Richard Poirier
THE MINORITY WITHIN
Since about
1957
and "The White Negro," Nonnan
Mail–
er has come to associate creativity and the imagination with the as–
sertion of a minority position, and
his
contempt for
liberals
is
a
consequence of
his
conviction that they would deprive
us
of the
vicissitudes and oppositions which
are
the necessary conditions for
art
and for any full
sense
of life. In "The Tenth Presidential Paper"
he
claims
that
Minority groups
are
the artistic nerves of the republic, and like
any
phenomenon which has to do with
art,
they are profoundly divided.
They are both themselves and the mirror of their culture as it
reacts upon them. They are themselves and the negative truth of
themselves. No white
man,
for example, can hate the Negro race
with the same passionate hatred that each Negro feels for
him–
self and for his people; no anti-Semite can begin to comprehend
the malicious analysis of his soul which every Jew indulges every
day.
Still later,
in
cC
A
Speech at
Berkeley
on Vietnam Day," he proposes
that anyone
in
America,
even the President,
is
CC
a member of a
minority group if he contains two opposed notions of
himself
at the
same time." He asserts that
What characterizes the sensation of being a member of a minority
group is that one's emotions are forever locked in the chains of
ambivalence - the expression of an emotion forever releasing its
opposite - the ego in perpetual transit from the tower to the dun–
geon and back again.
By
this definition nearly everyone in Amer–
ica is a member of a minority group, alienated from the self by a
