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The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/The Beatster, the White Negro, and the Evolution of the Hipster in Fight Club: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 9, 2015/The Beatster, the White Negro, and the Evolution of the Hipster in Fight Club (view source)
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Despite Mailer’s rhetorical identification with the hipster, competing discourses have called his character and his characterization into question. The White Negro is a cultural icon who may or may not have existed in reality as Mailer described him: was he a true composite of certain marginalized characters, or was he merely a projection of Mailer’s own racial and sexual fantasies about African-Americans and their relation to white, middle-class intellectuals like himself? Stanley T. Gutman claims that Mailer himself was “never a hipster,”{{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=67}} and Robert Solotaroff adds that Mailer’s hipster was an “improbable figure,”{{sfn|Solotaroff|1974|p=89}} while Joe Wenke argues that speculation about the existence of the real-life hipster “misses the point”{{sfn|Wenke|2014|p=67}} which in his estimation was to create a mythic, Adamic figure who would allow Mailer to “formulate a significant response to the threat of totalitarianism.”{{sfn|Wenke|2014|p=68}} More recently, Preston Whaley declares that the White Negro is simply a “caricature that does not exist.”{{sfn|Whaley|2004|p=41}} For their part, Kerouac and Ginsberg disapproved of Mailer’s construction of the hipster as one who embraced violence as a means to achieve existential transcendence. Their version of the hipster, a.k.a. the Beatster, was a figure beaten down and outcast by a conformist, militaristic, materialistic culture and in search of beatific ecstasy. The Beatster was a teahead or junkie, jazz musician or aficionado, artist or intellectual, sexual adventurer or deviant, and Buddhist or spiritual seeker, in many ways mirroring Mailer’s hipster but without the violence. Both the White Negro and the Beatster romanticized (and stereotyped) African-Americans as wise primitives, or, as Wenke puts it, “latter-day noble savage[s].”{{sfn|Wenke|2014|p=74}} The White Negro and the Beats saw themselves as people living on the ruins of a civilization, the fellaheen, in Spengler’s terms. In the shadow of the horrors of the Holocaust and of the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation they shared an apocalyptic vision. And just as Mailer conceived of the White Negro in exclusively and characteristically masculine terms, the Beatster scene was about male bonding based on a shared rejection of square middle class values, even though, as Alan Petigny writes in “Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro,’ and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America,” the 1950s was a less repressed and more liberated decade than we tend to think. | Despite Mailer’s rhetorical identification with the hipster, competing discourses have called his character and his characterization into question. The White Negro is a cultural icon who may or may not have existed in reality as Mailer described him: was he a true composite of certain marginalized characters, or was he merely a projection of Mailer’s own racial and sexual fantasies about African-Americans and their relation to white, middle-class intellectuals like himself? Stanley T. Gutman claims that Mailer himself was “never a hipster,”{{sfn|Gutman|1975|p=67}} and Robert Solotaroff adds that Mailer’s hipster was an “improbable figure,”{{sfn|Solotaroff|1974|p=89}} while Joe Wenke argues that speculation about the existence of the real-life hipster “misses the point”{{sfn|Wenke|2014|p=67}} which in his estimation was to create a mythic, Adamic figure who would allow Mailer to “formulate a significant response to the threat of totalitarianism.”{{sfn|Wenke|2014|p=68}} More recently, Preston Whaley declares that the White Negro is simply a “caricature that does not exist.”{{sfn|Whaley|2004|p=41}} For their part, Kerouac and Ginsberg disapproved of Mailer’s construction of the hipster as one who embraced violence as a means to achieve existential transcendence. Their version of the hipster, a.k.a. the Beatster, was a figure beaten down and outcast by a conformist, militaristic, materialistic culture and in search of beatific ecstasy. The Beatster was a teahead or junkie, jazz musician or aficionado, artist or intellectual, sexual adventurer or deviant, and Buddhist or spiritual seeker, in many ways mirroring Mailer’s hipster but without the violence. Both the White Negro and the Beatster romanticized (and stereotyped) African-Americans as wise primitives, or, as Wenke puts it, “latter-day noble savage[s].”{{sfn|Wenke|2014|p=74}} The White Negro and the Beats saw themselves as people living on the ruins of a civilization, the fellaheen, in Spengler’s terms. In the shadow of the horrors of the Holocaust and of the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation they shared an apocalyptic vision. And just as Mailer conceived of the White Negro in exclusively and characteristically masculine terms, the Beatster scene was about male bonding based on a shared rejection of square middle class values, even though, as Alan Petigny writes in “Norman Mailer, ‘The White Negro,’ and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America,” the 1950s was a less repressed and more liberated decade than we tend to think. | ||
Like Hemingway before him, Mailer explored the meaning of masculinity throughout his life and early career and, following Hemingway, he equated masculinity with physical courage and grace under pressure, all in line with the Hemingway hero and the Hemingway code. Michael Shuman writes that Mailer “became the Hemingway for a new generation of writers, a model of masculine courage, adventurous physical appetite, and singular | Like Hemingway before him, Mailer explored the meaning of masculinity throughout his life and early career and, following Hemingway, he equated masculinity with physical courage and grace under pressure, all in line with the Hemingway hero and the Hemingway code. Michael Shuman writes that Mailer “became the Hemingway for a new generation of writers, a model of masculine courage, adventurous physical appetite, and singular style.”{{sfn|Shuman|2010|p=102}} And yet the concept of masculinity both writers shared was even in Hemingway’s day being challenged by urbanization, industrialization, and the feminization of American culture. Mailer voiced his early concern with contemporary notions of masculinity in his apologia for the negative construction of gay characters in his essay “The Homosexual Villain” and in his opposition to second-wave feminism, provoking attacks from Kate Millett and others, even though, as Phillip Sipiora writes in his preface to Mailer’s selected essays, Mailer “maintained long-term close friendships with feminists including Germaine Greer and Diana Trilling.”{{sfn|Sipiora|2013|pp=xx–iii}} During the years after WWII, the Beats, in their attitudes toward marriage, monogamy, and homosexuality, were reinventing what it means to be masculine, an alternative vision to that of the stereotypical, white, middle-class 1950s man who, as Robert Bly writes in ''Iron John'' (1992), “got to work early, labored responsibly, supported his wife, and admired discipline . . . many of [whose] qualities were strong and positive, but underneath the charm and bluff there was, and there remains, much isolation, deprivation, and passivity.”{{sfn|Bly|1992|p=1}} During the 1990s the Men’s Movement provided a new yet archetypal perspective on what many contemporary artists see as the crisis in modern masculinity. Bly traces this crisis to the Industrial Revolution and the resulting rise of urbanization and suburbanization when men began to abandon the farm and village to work in factories and offices only to come home tired, unfulfilled, and unresponsive to their wives and children. All this time, of course, mother was a constant presence, so children experienced motherlove but not much father-love. During the 1960s, Bly writes, “the waste and violence of the Vietnam war made men question whether they knew what an adult male really was.”{{sfn|Bly|1992|p=2}} At the same time, second-wave feminists were encouraging men to become more sensitized to women’s issues and to the feminine or anima in their own natures, a positive paradigm shift and necessary corrective to the limitations of the stereotypical 1950s male, yet Bly argues that these so-called “soft” males, sensitive, nurturing, and politically correct, were and are not happy;{{sfn|Bly|1992|p=2}} instead, they were and are enervated, passive, life-preserving but not life-giving. | ||
Another work appearing in the 1990s, Chuck Palahniuk’s ''Fight Club'' (1996), reflects some of the concerns shared by Bly and others involved in the Men’s Movement: the absence of positive, nurturing father figures in the narrator’s and Tyler’s lives, their alienation from and subversion of corporate culture, and their search for authentic values. Palahniuk’s narrator and his ''doppelgänger'' or alter ego, Tyler Durden, in many ways descend from the White Negro and the Beatsters, as well as from their children, the hippies of the 1960s’ counterculture, but more particularly from the Youth International Movement figure or Yippie and from the Weather Underground, all proposing alternative visions to the Great Society and, in the case of the Weathermen, practicing domestic terrorism. Against that background, in ''Fight Club'', Palahniuk introduces a new kind of hipster at the end of the twentieth century, the anarcho-terrorist Space Monkey, a character who reflects the modern anxiety about masculinity shared by Palahniuk’s predecessors.{{efn|The 1950s hipster evolved into the 1960s hippie, who mutated into the 1980s yuppie, but in the meantime the 70s punks arrived on the scene, echoing themes of anger, rebellion, and anarchy. Today’s hipsters are white, affluent, urban millennials who live in gentrified neighborhoods. Tech-savvy, stylistically eclectic, and politically progressive, they now share little of their Hip heritage. These are not Palahniuk’s hipsters.}} | Another work appearing in the 1990s, Chuck Palahniuk’s ''Fight Club'' (1996), reflects some of the concerns shared by Bly and others involved in the Men’s Movement: the absence of positive, nurturing father figures in the narrator’s and Tyler’s lives, their alienation from and subversion of corporate culture, and their search for authentic values. Palahniuk’s narrator and his ''doppelgänger'' or alter ego, Tyler Durden, in many ways descend from the White Negro and the Beatsters, as well as from their children, the hippies of the 1960s’ counterculture, but more particularly from the Youth International Movement figure or Yippie and from the Weather Underground, all proposing alternative visions to the Great Society and, in the case of the Weathermen, practicing domestic terrorism. Against that background, in ''Fight Club'', Palahniuk introduces a new kind of hipster at the end of the twentieth century, the anarcho-terrorist Space Monkey, a character who reflects the modern anxiety about masculinity shared by Palahniuk’s predecessors.{{efn|The 1950s hipster evolved into the 1960s hippie, who mutated into the 1980s yuppie, but in the meantime the 70s punks arrived on the scene, echoing themes of anger, rebellion, and anarchy. Today’s hipsters are white, affluent, urban millennials who live in gentrified neighborhoods. Tech-savvy, stylistically eclectic, and politically progressive, they now share little of their Hip heritage. These are not Palahniuk’s hipsters.}} | ||
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* {{cite book |last=Palahniuk |first=Chuck |date=2005 |orig-year=1996 |title=Fight Club |url= |location=New York |publisher=W. W. Norton & Co. |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Palahniuk |first=Chuck |date=2005 |orig-year=1996 |title=Fight Club |url= |location=New York |publisher=W. W. Norton & Co. |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite journal |last=Petigny |first=Alan |date=2007 |title=Norman Mailer, 'The White Negro,' and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07peti |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |pages=184–193 |access-date= }} | * {{cite journal |last=Petigny |first=Alan |date=2007 |title=Norman Mailer, 'The White Negro,' and New Conceptions of the Self in Postwar America |url=https://prmlr.us/mr07peti |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=1 |issue=1 |pages=184–193 |access-date= }} | ||
* {{cite journal |last=Shuman |first=Michael |date=2010 |title=Norman vs. Ernest: Influence and Identity |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |pages=90–103 |access-date= }} | |||
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Sipiora |contributor-first=Phillip |contribution=Editor's Preface |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages=xvii–xxiv |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |contributor-last=Sipiora |contributor-first=Phillip |contribution=Editor's Preface |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays |last=Mailer |first=Norman |url= |location=New York |publisher=Random House |pages=xvii–xxiv |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Solotaroff |first=Robert |date=1973 |title=Down Mailer's Way |url=https://archive.org/details/ert00robe |location=Urbana; London |publisher=University of Illinois Press |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Solotaroff |first=Robert |date=1973 |title=Down Mailer's Way |url=https://archive.org/details/ert00robe |location=Urbana; London |publisher=University of Illinois Press |ref=harv }} | ||