rebellious and soul-ful expression of man,” or individual creative energy) and “Sociostasis” (the repressions of society, the “element in man placed there by society”). Mailer adds, “The tendency of society is to make all of mankind neurotic-conformist—the tendency of man, as viz. his modern heroes and celebrities, is to liberate the saint-psychopath present to some degree in everyone.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/425|#425]]}} Other Emersonian themes surface in ''Lipton’s'' (such as the hermaphroditic potential of the human psyche, the necessity of exaggerated expression to break through to one’s audience, and the law of life that one must grow and change, to suggest three examples). But what gives this rambling—often frustrating—document a degree of coherence is Mailer’s quest for the means to liberate the socially repressed psyche, above all his own. | ||
Among his earliest journal entries Mailer sets the stage for his liberation theme: “So far as we act to fulfill the needs of society, we are actually no more than a part of the net with which society keeps men from developing. We have the illusion of action, of motion; in truth we are merely lines of cord in the net.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/25|#25]]}} When “society wins,” he continues, “the saint is ignored, the psychopath is shunned, and the purity of the human soul is concealed. We are returned to a world where we must be practical, mature, pluralistic, and confirmed in abysmal and false humilities—in return for agreeing to admit that we know nothing, we are offered the comforts, the securities, and the prestige of society.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/44|#44]]}} Society is “opposed to the soul . . . attempts to destroy the soul in order to maintain its stability”; society is “the concretion of the collective surrender of man’s will.” But “the soul fights back.” Unfortunately, the revolution of the soul “never took place. . . . those who had souls retreated, or gave themselves up to being the machines of society,” and “the polarity” of this soul-revolution is “totalitarianism.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/59|#59]]}} That totalitarian polarity of the soul is the force, the dark angel, Mailer would wrestle with for the rest of his life. | |||
Mailer entitled his journal “Lipton’s” (tea, marijuana) because cannabis, “which destroys the sense of time also destroys the sense of society and opens the soul,” was his aid to deeper self-explorations and growth.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/63|#63]]}} He is speaking here not of intimate personal relations, which cannabis can of course enhance, but of the oppressive Collective Society and its “war upon each individual.” He then gives the example of modern advertising as one means by which society “reaches deep into each man’s soul and converts a piece of it to society.” Advertising coopts the soul’s longing for “love and power, the two things the soul seeks for in life, legitimately, finely,” by attaching that longing to commodities, which tempt the soul to “enter its contract with society.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/64|#64]]}} Modern advertising becomes, for Mailer, but one soul-trapping tool of Emerson’s 20th-century joint-stock company. | |||
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