The White Negro

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This article is about Norman Mailer's essay, "The White Negro". For white people who "emulate black people", see Wigger.
The White Negro
TheWhiteNegro.jpg
(publ. City Lights)
Author Norman Mailer
Country USA
Language English
Genre Essay
Publisher City Lights
Publication date
 1957
Media type Print

The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster, a 9,000-word essay by Norman Mailer, connects the "psychic havoc" wrought by the Holocaust and atomic bomb to the aftermath of slavery in America in the figuration of the Hipster, or the "white negro".[1] It is a call to disassociate from Eisenhower liberalism and a numbing culture of conformity and psychoanalysis to embrace a rebellious, personal violence and emancipating sexuality that Mailer associates with marginalized black culture.[2] The essay was first published in the 1957 special issue of Dissent, before being published separately by City Lights.[3] While Mailer's essay was controversial upon its release, winning praise, for example, from Eldridge Cleaver and equal criticism from James Baldwin, it remains perhaps his most famous and reprinted essay[4] and "established Mailer's reputation as a philosopher of hip".[5][6]

Background[edit]

The origins of The White Negro (WN) date from the mid-1950s. Louis Menand, in his history of The Village Voice directly links Mailer's 17-article column "Quickly: A Column for Slow Readers" to Mailer's development of his philosophy of hip, or "American existentialism".[7]

"Lipton's Journal", Mailer's unpublished 105,000-word diary of self-analysis written over four months while smoking marijuana, also figures into the essay's genesis.[8] It documents "his insights [that] challenge some of the dominant ideas of Western thought", specifically the dualisms that Mailer saw within every individual, like the saint and the psychopath.[9] Mailer had planned to use the insights from Lipton's in a series of novels which never happened, but he did incorporate some of the journal's ideas into WN.[6] He sums these up in one of the last entries in Lipton's:

Generally speaking we have come to the point in history—in this country anyway—where the middle class and upper middle class is composed primarily of the neurotic-conformists, and the saint-psychos are found in some of the activities of the workingclass (as opposed to the workingclass itself), in the Negro people, in Bohemians, in the illiterates, among the reactionaries, a few of the radicals, some of the prison population, and of course in the mass communication media.[10]

Other influences on both "Lipton's" and The White Negro include the psycho-sexual theories of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich, the writings of Karl Marx, and the work of Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and other bebop jazz artists.[11] Dearborn avers that Mailer saw these great men of jazz as quintessential figures of Hip; Miles Davis, for example, "was the avatar of Hip, and, with his lean, chiseled good looks and his ultracool manner he was distinctly a sex symbol as well, appealing to white women as well as black."[12]

Synopsis[edit]

The White Negro is a 9000-word essay divided into six sections of varying lengths.[13]

In section 1, he argues that the twin horrors of the atom bomb and the concentration camps have wrought a "psychic havoc" by subjecting individual human lives to the calculus of the state machine. The collective practices of Western progress seem to render life and death meaningless for the individual who is compelled to join the numbed masses in a "collective failure of nerve".[14] The only courage seems to be in marginalized, isolated people who can stand in opposition.[15]

The hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.

—§2, p. 341

Section 2 proposes that the marginalized figure—"the American existentialist"—lives with the knowledge of quick death, the possibility State violence, the compulsory need to conform, and the sublimation of baser desires. He knows that the only answer is to accept these terms, divorce himself from the bored sickness of society, and seek the "rebellious imperatives of the self." Mailer presents a dichotomy: one path that leads to a quiet prison of the mind and body — to boredom, sickness, and desperation, while the other that leads to "new kinds of victories [that] increase one's power for new kinds of perception". One is a rebel — the Hip, the psychopath — or one is tempted by the promise of success, conforms to "the totalitarian tissues of an American society", and become Square.[15] Because he has lived on the margins of society, Mailer sees the American Negro as the model for the Hipster — living for the primitive present and the pleasures of the body.[16] Mailer links this figuration with jazz and it appeal to the sensual, the improvisational, and the immediate, or what Mailer calls the "burning consciousness of the present" felt by the existentialist, the bullfighter, and the Hipster alike.[17] In other words, it's living life by "engaging death".[18]

For Hip is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle, and so its appeal is still beyond the civilized man.

—§3, p. 343

Section 3 defines the Hipster further as a "philosophical psychopath" who is interested in codifying, very like Hemingway,[19] the "dangerous imperatives" that define his experience of reality. He is a contradiction, possessing a "narcissistic detachment" from his own "unreasoning drive" allowing him to shift his attention form immediate gratification to "future power".[20] Psychopaths, Mailer continues, "are trying to create a new nervous system for themselves" that distinguishes itself form the "inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past" — destroyed with the middle-class values that made sublimating desire possible.[21] This latter state is the civilizing product of psychoanalysis, which only succeeds in "tranquilizing" a patient's most interesting qualities — making the neurotic out of the psychopath. The nervous system is remade, Mailer contends, by trying to "live the infantile fantasy" — to trace the source of their creation in an atavistic quest to give voice and action to infantile, or forbidden, desires.[22] In this "morality of the bottom", then, the psychopath finds the courage to act free of the "old crippling habit" that has anesthetized him.[23] Now, he can purge his violence, even through murder, but what he really seeks is physical love in the form of the "apocalyptic orgasm" as a "sexual outlaw".[24]

Section 3 ends with an introduction to the language of Hip, a "special language" that "cannot be taught" because it is based on a shared experience of "elation and exhaustion" their oppression made necessary.[25] Section 4 develops this language further, linking the language to movement and the search for the "unachievable whisper of mystery within the sex, the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm".[26]

Truth is no more nor less than what one feels at each instant in the perpetual climax of the present.

—§5, p. 354

Section 5 posits that any philosophy of Hip does not judge based upon a simple past, but looks to new, complex alternatives — a "collection of possibilities".[27] Mailer suggests, developing the existential reality of the Hipster further, that men are both character and context, giving way to "an absolute relativity where there are no truths other than the isolated truths of what each observer feels at each instant of his existence".[28] The consequence of this realization is the liberation from the "Super-Ego of society". The moral imperative, then, centers in the individual who acts in accordance with his desires, not as the group would have him behave: "nihilism of Hip proposes as its final tendency that every social restraint and category be removed, and the affirmation implicit in the proposal is that man would then prove to be more creative than murderous and so would not destroy himself".[28] The idea is that even individual acts of violence — because they come from courage to act — prove more desirable than any collective state violence, as the former would be more genuine, creative, and cathartic.[29] A "psychically armed rebellion," Mailer continues, is necessary to free everyone: "A time of violence, new hysteria, confusion and rebellion will then be likely to replace the time of conformity".[30] This potentially violent rebellion would be preferable to the "murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state".[31]

Finally, Section 6 Mailer speculates whether "the last war of them all" will be between factions of socially polar communities or despair at the current crisis of capitalism. Perhaps, Mailer ends, we still have something to learn from Marx.[32]

Analysis[edit]

True to his thesis in "The First Advertisement for Myself", Mailer attempts "a revolution in the consciousness of our time" by challenging the thoughts and practices that sanitize American life after World War II.[33]

In his biography on Mailer, J. Michael Lennon suggests that The White Negro was Mailer's attempt to "will into being an army of hipster revolutionaries who could bring about an urban utopia."[34] It embraces violence, but makes a distinction between violence by the state and individual violence; the former leads to concentration camps and pogroms, while the latter could lead to freedom.[35] For Mailer, adds Maggie McKinley, violence seems to be an essential part of the masculinity of the Hipster—helping to oppose collectivizing and numbing social forces.[36] In a 1957 letter to a publicly-critical Jean Malaquais, Mailer clarifies his intentions: (1) that barbarism could be an alternative to totalitarianism, and (2) that human energy should not be sublimated at the expense of the individual.[37]Some critics accused Mailer of testing his "violence as catharsis" theories in real life when he nearly killed his second wife Adele by stabbing her twice with a pen knife. [38]

Although the essay considers a subcultural phenomenon, it represents a localized synthesis of Marx and Freud, and thus presages the New Left movement and the birth of the counterculture in the United States.[citation needed] Probably the most prominent academic exponent of the New Left in the US was Herbert Marcuse. The essay is also very prescient because it anticipates the pejorative use of the word wigger in contemporary society to refer to white people who emulate the manner of speech, the fashion styles, or other aspects of the expressive culture of African Americans.[citation needed]

Several prominent critics, such as James Baldwin, chided Mailer publicly for their perception that, with The White Negro, he was openly aping lesser writers such as Jack Kerouac, in order to jump on the bandwagon of moody, meandering, faux-thrill-seeking Beatniks. [39]

Publication[edit]

Though the bulk of the content had appeared in piece-meal fashion in Mailer's regular columns in the Village Voice,[39] The White Negro first appeared in a special issue of Dissent in 1957.[40] It triggered a "great orgasm debate" in subsequent issues, touching on the zeitgeist of the fifties and the effects of psychoanalysis in general. Sorin observes that the board of Dissent published the essay without apparent debate, temporarily tripling the periodical's subscriptions.[40] It was only later, relates then-editor Irving Howe, that they realized publishing the essay as-written was "unprincipled".[41] Despite the initial controversy, Lennon notes, WN became the most reprinted essay of an era.[42] It was reprinted with rebuttals from Ned Polsky and Jean Malaquais, followed by Mailer’s rebuttal, as "Reflections on Hip", in his 1959 miscellany, Advertisements for Myself. The essay and "Reflections on Hip" were reprinted the same year in pamphlet form by City Light Press, and again by this press several times over the next 15 years.[5] Most recently it appears in Mind of an Outlaw (2014).[43] Young enthusiasts of Mailer's essay, states Lennon, carried their copies of the City Light's reprint proudly as a "trumpet of defiance" throughout an awakening nation.[34]

Reception[edit]

Reception to The White Negro was mixed and has been controversial since its publication: it has, according to Lennon, been "the most discussed American essay in the quarter century after World War II."[42]

In a letter to Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison called the essay "The same old primitivism crap in a new package."[44]

James Baldwin, in his essay "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" for Esquire (May 1961) calls The White Negro "impenetrable," and wonders how Mailer, a writer that he saw as brilliant and talented, could write an essay that was so beneath him.[45] For Baldwin, Mailer's essay just perpetuated the "myth of the sexuality of Negros" while attempting the sell white people their innocence and purity.[46] Baldwin shows this great respect for Mailer's talent, but aligns The Whole Negro with other distractions — like running for mayor of NYC — that Baldwin saw as beneath Mailer and distracted him from his real responsibility as a writer.[47]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

Citations

  1. ^ Lennon 2013, p. 77.
  2. ^ Greif, Mark (October 24, 2010). "What Was the Hipster?". New York. Retrieved 2017-08-04. 
  3. ^ Sorin 2005, pp. 144–145, 330.
  4. ^ Lennon 1988, p. x.
  5. ^ a b Lennon & Lennon 2014.
  6. ^ a b Lennon 2013, p. 189.
  7. ^ Menand 2013.
  8. ^ Lennon 2013, pp. 182–88.
  9. ^ Lennon 2013, pp. 183, 189.
  10. ^ Lennon 2013, p. 190.
  11. ^ Lennon 2013, pp. 184–88.
  12. ^ Dearborn 1999, p. 117.
  13. ^ Mailer 1959, pp. 337–58.
  14. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 338.
  15. ^ a b Mailer 1959, p. 339.
  16. ^ Mailer 1959, pp. 340–341, 348, 356.
  17. ^ Mailer 1959, pp. 341—342.
  18. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 342.
  19. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 340.
  20. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 343.
  21. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 345.
  22. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 346.
  23. ^ Mailer 1959, pp. 348, 347.
  24. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 348.
  25. ^ Mailer 1959, pp. 348–349.
  26. ^ Mailer 1959, pp. 350–351.
  27. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 353.
  28. ^ a b Mailer 1959, p. 354.
  29. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 355.
  30. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 356.
  31. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 357.
  32. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 358.
  33. ^ Mailer 1959, p. 17.
  34. ^ a b Lennon 2013, p. 221.
  35. ^ Lennon 2013, p. 219.
  36. ^ McKinley 2017, p. 11.
  37. ^ Lennon 2014, p. 228.
  38. ^ critic), Adams, Laura (Literary (1976). Existential battles : the growth of Norman Mailer. Athens: Ohio University Press. ISBN 0821401823. OCLC 2071779. 
  39. ^ a b Menand, Louis (January 5, 2009). "It Took a Village". The New Yorker: 36–45. 
  40. ^ a b Sorin 2005, p. 144.
  41. ^ Sorin 2005, p. 145.
  42. ^ a b Lennon 2013, p. 220.
  43. ^ Mailer 2014, pp. 41–65.
  44. ^ Manand 2009.
  45. ^ Baldwin 1988, p. 277.
  46. ^ Baldwin 1988, p. 272, 277.
  47. ^ Baldwin 1988, pp. 276, 277, 283.

Bibliography

External links[edit]

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